"It was a slog because it was constant. And all of it was profoundly horrible. Here, sometimes houses turn to chocolate or you get a curse that makes goats hate you. Back home, I spent three years chasing evil clowns embodying the abstraction of identity while they roamed the globe stripping the skin off of people to recycle it for making monsters, trying to stop them from turning the world into a merry go round of endless incomprehensible unreality, and I got sidetracked in France by a guy who'd become an apartment complex for sentient beetles, and then again in Australia having to seal a man-eating pig into concrete."

Yeah, that's a ton of information. A lot of it completely insane. But the point isn't for her to parse it--- it's to demonstrate just how challenging it is to parse it all.

"If the real monsters only show up a few times a month, and the rest are just tricks designed to make a fool of me, I'll take it."

He notes the scowl. How could he not? He does, after all, have such an eye for detail. But again he does not remark. Gerry shrugs again, casual. "And in between, I get to have a life of my own. I'm not ashamed to say that's new to me. My last crack at life was centered around what I could do for other people."