The police tailed Elias into Santiago Casino And Resort, dressed in black suits and concealing themselves within the crowd. King Zacchias was a few paces behind the police, following them and Elias into a room brimming with gamblers, scraggy men gathered around a table and fiercely roaring as the first round of a drag race bucketed into a tense conclusion, an energetic racecar on a TV screen zipping onto the finish line and coming to a screechy halt as trumpets howled in the background.
Elias bet on this racer, patting the other gamblers on the back as if they were his friends. He slammed his poker chips onto the table, chuckling in the last few seconds before the next round.
Once the second round of racing began, the police drew their pistols. Gunshots. Elias ducked as the police yelled for him to stand still. He crawled behind the table upon which the TV screen sat and poker chips lay scattered, covering his neck with his hands and making his way for the back exit. The police climbed onto the table and shot at the floor below, but he was nowhere to be found.
Elias tricked them. He exited out the front doors, Zacchias following him quickly behind. The officers–denied custody of their primary suspect–resorted to arresting the other gamblers.
Elias loved this. He was getting his enemies locked up and Rivalo was being cleaned up; that was a win-win scenario. King Zacchias morphed into his furrian form and zipped after Elias, his fleeing brother laughing as he shot down the streets.
The chief of the police, Deputy Rick Flames, burst out of the casino, scoffing as Elias escaped his grasp.
-
Gunshots. Broken memories. Shattered dreams.
He couldn't think straight. Deputy Rick Flames couldn't think straight–not since the shootout that led to the death of his best bud, Officer Tony Periwinkle. He couldn't think after remembering those events–gunshots, his best bud falling to the ground, him cradling his pal in his arms as he slowly passed away, the scream he gave out as police cars pulled up a minute too late.
He was sitting before one of his new recruits: Officer Bert Powell, a man from the capital of Somma. But he couldn't bring himself to see Powell as a replacement.
Officer Powell asked about the image of Deputy Flames and Officer Periwinkle standing side by side, the image of them laughing at a movie with beers in their hands. Deputy Flames couldn't bring himself to talk about that.
The world was viewed, indeed, through Officer Flames' broken gray visage.
Through loudspeakers, the deputy–silenced–could hear his name being paged.
He got up, and (like a robot) moved down the halls and into the cubicles where people jammed away endlessly, walking up to the man that had paged him and signing off paperwork.
"Jesus," he muttered, walking back to the office. "We need a lead." He couldn't get that memory out of his mind. "Just one lead, and we can finally catch that sonovagun Elias. Just one."
But then he looked at that paper he signed in his hands, the one in the folder that he was carrying back to his office. He opened it and read it–some stuff about the press, legal team, the police pursuing Elias.
"Woah, woah, woah!" he blurted out randomly. "The police pursuing Elias?!" He darted down the halls.
"We have a lead, goddamnit!"
-
It was too dark and stormy.
Queen Hekezel watched the smoldering flames dissipate into ash as what remained of the pub crumbled into the soot.
Bev's Bevs was once a thriving establishment. Now it was rubble. Garbage. Now it was nothing, a mere shell of its former self, a husk amidst the metropolis that was Abitha.
Queen Hekezel watched the last of the drunken men stumble out of the charred mess, watched as police grabbed him by each arm and dragged him away as he cursed, watched as the rain extinguished the fire that once enveloped the pub entirely, watched the last of Damara's past dissolve into nothing.
A glowing white figure with emerald pearls for eyes and grand wings that mushroomed outwards descended through the bubbling storm and landed next to Queen Hekezel; it was Destiny Sundalo, taking a hiatus from her investigations across Rivalo to aid Queen Hekezel.
Queen Hekezel looked at Destiny–her longtime friend and formerly romantic partner, the one she needed the most… yet the one she refused to keep. The queen had turned Destiny's offers to help for days–weeks now–but eventually, Destiny knew she had to crack. The queen didn't crack today, though. She looked at Destiny–at her proper and trimmed snout, at her sanded and clipped claws and groomed fur, at her pearly eyes and noticing how they seemed to absorb the few glints of sunlight and radiate them back out–and she scoffed. "What do you want?"
"I only want to help," explained Destiny, placing a fuzzy paw on the queen's shoulder. "The manhunt for Elias, I want to help you find him." Destiny's hand traced the veins of the queen's arm, but the queen swatted her away. "I know his betrayal hit you hard, but you aren't alone."
"This isn't about that!" the queen blurted out, police officers slowly turning around and darting her dirty looks. With Destiny and her troop on her tail, she scurried away, screaming, "And how do you even know this is connected to Elias stepping down?!"
"Because of this," Destiny shouted back, drawing a folder from a flap in her furry pelt and darting in front of the queen, drawing her wings inward as she laid her eyes upon her face. The queen tried to sidestep her, but she pushed the folder into Queen Hekezel's hands until she relented and accepted it. Inside were photos of dead bodies, each containing a different emblem; and there was a vest that once belonged to Elias with all of the emblems embroidered onto it. "Elias worked with all of these gents in the past, and now they're being killed off. Why do you think Elias stepped down?!"
"Because there's someone going after Elias' former accomplices, and he believed he was next."
"Exactly!" replied Destiny, her wings whooshing back out and enveloping the roads and the shops around her in her shadow, letting raindrops slip off its tips as the storm hammered on. She danced in a circle, the feathers on her wings rippling outwards as she pranced and hovered into the air. "There's a deeper criminal conspiracy than you might realize, and we need to get you, Zacchias and Elias to safety before this entire empire topples." Destiny bolted into the rumbling skies, lightning greeting her merrily.
-
There were more crackdowns on illegal gambling–each one was more elaborate and risky than the last, but generally the scheme went like so: the police planted a microchip in the pocket of his polo, and he allowed this; the police followed him to different gambling shacks, poker hideouts and blackjack dens, illegal shipping ports and the like. He'd arrange each meet-up beforehand by having several major gang bosses there, then ditch the scene just as the police revealed themselves. It was the perfect ploy.
Elias sauntered into a backstreet–a gambling den run by a criminal franchise–nonchalantly walking up to a counter with his thumbs lodged into his belt and his head gazing at his feet.
King Zacchias walked a few steps behind Elias, throwing his orange shawl over his face and keeping his head down, his shadow flickering as a street lamp illuminated and faded slowly. He leaned over the shoulder of the man in front of him, listening intently for the password–an answer to a question–as the line moved forward. He kept his hands at his belt like everyone else, moving the left foot before the right as everyone else did; and when he reached the front of the line and the guard asked him the question, he whispered, "Stanley."
The king followed Elias into a dark corner of the gambling den, watching him chat with one of the gangsters as a few men Zacchias recognized from the last sting entered the den, the tattoos of serpents sticking their tongues out with a biting viciousness burned into each officer's left arm, black shades masking their squinted eyes.
Elias spun around, noticed the police and finished his chit-chat with the gangster, sneaking off into a gaggle of mesomorphic gangsters gathered around a poker table, cheering as a veteran member moved a stack of poker chips and toppled them onto his pile, clapping for himself and raising his hands to the others' applause. The man winced at Elias, his wrinkles softening with confusion and a sly smile appearing on his face as he mumbled, "Who's you?"
"You don't remember?" Elias asked with a certain stare.
"Of course I remember," replied the gangster, crossing his arms and straightening his posture, leaning away from the poker table. "But who's you now?"
"You know who I am now," Elias responded, sliding towards the poker table and looking the gangster in the eyes. "I'm an outcast in my castle, a hermit in my own home. I'm no longer welcome in my palace, so I seek to rejoin you gangsters."
"Why should we believe you?" Elias drew several stacks of paper currency from inside his cyan polo and slipped it across the table, concealing a coy smirk behind a bland expression. He slipped his thumbs back onto his belt and tilted his head, the gangster conceding, "Alright, that's something." The gangster accepted his bribe, scooping up the money and shoveling it into his pocket. He stomped onto the poker table–the chips rumbling as he got up and his legs stomped across it–and he shook Elias' hand, his scrunchy white beard crunching against his black jacket and his poofy hair flinging forward.
Elias' facade slipped from his face, his lips swallowing and his face lighting up with anticipation. Unable to swallow his own excitement, Elias impishly shook the gangster's hand, his heart chugging as if his veins pumped espresso shots in lieu of blood, his eyes dilating and their figures embiggening in his irises. He pinched his side, drawing himself back into reality's folds as the gangsters jumbled the sea of poker chips across the table and over itself, and criminal schemes were confessed across the table like dirty high school secrets.
"Lord," the king thought, furtively rolling his eyes at his brother. "We're going to be here forever if the police don't interfere. I'm going to have to listen to my brother's yapping forever if they don't act quickly." King Zacchias moved in on his brother, drawing his hood with one hand and reaching for his eskrima sticks with the other.
Elias quickly spotted the approaching king and foolishly tried to wave him away, the gangsters looking out to the crowd of gamblers and merry men. Elias, pointing at a hole in the wall, cried, "Gentlemen, gentlemen! Is that a spider I see?" The gangsters–spotting no spider–turned to him with both upset and confused faces. Elias jumped up and down and called the attention of the other gang members towards the hole in the wall. "That's a spider crawling out of the wall!"
"Goddamn you," the gangster murmured, picking Elias up by the shoulders and pinning him against the wall. "Who do you think you're fooling? Swanky-ass teenager, you look like someone ought to teach you a lesson!" Suddenly, something hit the back of his head, boomeranging away from him and spinning across the heads of stumbling, husky men wobbling around with beers in their hands, some wearing tank tops and others wearing jackets; the object that slammed and ricocheted off the back of the gangster's head barely nicked the gray hairs of the disguised policemen, older men who removed their black coats and slowly drew their pistols; the object returned to the hand from whence it came, the eskrima baton into the hand of King Zacchias, both blades unsheathed and his face emanating daring determination.
"What the shit?!" the gangster bellowed, pushing through the mob of drunken, hooded faces while holding Elias up with one arm. He walked in the general direction of where the king was, but did not spot him hiding underneath a poker table. "Who the fuck threw that?"
King Zacchias slipped out from under the table and joined the crowd (that congregated around the large gangster.) He drew his arnis blades from his sheaths and slithered towards the brawny man, raising one blade into the air whilst the crowd was talking amongst themselves…
In a trice he pounced, savagely bombarding the scraggly man with attacks as his form blurred into a fluster of light and ear-piercing screeches. His Furrian form spun out and dissolved in an instant, and the gangster awoke, pinned to the table. The gangster screamed as the king's shrouded figure (before the police could draw their pistols) dissolved into the darkness. King Zacchias' mark remained on the bar tables he knocked over, three hook-like slashes running down the gangster's arm and one scratch taking out a front tooth.
Then the chief of police emerged from the crowd of officers–the first to fully draw his gun. He pointed his pistol into the air and fired off one shot, startling the crowd of gamblers and crooks out of their shocked state. "My name is Deputy Rick Flames," he announced, his eyes landing on Elias. "Elias Magaspang Anti, you're under arrest for treason against the state, breaking-and-entering and grand theft auto!"
"You're mad!" cried Elias. He stumbled into a bar stool, the bar stool fell backwards and the back of his skull crashed into the floorboards. He blacked out in front of the rest of the patrons, blood oozing from the back of his head.