The Third Adventure: Action, That's How! (A Caper in Time Part 2)

by Evan Forman and Michael Robertson - One Chapter a Week Starting 27.11.16


Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - King Zaedar is Introduced, He Learns of Our Hero’s Exploits in Issue #2, and A Mysterious Force Awakens™ From The Depths of The Ancient Past
Chapter 2 - John Boss - Incredibly - Escapes from "The White Palace of Death”, Shoots A BUNCH of Dudes, and Makes His Way to The Relative Safety of Dryadora’s Coal District
Chapter 3 - Dhubagèl Escorts Aerin Through The Sewers of Dryadora, But Maybe Also His Subconscious? What I Mean is We Get to Know More About This Previously Mysterious and At Points Unsettling Character, and The Subterranean Setting is Associated - in Jungian Psychoanalysis - With The Subconscious, So That Works
Chapter 4 - That Relatively Sedate Chapter Was Just a Break from The All-Important Action! As John Boss and Chel Make Their Way Through The Coal District In Their Attempt to Find Safe Refuge, But Not Without The Police Giving Chase
Chapter 5 - John Boss, Aerin Liette, Dhubagèl Shaen, Chel Hagar, and More are Finally United, and Ready to Strike Back Against King Zaedar’s Brutal Regime
Chapter 6 - The Past 30 Years of Aerin's Life Are Unlived for the Sake of the Plot, by Which I Mean Primarily the Plot of This Book, but Also the Plot Which the Red Hand Formulate in This Chapter, Which - If That Wasn't Obvious to You, Reader - Is a Clever Bit of Wordplay on the Similarities between The "Diegetic" Rebellion's Plot Which Requires Sacrifice, in a Very Fatalistic, Heroic Sort of Way, and The "Non-Diegetic" Aristotelian Plot Structure Which Requires Sacrifice in a Very Ritualistic “High-Maintenance Volcano God” Sort of Way
Chapter 7 - In a ‘Baroque Formalism’ Power Move, Four Conversations between John Boss the 34th and the Three Members of the Dryadora Red Hand Cell Are Intercut with a Scene of Domestic Mundanity, and a Scene of Great Heroism Which Is Also a Flashback into the past of John Boss the 41st. For the Purposes of Light Genre Parody, a Minor Character Has a Silly Name; A Minor Character Waits for a Bus, Which Doesn't Actually Move the Plot Forward or Contribute to The Themeing in Any Meaningful Way, And a Minor Character Mentions Things from Wurld’s past but Doesn’t Explain Them, Which Gives You That Kind of High-Fantasy Texture without the Bogged-Downedness That Comes with Fields of Exposition: All the Flavour of Fantasy with None of the Nutrition, and I Think That's Beautiful
Chapter 8 - The Night before the Operation, Aerin — Overcome by Insomnia — Hides Away in His Study and Distracts Himself from His Fear of Tomorrow's Events with the Comforting Familiarity of His Self-Loathing. Kreida Tries to Comfort Him and the Two End up Comparing Notes on a Relationship Forged under the Crucible Pressures of Mental Illness. It's Actually Really Nice.
Chapter 9 - There's a Flashback to an Episode from Chel Hagar's past with Revealing Parallels to Another Episode from Chel Hagar's Past: Chapter 7 of Issue #2. You Might Assume This Is Our Only Reason for Jumping Back a Few Years in Time, but Only If You Pay Attention Will You Notice That We're Subtly Reminding You of and Expanding on the Sub-Sub-Plot of Dryadora and / or the Whole Elvin Empire's failing Electricity System, Because That's Going to Be Important Later. We Then Seamlessly Transition into the Red Hand Cell's Infiltration of the DTV Station Where the Tapes of What Actually Happened in the Arena Are Kept. Being the End of Act II / Beginning of Act III, Things Go a Bit Skiwhiff and the Chapter Ends on a Thrilling Cliffhanger That You'll Have to Wait 'Til next Sunday to See Resolved!
Chapter 10 - Aerin and Krieda Spend Most of the Day in Dryadora's Pearl District, a Nice Day out Which Is Actually a Ruse by Aerin to Get near the Arena Where the Prime Minister Is Making His Speech. Krieda Is Conveniently Scheduled to Visit Her Parents in the Afternoon, so This Gives Aerin the Perfect Opportunity for a Heartbreaking Goodbye Scene before He Goes to Infiltrate the Press Crowd and Place Lockswell's Signal Jammer on the DTV Van's Satellite. Aerin and Dhubagèl Engage in Some Breathtakingly Suspenseful Scenes of Social Deception, but Are They Wily Enough to Avoid Detection by the Already On-Edge Members of the Prime Minister's Elite Guard? Also, How Good Was Doctor Who Last Night?
Chapter 11 - The Red Hand Defend the Control Room as Their Broadcast Goes out to the World. They Flee, and after a High-Octane Chase Scene They Escape into the Forests. All Hope Seems Lost, but Then They Are Saved by a Mysterious Character from an Earlier Point in the Story in a Way That Is Surprising but, Crucially, Still Made Inevitable by the Aristotelian Clockwork We've Established up until This Point. I Liked This Week's Doctor Who a Lot More Than Frank Cottrell-Boyce's Last Episode. It's Good That We're Getting More Fully-Realised Alien Planets In The Show Again
Chapter 12 - The Twelfth One

58 HOURS, 52 MINUTES, AND 5 SECONDS

"The figure of the Red Death himself: standing on a cliff and literally painted red with what looked like the blood of his enemies. Despite the huge black beard with framed his grimace, Aerin still recognised his face instantly. He wore some steel vambraces on his wrists, the pelt of a monster whose stuffed face roared at the viewer, and a gold metal eyepatch decorated to look like another open eye. In his right hand he held an axe, bloodied by the elvin soldier who lay dead behind him. And in his left hand, raised defiant against the black night, was a flaming red scimitar.

“But...he’s…” Aerin trailed off.

Dhubagèl turned to him. “He’s...what?”

“He wasn’t always the ‘Red Death’ though, was he? He had a hereditary title, you said, so he must have been from a family of note, surely? And a well-travelled man if he could guide his army through Orcadia and Astor, some kind of...adventurer.”

“We don’t know.” Dhubagèl shrugged. “There’s nobody that fits the profile, and if there ever was any record of the man’s identity they would have made a point of destroying it.”

“Nobody that fits the profile?” Aerin forced a little sardonic laugh. “Are you sure?”

“Why? Oh!” Dhubagèl leaned forward. “Do you have a fan theory?”

“I mean…that’s,” Aerin swallowed. “That’s John Boss, right?”

Dhubagèl narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“Yeah. John Boss. I mean, comes from a famous family, one of the most well-travelled humans of the time, big bald guy with a beard, arms thick as cows and overdone...performance abs.”

Dhubagèl stepped back, arms folded, squinting as he walked over to a nearby wall. “The hell have you heard about John Boss?”

“Not a whole lot, actually. But I intend to get the exclusive.”

“Your enthusiasm is…” Dhuabgèl paused, visibly considering the most polite phrasing. “Creepy.”

“Wh-” Aerin scratched behind his neck. “What happened next, anyway?”

“Hm?”

“It just seemed like you had more of your story left to tell.”

“Ah, yes. Well.” Dhubagèl hauled an empty crate away from the wall. "You don't need me to tell you that the Red Hand is a fallen organisation. We used to be rather big, busting human babies out of the farms in huge quantities and smuggling them around the kingdoms to grow up in various safe outposts." Even in the dark corner of the room, Aerin could see the elf smile. "Not me, though. I did administration, mostly. Making sure a couple in a South Valenshire cell who wanted a little boy got one; making sure a girl with asthma got to a post with trained doctors. That sort of thing."

Aerin sat down on a little wooden stool in the middle of the room. "So what happened?"

"They found headquarters about six months ago. After that, we've been struggling to restore communication lines with the other branches. HQ's important files were encrypted a hundred different ways, which is why we're still alive to have this conversation, but that place was the centre of all our operations. That, and the archive they had." He stood up and rummaged around the shelves. "See this crawlspace? These bastards had an entire cave, and the cave was full."Dhubagèl knocked a small metal object off its shelf with his elbow, and he picked it up off the dusty floor, wiping it down on the sleeve of his tweed jacket. He pressed the small cuboid around the dust-free square of exposed bricks like a stethoscope, and something clicked. "Right, enough storytime. Let's get you moving again. You're expected."

"Yeah, about that: I still don't actually know why I was sent here," said Aerin, who surely meant to gesture to the room around him, but anxiously flail-shrugged at the world and cosmos.

"Me neither, to be honest.”

“Really?” Aerin replied, having coaxed nothing out of the elf.

“I just got a call along the lines of...actually...I'll play it for you." Dhubagèl abandoned the wall and worked his way over to a little table nested between two shelves, on which sat a chunky device with an aerial and two tape reels. He put on some large headphones and fiddled with the buttons, causing the reels to spin back and forth before he found the right configuration. The machine popped as he pulled out the headphone cable.

He pressed a button and a strange, slurred voice shouted: "RIGHT YE WEE STAIN, YIR JOB IS NOW TO FIND ESS PRICK CA'AD 'AERIN LIETTE' AN' MAK SURE HE GETS TAE YIR SHITEY WEE LIBRARY AT 11:54 ON THE..." Aerin could make out the sound of rustling paper. "...EIGHTEEN. NINE. TWO TWO ONE FOUR. AND YI FUCKIN BETTER, BECAUSE IF I COME DOON THERE AND HE'S NAE EXACTLY FAR I WUNT HIM I'LL HUNT YI DOON, RIGHT? I'LL GET MA MATE SOLVENT - AND SOLVENT'S FUCKEN MINTAL RIGHT, MA MATE RICKY BUMPED INTAE SOLVENT IN THE STREET ONCE, HE'D BEEN WALKING HIS DOG WHICH WIS A PITBULL THAT HE'D NAMED MR. WORLDWIDE FUR A BET BUT ONYWAI; HE WIS GA'AN DOONTOON TO GET A RAKE FUR 'IS MAW’S GAIRDEN, AND HE'D BUMPED INTAE SOLVENT AND SOLVENT WINT FUCKEN MINTAL RIGHT, STARTED SCREAMING AT HIM ON THE STREET, IVERY WORD WHISTLIN FAE THE PERFECT CIRCLE THE CRYSTAL METH HAD BURNED THROUGH ‘IS TEETH, BUT RICKY JIST WALKED AFF AND DIDNAE APOLOGISE OR NUHIN. SO THE NEXT NIGHT-” She cut herself off to address a thudding noise. “HERE FUCK OFF AM THE PHONE AYE?” She paused. “SORRY IT’S ONE A THEY FUCKIN FILIPINO BOYS, RIGHT. SO RICKY WIS OOT WAE 'IS PALS TRYIN TAE PULL SOME RANDOM BURD OR SO HE SAYS, BUT STEPHI WIS THERE ANAW. NOW: WE AH KEN HE FUNCIED STEPHIE FOR YEARS AND NOO ESS WIS HIS CHANCE. IT WIS AH GA'AN SMOOTHLY FUR HIM, BUT THEN STEPHI - ESS WIS AEFTER SOLVENT AND STEPHI BROKE UP BIT BEFORE THEY GOT BACK IGITHER - GOT A TEXT FAE SOLVENT LIKE, 'AH KEN YIR IN THERE WAE RICKY. FUCKEN GET OOT HERE, AV SUMTHIN TAE SHOW YIS'. SO RICKY STEPPED OOT ONTAE QUEEN STREET ON 'IS OWN SO HE COULD PLAY HARDMAN FUR STEPHI OR SUHIN. BUT FIT - *FIT* DID RICKY FIND OOTSIDE AT NIGHTCLUB? SOLVENT...HAD *KILT* MR. WORLDWIDE. WAE. THE RAKE.”

She breathed in, then the speakers rattled with a sandpapery smoker’s cough. “NOO AH KEN TALENT FAN AH SEE IT. AV GOT SOLVENT ON FUCKEN SPEEDDIAL READY TAE PULL YIR TEETH OOT, SAW YIR HANDS AND FEET AFF AND PUNT YE AFF THE CLIFFS BY THE QUARRY. ARITE? ARITE. IT WIS NICE SPEAKIN TI YIS ONYWAI, AM COMPLETELY BLOOTERED SO AM AWA BACK TI THE PARTY. THIS IS BRITTANY SUMHINORITHER, OVER AN OOT. TRY NAE TI DIE, CIAO FIR NOW."

The sound cut out, and Dhubagèl stopped the machine.

Aerin took it upon himself to speak first. “Where was that from!?”

Dhubagèl rummaged around paper clippings and tearings on the desk. “They used all the callsigns, so it’s legit, but the only identification they gave for their location was…” he unfolded the scrap and leaned forward to read in the dark. “...‘the middle phonebooth on Drummers Corner’. Mean anything to you?”

Aerin shook his head, and gestured to the seam in the wall. “Should we be going now?”

“Ah, yes.” The metal object had cracked open some kind of secret door hidden in the building's internal brickwork. When Dhubagèl opened it, the dark room was flooded with harsh yellow light from the small hole. "Right, it's through here, mind the drop." He smiled. Aerin got on his hands and knees and crawled through the hole, clinging to the concrete rafter as he looked down the bottomless elevator shaft. His voice trembled. "Where is...it?"

Dhubagèl extended upright again, the section of brickwork automatically slipping back into the anonymous grid of gray rectangles. "Just shimmy around the corner, there's a ladder down the side of the shaft."

"The entire shaft?"

"You’re complaining now but wait ‘til you’ve to climb back up."

Aerin gripped onto the ladder's grubby rungs as he climbed down the eight floors of Dhubagèl's building, stopping and pressing himself against the wall when an elevator came croaking down past him on metal strings.

The ladder went down to a cage in corner of an underground basement floor overrun with pipes and humming machinery. "Now if you just follow me over to this end, see that?" Dhubagèl pointed at an anonymous door hidden in the dark. There was a triangular sign of a man being struck by lightning nailed into the wood. "You know when you're little and you always see these kinds of doors with 'janitor only' or 'electrical hazard' and you wonder what goes on inside, what sprawling, subterranean arteries they’re trying to hide? Why only one or two people are allowed in, and what exactly they get up to in there? But then you grow up and you tell yourself-" he waved his limbs around and flapped his lips "-'oh it's just the Janitor's cupboard' or 'oh it'll just be some fuses or some electric thing I'm just too stupid to possibly understand'?"

"Yes.” Said Aerin. “Absolutely."

He smiled. "Well, open the door. Just this once. See what The System doesn't want you to see."

Aerin stepped forward, turned the door's dusty knob and pushed it open, casting light where no light had been cast before; his eyes taking in sights had once been the dark secret of an exclusive cabal of people in overalls and boiler suits.

"It's empty," said Aerin.

"Yeah it’s a cupboard innit?” said Dhubagèl, placing a hand on Aerin’s lower back. “Get in.”

Aerin shuffled into the middle of the small room despite the gentle sound of something scuttling in the corner. Dhubagèl closed the door behind them and they stood in total darkness for a few seconds. Something creaked open at the back wall of the room, and grubby electric lights buzzed into life in a line that stretched for at least fifty meters. The dull green light spilled into the room and Aerin looked down the narrow corridor.

"You've got a secret tunnel?!"

"I've got a secret tunnel." Dhubagèl closed the hole in the wall behind him and led Aerin down past the crooked and misshapen bricks.

Aerin inspected the walls with his torch. "I assume this tunnel isn't another of your 'special features'. It looks older than the rest of the building."

"Much older, it's a remainder of the sewer system that existed long before the city got destroyed and rebuild to Praeon's grand design. This place used to have character. Filthy, disease-ridden, lethal character."

"What happened when the city got destroyed?"

"His all-consuming majesty decided that the city should be divided into six sections by the rivers. He had an idea that societies weren't made up of people, they were made of...orders. Hierarchies. Forged in the mind and reinforced by architecture and association. If you programmed your will into the bones of the city, the city would move accordingly. The city would watch its people from glass eyes in concrete sockets and would invisibly shepherd them through life according to the orders it was given by its architect."

Dhubagèl didn't see Aerin raising his eyebrows behind him. "I never thought about it like that."

He spun around impatiently. "Oh, that's an Aerin Liette quote! From...In The Shadow of The Valley?"

"Oh." Aerin tried his hardest to seem coolly indifferent. "Is that one any good?"

"Eh. It was alright. His novels definitely got better as time went on.”

“Do you think?” Aerin considered it. “I suppose, even as you lose the flowing inspiration of youth the sheer craftsmanship only ever improves with age. It’s a comforting thought.”

“I meant that censors upon censors slashed those things down into coherence over many decades.” He chuckled. “I don’t think that quote survived the third edition. Don’t remember how many versions of every book there are but I’d say each was a seven-man job, at least. ‘Valley’ is one of his better books though, technically unfinished before he died aged-”

"ANYWAY," Aerin hastily interrupted. "I'll have to read it sometime if you have a copy lying around."

The narrow tunnel became a decrepit, disorienting maze through which Dhubagèl navigated almost automatically. Eventually Aerin was led to a ladder which took them up through a heavy iron trapdoor into some obscure corner of the city's current sewer system.

Aerin looked up and down the vast sluiceway. "Shouldn't we turn off these torches now? What if somebody sees us?"

Dhubagèl kept walking through his memorised route. "The only people with access to these tunnels are the sewer company."

"What if somebody from the sewer company sees us?"

"Nobody from the sewer company will see us."

"You don't know tha-...You know that, don't you?"

Dhubagèl turned to him. "I eliminated their nightshifts. Inefficient, sure, but who’s to stop me?”

"An art-collecting newspaper overlord who owns a sewer company?"

"It’s not suspicious. Bought a floundering sex shop for a laugh last week.”

They arrived at a short waterfall - about ten feet high - where one tunnel tumbled down into the other. The walkways had become narrower as they'd made their way through the dark and reeking tunnels, and this one ended at a ladder up to the level above.

“...that’s something I was meaning to ask. Monarchies are built on foundations of myth and history, why would Praeon erase so much of it?”

Dhubagèl tossed his torch up onto the next floor and climbed the ladder. “History is fossilised, some would say. Myth is fertile, oral. Disappointed that there were no lands left to conquer, dissatisfied with being the greatest and most terrible of the mortal beings, Praeon wanted to conquer all of time. He established machineries of government that rewrote history around him, as if he were its main character. This served a second purpose. The history of our world has unity: every event must be the inevitable result of every event that came before, and every event must serve to make the next more inevitable. In re-charting the boundaries of the past, Praeon wanted to contain the future in his shadow. And he did, we fight for a sick and dying planet where hope vanished with the seasons. It’s more likely than not that his stories will be the last ever told.”

Aerin stood at the bottom of the ladder and tried to imitate Dhubagèl's physical, radiant cool: throwing his torch up to the narrow walkway next to the river. Splash. Dhubagèl leaned over the rail above. "It's about to drop, if you reach out you could catch-"

Aerin looked just in time to see a beam of light subsumed by the flow of rancid water, dropping down into the river and stopping at a gate of iron bars between it and the larger tunnel into which many rivers joined. Aerin considered reaching into the reddish-brown murk to retrieve it, but decided his arms weren't that long.

"It's fine," said Dhubagèl. "I haven't changed the batteries in months, it'll likely fizzle out in a couple of hours if the water doesn't destroy it first. If anyone did happen to find it, they'll think it was from a maintenance worker."

Aerin didn't verbally reply, his limbs mired in awkwardness for a few more seconds. He nodded and just climbed the ladder. “What was that you were saying, about the ‘dying planet’?”

“They do actually teach you fucking nothing over in Collisterra, do they?”

Aerin didn’t reply for a few minutes, looking at the ground. “What has you so interested in history anyway?”

"History was the only subject I really enjoyed at school. Elvin would later prove useful with many a beautiful stranger, but I hated it at the time. So when I noticed a contradiction between my shiny new school textbook and the big leather-bound bastards collecting dust in my uncle's home library I thought 'oh, isn't that strange' and I started actively hunting them down. It was a girl at university who found me. The place was a draconian castle where I met half of today's parliament and most of my future business rivals-slash-victims. The girl's school was another building across the river, and their smoking spot in the forest was across the river from our smoking spot in the forest, so there was a lovely and at points literal cross-pollination between the two groups. One night there's some mass prayer...thing in the school's chapel, so obviously I'm down by the river on my own. It's a lovely indigo evening, and then I see this orange light flicker in the black of the trees across from me. So I shout over and then we talk for a few minutes, and then I decide to uncover the ladder we kept beneath the autumn leaves and cross the river. She's a history student too. We know Prayer Thing lasts at least an hour and a half, so there's no rush. After that night we sent letters. Her cover story is that they're from her dad, so, figure that out for yourself, and in the midst of my memories of abandoning prayer and lessons for talk and instruction, I remember her saying 'People think history's this dry and stale thing that happened and grew still and collects dust, but it isn’t. History is a slow tsunami coming in from the future, and everything around us will be washed away'."

He spun around to Aerin, smiling. "That’s the sentence that ruined my life. History took her too, she just sort of...vanished, over time. In the slow and completely mundane way that all the most important people do.”

Dhubagèl's nostalgic smile faded. "Anyway, I decided from then on I would endeavour to be on the right side of the tsunami. If anyone’s getting washed away, it isn’t going to be me. These days the history books are written by unreliable narrators, and the ink is never dry. It is written in the gutters, and more often than not, in blood. Which is where I’m taking you now,” he declared. “Welcome to ground zero."

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - King Zaedar is Introduced, He Learns of Our Hero’s Exploits in Issue #2, and A Mysterious Force Awakens™ From The Depths of The Ancient Past
Chapter 2 - John Boss - Incredibly - Escapes from "The White Palace of Death”, Shoots A BUNCH of Dudes, and Makes His Way to The Relative Safety of Dryadora’s Coal District
Chapter 3 - Dhubagèl Escorts Aerin Through The Sewers of Dryadora, But Maybe Also His Subconscious? What I Mean is We Get to Know More About This Previously Mysterious and At Points Unsettling Character, and The Subterranean Setting is Associated - in Jungian Psychoanalysis - With The Subconscious, So That Works
Chapter 4 - That Relatively Sedate Chapter Was Just a Break from The All-Important Action! As John Boss and Chel Make Their Way Through The Coal District In Their Attempt to Find Safe Refuge, But Not Without The Police Giving Chase
Chapter 5 - John Boss, Aerin Liette, Dhubagèl Shaen, Chel Hagar, and More are Finally United, and Ready to Strike Back Against King Zaedar’s Brutal Regime
Chapter 6 - The Past 30 Years of Aerin's Life Are Unlived for the Sake of the Plot, by Which I Mean Primarily the Plot of This Book, but Also the Plot Which the Red Hand Formulate in This Chapter, Which - If That Wasn't Obvious to You, Reader - Is a Clever Bit of Wordplay on the Similarities between The "Diegetic" Rebellion's Plot Which Requires Sacrifice, in a Very Fatalistic, Heroic Sort of Way, and The "Non-Diegetic" Aristotelian Plot Structure Which Requires Sacrifice in a Very Ritualistic “High-Maintenance Volcano God” Sort of Way
Chapter 7 - In a ‘Baroque Formalism’ Power Move, Four Conversations between John Boss the 34th and the Three Members of the Dryadora Red Hand Cell Are Intercut with a Scene of Domestic Mundanity, and a Scene of Great Heroism Which Is Also a Flashback into the past of John Boss the 41st. For the Purposes of Light Genre Parody, a Minor Character Has a Silly Name; A Minor Character Waits for a Bus, Which Doesn't Actually Move the Plot Forward or Contribute to The Themeing in Any Meaningful Way, And a Minor Character Mentions Things from Wurld’s past but Doesn’t Explain Them, Which Gives You That Kind of High-Fantasy Texture without the Bogged-Downedness That Comes with Fields of Exposition: All the Flavour of Fantasy with None of the Nutrition, and I Think That's Beautiful
Chapter 8 - The Night before the Operation, Aerin — Overcome by Insomnia — Hides Away in His Study and Distracts Himself from His Fear of Tomorrow's Events with the Comforting Familiarity of His Self-Loathing. Kreida Tries to Comfort Him and the Two End up Comparing Notes on a Relationship Forged under the Crucible Pressures of Mental Illness. It's Actually Really Nice.
Chapter 9 - There's a Flashback to an Episode from Chel Hagar's past with Revealing Parallels to Another Episode from Chel Hagar's Past: Chapter 7 of Issue #2. You Might Assume This Is Our Only Reason for Jumping Back a Few Years in Time, but Only If You Pay Attention Will You Notice That We're Subtly Reminding You of and Expanding on the Sub-Sub-Plot of Dryadora and / or the Whole Elvin Empire's failing Electricity System, Because That's Going to Be Important Later. We Then Seamlessly Transition into the Red Hand Cell's Infiltration of the DTV Station Where the Tapes of What Actually Happened in the Arena Are Kept. Being the End of Act II / Beginning of Act III, Things Go a Bit Skiwhiff and the Chapter Ends on a Thrilling Cliffhanger That You'll Have to Wait 'Til next Sunday to See Resolved!
Chapter 10 - Aerin and Krieda Spend Most of the Day in Dryadora's Pearl District, a Nice Day out Which Is Actually a Ruse by Aerin to Get near the Arena Where the Prime Minister Is Making His Speech. Krieda Is Conveniently Scheduled to Visit Her Parents in the Afternoon, so This Gives Aerin the Perfect Opportunity for a Heartbreaking Goodbye Scene before He Goes to Infiltrate the Press Crowd and Place Lockswell's Signal Jammer on the DTV Van's Satellite. Aerin and Dhubagèl Engage in Some Breathtakingly Suspenseful Scenes of Social Deception, but Are They Wily Enough to Avoid Detection by the Already On-Edge Members of the Prime Minister's Elite Guard? Also, How Good Was Doctor Who Last Night?
Chapter 11 - The Red Hand Defend the Control Room as Their Broadcast Goes out to the World. They Flee, and after a High-Octane Chase Scene They Escape into the Forests. All Hope Seems Lost, but Then They Are Saved by a Mysterious Character from an Earlier Point in the Story in a Way That Is Surprising but, Crucially, Still Made Inevitable by the Aristotelian Clockwork We've Established up until This Point. I Liked This Week's Doctor Who a Lot More Than Frank Cottrell-Boyce's Last Episode. It's Good That We're Getting More Fully-Realised Alien Planets In The Show Again
Chapter 12 - The Twelfth One