***

Matthew Grim powers down his craft and disembarks onto the primary Islay bay.

He wordlessly pays his parking fee to the dockmaster while a pair of workers unload the Claymores cargo hold, consisting of only four escape pods.

Five minutes later, he enters Murphy Central. Hells primary cavern, sixty-six levels underneath the stations primary operations.

He walks through the main alleyway to the middle area that serves as a small approximation of a public park, leading four hooded men: bound, gagged and daisy-chained together at the necks as if they were dogs.

Silently, he stands and watches patiently as curious onlookers line the perimeter of the circular park until the normal hum of Hells daily activity is replaced with the dull roar of hushed murmurs of curiosity seekers.

He reaches into the pocket of his duster and tosses a small sphere into the air and it positions itself, hovering close by.

In an instant, the twenty four massive monitors spaced and bolted across the span of the rocky ceiling switch from the regular outside feed of the Islay ice cloud, changing to broadcast the face of the Banger Grim across them all.

With a showman's' flair, his deep, amplified Voice booms across the cavern:

"Gaians! All of you! Ladies and Gentlemen! Children and Peers! Natives and pirates, poseurs and pilots! Direct your attention to the center ring and open your goddamned ears!"

"It was over thirty years ago that we began to build this niche! Over thirty long years to make this place a home! Over thirty years of Union blood and sacrifice to turn this once inert hole into a truly, living Hell!"

"Since then, one by one, willingly or otherwise, each of you have come here to take your opportunities for drink and pleasure!"

"In Hell you have fought and eaten, screwed and screamed, rejoiced and hated and hurt!"

"Now, I must openly admit with specific regret that the perpetual atrophy in the roots of the Gaian cause has now crystallized issues that have been slowly growing like a tumor over the decades!"

"...However today will be different! Today Gaia begins to push the so-called forces of Nature back into a natural balance by way of the snarling jaws of the Beasts of Nature!...Today I offer a small reminder of the many things it takes to truly own the privilege of calling yourselves Gaians!!"

In line, one by one, Matthew tears the hoods off the heads of the four men and only separates the chains that connect three of them.

Starting on the far left, Matt locks his eyes onto the one in front of him and simultaneously adressess both captive and crowd without wavering his gaze from the Maltan.

"Outcast! Your very existence is a perverted abomination of natural evolution! You and yours are nothing but a nation of junkies and an active participant in spreading an orange cancer to all that you touch!"

"Choke on the poison that enslaves you."

The old Gaian pulls a stalky bushel of fresh cardimine from another pocket, rips away the prisoners gag, and violently shoves it down the Spaniard's throat until the mans neck turns a disturbing black and blue from severe subcutaneous damage that forces the man to drown in his own blood.

Stepping over the collapsed body, He moves to the next in line.

"Bretonian Mineral Miner! Your choice of employment is the epitome of the banality of evil! Your mundane existence through life in the simplistic pursuit of a paycheck has blinded you to the damage you regularly inflict upon the very universe that saw fit to gift you with sentience.

"You choose not to see, therefore, sight is wasted on you."

The old man flanks his hands around the sides of the BMM employees head and digs his thumbs into the mans eye sockets, twisting the optic nerves around his opposable digits and yanking out what remains by the root.

"Orbital Spa and Cruiseman! You cater to the whims of the rich and powerful as they holiday carefree above the daily rape of Gaia below them. Her screams of pain drowned out by the deafeningly shallow sounds of the revelous distractions you provide for them!

"Nature only knows how to give what it gets and it will have its revenge."

The Banger Grim removes the gun from its holster under his coat, stalks behind the terrified man, sticks the barrel into cheeks of the Cruiseman's backside, and fires.

Matthew now turns to the last man in line.

Planetformer! You hold a very special place in my heart because everything about you and yours does nothing but break it time and again.

You I condemn to to remain pristine and unmarred. Doomed to lifelong imprisonment in perfect health here in Hell.

...Very much unlike the synthetically accelerated metamorphosis you force upon the many cells of the Living Universe in the name of shortsighted, ignorant Human 'progress' and profit.

Nature evolves on her own time line, but never on ours.

You will experience the rest of your long days perpetually agonizing alone in a cage, becoming intimate with the acute suffering of a very slow and lonely death.

Yanking the chain still connected to the Planetformers neck, the old man drags the gagged and protesting animal to his jail, his muffled fearful screams of protest and anger echoing through the otherwise now remarkably silent cavern.

ID: The Banger Grim

Matthew re-enters the central cavern, fresh from throwing the planetformer in jail to rot in good health. As he walks the thoroughfare past the bars, shops and brothels, he notices three distinct things. People that smile and want to shake his hand as they pass him, people that nervously avert their eyes and give a very wide berth as he passes, and people that do nothing and just simply pass him as he passes them.

He notices Sequoia sitting under a tree and has the wisdom to recognize the thoughts that dwell behind the look on her face.

The old man takes a seat at the base of her tree, making a point to sit opposite of her. She, facing north and he facing south.

A few minutes pass in silence before Banger breaks it.

"Nature truly is a beautiful thing isn't it?"

Sequoia understood that the question was a rhetorical statement of fact and it didn't require a response.

Another minute or so passes before the man spoke again.

"I was alot like you when I was your age you know." He said.

"When I was finally old enough to begin University back in 759, I started to attend many of the student protests on the quad primarily as a tool to meet people. It didn't matter to me what they were protesting about, it's just, at the time, that's what people did. I had a pretty average and very sheltered upper-middle class upbringing, so back then, I really had nothing to be truly angry about because I've never really experienced what true injustice felt like in any of its forms. I simply feigned anger and protested in the attempts to discover what kind of man it was that I wanted to become, and which people I could relate to most."

Matthew pulls a joint rolled from his latest test crop of 'organic synthweed' lights it, and takes a long hit before continuing:

"The Gaian protests were my favorites though. Not because I cared anything of what they were about honestly, but really only because Gaian protests drew the hottest, most hedonistic women. Ultimately, the bottom line is, it was my johnson that eventually led me here to Edinburgh."

"I was a player though, I knew all the right things to say and all the right times to say them. I mean, as a kid, I can remember all the times my dad turning on the media wall in the 40's and watching the news reports on the couch with him of Gaian attacks against the BMM over the Cobalt on Gaia and the violence of the Gaian blood riots on New London. Anyway, college chicks tend to get moist around dudes that can tell them what they want to hear, and I preferred to moisten the pro-Gaian girls more than the rest."

"Eventually, within a few years I started to truly sympathize with their cause to the point where I was leading the protests instead of just attending them. That put me in a position to begin actually meeting real Edinburgh Gaians. I was approached one day by a Green Front representative and that led to my making weekly trips here to Islay, well away from the prying eyes of the government to coordinate the public face of the movement on the Cambridge campus."

Banger takes another long draw of smoke.

"So, getting to the part where I say 'In other words' My preconceptions of what the Gaians were before I ever met one was almost completely different than what they actually were in reality. I really had to admire the Green Front's skill at media manipulation, because back in the day, they were true masters at it in every sense of the word.

I was eventually blacklisted by the government for my publicly pro-Gaian stance. I was expelled from school, I couldn't rent an apartment, I couldn't get a job, and hell, I couldn't even legally leave Planet Cambridge for a fresh start in another House because the crown invalidated my passport. I was trapped on the breadbasket of Bretonia and I began to starve to death, homeless and alone. I was malnourished, I was desperate, and the Gaians saved my life by smuggling me off-world and bringing me here."

"I forever owe them an unpayable debt."

"Anyway, as I was saying, back in the 60's, actual Gaians were far removed from the Green Front-media created romantic myth popular with a naive young subculture searching for idealistic heroes to emulate."

"In reality, they were many things. Mostly though, they were an uncompromising people willing to take life for their cause just as equally as they were willing to give up their own for it."

"In my many moons of drawing breath, I've seen untold hundreds of disillusioned recruits with dreams and aspirations of heroic valor, vaporize in the pragmatic brutality of the life they were grossly unprepared to face."

"Now, If I may: Your fatal flaw, sweetheart, is that you, like so many others before you, willingly fall into the myth-trap. You and people like you seem to treat this life as if it were some sort of game where good can triumph over evil, wrongs can be righted with words and slogans, and the boy can ride off into the sunset with the girl and live happily ever after."

"Trust me...choosing this life as a Gaian is not a game by any stretch of the imagination."

"The reality is that you are blinded to the very nature of Nature. While you're preoccupied with the panoramic beauty of it and Utopian fantasies based upon it, you've yet to recognize the true beauty of it. The true beauty lies within the absolute perfect balance of it. A predator that kills to eat in the veldt is equally as beautiful as a sunset."

"Good and evil do not exist
Right and wrong does not exist
Heroes and villains do not exist
Gods and devils do not exist
These are simply constructs of the limited human mind."

"In Nature, the only thing that truly exists is balance and imbalance. Those that fail to understand that, fail to survive past their youth and are returned early to the ash."

"You may not like to hear the reality of all this right now, but if you do not internalize this absolute truth, your sentience will be wasted when Nature calls to claim your life."