The story doesn't end there...

I stayed at Ron's house for about a month after the Windner incident. I was basically crippled; I could speak, but I could hardly move... Willie literally disappeared overnight, and we were all worried about that, but we figured he'd gone out after something important...and it turns out he did.

Around the middle of November, I was talking with Ei, and she got a PM... (She had her browser set to automatically refresh every so often, and this site set to display a pop-up notification of incoming PM's, so we heard her screenreader report she had one...) It turned out to be from Gabe. He wasn't typing in his typical red text, which had us curious, but he said he thought he had a way to restore me to myself... I told Ron about it, and we got plane tickets down for the weekend of December 1st.

Well, on the night of Friday, November 30--leading into the morning of Saturday, December 1--I got a strange feeling... Something was amiss, and I couldn't place my finger on it. (Figure of speech; I didn't have any fingers at the time.) For the first time in the month I'd been there, I slipped uninvited into each room to check on everyone... Ron was asleep--though he *looked* ready to snap awake at any time... Hannah and Ei both sensed me slip into their rooms, but I managed to keep them both calm enough just by talking quietly to them, I don't think either of them remembered it in the morning...

Nothing was amiss inside the house...which led me outside. I left a note for the others, in case any of them woke up while I was out.

Now, I've only met Konrad a few times...but I was pretty sure that was who I sensed sneaking up on me as I wandered around... He was doing an expert job of it, too. Pity that, as a shadow, I was naturally attuned to sense things like that, and noticed him more than I would've if he'd just casually walked up to me... I feigned as if I didn't notice, and let him catch up to me.

Another nice thing about being a shadow instead of a person--I could literally watch behind myself at all times... Appearing to look somewhere else, I watched him very intently as he came up... He had a jar of some sort--not as big as the one that Windner had captured me in; more like the size of a jar of jelly or jam that you might get at a farmer's market... I could feel the magic oozing off of it.

"Hey, Spidey," I said casually as he came close. For a moment, he hesitated, looking slightly taken aback...then he lunged at me with the jar. I felt it suck me in, and I watched him close the lid on the jar... I allowed myself a slight chuckle; the jar had nothing to seal me. It was rigged to catch me, but I could break out... I decided to see what he intended to do with me, first.

He didn't talk the entire time. Pretended he didn't hear me. When he started taking me through one of the more well-lit sections of town, I decided I didn't want to know his plans *that* badly, and I shattered the jar...

Unfortunately, it was getting pretty close to sunrise by the time I escaped... I hadn't realized it was that late. I had to keep to shadows, and ride in peoples' shadows as they walked past, trying to navigate myself in the right direction.

It wasn't easy, and I burned myself quite a few times, but I eventually made it back to Ron's house... Fortunately, Ei had scheduled a flight that left in the afternoon, so we made it to the airport on time.

Barely.

Willie Long wrote:You don't know how much I wished Bert, Koyla, and Pendragon were with us. Especially when Loni wandered off without a word!

Its good to be wanted!

Wish I were there, too.

Gabriel wrote:I'm still not quite sure how Hannah did that... Had anyone else said the same things, I wouldn't have listened.

Maybe she just has that effect on people...

Hannah, thank you again. You saved my soul, and Josh's life.

Hi Gabriel,

You did it all, those chains were there because you thought they were.

Hannah

PS: All I did was tell ya the truth.

We got to my house... Lex was...less than thrilled to see me. She greeted Ron, Hannah, and Ei, and was pretty nice to them...and then Ei let me out of the bottle, and Lex tore into me, and read me the riot act.

Gabe was there, too, using my body for the time being... Lex served us dinner, then she dragged the girls and me upstairs to show off her newest dolls, which she'd ordered, but hadn't gotten, yet... That left Gabe and Ron downstairs.

The power flickered, and I suddenly got the feeling that we weren't alone... Something had somehow gotten in through my wards. We quickly figured out who, and how-- Malakai had hijacked our dog. Literally. He tried to kill her and toss her aside, but by that point in time, everyone in the house had been alerted to the presence, and pretty much everyone had jumped into action...

Cubrious was in Julian's room, protecting him. Everyone else, myself included, were coming down the stairs... I couldn't see the fight that rapidly evolved between Malakai, Gabe, and Ron... I did feel Cubrious send some ethereal energy blasts through the floor of Julian's room, straight into the dining room... Malakai, possessing no body, felt the full impact of those blasts.

Lex, before coming down the stairs, had grabbed an iron bar I'd given her to use against spirits and whatnot, some time ago... Malakai did something to trip her down the staircase, but she ended up using that to her advantage... She turned, and hurled the bar at him as hard as she could. Aiko was at the bottom of the stairs to catch her... The bar hit Malakai, knocking him through the wall--and through my wards, which had to hurt... At that point in time, he was outside the house, and could do no more for that particular moment...

Meadow had helped keep Amelia (our dog) alive, and we healed her... She was the worst off of any of us.

I know Malakai made another attempt on us that night, but I'll let the others tell that story, since I was kinda out of it...

Bastard's stealing my thunder.

That must've happened after Gabe started the ritual to put me back in my own body...?

Sorry I put you through so much trouble... ~_~;

Might as well finish this up, what I can remember of it...

There was a major stakeout outside... Ron kept them at a standstill, and tried to minimize losses on both sides (not just loss of life, either). Lex couldn't help them transplant my soul back into my body, and she couldn't really help deal with the police, so she stayed in Julian's room, keeping him company, and keeping him safe. Everyone else was in my room, trying to put things right with me...

At some point, Gabe got up and left the operation. He later likened it to trying to perform heart surgery on one's brother... If the transplant hadn't worked, he'd said, he couldn't've forgiven himself. So he left, on his own.

That was apparently when Malakai attacked him... Malakai, being an astral entity, and Gabe, being a spirit, forced them both into the same plane of existence. Sounds like the fight was pretty one-sided, since Gabe had lost a lot of his abilities, due to being a spirit...and what abilities he had left were hampered, due to his having channeled a lot of his energy into helping me.

I guess during the ritual up in my bedroom, several of the spirits sensed the fight going on, and went down into the garage to check it out. According to Victoria, they arrived "just in time", but according to Gabe, it wasn't as close as all that... Believe what'cha want on that one. However it went down, Gabe, Victoria and Aiko managed to keep Malakai at bay...

When my soul was in my own body once again, Death showed up. The shadows that had been Gabriel's body, and had up until that moment been the body I had inhabited, were gone, and Gabriel no longer had any ties to our plane... Death had come to collect him.

I don't know how, but Hannah pointed out to Death that Malakai was a human soul with no physical body, and therefore, no tie to our world... The distraction worked long enough for me to bind Gabriel to a ball of quartz crystal I have, thus giving him a tie to our world.

So Death went after Malakai, and Gabe's still with us. I guess Malakai gave the Reaper the slip in his own domain...or something, I dunno.

I do know that at some point in time, Ron's friend from the FBI showed up, and managed to get our names cleared...

The rest is pretty much history.

Ron, thanks again for helping us get the place cleaned up as much as you did.

Just to fill in some blanks for everyone who was involved... The Windner clones were necromancers who Windner trusted, for one reason or another. Their flesh was altered to appear like Windner's, their souls were altered to seem like Windner's. Their attitudes and personalities didn't always match Windner's, but they were all capable.

As a note, the most quick-witted and craftiest of them was sent to be Shadow's opponent, since none of them could have matched Shadow in power alone... He still fell, but he made it a costly fall.

The purpose of the clones was to obtain blood, at which two of them succeeded. The blood was to fuel the rituals they were performing, which were slave-rituals to a larger rite, dedicated to calling Hell to Earth from five different planes of existence.

The clones' rites' energies were fed into the crystal being guarded by Malakai and Windner's corpse... From there, the energies were funneled through a small portal, to a location where Windner had already set up the final rite. As the energies from the various rituals were fed into this final rite, gates began to open... This...almost definitely began to happen with two of the gates. I don't know if they've been opened enough for anything to get through... We can always hope that one sacrifice each wasn't enough.

That's...all I know, unfortunately.

Konrad, Gabe won't be responding to that message, or any other. He never existed. He was, quite simply, a dysfunction I had in high school. Nothing more.

Think about it... Especially there at the end, he couldn't type at the computer unless I was right there with him. In the months leading up to Halloween, he hardly posted at all. Mysteriously, in the time I was living with Ron and Ei as some kind of shadow ghost, he was "possessing my body" so I could keep going to work.

Let's face it... It was all a delusion of mine, and I'm sorry to everyone who feels I lead them on about it. It wasn't my intention... I was...deluded.

If this were a product of Khavik's mind control, he'd have to still be around. Considering that I supposedly damned near tore him into four different pieces, and considering that I supposedly made it so he couldn't regenerate from it, it'd be pretty damned stupid for him to still be around.

Ergo, he isn't, if he exists at all.

As for Gabriel, yeah, no shit it was a pretty realistic. I thought it was happening, too. I thought all of this was happening.