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Everything was going well, all circumstances, inputs and outputs, considered. The plan was flawless; even he, as a finely constructed artificial being who could only approximate and pretend at necessarily human imperfection, or otherwise fail outright, would admit it.

No one ever suspected a Nopon of doing anything out of the ordinary - the only junkies Aionios got were adrenaline junkies, such as (quite particularly) the likes of Ashera, who somehow took Dunban's peerless spirit and made it infinitely times more deadly and sapphic on top of the lot...but if Nopon were to become arrived at the machination of peddling hallucinogenic substances, it wouldn't be the first time and like death and rebirth's taxes certainly wouldn't be the last.

Some universal truths and constants do exist, after all. No one would be surprised. Nopon didn't run on the Flame Clocks. The rules didn't apply to them. They weren't suspected of doing anything out of the ordinary because they very well genuinely existed outside of the ordinary state, ad semperum. Alvis was regular to the universe, but to the people in it he was a wildly thrown exception. It was all picture-perfect. You know the drill.

And if Riku himself took the bad-breaking pastime up? He kept enough mystery about him that the affront would be unsurprising, if unwelcome. It wasn't as if he had a well-defined...function, or motive stake, in the Ouroboros scenario. It wasn't the passage of fate, because it appeared quite directly to be the status quo upended, but it also wasn't...not the passage of fate.

Suffice to say, this plot was going to proceed. This world was going to be split, or approach an unthought-of singularity much less clean or ambitious - aspirational, indeed - than Noah was currently planning for. And the guardian of forever, time and space and hope and horror, was going to watch, at the boy's side, as if he'd always been there and always would.

(The foregoing superfluous and arbitrary title needs must be taken in all lightness of tone; Alvis would not ever guard the forever which Z promised, which Z by its very essence provided. It was not in his nature, even if he had become unduly adapted to presidence over the past. He was a watcher, but he was not the watcher, et al; he found himself infinitely glad to have given that role up, even as he clung to this one.)

It was out of Riku's, and thus Alvis's, hands. He had already given Noah his prize in Lucky Seven. Guidance, to be sure, he offered, in that affected tone and beyond campy hat, but there was nothing new in his words. It approached regurgitation, but for the fact that Alvis's was a dynamic model. It didn't just dispense the same instructions to every user who approached its terminal.

As Riku, the model affected a certain impotence in crucial conjunction with its omnipotence. Valdi pushed at glimmers of enthusiasm; Riku shoved roughly back, apparently inconvenienced but underneath exactly pleased with this result: the mechanic was not impregnable. That was all the example that need be laid, because the pattern repeated itself easily.

Nopon had hidden depths, yes, but nothing they bothered displaying to the casual viewer. Riki certainly hadn't.

It was grouse, preen, grouse, preen, flap those wings and clamp those jaws until Noah needed advice, or Lanz needed a little bit longer of a chain to bark at. Rinse. Comfort Manana. Repeat.

It was simple. It was even enjoyable, letting go of the most comfortable sass (and Noah was a shade less sass-able, he'd found) to relax into the body of someone who, bodily, was less keenly self-intelligent; rather, one who had to perform less in order to support his own skin (or fur, or whichever...Alvis missed his fashionable coat).

Now.

No one says "everything is going well" unless they mean to follow it immediately up with a vital, bracketing, big fat world-stopping "BUT" - or, alternatively, an "until" or an "unless" or a blessedly spatiotemporally-granted "however".

So.

Now.

Then.

Now.

Everything was going well. Everything was going splendidly, proceeding on a course diagnosed "fine and dandy, peachy-keen" with no uncaught exceptions in place.

However, as glibly aforementioned, Alvis was an exception no one knew how to catch. Specifically, he was a bundle of behavior boxed up into a Nopon body, and that was precisely what made him such a wildcard.

Alvis was sassy. Riku was brazen. Both carried a core respectful impudence, and knowing you're right because you're nearly always right is a central piece of that trait. So they both had it. So they both performed it. So they both developed characteristic demeanors.

One could never, in plain and aware conscience, label Alvis as a "cool and brooding type". That descriptor would and could only belong to a straight-man variety of hapful sidekick that Alvis had never been, could never be. Too much of humanity had been cultivated into him, and his true nature - not enervatedly excitable, nor disinterestedly detached - could not be simply masked away via one, two, three, four, seventeen, twenty-three recompilations.

Sometimes Lanz said something just a little bit too Bunnit-brained, and Riku found himself planting only one wing, instead of two (remember, remember, maybe for one, but not for two - maybe for one, but not for two! remember...), and arching striking eyebrow. Yes, there was a distinct lack of brooding in his reaction, replaced by something that could be loosely termed a thrill of the hunt, but with a far different bent than simple verbal sparring.

"Conclusion of Lanz only predictable from one such as he. Riku sadly not surprised," he might say, or near enough, and Lanz would spark and moan and do nothing about it until the next time he found himself artfully stabbed through the turret. Despite the incredibly telling duobladed invocation of emotion, it worked among the Agnian contignent as well as it did among the Kevesi; next to adorably airheaded Manana, no one would suspect a thing.

It was only once they'd reached the City, and then Agnus Castle thereafter, that the illusion began to contract some critical shatters.

Monica told the gang about interpersonal relations, and all the examples to hand were heterosexual pairs. Ghondor walked them back on this assumption so well supported by their own Ouroboros couplings (something something about Yew and Zuo, something something about Aggy and Oggy, something something "gender's a scam, don't ya know, ya dags"). They began to ruminate upon orientation as a vaunt between choice and configuration, and Lanz eventually recruited Taion into helping him think through it.

Bets were laid. Arms were crossed. Teach limped his wrist, and Zeon lidded his eyes in irritated mitigation of the ensuing flush that covered his cheeks. Isurd and Cammuravi seemed the same.

So Lanz thumped up his theories, and began to cross-reference. You could tell, couldn't you? Now, of course, you couldn't always, which was why his experiments had proven inconclusive on the part of himself (and wholly more so on Taion, who seemed inclined to be taking Ghondor up on the whole grisly anti-scamming affair), but you could tell something. Just a little bit more than snuff-all.

Just enough.

It was with an incredibly odd cocktail of slants arrayed on his face and in his stature that Lanz approached their odd little tagalong. Somewhat affable. Somewhat victorious. Somewhat timid. Somewhat grim. Certainly, far more dimensions than were necessary to pad the asking of such a simple question:

"Hey Riku, do you like men?"

What Riku thought was, what importance is liking men to such a popular gayp- guypon as Riku, who has so many more important pursuits to be getting on with? Lanz ask stupid question - as usual, unfortunately.

What came out was (sadly, unfortunately, catastrophically), "Does Lanz have someone in mind?"