​     Francis stood at the center of the room so that everyone else surrounded him.

     "We'll start with this," he said.

     A three-dimensional hologram of an image appeared over his head.

     It was an image that kind of resembled a ball of string, only they weren't strings but ribbons of multi-colored light, of energy.

     "Take some time to merely gaze," Francis said. "It's mesmerizing, I promise you."

     And it really was. Trevor found, at first, that he couldn't take in the entirety of it in a single glance. It all became too much, too overwhelming. Trevor tried to dissipate the intensity of what he saw by merely following one of the zillions of threads that pulsated and glistened, but then that thread would intertwine or blend with other threads, and those threads would intermingle with other threads and...                                                     How long he stared at it, Trevor had no idea, they'd all fallen into kind of a trance, but, at last, Francis asked, "Who can tell me who that is?"           "Infini," Four people in the room responded, although everyone else in the room, except for Malika, responded with nods.                                                             "Her timelines ever-expanding, blending, evolving," Adam said.

     "Infini is all that was, is, or ever will be in all of their zillions upon zillions of permutations," Niki said.

     "If you believe in that sort of thing," Gramps said.

     The image over Francis's head changed. Now, another entity, this one an oil black serpent with four heads, looked attached to the first one, to Infini, or was it a part of Infini, something that grew out of Infini?

     "Can anybody tell me what that is?"

     The people who'd responded before now paled.

     "The Fours," four of them responded. 

CONTINUE