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Erick sat across from Shadow, on pillows, on the moon, under the lights of the towers he had built, and in the atmosphere he had made. It was time to do this fae-ascension thing. Erick didn’t know much about it, except that he needed to become ‘Simply Him’, and that there was some sort of ‘Elemental Life cultivation’, and that he needed to ‘absorb an environment that was himself’. Admittedly, that might have sounded like a lot of good information, but Erick was somewhat lost about the specifics.

Shaping mana? Easy to understand.

Accretion and Cultivation? Also simple. Mana and resons go into the self and do their thing.

Becoming fae?

Not so simple… But it was supposed to be ‘Simple As’, and so Erick might just be overthinking it. He was doing that a lot these days. Thinking was great and all, but doing actually got stuff done, and Erick was ready to start doing something transformative.

Shadow sat tall on her pillow, as she said, “First, we must confront the Self. The Self is the base nature of your being. It is not your entirety. It is the core of yourself, upon which all other things are built. It is the seed. You are the growth of that seed. Tell me of your Self.”

This did not feel like that time when he was in Ar’Cosmos, and Fairy Moon blindsided him with a question about ‘describing Benevolence’. This was just talking. And so, the words came easily to Erick, “For the good of all and every individual… That whole thing.”

Shadow grinned a little. “Usually that’s a much harder step for people, for most people do not make their own Element.”

“How do people usually answer when they use the Elements made by others?”

“The Question of the Self —also known as the Core Question, and other variations— would lead to a normal person —who took in the mana of others and made themselves into a powerhouse— to talk about what their chosen power meant to them. That’s how most people got powerful, after all; they picked an Element, and they went on to embody it, and they were never the first to get there. Always, there is baggage.

“Say if a person absorbed Blood as their chosen power. Then such a Question of the Self would go on to discuss what Blood meant to them. What specific aspect of Blood was their chosen aspect, etcetera. Sometimes a person would be born with an Element which they wanted to keep, and in that case the Question of the Self would send that person on a personal Quest to discover themselves, where they would continually refine themselves into Themselves. That sort of transformation into Oneself was usually the easiest, but sometimes people who took power and made it their own had it easier.” Shadow said, “But as for the Quest… The mechanics of such a Quest would likely have such a person spending their entire lives trying to find Themselves, or maybe they’d simply take a few good tragedies and growths to get there. That could take a while. A lot of fae, when they find people who seem like they might become fae themselves one day, will ask them leading questions that would send them down such paths in life. I believe this is what my father did for you, when she helped you make Benevolence.”

Well that was interesting.

Erick nodded, moving on.

Shadow nodded in turn, then said, “Now that you have answered the Question of the Self, we must consider the environment you wish to surround yourself with. It can be anything, of any size or shape at all. This is where things will get weird for you, and thus they will get weird for all of us, because you are a Paradox Wizard and you have tremendous goals ahead of you, and you already plan on becoming a true Time Wizard. You should experiment with Time in the following however-longs, and with Malevolence, and with every glorious and horrible thing you can imagine. You should see sights you wish to see, and things you wish you never knew. You should Create.” She said, “When you are ready, you will know what needs to be done, and this will cause your Great Death. If you can come back from that, then you will be fae.”

Well that got to the Big Part faster than Erick was ready.

Erick almost asked a question about what all of that really meant, and if she really was telling him to play around with Malevolence, but then she hit him with the ‘you will die’, and his questions seemed trivial compared to the gravity of what was to come.

Shadow stood up, and said, “Any more instruction would influence who you Simply Are, so I will leave you with this: I trust you to do well. Cultivate your Life, Erick. I will be here when I need to be here.” And then Shadow loomed over Erick and the entire moon like a Dark Goddess, her black hair flowing in the void, her dark eyes shining with untold depths and distant stars, as she intoned, “The Fate of Fae be upon ye, Erick Flatt, Apparent King, Wizard of Benevolence, and so much more. Thrive in the cataclysm of your own Creation.”

Shadow vanished into a twist in the world.

… Erick was alone, sitting under the bright prismatic lights of his moon base. But he wasn’t really alone at all. Though the shadows were empty, and the world only had Benevolence mana, a lot of slimes tumbled around and inside the mana towers, and in the shallow waters.

…

Welp!

That was a lot of stuff, and also not much at all.

Erick smiled at that, and decided to get on with his initial plans, the ones with actual actions he knew how to take, and to see where those plans took him. He stood up and said, “Time to make a gate space.”

Opening a portal into Benevolence Itself was different outside of the Script. Without that multi-dimensional barrier to surround and contain mana from all possible angles, mana slipped into the void and went… somewhere. Erick wasn’t quite sure where the mana went, but he realized he should find out. He knew a few facts that could help him before he went exploring.

The Script had a very good dimensional barrier. It kept everything inside, and allowed gate spaces to exist properly, without fading away as the mana on this side of reality brushed off into the void. As long as the mana was contained properly on this side, then the gate space on that side was solid, and secure… Except that wasn’t the truth. That only happened on Veird, where the Script set up some weird, multi-dimensional Bands of Intent, or something. When Erick had been on that base on Fenrir, and he had opened up a portal into Benevolence Itself, the entire base almost failed because the mana inside of the barrier washed through that hole, super fast. So a simple containment on this side of reality was not good enough to make a gate space on that side of reality.

In the Painted Cosmology, mana and its private dimensions piled up atop each other, making a home inside of the Dark. During the Sundering, Nothanganathor had opened up massive holes throughout the entire Painted Cosmology, and all of the Painted Cosmology spilled out into the void that existed here, in the Infinite Fractal. So with that sort of thought… The Sundering was more like ‘pulling the plug in the bathtub’ in a way that should not have happened at all. But it did. With the Sundering, the mana ocean of that Old Cosmology faded into the ocean of Infinity on this side of Everything.

Veird survived, though it was a near thing.

Mana on Earth was kind of like a constant Sundering between the Painted Cosmology and the Fractal Cosmology, in that the mana here diluted and died when it went outside of the control of the Intent that made the mana into magic. When the Intent passed, the mana faded back into lower states of possibility, and folded into the universe, where it was sucked away into Infinity.

Only a few places in this Infinity could actually contain mana in any meaningful way. The Script on Veird was one. Fenrir, after Nothanganathor turned the whole of it into a manaminer land, could also contain mana. Margleknot contained mana, too, but Margleknot was more than a mana container. There were so many different dimensionally-active powers on Margleknot that they all sort of muddled together, and Margleknot had some sort of power that kept them all from fading away into Infinity. Erick wasn’t privy to Margleknot’s exact inner workings, due to Yggdrasil unwilling to tell him, but that was fine.

Erick didn’t need to know the full stretch of Margleknot’s powers —or anyone’s powers— right now.

He needed to figure out how to make a dimensionally-stable gate space, and there was really only one way to do that.

Erick stood up from his pillow, and then he opened a hole into Elsewhere. Iridescent white lightning flickered into a circle and then opened inward, creating an absolute abyss of black that was soon filled with tumbling white mana. That mana flowed out of Erick’s protected space and into the hole, just like when he had first Ascended on Fenrir. Whatever existed beyond this reality, inside that ‘Benevolent Space’ on the other side of the portal, was more like a vacuum.

There were several key differences in Erick’s circumstances between now and back then, on Fenrir. Sure, mana flowed into the hole, robbing this moon base of its equilibrium and stability, but Erick had built this place well, and the bubble walls began to contract right on schedule, responding to the decrease in density. Erick hadn’t built this place to protect against multi-dimensional attacks, though, so that was why he could create the hole into Elsewhere in the first place. Fixing that oversight was part of his chosen tasks today.

And so, Erick stepped into the void to see the problem from the other side.

- - - -

It was strange to see nothing.

That was Erick’s primary thought as he floated inside of the void beyond reality, while a thin tendril of power still connected him to the portal at his back. Benevolence and trace amounts of other manas, birthed on Erick’s moon base, flowed through that portal, spinning off into infinity, rushing against Erick’s back like a thickness in the air. Mostly, Erick felt the rush of air and dust and even a few leaves that sucked through that portal and washed over him.

The space itself wasn’t a space.

The mana and air and otherwise that got sucked through the portal, into this side, spun off into nowhere, practically disintegrating in the void. Erick was rather certain that the only reason he was able to ‘be’ here, and not get ‘voided’ himself, was that he was a True Wizard, in full control of his own body.

So he just enjoyed the space.

It wasn’t black. It wasn’t white. It wasn’t any sort of color. It was just empty. And Erick remained. He floated in the absolute void, subtly glowing. His control over his mana was absolute, but his mana still radiated below his skin, and somehow that caused illumination. Or maybe the very fact that he existed is what caused the illumination.

The portal behind him was still open, and that also caused some light to shine into the void. Erick held onto that portal with a thin bit of aura…

Erick flowed a command through his aura, to the portal, closing the portal—

The portal flashed away, so very far away and fast, like a silent, speeding balloon, racing away after letting go of the nozzle. By the time the portal shrunk and closed and then vanished, it was thousands of kilometers away, or more. Erick couldn’t really tell. Distance was kinda… weird, here.

He was alone in the void. Even the mana and air that had come in here with him was gone; spun off into out there, whatever ‘out there’ was.

Erick decided he needed something solid to start his extradimensional experiments, so he spilled out some mana to create something solid: a rock.

What popped out was not a rock at all. It was a splash of nothing. Or at least that’s what it kinda looked like; Erick had spun his aura into a rock, and what came out was sparkles.

Only because of Erick’s natural tendency to scope out everything that existed around him, and through his Lightning Path, did Erick see what had truly happened. He had created a rock. It had been roughly white and solid, and kinda shaped like rippled and chipped obsidian. And then that rock had turned to dust and then crumbled in the infinite, becoming sands that flowed away like the breaking of so much magic.

Erick frowned a little at that. He had made rocks out of Benevolence before, but this time it had failed?

It wasn’t like this was some sort of metaphysical journey into his soul, like when he had made Benevolence and turned that empty white void into a land of stone, water, air, fire, and life. This was a real place, on the other side of reality.

This act right here was taking place completely outside of his body, in a nothing-space that existed beside reality... where mana went when it was done? Erick wasn’t sure about that last part.

Whatever this place was, it wasn’t the Darkness. Of that, Erick was rather certain. He was still in the Fractal Cosmology, for sure… Probably.

Erick focused and cast a jolt of Benevolence into the air—

The Benevolence fractured and split even as Erick was forming the magic. White iridescence went wide, flowing from the space of high concentration, where he had cast the magic, into all the rest of everything, where nothing existed at all.

Erick cast a few more jolts into the air, trying to keep them together—

He realized something.

A while ago, he had had a conversation with Phagar about the nature of Time Travel, after the reveal of the Fractal and all the side slices of Infinity that one could get lost within. He had basically said that if Erick ever Time Traveled to the past inside the Fractal Universe, that he would likely end up in a different slice of Infinity, like the ones where Nothanganathor ate everything except for the God Pact world. Paradox Wizards didn’t have this problem back in the Painted Cosmology, because, while the gods decided such things as the local time frame and stability, they also decided on a consensus reality. Thus, a Paradox Wizard always ended up in the consensus reality of the gods, unless they were going outside of godly matters, and then they’d just end up in the Dark and likely dead.

Erick wasn’t dead, therefore this wasn’t the Dark.

Being a Paradox Wizard in the Fractal Cosmology was harder than being a Paradox Wizard in the Painted Cosmology, because unless one was aiming very well, and had something specific to aim at —like the ‘ground state’ that was themselves-in-relation-to-their-home— they usually ended up on a side reality.

That didn’t help to explain what was happening in this void, but Erick was on to a different, equally important thing to keep in mind, going forward.

A true Paradox Wizard traveled to their own past; they did not muck around with alternate realities at all. Erick was a true Paradox Wizard. When he eventually figured out the Big Time Travel Magic, that he had spoken about with Phagar before, then he would (if he was aiming correctly!) end up on the God Pact world, under the direct purview of the gods like Rozeta and otherwise.

And being under the views of the gods meant that there would be uncomfortable questions and shit. Even if he evaded Rozeta and the other gods of the Pantheon and their paladins, Melemizargo would definitely notice him. Phagar, too. As for Nothanganathor… Erick could probably evade him… Maybe.

But he couldn’t evade anyone if they could sense his Benevolence spilling out everywhere.

So Erick needed to figure out how to hide his mana.

Briefly, Erick thought about trying to literally ‘hide’ his mana, perhaps through camouflage, to make it look like something else… And that might be part of the solution. The Script contained and purged everything it didn’t recognize, so leaving a bit of Benevolence around wasn’t a huge deal, as long as it looked like, say, Elemental Fairy— No. Elemental Mystical. Yeah. That worked.

And thinking of Mystical… There was another part of the solution to Erick’s mana spilling everywhere, and also the solving of an old problem that he had never gotten around to solving.

Elemental Mystical was what the Script used for Abilities like Clarity, which dropped the mana costs of stuff from 100% costs, to 50% costs, and then even lower, once more and more Mystical mana was being used to dupe the ambient mana to play along with what the Intent-filled magic was doing.

Erick needed to reinvent Clarity for himself.

And he also needed to contain all of his mana; to spill it out there and then bring it back, so that he never actually used any mana at all, like what Solomon had shown him a year ago, back when Erick was trying to figure out how to get Elemental Genesis. Erick had cheated to get Genesis, so he hadn’t really learned the spill-and-suck methods that Solomon had shown him with the tubes and junk. But now it was time to learn those methods.

Erick couldn’t very well travel to the past and then disrupt his own present could he? Absolutely not.

So the only way to do that was to go into the past and be absolutely invisible. Invisible to gods, and everyone.

… But he probably couldn’t do that.

Just being realistic, now. He could not do that. Not on his own.

He needed help.

But the very second he showed up on Veird, no matter the time, he would face the horrors of Nothanganathor, so he couldn’t get help from Phagar… Not yet, anyway. Phagar would have been the first choice.

So who would his second choice be?

Hmm.

Well…

Considering that he was about to fuck around with time in a very, very big way, then why not pick the best possible person to ask for help?

Why not ask himself?

Erick stared out into the void, waiting for himself to appear, to help…

Nothing.

… Erick still needed to work on the gate space, anyway. Something solid that wouldn’t fall apart, that he could access from anywhere… and any time. And maybe, if he did it right…

Erick gazed out into the void. The nothing shifted, but not in any particular way. Erick’s [Wizardly True Sight] eyes were still working fine, and he saw far and true just as well as before, but there was truly nothing out there… And yet, Erick did not feel scared of the emptiness like he had when he had faced the emptiness of Fenrir’s surface. This place was just… just empty. Kinda relaxing, though.

He wondered if his future self was staring back at him from the emptiness, hidden in a cloak of absolute secrecy… or whatever Erick ended up calling it.

Erick held out his hands, a little bit across from each other, and began trying to learn how to perfectly recycle his own mana… and his resons too! Why not. A jolt of Benevolence jumped from palm to palm, fraying as it writhed between his hands, tendrils of white curling and breaking away as the power left the absolute solidness that was Erick’s body. The jolt that exited Erick’s right hand, entered the void, and then came back to Erick’s left hand, had been reduced from wrist-thickness, to hair-thickness. It was a near-complete failure.

This was good experimentation to figure out some better mana control and to try and understand this void, as well… And that made Erick smile. Everything was coming together.

Erick tried the jolt again, this time adding in an expression of his Benevolence Domain to the working. The fraying was less bad this time, but it still didn’t stay together like it should have. Erick began weaving in Elemental Mystical into the whole thing, Intent on making the mana want to remain itself, corralling the whole thing together. Asking and tricking the mana into behaving worked a bit better than pure force; the ropes of Benevolence didn’t fray nearly as much. As the Mystical-altered Benevolence flowed, it turned back in on itself like loose yarn. It was a rather unstructured working, and it wasn’t good for anything except stringing between his hands, but it was rapid progress in the realm of ‘making magic that no one else can sense’ and ‘figuring out dimensional barriers and other Elsewhere logics’.

Gathering the mana he expressed and stuffing it back into his body was kinda difficult, though.

But this emptiness was a great practice zone for expelling and bringing mana back; no interference of any kind except for active dissolution did great for refining control.

Erick played around with the mana for a long while, while also inspecting his body, and the differences that allowed his body to exist without injury in this nothing-space, but which tore at his mana whenever he cast anything. It wasn’t hard to figure out the difference was that mana was mana, and his body was made of up particles, but there was more to it than that, because when Erick cast some Genesis to create a simple quartz crystal, the crystal evaporated just like how particles didn’t.

Erick was still wearing his clothes, too, so it wasn’t a matter of living or dead particles, or whatnot.

What a fun little (probably very large, actually) puzzle!

Erick smiled as he played around with mana, Authority, and Domains. Soon, his work all began to flow together, like silent music, pieces of power building upon other pieces of power, forming an orchestra of Intent and understanding. Erick created a symphony in the dimness of the void.

- - - -

Erick played with power for a long while. Hours or days, he wasn’t quite sure, though according to some math and looking at his Status, he had only been in here for a little over… A month? Really? It had been that long? Time flew when you were having fun, he guessed.

He had made a lot of progress in keeping his mana together and even making it come back together once his spellwork broke.

Erick flicked a ball of Force into the air and the Force broke into shards that then rotated around and came back into the shape of a ball, right above his palm. All of that had taken place outside of his control; outside of his aura. The next part actually took effort, though, as Erick gripped the ball and sucked the ball back into his hand, into his mana well. Erick smiled.

He had managed to do that perfectly this time, and five previous times as well.

He was ready to make a new Ability out of his [Endless Aura] —his ambient mana accretion ability— and his Mana Siphon, and all the rest of his control. This Ability would affect all of his spellwork, and make everything going forward easier, because then he could hide from himself and all others, even in his own timeline...

As long as he got it right.

Erick opened the barrier of his skin, allowing his mana to flow into the void like a white tsunami, tinged with gold and rainbows. Tens of thousands of Mana, Health, Psyche, and resons all poured into the grey void, establishing his Authority in the area, providing Erick with the space and the manasphere necessary to do a larger working.

Briefly, the area around Erick looked like Benevolence Itself, all white with clouds.

Erick expanded his [Endless Aura], crafting tubes of power into the white, into his own expression of power, and then he coiled Siphon through those tubes. [Endless Aura] was incredibly fragile, and even more so in this space, but Siphon and Erick’s own aura control helped to shore up those weaknesses.

Erick spoke,

“In sightless Void this power’s blessed

“To gently guide a Wizard’s quest.

“Magic turns might to sights unseen

“as Mystical becomes smokescreen.

“And if it is ever known, it turns to here, to this Void’s rest,

“Cleaning up as it departs, ensuring Paradox’s behest

“to not be known until it’s time;

“to show the world, to show the truth,

“That this stranger is not some simple youth

“But a Wizard, true, in his full prime.

“And that this is not a void at all.

“It is Benevolence’s home sprawl.

“And so, with gifts, I mark this space,

“this vibrational, eternal grace,

“With power lovingly inclined,

“We mark simple purpose:

“To be kind.”

This was a void, right?

Well it was Erick’s void, on the other side of Benevolence, uncontained and unrestrained, and it had always been.

He had just needed to claim it.

The universe peeled out from under Erick’s feet, revealing white stone floating in air, as the void retreated like Erick had turned on a light in a dark room. He was that light, and the room was Benevolence; the vibrational frequency that Erick’s personal mana vibrated upon. This, then, was yet another extension of Benevolence Itself, but outside of any mana-controlling forces out there in the Layers of Infinity.

It was a gate space, but it was more than that. It was outside of all other forces, and so it was everything Erick needed it to be.

The Void pulled away as Erick’s magics twisted outward, becoming clear in the far distance as the spell stabilized. There was no mist, like in Benevolence Itself on Veird, but that was only because this spell held itself together here, in this space, and there was nothing else outside of it; just emptiness, waiting to be filled—

No.

There was something else out there.

Of course there was other stuff out there.

Tiny glinting stars, far, far away. Further away than it was possible for light to traverse in the brief moments that this land had existed, but nevertheless, those stars still existed, and Erick saw them with senses far beyond his eyes. Erick somewhat focused on those stars, and on the largest one in particular which seemed to be getting closer, or maybe Erick’s new ‘Benevolence Itself’ was getting closer to it. Erick would get there soon enough.

He finished coalescing his new ability inside of his soul.

Text popped up in the air.

Wizard’s Clarity

A purpose clarified. A power controlled. Resources you expend automatically cloak themselves when they leave your control, mimicking the powers around them. Resources automatically attempt to return to you, if they exist on the same plane of existence as you. If your resources cannot return to you, they return to Benevolence Itself, and then they return to you, unless you decide otherwise. If neither of these options hold, then your resources permanently transform into whatever they were mimicking and fall out of your control, possibly forever.

But Benevolence always knows its true purpose.

As Erick finished making the ability his ‘clarity’ of space around him reached the nebula up ahead.

Erick’s rocky platform was a spot of solidity inside the sphere that was his mobile gate space, and as it crashed into one of the distant ‘stars’, that star became a nebula that surrounded Erick’s space like clouds outside of a glass bubble. Those clouds rumbled. Sparks jolted from the intangible edge of Erick’s space, which was maybe a few tens of kilometers wide, and then Erick’s gate space settled into the center of this strange land. As the clouds moved, Erick caught glimpses of a series of worlds that he had never seen before.

There, just beyond the mist in so many different directions, lay foreign lands.

Erick focused on the nearest, largest one, and then he Saw.

Spires of silver metal curled up from desolate, former utopias, like the tower-bones of great civilizations gone to corruptive rot. There were no trees, but there were lots of red and brown and pulsing growths here and there. The streets were littered with the dying and the destitute, while bands of marauders, wrapped in half-rotted leathers and streaked in blood, used spikes on poles to poke people out of hiding holes, and out of piles of refuse.

… But they were not spears; they were instruments of cruelty that left no mark upon the people they injured, except in the form of tumors that then turned into eyes and mouths.

Those mouths yelled with lungs that did not exist, exposing their new host’s deepest secrets and also the locations of others hiding out in that broken world. When people got away from the hunters of slaves, because the hunter didn’t really care about being methodical since the bounty was everywhere, those tumors turned on their new hosts, burrowing deeper and telling their hosts how much they would hurt them unless they returned to the fold. The tumors were in charge of the world, and they grew upon the marauders, who were really just slaves themselves.

Many people, newly infected by the eye/mouth tumors, simply walked along with the higher-ranking slaves, while the slavers’ tumors spoke of bounty waiting for them back at base. Some of the people using the poles to poke others, to make new tumors on those victims, readily agreed with their tumors. And so, the ‘new citizens of the empire’ walked along with their captors, because it was easier to walk and cooperate than it was to live whatever semblance of life they were trying to live.

It was easy for Erick to imagine that this world had been prosperous not too long ago; that it had fallen victim to this plague, or whatever it was, merely last year.

And then Erick looked away from that, trying to find the cause of all of this horror. Erick’s Benevolent Space responded to his searching eyes, moving for him, the entire space parting clouds as it moved on, further into the bad lands, past more fallen cities, and then off world, to another world, deeper into the infection.

Aside from what he was looking at, which Erick still didn’t fully understand, Erick guessed what was happening with him and Benevolence right now, as his Lightning Path flickered in front of him, and Erick’s ‘space ship’ moved along, images of recent history appearing beyond the clouds. His Space was guiding him to a confrontation that Benevolence had not been able to solve itself. Benevolence was supposed to act on its own, most of the time, and it did. But sometimes it needed people to actually do things, and Benevolence needed Erick to do something right now.

Erick had not imagined that this is what his first action after creating a gate space on Earth’s moon would have been (and he was probably nowhere near Earth at all) but Benevolence had been spilling out of Margleknot for decades by now, hadn’t it. Of course there were places out there that needed a Wizard’s touch.

The spell was slowly guiding Erick toward what he needed to do, but Erick’s sight went far, and he saw what he needed to do long before his new floating rock brought him there. Erick took control of his gate space, and metaphorically ‘pressed the accelerator’. How did he do that? He wasn’t quite sure. But he had seen his Lightning Path headed in a direction, and he desired to go faster, and so he went faster.

He would be solving this problem, wherever it happened, and he would be solving it in the quickest way possible; through brutal force.

After all, there was no danger of accidentally ascending to Fractal Godhood anymore.

Erick’s mana cloaked itself. He was invisible and intangible to everyone out there, just like the Fae were, when they wanted to be. He could do anything he wanted to, to save everyone he wanted to save, and no one could stop him.

… Though that was probably some hubris talking.

Anyway! This was good testing for his new Wizard’s Clarity; to make sure it worked as intended. If absolutely no one saw him act, then ‘Operation Ultimate Time Wizard’ was a go.

Erick parked his gate space over the main world of the system.

Which he now recognized, thanks to the yorddle in his Status, and his own memories of a message asking for help several years ago. His yorddle told him a lot of stuff, but he didn’t pay attention to most of the time junk; he’d be fixing that soon enough. He was a Paradox Wizard, after all. The question of ‘what year is it’ was mostly a matter of choice.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Year: 568 New Painted, (Post-Veird, Layer 789). [Current Reality: Abarial, Eleventh Millennium, Layer 172,287,913]

Erick was now 568 years past the destruction of Veird and the Godhood Ascension of Nothanganathor, He didn’t like that. Because he didn’t like that, he noticed something that he had failed to fix in his Status long ago. There was a hanging bracket in the middle. Erick changed that.

Soon, the readout looked different.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Abarial, Eleventh Millennium, Layer 172,287,913], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 568 New Painted, Post-Veird], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 2710]

Earth was kinda far ahead too, eh?

Erick would get back there, too. For now, he had some people to save.

- - - -

Fixing the situation would be the work of an age, but Erick didn’t want to do that, so he worked harder, and not exactly smarter. He wanted to test the limits of himself, anyway.

Erick appeared in a nexus of his own power, wreathed in Mystical Benevolence, invisible to the world, high above a valley of the damned that was more like a crack in a whole planet than a ‘valley’. The world itself was spherical, Earth-sized, and the planet was called Abarial. In this crack in the world, monsters spewed from some Other Place. The very land was corrupted.

Erick had never seen corruption before. Not really. He had seen it a little bit when he spoke to that eldritch thing in the Corrupted Archive, through that piece of paper activated by Blighter and Seabass, in order to facilitate the legal dispensation of knowledge to Erick. Back then, the corruption he had seen had been a twisting of the world, like seeing something through a mirage that was also a lens into another set of realities.

Corruption was, by definition, corruptive, and it came in many different forms, all of them rather easy to recognize when you knew to look for twisted Infinity.

The entire bottom of the valley was like that; all thousand-kilometers-long of it, about a hundred kilometers below the surface of the world overhead. The walls of this crack in the world of Abarial were filled with wall-cities. Those cities were like bee hives, honeycombed and filled with life. Some of the streets were normal places, with greenery and white buildings and bright lights. Most of them were filled with hungry people dying on the lower levels, closer to the corruption at the bottom of the valley, and also, paradoxically, in the higher lands, at the top of the valley. The only safe spots in the whole place were a 10-or-so kilometer-wide band that circled the whole valley of the damned. For whatever reason, the corruption in the center of the valley leaked upward, out of the center of the valley, like condensation on a wet glass, then it flowed up into the sky, where harsh winds on the surface billowed that corruption out into the rest of the world.

So being nearer —but not too close!— was the only safe space to be.

Once, long ago, according to these people, and not too long ago at all, according to Erick’s view of time, Erick had received a request from the world of Abarial, through a complicated series of relays that had burned out between Margleknot and these distant people. Those people had thrown Erick a request through time and space, for help. They did not expect that request to land, or to get help at all.

Erick recalled that whole message.

“Hello…” The woman paused, looking at someone off screen. She whispered, “Is it on— It’s on. Ah. Fuck. We can re-record it.” The woman looked at the camera, breathed, then said, “Hello, Father of Margleknot. I represent an organization of mageknights of the world of Abarial, a former nexus world located on Layer 172,287,913.

“We are very far from Margleknot, I realize this, but until very recently, within the last thousand years, our worlds were doing fine. Better than fine. We had 7 colonized planets in our Abarial system and had begun to expand throughout our layer. We were a nexus world at the further edges of Margleknot’s roots.

“And then something broke between The Great City at the Center and propagated to us, and Margleknot broke connection to our world and 187 more worlds in our nexus in order to preserve the whole. We do not begrudge Margleknot their decision. It was a normal enough decision that happens to lands without world trees, which are only tenuously connected in the first place. It happens.

“It can also usually be repaired.

“We thought we could repair the problem on our end, but we cannot. The pillars are crumbling. The fountains are running dry. The storm is dying, and we have no fuel for the fire. We have only been able to send out this message because of the vast changes of Margleknot into this new form have revitalized a small part of our connection. That revitalization will not spread. It is already fading.

“Our nexus is dying.

“Our billions of people face extinction, and we have thus-far been unable to reconnect to Margleknot except through these most expensive of messages. We have no idea what the problem is. A thousand years have passed since the Degradation began, and none of our people have been able to find out anything solid; anything more than what we have in the books and papers we are sending with this message. With a prayer to the Universe, we hope and pray this message finds you in a charitable mood, for we have had to empty a world of life, evacuating all the people we could, in order to pay to bring this message to you now.

“Please help us, Father of Margleknot, and our gathered worlds will become your staunchest allies in all of your needs, forevermore.” The woman paused in prayer to the camera. And then she said to a person off camera, “That was good, but I need to do better. This thing could actually work, couldn’t it?”

Another voice said, “It could work; if this isn’t some old cousin’s tale. I’m not convinced we’re not deluding ourselves.”

The woman laughed. She smiled, and then she focused, saying, “Okay. Going again.” The woman breathed in, and then looked to the camera—

And then the message had broken.

Erick had gone on to request more Benevolence be spent in this direction, and Yggdrasil and Lionshard had told him they had done that, and he believed them...

“And yet,” Erick said to himself, floating in the sky, “The repair didn’t take, or something bigger happened.”

Erick had seen much of the local system on the way to this planet, second from the sun, Abarial. This crack in the world was the ‘Great City at the Center’. That corruption down there was supposed to be a ‘fountain’. These people were supposed to get Benevolence and then succeed in repairing themselves. They were supposed to be a land of new Benevolence users, who would take in this power and then fix themselves, and then spread Benevolence outward, everywhere. Some of that had happened; specifically, the people using Benevolence. That’s why this part of the universe had been such a large, demanding nebula to Erick.

And yet...

Erick frowned, and then he stepped back into Infinity, into Benevolence Itself.

From a much higher point of view, Erick gazed down at the world and its assorted fractal infinity, and then he found the ‘time dial’ on his Intent and the gate space, and he ‘turned the dial backwards’. It was all mostly metaphorically metaphysical, but it worked, and Erick gazed backward through time. What he saw appalled him. Every single version of this world was a cancer, growing at the heart of the problem. Benevolence had worked for a time, long ago, but then it had stopped working…

For some reason.

Erick was able to work Benevolence Itself because he had Authority here, and so he could see quite a lot once he flicked his perspective around this way and that, but he couldn’t tell exactly why the plan to save this land had failed. He suspected Nothanganathor was involved, but that might have been reductive. Whatever the case, Erick was here now, and he needed to make a systemic, infinite change.

Erick sorted through Infinity until he came across a version of this land that seemed to be poisoning all the rest, exactly like corruption was capable of doing.

Erick stepped back out of Benevolence itself, and into a much worse version of the chasm.

The beehive lands, hooked to the walls, were filled with people who had become their eye and mouth tumors; the people themselves were little more than appendages that hung off of the body of the tumors, which were all a few meters tall. The biggest problem was with the corrupted fountain at the bottom of the chasm. It was filled with a gooey mirage, thick as gel and mirrored in horrors. The air above that infection spilled upward like a constant-hurricane, filling the world of Abarial with infection that leaked through all of Infinity within this Layer, and even outside of this Layer.

Erick hovered in that hurricane, like an invisible ball of light that no one saw, and even if they did, they probably only saw a mirage. There was nothing in this sky that looked like itself. The only thing in the sky at all, that people could really see, were confusing mirage-clouds that blocked the sun and gave everything a bloody sort of glow.

The corruption did not touch Erick at all. It tried. It failed.

And then Erick, as a human, opened his aura up at the bottom of his sun form, and Benevolent Lightning crackled between him and the very center of the world of Abarial, piercing the lake of corruption as though it did not even exist. Erick’s power coruscated through the goo, illuminating the entire valley of the damned like the sun had reappeared in the sky, except the light was coming from below, and that light was white.

Brown and black clouds peeled away from above, and the storm of corruption faltered under Erick’s strength.

The tumor-filled people of the valley walls all noticed. They had long since given up on being themselves, though; they were the hosts of tumors, and not their own people. Erick didn’t want to imagine what sort of horrors a person like that experienced as they lived, but he saw those horrors anyway.

As Erick’s Benevolence cleaned the world below, the spent Benevolence spilled outward, annihilating the corruption even more as it went sideways. A billion mana went fast. And then two billion, and four. At 5 billion spent, the tumors on the walls tried to find the source of the anti-corruption, to stop whatever was happening, but no one saw Erick at all, and Erick noticed a fundamental change in the world. The sky cleared as Benevolence ate at the corruption up there, too, and the waters of the fountain turned blue, and healthy. At 10 billion mana spent, the tumor people started to lose cohesion, to falter and shrink.

Erick started spending Health, Psyche, and finally, resons.

The world seemed to explode, and yet that’s not what happened at all.

Erick detonated with power, yes, but he was fine, and as the wave of power washed out over people and their tumors, the people and tumors were fine, but they were split asunder. Two people in one body became two people, in two healthy bodies. Erick desired them made whole, and they were; even the tumor people, for they could not help that they were tumors. They still had the souls of sapients.

The trash on the streets evaporated. The growths on walls and floors turned to splashes of mana and thick air, [Benevolent Cleanse]d away. Castles fell into the waters below, and everything changed for everyone, here at the City at the Center.

When some newly-peopled tumors started taking fists and knives to their former hosts, Erick sent Lightning to strike down those people, and whoever else it needed to strike down. [Blood of the Valkyrie] spread among those who needed the help to fight back. Soon, the war machine began to churn, to erase lines between people and bring all under the oversight of the Apparent King.

[Seeds of Atunir] landed on the rim of the valley of the damned, where the broken silver bones of past civilizations lay in heaps and stretches across the land. Those white seeds took instant root, and then began to tower, and then to spread. Within ten minutes of Erick descending onto the world of Abarial, upon this former Great City at the Center, Erick had cleaned the land and the Valkyries were doing the rest.

Something awoke down below. It was like a tentacled, great demon, living at the very bottom of the chasm, wrapped around an ancient artifact that was the core of Abarial that should have been making clean water, but which was now getting processed by the tentacled thing into more and more corruption. Erick suspected that core-thing was a manaminer of incredible power that had somehow lost its oversight control, for whatever reason.

Erick wasn’t going to fight the giant tentacle thing as a human, so he became his draconic self, right as kilometer-long tentacles, black and hooked, reached up into the sky. They were not normal appendages. They flickered, and one tendril became ten, and then became knives and eyes and fangs all chained together, and then they became baby faces, screaming as they tried to bite. They attempted to grab onto Erick, and he let them, because he had already done experiments with the corruptive touch of whatever-the-fuck this was, and this thing could not affect him.

Just as his experiments proved, the thing grabbed Erick, and the corruption broke within Erick’s Benevolence. Those baby-faced arms, and all the rest, became withered, old leather, which probably pained the creature, because it screamed along several dimensional axes. Erick let the thing pull at him, because he pulled at it, too, to line up the corruptive thing for a good shot, in order to expose its endless maw in the middle—

He wondered what the people out there were seeing.

Probably a whole lot of mind-bending shit, as this thing wrestled with a dragon half its size, which was still very large—

Ah.

There was the monster’s mouth. It screamed its terrible scream.

Erick opened his own mouth and screamed a stream of Benevolent dragonfire down its throat, into the depths of whatever existed down there, inside of the beast. The monster screamed louder as Erick shoved a few billion mana’s worth of reson-empowered [Benevolent Cleanse]s down its gullet, but soon the creature faltered. Its voice choked off. It tried to get away. It tried to close its mouth. Erick held it firmly open, and filled it with fire. Soon the creature began to explode in small parts all throughout itself, and far, far away from here.

When Erick was done with that, he focused on the Valkyrie Weave he had created to organize the killing and recreation of all of the people of this world. He had needed to leave that Weave while he fought the beast, and now corruption had gotten into that Weave. Some of the Valkyries were turning on each other. A bit of maintenance cleared that problem right up.

And soon, Valkyries flew across Abarial unimpeded and vicious.

Erick spent the next 4 days clearing away another 7 major monsters of the Abarial system, one of which was on the sun itself. Finding that one on the sun had been a minor problem, because Erick’s Lightning Path had told him he wasn’t done here, but he couldn’t actually find the problem. It wasn’t until Erick broke out the [Infinite Imaging] and set it to locate corruption that he found the thing that had infected the sun itself. It had poisoned the light, and thus poisoned the entire system. It was the original infection, and somehow no one had ever noticed it before now.

Maybe Erick shouldn’t have been surprised by that.

Erick never would have found the problem without his own spell, because the infection on the sun was just a spot of orange light that was the same as all the rest of the light. Dragonfire took care of that one, doing what solar fire seemed incapable of doing.

Erick spent 7 more days in the Abarial system, and 2 days on side Layers because some corruption had filtered into the nearby inhabited worlds. People were still putting up fights against the corruption. The original Layer had lost the fight, but the society on Layer 172,287,915 was connected and still fighting. Poorly.

Erick let the Valkyries go to town on everything, even those minorly-infected lands that were still fighting, until the problem was completely solved. Ten billion minds working together and ignoring politics did wonders against systemic issues, but it was a rather shitty thing to do. Eh! They’d all be fine in the end.

Erick never showed himself. Other people rapidly took up the mantles of power against the problems plaguing their land, and with all of them gaining each other’s knowledge of magic, and the capability to share everything, too, they began to set their worlds to rights rather fast.

The Valkyries spoke of the Apparent King all the time. They spoke of searching for him, of finding him, of going home. They needed to know. They needed to expand, and find him, for he had obviously done this for them. He had saved them all.

Erick half-expected godhood to suddenly take him, but, even though he was so far away from Margleknot, perhaps he was still connected? Yggdrasil was probably still taking away this divinity, even though Erick knew that Yggdrasil couldn’t act this far away from Margleknot; not directly. Anything past 50,000 was iffy.

So maybe his Wizard’s Clarity was working just that well, and they simply couldn’t notice him, because he had decided not to show himself. Absolutely no one spoke of big black dragons, and no one spoke of human-shaped Wizards either, because why would they? There were no dragons on the Abarial system. There were no humans, either. They were all elves. The Valkyries certainly tried to put a face to their worship, but eventually they all agreed to simply not worship at all, because the Apparent King didn’t want to be worshiped, and that was probably what actually saved Erick’s bacon from the Curse of Power.

The people of Abarial had their own gods, after all, and though they were currently Valkyries, they were still themselves. There’d probably be a Valkyrie God rising to power after this, though.

Eh!

Not Erick’s problem.

Erick set up several [Reincarnation] zones in the lands around New Abarial, as they were calling it.

With a silent command, Erick ‘ruined’ the Valkyrie plans for universal searches, and ‘told’ them all to go get remade as they were. It was more of a silent command made through the Weave. The Valkyries took to this command rather well. As soon as it went through, the collective mind of all of the Valkyries had a laugh, saying, ‘Ah, yes. He doesn’t want to be found, and home is right here.’

Five days and many different worlds of [Reincarnation] machines, hooked up to yet more [Seeds of Atunir]-created forests of Benevolence Mana, and the entire population of Abarial was freed of their corruption, and their entire system of multiple worlds was cleansed of danger. They still had social problems to solve, and now that the mind meld was gone those problems actually started to reappear, but that was on them.

Erick had done enough.

He erased every speck of magic he had created, and felt a bit giddy as it returned to him, or as it vanished into Benevolence Itself.

Erick retreated back into Benevolence Itself, and when he turned back and looked at Abarial through the Fractal, gazing upon all the variations of infinity in this land, he saw his influence spread alongside the slices of layer 172,287,913, and 172,287,914, and 172,287,915. He saw people returning to life, and making peace with their captors, or their slaves, and even more people calling for executions. He saw people helping each other, too, whereas before they had no desire to help at all. He saw kings decide to turn a new leaf, and to choose things like forgiveness and exile over public humiliation that led to ruinous revolution just a few years down the line. He saw kings deposed and wealth stolen and wealth made.

It was life, as it should have been, coming back.

Erick saw Abarial connect back to Margleknot under its own strength. This land was still one of the furthest from the ‘Center of the Universe’, but they got their connections fully up and running once again, and then they spread, not as Valkyries on a mission, but as people, populating worlds once again.

Erick smiled at that.

His resources remained in the trillions. Almost all the resources he had spent, had fallen into the fractal splash that was the edge of his invisible, intangible, Mystical-cloaked form, and come back to him, through the automatic accretion that was Wizard’s Clarity. It did take days for that to happen, and when he left his Benevolence behind it went outside of his control, but everything he spent in front of himself came back readily, and easily. That was part of why he had spent so long there. The other part was that he needed to help in a few scenarios here and there, and that is what he did.

So that was fantastic.

None of his big numbers had gone up at all, which confirmed his suspicions that Abarial hadn’t noticed him at all, which was also fantastic.

Turning Benevolence Itself back around, back through time, turned out to be as easy as willing it, and soon, Erick was standing on his rock in the middle of the void again, while behind him, Benevolence spread outward exactly as it should have a long, long time ago. Erick smiled at that, too. He might have been flowing backward in time right now, but Benevolence acted along time-based vectors, too, so of course it spread outward, even if Erick was headed backward in time.

Or maybe he was seeing the fall of a former golden age, returning out of history, and Erick had merely visited the land at a dark point in its time.

Maybe Erick would find out later.

- - - -

There was one thing Erick had forgotten to do when he made Wizard’s Clarity, but he did that now, because now he fully realized why he had not gained Divinity back there. Yggdrasil wasn’t back there at Abarial, and according to all the rules of Fractal Godhood, he should have been Cursed with Power.

But he hadn’t been.

And now, Erick knew why.

With a twist of power, Erick broke the [Telepathy] crystal inside of himself, taking out the Fractal Mark within, and joined that with his new Wizard’s Clarity. The Fractal Mark became one with his hiding-based magic, and Erick Established that it had always been that way. Where better to hide than in Infinity? There was no other place better—

Power melded with power. A fractal gift became one with a glowing corona, and light shattered in every direction, revealing paths through the nothing. Erick became the center of a shifting kaleidoscope of Infinity—

The Fractal Fairy stepped out of the Nothing, and onto Erick’s floating white stone in the middle of his Authority.

They looked the same as before; dense glittercrystal in the shape of a person, each of those glitters a universe unto themselves. Erick hadn’t seen it back then, but he certainly saw it now. He felt it, too. The Fractal Fairy was a weight upon reality that was unlike anything Erick had ever felt, except maybe when he was a tiny human, looking up at Melemizargo, before he knew Melemizargo as a friend.

The stress of having Them here was like he was holding up a world, but Erick was strong enough to hold up a world, now. Maybe even a few worlds.

Erick simply said, “Greetings.”

They held out a stack of papers in one hand, and though Their voice was a terrible, powerful thing, Erick withstood it as They said, “Your duties to battle corruption in whatever ways you see fit.” In Their other hand, They held a glittering diamond that was not a diamond at all, but instead an ever-inward-tumbling fractal of True Power. “A gift of guidance that is usable multiple times.” They gained a second and third arm on that same side of their body, and each hand of those arms grabbed at the fractal diamond and pulled another diamond out of that first one. Three arms became ten arms, which became ten diamonds, and then all of those arms folded into one, and all ten diamonds became one again, having never lost or gained anything in the transaction. “It is like the Mark I gave the previous Incarnation of the Dark before that Sundering business. He ended up using it to make the Mind Mages of Veird. They’re doing well on Margleknot, so you know. They did not choose to Join Together As One, but that is a normal enough choice.”

Erick was stunned for a few reasons. First, he experienced the presence of the Fractal Fairy without convulsing or falling over, even though that is what the entire realm around him tried to do. Erick grounded his realm, though, and it remained strong. And then there were the ‘gifts’ of more work, and a gift that kept on giving. Erick had no idea what to make of those—

And then the Fractal Fairy said, “Feel free to experiment more with your own Fractal Mark; you seem to be a good carrier of my power. I look forward to your cultivation of Life into a Fae existence! That is all!”

And then They left, vanishing from sight, though the papers and the fractal diamond remained; hovering.

… Erick had wanted to ask some questions.

A lot of questions.

In the smallest of ways, but also in a pretty big way, Erick wanted to make sure what he was seeing down there on Abarial was what was really happening; if Erick killing the monsters all in those specific slices of infinity really did clear up the infections that spread throughout all the other slices of infinity, and what it meant to start doing this sort of stuff for Margleknot… Or rather for the Fractal? Not really for Margleknot at all. But then he read the papers, hovering in the air, and the primer in the front of the paper packet that explained that each paper held 1 different infection that needed killing, and that to kill and cleanse that infection was to cleanse that entire small part of those Layers of problems in those specific areas.

And also, the only reason that corruption existed at all was because the Fractal Universe itself turned true problems that would end the universe into monsters that could be fought at all. The Fractal reimagined the danger into something manageable. The Fractal was already doing half the work; They needed someone else to do the real work, and that person was Erick right now.

“Well that’s an interesting mind fuck,” Erick said, as he picked up the papers and looked over his… 11 targets? “That’s all? 11 targets? Very doable.” Erick picked up the diamond next—

The diamond vanished into the air in his grip, disappearing entirely. The trinket had even vanished from the history of the space, and as Erick looked into the future a little, the diamond was still gone… But that wasn’t quite true.

… It was still there, somehow? Erick narrowed his eyes at the space where the diamond had been, and then twisted his hand a little—

The diamond fell into his hand while he was concentrating on it, but when his concentration wavered the fractal gem vanished again. Erick pulled the object in and out of Elsewhere a few times, just to be sure that he could do that without repercussions, and then he held the diamond in his hand and pulled another diamond out of the dense fractal gem. And then he had a second one that vanished or came back as Erick concentrated on the thing.

Erick made a few more of them, and then he packed them all away back into one diamond… And then he decided he wanted two of them, just in case something should happen to the first one, so Erick made two of them, and let both vanish into Elsewhere.

“Neat!”

Erick smiled, and then he looked at his paperwork. Flipping to the first of his issues…

“Let’s see…”

Anomaly #FLATT-1, named after the first assigned problem given to entity designation FLATT, located on Layer 578,927,221, this one requires complete anonymity to solve, but since you are new at this, we will forgive the transgressions of being seen. Try not to make a habit of it, though. You possess capabilities we do not often find, and thus we will keep your assignment list short. Your Valkyries are doing the bulk of the cleanup work, far, far outside of your view. If you wish to view that operation, then return to Margleknot and speak to the Fae Enclave.

You will need to return to them to get a better communication device, but you can do so without alerting them of your presence, too, and you should do that.

To begin, you need to travel back to the year where you started this assignment, back to year Veird 1453, in the war with Nothanganathor. Once you arrive, you are to IGNORE THAT WAR and proceed to the center of the galaxy designated OF-716-B-16. You might need to upgrade your yorddle to navigate there properly.

Once you are there, you are to confront the giant icky thing consuming one of the entrances to universe-designate BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap and then kill it and cleanse that entrance. Such monsters are typically called ‘door munchers’.

And that was the entire assignment.

… Well okay then.

Erick hmm’d as he read, seeing this as a test of willpower and a whole bunch of other tests at the same time. He decided to do it. Even though he would be driving close by the same year as Veird, he wouldn’t be anywhere close at all, and it wasn’t like he was ready to face Nothanganathor yet, anyway.

The Fractal Fairy had said, ‘I look forward to your cultivation of Life into a Fae existence!’ which implied that Erick was not a Fae yet… And he supposed he wasn’t? Hmm. He had kinda thought he was…

Well whatever.

He set the papers on a desk he conjured to the side… and then he looked at the papers and decided he didn’t like to be that messy. After a moment, he set down the papers under a paperweight in the shape of Veird, in a box he labeled ‘IN’. The OUT box was empty, for now.

Erick turned to face the front of his floating rock space, whereupon he created a captain’s ship wheel out of stone. He smiled as he put a hand on the wheel and then whipped his hand to the side, sending the wheel spinning hard, and the entire gate space swishing to the side, like a giant ship changing course in an endless ocean.

Upgrade the yorddle? Pshhh! Erick knew his way around the universe without needing that.

Probably.

It was all theoretical knowledge, but Erick needed to work those theories to figure out how they worked, and he had time to do that. So what if he ended up crashing somewhere for a while?

… He wasn’t going to delay the Nothanganathor fight, but he was going to go in prepared.

Erick moved his gate space through the void where Benevolence would eventually exist, until he came to a place that was probably the correct-ish location. He popped out far, far above some sort of nebula-like galaxy, without any real arms to it at all.

Erick checked his Status, but mostly just his yorddle.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1317], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 1869]

“Right universe and Layer!” Erick announced to no one except himself. “Wrong time!”

He swung the steering wheel a little bit to the right, which was completely unnecessary and didn’t actually do anything, but the physical action seemed useful to keep around.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1456], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 2008]

Erick turned the steering wheel just a biiiit to the left.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1453], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 2005]

“Close enough! 1453! Let’s go kill a door muncher.”

The ‘door muncher’ was an ooze the size of a planet and it surrounded a black hole, like a whole lot of clear/black hair stuck in a drain. The muncher was eating the gravity or the time of the black hole, or doing something equally crazy like that, because there was no black hole right now. There was just a door muncher that occasionally slipped out of position around the black hole, briefly exposing the black hole, and briefly sucking in the time and space of the Fractal universe in a really cool lensing effect.

It was all sorts of neat, and Erick was kinda thrilled to be able to see a real black hole, in person.

As for the muncher itself, it was probably slipping back and forth between universes, somehow ‘munching’ on this door to the other universe, which was labeled under the ‘BORING’ classification, which Erick suspected was reserved for stuff which the Fractal found boring. This clean up right here was basically trash duty given to him by the Fractal.

But Erick was only 7 kilometers large at his largest point, and cleaning away the ‘door muncher’ would involve fully exposing the black hole, which would then expose him to the black hole. He was pretty sure he could survive the black hole rather easily…

But he had planned on using the Valkyries to attack the problem, since the problem was so large. It was the anti-Nothanganathor Plan Valkyrie plan; attack, surround, and devour. The problem was that whatever Valkyrie he managed to make out of this land would very much not survive the gravity well. Might not even be sapient, either, since there were no people to use as a base warrior. Also, there was no mana here, so everything would be difficult for people who weren’t as solid as Erick.

Anyway. Erick suspected that universe ‘Blaghargabap’ was called ‘Blaghargabap’ because the Fractal needed to call this place something, and so They had strung together some letters on the fly and attached them to this problem here.

Erick was beginning to think that the Fractal was kinda… not a serious god.

Good to know?

Erick got a move on with some initial tests against the door muncher, flying in close in his dragon form. Hovering in the thousands-of-kilometers-long tangles of not-hair, Erick found he easily warded off the corruptive effects of the door muncher through his natural Benevolence. With that test out of the way, Erick spat some [Benevolent Cleanse]s at the surface of the monster—

The very second that Erick’s anti-corruption magic touched the monster, the monster dipped its tendrils and its body below the event horizon, exposing the event horizon and suddenly filling the space that Erick occupied with crushing gravity and warped time.

Erick was fine. Wizards went through ‘doors’ like this all the time, back in the Old Cosmology days.

He was still inside the doorway to another universe, though.

Far, far below, was a universe that felt slimy, and worlds upon worlds of red-skinned, bipedal aliens with two main arms and two small arms. They looked to be nomads upon planets that were shaped like long cylinders that seemed to have no end and no beginning. Those worlds had hair-monsters, just like the door muncher here, at this entrance to that universe. Those hair beasts were the sizes of cities, and they reached into cities as they ate at the people.

Erick glanced upward and saw a sky with a giant hair-clog in the shape of the sun.

Ah.

So he was a bit inside the doorway, then.

The door muncher was above him right now.

Perspective was kinda wonky right now, here on this side of the door. Erick's own body started to feel kinda pressured, too, like he was at the bottom of an ocean. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

Erick started throwing around [Benevolent Cleanse]s, but when one of them touched a cylinder world, it ate away at that world, too, exposing a core that ran through the entire cylinder-planet, like a vein of magma—

Oh.

The cylinder worlds were hair.

Erick was currently the size of multiple worlds, and the cylinder worlds were all hair.

… Erick didn’t think too much about whatever thing the hair was attached to, and he ignored the hair, trying not to disrupt that stuff too much. He got to work on the ‘drain’, and on the monster occupying it. The door muncher shifted and died under Erick’s onslaught of dragonfire. The people living on the nearby hair noticed something happening to the ‘sun in the sky’, but they did not see Erick. Maybe a day of burning later, and there was a shift in the muncher. It could no longer fully occupy the drain— the door.

… or was it a drain?

Erick looked backward, briefly, and he saw an eye beyond the hair. It was larger than anything Erick had ever seen before. It was the size of a universe. It had been watching him for an eon.

The eye seemed to approve.

That’s when the door muncher died completely, the parts of its body faltering hard as it got sucked back into the Fractal Universe, and Erick went with it. The last thing he saw of the Hair Universe was water cascading down dry hair, and into the drain.

Erick soon floated in the Fractal Universe, around the door to ‘Blaghargabap’, and the black hole went from being a dead thing, to a spinning thing of brilliance around absolute black, and with two streamers of power shooting off from the top and bottom of the hole. Erick went to investigate one of those streamers, but not too close; that was a lot of water pressure right there.

Erick wasn’t sure what he had done, exactly, but it seemed like a good thing, so he decided to go back into the Hair universe to find out exactly what he had done; what happened. He touched the black hole—

And his claw tips broke away, sheared off from the water pressure.

Erick flexed his Authority… and still got his claws sheared short. Looking at the damage to his claws, Erick tried a different approach. He blunted his claws with an old spell of [Conjure Armor] mixed with anti-Elemental Water properties, along with some resons to make that sort of combination actually work on stuff that obviously wasn’t ‘water’ at all.

He knocked on the door.

The white glows and water pressure around the ‘door’ vanished, leaving a hole to travel through.

Erick went inside—

Suddenly, Erick was sitting in a kitchen from the 80s on Earth. He was still a dragon, but he was human-sized. The sun shone in the window and nice curtains framed a blue sky. Tea steamed in mugs on the kitchen table. The refrigerator was roundish and green… so maybe the 60’s, not the 80’s. And yet there was a flat color television hovering on the wall. So the style was really ‘anachronistic’—

A woman sat across from Erick and her hair was gorgeous and long and every color of the rainbow, but mostly brown. It draped from her head to the floor in rivulets, twisting and draping, and it flowed across the floor, to the edges of the room, where it vanished into the cracks in the floorboards.

The woman was about to say something, but then she paused as she looked at her body, and then at Erick’s body, and said, “You have a very sexually dimorphic species.”

Erick transformed back into a person. “Apologies for the miscommunication.”

“Ah!” The woman’s face lit up. “That makes more sense. Very good. I thought only your women had hair, but it’s good you have hair, too. You want something? Glad you decided to knock instead of trying to push your way in again. Coming in through the floor was bad enough. Gave me quite a scare!”

“… Ah. Apologies. I just wanted to come back in to make sure the problem of the door muncher was resolved. I didn’t see any pieces over there, and I wasn’t sure what was happening over here.”

“Oh yeah. It’s gone. Amazing what a little cleaning can do for the consciousness. You can tell Fractal that we can have tea again if they want, but all they want to do is fight, so I try not to bother with them too much. Their agents are much more pleasant. You want sex?”

“… Ah. No thank you. I am already practically-married twice over.”

“Hmm! Fair enough.” She set a trinket of silver and gold and water onto the table between them, saying, “I was eventually going to raise up one of my own to clear away that plug and I was going to gift them this, but now I guess I gotta talk to the Fractal again. Way before I was ready, too… But I guess this is what is happening now. You can have the thing.”

Erick took the gift though he wasn’t sure what it was even as he held it. “Glad to help. I’ll be on my way, now.”

The woman nodded—

Erick was a dragon again, floating beyond the illuminated black hole that was the door into the Hair Universe. Tendrils of light and dark were wrapped around his body for a brief moment, but they were already letting go.

Erick floated backward with something gold/silver/water in his right, clawed hand.

With a quick push through into Benevolence Itself, Erick settled down into his gate space.

The trinket turned into a torc that could go around one of Erick’s arms.

… It didn’t seem dangerous. It wasn’t mana-based magic, though.

It was probably fine.

Erick put it on, and felt out the magic it was trying to do as it touched him. As soon as he realized what was happening, he let it, and then he conjured up a big mirror. Thanks to the torc, Erick now sported a massive black beard and hair that came down to mid-back. With a flick of power, Erick tied the hair into braids and then brushed out the beard. He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled.

“Not a bad look.” He took off the torc, and his hair melted away. “Not for me, though.”

And then Erick looked around at the floating stone platform, and saw he needed to make some improvements to the place.

“A steering wheel and a desk is not enough.”

Erick considered—

“Ah ha! I need a ship.”

- - - -

Ten-thousand years later, and not that long at all, Erick set down the paperwork for mission number 37 into the outgoing box of his new office and smiled as that paperwork vanished through the port he had installed between mission #3 and #4.

That paperwork zipped off to Margleknot, to the archives, where no one would ever see it at all except for those who wanted to get their brains scrambled via time-twisting memetic threats—

A receipt came through the port—

Another piece of paper came through, and this one was a personal note ‘From the desk of Lady Aelorika of the Fae Council’, scribbled in flowing ink that mimicked vines that had met a weed wacker. Erick had gotten several letters from Aelorika so far, but he had been a ‘hidden agent’ until now, apparently. Usually the Lady was rather thankful without actually saying ‘thank you’. Now, she was all perturbed.

Erick laughed as he read it.

‘Fractals and Fate! I cannot believe I did not put it together sooner, but you’re the one doing this job now, Erick?! ERICK FLATT. Who is supposed to be having a war with Nothanganathor right now!’

There was a break in the script and some splattered ink stains that had transformed into ink flowers upon the page. The Lady had been interrupted while writing. She was obviously distraught.

Erick smiled.

‘I suppose, though, that according to this memo that I have just been handed, as I have been reviewing this case and putting together all that has transpired, that I am to ignore that breach of protocol because the war has spiraled far out of its initial bounds. It’s also still happening, apparently. I am not to do a thing except congratulate you on this work and tell you that your initial volley of requests are done.

‘Congratulations! You have earned a total of 5 favors; 2 from me, 2 from Lady Seraphaka, and 1 from Lord Dakka. Should you choose to use these favors against someone who has their own favors, they will be counted against each other on a 1-for-1 basis. Whoever has favors left over in such a conflict will find the Council on their side.

‘Nothanganathor currently has several thousand favors.

‘Luckily, we have already decided to forgo the usual favor-trading which would usually happen in such a scenario. You two are at war. Good luck, Erick; I hope you win.

‘You’re free to return to doing whatever you were doing before you accepted this assignment.

‘The Fae Council of Margleknot appreciates your efforts to cleanse this universe from corruption.’

Erick read the letter a few times, smiling wider as he finished.

And then he duplicated the letter three times and set one copy into each of his filing cabinets. The first cabinet was organized chronologically, the second was organized on Erick’s timeline, and the third was organized by Layer number. Erick only had a few hundred Layers visited so far, all of the boxes were small, but they could get bigger.

Erick was grinning as he shut the cabinets back up, and then he strolled out of his captain’s quarters, onto the deck of his ship. The great ship Worldsaver stretched out before him, like an old timey pirate’s galleon, and Erick stood at the wheel in front of the aftcastle. The ship was brilliant white and black and made of solid crystal Benevolence, while the sails were completely decorative and mostly invisible, to give Erick an unobstructed view of the cosmos. The whole thing was only a fraction of the size of Erick’s true draconic self, but it was comfortably grand.

The storage was filled with treasure, and Erick was filled with new experiences about how to win a Wizard’s time war.

Now that he had gotten true clearance to get on with his own life, though, it was time to do that.

Erick was ready.

Erick grabbed the steering wheel and spun it hard to the left. The readout floating to the side of the wheel rapidly flipped through Layers and Time, while the spots of light in the void beyond the gate space all rapidly turned to blurred lines of light, some fading, some growing, some turning into nebulae that spanned whole galaxies.

Erick navigated through it all, Worldsaver plowing through time and space to arrive exactly where it needed to be.

Hovering over the dark side of the moon, invisible to all, but with enough visibility for Erick to see everything happening down there, Erick and Worldsaver floated, and Erick glanced through the Fractal.

With his sight spanning a thousand little fractal splashes, Erick Saw everything big happening in his neighborhood. It was mostly a bunch of slimes, playing in the water. Big events! Erick smiled to see the ease of it all. The simplicity. The simple good, of slimes eating plants and playing in water and the light towers growing taller and the rivers rushing water out across the lunar surface.

According to the timeline it had been exactly 19 days since Erick was here with Shadow, sending him on a Quest to become fae. Erick had certainly done a lot in that amount of time. But had he become fae? Probably not, though he knew what he needed to do.

He needed to eat his ship, and become one with it.

This Worldsaver was the ‘environment’ he had created. Everything here, from the treasures of the Itiki-ki Islands, with their long histories of Counting Good, to the Blasted Lands of Shar, where the Valkyries had a major home base, and even to a land overseen by the God Cascadio, whom Erick had yet to actually get to Veird… All of it was who Erick was, and who he wanted to be. It was all just a mirror to all his time on Veird, though. Veird was his home, and his people.

And he needed to get back to it.

For right now, though, Erick expanded the scope of his spying on his own home-away-from-home, to see if there were— Ah ha! There was a satellite looking down at the moon. It was far away, but it had some good imaging stuff going on with it, but it bounced a signal off of a separate satellite in order to transmit its imagery to Earth.

Erick expanded his Fractal Sight, diving down into the ‘scrying’ ‘magic’ that the satellite was using, to spy on whoever was checking out the place. Sure, it was all tech out there, but with a twist of perspective and some resons to back up that perspective, and tech started to work like magic when Erick decided it should work like magic.

Erick spied on a control room at NASA in Florida filled with Americans and Chinese and all sorts of other people, all of them staring at the images on the big screen. Empty coffee cups filled trash cans that overflowed. Break rooms were filled with people yelling at each other. The military had come and gone and were now present in full force, and the diplomats were four buildings over, talking about what was on the screen.

The big initial panic was just beginning, but the news of the stuff on the moon had broken across Earth 10 days ago.

There was some talk of the ‘Black Dragon and Shadow’ in Japan, but no one had connected any dots yet. A lot of people were making a lot of theories, though!

… Erick decided he didn’t want to do this Fae-thing here on the Moon.

He turned his ship around, and went to one of the bigger moons of Jupiter. Ganymede. It was a pretty big moon, maybe a third the size of Earth, and it was dark. The sun was a cold dot far, far away, and Jupiter was large and brown, tan, and red. This was a good, desolate place to make another Ascension.

An Ascension of the Cultivation of Life Itself.

Erick left his ship in park around the northern pole of the planet, and then he got to work terraforming. The interior of Ganymede was actually liquid water, which was interesting to find out, but it was ice, too, and so the whole thing was both unstable for big dragons on the surface and kinda weak on gravity, anyway.

A day later, Ganymede was twice the size but it retained the same weight, so as not to mess with its orbit, and the gravity was now Earth-normal. A forest of towers grew upon the entire surface, illuminating the planet like a spot of light upon the dark. The sky here was black as a star-filled void, with the Sun not providing much illumination and warmth at all, so Erick made the planet provide its own warmth.

Upon a prominence of stone, on the newly-terraformed moon of Jupiter, Erick turned into a full dragon and stared up at the invisible ship, Worldsaver, hidden inside Benevolence Itself...

A dread settled upon Erick, as he contemplated eating that entire ship.

That dread had been growing, but now it was here.

All Erick had to do was eat the ship of his memories and future and life, taking it into himself...

Erick recoiled from the idea of becoming a fae in a way he hadn’t recoiled in years. Not since he saw the orgy pits of that job at the undying-life world, at job #17, over on Layer 19,270. During that job, Erick had needed to take a moment to understand just how he was going to untangle all the souls from each other in that world, and erase that corruption, and now he was taking a moment to understand how he was going to be a dragon, eating himself.

This… This was like eating his own heart.

In fact, it was exactly like that. It was metaphorical just as much as it was literal. In this action, he would remake himself, he would die in the process, and be reborn. Erick had been thinking about this task for the last few… years? Maybe? It was all a recursive function, basically.

Erick created Benevolence, and now Benevolence needed to create Erick, so that both of them would forever create each other; so that Erick would always create Erick.

He knew he needed to do it, but it was only in looking at everything that he knew, that he knew he needed to do this. Even the [Renew] symbol was an ouroboros. His Benevolence and even Fate had been leading him here since forever! How much more obvious could you get, Erick!

… And yet…

Erick sat down on his dragon ass on the mountain he had made at the north pole. The Worldsaver floated above him inside an invisible space, and Erick himself was invisible, intangible, and not really a part of the world; of this world, or any other right now. The grassy plains of Ganymede stretched out in every direction, and the towers and trees that Erick had built covered all the land beyond that space. His Status and Lightning Path had not changed much in all his quick years as a fighter of corruption out in the universe, because no one knew he had done all that… or at least the masses didn’t.

Erick wondered if Lionshard had ever made a ‘Wizard’s Clarity’ like Erick had, to save himself from the Curse of Power. Probably not; Lionshard was still in Margleknot, and would not venture outside. Or at least that was what Erick had heard after showing up to job #23, to act as Lionshard’s invisible hand and to fix the corruption plaguing several worlds to begin the cleansing of an entire galaxy; to help those people there help themselves.

That had been a fun job.

Erick basically just followed his Lightning Path and tipped over a few castles here and there on several different worlds. The biggest thing he had done was to erase an autonomous drone system that was running amok and killing people because the corruption had gotten at its systems. That had taken half an hour. And that was the whole job! With just a little bit of help, done in the time span of 27 years, of which Erick had only spent 3 days actually doing work, had set that entire galaxy to rights.

Erick had learned a lot in his years out there, working with people who were so much more capable than him.

Mainly, he had learned that the universe was wider and simpler than it appeared.

Corruption started at individual locations, for any thousands of reasons. There were people that tried to revive the dead, who used inferior magics to do so, and who made deals with entities that did not fully exist, except in their minds. There were revenge-seekers, who tried to annihilate problems through terrible reson-based desires. Those were usual starts for corruption. But then again, corruption started on job #30, just because a system of government failed on one world, and then the problem propagated to civil war and somehow corruption came about.

The main problems with corruption were not the corruption itself.

Erick had seen, that in every case of corruption, that it had all started on one slice of Infinity, in one Layer of Infinity, and thus that entire area of spacetime began to degrade. Corruption started at a source, and then leaked out into Infinity, replicating itself in inferior ways. Every version of Abarial did not fall to the same several corruption monsters; only once the major, central slice of Infinity fell, did all the rest follow. Erick had just needed to burn out that corruption at the source to save everyone else.

All of life was like that.

All of Life was like that.

Every world had an infinite variation surrounding that world in the nearby multiverse, and all of them were visible when you were there, but it took a level hand to navigate that infinity, to go to the center of the major problems, where the major actors were causing major problems, to find them and to change everything. Not all of those major actors were even on the same slice of infinity, either, which was fun to find out—

Erick breathed out.

He didn’t need to think anymore.

He was ready.

Erick opened his maw, and ate his own heart—

Reality collapsed inward.

- - - -

Shadow watched from the backside of an illuminated tower as Erick ate his own heart, and then he spun inward, into himself, dying in that action.

Nothanganathor watched with her. He had been ready to intervene, to kill, to annihilate. That had been his original plan in coming here. But he held back, and it was just his avatar here, anyway. He held back, because others were present. Others that he actually respected… Or that he at least acknowledged.

Also, if he tried shit, then he’d get shit on, and that was that. He had already been trounced once.

Shadow kinda wanted him to try again… But no.

Lady Aelorika, Lady Seraphaka, and Lord Dakka were there with Shadow, all of them fitting into the same wide gloom behind the light of a tower of a [Seed of Atunir]. Yggdrasil was a bit larger of a presence, so he couldn’t fit very well, but he had his own leaf present, growing on the tower, in the light, like a little air plant; just a simple single flaming green leaf and some white roots and a tiny crown of rainbows. All of them were as hidden as they could possibly be, and though Yggdrasil was less adept at it, he hid just fine, thanks to the Fae Council helping him hide. Technically he shouldn’t even be here, but Erick was his father, and so the Council had allowed it.

Nothanganathor shouldn’t have been here at all, but he was an asshole who spent a thousand favors to watch, thinking he could actually kill Erick while he watched, and now he was down a thousand favors and that was that. Shadow had thoroughly enjoyed it when all the Fae Council fought him back from interrupting Erick’s moment; it was the only time she had ever won against the bastard—

Lord Eldraki showed up with a tub of popcorn, smiling— Until he saw that Erick was gone. “Dammit! I missed him killing himself!”

Dakka said, “Told you not to venture to Earth. He had sat down for a think; not to not do it.”

“Well I’m just glad he took my advice to learn how to hide his mana and stuff, and now he can be responsible for hiding us all in the future, instead of me having to do it all the time,” Eldraki said, eyeing everyone in the group. “That means he’s closer to me than the rest of you.”

Everyone scoffed at the absurdity of Eldraki trying to claim Erick as Of Him.

Eldraki grinned at his own joke.

Nothanganathor grumbled and vanished, but not before splitting Ganymede into ten pieces, casting the gathering and the moon into a drifting, broken orbit around Jupiter. No one really minded the attack; not like he had hit them. Seraphaka managed to cup Yggdrasil’s tiny leaf into a hand, so he was perfectly fine, too.

Shadow tumbled unconcerned, floating in the void along with the others, saying, “Any of you want to put that planet back?”

“It’s a moon,” Eldraki said, just to be a pedant.

Shadow didn’t argue. It was a planet now, dammit.

Aelorika was currently upside-down as compared to Shadow, and she was also drinking tea. She shrugged. The others were all angled weird, too, gently spinning as they drifted, but the group remained somewhat together.

Dakka moved first. He waved a rusted wing and the planet crashed together, though it had certainly seen better days. Everything grew at a weird angle now, and the careful balances that Erick had set up so that the planet wouldn’t pull in the other moons, or fall into the gas giant below, had been disrupted. But the planet looked like a proper warzone, and that made Lord Dakka happy.

“There!” Dakka said, smiling. “Much better.”

Seraphaka rolled her eyes and then waved her hand and the desecration of War… lessened. The planet also moved into a new, stable orbit and then stayed there. “Now it’s better.”

“I liked the red lines I put on it! Like those Blasted Lands of Shar.” Dakka said, as he waved his hand. The planet buckled a little and some big cracks appeared, as though the fae had carved into the surface with giant claws. Those claw marks crystallized and sent out citadels of war, like towers made of metallic ice to pierce the sky. The planet had been turned into a war fortress, made for beings that were between 3 and 5 meters tall, on average, though it was completely empty at the moment. “A home base for the Valkyries he wishes to gather. He didn’t make one yet, you know.”

Aelorika sighed, tumbled until she reoriented, and then she pointed at the planet. The disturbed atmosphere and boiling red clouds and broken bamboo towers all shifted a little. The atmosphere evened out. Boiling red clouds became illuminated things, bringing natural light to the world. Broken bamboo towers grew taller and thicker, to become the makers of those illuminated clouds. “This part of this system is way too dark. It needs more light for all the plants, and your citadels disturbed that light.”

Dakka shrugged.

Margleknot’s Yggdrasil avatar fluttered down to the planet and planted itself at the northern pole.

Things evened out even more as a giant Yggdrasil grew taller than all the rest of the plants on the world, which were all multiple kilometers tall at that point.

Eldraki frowned at all of them, and then he pointed at the planet.

Shadow didn’t see what he did. It was, quite possible, that he did nothing at all. But his action demanded a response, and Shadow was the odd-fae-out, so she asked him, “What did you do?”

Aelorika also asked him, “What did you do?”

Shadow was a little surprised at that. It felt good to have backup, though.

Eldraki smiled as he pointed at his own cheek, saying, “Give me a kiss and I’ll tell you.”

Aelorika shrugged, and then she turned to Shadow, saying, “Good luck with your betrothed.” She vanished, back to Margleknot or wherever.

Seraphaka said, “Good luck!” And then she also vanished.

Eldraki said, “I hope he dies for real.” The bastard vanished.

Dakka said to Shadow, “Good luck with the guy. Are you going to stick around here?”

“For a little while,” Shadow said. “I’ll leave Eldraki’s present for Erick to find, but I do want to stick around.”

“If Erick succeeds, he’ll probably come back to you on that Earth Moon.”

“I’ll head that way soon enough.”

Dakka nodded, and then he vanished.

Shadow floated above Ganymede for a little while longer.

Erick was on his own.

- - - -

Erick woke up feeling a specific kinda shit that he hadn’t felt in forever, and also rather slowly. His mind was groggy and his mouth was dry as sand, and everything smelled… Not good? Smelled like sex, which was good sometimes, but not right now. Erick was pretty sure that his hand was gripping some sort of boob on some sort of woman —male boobs and female boobs were very different, after all— and it was squishy and warm, and his chest was warm and pressed against some sort of slender back, and someone moved around behind him, grumbling and muttering about needing a drink. It was a man’s voice.

Erick cracked open a crusty eye and all he saw was dark brown hair that smelled of jasmine.

He tried to sense the world…

And his mana was tired, or something, because nothing happened.

He did not panic, though his heart certainly raced hard. Rapidly, Erick woke all the way, and found himself in a bed with a woman and a man, both of them maybe 19 or 20, and a cheap mirror hung on the wall. Erick was 20 as well—

He recognized the apartment.

And then the man sitting behind him got off the bed and tugged at the covers, unceremoniously ripping them away from Erick and the woman, as he said, “Come on, you dweebs! It’s time for you to bounce. I had fun and I hope you had fun, too, but there’s some english homework I gotta bullshit, and I can’t bullshit it with you two bomb booties in my room.”

Erick sat on the bed for a moment longer, to look up at Erick Flatt, circa 1997.

Younger Erick was nude, of course. Erick always slept nude with people back in college. He teased the guys who he fucked, too, when they ended up looking at him like Erick was looking right now, in complete disbelief. Young Erick smiled, saying, “Don’t have a gay crisis on account of me! Or do, if you want. I’m pretty fucking hot.”

Ah.

Well then.