The fine liquor burned a warm, comfortable path down Lutz's throat, a stark contrast to the cold, clinical taste of the acid fumes still lingering in his memory. The silence in the office was companionable now, charged with the new energy of their partnership. They were two sharks who had just recognized each other in the same water, and the relief was palpable.
It was in this unguarded moment that Lutz asked the question that had hung between them since their first meeting. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass, his gaze fixed on the whirlpool it created.
"So," he began, his voice casual yet deliberate, "how'd you end up here?"
The question hung in the air, simple and immense. It wasn't about St. Millom, or this office. It was about the fundamental, universe-shattering here.
Gene, who had been admiring the quality of the whiskey with a connoisseur's appreciation, froze for a fraction of a second. He then lowered his glass, a practiced, cynical smile playing on his lips. It was a defense mechanism, and Lutz saw it instantly.
"Wouldn't it be courtesy for you to tell me first?" Gene parried, his tone light but his eyes sharp. "You're the one who dropped the bomb. You don't just get to do that and then play interviewer.
Lutz studied him for a long moment. He saw the wariness, the calculated casualness that hid a deep, profound curiosity—and fear. He was asking for a show of trust. And for the first time since he'd woken up hanging from a rope, Lutz felt he might actually have someone he could extend that trust to, not out of naivete, but out of a cold, strategic assessment of mutual need. This man understood references from a world that didn't exist here. That shared context was a fortress they could build together.
He chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. "Fair enough." He took a slow sip, buying a moment to order the chaos of his memories. Where to even begin?
"I'm Romanian, Andrei Hayes, language student, 2025, came across a strange coin in a random antique shop," he started, his voice dropping into a lower, more reflective register. The persona of James Morgan was completely gone now; this was Lutz Fischer, or perhaps the ghost of Andrei Hayes, speaking. "It had a spiral engraving on it. It… called to me. In a sinister way. You know that feeling? Not like a siren's song, but like a hook in your gut, pulling you towards something you know is bad news."
Gene nodded slowly, his flippant demeanor receding. "I know the feeling, I get it with women I know will destroy me all the time!"
Lutz chuckled "I had problems going on in my life," He continued, his gaze distant, looking through the wall of the office and into a past life. "The kind of slow, grinding failure that makes you numb. One night, I was walking through there, past that shop, and I saw it again in the window. Just sitting there. And in that moment, I thought… I think I thought I had nothing to lose."
He paused, the memory of that fatalistic despair as vivid as the desk in front of him. "So I broke the window and stole it."
Gene's eyebrows shot up. "You? Mr. Calculated? A smash-and-grab? That's… surprisingly impulsive... well, checks out for a Romanian."
A grim smile touched Lutz's lips. "Desperation makes fools of us all. When I realized what I had done—the broken glass, the coin cold in my hand—I started running. Like crazy. Just… running. No plan, no direction. Just panic."
He could almost feel the burn in his lungs, the slap of cold air on his face, the weight of the coin in his palm. "Then everything went bright. Not white, but… a painful, overwhelming bright. And then, just as suddenly, dark. Pitch black. The next thing I know…"
He took a sharp breath, the sensation of the coarse rope around his neck still a phantom pressure.
He pointed at himself "...I'm this fellow, Lutz Fischer, hanging from the ceiling with a rope around his neck."
Gene, who had been taking a sip of his whiskey, choked. He coughed, spluttering, his eyes wide as he stared at Lutz. "You're shitting me."
Lutz met his gaze, his own eyes flat and serious. "I wish I was. He was indebted to a gang—the Harbor Vipers in Indaw Harbor—so he chose the easy way out. I still don't know how I managed to make my way out of that situation. Luck, I suppose. Or something else."
"Holy shit," Gene whispered, all traces of sarcasm gone. He was utterly captivated, his mind trying to process the sheer, visceral horror of the scenario.
"To not die, I offered to work in order to pay off the debt. I eventually became a Beyonder. I learned to lie. To steal. To… kill." The word landed in the quiet room with the weight of a tombstone.
Gene's jaw, which had already been slack with surprise, dropped further. His eyes widened in complete, unvarnished incredulity. He looked at the man in the bright yellow suit, sitting behind the fine mahogany desk, and tried to reconcile that image with the one being painted—a man waking from suicide to a life of crime and murder.
He killed? Gene's mind reeled. This guy, who set up this legit-looking business, who talks all dandy and funny… he's a killer? He'd assumed Lutz was a schemer, a grifter like himself, just operating on a higher level. But this was something else entirely. This was the deep end of the pool.
Lutz saw the shock on Gene's face and pressed on, almost relentlessly. It felt like lancing a wound, painful but necessary. "I ultimately managed to take the gang out by leading other forces onto them. I used an important artifact as bait, set them at each other's throats, and in the chaos, I looted the gang's treasury. Then I ran off with the funds and came here."
He fell silent, the entire, brutal summary of his life in this world laid bare. The theft, the near-death, the potion, the manipulations, the violence, the escape. He had told no one. Not a soul. Eliza knew he had something going on, but she had no context. Telling Gene, watching the man's typically unflappable expression cycle through shock, disbelief, and a dawning, grim respect, was… freeing. It was a weight off his chest he hadn't even realized he was carrying alone. For a moment, he wasn't a Swindler or a noble or a fugitive. He was just a man who had survived hell, confessing to the one other person who might, on some level, understand.
The silence in the office was a physical thing, heavy and dense in the wake of Lutz's story. The fine liquor in their glasses seemed less like a celebration and more like a necessary fortification. Gene stared at Lutz, his usual arsenal of sarcasm and witty retorts completely depleted. He looked at the man in the yellow suit not as James Morgan, the frivolous noble, or even as Lutz Fischer, the shrewd operator, but as a survivor of a catastrophe he could barely comprehend.
"Wow," Gene finally breathed, the word soft and utterly devoid of its typical cynical edge. "That's... a handful." It was an inadequate term for a horror that demanded something more profound, but nothing else would come.
They remained in that shared silence for a long moment, the only sound the faint ticking of the clock from the outer office. The weight of Lutz's story hung between them, a bridge of grim understanding. He had shared his deepest, darkest truth. The ball was now in Gene's court.
Gene took a deep breath, draining the last of the whiskey in his glass. The liquid courage burned, and he set the glass down on Lutz's desk with a definitive clink.
"Alright," he said, his voice quieter, stripped of its performative bravado. "Here's mine."
He leaned back in the uncomfortably strategic visitor's chair, but this time, the discomfort seemed to come from within. His gaze grew distant, looking not at Lutz, but at some painful panorama of memory projected onto the wall of the fine office.