I knew this was a bad idea, but, in the absence of any good ideas, I continued forward.

Aiden: He wants to lay his hands on a woman. He'll be eating through a tube before I let that happen

I hope you brought something stronger than a portal gun this time. Otherwise, I'm afraid you're about to become the immediate past president of the Being Alive Club. Ha, ha.

I realize now that it will take time, that the road ahead is long and shrouded in darkness. It is a road that will not always take me where I wish to go and I doubt I will live to see its end, but I will travel down it, nonetheless. For at my side walks hope in the face of all that insists I turn back, I carry on and this...this is my compromise.

Like moons make swell and wane the nescient seas, so too the sky-strewn gods ordain the tidal fates of mortal days. And yet - a notion born in lonely hours - come ebb, come flow, come all that is beyond the breadth of our dominion: be a moon unto yourself. Even the waves of fate can break upon the shores of will.