As a glorious dawn broke over the green hills of Alsace, Sanya V. Juutilainen-Litvyak was reaching the end of another long day at the office.

She was pottering along toward home, props drooping, flying more or less on autopilot, as she often did at this stage of her working day. She yawned, a hand in front of her mouth, and then smiled as she anticipated her favorite part of the day. Soon she'd be back home, able to take off her Striker Unit, get out of her uniform, and fall into bed, to savor that delicious hour and a half or so before Eila had to get up and start her day.

Sanya giggled lightly, recalling a time when the Suomish witch had been convinced that her Orussian counterpart was wandering into the wrong room by accident. As if that would happen every day? She had noticed early on that Eila wasn't about to tip her off to her "mistake", anyway.

The reddish stone bulk of Château Saint-Ulrich, where the 501st was headquartered these days, came into view. Sanya didn't like it as well as she had their place in Britannia, but it was all right as these things went. A bit drafty, since it had been abandoned for a long time even before Gallia had spent years under the occupation of the Neuroi, and even the miracle-working engineers of the Allied Forces could only do so much. It was comfortable enough, though; and really, Sanya would have been happy anywhere so long as she had her lover, and their friends around them.

She was just preparing to make her final approach to the castle when her dimly passive magic antenna suddenly brightened to full life again, an electric something crackling across her synapses and bringing her instantly out of her pleasant drowse. Neuroi? No... nothing like their unique electromagnetic signature. A signal - a radio transmission, on a frequency not normally used by any of the forces in the area, weak but pulsing with an intangible urgency. Sanya tilted her head and concentrated, her antenna brightening further as she worked to tune in the signal.

"###ayday may#ay, any##e on t##s fr#que#cy, ### one four one ####aring an emer###cy. I am at fl###t level ##irty and have l### all p#w##, rep##t, angels three #ero and noth###'s work##g. Anyb##y out th##e, I c##ld re##ly use a ha#########"

Gone. Not just the voice, but the signal itself, its carrier wave suddenly vanishing from her awareness. The contact had been brief, but long enough for her to get a sense of its direction - and despite the liberal soaking of static, she had recognized the speaker's voice. She had no idea how he had come to be here, but if he needed help...

Sanya aborted her landing approach, turned, and throttled up, bringing her Yak-9 Striker to full power again. She felt a dull ache somewhere deep within her as she tapped reserves of strength she rarely called upon, making full speed at the end of a long day's patrol - but from the sound of things, there was no time to be lost. She'd just have to make it work somehow. At dawn, there would be no one else to do it.

Gryphon had been reasonably sure that he was about to, if not die, at least end up in a whole lot of pain for quite a long time. Falling seven and a half miles would tend to do that to a person.

Instead, at some point before the big crunch would have happened (having lost all his instruments at 30,000 feet, he had no precise idea where; his ad-hoc mental count had him at around 5,000, but that was little better than a guess), he'd felt a heavy-but-not-catastrophic side impact, followed by what he could only summarize mentally as an embrace, and then there were several seconds of quiescence... and then a hard, but far from fatal, impact with the ground, and the next thing he knew he was tumbling end-over-end in a welter of flying sod before fetching up face-down against some solid obstacle or another.

At this point, he'd have liked to open his visor and find out what was going on, but he couldn't; the failure of his XT-474 was so complete that its power-assisted limbs were not just dead but frozen, and barring a supreme effort, he wasn't going to be doing any moving around to speak of without help. With his head stuck in one position, he couldn't even look around, just wait and hope that whatever was going on outside eventually wandered in front of his visor. Right now all that view was showing him was that he'd come to rest someplace grassy.

(At least with the suit vents having opened under atmospheric pressure at 10,000 feet, he wasn't going to run out of air and smother while he waited for it.)

A few seconds later, he found himself dragged partway upright and propped in a semi-sitting position against whatever he'd crashed into ( a momentary swinging glimpse suggested it was a tree). Hands fumbled at his helmet visor, then unlatched it and swung it up, and he found himself looking at a familiar, but entirely unexpected, face. Pale skin, silver hair, big worried eyes of a remarkable deep green; a bit older than when he'd last seen her, maybe... fifteen? It would always be hard to tell with bone structure like hers. She didn't seem as surprised to see him as he was to see her, but then, she'd always held her feelings pretty close to the vest.

"It is you," she said softly.

Gryphon smiled. "Hello, Sanya. Boy, am I glad to see you."

Upon closer inspection, Sanya was looking a bit rumpled, her uniform torn and grass-stained; her black tights were holed in several places and her tie was askew. A short distance away, he could see the two parts of her Striker Unit lying discarded in the grass, undamaged but plainly inoperative.

"Did you crash?" Gryphon wondered.

"A little," Sanya replied with a flicker of wry humor. "It's morning," she explained, figuring he would remember enough of her daily routine from the old days to understand the significance of that. "I used up the last of my magic getting you down in one piece. Can you move?"

"Nope," Gryphon replied. "This suit's - was - powered. It's totally dead. I hope you've got a radio."

She nodded. "No one will be awake right now," she said, "but in an hour or so I can -"

The sound of an automobile engine reached them, and then the cheery beeping of a horn. Gryphon instinctively tried to turn his head and look, but failed; instead, he saw Sanya look to her left and smile, albeit with mild surprise.

"Eila," she said, sounding relieved. "What are you doing here?"

"Under the circumstances, I think that's my line," said a familiar voice in reply, and a moment later the equally familiar blue-and-white-clad figure of Eila Ilmatar Juutilainen-Litvyak stepped into Gryphon's field of view, crouching like a baseball catcher next to Sanya. "What did you do?" she asked, fussing at the torn bits of Sanya's uniform and brushing away flecks of grass and dirt. "And what the heck is this thing -" she started to add, turning to regard the object crumpled at the base of the tree.

"Hey, Eila," said Gryphon.

Eila blinked once, slowly, then nodded. "Oh," she said. "Of course. What else?"

"Pardon?"

"When I woke up and Sanya wasn't there, I checked the cards to see if I could tell where she was," Eila explained. Reaching into one of the pouches on her belt, she produced a couple of Tarot cards and displayed them. "The Magician and the Wheel of Fortune." With a wry little grin, she added, "In hindsight, what else could it mean?"

Sanya and Gryphon glanced at each other, then shrugged (or, well, she did, anyway). Neither had any real idea what the Suomish witch was talking about at this point, but it didn't really matter. What was important was that she was here and she brought a vehicle.

Missing the byplay, Eila straightened up, brushing dust from the knees of her white tights, and said, "All right, let's get you back to base." Tilting her head inquisitively, she added, "What the heck are you wearing here?"

"It used to be a pressure suit," Gryphon explained while Eila got hold of one of his arms and Sanya the other. He didn't bother telling them they weren't going to be able to shift him. Neither one was a big woman - Sanya was tiny and fine-boned, and Eila, though more rugged by comparison, was hardly what a person would call husky - but he knew that, like all the witches of this world, they were much stronger than they looked.

Even so, his suit was so heavy and its locked joints so rigid that it took a good bit of grunting and cursing (mainly on Eila's part) before they were able to womanhandle him into the back seat of the Kübelwagen Eila had driven out in search of her partner. Once they had him situated, they went back for Sanya's Striker Unit. This they lashed to the rear deck of the vehicle, after which Eila got behind the wheel, Sanya climbed in back next to Gryphon, and they set off.

It was pleasant countryside, and Gryphon spent a bit of the ride back trying to place where they were. Could've been anywhere with a reasonably temperate climate, he supposed, but given what he knew about the 501st Joint Fighter Wing's habits, he guessed they were someplace in northwestern Europe. Gallia or the Low Countries, maybe. He was finding it hard to concentrate for some reason. There was something nagging at the back of his mind that he couldn't seem to focus on. After spending a while trying unsuccessfully to pin it down, he decided to stick to things he could get a handle on and asked,

"So this is going to seem like a weird question, but when am I?"

"1946," Eila called back over her shoulder. "April Fools' Day!"

"Heh, well, that figures," he mused. "Obvious next question is where?"

"Gallia," Sanya said. "A district called Alsace, in the northeast of the country."

"Oh, I know Alsace," said Gryphon, sounding a little abstracted. "My grandmother's people come from there. Which makes me, what... a quarter Alsatian." He snickered. "The rest is probably Labrador retriever."

Eila looked back at him, a puzzled look on her face. "Are you drunk or something?"

"No, but I do feel a little weird," he admitted. "I think it's just shock." With a crooked grin, he added, "An unplanned dimensional crossrip will do that to a person."

"Right. Hmm." Abruptly, she pulled the Kübelwagen over to the side of the road and tugged the handbrake on, then turned around in the driver's seat. "I just thought - how are we going to get him into the base? We've got those sentries now. If we try to explain what's really going on, they'll either think we're crazy, or worse, believe us."

"That's true," Sanya mused. They sat in thought for a moment; then, brightening, Sanya rummaged in the pocket on the back of the driver's seat and came out with an old operations manual. Ripping off the back cover, she turned it over, got out the marker pen she used to make patrol notes, and wrote MA in big, square letters on the blank inner side. Then, after a moment's pause to think, she nodded and finished the sign, QUETTE.

That done, she put the pen and the now backless manual away, turned to Gryphon, and - without explanation - wedged the sign into his helmet over his face.

"Hey, what -" he said, but before he could finish the question, Sanya shut his visor again, cutting off the sound.

Eila regarded the pair in the back seat for a second, then grinned, faced front, and set the car in motion again.

"You are a devious little Orussian witch," she declared, "and I love you."

"Thank you," said Sanya, a touch of color coming into her cheeks.

When they arrived at the fence, one of the two sentries on duty flagged them to a halt by the barberpole gate and leaned down to consider the vehicle's contents.

"What the heck is that thing?" wondered the man, a burly sergeant in the battle dress of the Liberion Army.

"High-altitude survival suit," Eila replied. "We're testing it for the Orussian Air Force." With a rueful grin, she added, "Between you and me, I don't think it's gonna work out."

"What's the sign mean?" the sergeant asked.

"Gallic for 'dummy'," Sanya said softly.

"So if it gets away from us in a test, and civilians find it in a field somewhere, they won't freak out and try to give it first aid or anything," Eila explained, and then, with a flash of inspiration, added with a wink, "We call him Ivan Ivanovich."

The sergeant laughed, then turned, opened the gate, and saluted. "Well, you better put Ivanovich to bed, he looks like he's already had a tough day," he said.

"Ha ha, right," Eila replied; then she put the Kübelwagen in gear and drove away.

As the sergeant stood and watched them drive off into the base grounds, the corporal manning the other side of the road came across to stand next to him. For a moment, watching the witches drive away, neither spoke.

"Hey Sarge? What do witches need with a survival suit?" the corporal wondered.

"Hell if I know, Plumbson," the sergeant replied.

They dragged "Ivan Ivanovich" into the hangar, over to the corner that the 501st used as an impromptu meeting room, and dumped him in the corner, where he assumed a sort of slumped sitting position, wedged into the angle where the walls met.

"OK," said Eila. "You put your Striker away, I'm going to go round up the others so we can tell them what's going on."

Five minutes later, with Sanya's Striker Unit back in its launch stage to be tended by the maintenance crew later in the day, Eila was back with as many members of the squadron as she'd been able to round up at breakfast. The turnout was a little disappointing - she hadn't been able to find Lynne, Yoshika, Hartmann, Minna, or Major Sakamoto on such short notice, and Heidemarie Schnaufer, the outfit's other Night Witch, was in bed - but the others were accounted for, and she was at least able to put out the word for the rest. Hartmann was probably still asleep, and the Major was almost certainly out running the perimeter or some damn thing at this hour.

As the others, curious at their sudden summons (and the fact that Sanya was still awake), took seats around the improvised conference table, Eila experienced another of her little flashes of inspiration. Shizuka Hattori - the recruit from Fusō who had come back with Miyafuji the previous fall, and still the FNG - was just about to take a seat when Eila told her in a peremptory sort of voice,

"Not there, new kid." She pointed at the slumped, rather-charred-looking suit in the corner and said, "You sit there."

Shizuka halted her behind an inch or so above the chair she'd been about to take, straightened up again, and looked where Eila was pointing, then back at her Suomish wingmate with a not-sure-if-serious sort of expression. "Uh... what?"

"When Pilot Officer Ivanovich is among us," said Eila importantly, "the junior pilot in the squadron has to sit in his lap. It's traditional."

"You just made that up," Shizuka replied, folding her arms.

"You'll never prove it, Sergeant Hattori," Eila replied with a slightly wicked grin.

Shizuka gave a long-suffering sigh, wondering for what felt like about the 500,000th time what had ever possessed her to think that being a member of the legendary 501st would be cool, and went unwillingly to stand by the suit. It sat there, knees bent, back against the wall, arms outstretched like the Frankenstein monster's. It didn't look very comfortable, and it smelled like burnt electrical wiring. She didn't really want to touch it, let alone use it as a chair, but an order was an order...

With a look of distaste, she turned back to Eila and said, "What's the point of this tradition?"

"It's like... do you have Joulupukki in Fusō?" Eila asked.

"Do we have what?" Shizuka wondered as she lowered herself gingerly into the charred suit's awkward, stiff-armed embrace. "Is that that horrible salty licorice? No, we don't have that."

Eila shook her head. "No, that's salmiakki. And it's not horrible!"

"Uh, yeah, ten out of ten normal people beg to differ with you there," said Shirley Yeager dryly, drawing a stifled snicker out of Perrine Clostermann (and a not-so-stifled one from Francesca Lucchini).

Eila turned an entreating look to her wife. "Sanyaaa, back me up here."

Sanya glanced reluctantly away and said softly, "I'm sorry, lapochka. It's revolting."

Seeing Eila's stricken look of betrayal, Perrine felt a little sorry for her and offered, "General Wilcke likes it."

"Minna eats sardines straight out of the can," Shirley pointed out, while Lucchini made a disgusted face.

"Well, true," Perrine conceded.

Eila palmed her face. "Nnnnhhh. Anyway, no," she went on, "Not that. Joulupukki is Suomish Father Christmas."

"I think in Fusō they call him by his Liberion name, Santa Claus," Sanya put in, as if trying to make up slightly for her complete abdication of helpfulness a moment before.

Shizuka furrowed her brow. "What does Santa-san have to do with making me sit on a burned-out diving suit?"

"Looks more like a spacesuit to me," Shirley put in. "Like in Buck Rogers."

"Right, Yeager, I'm sure it's really a visitor from the 25th century," said Gertrud Barkhorn, rolling her eyes. Then, with a thoughtful frown, she added, "Although that does raise the question..."

"Of what it actually is," Shizuka agreed. She opened the suit's helmet visor and plucked out the hand-lettered MAQUETTE card, expecting to see the blank face of a mannequin behind it.

"Uh... hi," said Gryphon.

"Yaaaaahhh!" Shizuka cried, all but levitating out of his lap.

"Yessss," Eila hissed, making a little pumped-fist gesture of triumph. "Suomus: 1, Fusō: nothin'."

"That was mean, lapochka," Sanya reproved her mildly.

"Was I just used as the central prop in a Suomish opera?" Gryphon wondered as the flustered Fusōnese girl (whom he didn't recognize) hurriedly left the area.

"Yes, yes you were," said Barkhorn. Fists on hips, she regarded him thoughtfully for a second, then smiled and said, "I have to admit I wasn't expecting to see you again."

"Yaaaaay!" cried Lucchini, propelling herself into his lap now that Shizuka was out of the way. "You came back!" Then she sat back and gave him a reproachful frown. "You're not huggiiing," she said in an annoyed singsong.

"I can't," Gryphon replied, trying and failing to move. "Suit's frozen. I can't move a muscle."

Shirley grinned and cracked her knuckles. "Well awright then," she said. "Let's get this party started! It's not every day I get to strip a spaceman."

Minna-Dietlinde Wilcke had just entered the hangar, mulling over the curious message she'd received - why would Eila, of all people, call an emergency squadron meeting at eight-thirty in the morning? - when she noticed the ruckus happening over in the "meeting room" area. At first she took it for some kind of wrestling match - Shirley and Trude seemed to be involved, so that was hardly out of the question - but as she drew nearer, she heard the unmistakable sound of a man's voice from someplace in the mêlée, remarking dryly,

"Well I designed it to come apart, so..."

A moment later Minna's confusion deepened, as she heard Lucchini wail, "I can't get his pants off! Shirleyyyyy!"

"Well, hold on, lemme help you," Shirley replied, repositioning herself. "If I can just get some leverage on this dang thing, maybe I can -"

"Shirley?" Minna inquired as she reached the edge of the 'meeting room'. "What's going on here?"

What was going on appeared to be that Shirley was crouching on the floor astride the hips of the sprawled figure of a man in what looked like a bulky, badly damaged diving suit, one of her feet braced against the leg of the conference table, while Trude Barkhorn wrangled his arms and shoulders from behind in a sort of nelson hold, Perrine tugged on one of his gloves, Sanya and Eila pulled on his boots, and Lucchini pried at the metal fittings of his suit's articulated waist.

For a moment, nobody spoke, all faces (including that of the man in the suit) gazing in silent disconcertion at the wing commander's.

Then Shirley said matter-of-factly, "Let's face it, this is not the worst thing you've caught us doing."

"Who in the world," Minna began, but then she belatedly recognized the slightly pale, rather sweaty face of the man in the battered suit and let out a faint, startled gasp.

"Well hello, Colonel - excuse me, Brigadier! - Wilcke," said Gryphon, noticing the changed rank badge on her uniform's collar. "How lovely to see you again. Excuse me if I don't get up..."

Meanwhile, Lynette Bishop, Yoshika Miyafuji, and a still-drowsy Erica Hartmann entered the hangar by a different door a minute or so behind Minna, having come from the residence wing, and so missed all that; but unlike the commander, they did encounter Shizuka Hattori, who was hovering by that door watching whatever was happening over in the far corner with a look of startled dismay.

"Are you OK, Shizuka-chan?" Yoshika asked, concern on her face. "You look pale."

"There's a man," Shizuka blurted, still so flustered she was barely able to get the words out in the right order.

"Well, yeah, I think you'll find there are a lot of men," Erica replied, arching an eyebrow. "About half the people on the planet."

"No, I mean in here!" Shizuka insisted.

Yoshika looked puzzled. "Our mechanics are mostly men," she said. "Haven't you noticed?"

Her face going red, Shizuka seized Yoshika by the front of her medical smock and shook her, demanding, "Are you really this dense, Miyafuji, or are you just messing with me now?!"

"I like that she's starting to show some spirit," Erica mused to Lynne.

"Mm," Lynne agreed with a little nod.

Then, looking past the two Fusō witches' little tableau, the blonde Karlsander blinked. "Huh, there is a man," she said, and then, looking more closely, "Hey, I know that man!"

"... You do?" asked all three of the younger witches, but Erica wasn't paying them any attention; now she was darting over to "help" with the suit dismantling.

"This is what we get for being late for staff meetings, Yoshika," Lynne mused.

"This is not working," Shirley grunted, tugging uselessly on one of Gryphon's sleeves. "Maybe if we used an impact wrench..."

"Everybody stand clear," said Trude, leaning Gryphon against the wall so she could come around to the front of the group. Shoving up her sleeves, she went on, "I'll handle this myself."

"No!" cried Lucchini, Minna, Eila, Sanya, and Gryphon simultaneously.

"Yeah, bad idea," Shirley agreed.

Trude frowned. "Well, fine, then there's only thing left to do," she said. "Go get the saw. We'll have to cut his arms and legs off," (here she angled a thumb back over her shoulder) "and Miyafuji can put them back on afterward."

"Um, that's not -" Yoshika began.

Before she could finish, Lucchini wailed, "Nooooooo!" and threw herself protectively onto Gryphon again, huddling against his chest and shaking her head so furiously the motion threw tears aside in sparkly arcs.

"Jeez, Barkhorn, what are you trying to do?" Shirley demanded, leaning down to pry her distraught wingman off and gather her up in a hug. "Shh, shh, she didn't mean it, no one's going to cut up Gryph."

"... I was only kidding," said Trude lamely, her expression one of startled horror.

"For Pete's sake, Trude," said Erica with a sad shake of her head. "You can't say something like that with a straight face and expect anyone to realize you're not serious."

"I was just trying to lighten up a little..." Trude protested, her voice quavering, a helpless look on her face as she watched Shirley try to comfort Lucchini and all the rest gave her reproachful looks. Hartmann regarded her for a second, then sighed.

"Aww, you're so cute," she said, softening. "C'mere."

"Ladies," said Minna, "the situation is not yet resolved."

"Yeah yeah, be there in a second," Erica replied. "We're havin' a moment over here."

Eventually, with the use of most of the readily available hand tools (except the saw), they did get him pried out of the suit, although not without mostly destroying it in the process. Fortunately for his own sensibilities, if not necessarily anyone else's present, he was wearing a sort of black jumpsuit underneath it, which appeared none the worse for its wearer's adventure. Sitting at the conference table, he worked his way out of the last piece of the outer suit, the clamshell of chest and back plates, and set its halves down on the table.

"This looks like it didn't go according to plan," Shirley quipped, observing the jagged remains of the jetpack mounting points on the back plate.

"Not as such," Gryphon agreed.

"Are you OK?" Shirley inquired. "If this is from what I think it's from, that must've been a helluva ride."

Gryphon nodded. "Sure," he said. "I'm fine. Never better." He looked up as the one person missing from his internal count of squadron members arrived: Mio Sakamoto, a towel around her neck where she'd just finished her morning workout, trotting in with a concerned look on her face from the door Minna had arrived by earlier.

"What's going on?" she asked. "I just got the -" She skidded to a halt, both physical and verbal, as the little group of her colleagues by the table parted at her approach and she saw who was sitting at the end.

"Hello, Mio," said Gryphon. "Been a while. You're looking well." Observing the towel and her general air of flushed sweatiness, he added with a little smile, "Still keeping fit, I see."

Mio stared at him for a moment, her one visible eye blinking a couple of times; then, relaxing, she smiled back and asked wryly, "Are you hitting on me?"

"Major Sakamoto," Gryphon replied, drawing himself up with an air of wounded dignity. "I did not come all this way to flirt with you."

"Fair enough," Mio replied. "Then what are you doing -"

"Don't get me wrong," Gryphon interrupted her, rising to his feet. "I'll happily do so! But it's not why I came -"

And then, his voice cutting off in midsentence, he pitched forward, bounced off the corner of the table, and sprawled face-down on the floor, his arm wiping the scattered pieces of armor off the table as he went down.

"What the -?" Shirley blurted, kneeling beside him with her hand on his back. "Gryph? You OK?"

"Aaaaahhh!!" Lucchini screamed suddenly. The others turned to see her standing a few feet away, pointing in horror at the piece of the suit that had ended up at her feet in the confusion. It was the piece that had been the back of the torso, and it had come to rest upside down, so that the inner surface was facing up.

The padding within it was sodden and crimson, the reason for which was obvious: a jagged chunk of metal, what had been part of the outer plating, had been blown inward by whatever had done the external damage Shirley had noticed earlier, and now jutted up wickedly from the middle of the plate, a bit to the right of center. Shirley lifted her hand from his back and found it sticky with blood... which had been invisible against the black material of his jumpsuit but was now spreading around him in a slowly growing scarlet pool.

"Oh, not good," said Erica.

"Miyafuji!" Mio snapped, swinging instantly into Crisis Mode.

"I'm on it!" Yoshika replied firmly. "Give me room, everybody."