Dale Gibbons was fired from Top Shelf Security after all of his court fees were paid for. Jerry Markham's assault case was entertained just long enough for the lawyers to feel that their fees were justified before being tossed out on its ear. That was fine with Dale. He soon had a job teaching metal guitar down at Upbeat Music. After working there for a year, he quit so he could start his own Scorpions tribute band, The Tempe Krauts. They never took off, and Dale moved back in with his parents in Phoenix while he worked part-time at the Piggly Wiggly. Night shift, of course.

Holly Day looked at her framed, autographed copy of The Phalanx of Ebon Keep with unconcealed glee. It hung over her computer, a prized possession, and clashed with absolutely everything in her tasteful, if cluttered office. Lime green, she thought. Oh, Larry, what am I going to do with you?

The guys showed up on her doorstep, following a shy call from Larry, some two weeks ago. They were all dressed in their best, and Holly noted that Larry was wearing the black long sleeve shirt that she had bought for him. They presented Holly with cash money for the collect call from jail, plus her fee for wiring the money that was ultimately never used for their bail through Western Union. Then they took her out to dinner at Scarabelli's and told her the whole story, start to finish, tripping over one another to get the details right.

She had a hard time believing it, of course, until they presented her with her complimentary copy of the module, signed by Rob Rutlege and all four of the guys. Bless their misanthropic hearts, they knew she could care less about the module itself. It was very much the thought that counted.

It was when they told her that they were going to sell them on the Internet that she got her really brilliant idea.

Holly and Linda set the guys up with their own website, complete with the ability to take credit card orders. Rhonda helped the guys whip their content into readable shape, and Leslie spammed all of her newsgroups, which included alt.erotica.fantasy, to help get the ball rolling. The rest of the sisters got autographed copies, of course, but they just read the thing and shook their heads. Only Holly framed hers. When Larry came over, a week ago, to take her out for their new first date, he took one look at the module over her desk and attacked her. They didn't leave the house that night.

Was it what she expected? Not really, but what is, in this world? Larry was eager and still very shy (he insisted she keep the lights off, and wouldn't let her touch his stomach). He also needed a lot of work in the lovemaking department, but it wouldn't be the first time she'd had to teach a man. At least Larry wanted to learn, she reflected.

Now, geek fever had gripped her friends, too. Bolstered by the tales of their exploits, Linda and Leslie were giving Burt, Turk, and D.J. the once-over, to see who might also be a diamond in the coal pile. Rhonda, of course, was trying to be her own person by not having any of it, but she was surreptitiously e-mailing Turk, who had recently signed up for a month on her website.

She smiled at the module again. The doorbell rang. It was Larry. Maybe they would actually make it to a restaurant this time.

D.J. raced home from work, ignored the hellos from his parents, and bounded up the stairs to check his e-mail. He had a report to create, and he needed to know how much money they had made through the website.

He pulled the ordering summary off of Rhonda's server and giggled. Of the one hundred and seventy five modules they had for sale, they had sold seventy-eight in just one week! And, at two hundred bucks a pop, that was good money for everyone. It wasn't a quarter of a million dollars, but for D.J, he was building a nest egg. It was way past time to get out of the house. He typed in a few things, and did some math. His share of that came out to just over thirty five hundred dollars. More than enough for the down payment on an apartment.

In the long run, Rutlege would make that much, all for just signing his name. The rest of the money was to be split four ways, and that wasn't chump change. The last twenty five of the original stock would go for two-fifty, which would leave ten special modules, set aside as a last ditch effort, to be placed on auction one at a time on Ebay. For the fifteen modules that hadn't been accounted for, they were given away to various people.

The girls were paid in advance, which didn't amount to very much, since they did it as a favor. Larry thought it would be good to pay them with the rest of their initial stake money, which was roughly four hundred dollars.

As D.J. made his final calculations, plugging numbers into his spreadsheet so everyone could know what page they were on, he got an ICQ message from Leslie.

D.J. stopped. They had been emailing and chatting for the past week, now, but he still couldn't figure her out. He typed:

D.J.'s heart turned over. He wrote:

Holy shit, there it was, thought D.J. Before he could stop himself, he typed:

D.J. kept typing, but he suddenly couldn't feel his chair beneath him or hear his mother calling him for dinner. And why not? He had thirty-five hundred dollars burning a hole in his pocket and a flesh-and-blood geek girl coming into town for the weekend.

It came in a stiff white cardboard mailer, with no return address. Without thinking, Jerry Markham tore into it. Probably another hateful note from his parents, he thought bitterly.

He pulled out a lime green module and a note. It was the Phallus of Ebon Keep, with writing all over the front.

Markham read the note:

"Son of a bitch," said Markham. Larry had signed the front of this collector's item module in his big, awkward scrawl with a magic marker. All of them had. Wait, there were five signatures on there...Robert Rutlege. They were all in on it. That was their inside man. Now he knew everything, but the knowledge only bubbled in his stomach like a betrayal.

Markham opened up the module and moaned. Words, sentences, entire passages had been censored with a Sharpie marker. The module was useless. He threw it across the room, where it bounced off the wall and fluttered onto the couch. Larry Croft! I will not rest until I have pissed on your grave!

Chris Threadgill walked up to the check-in counter of Seattle Tacoma International airport. "Hi, I'm flying ticketless," he said to the girl as he handed her his driver's license.

"Well, well," said Renee, "you've come back to me."

"What?" Threadgill looked dumbfounded. Then he recognized her. The girl he'd flirted with before he went out to Tempe. "Oh, hey, how you doing?"

"I'm hurt," she said, in a mock-pout. "I expected to see you after you got back."

Threadgill gave her his professional smile. "Sorry, Renee, I've just been too busy at work."

"Going back to Arizona, I see," she said. "More business?"

Threadgill smiled. "Actually, pleasure."

"Oh," said Renee. She finished the rest of Threadgill's check-in without any extra patter.

That was a little mean, he chided himself. But, then again, the only woman he'd had on his mind since he got back to Washington was Hillary. They had exchanged a series of hot phone calls and even hotter e-mails, until Threadgill told her to knock it the hell off, he was coming down for the weekend. It wasn't the best idea he'd ever had, but at this point, he was bound and determined to see their relationship to some sort of conclusion, as much as the notion terrified him.

He sat down on the plastic chairs and pulled out the lime green module Larry Croft had sent him, along with a note that explained in brief the whole story. Smart kid, that Croft, Threadgill thought. If they ever needed to expand their sales rep program into SF, Croft would be the first person he called about a job.

He told Hillary the whole story, and she begged him to bring the module. She promised to read him some of the more racy parts while doing that thing to him that she did... The memory sent blood surging south, and Threadgill crossed his legs and put the module away.

It hadn't been a total loss, he reflected. When Threadgill got home, he told the head of marketing about his experience with Larry's gang at the police station. They both inferred from the story that there was still a market for the old LegendMaster line of games and accessories. When Chris left the office, the head of marketing was already drawing up the ad campaign, with the caption, "Old School." They would be ready to go with the new LegendMaster Classic line in four months. And best of all, they didn't have to pay any of the old writers or artists. It was all work-for-hire back in the early eighties. In the twenty-first century, it was now free money.

For the idea, and the office goods arriving more or less on time from Arizona, the CEO gave Threadgill a month of paid vacation by way of a bonus. He thought about Hillary and smiled. That time wouldn't last very long, he mused.

They called his flight. Threadgill stood up, stretched his tall frame, and strode over to the jetway, eager to get back to a pair of willing arms and a very dry heat.