Tori was brown-skinned and round faced, small and of a build that someone might term cute, but she had a mean look on her face in each of the attached files. The others at the table drank, but Tori didn’t—instead, she apparently smoked up a storm, favoring cigarettes with blue paper and a blue glow at the end. I’d seen them before—blue flames or something.

In the time it had taken her buddies to finish several beers, she had downed an equivalent number of cigarettes. Her unlabeled friend was mixing drinks and smoking, coming just shy of her in smoking and a bit shy of his friends in drinking, if I had to judge by the glasses beside him and the butts he’d stubbed out in the ashtray among Tori’s blue flames. He was unlabeled, but I knew him. I’d seen him as a civilian in past shoots with the time camera, and I’d fought him.

Kingdom Come.

The light-haired woman next to her was leaning heavily into her personal space, and Tori didn’t seem to either welcome it or hate it. One photo where the blonde sat with her tattooed arm pressing hard into Tori’s shoulder, and another photo where the woman had an arm around Tori’s shoulders, half leaning into Tori and half onto the table, clearly tipsy.

The woman was Lionwing. And she, too, had cropped up on the time camera. When we’d first seen the Pharmacist, Kingdom Come had been there, and so had a strawberry blonde woman with a tattooed arm and cat mask.

I clicked the label, and I brought up a page. Lionwing, in varying costumes. She had light armor she wore when in the field, along with a sword and a triangular shield that had decorative arrangements of spikes at each corner. A bit of a ‘gladiator’ look.

The last person sitting at the table was Cretan. Muscular, with a shaved head and goatee. Clicking through produced a blurry picture of him standing in the midst of fires. He had a helmet with a bull motif, but didn’t even use the bull’s horns as part of the aesthetic—the helmet hugged his head pretty close, and the ‘bull’ arched over top like a mohawk, its eyes lining up with his. His armor was similar, hugging his body pretty close, with the design etched in or marked out in white metal.

Okay.

Making sense of this—the Pharmacist had been allied with Teacher. Teacher was connected to the hyper-religious nuts from Earth Cheit, with some Fallen and Kingdom Come roped into that.