Howard seemed to relax slightly. His muscles simply went more limp, he closed his eyes a bit, and I could feel his current energy level go down. "So how did you deal with people two-fifths your IQ, Billy?", he asked, a grin on his face.

And once more I had to tell him the truth. "I avoided most of them.. two fifths? It felt like less! Well.. some of them were cool. Some of em I could manipulate, but others were just plain stupid and obsessed with their own dicks, like nothing else mattered except how long their cock was. Ever since I was seven, I realized I was better than them," As I said that, I realized a strange correlation between my previous thoughts and what's happening now. Of course... fuck, I won't have to deal with any of them again, that's for sure.. "I knew I was way stronger and smarter than any of em, and I kept wishing I wouldn't have to deal with them anymore." As I spoke, I realized the connection all too well. I had long been... wanting to be away from.. fucking HELL!! "I got what I wished for!!", I screamed, squinting my eyes so as not to cry.

"Yup. And now you're the genie.", Sarah said in an all-too-pleasant voice.

"I saw that movie..", I muttered back.

"What?", Howard asked, unfamiliar with what we were talking about.

"Aladdin.", we answered simultaneously. Sarah continued, "End of the movie, guy gets a genie and three wishes, he wishes to be a sultan, not powerful enough for him, wishes to be a sorcerer, Aladdin tells him the genie is more powerful, so he wishes to be a genie." And then he gets nailed by wrist-cuffs, the restrictions of the genie, and he is crammed into a lamp and sent off to the far reaches of never-never land, only to return when Disney feels like making sequels.

"Complete with restrictions.", Howard figured out.

"Yup. Saw it while tracking my fifteenth kill." What?!

"What the hell would someone the Illuminati are trying to kill be doing watching a Disney movie?!", I asked in total surprise. That doesn't seem to make sense, but I know it does.. the same strange sense the rest of this makes. But hell, a Disney movie?! The happy variety, with all the bright colors and the whistles? That's just fucked up..

"He was a family man. Eight year old boy, six year old girl." I guess their targets have families just like everyone else.. the knowledge woke me up a bit.

"Why?", I asked.

"They never told me for any of em." Figures. A soldier's job, and all that.

"So how'd you do it?", I replied.

"Poke to the heart." Uh, what? "A lot of people live on the verge of cardiac arrest, Billy. Sweet shit might be great for us, but cholesterol clogs up their arteries, fat makes their hearts pump harder, and a lot of other shit they do hurts their health. Do a strong, quick poke to a few points on the chest, blood clots and pieces of cholesterol get stopped up in the cardiac muscle, and presto! Instant corpse." In other words, she does the right shit to the arteries and the veins and.. oh crap. But I know that can't work except on people ready to die..

"So what about the healthy people?", I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

"If you can think of it, we've probably done it.", she answered, in a voice that would normally have a shrug with it.

And can I ever think of it. Gibs Ahoy... "Ugh..", I said, thinking of all the possibilities. Violence is great, yeah, violence kicks.. but these people probably have a power of nastiness you don't exactly see on TV. And with those fingernails.. a little chunk here, a little chop there... that's an interesting way to kill someone, just take them apart, small piece by small piece until nothing is left but a bloody mound of flesh.

I looked and noticed Howard happily drifting off to half-consciousness or sleep. Why not? He has nothing to fear for the moment..

"This is nothing like what I expected.", I muttered. When you get captured by the bad guy, you expect bad things to happen to you. When nothing other than the obvious happens to you, and the bad guy is perfectly willing to let you live, oddness is afoot. When the bad guy happens to be your fucking world-controlling twin brother... yeah, it's pretty fucked up. Fucked up or no, I'm seriously beginning to doubt I have any hope in Hell of getting out of this..

Sarah chuckled a bit, in a nice tone that isn't usually heard from expert assassins with kills galore under their belts. "Oh, you're going to have to get used to that. In addition to running the world, we also specialize in fucked up shit." The first thing that struck me was her use of 'we', but then I discounted it in favor of the second thing.

"It gets more fucked up than this?"

"Billy, these people are trying to engineer a dragon up at Northberg. And it gets more fucked up than that.", she replied in a slightly nastier voice. Now how would they go about doing that?! I guess since they have the Genetic Engineer's Construction Set, they can do whatever the fuck they feel like.. wonder what practical applications it has, or if they're doing it simply because they can.

"I feel like I'm in a book.. with a schizophrenic as the author.", I muttered, wondering what kind of freakish, mutant, deranged mind could ever possibly come up with something like this.

"Welcome to your own private piece of Hell, Billy. Just feel lucky Satan over here doesn't believe in torment.", she said, gesturing to Howard's relaxed form. No, he doesn't believe in pain, he just likes servants, someone to be there for him as he goes about his business of world domination.. and that's who I am, now. The best toy in the world, kids.. I wonder if three hundred years in the future, they'll have a Friends Factory for this. Get whoever you want, freshly created, pick any servant you want, we got hundreds, we even make em custom. Yeah, they probably will. And I'll be around to see it happen...

"Billy... it's not going to be.. what you think it's going to be.", Howard gently said, his feet on my stomach relaxing even more.

"I believe you, Howard.", I told him. That much is certain. I better quit even trying to guess the methodology of this place before I find out more about it.. and if I can't escape, I'll find out lots, lots more about it shortly. I am not being kept in a box.. my imagination drifted a bit, spurred by recent developments. I imagined myself coming into school and telling my adventures.. I imagined Howard coming there, I imagined my old buddy Paul coming here.. I imagined a number of things, most involving the people I used to know or thought I knew, all interplaced with various elements of what I've seen here. It makes for some pretty freakish combinations.. some of them utterly unrealistic and impossible, some of them merely unlikely. All involved some sort of dominance from one hominid to another. Oh, God.. but God can't help me now, and neither can anyone else. Actually, the only person who can give me any sort of real help is Howard himself..