The Fortress of Doom rocked on its foundation. Though this was not a
generally uncommon happening, Senior Prophet Paul Pulley still liked
to know what was going on. "What the FUCK?!" he intoned at the top of
his lungs.
       Bevin Conners, Senior Prophet, and Fourth highest-ranking officer in
the World Oligarchy, poked her pigtailed head out from the doorway of
the kitchen.
       "I thought Noah was still in the South Pole -- at the South Pole...
you know what I mean." She raised an eyebrow.
       "What the fuck was THAT?!" Paul repeated, at no less than ten
decibels louder than before. He stood up from his desk.
       "I... don't know?" Bevin hazarded.
       Paul reached forward, and with one large, long index finger, flicked
the slat of a blind downward, and gazed out of the front window of The
Fortress of Doom, as though he expected the explanation, as unlikely
as it might be, originated from without the Fortress.
       The house rocked, once again, as though thousands of large trucks had
thundered by, in speedy, but lasting, succession.  Bevin looked
around, her pale blue eyes wide.  Glasses had begun to jitter and
dance across the shelves, books had begun to totter and dive off of
the bookcases, and Banno, the gayest kitty east of the Mississippi,
high-tailed it, hell-for-leather, upstairs towards the Fortress'
sleeping quarters.
       Suddenly, the house lurched, and everything seemed to not only jump,
but twist a full ninety degrees along the vertical axis. There was a
resounding CRASH as just about every breakable item within The
Fortress of Doom struck a suitably hard object; whether it wall,
floor, or ceiling, no one could be sure. Silence fell.
       Bevin sat up from where she had been thrown during the ruckus.
       "Ow," she muttered, and then, "Demmit!" as she opened one eye.
       Paul strolled in from the other room, his computer tower in one hand,
a .500 Smith & Wesson in another.  "You okay, baby?" he asked, as she
helped herself to her feet.
       A klaxon, belatedly, began to blare, and red lights began to flash
throughout the house.  A young security guard poked his head out from
the laundry room door, which lead to subterranean levels of the
Fortress.
       "Sir...?" he began, but paused as Paul loomed up, computer tower
still in one hand. "Ahhhhhhh...," he stammered to a halt without a
particular sentiment attached.  Paul was glowing with a swirling
green-black battle aura, which was melting off of him like smoke.
       "Gimme this, or you'll wipe your hard drive," said Bevin, and she
pulled the computer tower from his single hand with both of hers.  Red
electricity had begun to crackle from his hands.
       "I'll call Antarctica, and then the Brendan. They probably need you
downstairs."  She had begun to search through the rubble for the base
of the portable telephone.
       "What the FUCK was THAT?!" growled Paul.

       The crack in the space-time continuum was just large enough for two
of the Entities to seep through. The lead Entity began to sense the
local energy fields and was shocked at what it felt. The energy in
this universe took patterns that were wholly unlike that of its
origin. Some energy was ambient, but much of it was stationary,
occupying shapes with sharply defined borders. The field was very
powerful, and enormous -- it seemed to go on forever in two
dimensions, though it was clearly demarcated in the third.
       As it explored the cavernous realm, it sensed a strange opening in
the energy field, similar to the crack they had emerged from, but with
a more defined shape. A blob of dark energy entered the realm and
began to interact with other, similarly shaped blobs, which he
realized do move after all, though in strange ways.
       The Entity considered the shapes he sensed. No normal energy field
could be focused on a point this way, or have such boundaries. A
sudden realization hit it.
       This universe is made of matter!

       Three hours later found both Bevin and Paul dealing with the
after-effects of the mayhem. Bevin had begun to orchestrate the
removal of injured Fortress of Doom personnel to local hospitals, and
utilizing her marginal medical expertise, was doubling as an EMT. Paul
had been put to the vital task of rescue and recovery of those still
trapped within the bowels of the installation. Emergency protocols
dictated that, upon a disasterous occurance or attack, many portions
of the Fortess of Doom be sealed. As such, several hundred blast doors
had been strategically positioned throughout subterranean levels of
the Fortress. These had all engaged at the outset of the incident.
Disastrously, most of the regulatory equipment required to unseal the
doors had been badly damaged in the course of the event, and life
support had failed as well. Many portions of the facility, besides
requiring obscenely high security clearances, were simply too
difficult to access with the requisite heavy rescue equipment through
all the rubble and debris.
       Paul had been tediously trekking through more than a mile of
"underground" facility, which technically was not under the house, but
rather formed in a fold in space using fifth-dimension technology.
Paul occupied himself with freeing the trapped and extricating the
wounded. Luckily, where rescue workmen might normally have required
cumbersome machinery, Paul was involved instead, but his prolonged
efforts were beginning to take their toll. Paul's "other" had begun to
manifest itself into this reality.
       Paul's stature, normally a linebackeresque six-foot-seven, had begun
to increase, seeming to have settled for the moment at seven and a
half feet tall, with muscular bulk to match. His eyes glowed a
disturbing reddish-orange, and red sparks of electricity could be seen
crackling in the air around his hands and at the tips of his
waist-length black hair. A crazed grin had affixed itself to his lips,
and inhumanly sharp teeth gleamed as if they had malicious and baleful
intents of their own.
       Terrified Oligarchy personnel fled at the sight of Paul as he
effortlessly knocked his way through walls and tore through emergency
doors as if they were cheap aluminum foil. Only the most elite Death
Inc. guards and a handful of hardened medics seemed to be capable of
keeping up with the man without fear. The upshot of this was that only
those who were too injured to flee from Paul's presence were given
on-the-spot medical care, ensuring that those with dire need were
treated first.

       Meanwhile, OCB agents Rucker and Scarlett were attempting to keep
things under control upstairs, under Bevin's supervision.
       "Okay, nobody panic!" Agent Rucker said to all denizens and workers
within earshot. "You, there. There should be a cache of Raid in closet
warehouse B. I need you to start distributing it to everyone you can."
       "Raid?" asked Agent Scarlett. "I'm not sure if you were paying
attention, but this house was just doing the salsa. Why are you
worrying about roaches?"
       "Not roaches. This was the work of termites!"
       "Termites. You're saying that termites nearly flipped the house end over end?"
       "These aren't your average termites. I recently received an
intelligence report which showed conclusive evidence of a highly
evolved breed of termites, which can organize into societies. These
organizations can be similar in form to militaries, labor unions, or
even the Roman Catholic Church."
       "So the Termite Pope just led his followers to try to flip the
Fortress? If he could pull that off, he ought to be canonized. Agent
Rucker, there was a building inspection just last month, and it found
no signs of termites."
       "Well, obviously they've developed some sort of cloaking technology."
       "What was the source of this intelligence report?"
       "It was based on an article from Rense.com," Rucker replied.
       Agent Scarlett rolled her eyes and walked off, deciding she could be
of more use elsewhere.

       Onslaughts on the Fortress of Doom had previously wrought only
minimal, and largely superficial, damage. Though whatever had just
occurred had produced utter chaos in mere seconds, the outside of the
house still showed no sign of it.
       "Where is Norman?" asked Co-Ruler of the World Wayland Phillips as he
shut the door of his '68 Mustang. The facade of the Fortress was
unblemished, and as unassuming as a high-security military-based
compound occupying suburbia could be.
       "He took some leave to go to a Bolivian porn convention," replied
Brendan, as he exited the passenger side of the Mustang. "He'll be
away for at least a week."
       As Brendan perused the exterior of the house, a young man in a skull
T-shirt, camouflage pants and spiked, purple hair strolled over,
smoking a cigarette. He stopped a respectful personal distance from
the two Co-Rulers, and said to Brendan in a polite voice, "Sir. Bevin
has asked me to inform you that she will be out shortly. The President
is currently occupied with evac procedures." He strolled nonchalantly
towards the Fortress's side door.
       "The President?" whispered Wayland.
       "Of Death Inc., he means."
       Wayland, nonplussed, leaned against the Mustang and lit a cigarette.
"So, what did Bevin say, exactly, when she called you?" he asked.
       Brendan stuck both hands in his pockets and looked down at the lawn.
The Fortress of Doom could not be said to have grass, so much as
gravel cover. He shrugged. "She just said that something weird was
going on, and to bring beer."
       Wayland grinned. "Yeah, but..." He gestured toward the house with his
cigarette. "C'mon, it's Bevin. 'Something weird' could mean anything."
       "Yeah, that's true," Brendan said with a wry nod. "Like a monkey."
       Wayland chuckled. "She still rants about those?"
       "Probably."
       "Well, anyway, everything out here looks fine."
       At that moment, Bevin emerged from the house, covered in dust. She
had a smudge over one eye and a cut across the opposite cheek, and she
looked tired.
       "At first I thought Noah had something to do with this, but he wasn't
home. So I called you, because you guys aren't dangerous... much." She
pulled on one pigtail as she babbled. "And we're gating Noah in,
because we can't be sure."
       She looked between Brendan and Wayland. "I need a drink. Everything's
broken," she concluded. With that she heaved a sigh and hugged
Brendan.
       "O-kay," Brendan said. Wayland dropped the butt of his cigarette on
the driveway and stepped it out.
       As they walked inside, Brendan and Wayland saw that Bevin had not
been exaggerating. Despite the seemingly undamaged exterior of the
Fortress, the interior looked as if Wayland's daughter Emily Jane had
been practicing zero-gee jujitsu against every object in the house,
powered by an entire case of Pixy Stix.
       "What's worse, the emergency systems in the basement seem to be
fried. All of the blast doors went down, and none of the systems are
accessible to us, including ventilation," Bevin said with a frown.
"Paul's off taking down doors. I can only imagine what that's going to
cost to fix. And then there's the influx of hells and dark energies.
It's setting a lot of the staff on edge. About two dozen or so have
reported hallucinations of some sort of blue energy cloud. I've had to
break up three fistfights and one particularly vindictive rubber band
fight. I'd risk performing 'angelic channel' if I thought it would do
any good."

       Much had changed since the Entities' arrival to this realm. No longer
was the energy field static. The blobs and shapes of energy, which the
Entities now knew to be solid, matter-based objects and creatures,
were in chaos as they raced back and forth. One blob, the first to
emerge from the strange opening in space, had increased in size and
was now surrounded by a fuzzy envelope of energy.
       The two beings communicated briefly, and one returned through the
dimensional crack from which it had emerged.

       The Fortress shook again, unexpectedly. Brendan lost his footing, and
the case of Warsteiner he was carrying sailed effortlessly across the
room, the bottles shattering against the kitchen shelf.
       "God dammit!" Bevin shrieked, pulling herself off of a pile of
rubble. "Now I'm never going to get a drink!"
       Wayland carefully climbed down from atop the refrigerator. "Dear
God... how many times has that happened?"
       "That was the third time. I suppose the pieces everything was broken
into were still too recognizable," Bevin fumed.
       As they attempted to regain their bearings, the purple-haired staffer
approached them again. "General Conners... Doktor Freeze has arrived."
       "Good. Send him up."
       Noah emerged from the laundry room momentarily, clad in a slightly
scorched lab coat, with a Geiger counter attached to his lapel and
welding goggles perched on his forehead. "What the fuck happened
here?" he asked.
       "I don't know," said Bevin. "I'm hoping that between you, Wayland and
Brendan, we can figure that out. It felt like the entire house was
picked up and shaken around like a giant snowglobe."
       Noah gasped. "Snowglobe technology? I was afraid that might fall into
the wrong hands! I've been researching this concept myself."
       "Um, Noah?" Brendan started. "I don't think it was actually..."
       "Silence! Someone has obviously developed the elusive secret of the
Snow Doom Device. It works by encapsulating a region in a spherical
transparent shell. When this shell is shaken, frozen flakes resembling
snow fall throughout the region. These flakes are harmless until
ingested by humans, upon which said humans will dissolve into the
primordial goo from which they evolved."
       Bevin and the present Co-Rulers blinked with what would have been
astonishment if they hadn't known Noah for so long.
       "Noah, since Paul's not here to do it, I'm banning you from
speaking," Bevin announced.