The End of Felix Walker

(This is a very dark chapter, focused on stuff like murder-suicide. Taking a page from XarHD, I'm planning to make this more optional compared to the main storyline because of that.)

Felix knew that if he was going to confront his past self, there was only choice of whom to do it with. However, it would mean he had to get Paisley to let him have Cammy, and that would run contrary to her goals as a host. So after eating lunch, he psyched himself up to talk to a being far more powerful than him. What he didn't know was that the demon who used to host his season had a say in that, and had other ideas for how he should approach his past. Before he could even leave the mess hall, Vizrokoth teleported in front of him.

"Felix, you are going to face this alone," Vizrokoth held him by the neck and stared into his eyes. "Only you can forgive the person you used to be. Not Cammy, not Noah, just you. If you want any benefit from this, for either your world or yourself, you will not invite anyone to join you."

"But... why?" Felix asked. "Why do I have to suffer this alone?"

"This isn't just about your past Felix, but also a future that never was," Vizrokoth said. "I know of it, for a reason you'll find out, but no one else should know of it. Now go, and prove to me that you can face yourself."

Sullen, sulking, but ultimately accepting, Felix left the demon's embrace, and went, alone, to the room of mirrors. Would a full lunch prepare him for what was about to happen? How bad could things get that a demon felt it needed to be kept a secret? These questions haunted his thoughts as he walked to the mirror room, and prepared for the worst.

When he entered the room, Felix closed the door behind him. He then took a deep breath, walked over to the gigantic mirror, and pressed his hand to the glass. Like Z before him, the first image he saw was that of his mother. Even alone, he refused to let anyone hear the name of either his mother or his father. Whenever her name would be said, he blocked it through his knowledge of onomancy. Whatever happened, he was never going to let anyone watching learn the true names of his parents. It was the least he could do for them...

The memories started before Harem Hotel, before anything that even hinted at the possibility. Felix's mother was lecturing him about his bad grades... and the incident. Like every other he promised to study, knowing that it wouldn't do anything. His math teacher wasn't willing to meet him halfway, and neither was anyone else. Felix Walker continued to insist that he wasn't at fault, and that the school was throwing him under the bus. His mother gave up, too tired to continue an argument, and Felix went away, guilty as usual.

His father sought to lecture him next, furious, in something that was unsurprising to Felix Walker. Ever since his math issues started creeping up, Felix's father sought to correct him. The incident added that to a long list of complaints about his behavior, which only got worse when his son kept insisting he wasn't at fault. Unlike with his mother though, Felix had hit the point where he didn't care anymore what his father thought about him.

"Felix, you know-"

"You know I study," Felix Walker cut his father off, his voice rising. "You have seen me study. We even once studied together. Despite that fact, did my grades improve in any real manner? Or, as other fucking time I tell you this, did they stagnate, because whether I study makes no difference here?"

"You cut me off!" Felix's father angrily switched topics, ignoring every point. "You continue to be so disrespectful of me and your mother! I should take your compu-"

"If you want me to study, I have to have the computer," Felix Walker flatly repeated the retort. "And if you really care about me cutting you off, or being disrespectful, MAYBE YOU TRY LISTENING TO WHAT I FUCKING TELL YOU!"

He stormed out of the room, and slammed the door to his bedroom. His parents usually punished him for it, especially his father, but other than another warning from his father Felix Walker tuned out, he didn't get such a reprimand. Not that it mattered, because any punishment they could come up with was pointless. They couldn't ground him, as he had nowhere to go after school anyway, and had no friends to see because of the fallout from the incident. He had no allowance they could take away, as they were too poor from the court battle Felix's mother was embroiled in to give him one, and that from the sound of the argument Felix's parents had outside his door, his mother was losing. Every other punishment was similar in that any punishment his father could come up with either degraded Felix's ability to do schoolwork, or wasn't any worse than what he was already dealing with every single day from how he was treated at school. All of this was counting down to an unavoidable question: What was going to happen when, not if, Felix was expelled, or otherwise dropped out?

That question loomed in the background of his parents near daily arguments. The never ending arguments over whose fault it was that his grades had plummeted off a cliff, whether Felix Walker was actually at fault for the incident he had been blamed for, and what the future for them was. His father was steadily losing these arguments, but Felix's mother didn't have any better ideas for what to do instead, other than maybe just yanking him out of high school early. Overhearing the words made Felix Walker feel guilty, but as he could do nothing about it, it lead him instead to seeking escape from one of the last places remaining to him: Pornography.

Porn was something Felix's computer, which was getting on in the years, could still provide. Well, as long as they still had internet anyway. Porn that he hoped his mother would never find out about, and that he guarded access to as the one thing that could make his life tolerable. Not just any porn, but rather, depictions of monster girls, and other powerful women, raping men. In light of what had happened to his mother at work, it was disgusting, wrong. Yet he kept looking up hentai, finding porn games about it, and reading countless stories with the same topic. He couldn't explain what he liked about it, only that ever since he discovered it, it became his favorite type of porn.

That evening, he chose to jerk off to a story he had started earlier. To Felix Walker's immense shame, he enjoyed reading about a man being dominated by his monster girl office boss. The parallels to his mother's situation were obvious, and it was perhaps that forbidden shame which made the scenario all the more enticing. A sudden knocking made him quickly turn it off. His parents didn't need to know about his fetishes...

Felix understood in a way he hadn't, other than presumably in the first week of Harem Hotel, why he had been the way he was before the multiple layers of reality alteration had occurred. Without Cammy, every relationship in the life of Felix Walker had the stench of obligation about it, or quickly ended. The friendship with Noah didn't last, Cameron passed out of his life so quickly that their childhood friendship felt like a passing dream before brutal reality, and everyone who he dealt with on a daily basis did so because they had to for work. Even his parent's love often felt like they had to put up with him because Felix Walker was their child, and not because any part of him was one they wanted to deal with by the time he had reached his senior year of high school.

The rest of his life made a depressing kind of sense, for reasons that Felix Walker didn't know, but that the later Felix knew all too well. Benjamin Winters had systematically destroyed any chance he had of passing high school through being unable or unwilling to help diagnose his disability, and because he tag teamed with James Smith to make him look like a bad kid that should get expelled, not a troubled one who needed attention. Noah wasn't around to help him study, which meant the studying Felix Walker did on his own was subpar at best, and only added to the damage Winters did by driving a wedge between him versus his parents. And then there was the incident.

It had been many reality alterations ago that he hadn't even remembered it, despite it dominating so much of his life. James Smith blamed him for something Felix Walker clearly didn't do, a lesson only reinforced by what Felix had learned from Harem Hotel. Smith knew that the school's athletes had hazing ceremonies, and had dealt with incidents involved in it before. The decision to punish Felix Walker was made because it was easy, and avoided a fight with Hanson's parents, not because it was where the evidence pointed. Noah witnessing the crime, but not reporting it, helped cause the outrageous outcome, but wasn't the primary culprit. Even Felix Walker in his ball of rage knew that Noah wasn't primarily responsible, much less current Felix.

All of that meant so far, there was nothing Felix had to forgive his past self for. That self, which he thought of as Felix Walker, was angry from being exposed to an endless cavalcade of failure, humiliation, and loneliness he could do nothing about. Anger at his school, anger at his father, anger at his teachers, anger at his peers for leaving with him nothing, and anger at himself for being able to do nothing about it. Felix Walker was boiling, and at some point, would explode. But when would that point be reached? And what was bad about it that Felix, as his current self, had to forgive it?

Of course, Felix hadn't finished watching the memories, he had just taken a break by touching the giant mirror in the room once again. It was what would've happened if he hadn't been sent to Harem Hotel. While on paper that sounded like conjecture without substance, this was a set of memories being shown to him by Vizrokoth. The demon's power was great, often seeming like omnipotence from Felix's point of view, and the ability to show other realities was quite possibly within it. On the other hand, the demon could be lying, or otherwise altering what was shown to push him towards a specific viewpoint. Which brought back the question: What did Vizrokoth want him to forgive Felix Walker for doing? Or not doing for that matter? One way or another, Felix was going to find out...

Felix Walker's life might as well have been over, and this was no mere teenage angst. James Smith had completed the process to get him expelled, and by that point, Felix's parents hadn't bothered trying to fight it. Their son hadn't attended school in weeks at that point anyway after a bad math quiz and a bullying beatdown from Hanson made him just give up on it. He was supposed to be studying for his GED, and was trying to, but progress was slow. Not only was Felix Walker's mental state , but he was exposed, all day and night, to someone he didn't want to think about: Austin White.

He had never met Austin White, nor had he seen the man outside of photographs. But his presence was felt every time Felix's mother raised her voice, every time she cried when she thought nobody could hear her, and every time there was a phone call held in tense whispers. This man had destroyed Felix's mother one humiliation at a time, and that process had continued throughout the court case grinding its way to its sickening but inevitable conclusion. There would be no justice, and if anything, his mother would become destitute from the costs of the case. After all, Felix's mother had lost her job, and Austin White was known to be vindictive with those who tried to sue him.

Between attempting to study for the GED, and avoiding his parents, Felix Walker began to watch old movies. They were easy to find online, and his parents didn't mind. It was certainly easier to explain than all the monster-girl hentai he still read and watched. In that time, he ran across a movie. It was a slasher from the 1980s, but for some reason, the opening lines of narration stuck in his head.

"The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo, and found not guilt, not anxiety or fear, but freedom. Any humiliation which stood in his way could be swept aside by the simple act of annihilation: Murder."

It was a movie that would go onto demonstrate the kind of sick man who'd write, or say, something like that, however, something about it stuck in the mind of Felix Walker. Perhaps it had been because of Billy Hughes. After all, Hughes had been the only person to suffer any meaningful consequences for hurting Felix Walker, and while that limited justice had required him to suffer, it was still justice. By contrast, neither he or his mother had gained any form of justice from the formal justice system. Worse, in both cases that system looked like it would punish them. Was it the case that breaking the taboo against personal violence was the only way to end the litany of humiliations Felix Walker had endured?

This line of thinking would've amounted to little or nothing, as despite the depths of his despair, Felix Walker wasn't an idiot, or a bloodthirsty monster. However, then Felix's father chose to do something that everyone would regret by barging into his room shortly after the movie ended, making demands. It was a set of actions that caused a fanciful line of inquiry to become something else. Something much, much worse.

"Felix Walker, you need to get a job," Felix's father stated while barging into his room. "You are unlikely to get a GED anytime soon, and besides, you owe us. It was one thing to get tossed out of-"

"FUCK YOU!" Felix screamed at max volume and did not stop. "I didn't fucking do it, but you chose to believe lies over me. Meanwhile, we've been over the math shit so many times now but you still refuse to LISTEN TO ME!"

"You've been disrespectful one too many times!" Felix's father screamed back. "If you don't find a job soon, I will be taking the computer away. You understand?"

Felix's father tried to take the approach of the calm but firm disciplinarian. So Felix Walker calmed down, and delivered his last threat. "Then I'll leave. But know that when I walk out door, you will never see me again."

It wasn't a threat his father took seriously, so Felix Walker grabbed the only belongings he could carry, and walked right out. Perhaps Felix's father thought he would realize he couldn't take care of himself on his own, and come back after his son had blown off some steam. However, Felix had grabbed a kitchen knife on his way out, something that nobody else would notice was missing until much later. It wasn't the longest or sharpest blade, and Felix Walker doubted he knew how to use it well, but at that point, he didn't care.

At that point, Felix Walker chose to die that day, but didn't want to be the one to take his own life. Felix Walker was too angry for that, and wanted to force someone else to kill him. To make someone else suffer, even if it was in just forcing them to exert the effort to use lethal force. It was with that grim determination that he left his parent's house, and walked many miles to meet James Smith...

Felix stopped the memories, because he knew where this was going to go. But he had to continue watching, he had to know every detail if he was going to figure out how, or whether he even could, forgive his past self. As much as he hated James Smith, and understood the rage he had against Janessa Smith in their first week at Harem Hotel, this was too much. Felix Walker was going to throw his life away with murder. Maybe that wasn't what would happen, perhaps it would end in something more pathetic than that, and that was all Felix had to forgive his past self for. Hoping for the unlikely, Felix pressed the giant mirror again, and the memories of the future that never happened resumed.

It was everything Felix feared, except it was worse. He watched Felix Walker wait outside of his former high school for James Smith to come out. He then leapt out of a bush, and stabbed Smith several times. The man had no chance against the assault, and crumpled to the ground in a bloody heap, the knife left in his body. Whether he was dead or not didn't matter to Felix Walker, who showed no apparent guilt as he dug through the man's clothes. Felix wandered why his past self was doing this until he saw him grab Smith's car keys and a loaded gun.

Memories entered Felix's mind of a conversation Felix Walker had overheard. It was James Smith talking about concealed carry with some loudmouth bragging about his guns. Smith about being scared of how a particularly violent student might decide to take revenge on him, and wanted to be prepared for that possibility. Given James Smith was a corpse bleeding on the entrance to the school despite carrying a firearm, that plan had failed. Worse, it had backfired, because it had armed his murderer with a fully loaded Glock 19.

The memories became a blur as Felix Walker took James Smith's truck for a spin. In this timeline, Felix had gotten some driver's ed, but the lessons had been for naught because his parents lacked money, and Felix's father was in no mood to let his son drive, considering it a privilege Felix Walker hadn't earned. That limited skill was on display as Felix Walker broke several traffic laws as he drove to Austin White's office. Despite the traffic violations, despite the murder that should've been reported by that, despite all the factors that should've stopped him, he was able to continue.

In the present, Felix could do nothing except watch. Watch as Felix Walker entered an office building, and took the stairs to a floor that he heard his mother mention multiple times. Nobody stopped him, despite his hands being covered in blood. No security system prevented him from entering the building, despite him having no reason to be there. Maybe it was because he had taken emergency stairs that were unsecured, given they were meant to be a fire escape. Felix thought of all the reasons his former self should've been stopped, but for some reason, repeatedly wasn't. All he could do was watch helplessly as Felix Walker entered a meeting room, and once again, waited.

Felix Walker would spend an entire night in that meeting room. He slept there, somehow. The only other things he did were play with controls on his gun, and mutter to himself about how he was going to kill Austin White. But Felix could remember his thoughts and feelings, which meant he knew what was happening. He had expected guilt, but he had received none. Instead, he was angry and tired. Felix Walker wanted his suffering to end, but he also wanted to inflict, over and over again. Murder hadn't satisfied his rage, it had only fanned the flames by showing him what he could do.

Morning came. Felix Walker was woken to the sound of an elevator ping, and sprung into action, getting ready to ambush Austin White. He was ready, as he had sure to turn the safety off, and had chosen a range that ensured his shaking hands wouldn't matter. Felix waited, tense. Would Austin White even be the man who showed up? Or would some innocent victim be killed in his place, because it was clear that Felix Walker was consumed with rage, and had long left sanity behind.

Austin White entered the room, making a joke with someone who hadn't entered the meeting room yet. Before he could even see Felix Walker, he was shot. The bullet rang out, the sound filling the room with an immense level of noise. Then several more shots rang out, as the shooter had no interest in Austin surviving, or in his own long term survival. When the gun clicked empty, Austin's bodyguard ran into the room, and shot Felix Walker, landing two shots to the chest, followed by one to the head. The whole sequence took seconds, but the effects were irreversible.

Questions raced through Felix's mind. Why did Austin White have a bodyguard in this timeline? While he was an infuriating prick, was it to the point where someone had threatened his life before? But before he could answer any of those questions, the memories continued. Felix hadn't bothered to pause the mirror, thinking that death was the end, but it wasn't.

The world shifted, and a montage played out of Felix Walker being tortured through a variety of implements, all while being trapped in a glass room. The floor, walls, and ceiling of this room were all hot, to the point of inducing burns, but not enough to kill. The last of which Felix knew because he saw that whenever his other self would've died, the body was reset so his torture could continue. His body just existed to suffer. This montage ended with someone Felix thought wouldn't show up, and in a different body.

It was Vizrokoth, except not as Felix knew her. It was a different version of her, who had four arms, was shorter, and whose skin was covered in scars from prior fights. But he could still recognize it was the demon he knew, because of her burning eyes, and how similar her facial structure was to her present self. Just like her later self, the demon's eyes burned brightly enough to be painful to look at too directly. Of course, this version Felix had seen torture his alternate self many times, each arm wielding a different implement to maximize the effectiveness of the torment for a purpose he didn't understand. But then...

The memories slowed down from something that Felix thought was impossible. Vizrokoth from the past brought Felix from the present into the conversation.

"So you think you have suffered enough?" Vizrokoth asked to Felix Walker. "Let us bring in someone that I imagine you think will be a fair judge. You, from another timeline."

In that moment, Felix Walker, and Vizrokoth, looked out at Felix from Harem Hotel. "Tell me Felix, what do you think of... you?"

The demon was so powerful that even a past version of her could manipulate time itself. The implications broke Felix's brain and made it harder for him to respond. Even once he processed, on some level, what had just happened to him, he was still stuck, unable to respond. One would think being asked to judge yourself would be an easy case. But Felix hated Felix Walker, because he had murdered two men, and had traumatized countless more, including his mother. Vizrokoth was only too happy to pile on the reasons.

"After all, Felix Walker murdered two men, traumatized many students at his school, traumatized his parents, especially his mother given that she was hounded by investigators for years, and..." Vizrokoth said. "Oh yes, inadvertently laundered the reputation of his victims. There is also that matter of what happened to Austin White's bodyguard."

The demon clapped, and footage was shown from someone's perspective who wasn't Felix, past or present. It was through the eyes of Austin's bodyguard who, after killing Felix, looked down and realized he had been hit. Twice. Neither shot was stopped by a vest.

"The man died in the hospital of internal bleeding," Vizrokoth said. "It's one thing to take revenge, quite another to kill innocent people while you do it. You didn't even know you killed him, but I don't think your purpose is noble enough to forgive collateral damage like that."

Felix was stuck. He didn't want to remember any of this. Not the pain, the turmoil, or the horrific things he was capable of doing when all of those emotions came to a point. But he couldn't just refuse to forgive his past self. It was the only way out of an impossible dilemma, of either preventing contestants from graduating, and quite possibly ruining their lives even more, or allowing them to graduate, and wrecking his world, or at minimum, someone else in their life had to suffer. So the question was how could he forgive himself for murder?

Felix could understand the rage his other self had at Austin White. It wasn't just that Austin had molested his mother, but also that Austin was immune to all consequences for it. Even attempting to punish him just resulted in yet more suffering befalling his mother. However, none of that applied to James Smith. Yes, he had his issues with him, including his various bullshit punishments, but that didn't justify stabbing him to death in front of a school. Except...

The more Felix thought about it, the more it clicked into place. James Smith was a stand in for a justice system that was incapable of punishing the guilty, and that chose to hurt the innocent instead. The court system had done nothing to prove that view wrong, and so if Felix Walker wanted justice, any form of justice, for his mother, he would have to do it himself. It didn't justify it, but Felix could start to put himself in that place of utter despair that made it seem acceptable.

And despair, well, that was all too easy to understand the source of. Noah and Cameron both taught Felix Walker that everyone would abandon him the second he, in any manner, became a liability. His failure to even complete his GED, because his math ability wasn’t suddenly that much better outside of high school, meant his job prospects were garbage. Besides, his family was in no position to send him to college in the vain hope that he could find something to do that would justify its cost, and so really, what was the point? Continue to be a disappointment for the rest of his life to a family that had only barely clawed its way into the middle class, only for their son to throw all that away? Felix could see how it would be better to die in a hail of gunfire, and take someone you hated with you.

Except that was too neat. Too forgiving. Too easy. It was apologizing for murder, including that of an innocent man whose only crime was being a bodyguard for Austin White. It was also brushing off everyone Felix Walker hurt, including the very person Austin White hurt... for what? Killing them wouldn't change anything. If anything, it made both retroactively be forgiven by the public at large, and even if the other people Austin White harassed came out, so what? James Smith still got to be a martyr, who died because of a student that refused to accept his punishment. Felix could all too easily imagine the crackdowns and further slide into authoritarian bullshit that such violence justified.

But then it looped around again. Every man in this version of Felix's life had failed him. His father refused to listen to him, Benjamin Winters treated him as an irritation, and James Smith thought of him as someone to be framed. This was no matter of merely lacking a good male role model, as it seemed to have a much deeper impact on Felix than he wanted to admit. Hanging in the background of all this, and something he knew very well from Harem Hotel, was his kinks. He wanted to be dominated by women, wanted to be raped by women more powerful than him. Why? It didn't seem like a pertinent question, but somehow, Felix knew it mattered here.

Knowing he had to respond, Felix chose to take a specific tack. What Felix Walker did was wrong, but he had suffered for it a lot. Vizrokoth was better at punishment than any other being he had ever met, and while he hadn't met many other demons, he suspected none of them understood how to punish like she did.

"I... what have you learned, if anything, from all your torment?" Felix asked. "Do you regret anything you did?"

Felix Walker's response was both infuriating but also understandable. "No. I regret that I did it in a sloppy manner, but not what I did. Besides, you're not one to judge me."

"What do you mean by that?" Felix asked. "I didn't-"

"You are the master in Harem Hotel!" Felix Walker screamed. "I only killed three people, and one of them was on accident. You on the other hand are the central cog in a machine that irreversibly transformed eight people, and only two of them deserved to be there! Just like me, you blamed Austin White and James Smith for where you ended up, but then used it as an excuse to avoid dealing with what happened to everyone else!"

Then something surprising happened, as Felix watched his other self gather himself together before continuing. "How can you judge me for committing murder, a crime that brings an end to the victim, when you been integral to violating people's bodies, minds, and maybe even souls? That torment doesn't end! Austin White's punishment won't end for centuries, and Smith's could last even longer because of how you helped turn her into an object of your fetishes!"

"I didn't do anything!" Felix responded, the roles shifted. "I didn't choose to have Smith, or anyone else, transformed that way-"

"You didn't resist!" Felix Walker shouted over him again. "And sure, there were rules. But none of those rules required you to accept the actions of Kei Winters or of Z! Both of them had other people's souls trapped within them, unable to consent to anything the dominant personality did, and you knew it! You did nothing to resist their advances towards you despite knowing that! How can you lecture me about murder when you participated in RAPE?"

"You have my double standards too," Felix threw out without thinking. "I just..."

But then stopped. Felix then realized how this looked. He was judging another version of himself for murder, when he himself had benefitted from crimes just as bad, if not worse. Sure, he hadn't actively done anything, but had been a gleeful participant. More than that, he had brushed off the total horror of Harem Hotel... a reality altering show that, as a matter of course, violated consent. That was putting it mildly, and ultimately made what Austin White did insignificant in the scheme of things.

Vizrokoth from the past then began to clap. "Excellent Felix Walker, you can bring another version of yourself pause. I suspect the future version of me wanted this very conversation to happen, for that very reason."

The demon’s interruption gave Felix time to put his thoughts together. And also reminded of an emotion that he was all too familiar with, but that this other version of him was not. One that he suspected Felix Walker had lost from, ironically, the torture he had experienced.

"You're wrong, but not for the reason you think," Felix said to his other self. "I... was scared. Scared out of my mind. And in that case, I just found it easy to... retreat into the very fantasy that the show was serving up. You're into the same things I am, after all."

It was a confession. On some level, Felix always knew that Harem Hotel was wrong, but fully confronting that wasn't something he could do because it was terrifying. He would yell about how he was at the mercy of a reality altering TV show to others, but had refused to ever fully stare that reality in the face without shirking away. So he had submitted to most of what the demon had wanted to do, and had accepted the gifts the show gave him gladly, because he didn't want to resist the terrifying force that was the show.

"You did it out of fear," Felix Walker said. "Then why can't you forgive me for my rage? It was a spur of the moment decision, and you know it-"

"It was more than that!" Felix yelled. "You camped out in front of the school with a weapon to kill someone because they expelled you. Yes, what I did was wrong, but I had the excuse of being forced to! What do you have, besides your rage at being in an unjust world? It's not like we had it so bad-"

"Oh fuck right off, you can only say that because you don't have to live my life anymore!" Felix Walker screamed in return. "You get to have everything! A great job, a great friend, a hot as fuck girlfriend, and all you have to do is ignore the horrors that gave it to you, including that you made our world worse! I didn't introduce magic, or creatures that choke off society itself!"

The screams from Felix Walker were hoarse, but the point was still made. Felix benefited from an unjust system, and so because of that, Felix Walker just saw him as another corrupted figure making self-serving arguments. If he couldn't disprove that, what argument could Felix offer to his other self? So instead, he decided to return to earlier.

"What did you learn from your torment, if not guilt?" Felix asked. "You seem to know a lot about me, but I only know that you suffered, not if that suffering gave you anything."

"That torture doesn't work," Felix Walker replied. "I have nothing left to lose anymore, and all this pain just..."

At that point, Felix Walker cried. These were not tears of pain, or agony, but instead despair. The despair Felix had in his first week at Harem Hotel came rushing back, because he understood it. The despair of having nothing left, and thinking that no one cared. It was enough for Felix to get the point, but he had to phrase what came next carefully.

"My name is not Felix Walker anymore," Felix said. "That may be my true name, but I cannot go by it any longer."

Felix Walker recovered to stare back at him. "Because of Onomancy?"

"Because I cannot be you," Felix continued, straining to speak through his tears. "I have to carry you with me the rest of my life, because you are a part of me, but I cannot be you. I cannot be consumed by despair anymore, because too many people need me. It is because I hurt those people that I cannot just wallow in my anger, my hatred, my fear, my... despair. But I forgive you because I know you had nothing else."

"Felix Walker then will no longer exist, except as a memory," Vizrokoth said. "You will fuse with Felix, as I devour your sins as a meal."

Right in front of Felix, he saw Felix Walker fade away. Most of him entered Felix, as a kind of spirit, and all the horrific memories that were brought it. The rest of him however became a liquid which poured into a wine glass. The demon then drank in front of him. "A strong but ultimately shallow flavor. How typical of Wrath. Be seeing you Felix..."