PP5 Names Grease Tooth

PP5 entered the invention room like someone who expected the room to become more interesting when he arrived.

He greeted Eveline with theatrical affection, took in the state of the old inventions, and dismissed much of PP3's stored work as nostalgic clutter. Then he saw Maine.

The performance stopped.

PP5 circled Maine's face with a finger in the air, careful not to touch, and asked where Eveline's friend had gotten that face. His dead lover had looked exactly like Maine.

His name was Tono.

Tono had metal-forged work on his leg and the letters T and N tattooed there, with the dots making the missing O's. PP5 remembered him with grief sharp enough to cut through all the flamboyance. They had been in a field watching trains when Grease Tooth killed him without warning.

That name changed the earlier bombing.

Grease Tooth was not only the handler of suicide bombers at Dinkle's. PP5 described him as a goblin serial killer, now backed by a faction calling itself Evil. The Lawful had once been the practical shape of order after older systems broke down: guards, soldiers, people trying to live by law when the world no longer had a stable crown or Centrum structure. Evil had formed as an ideological answer. Not chaotic. Not complicated in the way people hoped. Just Evil, at least by its own chosen banner.

Grease Tooth had joined them.

PP5 explained why the city had not simply solved the problem. Some people pretended nothing was happening. Some protected only their own. Some felt inadequate. Some believed no one could do everything. He had fallen somewhere in the middle until Tono died.

Now Maine's face was not just familiar.

It was dangerous evidence that whatever story connected Tono, Grease Tooth, and the other versions of Maine had reached Point Pringle before the Ex Force did.