“Good? Fuckin’ great. Let’s get you some whippits and head over to the fireworks table. They’re about to open it up.”

“Fireworks? Inside?”

Mike laughed. “It’s hardly a party without explosives, brother. Just go with it.”

And so Manny did. He and Mike did some whippits, which meshed gloriously with the acid. Then they stood up on stumbling feet and headed over to the fireworks table. Things seemed to be just getting started over there. Manny inspected a few different brightly-colored explosive toys, before something burst next to his ear and he looked up to see Skullfucker Mike firing a massive Roman candle toward the musical punching people on the stage.

The sound of it—holy hell the sound! It might have been the most compelling thing his ears had ever heard. The acid is definitely hitting hard now, Manny thought, holy fuck. Holy fuck what IS this?

The rest of his night faded into a blur of lights and music and strange, indefinable sense memories. It was disorienting and exhilarating in equal measure.

Hours went by. The acid faded. And eventually Manny found himself on a bunch of cushions, sitting around a table with Skullfucker Mike and other Fuckians. He couldn’t remember any of their names but, after a few minutes of relative lucidity, Manny was able to piece together that they were all friends of the people who’d been captured. One of the men, a bearded guy with multi-jointed fingers the length and width of rulers, reached over Manny to grab a beer. He pulled it back, took a sip, and settled back into his seat.

“My favorite memory of Marigold,” he said, “is from back when we were still building this city, right after we stole the Bagger. She got a hair up her ass that there oughta be a big purple clubhouse at the top, for folks to do cocaine in and watch sunsets. I remember she strapped an armload of wood to her back, grabbed a can of spray paint, took a big rail of meth and just started climbing up the center spindle like she was gonna do the whole damn job herself. She got fuckin’ stuck two-thirds of the way up, just hanging out there with her panties in the breeze, screaming like a scared cat.”

Mike laughed, “I remember that. Me’n Topaz had to climb up and free her. And then she climbed the rest of the way up and started laying down boards.”

Finger Man nodded.

“Yeah, I remember. When I climbed up there an hour or so later she was all frantic and fiddling with nails and bolts and turnt to fuck but like, making progress too. And I asked her, ‘Marigold, why are you doing this alone? This ain’t a one person job.’ And she said, ‘I know. But unless I start building it, it’ll never be real.’”