[Thenamir]

Gateskeeper, realizing he could no longer dodge the questions, motioned for silence, looking about him as if unseen watchers might be hovering around. After a tense moment, he walked up to Grrralph and pantomimed opening and using his cell-antir, holding out his hand. The rest of the Now-much-cleaner-ship watched with silent interest as Grrralph handed over the device, not without a moment's mistrustful hesitation. Gateskeeper took the device and examined it on all sides before picking Sauerkraut's mithril wire from out of the mucken debris, and connecting it first to the cell-antir, and then attempting to adapt the other end of the wire to the connection socket at the base of the Entish thighs.

"No!" cried out Merisu, "you'll destroy them!" Gateskeeper's startlement was such that his glasses fell into a puddle of ketchup at his feet. "Shhhhh!" he hissed, shaking his head "no" and looking again around for unknown listeners. He threw a pleading look at Merisu which she unerringly interpreted as a request for trust. She considered only a moment before her not-just-good-but-perfect-even-in-the-face-of-insufficient-data judgement decided, and she nodded to him, almost imperceptibly.

Gateskeeper nodded back with relief and began his work again, after first fetching and cleaning his spectacles of the muddy ketchup residue. Completing the connections, Gateskeeper turned the cell-antir on and observed the brief messages before the item went dead. He moved the switch to the off position and thought for a moment. Then, with motions almost quicker than the eye could follow, he switched the device back on, and before the messages could flash and the device again die he began a flurry of pressing buttons in seeming random order that lasted for several seconds...

...and in the currently unoccupied viewing room of the penthouse suite of the fell Tower Block of Barát-Höm, the private cell-antir of the Dread Developer, Mogul Bildur, rang once, sparked a couple of times, and emitted a thin trail of blue smoke before it again went dark...

...as Gatesy completed the sequence and snapped the cell-antir shut.

"Now," he said, breathing a sigh of relief, "we can talk...for a time, until he can get a repairman out there from Dorktank. Here," he said to Grrralph, handing him the now-deactivated cell-antir, "it should be fixed now."

Merisu cocked her head at an angle (causing that one blonde curl again to fall fetchingly over one eye) and asked, "would you mind now telling us what this is all about?" Everyone else was paying attention as well, except for Chrysophlax, who was getting quite a charge out of his new friend, Sasser.

"I had to employ the power of the Entish Thighs to duplicate and send a copy of the Wyrm to disable the cell-antir of..." and even now Gateskeeper could not bring himself to say the name of his secret employer. Instead he peeled off the black glove that until now he had always worn in the presence of the others since they day they first rode from Minus Teeth. Taking down a torchlight as the others crowded around, he illuminated his ungloved palm and the diabolical symbol seared thereon. Pimpiowyn read the small inscription with some puzzlement, "Made in Valleyum??"

"Oops, wrong hand," Gateskeeper said, quickly degloving the other hand.

"By Emu the Flightless," cried Orogarn Two taking a stunned step backwards, "I recognize that symbol...from documents I found in the accounting department back in Minus Teeth...contracts and treaties negotiated in ages past by my grandsires with... Moredough!", he said, spitting the word out as if it were a mouthful of steaming dragon dung.

"Yes," said Gateskeeper sadly, and beginning from his employment with Sauerkraut, through the wars down south in Pea Sea, and through the unknown-to-anyone-else portions of his travels with the Devil-take-the-hindmost-ship, he spun his tale of greed, profiteering, and manipulation. Earnur nodded his head manfully, thinking to himself that now he had more than enough excuse to finally introduce Griper to Gateskeeper's spine. Orogarn Two calculated that you could clothe everyone in Minus Teeth and it's outlying villages with the amount of wool Gateskeeper had managed to pull over their eyes. Leninia sympathized with the dejected wizard, having only recently been herself liberated from the embraces of evil. Kuruharan wept openly, being in the presence of true greed-driven success and greatness the likes of which he could only dream of achieving...oh the deceptions, the cunning. Vogonwe was actually at a loss for words.

It was Pimpiowyn who finally put voice to the question all were thinking, "Well, now that we know who and what you are, what do we do next?"

Lord Earnur Etceteron, Ward of the Diminished Fifth and Proclaimer of the Bleedingly Obvious, drew his mighty sword Griper which, having heard the story as the rest of them, was actually egging Earnur on. "It is clear that we must spill the blood of this foul servant of the Dread Developer..."

Lenina and Pimpiowyn rolled their eyes in gratuitous disdain, saying almost in unison, "Men!" Earnur was stunned. "Do you mean to tell me that we should *not* kill this miscreant?" Gateskeeper certainly looked as though he expected no less.

Merisu stepped forward. "Gateskeeper is guilty of throwing in his lot with the Dark Side, true. But in the time since he joined the Are-we-there-yet-ship, he has saved our lives multiple times, and has made no move to actually steal the Entish Bow, even when opportunity presented itself. He has taken action to prevent Mogul from following our movenents for a time. And if he is penitent, well, he is a wizard after all, could be of some assistance to us, as he has been in times past. I mean," explained Merisu, "look what we've already picked up along the way at one time or another -- grocers, ex-uruks, hobbits, strange black creatures, and, ummm, whatever Leninia is -- what possible harm could one more do?"

There was a general nodding of the heads in the Time-for-bed-ship, as much from agreement as from being up *waaaay* past their bedimes.

======

Later that evening, Mogul woke and couldn't get back to sleep right away. Deciding to pass the time by checking on how events were shaping up with the New-revelation-ship, he entered his observation lair, turned on his custom cell-antir and waited for the picture to form. After several moments it failed to resolve into a definable image. When he began to fiddle with the buttons, the device began emitting a dark, foul-smelling smoke, which actually pleased Mogul until the smoke formed itself into an electric drake which looked not-surprisingly like Sasser...