"You know so much, why don't you tell us?" Jerome's twin brother snorted. "We've got plenty of time now, anyway."
"Things have already reached this point. There's basically no room left to salvage them." Schiller shook his head. "All I can do is play armchair general after the fact. If you'd come to me ten years earlier, it wouldn't have gotten this bad."
"Where should I even begin?" Schiller actually looked troubled. "I'm not trying to pick out which part of your operation was improper. I'm trying to remember which part of it was proper."
"First of all, did you conduct any historical research?"
"What?" Cobblepot asked in surprise.
"Did you investigate the historical background of this Great Dark Existence? When did he first appear? What did he do when he appeared? Which humans did he deal with? How many times did he showed himself throughout history, and what impact did he have? How many followers did he have, and where were they now?"
Just as Schiller had expected, nobody knew the answers. Jerome's twin brother was slightly better off; at least he mentioned the Judas Tribe, but he had failed to uncover the relationship between the earlier Bat Tribe and Bird Tribe.
Schiller could only say, "Since you found the Judas Tribe, you should have kept digging further back."
"What would that have accomplished?"
"We need to find the imagery. In mysticism, that is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly important. You could say that if you get this wrong, everything afterward will be wrong too."
"I'll give you a simple example." Schiller held up one hand. "Someone builds a door in order for you to summon him over. In other words, someone needs to open that door. Considering the success rate, naturally the more keys he makes, the better, because the