I'm surprised I actually remember the way- we landed at the same spot as we did about a month and a half ago, and walked in the same entrance, going directly to the main podium.

As we took positions again, Paul directly behind Howard, the dim lights came on to reveal two rows of white-clad figures. This is the second time I've been here, and this time I got a better look. Howard was around three meters from the bastard whose son his new servant had recently killed, looking down at the fat man from about one meter. I half-consciously realized that Howard didn't need us at all; he could just leap from the podium, and in two swipes of his blades (or one particularly long one), all three of them would be dead as doorknobs, their throats with an extra breathing hole. They might not even scream in time. But he doesn't want to intimidate anyone that much with his physical power, and that's what the guns are for- to make people believe he needs them.

If, of course, we use them, which we might not.

"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Illuminati, this gathering is now in open session.", Howard declared, formally bringing the matter into the voices of the people below him. "Before we begin discussion, I would speak the known facts. If anyone is in dispute with these facts, let yourself be heard." He took a deep breath. "On the night of June 5th, 1998, Damien Gladstone was shot and killed by his servant, Paul Smith. The implement of killing was a .45 caliber pistol. The cause of death was brain obliteration." Assuming he had a brain to begin with, of course.

Howard took another deep breath and was obviously going to struggle to keep a straight face. Watching him do that is one of the few things that sometimes make me glad I'm not him. "Immediately before that happened, my servant, Billy Bohecker, suggested to Damien that he should allow his servants to do the one thing they want most." After he finished saying that, I felt the room crackle with even more tension than usual.

A twenty-something first level mightily tried and succeeded in smashing down his growing smile, a twelve-year-old of the second chuckled and had to almost choke himself to stop, and a 18-23 year old Illuminatus of the second level started burbling and then just exploded "WHAT?! He did what?! You mean to tell us that he believed..." He lost coherent speech and just started laughing uncontrollably. After a few seconds he got a hold of himself and apologized, "I'm sorry, Master Howard. But that's just too funny."

"I agree. And I cannot condemn you because when I first really realized what had happen, I couldn't stop laughing either because it really is too funny. That is not a fact I am entering, however."

Of course, during all of this, all three of the bastards' faces were getting steadily redder- but not one of them said a thing. Howard, of course, is definitely going to capitalize on that with more demoralizing, more demeaning, more infuriating, and just plain flat-out more evil behavior and comments.

"Do you have anything to say, Mr. Gladstone?", he said in an overly condescending voice. Yup, Howie's that predictable.

"Yes, I have something to say, I have to ask a question. What are you going to do about your servant who killed my son? What are you going to do about him? Are you going to kill him, torture him, even fucking punish him?" Exactly what is punishment supposed to mean to an implanted?

"No. I personally don't plan to do a thing to him."

"And why not?!", the Bastard almost screamed. At this rate, Howard won't have to kill the fatass; he will have died of a heart attack first. Wait.. no. Damn you, Northberg.

"Because I don't fucking feel like it. Besides, if we tortured every implanted servant who wanted to kill his owner, implants would be utterly worthless."

"But he killed him!"

"What's your point? He just got the opportunity to do it, that's all."

"And your other servant--"

"Said a thing which I should have said." The Bastard's face grew red- not the purple face of rage we saw three nights ago, but a more controlled anger- he is an Illuminatus, after all. But his rage is interfering with his questionable manipulation abilities. If he's trying to make an impression, it's not working- Illuminati in general are soulless bastards, no matter who croaks.

He finally opened his mouth and I could envision a fly coming out, and a sticky tongue reeling it back in. "You are horrible, contemptible, disgusting, uncouth, destructive, out of your league, and wholly inappropriate for your position!" Woah. This guy must want to join his kid pretty damn soon. If there's one thing Howard usually grants, it's assholes' death wishes. "How can we possibly hope to tolerate this kind of thing?", he asked, rhetorically, to the group. "One of ours is dead and this so-called Dominator doesn't even care! Have we all lost touch with reality?! The death of a young Illuminatus by one of his servants is a horrible thing, a thing of no small meaning, a thing that should not happen!" This guy's voice is starting to get on my nerves.

"And I must say that you have run roughshod over all of us as a whole by flaunting that kind of action! What kind of masters are we when we allow servants to kill other masters?", he continued, turning to Howard again, asking questions that he isn't expecting an answer to. I could almost feel Howard ready to answer the obvious- 'Smart and stupid, respectively.'- but he didn't. He's just going to let this guy eventually run out of gas, and then he's probably going to say the phrase and BLAM, no more idiot. Guns kill idiots dead. You can almost hear Smith & Wesson cheering from beyond the grave..

"We cannot allow this to continue!" I agree. Shut the fuck up! It's bad enough having to deal with Howard, I don't need to listen to this polluted air. "We cannot allow an immature, poorly trained, poorly educated Dominator in here. We just can't allow it! This is just an example of the kind of thing we are inviting, if we keep going the way we're going!" I listened carefully for signs of Howard's anger, and found none.

"Now we know who has the egotism, eh? He who defiles us with atrocities within our own hierarchy, he who dares abuse his power for the ill of the whole!" Howard's said it before, he'll say it again- if you can't abuse it, it's not power. "Lack of sense, lack of internal discipline.. is this where we are headed? Where egotists take it upon themselves to kill those whom they dislike, simply for the sake of killing them? Who let their misbegotten servants annihilate masters with impunity?" I was almost ready to laugh maniacally for the sheer hell of it. This is funny! The guy sounds like he got thrown out of the first episodes of Star Trek for being too melodramatic...

From the sounds of it, I figure that this Bastard's speech was developed in the same way as Howard's original speech: with help. Only the Bastard used his two fat whores instead of highly intelligent engineered youth. But, he did the job he probably intended to do- he's conveying feelings of guilt, shame, and potential punishment, much like the threatening voice of a father or the condemning voice of a mother. And neither the feelings nor the subliminal parental references are in any way applicable to Howard, and are only serving to piss him off.. and me, vicariously. C'mon, Howie, say the phrase so this guy'll shut up!

"And now what do we have? A poorly-qualified boy dancing on our graves simply because of genetic engineering." Bingo! "And because of this, we are seeing the effects of his misrule already! It's barely been more than a week and now we have this! What next, genocide? We've disposed of tyrants in the past, why can't we do it now?"

"You've been talking way too long.", one unidentified second level man said, in a flat voice, interrupting the Bastard's tirade. Said Bastard and his Bitches proceeded to sharply turn around to glare at the transgressor.

"Let him speak. He has that right. Besides, he has to run out of hot air sooner or later.", Howard replied coolly. A tacit wave of general assent, with a few hidden semi-smiles and a barely-audible low chuckle. Wow, they really don't like this guy either..

"Hot air.. you really have no respect for us at all, do you? Not at all! Not even the people who created you! For once in a thousand years," I have no idea why he exaggerated. "we have a Dominator who doesn't give two shits whether we live or die!" Well, he kind of wants you in particular to die. The Bastard turned around in his chair and addressed the crowd, looking back and forth behind him. "You've seen what he's capable of, and what he can do to us, and what he'll do if we let this continue! Do any of you want to join my son?" ...in Hell, I mentally added. Does Fido count as Cerberus? "He talks about mutualism, and working together, and what do we get? This! And this is what we can expect to keep getting! I didn't think apathy and uncaring could make it all the way up here." In addition to Smith & Wesson's cheering, you can also almost hear the patience meter slowly dwindling to zero.. but that really is an 'almost' hear, as Howard isn't showing any signs of anything at all.

"Damn it, doesn't anyone understand? If this is the way of things to come, we're all going to be gone! This attitude is something we can't accept! He's almost saying himself that he's the harbinger of our downfall, and I seem to be the only one here talking about it!" No, yapping about it, repeating bullshit claims with lots of screaming, lots of rhetoric, and very little actual logical argument.

"We're with you, Herbert.", the Bitches said artificially.

Then he committed a sin I doubt he would commit, a thing I rank right up there with Russian Roulette with a bazooka. He looked Howard directly in the eye and proceeded to insult him some more. "You are a freak. I'm not sure who screwed up in Northberg, but it's obvious someone did. And now we're all paying for it. For your own sake and everyone's, I have to ask you to step down from your position, get out of here, and never be seen again." The room was deathly still, almost as deathly still as Herbert is sure to be very, very soon.

After all that, Howard was not angry. He was calm and deliberate, and, of course, when he's calm and deliberate... byebye, Mr. Bastard. No wonder he hasn't been pissed off. No sense in getting angry at the dead. "Is that your honest opinion, Mr. Gladstone?", he asked in an half-patronizing, even tone.

"Yes, of course it is!", Herbert spat out sibilantly, even more anger decorating his face with a blush of red.

"Oh. Oh well.", Howard sadly uttered, allowing a sigh to escape his lips. Here it comes.. "I guess I really have no choice, then. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Illuminati,", Howard stood up and said, his left hand sweeping across the room with all six fingers partially outstretched, "I have a statement to make." There was a collective gasp as five hundred milliseconds passed.

Wilma, Sandra, and Herbert all got a bullet in their foreheads, all exactly at the same time with a maximum variation of maybe a hundredth of a second; the sound was that of one shot from three places, noticeably startling everyone else in the room. The dead fools' eyes, brightened by the prospect of Howard's departure, rolled up into their heads as their corpses slumped back in their chairs. Alive, they were annoyances; dead, they looked almost cute. The Illuminati sitting next to them instinctively leaned away from the bodies as they realized what had been done, and then proceeded to smile.

"That", Howard said, "is my statement."

A wave of thunderous applause and the occasional cheer came from the room, as someone from Howard's left- sounded like Gates- said, "Well, now that wasn't too surprising, was it?" Now this I wasn't expecting. I was expecting some pissed off people, some applause, and some general confusion. Okay, so one guy wasn't clapping- it was the Head Night Operator, spitting foulness at the guy to his right to get him to stop clapping. The applause died down when he stood up.

"I don't believe this!", he shouted with a purple face full of rage. "This upstart Dominator" (I was expecting Howie to kill him on the spot for saying that) "just walks in here and kills three first level Illuminati, and you cheer him on? What is wrong with you? If we let this continue, he'll destroy us all!" Maybe two people in the crowd seriously listened to him.

"Would you like to know why they are clapping, Head Night Operator?"

"God damn you... Yes! Tell me!"

"Because no one liked those three.", Howard began, in a dark tone. "Because they gave nothing. They had a lot of power, and they didn't do anything with it except try to bully the rest of their fellow Illuminati with it. I'm surprised none of you already killed them by the time I got in here. Because, as I understand it, they were trying to kill me with the tests. Because he was a nepotist. Because he didn't support anyone else's plans, and he could not work together, and he committed the sin of trying to manipulate Illuminati, oh, what am I saying 'trying' for, he did do it, let's face it. We all wanted him dead. Any one of us could have pulled the trigger. And, if I remember right, he threatened a few people back in 1995 with a crime no one should have let him live for- he threatened to expose the holdings of various Illuminati, and two of them have had to create a normal connection between themselves because of it. And, because he committed another great sin; he believed that his power really existed."

"This is a game, people!", Howard said with majesty, fury, and the heavy hint of total dominance which marks his position. "We are playing a game. The name of this game is Global Domination. We rule the world, and I know some of you have gone too far from it to realize that. We are not to play politics with our fellow Illuminati, it's a form of cheating and just bad manners here. Because we're not competing against ourselves, we're competing against the normals. I know that might seem like a pretty imbalanced game, but they have an advantage we don't. They will exist if we fall, but if they begin a descent, so do we. So before any of you start threatening to start telling various unwanted truths on your news organizations or threatening to use the government against corporations or any of that other happy crap that might hurt the societies we command or our influence with them, remember that it's all just a game. We all have what we want, and if anyone wants more, then they'll have to get it the slow way, like the rest of us."

The Night Operator looked to be on the verge of a heart attack, and if not for the medical technology aiding his life, may have had one. He could say nothing, yet he wanted to. The man Howard had killed was his blood relative, but Herbert was guilty of all the sins Howard had mentioned, and probably more. "You... little..", he muttered, and at that moment I realized what he was angry at.

The Night Operator of Northberg probably had a hand in Howard's development. This man had supported the people who engineered us. He had probably put some of his own resources into the project, not only time and materials, but people and other-project planning. When Herbert, his cousin, wanted Damien to be Dominator, he had probably muttered and cursed to himself, but Howard was already completed and growing up. There was nothing he could do. He had literally helped his cousin's doom along. And he was angry at his cousin's fallacies, his cousin's son's fallacies, and his own. Deep denial is definitely never something Illuminati should experience. When you're juggling world power, would you people mind not adding your own mental problems into the mix? For a moment, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. He was human- petty, conniving, and egotistical- in an evil paradise where inhumanity is literally king.

"That's it! I know I can't kill you- but I'm not going to let you kill me!", he screamed, and everyone wondered what he would do- that is, if they haven't figured it out already by his words and their tone. The room grew steadily tenser.

He pulled out a small pistol, put it to his right temple, did not hesitate, and blew his own brains out through an exit at the very left of his forehead. For an instant I pondered the bullet ricocheting, then had an internal laugh at the fact that the walls were designed to not ricochet bullets. They think of everything... including inevitable gun violence in the masters' domain.

Any of us could have easily shot the gun out of his hand, but we didn't. Howard lost his master-aura for a moment in a fit of giggling. Everyone else had their mouths wide open. Why did he do that? Was his situation that hopeless, or did he simply want to join the rest of his family in Hell and wasn't willing to wait?

"This is crazy!", a middle-aged man shouted. "First we have Damien dying of his own stupidity. Then we have our beloved Dominator and his servants killing the people that yes, we hated. I admit, I clapped with the rest of you because of what they did and what they threatened to do, and because I was waiting for that moment like the rest of you. But now one of Northberg's Operators blows his own brains out?! What is this, some kind of sick joke? Howard- what did you do to him beforehand?!", he demanded.

"I know this is going to be tough to believe, and I really don't have any way of proving it, but I did nothing beforehand. I was prepared to kill those three; that statement was a trigger phrase. I didn't think the Operator would do what he did. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm as shocked as the rest of you, about a few things. The fact that this organization has seemed to lose its edge, and the fact that nepotism still has an effect. We are the Illuminati, and I'd like to remind everyone again of that. Don't come whining to me because people are stupid. I killed those three because they deserved it. I didn't kill the Operator. But, to get rid of all blame, I will say right here and now that I will have no part in the selection of the replacements for the five dead people. My vote will not be a part of those calculations, and I will not help anyone acquire any of the resources gleaned from the dead." Some of the faces could be seen changing on some of the people as they mentally changed their plans for placing whom they wanted in the newly-available positions, and recomputed their possible share of the newly-available power. I'm not sure how many people Howard really appeased- Howard's resources aren't managed by him, from what he told me, other Illuminati decide who does that. But it was a worthy gesture.

"It is also true that the three people whom I assassinated were Illuminati of the first level, and that they did oppose some of my plans that would have hampered their growth of power. But I believe that is true for all of us. If there is any of you who has anything to say about that, do so freely and without fear." Freely, maybe. Without fear? Not a chance. Four dead bodies are in the room, going through rigor mortis. Of course these guys are scared. And Howard would be scared, if everyone in the room wasn't so positive about the deaths. Maybe they're faking it.. no, not all of them at once.

The 18-23 year old, who had laughed before, stood up. "Howard, if it would have been any of us up there, we would have certainly done the same thing. You have nothing to apologize for." He then sat down. A general murmur of quiet assent flowed through the assembly. Howard didn't pay that guy, either- but it would have been a good choice had he did.

"Thank you, Mr. Beckett. Anyone else?"

"Yes..", a 50-55 year old, skinny, second level woman with wrinkles on her face and an Illuminated glint in her eye said, "I have something to say. I'd like to say that when we accept the five replacements, we better be damn well more careful to pick the best. We should have never let them in here, they ruined all our plans, and he was going to put that young scumbucket Damien in our Dominator's place." So there's the answer. Or maybe just a general intuition which makes good logical sense. "Howard, I support you here."

"Thank you, Mrs. Adams. Is there anyone else?" A couple of people pondered saying something, but either thought they didn't have much to say or it wasn't worth saying. "Now let's get back to the business at hand. Seeing as how the person who initiated this is now very much dead, is there anyone who feels this matter needs to be continued?"

No one did.

Howard adjourned the session, and we all went home.