[Author's Note: I'm not dead! Many apologies, I intended to take a break from this story after pushing myself to get three chapters out in December, but I didn't intend to be away so long. Back on board now, though, so enjoy!]

Chapter 43: And My Theater Never Closes...

La Fin de Toute
(formerly Galactica Palace)

37th Floor - Library/Security Center

The grating buzz of an alarm woke Labyrinth Commander Eas from her sleep. Perplexed, she opened her eyes and swiped the air with one fingertip. A dozen scrolling lines of holographic text flared before her, throwing her pale face into shadow.

It wasn't a system failure or an intruder alert; those would have been loud and grating enough to rouse her in an instant. Nor was it a summons from Joker, for that would do the same. No, the largest and most prominent status update came from the Merry-Go-Round.

All power to it had been shut down.

Eas lifted the transparent plastic cover of her sleep pod and sat up straight, reading the updates from her holo-tablet as fast as it could deliver them. According to the palace's routing systems, the Merry-Go-Round itself was still running and still at full power... but all conduits leading to it, the conduits supplying it with all its energy, were inactive. Mystified, she opened the Merry-Go-Round's schematics. Most of the details of its inner workings were classified above her security level, but if there were some form of battery inside, she would have known about it. And if it had been capable all along of running itself from an internal battery, why keep it connected to the palace's power grid for all this time? To charge itself? But then, why use the prisoners as fuel at all?

She didn't know, and her holo-tablet could only tell her so much. Eas stood and touched the comm embedded behind her ear. "Master Joker?"

"Yes, my dear?" The harlequin's voice was calm and even. Far moreso than it should be.

"Sir, I just received an upsetting alert. The power to the Merry-Go-Round has been cut."

"Of course it has, Commander. I was the one who cut it."

Eas blinked. That couldn't be right. "Sir?"

"I suggest you come down here, Commander. You can be the first to see it, if you'd like."

"To see what, sir?"

"The Merry-Go-Round is about to fulfill its primary function."

There was no refusing an invitation like that, and it was unsafe to refuse Joker in general. Eas disappeared in a streak of crimson light.

*****

The Merry-Go-Round

She materialized behind Joker, who stood on a raised platform hundreds of meters above the floor, jutting out of one of the chamber's fleshy outer walls. His back was turned, the black eyes of his mask lifted to the immense technorganic tower studded with living bodies from every world. It wasn't immediately obvious that the Merry-Go-Round had been disconnected from the grid; its burnt black machinery and circuitry still hummed, its biological components still throbbed and pulsated with pseudo-life, the hundreds of embedded prisoners still moaned in agony, their voices muffled by the horseshoe-crab-like masks clamped over each of their faces and held in place with sickly yellow pointed teeth. It looked much the same as the last time Eas had seen it.

Except, on her second look, Eas saw something new in the center of the tower's mass. It was maybe a meter in diameter and growing larger with each passing minute, round and plump and shiny red like a festering boil. Multicolored veins and arteries—red, blue, purple, green, black, white, orange, a few other colors she had never seen before—crisscrossed its surface. They throbbed faintly, pumping dozens of different fluids through the tower's circulatory systems. The new growth appeared to be purely organic in nature; Eas could see no obvious circuitry or machinery on its surface. The library's compiled data stated that the Merry-Go-Round's organic and technological components were blended near-seamlessly down to a cellular level, so perhaps its technological aspects were too small to be seen with the naked eye. Whatever the case was, it was best to announce herself before gathering more information "Master?" she said to Joker, bowing out of habit.

"Bonsoir, Commander Eas," said Joker without turning around, or moving at all. His hands were clasped tight behind his back.

Eas eyed the growth, repulsed, yet fascinated. "This is what you wanted me to see, sir?"

"Oh, not yet." She felt his grin, though she couldn't see it. "Just wait a moment."

A thousand more questions percolated inside her. She held her tongue; this was some sort of test, and she had every intention of passing it. Eas waited, watching the swelling grow... Was she imagining it, or were the prisoners' muffled groans becoming louder? They were, she concluded after a brief observation. Their voices were faint, but raising in a kind of crescendo as the new growth, now double its size from minutes ago, began to twitch and shudder...

"Ah!" said Joker. "Here it comes! Brace yourself, Eas!"

A tiny hole opened in the exact center of the growth, spilling soft, misty white light from within. Faults raced outward from it in impossibly straight lines, quartering it... and it opened along those lines, spreading meaty petals a half meter thick, a grotesque flower coming into full blossom. Hazy light poured from inside in almost liquid streams... it was not merely a tumorous growth, Eas realized, but a pod... a chrysalis for something developing within.

Silhouetted by the light, Joker raised his arms as if welcoming an angel descending from the heavens.

Confusion, and a surge of panic. Eas saw nothing in the chrysalis at all, only walls of raw red meat, gleaming in that mysterious liquid light. Had something gone wrong? "Master," she began, dreading his response.

"No need to worry, my dear," said Joker. "Everything is just as planned."

Eas looked.

She couldn't quite believe what she saw.

The shape that emerged from the Merry-Go-Round's monstrous chrysalis was very small, too small for the pod that birthed it, and much too small for the immense tower that housed the pod. It was no bigger than a spread-fingered hand, and so white that she could barely see it against the light. Like a feather on the wind, it drifted downward into Joker's waiting hands. He cupped his fingers around it before she could make out any more details, but then he turned, aglow with victory. "Go on, take a look," he said. His fingers uncurled.

A pure white butterfly rested in the palms of his hands, its fore and hindwings aflutter, its antennae testing the dank, moist air. It was of no species Eas recognized. The closest thing she could compare it to was a Terran papilionidae, a swallowtail, but its resemblance was vague at best. She couldn't even tell if the butterfly was alive, or just mimicking the actions of a living organism. At least superficially, it appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary insect, or a facsimile of one, except... except that it was stark, flawless white, without even a speck of another color. Its whiteness was beyond improbable, she realized, a chill scampering down the back of her neck... it was impossible. Though it was bathed in the hazy light from its chrysalis, the butterfly cast no shadows, and none were cast on it. Not single millimeter of its body was darkened by any sort of shade... it was entirely, uniformly white from its head to its wingtips to its abdomen to the tiny clawed feet at the ends of its six segmented legs.

Baffled, Eas peered closer. There was no explanation for the way that light behaved with this... creature? Construct? It was at odds with science, at odds with the physical world as she knew it. All solid, three-dimensional objects absorbed and reflected light; there would be no way to see an object otherwise, no way to define what it shape was. She could tell—or she thought she could tell—that the butterfly was solid, that it was a real, corporeal thing. Leaning closer, she could feel a faint breeze from the movement of its wings. But darkness simply did not touch it, it was as clean and spotless as a blank canvas... yet somehow she could still make out even the minute details of its body: the wings' veins and cells, the round ridges of its abdomen, its speckled compound eyes...

Her mind reeled with the effort of processing what her eyes were telling her. What she was looking at should have been terrifying, an undermining of natural law, but... but as strange and inexplicable as it was, the butterfly was beautiful. Each line and curve was elegant, perfect in its design; she needed no instruments to tell that its symmetry surpassed that of any living thing or mortal-made object. Whatever it was, alive or not, impossible or not, the butterfly resting in Joker's hands was gorgeous, delicate, irresistible, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She longed to touch it...

"Ah ah ah," said Joker. "Careful now, Commander."

Eas pulled back her hand, which she didn't even realize she had moved. The act of pulling away from the butterfly required such a concentrated force of will that her brow broke out in beads of sweat. "Master?" she asked through numb, tingling lips. "What is that?"

"It's exactly what I built the Merry-Go-Round for," said Joker. "All the effort of designing and creating it, of gathering prisoners from across the multiverse and putting them through unknowable suffering... Well, that last one was something I wanted to do regardless, but it wasn't without purpose, not at all. It was to produce this," said Joker. He stroked the tip of the butterfly's forewing with one claw, handling it with more care and gentleness than Eas thought him capable of. The expression on his face was one of immeasurable pride. "My ace in the hole, as the saying goes. All my armies and all my weapons—the Clow Cards, Moebius 90, the Bad End Precure, the Witches, the Incubators, the Frozen Flame, the entity, and the other fancy toys you haven't seen yet—they'll all be put to use in good time, but only this one gets saved for the moment of the climax."

She couldn't help herself, she could no more repress the urge to ask than she could stop her heart from beating. "What does it do?"

Joker's lips pressed together. "Spoilers, silly girl, spoilers! Of course I can't tell you that! There's still a chance that you'll fall into enemy hands, so I can't have you blabbing precious secrets. Frankly, even letting you see it is a risk... but what's a moment of triumph without anyone to witness it?"

"I... I see." In truth, for the first time since Dead End recruited her from Labyrinth, Eas wasn't paying attention. Not when the butterfly was—

"Ah, of course," said Joker. "No wonder you're distracted. Please, allow me." One hand hovered inches over the butterfly and moved as if turning a doorknob. A shifting tesseract of iridescent lines enveloped his creation... an Isolation Field.

Eas's focus snapped back into place, the spell broken, but not before an inexplicable pang of sadness tightened in her chest. "M-my apologies, Master. I'm not sure what came over me."

"Apology accepted, dear, you couldn't help it. Now, with the process done, the Merry-Go-Round can be dismantled—"

"Dismantled?" Now Eas wondered if she had left her trance at all. Surely she hadn't heard that right. "You're letting the prisoners go?"

"Mon dieu, no!" Joker cackled. The sound sent needles through Eas's temples. "What would be the point of that? Each portion of the Merry-Go-Round will be surgically extracted with its prisoner—or prisoners—still bonded to it. They'll all be shipped out to our various strongholds across the Vertices—save for Vertex Three, for obvious reasons—where they shall remain, inducing agony in our captives for many centuries yet to come. That's part of the brilliance of the Merry-Go-Round, if I say so myself: even with its primary purpose fulfilled, even taken apart and with its pieces scattered all over the multiverse, it will be perfectly functional in its secondary capacity... as the greatest instrument of torture ever conceived."

"Of course, sir." Lesser beings would be horrified. Not Eas; it wasn't long ago Labyrinth used to harvest human despair in hopes of bringing forth Infinity for Lord Moebius. The Merry-Go-Round, in her mind, was simply a more direct and invasive version of the same process. It was all in the name of gathering enough data to impose some sort of order on the anarchy of the multiverse. As Labyrinth's new leader, that was the purpose that Lord Moebius left her with... it was his wish that Labyrinth be absorbed into Dead End, for it was only with their assistance and prowess that the multiverse could truly be controlled.

Eas never believed that Joker's Merry-Go-Round would negate all existence. Cruel he was, cruel beyond measure, but it was that cruelty that assured her that the stories about him plotting to erase reality were false. Someone like Joker would never bring such a permanent end to his grand scheme. She knew his type; he enjoyed the challenge, he delighted in dangling hope over his prey only to snatch it away at the last moment. It was just as he said to the ill-fated rescue team from the Lighthouse: if he truly wanted to negate all existence, he had had the power, skill, and means to do it with the Book of Darkness alone, and he never did. There was a reason that he willingly sent the Book and its Will away, beyond any hope of retrieval. There was a reason that the premature loss of the Entity and the Frozen Flame didn't seem to be of much concern to him. There was some grand method to Joker's madness, one that he refused to share with anyone... Whatever it was, Lord Moebius had trusted that method enough to join forces. With Moebius gone, it was up to Eas to trust in it too. It was what he would have wanted.

Therefore, Eas reopened her holo-tablet and began relaying orders to the corps under her command. The dismantling of the Merry-Go-Round and the scattering of its prisoners would be done in as prompt and efficient a manner as possible. "Will that be all, Master?" she asked without looking up.

Joker turned back around, clutching his prize. "Just one more thing, s'il vous plaît. It concerns Major Rubeus, recently assigned to Vertex Four."

Eas's brow wrinkled as she brought up his file. Its lack of available data gave her a moment of pause. "Sir, I'm not reading any signal from Major Rubeus."

"And thus you see the problem. He appears to have... what is that quirky human phrase? Ah, 'done a bunk.' That was it."

"A desertion? That's hard to believe."

"Well, it appears that Major Rubeus used his Dark Crystal to turn Mademoiselle Tomoe—that's Mademoiselle Mami Tomoe, not our Professor Tomoe's errant child—into a Youma, as a distraction to cover his ignominious retreat." It was difficult to tell with his back to her, but Eas thought she saw flames leaking out of Joker's mask. His tone grew pinched as he made an obviously conscious effort to control it. "A decent strategy, if nothing else. However, Major Rubeus somehow neglected to retrieve the Rainbow Crystal I planted in Mademoiselle Tomoe's body as a countermeasure against the moon brat. She can't reform her Silver Crystal if she doesn't have all the pieces, and she can't collect any pieces without summoning a Great Youma in the process, you see?"

"Ingenious, Master."

"Of course it is, it was my plan. However..." Some of his control slipped, and Eas saw him vanish the butterfly's tesseract from his hand before something could happen to it. "Major Rubeus not only failed to retrieve the Crystal, he somehow failed to even notice it in the first place before he panicked and fled. So, the Morning Lights have one-seventh of that accursed Silver Plot Device, and Tomoe's Great Youma couldn't even dispatch one of them for the trouble. Major Rubeus, to his credit, has apparently deduced that it would be unwise to return here."

Eas began to get an idea of what orders he had in mind. "Locate Rubeus and terminate with extreme prejudice?"

Joker chuckled, just once. "Termination is far too merciful. Spread word: if anyone finds him, he's to be hauled back here alive, if only just. Azurite gets to be the first to punish him."

"At once, Master." Eas nodded. She didn't envy Rubeus in the least. "Will that be all?"

"Oui," said Joker, all smiles once again. Oddly, he seemed to be grinning past Eas, at something over her shoulder. "Run along now, I have more worlds to watch and more veils to peel back."

*****

Central Power Battery

Days Later

The shape inside the main generator writhed and thrashed, swiping at the inescapable walls of its confines with shadowy claws. Every so often, it would let out a hideous scream that echoed through the entire palace. Many of the lower ranks were terrified of setting foot anywhere near here.

Eas was unperturbed by its tantrums. In time, it would settle down, as it always did. She focused on her work, pushing everything else to the back of her mind. With the Merry-Go-Round disconnected, the palace's entire power grid needed to be rerouted to account for its absence. It was repetitive work, but it was good work.

"Commander Eas?" said someone behind her.

Eas spared a glance back over her shoulder. "Ah. Commissar Miki," she said by way of greeting without batting an eye. "State your business."

Sayaka Miki barely registered the flailings of the creature being used to fuel the palace's main grid. Her gaze on the back of Eas's head was unwavering. It was only appropriate that Joker had personally selected her to monitor Dead End's ranks, Eas thought. In her experience, to monitor effectively, one needed someone capable of absolute obedience and dogged persistence. Commissar Miki was nothing if not obedient and persistent. "You know why I'm here, Commander."

Eas's cheek twitched. "I assure you, Commissar, that I'm exactly as loyal to Dead End's cause as I was the last time I updated you. In regards to both the dismantling of the Merry-Go-Round and the rerouting of power, work is proceeding as scheduled. With all due respect, please stop pestering me."

"Believe it or not, I'm following orders. I don't like you well enough to stalk you, you're not my type."

Eas manipulated another slider, brushing off the bait. "I understand the need to find and quash any potential dissent. However, again with all due respect, you're wasting my time, Commissar." She was well aware that she wasn't the only one being investigated, but there was no need to tip her hand to that knowledge. A deflection would do nicely. "If I ever contemplated defecting to the enemy, I promise you I'd leave enough evidence for you to enable you to do your job... though not enough to implicate myself, of course. I'd most likely frame Iron Mouse, if she were still here. And if she were intelligent enough to be considered a suspect."

The point of a cutlass poked the base of Eas's spine. Not hard, but just enough for Eas to take notice. "Didn't much figure you for having a sense of humor."

"It's not one of my better qualities, I admit."

"Huh." The point receded.

"Now, will that be all?"

"Yeah, go ahead." Sayaka turned to leave.

"Commissar, sir?" said Eas, again without looking up.

"Hmm?" Her cape made a soft sound as it slithered past her ankles.

"I appreciate you keeping us honest."

Eas could feel Miki's eyebrow raising. "Was that another joke?"

"If you see your duties as a joke, perhaps. That's apparently how you see mine."

Miki lapsed into shocked silence.

Eas knew that last remark could be seen as unprofessional... but it felt strangely good, regardless.

END OF CHAPTER 43

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