Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant

[laughs] Pynchon 3:16.

[laughs] As a, as a storm rolls in, Slothrop encounters Ensign Morituri of the Imperial Japanese Navy, who knows Greta from a previous encounter at Bad Karma, the story of which he proceeds in a V-like manner to tell.

After an unsuccessful stint in Hollywood, Greta is handed off by her psychiatrist, Rollo Gross of the White Visitation fame, to Sigmund Freud of psychoanalytic fame.

She and Sigmund journey to Bad Karma, where children seem to be disappearing.

Morituri encounters them there in semi-exile at the twilight of interwar Europe.

One night, he spots Greta, who he claims had by this point started to believe she was, quote, "part Jewish," enacting the antisemitic trope of blood libel, doubly anti-semitically by attempting to murder a Jewish boy, whom Morituri rescues.

He warns Slothrop about Greta, while Slothrop is more worried for Bianca's sake.

They discuss fate and Morituri's wife and children waiting for him back in Hiroshima, and as the rain forces them inside, Slothrop is dragged back into the bacchanal and given the mission of getting Greta out of the toilet, where she's locked herself in a paranoid frenzy.

And Ned, thou must begin now to forget thy study and thy books, and urge thy shoulders to an armor's weight.

As cheerful-sounding to my youthful spleen this tumult is of war's increasing broils, as at the coronation of a king the joyful clamors of the people are when Ave Caesar they pronounce aloud.

Within this school of honor I shall learn either to sacrifice my foes to death or in a rightful quarrel spend my breath.

Then cheerfully forward, each a several way.

Then he heard the soldier's heels click smartly together.

Ave Caesar, he began.

But the immortal speech of those gladiators being about to die was not finished.

There broke on Trent's astonished gaze a flash of sunlight that made a blink painfully, and the terrifying noise of high explosive heard his ears, and that swift dreadful sucking of the air that followed such explosions was about him again in its intensity.