The very first thing the twins did upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere was give Daniel Westham a promotion to first level for saving all their fucking lives with his armor. He thanked the twins, graciously accepting the unmasked full-on gratitude he'd expected before. It was a shame the concept of levels had been so deprecated during the twins' reign. More than a decade ago, it was common for lower levels to be treated with less respect, given worse deals, and even withheld information from. The new egalitarianism improved efficiency by far, but it also left the Dominator bereft of useful gifts for incredibly beneficial Illuminati. (Daniel didn't care. Just having a symbol of direct respect from the Dominator and a place in history was more than enough, as it gave him a permanent, concrete edge in any future negotiation.)

"Bastard," Brenk muttered under his breath after Daniel was off the screen, rage surfacing despite his predicament. The twins looked at him. "All those advantages he gave you. As if you didn't have enough. What a waste." He regretted the words the moment they left his mouth.

The engineereds didn't hide their contempt. If he wanted to die so badly.. "Yeah how about fuck you, Brenk?" Paul asked.

"Or how about no talking until we land, Brenk," Sarah said. "I think I know someone who'd like to meet him for a while."

It was a good choice. There were a lot of places the Duumvirate could go for a victory lap: Northberg, Bavaria, various other bases and homes. Quad's palace, now home to more than a dozen young Illuminati, was even more ostentatious than the Duumvirate's home if not quite as refined. Even with the North Pole tilted towards the Sun, here above the Arctic Circle it was still fairly cold, the sun at the horizon but not setting for months. The jet landed in half-melted slush directly in front of a pair of great double doors, ten feet high; they opened and a crowd of preteens came running out to meet them, covered feet going slosh-slosh-slosh in the muddy snow to see the conquering Duumvirate and their captive. In many ways the kids looked like they were fresh out of Northberg, all bright smiles and bright colors, but these kids were even smarter, more Machiavellian, and more unified than the ones of a decade before, and everyone from Quad to seven-year-old ('almost eight!') Susie in her warm pink dress was ready to own the world.

Brenk stepped out first, his helmet under his arm as a normal astronaut, looking at the kids and obviously not understanding what they truly were. He was followed shortly by the twins, who were given shocked looks by a few of the kids; they pulled their faceplates and helmets back behind their heads, folding the neck back and letting their hair out.

Richie, having celebrated his eight-and-a-half semi-birthday just last week, found himself confused at the sight. "Why's it black?" he asked. His own suit was a blend of medium-to-light greens, and as he stood on the soft ground it looked as if he had grown there.

"It has to be black, for the heat," William said. The boy looked confused further. "Reflective paint works in both directions, read your thermodynamics." That didn't help. Fortunately, Richie had his friend Ricky by his side (the names were why their friendship had started) who knew more than a few things about space travel and the associated hazards. Ricky, glittering blue, leaned in to whisper him an explanation. "But before we get into that, this is Peter Brenk; Peter, this is Quad and his household. Brenk, I'd like you to explain yourself to him," William commanded, smirking. This ought to be good.

Peter knew the four-armed boy was the Dominator's son, but where else did he- oh shit, that's right, two of these kids ended up in one of his scenarios. He hadn't intended that. The intention was to get rid of the nosy William Blakesworth, pull Bruce Joseph out of circulation (even if the Duumvirate did know by then that he had a clone) and cause a destablizing minor secrecy panic in the process. He'd wanted to attack secrecy itself even more, but was aggressively voted down by the other rogues. Now he wished he had broken it completely, simply out of revenge; but if anyone here had any idea of that, he was toast, and he desperately hoped they'd never ask. He also hoped he could endear himself to these kids. "You kids all play games, right?" General assent of the 'No shit' variety. "I used to. Tabletop roleplaying, Atari.." ('Of course they don't know what that is') "Video games, of all kinds. But that was before I became an Illuminatus. Since then, I've been playing a different game. You see, despite how realistic a game world might seem, if it only exists in its little box, what's the point? It doesn't matter how realistic it looks, it's not meaningful because it's not real. So I decided to play reality instead, to.. oppose the existing power structure, before the Duumvirate was born, because I wanted to affect things, to change things. And since history is written by the victors, well, I guess I can just say now that I played the villain." Brenk felt a great deal of relief, as the kids were smiling at him.

"So that whole business of the amusement park..," Quad started. Fuck, this is what he had told himself to survive in there. To treat it like it's a game. To know that his enemy had done the same thing was both vindicating and maddening.

"Was me just being imaginative in my villainy. Yes." The twins quietly raged behind Brenk, still burning with the memory of the massive amount of secrecy cleanup that one required. But the kids smiled wider, as most of them liked the opportunity to see what was effectively a normal-TV bad guy in real life.

Brenk was slightly taller than Quad, so Quad abruptly forced the top of his head down with his upper arms to see eye-to-eye with him. "You're right. It's only meaningful when it's real." He looked over Brenk's shoulder to the twins. They nodded: Go right ahead.

Quad grabbed Brenk's shoulders with his lower arms and under his throat with his uppers, pushing his body downwards and his head upwards. A combination of desperate self-modifications and long-term weakness had led to Brenk's spinal cord being held together with more cohesiveness than his spine was to the other bones in his body. Quad was expecting decapitation and got massive rhizotomy, Brenk's vertebrae hanging off the end of the skull like a tail. A couple of the kids looked away from the spectacle. Brenk's mouth moved for half a second before he realized he was dead.

"Sub-Zero wins. Fatality!" Stan shouted, having never heard of Goro, and most of the kids broke up laughing. Quad whipped the head around by the spine in a hammer throw, and bounced it off the exterior wall to more laughter.

"Now let's see Daniel's armor!" Susie demanded, and the twins pondered how best to show them. Air turned to plasma from super-powered lasers might blind their unprotected eyes, the twins were already strong and fast, and armor's toughness wasn't something you demonstrated while wearing it.

Luke decided not to blind them and showed a low-powered electrical arc, grinning and causing some envy. Ruby boost-leaped thirty meters into the air before using hands and feet to land on a cushion of flame, to great applause. Howard pondered lifting the jet, but saw another opportunity. Smiling wide, he picked up Brenk's corpse by the ankle and gave it a fast, mighty heave in the direction of the water, sixty kilograms thrown like one. It tumbled end-over-end, legs and arms pirouetting, blood from the neck flying in all directions for engineereds to dodge, a wonderful example of ragdoll physics made meaningful by its reality. It flew more than two hundred meters before landing with a splash, and as they watched it fall they noticed a series of dorsal fins bobbing up and down, blowholes opening at regular intervals. One of the orcas changed direction to examine the corpse. Tetrina, having watched the mutilation and disposal of Brenk, found herself concerned with the welfare of living beings: "She's not going to choke on that spacesuit, is she?" The boy who had asked about the black-body suits assured her that whales were smarter than that.

Then the questions came, lots of them, from genuine Illuminati who were also inquisitive, perceptive children. What happened up there? What did they fight? Was that actually a dent on the back of the Dominator's helmet? The twins chose to answer them by having the group upload the suits' records to the public database. "Enjoy the show," Howard said. "Everyone, we'd love to stay, but we have a great much to do now that the rogues are dead. If you like, we'll come back when the current business is over." Of course the preteens liked, even if his tone said that might be a while.

"It's the End of Secrecy, isn't it? That's what we can do now that they're gone!" Richie piped up.

"It would be impolitic for me to tell anyone about the End of Secrecy before I tell everyone," William replied, and the kids knew Richie had guessed right. Some of them with normal-world holdings decided to stop worrying about long-term plans. The twins started to turn to leave, and the kids rushed forward to hug them before they left, and they very carefully hugged the kids back with their nuclear arms.