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Erick stared up at Young Erick Flatt from 1997 for a moment longer.

A lot of things were wrong in that moment.

Erick’s mana was sluggish, and if he was being honest with himself, not moving at all. His insides felt dead, but not dead at all—

And then Young Erick Flatt was about to say something more about a gay crisis again, because Erick had been staring for longer than a single moment. Time was moving fast, and Erick’s thoughts were just as sluggish as his mana.

No time for words.

Erick saw an exit, laying on the floor in a pile; some clothes. His clothes, probably. Over there was the door. Erick launched out of the bed and started grabbing whatever was on the ground—

Or at least that’s what he tried to do. He caught himself in the mirror on the wall instead. Blonde. Blue eyes. White. Gym guy. Erick didn’t know this guy at all. Not really.

And then Young Erick looked at Erick from behind, catching both of them in the mirror, saying, “Are you freaking out on me, dude? You really shouldn’t be too freaked—”

“Fucking—!” The girl in the bed thrashed angrily, briefly, but she had been building up her anger for a while, now that she was completely exposed to the air. And then she sat up and glared pure hate at Young Erick. “It’s too cold to rip off covers, Erick.”

She spat the last words at Young Erick, and Erick recognized her. She was Alice, one of his usual fucks that he just now remembered.

“Well you’re awake now, so it worked!” Young Erick ignored Alice and gestured to the boxers in Erick’s hands that he had yet to put on, “If you wanna wear my underwear, go right ahead.” Young Erick reached over and grabbed Erick’s ass. “But I expect it back.”

Erick launched away from Young Erick, but in a normal sort of way, and not in the visceral, magic-empowered way that he probably could have, if he wasn’t still waking up.

“Stop teasing the poor guy,” Alice said, before groaning as she sat on the side of the bed, holding her head. “He’s obviously new at this.” She tried to sneer through the pain of a hangover as she looked up at Erick, but all she managed to do was look tired. Her voice was tired, too, as she said, “A practical virgin.”

Erick grabbed the clothes he thought were his —and not Young Erick’s— and then he put them on as fast as he could—

Erick recalled this moment in time.

It had been buried, but he recalled this day… Somewhat. He actually recalled a lot of moments like this, now that he was here, thinking about it. He looked at Young Erick, and picked out some words that were probably correct, but Erick’s memory was kinda weird right now. He said, “This is never going to happen again.”

Young Erick faked a pout, using a hand to rub the air beside his face, like he was rubbing out tears. “Poor closet case doesn’t know what he likes.” And then he spoke seriously, “We had fun, whatever-your-name-was. Come by the quad again next weekend.” He shrugged. “Or don’t!”

“He’s a fucking worthless townie,” Alice said, as she looked at Erick. “I thought the whole point of you sneaking onto campus was to get fucked. Well, now you did! And now you can get lost.”

Erick suddenly remembered that Alice had always been like that. There was a very large reason that Alice was not Jane’s mother, and that vitriol was part of it.

Young Erick even winced to the side as he saw that vitriol, and then he noticed Erick looking at him, and he said, “Don’t worry. Next time it can be just you and me.”

Alice laughed loudly. Harshly.

Erick said some words that were probably correct, “There won’t be a next time.”

Guys had said that a lot to Erick, back then.

It was some date in 1997, after all.

Young Erick chuckled and said something about something and Alice responded with her own words, but Erick was out of there, with his pants on and his shirt on —backwards and inside out, apparently— and his shoes in his hand. Erick rushed out into the apartment hallway, trying not to panic, because he knew that even the slightest change to his past would fuck everything up down the line...

But then Erick walked a bit slower.

Would his presence fuck up anything at all?

The morning had already happened. Erick was now walking through ‘campus housing’ that wasn’t really campus housing or dorm rooms at all, because this wasn’t really a dorm, and the college wasn’t really a ‘college’. It was a community college, and this was an apartment building right next to the college, and the whole of the city beyond was kinda mashed in with the college to begin with. Only some nominal ‘walls’ contained and separated the college from the city, and only 90% of the people who lived here were students at the community college.

All around Erick, in the early morning hours, were people moving around and getting ready to leave for the first classes of the day. Or, in the case of Old Man Hutch over there, he was getting ready to go fishing. It might have been a Monday, then?

A pair of bros spotted Erick doing his walk of shame and called him on it, yelling those words loud and happy. A woman in a room across the hall came out of her room and roared hatred at the guys yelling about walks of shame, calling them too loud and almost starting a fight, but then the woman’s friend pulled her back.

Erick had already fucked up the timeline just by existing; just by walking through here.

Butterfly flaps, eh?

And yet… Hmm.

Erick wasn’t sure if he had messed up his timeline yet. He wasn’t sure about a lot of things. He did know his way around the place, though, but it had been half a century since Erick had been here, so Erick had needed to walk slowly to remember everything.

The place looked the same, and Erick found himself staring a bit too hard at the wallpaper. It was a bright green floral print that Erick was pretty sure… he recalled a story about the college, years and years after he attended, when he was thinking about going back and finishing his degree. Some wannabe historians had claimed that this apartment building had arsenic in the wallpaper, but that was an 1800’s Victorian London thing. And yet, the people who called this place on its radioactive-green ivy/vine/floral wallpaper were insistent that the government needed to take a look.

The government officers found nothing wrong with the wallpaper, but they did find asbestos in a whole bunch of places. The apartment ended up getting torn down because of that.

… Should he send them a ‘concerned citizens’ letter about the walls, and their arsenic content? Replay that set of history? Or should he circumvent that concern, and send a letter about the asbestos itself?

Erick left that concern for another day.

He had too many concerns right now.

With a practiced walk, Erick skedaddled out of the apartment building—

And then he remembered that the apartment building was located on the forest side of the college, and all the city was in the other direction, across the college campus. Townies, like Erick, had needed to walk across the college campus to get back to most of the rest of town. Most of the time, this was not a problem for the townies, but Erick already saw cops walking around out there, eager to bust townies who ‘weren’t supposed to be on campus’. It was a complete power-trip thing for them, too. Not actually something that they could enforce at all.

Young Erick had found that out later in life, and that drove him to kinda hate the cops just a bit more than he already had.

Erick still wasn’t able to control his mana, to see anything beyond his own eyes, and he certainly wasn’t casting any spells right now, so it looked like he had a walk across a campus full of power-tripping cops who had nothing better to do.

Erick made it to a public washroom instead of walking across campus. It was before the classroom buildings started. He ducked inside. No one was there. It was only 7 am on a… On a day. Maybe Monday? Sunday? Probably Monday. A clock he had passed on the way here told the time, and some students were already up and about, but what was the actual date?

Erick didn’t know the actual date—

He decided the date didn’t matter.

Erick was here, in the past, and that Young Erick was him.

Erick hung out in the bathroom for a while. Mostly, he felt out his soul, and began to wake up his mana. It was there. He hadn’t lost it. He poked. He massaged. But nothing happened. The world was the world, and there was nothing he could do about it except for that which could be done with his hands. Erick stared at his hands, at the unfamiliarity of them. They looked like construction worker hands, with calluses and small cuts that had healed a while ago.

He rubbed his hands together—

“Don’t panic,” Erick said to himself. “No need to panic.”

He calmed himself, breathing easily, and then he rubbed his hands together, trying to wake up whatever weakness had settled into his—

The solidity of the world began to wane. Mana flowed out of Erick’s hands, where he had massaged them, like he had broken up some ice and the river below had been exposed. All at once, all of the ice cap of Erick’s entire body eroded, and Erick was back to being himself, magically. Physically he was still whoever this was.

Erick cackled once, maniacally, and then softer, easier. He had almost emotionally lost it, but now he was back, and that yo-yo of emotion had broken him a little. Also, he was probably fae now, or something like that. Or maybe he was still transitioning?

Well.

Whatever!

Okay!

He had mana.

Good.

With practiced ease that came out more stilted than he wished —he was still waking up, apparently— Erick breathed out mana into the empty men’s bathroom, like he had breathed out a minor cloud of smoke. The mana spread, through the walls, through the floor, through the ceiling and the windows, and Erick was right there with it to see everything it saw. Soon, Erick shifted the mana to invisible Mystical mana, and then Benevolence easily flowed into the world on strong pulses of invisible, intangible power.

Normally, with mana flowing around, other people could sense it if they had the capability. If someone had been looking, they might have seen Erick’s first expulsion of white Benevolence into this world, but even now that first bit of Benevolence was disguising itself with Wizard’s Clarity. People would still see mana if they were out there and looking, but no one was out there and looking. Erick’s Benevolence wasn’t a memetic hazard like with Nothanganathor’s Malevolence; Erick’s Benevolence had become something quieter. In fact, if people wanted to accrete or cultivate with that mana he let loose, they could, and it would work rather perfectly for their established power sets.

… Erick wondered if people could cultivate Malevolence so easily. He hadn’t touched the stuff yet, and he hadn’t had much experience with actual users of the stuff…

Eh.

Later.

Erick cycled his mana for a while, pushing out power, and then letting it come back, and the mana went unnoticed as it gradually flowed back to its source, letting Erick sense the world as though he was simply mana sensing through the ambient mana, like anyone else.

The world looked somewhat like it should…

But there was a difference. A really big difference compared to what Erick had seen in 2047, but he’d get to that later; his plate was already too full of problems.

Young Erick and Alice were walking with each other to class, and Young Erick asked Alice, “Who was that this morning?”

Alice laughed loudly. “I thought you knew him!”

“I thought you knew him.” Young Erick said, “I don’t think I even got to touch him, except in sleep. Do you remember last night?”

“Fuck, dude. I don’t remember shit. That party was rad.” Alice said, “He’s a fucking worthless townie, anyway. He was probably shit in bed.”

Young Erick ignored Alice’s acerbic words. “It was a great party, wasn’t it.” He smiled. “Did you see Margaret dancing?”

Alice sneered at Erick. “You like that bitch?”

Young Erick laughed to stop himself from lashing out, and Alice didn’t notice that at all. Young Erick probably didn’t even notice that about himself; he wouldn’t realize he did that for years to come. Young Erick did try to get Alice to be nicer, though, by playfully saying, “Don’t call her that!”

Alice rolled her eyes. “I’m not helping you with her. Remember to wrap it when you get her. I heard she’s a total slut.”

Young Erick was about to say something about them being sluts, too, but he decided not to press that button. Erick, watching them from half a mile away, recalled guarding his words with Alice all the time, though Young Erick didn’t seem to realize that he was actively doing that yet. He would, eventually.

Young Erick changed the topic to English homework, and to how he had failed to do anything, and did Alice think that he could bullshit his way through the presentation today? Young Erick bet he could. Alice was nicer when it came to schoolwork, and she would end up helping Young Erick with his English presentation on Shakespeare for about 10 minutes. It’d be enough for a C, which was fine.

Erick returned to himself.

Erick was feeling some kinda way. Embarrassment? Subtle loss of opportunity for cheating himself out of a proper education? Happy that the whole arc of his life turned out like it did, anyway? Anger at Alice’s angry nature that Erick hadn’t felt in 50 years? There was a lot there.

… Erick would think about all that later, too. Or probably not at all.

He focused inward on his Status, which he had finally gotten online.

It was not the same as before.

Erick Flatt, [70-ish], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 1997]

Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 31%, 30%, 30%

Reson allocation rate: 9%

Soul: 1b per day / 11,574 per second , [Mark of Benevolence Level = 1]

Body: 1500

Mind: 2500

Overall Stability: ↑↑ [+10,532, -15] Basic upkeep

Mp: 121.5t/∞, ↑ [+3,587.9, -5] Basic upkeep

Hp: 121.5t/∞, ↑ [+3,472.2, -5] Basic upkeep

Pp: 109.3t/∞, ↑ [+3,472.2, -5] Basic upkeep

Resons: 19.7t [+1,041.6 = +115.74]

So that was different, but all the numbers were more or less the same as the last time Erick had looked at those numbers. Stuff was a bit rounder than he last remembered, but… Erick liked round things? Sure. Why not.

Erick had other, more important questions.

What the fuck was a Mark of Benevolence?

Erick found out as soon as he looked into his soul.

Everything was the same, yet vastly different, like a childhood home that had been renovated by new owners. The Benevolence crystals that were his Spells and Abilities were still there, and so was the ocean of iridescent white mana, but the Dark headwaters of the ocean had changed, and now there were no Dark headwaters at all. Everything burbled up Benevolence, everywhere. Erick was a self-generating depth of mana that churned and made more of himself with every passing second. As that ocean churned, and as Erick’s Wizard’s Clarity cycled his mana out into the world and then back inside, it brought with it tiny bits of power that it had sampled out there.

Because yeah.

There was magic on Earth.

And yes, Erick’s cycling Benevolence was allowing him to sample all the power out there that he touched, and take it into himself, just as he had done with Genesis so long ago.

Erick would get back to that and all those little magical powers out there later.

For now, he looked at his soul, trying to find the Dark Mark. It was not that easy. Before Erick had eaten his own heart out, the Dark was a vast sky that rained down Benevolence waters into Erick’s everything, supplying him with mana. Now, Erick generated his own mana, and the Dark Mark was…

Where was the damned thing?

It usually wasn’t this hard to—

Ah!

There it was.

The Dark Mark. It was a spot of black inside the white ocean, like a rock to hold onto. From the headwaters of Erick’s everything, to a tiny rock, the Dark Mark looked almost inactive right now. What to make of that? Erick wasn’t sure. He metaphysically poked at it, and it tumbled in his Benevolence ocean like a tiny island, before it settled back down to being simply stable, inside his soul.

Was it stable? It was stable.

Erick went looking for the Fractal Mark next. He found it inside the rim of the ocean that was his soul, near where he had put it to go along with his Wizard’s Clarity. It had taken up the entire rim of his ocean, but now his ocean was a reson-spliced fractal, generated by his Benevolence Itself, and the actual Mark was a tiny crystal floating in the ocean. It was lessened. It wasn’t necessary anymore. Erick’s Benevolence Itself took care of all of the hiding and cycling aspects of his Wizard’s Clarity, automatically. It even trapped the powers Erick’s mana sampled out there in the world, inside of individual fractals in that rim of his soul, keeping them inactive until Erick looked at them and wanted to try them out… Maybe? Is that what was happening there?

Hmm.

Erick picked up the Fractal Mark and set it next to the Dark Mark, setting the ocean to still around them, to keep them in place, and held. The two universal marks soon began to gently orbit within the depths of his soul.

The rest of Erick’s Benevolence-crystal-locked Status was the same as before.

Erick came out of himself and stood there in the bathroom.

He stood there for a while, just thinking.

And then he tested himself. Erick shaped some of his mana in his aura, and without using any special powers at all to keep his magic together, here in the manaless atmosphere of this Earth. He released that shaped mana as [Force Bolt]s that struck the bathroom tile, chipping the off-white glaze.

The Bolts worked exactly as they should have. Before Erick’s creation of Wizard’s Clarity, Erick had to string together some Domain work and other magics to keep his mana together inside a manaless atmosphere, but here, the power just worked fine. Wizard’s Clarity was doing exactly as it should have been doing.

The Bolts still disintegrated, as broken magic normally did, and then the mana that made up those Bolts drifted in the air, making its way to Erick’s body, where it joined with him. There was no magical trace upon the chipped tile; just the new damage.

So his powers were working as expected.

And this was his own past.

He could see that this was his own past. Erick expanded his senses wide and saw everything. This was the community college that Erick had attended for two or three years —depending on how you counted it— and Young Erick’s apartment room had the same posters of the Simpsons and Nirvana and Pulp Fiction that Erick had had. There were even the same sports posters hanging on the walls, of basketball guys and football guys that Erick didn’t really know, but his hookups certainly did. Of course this was 1997 and it was pretty fucking weird to talk openly about gay stuff with strangers that were probably into it, but which you weren’t quite sure, but the posters were a good part of the softer way to ask guys what they thought about other guys. And then there were the Jenifer Anniston posters; those were much more socially acceptable.

That Young Erick was him, at 26. Not 20, like Erick had imagined back there waking up in that room, all disoriented. He still looked 20, though. Erick had gone from high school to the job scene, and then he had gone to college because he wanted something more out of life. Young Erick had already spent several years at this point in time working shit jobs.

First there was the pizza place, and then the retail, and then he got passed up for manager because he didn’t have a proper education…

Erick left that past in the past, and considered Infinity.

Could this have been a side slice of Infinity? A variation-reality of Layer 99,081, Earth? Not his history?

Erick closed his eyes in thought, and then he opened them again, focusing on his Lightning Path, which was working just fine, too. The thing about the Path, when used in a certain way, was that it allowed Erick to view the fates of certain people, if he focused on those people well enough. It wasn’t a clear picture. Personal choices could change a lot.

Erick focused on Young Erick, and to him, the world fractured into futures.

Young Erick was in for some hard times ahead, followed by all the ones that Erick would look back on and cherish for how fleeting and good they were. There was Margaret, and then she vanished, and then came Jane, and everything fell apart before it came back together later, though things only truly got better when Jane was 12, and able to be on her own for a while.

And then, years after that...

Veird.

If nothing else happened, then Erick was 99% sure that this was his personal Earth, circa Young Erick Flatt, the one that would become the Apparent King.

There was a problem.

Multiple problems, actually, because Earth had magic...

But that was a part of the Malevolence problem, which was here on Earth, for sure, and so Erick would get back to that later, too.

Erick focused on himself, on following his own Lightning Path, his current Path, and choosing all the best choices for himself and for others...

The Path of best choices headed in whatever direction he wanted.

Those Paths called to him to do good here, though, which could have a whole bunch of Butterfly Effects if he followed that Path. But right now, his Path was calling strongly for Erick to step outside of the bathroom and take a glance at a girl who was walking by, who was feeling terrible because her hair dye had come out the wrong shade of blue, and now she hated the whole idea of dying her hair. The best thing for him to do would be to see the girl and then stare awestruck at that girl, and then when she asked him what the fuck he was looking at, he could honestly say that he liked that color. That small action would set that girl’s entire life onto a good path… Or at least she’d be good for another week.

… Erick decided that he wanted to help, and to see what happened to the future if he changed the present.

Erick stepped out of the bathroom, right as the crying girl with the blue hair stepped into view. Erick stared, marveling at the blue of her hair. It was all sorts of shimmery and with green undertones. Whoever had done that had done it very well. It was easy to appreciate the beauty of it all. And yet, the girl was headed toward the woman’s bathroom, carrying a shopping bag with some bleach and dye. She saw Erick staring at her.

She scowled and yelled, “What THE FUCK are you looking at?! Creep?!”

Erick honestly said, “Your hair is amazing. It’s beautiful.”

The girl’s mouth dropped open. She stared. Her tears dried for a moment. And then she remembered she was mad. “Fuck off, creep!” She rushed into the woman’s bathroom and shut the door. She took her time to go to the sink, trying to understand what had just happened. She almost turned around and came back outside, trying to make herself mad again, but then she stopped herself. She muttered, “Hot creep.”

She went to the bench at the back of the woman’s bathroom and sat down, to stare into her shopping bag with its bleach and a simple brown hair dye. The girl would be on that bench for a while, trying to figure out what had just happened. Eventually, she’d dye her hair back to brown, but she would remember being called beautiful for the rest of her life, and eventually she’d go back to dying her hair, and telling everyone who told her they didn’t like her colored hair to fuck right off. She’d get into the punk scene, and go on to become a minor musician celebrity. She would always remember Erick’s simple complement, and it would warm her for the rest of her life.

The future had changed, irrevocably, and for the good... As long as nothing else happened.

Other stuff was going to happen, for sure.

The Infinity of every Layer was always generating new worlds from every possible action happening all across all of them, all at the same time. Living inside the Fractal Universe, once you knew how it worked, was less like living in an individual part of a multiverse, and realizing that you lived on an ever-multiplying cascading river, and everyone you ever knew was there with you, but they were also going down their own paths in life, which would diverge from your own path in an irreconcilable sort of way. And yet, they were still there, with you, on your own path.

And then magic got involved, and made things like Margleknot’s society, where everyone lived on the same Layer and multiverse, an amazing sort of thing. The same situation happened with Veird’s Godpact world. Nexus events in worlds also spilled out into other versions of those worlds in undeniable sorts of ways, too.

Infinity was both amazing and horrific to think about, so it was usually best not to think about it, and to cherish what you had.

Erick walked away from the bathroom, thinking about stuff as he headed into campus, to get to the town on the other side. He could have gone through the woods in the other direction, but he went forward, instead.

He had a lot of thoughts as he hid behind bushes and low walls to evade the campus police. There had been a big rager last night on a Sunday and the townies had come onto campus in force, and the cops were still angrily clearing out townies. Erick, of course, didn’t evade the early-morning college students. The students all saw him hiding. They knew what was going on, and they laughed about it. One pair of girls even covered for him, to help him make his escape by distracting a donut-eating cop that was stationed at the gate on Erick’s preferred exit.

He could have turned to light and walked away, but he didn’t want to do that.

He was checking on Young Erick’s future all the time as he set off butterfly effects everywhere, and yeah, there was some alteration, but he was still on the same slice of infinity as Young Erick, and Young Erick was still headed toward Veird… So what was happening here? Erick needed to find out.

Also, Erick wasn’t evading the police just because he shouldn’t be here.

He had no identification at all.

This person that Erick had woken up as was not a person at all until recently… Maybe. Maybe this guy died in his sleep and Erick slipped into the body? Maybe Erick created the guy whole cloth? He couldn't check the manasphere for the history of it all because there was no manasphere here on Earth. Erick assumed that he had created the person whole cloth, but without any IDs for whatever reason…

Or maybe something weirder was going on.

Whatever the case, Erick needed to avoid the police. ‘Oh, you don’t got no ID? We’re calling the real cops on you, kid.’ Erick didn’t need some sort of ‘Fractal Sight’ to see that things would spiral bad from there. Really bad. Like, governmental-agency bad.

It was weird to pick up those clothes in Young Erick’s room and not have a wallet, or anything at all. Of course he had no cellphone, but even in 1997 people had wallets. Great big ones, too, filled with all bunches of cards and photos and even a condom or two for those calmer sort of weekends. Young Erick had a box of condoms back in his room, and he went through a box a month.

Well.

Whatever?

Sure.

Whatever.

Erick passed a large window on a bakery outside the college. In the light of the morning it was more like a mirror, and this person was young, hot, and with short blonde hair and blue eyes. He looked like he was more at home in the gym than on a treadmill, and he was a bit older than the usual college student; maybe 25. Young Erick was older than the usual college student too, though, so… yeah?

… Well! Erick certainly existed. This person he was, was here, and Erick remembered… people like him, anyway, back when he was in college.

Also, Earth had magic.

Not a lot of magic, but it had magic.

That had been the thing that Erick had avoided thinking about until he was here, away from his younger self and finally not in danger of getting found by the cops. Sure, he could have turned to magical light and stepped away from the college completely, but he did not want to take such an overt magical action. Not now that he looked around Earth and saw all these little bits of magic everywhere. People could be spying on the magic out there. There might even be magical societies, and Erick didn’t want to get involved with them.

There were always magical societies on worlds like this; Erick had seen a lot of them in his universal travels. Earth was literally nothing special compared to all the other worlds Erick had seen in his work against corruption; it was exactly the same as many other worlds, in fact. That meant certain things were to be expected. Like magical societies.

Erick didn’t know it at the time, but Earth had been odd in 2047 in that it had no magic happening anywhere.

Not even reson-based stuff.

This, then, looked like a much more normal world.

Erick guessed that maybe 1 out of 100 people had something going on with them, though his sample size was currently just a few miles around himself, and he didn’t want to poke at anything too hard at all; Butterfly wings, etc.

Erick passed a paint store on the street outside of the community college and the girl behind the counter had some sort of reson-thing going on with her eyes, as she painted a window display. Down the road, Erick saw a cook in a breakfast joint have something going on with his hands as he flipped breakfast sausage patties. A woman at a public payphone held her pager in her hand as she spoke to the person on the other end of the line, talking about where to find things in a warehouse, her mind crackling with some sort of memory magic.

Erick walked all the way across town, through nice neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, and he saw a lot of magic everywhere, but… Maybe Erick should re-examine his idea that Earth might have a magical society or three. Not a single person out there knew what they were doing with that magic at all. It was all natural magic. It all just happened. No one actually tried for magic at all.

Erick had one big thought about that.

In the year 2047, there was no magic on Earth at all. Nothanganthor had claimed that he had removed all of his Malevolence from Earth —which he had said was here, and the ‘cause’ of Erick’s own Benevolence— and left Earth to Erick. And yeah, Erick saw some Malevolence here, so at least that part of Nothanganathor’s story was true. Red Sparks glittered in the heart of a father over there, as he roared at his teenage son that the son needed to do better in school, or else he would be disowned. Gods. Seeing the father yell at his own son almost sent Erick into a rage, but then the Malevolence connected to the son and the son gained his own spark of Red. Erick opened his Fractal Sight.

That son would go on to bully kids in his school, and thus ‘do better in school’ by way of stealing the homework of others.

It was a cycle of violence.

Erick wanted to intervene, and yet… If he did that, then… He wasn’t sure what would happen. There was no easy solution to that sort of problem, anyway. Maybe he could reincarnate the father as a better person? But the father was probably getting shit on in his own life, causing that shit to roll downhill...

All of Earth had problems.

Magic, however… didn’t seem to be a problem?

It was there. Nothanganathor claimed to rid the world of it in a few decades. So yeah, it made sense that it had been here. Erick had assumed that Nothanganathor had spoken of getting rid of Malevolence as what he had done to the magic of Earth, and since there was no magic, that meant that the only things here had been Malevolence. But that was obviously not the full story at all. The full story was that Nothanganathor killed all the magic users on Earth in like, 30 years, or something like that.

Erick closed his eyes to those problems, and focused on his own. As Erick turned his gaze back to the college, back to Young Erick, Erick noticed something that he had not noticed before.

Young Erick wasn’t magical at all.

He had no Dark Mark. He had no power at all. His soul was a thin thing, rather weaker than all the other souls around him, actually. He was just a dude, coasting through life…

So what the fuck did that mean?

Was Erick not born a Wizard at all?

… Erick paused on the sidewalk, beside a park where kids played and moms gossiped with each other as they watched their kids. A thought had hit him. Did he make himself a Wizard? Well, sure. That’s what people had said before, but it was always a metaphorical sort of thing. ‘You made yourself who you are’ and ‘You certainly didn’t start off throwing lightning bolts’ and all that sort of stuff had happened, but Rozeta had also said that Erick was a Wizard before he hit Veird… Or rather, that Erick had been a Wizard when he entered the Script for the first time.

Hmm.

That Young Erick back in that room was Erick, but also not. Young Erick wasn’t a Wizard. Young Erick was stuck here, in this life, in whatever he made of it. Young Erick had choices ahead of him, and all of his life could change based on any one of them.

… But Jane didn’t have any choices, because she did not exist. Not yet. Maybe not ever, if things didn’t go how they had gone before.

Erick saw a Path open up before him.

He could sever himself from his own history, sending Young Erick down a path of something else, and thus Nothanganathor would have nothing to ever use against him. It wouldn’t take much to do that. Erick could go back home to his parents —oh, shit, his dad was still alive! Mom had already passed on from blood cancer, but Dad was sitting at home, not going to the doctors, and not getting diagnosed while he was still able to be healed… for a given definition of ‘healed’. Medicine in 1997 wasn’t great. Dad was only gonna get tested when the problems actually started to hurt him, and then insurance was going to drop him and he was going to die.

But Erick could fix all that, and then he could fix up Young Erick’s life, and Jane would never happen and everything would change. Young Erick would take another 10 years to grow up properly and when he did he would have a family in his 30’s. He would never go to Veird. Veird would remain as it was before Erick got there.

The war with Nothanganathor would never get as bad as it did, and then Erick could just go to Veird and blindside Nothanganathor, fighting him then and there, while he was still the Arbiter of Veird. He probably had some safeguards against that because he did win once, to Ascend to the God of Magic, and exist outside of time, like Erick did now, sort of, but it would be an easier fight…

Maybe. Who knew.

That was Option One.

Option One also had concerns regarding multiversal shenanigans, but Erick would rip through those, too.

Option Two was to reinforce his history. Young Erick would go through some very big trials, and then Erick could have his family again exactly as it was, and this time… This time, things would turn out how he wanted. Not how Nothanganthor wanted them.

The second way was much tougher, of course. Erick would need to thread a whole bunch of needles, all at once, and he would have to stay here for the next 23 years…

Or maybe just step back? Let stuff happen? Maybe everything would happen as it needed to happen as soon as he wasn’t here interfering…

Well. No. He’d need to step in and help make Young Erick a Wizard; the guy had no Dark Mark at all. Maybe he gained one later? Somehow?

Option Two was Erick’s choice, obviously.

It was selfish beyond belief in some ways, for Erick would be orchestrating everything for his own benefit… But also, the Veird Erick and many others had worked hard to make, had been prepared to face Nothanganathor (as much as they could have been) and now, as soon as Fae Erick rejoined them, they would be more prepared. They could actually win.

… Erick was going to be a little selfish. He was fine with that.

Anyway.

If Nothanganathor was to be believed, Erick became a Wizard in an almost ‘immune response’ scenario against Malevolence. Erick didn’t believe that for one fucking second… And yet, it kinda made sense? Maybe it was the truth in the way that someone can say ‘the sky is blue’, but which doesn’t take into account sunset, night, sunrise, storms, and all that.

… Erick decided: he certainly wasn’t going to spend the next 23-ish years on Earth, watching shit happen.

He could bounce around some.

Maybe he could go live a quiet life down in, like, Australia, or something, as he waited for the big events in Young Erick’s life to happen? That might be fun.

Erick smiled at nothing in particular and he started walking again, having only briefly stopped by the park with the kids and the moms. All his thoughts had taken but a half second to work out, so that was all working back as it should. Erick chuckled a little, and then he practiced, “G’day mate. Crikey it’s a bonzer week. I need to get me thongs on and go walkabout outback.”

… Was any of that correct? Some of it sounded correct. Sort of.

A pair of moms had stopped their gossip to look at him, wondering what he was doing out here. They should have been looking more at their kids, but gods knew that Erick had trouble keeping up with Jane all the time; he didn’t blame them for wanting to talk with each other instead of stare at their kids.

But one of their kids was about to poke the other one in the eye with a stick, and it wasn’t going to be an accidental poke, either. Those kids fucking hated each other, but both the moms thought since they were good friends, that their kids were also good friends, but those two kids had been out for blood for, like, maybe a month? Erick guessed a month. They were only 6 and 7, though. They were both too young to understand their own feelings, or how much damage they could do with those sticks.

Erick had a thought.

The Dark would probably let the kids hurt themselves. That’d be the usual go-to lesson plan on Veird. But Veird had good healing. Earth had no capability to replace eyeballs.

Erick pointed at the kids as he kept walking, saying, “They’re gonna poke an eye out with that.”

Both moms stopped gossiping with each other and both of them got furious, real fast. One mom was almost ready to light into Erick and the other mom was going to help, but the other mom looked at her kid. Her eyes went wide and then her mouth opened wide as she yelled her child’s full name, launching off of her seat. The first mom had a moment of uncertainty, and then she saw what was happening with her kid. She shot off of the bench, too, both of them yelling at their kids not to play with sticks like that.

Erick smiled at the scene. A thread of lightning untwisted within his vision, a tiny problem removing itself from the timeline that would have become a massive event in every one of their lives—

Something twitched within Erick, as a Path diverged.

Erick kept walking, but his smile dropped as his Sight extended off into the future. He had just flapped a very large butterfly’s wings and Jane no longer existed, and thus this Young Erick Flatt never went to Veird.

Ah.

Shit.

So.

Uh…

Where did he go wrong? Was it the kid back there—

Something twitched again, and Young Erick Flatt’s Path was leading him back to Veird.

A mirror had shattered, and then it came back together.

… Uh?

What just happened?

Erick had no idea.

He needed to sit down and think.

Erick got to walking under the bright morning sunshine, all the way until he reached a fast food joint. He went inside and ordered some food while he copied some money inside the cash register in order to pay. He changed the serial numbers on the cash, of course. With greasy breakfast sandwiches in hand, Erick sat down at a table beside the kid’s play area, which took up a good half of the seating space—

Nostalgia hit Erick like a truck.

Some kids played in the ballpit inside the kid area, while another pair of kids played on some arcade machine. Jane never got to experience a kid area like this, and yet they used to be so common across America. Erick remembered playing in one when he was a kid, and his parents took him to a place like this every so often. Veird didn’t have anything like this at all, or at least not outside of playgrounds.

Erick watched the kids play for a little while, feeling somber.

And he thought.

As he ate, he turned his senses inward, to see his Lightning Path, and to view the fractal splash of reality all around him, as he had so very many times when he was cleaning up the universe of those few spots of corruption. He also looked in the past, to see whatever that ‘blip’ was that had happened after he stopped that kid from losing his eye.

He was no closer to understanding how the world had ‘torn’ and then ‘come back together’ after a half hour of magical thought experiments, but he had a few guesses. Perhaps Benevolence was working outside of his direct control? To fix things how he wanted? And yet… That felt like a weak answer right now.

Perhaps Erick’s very presence on this plane of existence was like a weight, ensuring that this history remained strong? That seemed closer to the truth, but not the whole truth. Erick was practically a walking Nexus Event right now.

Breakfast was great. It was exactly as delicious as he remembered, back when he was a kid. Of course the sausage and bacon and egg and the single squirt of ketchup was a pretty abysmal meal, but it tasted great when your taste buds were new, or when you didn’t have to worry about heartburn. As Erick had gotten older, this meal had started to taste less and less good, and his body started telling him that the grease was bad. But Erick was young again, and the food was great.

He went and got another one, and then he sat back down.

Soon, he left the place and went for another walk.

He walked for a few days, not bothering to sleep or do anything else but walk down the road, wherever it took him. He cleaned himself up when he got dirty. He ate when he felt like it. He copied some clothes and wore them. And he did little good things for people as he walked.

A very old woman was about to have a heart attack, as she struggled to get out of her car to go into the grocery store, but Erick healed her and helped her get her walker out. He also copied some of the money in her purse and gave her some more of what she already had, though he did change the serial numbers. He didn’t want her to be suspected of counterfeiting. Later, the woman was so surprised at the register when she saw she had two extra 20s, which was more than enough to get everything she wanted. She told the boy scanning her groceries that she was going to have the best possible birthday party for her grandson this week. The boy scanning the groceries didn’t care, but he pretended to.

The grandmother’s grandson would go on to have a lot more birthdays with his grandmother because of Erick, and those two people would grow closer because of that. It was a fantastic outcome.

Erick saw a homeless guy sleeping under a bridge. The guy had some sort of plaque and tumor problem in his brain. Erick cleared that up, ridding the guy of his cause of early-onset dementia and cancer, and then Erick cleaned up the guy himself and gave him $20 in his pocket. Four days from now the guy would finally start to realize that the voices were gone, and that he could go back to living a normal life. He would go on to get help at the local shelter, and this time that help would allow him to help himself.

A little boy was running away from home because he was scared his father was going to beat him. The boy was completely unprepared to run away, because he was 9 years old and his backpack only had 1 sandwich in it, and the kid was on the edge of the forest, unsure where to go from there. He had managed to get a full ten miles from home, though. Erick saw the kid, crying beside a tree, so he walked over while opening his own backpack. With a sandwich and soda can in hand, Erick sat down with the kid, and the kid instantly latched onto him once he showed off the food. And then the kid started talking. Soon, as the kid cried and ate his food, the story came out. He was running away because he had broken a window by playing with the baseball inside the house, and he didn’t want to be beaten. He was terrified of his father, and his father was going to be home in an hour.

“You know what’s more scary?” Erick asked the kid.

“Noo-ah?” the kid said, his mouth full of sandwich.

Erick said, “Getting a job. Making decisions for yourself. Taxes. Solving problems yourself but you don’t know how. Being alone.” He looked to the kid. “Being alone is terrifying. You should go back home and accept your punishment. Just imagine what your father is going to experience when he gets home. He’ll see a broken window and he won’t see you at all. He’ll be terrified. Don’t do that to him. Don’t do that to yourself.”

“He’ll beat me! That’s what the television says!”

“Television lies. Real life is so much more complicated, and you won’t make it home in any short length of time. Your father will be there before you get back, and your father will be worried sick. He will be crying. He will be furious. He will be happy to see you again.” Erick shrugged. “And if he’s not, then you don’t have to worry about his feelings ever again.”

The kid had a complicated set of emotions.

Erick handed him another soda, saying, “For the walk back.”

And then Erick left.

He was pretty sure he knew exactly what was going to happen when the kid got home, which was why Erick had spoken to the kid in that way.

The kid stayed there, just on the edge of the forest, off the edge of the road, for a little while. Eventually he got up and started walking home. When he finally made it back it was dark but police cruisers sat in the front yard, red and blue lights spinning. The father was there, sobbing and terrified that something had happened. He was an absolute wreck, and then he saw his boy walking up to him. The father broke down, and then the son did, too. There was a hug, soft words, harsh words, questions, and anger, but there was no hitting. There was only hugging.

The father and the boy’s relationship became stronger, because the father cut back on work and the boy actually asked his father to play catch again, like he used to ask. And this time, the father actually played with the son. Soon, the father started to attend the boy’s little league games, and the son eventually got into the pros in his 20s.

Now that was a big butterfly flap.

Young Erick’s timeline diverged, like the rumbling of a quake far, far out of sight. And then the timeline rumbled back into position, aiming back toward Veird. That future seemed even stronger after the rumbling, too, which was kinda weird. Kinda nice, but kinda weird, too.

Erick would figure it out, eventually.

“Maybe it has something to do with my Ascent to True Wizard, and solidifying my own timeline...”

- - - -

Erick stepped onto the stony shore of Lake Michigan. The air was cold and the waters dark. A storm held on the horizon, blowing waves Erick’s way, the wind catching on the crests of waves and sending droplets onto his face, and hiking clothes. It had taken him two weeks to get there, but it wasn’t like it was a destination or anything like that. It was just part of the journey, and Erick had been testing out his life and his power and the world around him the entire time. Mostly, he was helping people without them knowing how much he was helping them. There was that one time that he gave that kid a sandwich, two sodas, and a talk, and told him to go back home, as well as a few other incidents that would remain for-life memories in the minds of those he helped. But mostly, people got help without knowing it.

Earth was filled with problems.

Erick had his own problems. Every time he interacted with people, changing the world in a small, good way, he felt a little tear. That tear was Young Erick getting knocked off course on his trip to Veird. And then the tear would heal… or something like that, and Young Erick would go back to being on the right path to Veird. Erick wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but he was trying to find out.

Perhaps Erick was strengthening his own history by tearing at it a little, like how a muscle grew bigger and stronger through exercise?

Who knew.

The little rips had first happened when he prevented that kid from getting his eye poked out, but then it kept happening, because Erick kept helping people. Every time Erick helped people, the gap between Young Erick and him would tear, but then it healed soon after. Actions done further away from Young Erick seemed to tear less, though. Erick’s initial idea to go all the way to Australia for a while was probably an instinctive desire to get away from his own past, to prevent any big tears.

Erick was absolutely sure that if he changed the world a whole lot, then that tear would truly rip, and there was no putting that genie back in that bottle.

… Should he test that theory? Maybe. Maybe, if he did rip this past from his own past, he could also go back and change that rip, and undo whatever he had done to majorly change the world?

Erick stared at the waters ahead of him...

“Let’s test that theory.”

Erick raised a finger and pointed at Lake Michigan—

Another Erick stepped to his side, and gently put a hand on Erick’s outstretched arm. “Nope. That breaks the timeline for sure. Big rip. Unrepairable, except by me doing this right now and stopping you.”

Other Erick wore the same clothes as Erick did right now, so he couldn’t have actually lived enough of a life here on post-incident Earth to really check things out… And yet, Erick believed Other Erick. Mostly.

Erick asked, “You didn’t try and check to see if it was actually unrepairable?”

Other Erick smiled a little. “Nope. I felt it, though. I saw enough. And so I came back and stopped it. Also! Can you feel it now? The weakening of the world? With two of us here, infinity starts to spiral and we create an even larger nexus event than we already are, changing the world to make it revolve around us.” Other Erick stepped back from where he stood. “So let’s not make a Big Rip.”

Erick considered…

The world was kinda… thin right now. It was hard to explain, but yeah, this was the start of a nexus event, though Erick himself was already a walking nexus event, so… Hmm.

Other Erick nodded, and then gestured at the ground where he had been standing; where he put his arm on top of Erick’s, to stop nuclear explosion magic from detonating off the coast of Michigan.

Erick didn’t need to hear more. He nodded, and then he stepped just to the right of the spot where Other Erick had stood, and then Erick stepped through time, directly onto the spot where Other Erick had stood. Into the near past.

The first Erick was where Erick had been, and now Erick put a hand onto that Erick’s arm, saying, “Nope. That breaks the timeline for sure. Big rip. Unrepairable, except by me doing this right now and stopping you.”

The first Erick looked Erick up and down, and said, “You didn’t try and check to see if it was actually unrepairable?”

Erick smiled softly.

And then he went through the whole event from the older perspective, and then the other Erick went back in time, and Erick wondered if there had ever been a version of him that dropped an atomic bomb on Lake Michigan, to see what would happen. Did he need to go forward with that experiment, anyway?

… Nah.

Erick stepped further down the beach, continuing on his walk, practicing his slang.

“G’day mate. G’day matey… What’sa bloke gotta do to get a beer? … No. That’s not Australian…”

The further Erick got from Younger Erick, the easier it was to do good for others without twinging on the fabric of reality that made this Earth Erick’s past, so Erick was going to be far away, and yet, he saw that he needed to remain close, to ensure that this world remained, and that Erick kept his life exactly as it had been. So maybe Erick would try to help the world through intermediaries, instead of directly? Maybe he could do the same for Young Erick, too.

Maybe he should stick around to figure out whatever happened between 2019 and 2047, that removed all the magic on Earth, but he certainly wouldn’t be living any of that life chronologically.

Mostly, Erick was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Gods were extra-chronological entities, operating outside of time when they wanted, after all, and in some ways, they determined how time actually worked. In the Old Cosmology, the gods did exactly that, ensuring that their guarded worlds were all a part of the same time frame.

So while Melemizargo was (maybe) the God of Magic of the Dark right now, Nothanganathor was also the God of Magic of the Dark, too. He’d be showing up… maybe.

Erick considered the tiny Dark Mark in his own soul, as he walked the stony beach, and stepped over some driftwood. Should he ‘get rid’ of his Dark Mark? Hand it over to Young Erick right now? Would either of those scenarios be absolutely ruinous? How ruinous, though?

At least there were no magical societies on Earth. That’d probably end up as a whole thing if Erick stumbled into one of those. He was ready to get back to Veird…

Mostly.

Erick pulled a soda out of his backpack, which was connected to Benevolence Itself, his gate space. Figuring out a ‘bag of holding’ had been easy, and Jane had been right about how nice it was to have easy access to sodas and beers and fruits and meats and all sorts of food, whenever he wanted, without having to make them himself, or haul them around directly. Enjoying his powers and the taste of fizzy orange drink, Erick walked the stony beach—

Erick’s Lightning Path flickered hard, pointing back the way he had come. Back to the community college. Back to Young Erick.

Erick ignored the idea of being quiet and unassuming and turned to light to Step all the way back to the college, just in time to see Young Erick almost die due to a series of events, like he had stepped into a Rube Goldberg killing machine that looked nothing like a killing machine at all.

Erick had entered the scene on the far side of a street.

On the other side of the street, Young Erick walked on the sidewalk with some girl, beside a park. Malevolence flickered beside a squirrel up a tree. The squirrel flipped the fuck out, falling out of the tree and onto the ground, where it then ran across the road. Some grandpa, driving his car, panicked at the sight of the squirrel and turned off the road, aiming right for Young Erick and that girl. That grandpa pressed on the accelerator instead of the brakes. Young Erick and the girl didn’t notice the car speeding at them for the car was only 5 yards away when the driver decided he didn’t know how to drive. Young Erick and the girl noticed as fast as humanly possible, though.

Young Erick pushed the girl out of the way.

Erick had arrived right when the car was about to crash into Young Erick.

And then Another Erick waved from his seat on a nearby bench. He flickered some magic underneath Young Erick’s feet, and Young Erick did the only thing he could do, which was to leap up. Young Erick leapt, and then he crashed right onto the car’s hood and windshield. That was when the driver realized he should press the break instead of the gas.

Young Erick skidded off of the car, into the grass.

Erick’s heart had been in his throat the whole time. It was like watching one’s own life flash before their eyes, but in a disconnected sort of way that made Erick sweat anyway.

What followed after the crash was Young Erick getting out of the ordeal with a few scrapes and a ‘wicked tale’ to tell, according to him, as he smiled and told the apologetic and very-worried driver that nothing was broken. ‘Everything was fine!’ he said. The girl thought Young Erick was amazing, though she had gotten a few scrapes from when he pushed her. The driver had no insurance, and as soon as he saw that Young Erick wanted to play off this whole thing as nothing, the driver quickly worried over his own driver’s license being taken away, so he got in his car and left the scene. The girl with Young Erick was too young to realize what was happening, while Young Erick himself merely thought he truly was fine, so he shouldn’t press charges or anything like that.

None of them thought about getting the old guy off the road, because he clearly wasn’t fit for driving anymore.

In the course of several more years, that old man would get into several more accidents, and end up killing a family driving to church. He shouldn’t be driving, but he also had no one in his life to help him with anything, so he had to drive to get around. Erick would do something about that, later. Maybe get him to move to a bigger city where he wouldn’t need a car.

But for now...

The fabric of the world was thin; what with two Fae Erick and Young Erick all together. The older Fae Erick vanished behind a tree, leaving Erick to go back in time and do exactly what he had done to save Young Erick’s life.

So Erick did that.

As Erick cast a tiny spell that pushed against the soles of Young Erick’s feet, helping him get some air, he felt Infinity spread wide, like a loose sweater. Erick casting magic upon Young Erick was the culprit. The world relaxed back down to a normal Path when the magic was done and Young Erick was profusely telling the old man he was fine. All Erick really learned in that moment was that directly helping Young Erick was off the table.

Soon enough, Erick waved at himself, across the road, and then he stepped away behind a tree, and stepped out where the Older Erick had vanished from, neatly closing a loop.

And apparently Young Erick’s life was still fine, though he would be feeling this crash for a while. That had fucking hurt.

Current Erick remembered that close-call. He remembered leaping up when the car had come for him. He also remembered how much pain he had actually been in, and the gnarly bruise across his back and left leg that he never got treated for. He remembered blowing off the girl whom he had saved, too, because he was in too much pain to have sex.

Erick hadn’t recalled it at first because it was a long time ago and he had partied way too hard back then, but yeah, that had happened.

… Erick spent the next few hours sitting on a bench by a lake near the college —the one he had fed the ducks on— thinking about what parts of his life he was going to interfere with, that his Lightning Path pointed toward, telling him that interference was necessary. Most of the time Erick would stay away, but…

Erick began writing on a piece of paper to organize his thoughts better, and to plumb the depths of memory that was already riddled with holes, thanks to drugs and booze, women and men, and not nearly enough schoolwork. A short while later, the list of possible deaths turned out to be a long list.

129 incidents.

31 were solid ‘this needs to not happen’ sort of things. The rest were iffy.

Did Nothanganathor do this?

Some of them, yes. Like that squirrel incident. That was not Nothanganathor’s direct working, though. Not really. That was an Establishment, cast from the future. Nothanganathor was trying to kill Erick from the future. Erick was literally on the other end of Establishment Magic right now, and he could see how the world was altering in the past to bring about an event an uncountable number of lightyears and 98,292 Layers away.

Erick was in the middle of the Wizard War, and though he was —for the first time!— in an advantageous position, he couldn’t see nearly enough of what was to come, and Erick was absolutely sure that when he started to foil enough of these little Red Plots, that the Red would start to act in side-directions. Not only that, but Erick’s eventual return to Veird and all of that was cloudy; obscured by whatever events would unfold when they unfolded. Right now, the war was rather slow and imprecise, and Erick would likely bounce around a lot through time…

But he’d also stick around, having a bit of a slow life for a while. He had earned that. Maybe he’d go back to some other slice of Earth, in some early year, or something, and play around in the Gardens of Babylon, or see what being a real cowboy was like, or… Or do something besides race around and save his own dumb ass from death.

Erick looked at the list, and knew that most of these incidents were just normal human stupidity.

Young Erick was a dumbass.

Erick set the list aside and looked out across the lake in front of him, muttering to himself, “Did I really have that many close calls? Shit. I almost die when I fall through that floor in a month, too, right next to that broken pipe. Then there’s the leaf fall incident, where I jump into that pile of leaves and narrowly miss braining myself on that fire hydrant. Even when I was 38, with that one gangster who was always waving that gun around and it went off, missing my leg by inches...” He paused. He looked at the list again. “I think I relate to Jane a whole lot more.”

And then there were the bad incidents. The ones that Erick didn’t write down at all.

It was amazing that Erick didn’t catch HIV like George and his boyfriend, both of whom died in 5 years. It was amazing that Erick didn’t die from those random drugs at that one party in two weeks, where those same drugs had killed a girl. A hiking incident in two years involving a rabid bear, or something like that; Erick had never found out. Boating trouble in 10, when that engine exploded and the boat sank off the coast of Florida, and Erick swam to shore with three other guys, and all of them were bleeding.

That decision in that dark room, while holding a gun and baby Jane screamed at the top of her little lungs because there were no more diapers and Erick had no money to buy anything else, and it was either go out and rob that convenience store or to try something else. Anything else.

Young Erick was a dumbass, but he was also plagued by Malevolence.

Erick crumpled the list in his hands, saying, “Not while I’m around.”

- - - -

1997, not much later:

Erick lay in bed, staring at the posters on his wall, feeling so weird. Like the world was fake and everything was wrong. He had failed his midterms in biology, and he was now on academic probation. Everything had been going so well, too… Well. No. Everything was going wrong. Everything in his life was a horror and a failure. He was a failure. Tears crowded his eyes and he sobbed, alone, in the twisted covers of his bed. How much money did he have left to pay the bills of even going to college, anyway? He had saved up some, but it all went away too fast and he had no scholarships and he had just been fired from his part-time job—

The door knocked.

Erick breathed deep and steadied himself, saying, “One moment!”

Someone said something on the other side, and Erick had no idea who it was. Maybe a man’s voice? Erick got up and put on his nightshirt. Boxers were good enough to answer the door, so that’s what he did. “Hel— George? What’s wrong?”

George was a big guy. Muscular and very gay, though only a few people really knew that last part. Best friend to all at the gym, too, and willing to raise fists against the bigots at that same gym. He had beaten up and kicked out more than a few assholes since Erick had known him. George had been feeling under the weather for a little while, though, so Erick hadn’t seen him in a few weeks. Right now he looked like a beaten dog as he stood outside of Erick’s room. With dark circles under his eyes, George was looking skinny even though he wasn’t skinny at all.

George softly said, “I need to come inside and tell you something important.”

Erick stepped back.

George came in.

And without waiting for anything else to happen, George started to tell Erick how he needed to go get tested, and how he and his boyfriend were both Positive.

Erick’s world crashed down on him for the second time in as many days. And then Erick held George, and told him that they had new antivirals out, and that everything was going to be okay. George sobbed hard, telling Erick not to touch him, not to be near him at all, because he could catch it. But Erick held on, saying that Princess Diana touched Positive people all the time, and nothing happened. George could still hug people, and Erick could still hug him right back.

George sobbed onto Erick’s shoulders.

- -

Erick watched from a lab in London, and then he got back to work on the next generation of HIV antivirals, which was mostly just getting the right people into the right places. Erick wasn’t great at this particular kind of science, and he didn’t feel the desire to learn that much, because it wasn’t important for him to learn this stuff, anyway. It was important for the people of Earth to learn this stuff.

These particular antivirals wouldn’t come out for a decade or more. It wouldn’t be fast enough to save George or his boyfriend, or the millions of other people who suffered from that hated disease, or all the other viruses on Earth.

But Erick had a plan to save everyone, anyway, in other ways.

- - - -

1997, later:

Erick laughed as he got out of the shower, saying, “You shouldn’t worry so much about it, Margaret!”

Margaret followed him, soon ruffling her towel all over herself as she said, “It’s a big deal, Erick! This internship might be more important for me than college. I might just need to take it!”

“Then you should take it,” Erick said, smiling as he watched his girlfriend put on clothes. “College is for getting a good job, right? Take the connection with your cousin’s boss and just do it.”

Margaret paused… and then she pulled her shirt down and looked at Erick. “It means I’ll leave college. I’ll leave you.”

Erick nodded. “Yup. And when I graduate, maybe I’ll look you up, and we can get back together, for real. Maybe your cousin’s boss will have an opening for a business major. You said he was like, some big shot with 10,000 employees, right? What’s one more.”

Margaret’s eyes went wide and her lips stretched into the most wonderful of smiles. “Really?!”

“Yeah. Let’s make a plan for it.”

“Oh my god, Erick,” Margaret started to cry tears of joy.

Erick chuckled a little, and then he hugged the love of his life, and then they did a lot more than hugging.

- -

Erick downed half a bottle of whiskey from his office as he watched Young Erick and Margaret get to making Jane. The office was a pretty good office. It was a Social Services office in Detroit, not too far away from Erick and Margaret.

The Malevolence in Margaret’s body sparked Red and powerful as it mutated what was to come, turning Jane into an ectopic pregnancy. Margaret would die rather than get an abortion, even when she knew it was killing her, and by the time she went and got it done, it was too late. Or at least that’s what Erick foresaw.

The world almost did a Big Rip right then and there, or rather, over the next few days, when the sperm actually met the egg in the completely wrong place.

But Erick meddled.

He might not be able to cast invasive magics on Young Erick himself, but Erick could certainly create a successful pregnancy in Margaret, instead of death.

Jane would happen, exactly as she had happened.

Erick finished off the bottle of whiskey in his office of Social Services, and then he rapidly stuffed the bottle into the drawer, acting like a kid who had been caught—

The door to his office slammed open, and Erick’s boss, Manfield, stared down at him. He sniffed the air. “I smelled whiskey, Kevin. I know I did.”

Manfield had some Malevolence inside him, too. A lot of the world did. Half of Erick’s accepted job right now was cleaning it up and setting the stage for good things to come, and whooooh boy, did Erick need to set stages. Erick had messed up more than once when confronting Malevolence on Earth, and he had needed to redo things here and there, but the Malevolence here on Earth didn’t seem to have any sort of consciousness behind it, so that was great. It made confrontations with the stuff… easier. Even so, Erick suspected he would be redoing this confrontation with Manfield several times while he worked here.

Manfield would actually be the man who saved Erick, when Erick walked into these offices a year from now, begging for any kind of real help he could get. Young Erick wouldn’t start at Detroit, but he would end up here, when all the other Social Services offices hinted that they might need to take Jane away from him if he couldn’t hack it as a single father. Manfield would be the man who helped when no others could.

But right now, Erick needed to save Manfield, first. Manfield was at his wits end with his alcoholism, and he was furious at everyone who dared to drink around him for whatever reason. And drinking on the job? Right out.

Erick breathed out, and then said, “I had a rough day.” He pulled open his desk drawer, and pulled out the empty bottle. Manfield’s eyes went wide at the offensive thing, but his pupils dilated, and he almost licked his lips. Erick said, “A woman I’ve been sleeping with is pregnant and she won’t let me know anything about the kid, or anything at all. She ran away to her family and I’m not wanted. She wants to keep it, and cut me out of her life. I thought we were going to get married.”

Manfield’s entire demeanor changed, but he still looked at the bottle. He grabbed the bottle, saying, “I’m throwing this away, and then I’ll be right back.”

Erick nodded.

Manfield took the bottle out of Erick’s sight. He stared at the container for a long minute, moving it back and forth, watching the drops of golden liquid at the bottom of the container move around. And then he shuddered and opened the window at the south side of the building. The open dumpster was just one story down. He held the empty out, and then dropped it. It clattered into broken glass inside the dumpster, and Manfield shut the window.

Walking back into Erick’s office, Manfield sat down with Erick, saying, “Tell me about it.”

Erick wove together a few different stories of his own time working in offices like this one, but he didn’t give Manfield anything to actually work with. In the end, Manfield left feeling like he wanted to help, but he had no way to help, because Erick wasn’t allowing it. They both knew it, too. Manfield would try to work on Erick, to get him to open up, but Erick would shut those attempts down.

Erick stayed in those Social Services offices for a month, and then he left without a word to anyone.

He did not move on, though. He just changed his face, and his position in the world, and how he helped people. Sometimes he was closer to that social services office, and sometimes he was rather far away.

Some days he was a helping hand at a church. Some days he was a janitor, telling someone that he didn’t know that mole on their neck was suspicious because he ‘had a cousin like that; turned out to be cancer’. And sometimes Erick just gave people extra money in their wallets, or pockets.

Manfield was on his way to healing from his own demons inside of 4 months.

- - - -

1998, January 5th:

Erick lay on his bed, phone in his hand, twirling the coiled cord in his fingers as he smiled and said, “Margaret! How’s your new job?”

Margaret was in California, in one of her father’s rental houses, holding the enormity of her belly as she pretended everything was okay, her voice full of false cheer as she said, “It’s going great, Erick. I’m just working the mail room right now. Sorting stuff for the guys upstairs.” She touched a pink slip beside her on the table and ignored the tears falling from her face. They had been falling for a while. “Soon I’ll be moving up to secretary for this one big lawyer, or at least that’s the talk around the room— Say. Uh. Do you want to get married? How about on the 15th? In ten days? Before your birthday on the 20th.”

Erick breathed deep. He sat up. He chuckled, and then asked, “That’s a pretty weird thing to ask over the phone, but heck yeah! I love you, Margaret. But. Uh.” He dropped his voice a little, trying to be playful-serious, even though his heart was beating a thousand times a second, “You’re gonna have to let me get on my knees in front of you and get you a ring, though.”

Erick hadn’t been sure about his feelings until he had said them, but yeah.

Yeah.

He loved Margaret, and yeah.

Marriage!

Yeah.

Erick could upend his life. College wasn’t going that great, but he had a few years under him, and maybe he could complete it later? Yeah. That would work. He could go back to doing… anything at all, really? Maybe something in the mailroom of Margaret’s work. She was doing well, and they’d need to put someone into her current position, wouldn’t they?

Yeah.

This could work!

Margaret giggled on the other end of the phone and wiped away a tear, saying, “I’m joking, but I’m glad to know where you stand.”

From the highest highs, to sudden, abyssal lows, Erick soared and then fell.

Splat.

Erick’s eyes watered, but he blew off that emotion like it wasn’t real, “Okay. Well… Of course I knew you were joking! Ha! Ha… right.”

“How do you feel about kids?”

Like punches coming from every direction, Erick had no idea how to move, or even what to do.

So he was honest.

“Uh. Kids? Yeah. I kinda want kids. I’m probably gonna die of genetic-based cancer or some shit like my sister and mom did, though, so maybe I shouldn’t be making babies. Dad is not doing hot, either, but at least I got him to go to the doctor. Hopefully it turns out to be nothing. How do you feel about adoption?” Erick smiled. “We could get a pair or trio of—”

Margaret hung up.

“… Margaret?”

Erick stared at the phone in his hands. There was no dial tone, so maybe she was still there?

He held up the phone again, softly asking, “… Margaret? Are you—”

The phone started whining.

Erick hung up.

He laid in the bed, unsure of anything anymore.

- -

Erick watched Young Erick from four states over—

“Sir?” asked Erick’s lawyer. “If you don’t want to do this, then we shouldn’t do this.”

Erick looked at his lawyer, and focused on himself, and his own plans, as he said, “I had a scare the other day. Even the press is talking about it. I was asleep before now, but I woke up. I don’t want to go to hell so I’m changing my ways.”

Erick was currently pretending to be a billionaire that died...  Well. More like ‘been murdered’. It certainly wasn’t how Erick remembered this happening, but he had only ever heard the story from the press. Now, he was an insider to the tale, and he knew a lot more than anyone else would ever know.

Once upon a time, Young Erick had read about a billionaire that changed his ways after a close call with death in the Bahamas. That story had inspired Young Erick to know that people can change. And so, Current Erick went to go see the incident that had once inspired him.

Under the waters of the Bahamas, the billionaire went fishing with a harpoon, aiming to kill and fry up some angelfish, just because some locals had told them they were too beautiful to hunt and that they didn’t taste good anyway. That harpoon had failed in his hands and ended up somehow backfiring, right into the billionaire’s air tubes. The guy had died drowning to a few cupfulls of water.

The people on scene didn’t even notice he was dead. They weren’t looking. They hated their boss, and for good reason. Oh, sure, they’d check on him soon, but until then, Erick had a decision to make that he never expected to have to make.

To Erick’s perspective, Malevolence had flickered Red under the water, causing the malfunction in the first place. Sometimes Malevolence just did that. It just killed people.

Most of the time, Erick stopped it.

Sometimes he stepped backward in time and stopped it more easily.

Erick didn’t stop the Red this time, because he could already See what was going to happen.

If the guy went back home after experiencing nothing wrong with this trip, nothing would change. If Erick saved the guy after he started drowning, then he would fire some maintenance crew and then sue a few different people into oblivion.

But if Erick stepped into this vacancy of life…

The guy was dead, and yet, the guy would return from his fishing trip a changed man, but it wouldn’t be the guy at all. It would be Erick. The guy’s big change of heart was a big story that had inspired Erick, and now Erick would be his own inspiration, though he wouldn’t know that for a very long time; not until today.

If Erick hadn’t stepped in, and just let the guy be dead, then the guy’s money would have gone into ten different organizations, each of which were poised to fuck over the world in a myriad of ways, mostly through funding rather evil lobbying efforts against equality and a bunch of hate groups that he had been a part of the billionaire’s whole life. And that wasn’t going to happen. Not on Erick’s watch.

And so Erick had stepped into the billionaire’s life.

That old asshole was both dead and feeding the fishes due to his own bad luck. The bastard didn’t deserve the good public memory that Erick was going to give him, but he was going to get that good public memory anyway.

The lawyer said, “I don’t believe that you actually want this, though, sir. Perhaps we should wait a month and see if you—”

“You can stop right there.” Erick said, “I am quite alright. And yes, I do want to fund those cancer and disease research programs. Take all the money out of that propagandist news fund and move it around, and if you cannot do that, then perhaps I should be getting new lawyers. Let’s defund those lobbying efforts, too. Redistribute that toward solar power and other stuff like that.”

Erick might not have been this guy, but he was still the Apparent King, and it was rather easy to adjust his countenance to quell all opposition. The lawyer and the financial guy both started sweating.

“At— at once, sir—”

The doors banged open and in strode a man in his 60s —the billionaire’s son— roaring, “What the fuck are you doing, father?! That’s my company you’re fucking over!”

Erick said, “I am doing the right thing, and I don’t give a fuck about your company, because I’ve seen what your company does, and it is horrible. Now sit your ass down, and if you can adjust yourself to doing good in this world and you can prove that you’d actually do those things, then I’ll keep you in the will.”

The billionaire’s son glared, saying, “I have worked hard for…”

The son explained himself, all the while displaying a lot of anger and fury.

Erick listened.

And then Erick did what he wanted to do, anyway. Over the next few days, Erick did some politicking and dynasty shaping, casting down the firstborn and raising up a few daughters and sons that were further down the inheritance line, but who had much better morals. The firstborn would come around eventually, but it would take a while. Erick was changing the world in a deep, fundamental way, into what it had been changed into during Erick’s own timeline.

Erick was saving a lot of people, left, right, and center…

But some guys didn’t deserve saving.

At least not yet.

Those people went into the bigger plans, that Erick would eventually get around to.

- - - -

1998, January 20th:

Young Erick was having a birthday party with some friends, but his mind was still on Margaret, so when George arrived at the party, Erick was not prepared to welcome him. Rapidly, out of Erick’s sight, people started talking about how George had HIV. Erick had not been able to step in in time, to tell people to stop being jerks. The party died as an HIV scare went through the entire group. George left. Everyone left.

And then Erick sat on a stool in his room. A cake with candles held to the side, on a foldout table. The candles remained unlit. The booze was unopened.

It was, perhaps, his worst birthday party ever.

It was also Jane’s birthday, but Young Erick didn’t know that.

- -

Erick was in ‘his’ office, signing papers, only a fraction of his attention on his surroundings, on the opulence of his view of Central Park, and on the secretaries and otherwise outside his office, rearranging everything to suit their boss's new needs. Soon, the shareholders would be on him, and then the government would be coming after him, too. He was changing too much, moving too much around. And yet, Erick could and would outmaneuver them all, using a fraction of his true power.

Mostly, he was watching Young Erick have a crisis, and also Margaret in a hospital on the other side of the country, for Jane was being born at that very moment, the Malevolence in Margaret flowing into—

The world began to thin.

A Future Erick walked into his office without preamble, saying, “Hey. I’ll take over from here. You should watch that stuff more closely and then do what you need to do.”

Current Erick had already expected to need to show up personally to the birth of his daughter at some point in time, and it appeared that he would finally get to do that. Erick stood from his desk, and said, “Thanks.”

Future Erick looked like he had a whole lot he wanted to say, but he chose not to say it. He simply nodded.

Erick decided to leave that as it was.

He Stepped away and the Future Erick shifted into the shape of the billionaire.

The billionaire’s secretary walked into the open doorway just in time to see the Older Erick looking like her boss. She paused, then said, “Sorry. I thought I heard… Nevermind.”

Older Erick said, “I’m going to do another shakeup. Call the lawyers, and my niece Deborah; the really weird one. I believe she has that Witch Coven group happening this weekend, and I want to attend.”

The secretary had absolutely no fucking clue what to make of that, but her ever-more-eccentric boss was just being his usual self, and so she said, “At once.”

- - - -

At a hospital in California, Erick stepped out of a janitor’s closet, pulling a cart of cleaning supplies. The smells of hospitals hadn’t really changed in Erick’s entire lifetime. The air was clean and smelled of disinfectant, and it was cold; all the better to inhibit bacteria development. In this part of the hospital, the air was also filled with the sounds of babies wailing and mothers grunting and doctors fussing. Some woman was about to die three doors down, about two hours after giving birth, because she was having a massive internal bleed that no one caught, and that no one would catch. Erick fixed that complication as he walked down the hall.

He fixed about 387 complications while he was there, and then he focused on the reason he was here.

The delivery center was two walls beyond his right side. Erick saw everything happening over there, as it was happening. Margaret was on the table, dilated wide, the doctor telling her to push. Margaret screamed—

The world thinned, as Another Erick stepped out from behind a counter on the other side of Jane’s birthing room, outside of the room. A lot of things happened, including several more Ericks stepping out of the walls here and there, some of them yelling, trying to stop the Erick closest to Jane from interfering, but other Ericks stepped in the way of those yelling ones, and shut them up, telling them to stop it.

Erick wasn’t sure what was going on, but he solidified the space around Jane’s birth, just like the Other Erick closest to her was doing. The multitude of Erick’s fighting to interfere or stop the interference faded away, back to whenever they came from. What were they trying to stop? Erick wasn’t sure, but he saw what he would have done in this moment, where his Lightning Path flickered in ten million different directions. He would have erased the Malevolence happening between mother and dying daughter, to save them both. But he wasn’t in position to do that. Future Erick was, and Future Erick probably knew more about what needed to be done than Current Erick.

Jane’s soul was barely there.

She was going to be born dead if she wasn’t born and saved soon.

Erick watched as Future Erick stepped into the light near the doctor, near Margaret, and, unseen and unfelt by all the people there, he reached out, and he waited for the moment to act.

Jane came out in a flush of body fluids. Margaret screamed and then cried in relief. The doctor cheered. Erick barely heard that; he only had eyes for Jane’s tiny, shriveled purple body. He only had ears, listening to the absence of breath and cry. But he sensed the thread of Malevolence that connected her to Margaret, through the umbilical cord. That thread held Jane’s soul together. It was the only thing holding her soul together.

And then the doctor said, “A beautiful baby girl!”

Margaret, half lulled into relief, suddenly gasped, her eyes going wide, her mouth turning into a deep frown as she yelled, “A girl?! It can’t be a girl! Not a girl!”

The other people in the room thought the mother was hysterical and worried and not really meaning what she was saying. Margaret meant every word, and a million more hateful words besides. Margaret was too tired to know that she should not be speaking so openly, though. She was too tired to see the doctor’s frown behind his mask, to see how the nurses who took Jane, trying to wake her up, had no idea what to make of Margaret, but they did not like her at all.

None of them saw how Margaret’s words echoed in her Malevolent soul, causing a cascading failure-to-thrive to shoot down Jane’s umbilical cord, into her body. Margaret had made a curse without meaning to, and then the doctor cut the cord, sealing the curse into Jane like a Malevolent tumor, her entire, barely-there soul turning Malevolent, and Red.

That Red curse became Jane’s entire soul.

And then Future Erick was there.

While the nurses fussed over Jane, trying to wake her up, Other Erick wove magic, but it was not Benevolence at all. Jane was Jane, and also Malevolence, and Benevolence would have killed her. So Future Erick’s Benevolence turned from iridescent white to shadowy, sparking Red, and it began to touch Jane, to pull at the threads of Malevolence in her soul, to undo the curse while it was still young—

Current Erick almost rushed the man. He almost stopped him. He wanted to, but he didn’t know enough, and—

—Jane’s tiny soul flexed to strength, the Red clearing away like a clot falling apart, revealing a simple soul of dust and light, like everyone else in the room.

Future Erick locked eyes with Current Erick, three walls away, and said, “Good luck learning how to do that. The Red will try to worm into you. Don’t let it.”

Future Erick stepped away.

Erick, as the janitor, stood in the hall outside of the delivery rooms, listening to the cries of Jane for a little while longer, while trying to ignore the cries of Margaret, and her soft, hate-filled words about how her father wouldn’t accept a girl granddaughter. By now, the doctor and nurses actually believed her when she said she didn’t want a girl. It was wrong. It was evil of her.

But the nurses and doctor had seen similar things in their life. Perhaps not as bad as with Margaret, who had come into the hospital alone to give birth. But they had seen some shit.

Shit like that was just a part of humanity.

Young Erick, bemoaning his bad birthday party half a country away, didn’t know it at the time, but Margaret’s job that she had taken and gotten fired from was a job from her very rich father, not some cousin’s simple boss, and that as soon as he found out Margaret was pregnant, he had given her some ultimatums. None of that excused anything she had done, but she was just a young woman in a bad situation, trying to do what was best for herself, without knowing how to do that without hurting others.

Young Erick never blamed Margaret for her decisions except for at his darkest points, and those were still years away.

What mattered to Current Erick, and what would always matter to Erick, was that Jane was alive. She was whole. She had soul damage, but it would heal.

And that was good enough.

Erick stepped away, casting himself through time.

He needed to learn how to do whatever Future Erick had done to save Jane.

- - - -

Erick Flatt, [75-ish] [Current Location: Layer 99,081; Earth, year 1541]

It took Erick three days to find a large collection of Malevolence upon Earth, in this year where most of his actions wouldn’t be affecting anyone at all in the future. He was also a good infinity of slices of layers away from Erick’s Earth, so whatever he did here probably wouldn’t affect there, at all.

… It probably would affect Young Erick’s slice of Infinity, considering Malevolence wormed through Infinity all the time, but Erick needed to take that risk. Even aside from Jane being born with Malevolence problems, it was quite possible that Erick’s experiments with the Red stuff would allow Jane to exist in the first place. And once he figured out this shit, then it would be easier to undo it later.

Probably.

That was Erick’s rationale for touching this shit, anyway.

The collection of separated Malevolence he found was on a tiny island shaped like a fishhook, when seen from high, high above. It was the island of Bermuda, though it would only be called that next century, and a slice of Infinity away. This particular part of Infinity was nearly completely devoid of people, so it made this version of Earth a good place to begin.

Erick stepped out onto a sandy beach and plucked a dirty glass bottle out of the waves, where it had been half-buried in the surf. The bottle was corked and waxed, but it was also adorned with barnacles and the insides were blackened mush. Whatever letters existed inside did not exist anymore, but Malevolence still clung to the putrid contents of the bottle like a Red poison.

Erick wondered if the letter was from some person tainted with Malevolence, or if it was from Nothanganathor himself, sent to Erick through Establishment. A lot of people passed Malevolence around like a curse, because it was easy for them to do so, because Malevolence didn’t dissipate in a manaless atmosphere like most mana did.

Which had some implications that Erick was following in Nothanganathor’s footsteps again.

Which was. You know. Ick.

Assuming no direct Nothaganathor involvement… Was this letter from someone who strongly cursed someone else, and they wanted this letter to get to them, to curse that person? Or was it the other way around, and the person who the letter was to didn’t want to receive the letter, so it got waylaid onto Bermuda? Erick suspected the second was most likely. He had some good guesses as to how Malevolence worked when outside of Nothanganathor’s control, but he hadn’t done any actual experiments himself.

The old Erick would have tried to reconstruct the letter, to figure out what it had said, and where it was going to. Erick didn’t care for that impetus right now. Nothanganathor was corruptive, even if he wasn’t actually corruptive, and so there was no point in reading this letter. So Erick gripped the Malevolent contents of the bottle and held onto them, pulling them out of the glass—

The Malevolence struggled and almost dissipated, but Erick flowed resons through his aura, into the Malevolence, to hold it there, to tell it that it wanted to learn how to use it.

The Malevolence struggled harder to get away.

At least it wasn’t Nothanganthor’s direct Malevolence. If that were the case, then it would have tried to meld with Erick directly, to influence him in whatever ways Nothanganathor desired. But, no; it tried to escape… Hmm. Erick had a thought. Was it trying to escape because it realized that Erick would try to use it against Nothanganathor?

No.

That was overthinking it.

Erick commanded the Malevolence, “You will bend to my will.”

The bunch of Red Sparks stilled, and then the sunk into Erick’s aura—

Erick almost vomited, such was his first metaphysical taste of Malevolence. It was like swallowing pure putrescence. Like Erick was human again, and seeing a mirror in a dark room and seeing a terrible reflection of himself, and feeling a rising heat that made him want to kill, kill, kill the impostor. It was like watching Margaret hate Jane, the moment she was born, and feeling an overriding need to hurt Margaret in order to make her feel the pain she was making others feel—

No.

That hadn’t happened.

The Red had infected him that fast, eh?

Erick pushed away at the Red and his soul cleared from the center outward.

Red splashed into the world all around him as Erick expelled a small nova of the stuff. It had already infected him that badly, in that little amount of time, that now all the world around Erick was filled with Red, and now the Red rained down upon everything.

Erick blasted the land with Benevolence and got rid of most of the problem, but some of it managed to get away, into Elsewhere, because of course it did. That shit spread like poison.

“Fuck,” Erick said, scowling at the blasted sand and trees. The ocean rapidly refilled the hole Erick had made, and Erick floated over to the part of the beach that was still existent. He settled down and grabbed a Red-infused rock, telling the rock, “Don’t do that again.”

Now that Erick understood Malevolence a little, when it slipped into his soul and he felt it try to do its thing, Erick pushed back on those feelings, cordoning the Red to the rim of his power. Once that was achieved, Erick began playing around with the stuff. He started, as always, with the basics, twisting his aura into a packet of power that would deliver a strike against a distant target.

[Malevolence Bolt].

A bright Red strike of lightning arced from his aura, impacting a tree. The initial damage was almost nothing at all, but the Malevolence did not dissipate like normal. It sank into the tree, into the very heartwood at the center, where it infected the fruiting bodies at the top. This was some sort of berry tree, and those berries turned Red with Malevolence, as they swelled to fullness. It was not a [Grow] spell, but it acted sort of like that…

“Are those fucking strawberries?”

It was a goddamned strawberry tree, which Erick was absolutely certain did not exist in this year of our lord, 1541, on this here island chain of Bermuda, in the middle of the Atlantic-fucking-ocean. But… Erick liked strawberries? So the tree made strawberries? Maybe?

With a new theory in hand, Erick thought of coconuts and shot another [Malevolence Bolt] at the tree.

The strawberries turned into coconuts.

“Holy shit. No wonder people were drawn to use Malevolence all the fucking time. What the fuck??”

Erick threw another [Malevolence Bolt] at the tree, thinking about cheesecake—

The tree started spilling out complex fats and carbs from holes in its upper branches, like some sort of white pus falling out of the places where the fruits had been, and then the tree died. It died fast, almost shriveling in front of Erick, and then it actually did shrivel and curl, dropping its leaves to the ground in a rush of fallen life. It had tried to do more than it was capable of doing, and so, it had perished.

Erick felt dirty about that, and yet, this was fine? Sure, this was fine. Malevolence looked to be truly use… ful...

Erick looked into his soul, and found the Malevolence trying to infiltrate again. Erick had somehow dulled his Benevolence sense to allow himself to work with Malevolence, and that had allowed another infection. Once again, Erick pulsed with power, throwing the Malevolence out of his body, and then cleansing the land of everything he could before the Red got away.

He continued to experiment with Malevolence, but he was even more careful as he went forward with animal trials, and then cursing trials, and then mother-child propagation trials of Malevolence, to see if he could replicate what happened with Jane’s birth. After 5 months of constant vigilance and more than one eruption of Red, Erick managed to replicate the cursing circumstances of Jane’s birth with some bats and with some insects.

A Red-infected bat gave birth to a bat that was fully Red.

A Red-infected spider carried babies on its back that became Red like the mother.

Erick’s first attempt to clean up the Red in the newborn bat was one of Benevolence, to simply wipe out the Red. This, predictably, killed the newborn bat. He had to use Malevolence to undo the curse, obviously. It took Erick another 4 attempts to accomplish that, and by then he was more than done with Malevolence, and Erick had learned how to Erase things with the stuff, too.

He never wanted to touch the stuff ever again…

But there was one more use for it.

Erick stepped back into a certain hospital, and this time he—

Another Erick was there, diverting Current Erick into his current spot, outside of the birthing room, and not into the actual position to do something with Jane’s birth. He was half a room over, still in the shadows and light, and Another Erick held him back, saying he wasn’t ready.

Ah. So. It appeared Erick was one of those Ericks that had tried to do something and then failed, so he was stopping himself. Still, though… Erick argued, “I can do it. Out of my way.”

“Nope. Can’t let that happen. Go do some more research. You have time.”

Erick stepped away so as not to strain the space any more than he already was. He was already half-sure that most of those Ericks out there in the crowd were more phantom reflections of possible Nows, and not really real versions of himself.

- - - -

Finally, Erick appeared where he needed to appear.

It was time to save his daughter.

With a twist of Malevolence, Erick pulled apart the curse laid upon his daughter at the moment of her birth, at the moment of her own mother cursing her existence. There were scars upon Jane’s baby soul, of course. They would heal with time.

Perhaps a powerful enough god, so inclined to see, might notice the Red-shaped scars upon her. Perhaps, in a moment of lucidity, brought on by a song from another land, sung by the father of the daughter, such a god might spare the oddities he saw before him, and then eventually try to make Jane one of his paladins.

But no one would ever know that Jane was born to the Red, except for Erick.

And he would keep that secret to his grave.

- - - -

That had taken way too long.

Erick stepped into the billionaire’s office, having just saved his daughter and spent way too long touching Malevolence, so he was kinda curt as he told his past self, “Hey. I’ll take over from here. You should watch that stuff more closely and then do what you need to do.”

The Erick-pretending-to-be-the-billionaire eventually left.

Erick didn’t have the heart to tell him it would take the guy 4 more years before he was ready to save Jane; it was best that he did not know that right now. Erick was here, now, and he was ready to get a move on. First things first, though! Erick transformed into the billionaire.

The billionaire’s secretary walked into the open doorway just in time to see Erick looking like her boss. She paused, then said, “Sorry. I thought I heard… Nevermind.”

Erick said, “I’m going to do another shakeup. Call the lawyers, and my niece Deborah; the really weird one. I believe she has that Witch Coven group happening this weekend, and I want to attend.”

The secretary had absolutely no fucking clue what to make of that, but she assumed her ever-more-eccentric boss was just being his usual self, and so she said, “At once.”

And so, Erick made plans for removing all the Malevolence out there.

He had spent 3 years learning how to work that magic, and more than once he had needed to use his Mark of Benevolence to fully purge himself of that shit, because that shit had started to infect him too deeply. When he was finally done learning how to use it, Erick had spent the next year removing all the Malevolence he found on Earth. It didn’t work that well.

No matter how much he tried, when he checked on the world just a few years after he declared it fully cleansed, the Malevolence was back. He even did a Day of Clouds in the 1670s. It was a small world-wide [Benevolent Cleanse] compared to what happened on Veird, and it was very targeted, only disrupting Malevolence itself, but it was still a Day of Clouds.

Erick spotted Malevolence a decade later, in ten different spots on Earth.

Obviously, his solution was not going to work, and he needed to do something more. Something bigger.

Earth didn’t have any hidden magical societies (or at least none that were out and about and doing magic) so Erick decided he needed to make one, to do all that he could not. It would act in the shadows and be a part of this timeline, and they would be there to stop Nothanganathor from fucking up Earth in the years between Erick’s departure to Veird, and whatever happened before 2047. He did claim to be responsible for removing the magic on Earth in 2047, but Erick doubted it would be that simple. Perhaps, when Erick won the war with Nothanganathor, that sort of confrontation simply wouldn’t happen between the leviathan and Earth. That would be the better outcome.

Whatever happened there, Earth needed some sort of magical society, though. In 30 years, such a society would be ingrained enough to be able to bring Earth into Infinity, with as little disruption as possible.

It seemed like a good idea.

Much better than making a moon base and watching the world panic from afar.

So Erick got to work, laying the foundation for a House Bene— No. Benevolence was too out in the open. As soon as Erick was done with hiding, he’d allow his Wizard’s Clarity to let his mana go, to expand outward and seed the universe with good fortunes for all it touched. But for now, Erick’s Benevolence was hidden, so he wouldn’t make a House Benevolence here on Earth.

A House of... Secrets?

House of Mana… No—

“Ah!” Erick said, “A House of Reason, but with some wordplay reserved for the people-in-the-know.”

- - - -

1998, May:

Erick sat in a dark room. It was not his college apartment. He and Jane had lived in Dad’s house for a while, but not anymore. The two of them lived on the wrong side of town, now, and Erick had no money for diapers, or formula.

But he had a gun.

The convenience store down the road was a good target. They saw him looking at the formula on the wall, at the prices, and they chased him out, knowing he was thinking of simply stealing it. Erick had gotten the gun from his father’s estate, which was just about the only thing he had left of his father. Collections had taken everything else of Dad’s, ever since his hospital bills had climbed high. This gun was all Erick had managed to take, and only because he had stolen it while the officers were kicking him and Jane out of that house, because it wasn’t Dad’s house anymore.

And now Erick was here, in the dark, looking at that sleek grey metal, touching the bullets, and the safety.

He could rob a place.

He really could.

The darkness of the room swirled hard, like void black ink. Cars drove outside, their headlights flashing across Erick’s vision like eyes in the night, their light casting squares of illumination into the gloom of the room.

Jane cried in the other room. She had stopped crying an hour ago, but now she was back to wailing. She was probably dirty again. Erick glanced over to the empty plastic of the diaper bag. There was nothing left in there. Jane had gone through the last one already.

Erick cried in the dark, joining his daughter in her pain.

And then he stared at his gun…

“Fuck. No. I can’t…” Erick set the gun down. He cried some more, but then he stopped crying and he went to Jane and held her close. “I’m so sorry, Jane. Things will get better, I promise. We can try one more Social Services office… and then… And then I’ll make some bad decisions, and you’ll be okay.”

Erick held her, and Jane eventually stopped crying. He used an old shirt and some papers for a makeshift diaper and Jane cried again, hungry, but Erick was sure he was out of formula. He went looking into the bag for formula, anyway, into the can, which he had thought to be empty.

There was maybe one scoop of formula left, and Erick almost broke down in tears of relief for that little bit of bounty.

- -

Erick watched Young Erick contemplate horrors in the dark.

And then he saw Jane cry, her wail like a pierce of steel through Young Erick’s heart. In that moment, as Young Erick glanced toward the other room with Jane wailing away inside, something bloomed inside Young Erick, even as tears poured from his eyes. He wanted more. He needed to be more. He stared at the gun, and then the Darkness twisted. Possibilities grew. The world turned thin as Young Erick’s soul fractured and came back together, without doing any of those things at all.

Erick pulled back from watching too closely, for to watch Young Erick too closely was to thin the world, just like it usually thinned when multiple Ericks from the same timeline got close together. This, then, was Erick’s Ignition to Wizardry, blossoming from the Dark and coalescing in a decision… to wait one more day. To try the Good Path once more.

At least once more.

Young Erick set down the gun and went to Jane and Jane calmed down, for she felt something ephemeral and calming spill out from her father, into the world, washing away her own soul damage. Young Erick had just become a Wizard, though he wouldn’t know it for a very long time.

Erick pulled away, far away, and he knew that he would not need to watch over every part of Young Erick’s coming life. He was starting to save himself.

Erick did give his younger self a bit more formula in the can, though. Just a little bit. Erick remembered how he had felt when he found that little bit of extra formula, and Young Erick reacted just as Erick had.

- - - -

1998, May, later:

Dark circles marked Erick’s eyes as he sat down in the social worker’s office. The nameplate read Manfield, and Erick had heard good things about him, but if this didn’t work, then… Then he wasn’t sure what he was going to do.

Manfield sat down behind his desk. “So Mister Flatt. I read some of your file. Where is Jane right now?”

“With a sitter I cannot afford to pay anymore.”

Manfield nodded. “Tell me why you’re here.”

Erick breathed deep. He was at his wits end—

The tears flowed hard, but Erick managed to say, “A woman who I thought I was going to marry turned out to hate me, and she didn’t even tell me that she had a kid— my kid! She named the girl ‘Jane’, as in ‘Jane Doe’, as in she doesn’t even fucking care about the girl at all— But I care! But I can’t do shit for her. I’m poor as fuck and I dropped out of college— I went back to get a degree but that’s not happening— And now I got a kid! I could work, but I can’t get any daycare that I can afford— Everything is falling apart.” Erick sobbed hard, once, and then he said, “And dad died. He got to see Jane on his hospital bed, and then he died, and we were living in his house but then the collectors took it and I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Erick grabbed for the tissues on Manfield’s desk, and he tried to act strong, but he wasn't strong anymore.

Manfield waited till Erick calmed, and then he began with, “A hard question: You want to keep her? Or do we need to talk to Child Services?”

“I want her more than I have wanted anything else in my whole life.” Erick said, “If you talk more about CPS then I’m walking, and I can find another way to make this work.”

Erick had walked out of these sorts of offices before.

He had even almost punched a guy who started to call CPS right in front of him.

Manfield nodded. He said, “So, Mister Flatt. I said I read some of your file, but I did more than that because it seems you already had something of a work history before you left for college. I already took the liberty of calling a few places. There’s home programs for single mothers up north, but they can take in a single father. It’ll be awkward —downright uncomfortable for you, because those women are going to distrust you a lot— but it’ll work. You’ll have to move to make it work, but the program has public housing. And then there’s the question of actual work. You need a good job; you can’t stay in college. That’s done with. You can go back later. Right now you gotta take care of Jane, and that means you need money. I got a factory job in that same town lined up for people who can cut it, and who really need it. A lot of those single mothers do the same thing, but they’ll be secretaries. You get shit janitor work, and it’s only part time, but that’s just the starter option. They also have a construction company wing that is always looking for men. When you get there, you can make some choices, but not a whole lot. You have a lot of rough years ahead of you, Mister Flatt, no matter what choices you make. So how about it? Does this option sound like something you’re interested in?”

Erick felt a weight fall from his shoulders. “Yes.”

“Good.” Manfield said, “Then let’s talk specifics…”

- -

Erick smiled a little as he remembered his first meeting with Manfield. He was the first social worker who actually tried to help Erick and Jane, instead of trying to take Jane away. Of course, looking back on it from his new perspective, Erick saw how much Manfield struggled to keep CPS off of Young Erick’s case, and how much the man truly did work behind the scenes to get Young Erick into those programs. This year was only the first of Young Erick’s hard years, though. It’d take 8 years of moving and opportunities given and taken away before Young Erick actually managed to settle into a place, with a good community of people who helped him just as much as he would help them.

But that was his life, now.

He was a Wizard, and the world was bending for him just as much as it was throwing shit at him. He would be saving himself from now on.

Erick had other people to save.

Deborah, the billionaire’s rebel granddaughter, looked up at her grandpa with concern, as they hiked in the woods of Washington state. Erick spent a few more moments thinking about the past, and then he came to the present, and allowed himself to fully enjoy the smell of wet earth and cool forest. Deborah looked over her grandpa, at how he walked so surely and had no trouble keeping up with her on her hike into the woods, and she hated him, but she said nothing. She showed nothing.

Or at least she tried.

She had been very pissy about Erick getting involved in her life the first time, with a whole lot of shit said in anger and then in fury, as Erick butted in to her ‘seances’ and ‘coven work’ that first weekend. This was outing #7, though, and Deborah had come to accept that whatever her grandfather was doing, she couldn’t do a damned thing to stop it, because if she tried then he would just buy out all her friends and have them simply drop this whole wiccan belief system.

Erick had already done that to 4 of her friends, because they were unsuitable for what was to come, for they would erode the system he was trying to build and they were just using Deborah, anyway. The thing was that Deborah knew that they were using her, and she didn’t really mind. She wanted anything that wasn’t the life her billionaire grandfather had demanded of her, and being friends with criminals and users was acceptable.

Deborah had developed those feelings about her grandfather because her grandfather had been her grandfather, though. She didn’t know what to make of this person who walked beside her, in these woods, and who actively seemed to be trying to get to know her, for her.

She was a good ‘kid’. She was 23, though; she wasn’t a kid. Her friends, Nancy and Lilly, and even the guy in the group, Joshua, were all good kids, too. They could stay in Deborah’s circle.

But right now, it was just Erick and Deborah walking in the woods, and for good reason.

The air was cool and comfortable, so Deborah wore her normal black eyeliner and some of her other goth gear; the silver trinkets in her ears and on her hands and wrists. Little ankhs and Stars of David and scales and crosses and otherwise. Normally, she would be wearing all black, too, but they were hiking and she wasn’t crazy. She was 23 and just out of college with a degree in business, because that was the only way that she was ever going to get an inheritance, according to the original grandfather’s proclamations, made 10 years ago when he was still alive.

Deborah was a little bit magical, though, so she was never going to end up like her real grandfather wanted. He always thought her some sort of satanist, but Deborah specifically didn’t wear any inverted crosses or any satanist jewelry, so when her grandfather had called her a satanist she had been hurt; more hurt than he would ever get to know. Her personal beliefs were more of the ‘the world is alive and we must cherish it’ sort, which Erick thought was great.

Erick watched her without watching her. He saw how she stepped onto the forest trail, and the slickness in a patch of slime turned solid at her footfall, so she didn’t slip. He saw how she casually touched poison oak climbing up a tree, and the irritants from the itchy vine didn’t touch her. Her makeup didn’t run, even though mist filled the air and got everything damp. Deborah was a bit kooky, but it was a pleasant kind of kookiness.

Deborah hummed a little, and then she asked the air, “Do you think Grandpa will actually tell me what he’s doing in my life today?”

Erick smiled a little, knowing that question was not for him. It was for the forest, and Deborah was getting her answer in the form of a butterfly flapping across the hiking path. It was a little light-colored moth this time, out here in the middle of the day. It was close enough to an answer, for Deborah.

Deborah muttered to herself, “Thank all the gods that the mystery of my grandpa is finally coming to a close.”

Erick knew what Deborah was doing, but he asked anyway, like a grandpa-trying-to-understand would, “The light colored butterflies mean a ‘yes’, right?”

Deborah’s eyes went wide. “… You actually listened to me when I said that last month?”

“I did.”

Silence, as they hiked.

Deborah said, “If it had been a grey-ish butterfly, then you would have been telling me more half-truths, and a dark one is a straight-up lie.” She looked at Erick, saying, “It’s usually a dark one when I ask the world about you.”

Ah.

Deborah was getting into full-confrontation mode again. She had been building up to that for a while, ever since her last big confrontation with him a month ago.

Well.

Sure.

It was time, and they were probably far enough away from civilization…

Erick decided it was time. He transformed the land up ahead, just out of view, into a trailside rest area, with solid and primitive stone seats around a boulder of a table.

Erick said, “So you ask the world a question about me, and you get a dark butterfly. Doesn’t that just mean that the answer is a ‘no’?”

Deborah frowned. “… Maybe.”

“So you aren’t even in the ballpark of a correct question. Of course your Butterfly Prognostication is going to say ‘no’.”

Silence.

Several steps later, they came upon the clearing.

Erick walked right to the table, saying, “Let’s sit down and talk.”

Deborah was stuck at the edge of the clearing, though, due to her own volition. She stared at the open space, and at the clear blue sky framed by massive trees and overhanging branches. She glared at her grandfather. “Did you mess with this trail? This is my favorite trail, grandpa!”

Erick smiled as he sat down on one of the stone chairs and a white butterfly flew across the clearing, directly between Erick and Deborah. Deborah noticed it especially because the butterfly was massive, easily a foot across, and it glittered with a touch of white Benevolence. She didn’t know what Benevolence was, though, so all she saw was the big white glowing butterfly.

And that both scared and thrilled her, and then she went back to being scared as she looked at ‘her grandfather’.

“Smart girl.” Erick asked, “How do you think I did it?” He gestured around. “This is a good ten yards of open space, with a giant boulder in the middle and I don’t see any construction work, and you were out here last week. Surely you would have noticed such a change to your favorite trail. We’re so far deep into the trail, too, and the forest is so dense. How would I get construction equipment out here?”

Deborah was wary. She stepped into the clearing, her eyes darting to the side, to look for more butterflies. And then she focused on Erick. “You could have used helicopters. Rip the trees out of the ground and then have some people come in on the ground and clean it all up.”

A black butterfly flitted through the air. This one was void dark, and made that way through some more Illusion magic and an inversion of light, though all Deborah really saw was the blackness.

Deborah noticed.

Erick said, “Possible.” He pointed to some ferns and such growing to the sides of the clearing, and to the trees overhead. “But those ferns look like they’ve been growing there for years, and those trees have branches extending out into the open. Surely any trees uprooted would have messed with the local ambiance.”

Deborah narrowed her eyes. “The workers I mentioned earlier. It's not hard to plant plants.”

She was in denial.

Another black butterfly fluttered across the clearing. This time Deborah noticed the butterfly, and how it came out of the woods, fluttered across, and then went back into the woods on the other side of the clearing. The path it took was a bouncing, yet mostly straight line from one side to the other.

Butterflies, especially giant ones which shouldn’t exist at all, should not be flying like that.

Deborah’s heart raced.

Erick said, “Try again.”

Deborah, mouth dry and eyes wide, stared at Erick, sitting on the stone chair in the clearing. She whispered, “My grandfather is dead, and you are not him.”

Erick held up a hand and let a white butterfly go. It fluttered around the clearing like a fluttering beacon of light. Deborah’s entire body broke out into a sweat and her heart beat harder than it ever had in her entire life.

Erick spoke, “The universe is so much larger than you will ever be able to know, Deborah, and yeah, your grandpa is dead. I watched him die on that trip to the Bahamas, due to an accidental harpoon malfunction, while he was trying to kill a beautiful angelfish. Perhaps the angelfish did something. Perhaps the universe hated him. Perhaps it was just a thing that happens sometimes. All I know is that I watched a man die and I saw how much damage he would do if he died like he did, and so I stepped in to take over, to make his legacy into something better.”

Deborah’s pale face had gone paler, her breath shallow as she looked down at the man who she knew was not her grandfather at all. She whispered, “Who are you?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you right now, and I’m not going to tell you the full truth anyway. Not yet. Probably not ever. You can rest assured that I am not Satan or God or anything like that. Gods are much more limited in what they can do.” Erick gestured to the stone table, and suddenly a checkered red and white tablecloth appeared, along with a picnic basket stuffed with goodies. “Let’s talk about the future and changing this small world for the better.”

Deborah was a smart girl. Erick saw her thinking a lot, in a short amount of time. And then she focused on Erick and asked, “Did you kill my grandpa?”

“Nope. But I am profiting from his death.”

Deborah strode forward and sat down, saying, “That’s really fucking morbid.”

Erick smiled. “It was either me profiting, or a whole bunch of hate groups profiting, and I chose myself. I’m also choosing you.”

“Why?”

“I have given my own reasons for my own actions. As for bringing you into it? Because you’re an outsider and you want to stay that way, and so you shall.” Erick added, “And you already have some magical power of your own, so it wouldn’t be too disruptive to give you more, and then train you how to use it properly. I’d expect you to train your friends, too, if they should decide to partake in the Truth of the Universe, and in 30 years when the war comes, you’ll either be ready for that war, or the war won’t happen at all. Personally, I’m hoping that I can make the war not happen at all. You and whoever you train are more of the backup plan. If the war never happens, then you’re to make Earth ready to accept magic on a grander scale than what I have shown you, but on a timescale that isn’t too disruptive to Earth.”

Deborah stared.

And then she opened up the picnic basket, her eyes going wide for a moment, before she pulled out a six-pack of the artisanal beer she loved. She pulled the beer can out of the cardboard, decomposable ring container, and then she cracked one open for herself. She set the rest in front of Erick. She did not drink hers yet.

She stared at Erick, and her eyes glancing at the beer cans.

Erick smiled a little as he pulled off a beer for himself, opened it, and waterfalled the whole thing. He held out his hand and the empty can floated for a moment, Deborah watching fully, and then Erick telekinetically crushed the can into a perfect sphere of aluminum, smaller than his pinky nail. Drops of beer splattered into the air where they held, floating, as the plastics and otherwise of the actual can disintegrated in a burst of flame. Erick set the remaining dot of aluminum onto a white square of the tablecloth in front of Deborah.

The world was silent for a while, as Deborah considered what had just happened.

Deborah asked, “You adjusted this entire little sit-down place right before we got here, didn’t you? Are you some sort of fairy?”

“I was originally human, and still consider myself to be human, and that’s about the only answer you’re getting in that direction… For now.”

Deborah stared at the drink in her hand and the picnic basket, contemplating a lot. And then she cracked the beer open and took a sip… She took another sip. “Tastes normal? I still feel like I shouldn’t be drinking this.”

Erick nodded. “As a rule of thumb, you don’t want to go accepting drinks and food from strangers, but as another rule of thumb, you must accept the food and such given to you by stronger powers, because they could just kill you if you don’t accept that offering. Accepting that offering allows for some rules of hospitality to apply. The whole idea of ‘rules of hospitality’ is a lie, though, but like most lies, a lie becomes a truth if told strongly enough.

“Hospitality Magic is an actual school of power in some parts of the universe; a codified thing, not so dependent on the whims of morality and individuals. In those cultures, all the noble houses have one or two of what you might think of as a ‘hospitalier’ or perhaps a ‘castellan’ or even just a ‘head maid’ or ‘butler’. Those magics they create when they offer temporary housing to people are a sort of social-magic that binds every partaker with certain rules. Basically Warder work, but by a specific name.” Erick conjured a notebook out of thin air and set it in front of Deborah, saying, “If you want to take any notes. Magic is magical, but it is also grounded in rather easy-to-understand rules which mostly cleave with cultural understandings and physical actions that exist separate from cultures. Your own Butterfly Prognostication is more like Witch Magic, which is a whole nuanced discussion, but which boils down to ‘you make the magic work how you think it should, because you’re kinda kooky with your understanding of the world’.”

Deborah stared hard at the man who wasn’t her grandpa as he spoke, and then she stared hard at the notebook that suddenly appeared before her. She gasped a little bit here and there, as she heard his words, and especially when she opened up the notebook. “… There’s stuff written here already?”

“A primer on mana, yeah. Not your own Witch Magic. You’ll have to explore your Witch Magic on your own; I can’t do anything to help you with that besides some general pointers. Right now you can’t do anything with the stuff in that notebook because you have no mana-making capabilities, but this is stuff you need to know anyway for a multitude of reasons, and also because I will eventually grant you mana-making abilities in addition to your Witch Magic.”

Deborah stared at the notebook, reading not a whole lot. She skimmed a few pages, her eyes glittering with wonder. She looked back up at Erick. “… I’m a witch?”

“You’re a witch.”

“Awesome.”

And then Erick transformed into his ‘usual’ 2-meter tall self, in some grey mage robes. He didn’t have his horns out, or even his usual face. He had gone for a blond guy with bright green eyes, which was near enough of a weird combination that it would be sticking into Deborah’s mind as ‘the real him’ for a long time.

Deborah stared at Erick, her voice an octave higher and a little more awed, “Awesome!” Deborah never liked her grandfather very much, which was not surprising, so it wasn’t too surprising that she was completely on-board with him being gone. Instead of asking about all of that, though, she asked, “How much of the wiccan stuff is true?”

Now Erick was the one caught off guard.

He knew that Deborah was the right choice for this… But she was still only 23.

She’d grow into who she needed to be.

“… Uh? Like that bloody gold ceremony that you did last week with your friends to gather gold to yourselves? Or rather, wealth?”

Deborah squealed a little. “Yes!”

And so, Erick began a discussion of stuff that he wasn’t sure about, by saying, “I don’t know about all of that at all. Honestly, I’m not a very god-leaning sort of guy, though I do work with them on occasion. The impor—”

“You work with them?! Who do you work with?! Odin? Or the Goddess? Mother Earth?!”

“… I have just now decided to cut out a portion of the planned conversation and never touch it again, but I can tell you that I don’t… Uh. I don’t know about any of those, uh, gods.”

Deborah was completely undiminished in her enthusiasm. “What about...”

- -

A little of semi-uncomfortable topics later, Deborah asked, “You said something about granting me power? Uh… Do I have to accept your power?”

“Nope. Not at all. You could be a witch if you want, and only a witch. Based on what we’ve spoken about regarding resons and infinity and the power of this universe, you should be able to gain a semblance of true power now that you know how it works.” Erick pointed upward and released a silent tendril of lightning that cascaded into an open sky. Within seconds, the world turned dark with black rain clouds that unleashed a torrent that broke upon a [Weather Ward] that stood just yards from their little meeting, here at the sides of the hiking trail. Rain splashed down in sheets and gusts, and water flowed around them. And then Erick twisted his hand, and the storm vanished. “The hand gestures were completely unnecessary, but they helped to bring your eyes where they needed to go, to see some of what I was doing.”

Deborah stared in open wonder at the newly-drenched world all around them, and then she looked at Erick. “That’s what actual power looks like?”

“... Hmm. Uh. No. Sorry. Not at all. That was… very small, actually.” Erick seriously said, “I hope you never get to see a display larger than anything I ever do, Deborah. And I mean that. Earth needs heroes, and for very real reasons. I hope I can win against those very real reasons, far away from this land, but even so, Earth still needs people who know about this stuff. Big things are coming, one way or another.”

Deborah had skirted around the big questions, purposefully not engaging with Erick’s attempts to bring up the future because she was afraid of it. Of the things Erick had hinted at. But Erick wouldn’t let her hide from the reasons he was doing this; not anymore.

Deborah centered herself, and asked one of her big questions, “Why are you doing this for humanity? You claim to be human, but I doubt that. Perhaps you started off that way, but you aren’t human anymore. So why do this for any of us? Why prepare us for anything at all?”

Erick said, “Because civilization is what we make of it, and I want to make one for the good of all and every individual, for all always.”

Deborah seemed a little relieved at that sort of answer, though she would be mulling over those words for the rest of her life. And then she asked, “What happens in the year 2000? Something big, right?”

The year 2000?!

Ha!

Erick almost actually laughed, but instead he pulled that emotion back to a simple, mirthful scoff, because he could see that Deborah was actually really concerned about that. “Ah. Yeah. Uh. You think something happens in 2000. It’s in the news now, isn’t it. I had completely forgotten about that. Uh… The computer guys work hard to fix some problems in some code and then nothing happens—” Erick paused. He reoriented. “Actually. That’s a good point. All of Earth right now sees that collective problem coming for their asses, and it’s a hard problem, so they work hard to fix that problem, and then the problem doesn’t happen.” Erick said, “You gotta keep up that energy for the rest of your life, Deborah, and it’s gonna be tough, because as soon as you solve one problem another problem appears, and a lot of the problems coming for Earth have much softer deadlines than some date in a computer. The problems start coming for Earth and they never stop, and they’re only gonna get bigger, and the responses you need to come up with will need to be better. Over and over and over again.”

Deborah was tense as she accepted that answer.

Several moments passed.

Deborah made up her mind, and then said, “I want the real power.”

Erick smiled and stood up, vanishing the picnic tablecloth and the debris of their little meeting, as he said, “And so you shall have some real power, in like a week or two, after you have some time to really think about all of this, and to accept that this is really happening.” Erick shrunk back down into the shape of the billionaire. “It’s a bit of a hike back, so let’s get walking.”

Deborah looked at the clean table and then at Erick. Erick had left behind the little aluminum ball from the beer can he had crushed, but Deborah picked it up and put it in her pocket, saying, “I’m not calling you grandpa anymore, but you still haven’t told me your real name.”

“And I won’t. Call me what you want; whatever will make you seem not-crazy. I have carefully curated the knowledge I have given you in order to make you a powerhouse, but also not targeted by my own enemies. If you had my name, then you would be in danger.” Erick said, “You have time to prepare, Deborah, but not a lot. Become strong in the way that people are strong on Earth, but also in forms of strength that do not exist here, in this culture you were raised in. It’ll be hard to prepare for what you cannot prepare for, but you’ll need to do it anyway.”

Deborah nodded, seriously.

They hiked back into town, with Deborah silent the whole time.

They parted ways.

Erick visited Deborah twice more. Once, she was furious and angry, and the next she was contemplative and serious. She was young, and this was big shit, so Erick let her have her emotions, and then they got to talking again about much more solid topics.

About what would happen, and what they would do about it.

Two weeks later, Erick thought about handing Deborah a bit of the Fractal Diamond that the Fractal Fairy had given him, but he didn’t know what that power did, and he wasn’t willing to do that. Instead, he went with his initial plan. He plucked out a small bit of his own soul, his own Mark of Benevolence, and gifted it to Deborah.

It was, perhaps, the ‘truest’ form of Benevolence that Erick had ever done, in that he directly gave away some of his power to another, installing it within Deborah like it was a Dark Mark, but different. Erick didn’t seem diminished at all; in fact, he felt stronger than ever, just by raising someone else up. And Deborah’s soul blossomed with iridescent white mana that was much more controlled than normal mana; her Benevolence stayed inside of her, instead of flowing away. It seemed she had inherited Erick’s Wizard’s Clarity. That was good.

Months after raising Deborah to strength, he and Deborah founded the House of Reason as a corporation, with all the attendant documents and rules thereof. They specialized in charity work and Erick used it as a tax write off to start with, but it would become more than that in the long term.

Soon, the House of Reason gained several new members, and Deborah was quite accomplished at Butterfly Reading, easily directing the entire organization on her own. She and Erick found more people, and Erick gifted them with tiny Marks of Benevolence, which granted them mana production that seemed to grow as they gained apprentices and businesses of their own, and as they rose to power, when they used that power to raise up even more people. Erick’s own Mark of Benevolence grew, too, but he kept his influence on the organization small; only Deborah and the ‘Inner Council’ of the House of Reason knew about him at all.

Two years later, Erick condemned his billionaire persona to a plane-crash grave in the Indian ocean. Deborah and two other people of the House of Reason were on the plane with him, and all of them ‘died’ in the public eye. In reality, Erick gave them all new bodies. In Deborah’s case, she got the body of her own successor in the House of Reason, which was a persona she had already been playing for the last year, in preparation for today. Others went off the map entirely.

The years of smartphones were rapidly approaching, and so was the spying capability of the government, so the Inner Council inside the House of Reason had to get good at everything, and fast. Luckily, Benevolence worked very well for giving its users a knack for getting out of the true sight of various alphabet agencies, while also allowing them to gain power and organizations of their own. They stayed out of trouble, which was their purpose, and they grew, which was another purpose.

They all saw so much wrong with the world, but they did nothing magical to influence events, though they did participate in the world as normal people. Their real powers were not to be used against others, but for others, and they all knew that.

Deborah ran her organization well.

They were not prepared to battle all of what might come, though they certainly tried to be prepared in the ways they expected to be prepared. Perhaps they might be useful in the future in that way, but Erick was unsure. He told them as much, once or twice, but when they asked about the real threats, he never showed them what sorts of threats they might actually face. This was by design.

Some people hated that.

The organization split twice.

All three branches were great, in Erick’s mind.

They were all different starting points for magic to be introduced to Earth, when it could be introduced.

Congressmen. Military. CEOs and all the way down to the social workers and community organizers. Not many people in the House of Reason knew about the whole thing, and even fewer had actual magic, but enough did. That would be more than enough for a soft exposure, years and years from now.

Hopefully they would never see real war.

- - - -

The year was 2019, and Erick hadn’t been checking in on the House but once every month for the past 5 years. It was time.

Deborah sat on a bench in front of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She was in Hawaii, and flowers grew all around her. Butterflies floated on the air.

Erick stepped out of the air, onto the paving stones near the flowers. “Hello, Deborah.”

Deborah smiled a little as she looked up at him… And then her face fell. Erick was wearing the finest white and black mage robes he had ever worn, which were a match for the ones that he had worn when he attended Deborah’s wedding to her childhood friend and lover, Joshua, who had been there since the beginning. Deborah had remarked at the time that she loved seeing ‘the Founder’ wear something truly nice for a change, when all Erick usually wore was simple grey robes.

And now, here he was, wearing something fancy again.

Deborah already knew what was coming. She had known what was coming for a long while. But now that event was here, and her heart filled with sorrow.

Quietly, she said, “You’re leaving.”

Little white butterflies floated closer, on their way to other flowers.

Erick nodded. “Yeah. I’ll be back eventually, but the universe awaits, and I did what I needed to do.”

“It wasn’t the Houses of Reason, was it. What you needed to do. You were here for something else, and you chose to do…” She waved her arm around. “To do all this on a whim.”

Erick smiled softly as little grey butterflies floated on the air. “You were half of my reason for being here; the reason I chose myself. Please always remember that. Thank you for never asking about my other reasons for being here, until now. I know that wasn’t easy. I know how that very same question fractured the House twice, and it looks to be fracturing again next year. I’m sorry about that.”

Deborah shuddered. Her plate was full, and now Erick was piling on more problems. She sighed. She asked, “Will you tell me the original reason? Please?”

“No.” Erick said, “As for what should be your concern: Hopefully I win the war, and it never touches Earth.”

Deborah suddenly screamed hatred at Erick, saying things she didn’t mean, and then she instantly took it back. She cried. She tried to punch Erick, but all she did was fall into a hug. With her head against Erick’s chest, she said, “I’ll miss you, grandpa.”

She had eventually settled on calling Erick ‘grandpa’, which was what most people called him. Some called him ‘Founder’, or ‘Grey Robes’. Erick never told them his real name.

“I love you, too. I’ll be back, when and if I can.” Erick held her.

For a while, that is all that happened.

Erick asked, “Hey? Want to see something amazing, that you really shouldn’t tell anyone about? It won’t be a lie. You shouldn’t try analyzing it, though, because you might come out with a wrong answer. It will just be something for you to see, and know.”

Deborah stopped sobbing, but tears still fell even as she chuckled. She shook her head a little bit. With a hint of well-worn frustration, she half let go and asked, “Show me?”

Erick stepped backward, becoming light and then utter dark, billowing away from Deborah and into the sky.

He showed his true draconic self, all 10 kilometers tall of it, and 15 wide, his wings blotting out the sun, as he hovered just off the coast of Hawaii. Anyone outside of Deborah’s little slice of the world would have seen a cloud. But Deborah saw Erick, as he was, perhaps for the first time.

Erick rumbled like a storm, “See you later.”

Deborah stayed on that bench by the flowers, by the cliff, for a long while, just staring at the clouds in the sky that rapidly stopped resembling a giant black dragon. Her heart had pulsed for a while after seeing Erick’s ‘true form’, just like it had in that conversation in that clearing, more than 20 years ago. But eventually, her heart calmed. She breathed.

Eventually, her phone rang and she needed to answer it, but until then, she sat on that bench, among the flowers, by the cliff, and stared at the sky.

It was a beautiful sky.

Lots of fluffy white clouds.

- - - -

In another part of America, in early 2019:

Erick lightened his grip on the steering wheel. “All I’m saying is that you can call more often. I missed you at college, and this life you’ve chosen won’t be easy.” A moment passed in silence. Trees whizzed by, but no cars. Theirs was the only vehicle on the highway. “You’re going to be—”

“Dad,” Jane stressed. “Come on. We’ve gone over every bit of this already, including the danger. I’m going into the CIA, and that’s that.” She added, half-whispered, “If they’ll have me.”

Streetlamps pooled yellow glows onto the road, like ponds of light in a 4:00 am mist…

- -

Erick watched from above as Infinity twisted upon itself on that highway down below, and Jane’s car gradually vanished, as though it was filtering through a fog of invisibility. The lights of the vehicle went first, and then the actual car vanished. Soon, they were gone.

A tension vanished from the world, like the release of an arrow, followed by the unstringing of the bow. All of the danger had passed. Something like certainty settled into Erick, and Erick breathed out a sigh of relief. His past was safe. His past was solid. Nothing was ever going to change this past, because Erick was here to make it happen exactly as it happened, and now that he had been here, he would always have been here.

Erick had become a fae, in truth.

‘Young Erick’ was on Veird and Jane was with him.

Earth was poised to accept magic as real in the near future. Maybe a decade or two. Hopefully they would never meet Nothanganathor, and Earth could have a relatively peaceful time joining the universe, and Erick could enact some other plans he had begun to set down when he arrived, back in 1997. That would be the best possible outcome.

Erick smiled, and then he Stepped away from Earth.

If anyone had been watching him they would not see him vanish in an invisible fog, to pass down a tunnel of Infinity to his destined destination, like some planar. Erick was more than a planar flowing along in universal conversations, these days. He made his own moves.

Erick flashed with light, and then he was gone.

Back through Infinity, back to Veird.

- - - -

- - - -

- - - -

- - - -

Jane watched, horrified, from the command center of the Blue Corps.

Erick had been up in the sky, getting ready to direct the next attempt at Fenrir, when something had sparked in the air, ripping at the Edge of the Script. That ‘something’ had resolved into a giant fish-mouth that reached through and seemingly materialized its mouth directly around Erick, like ten million fangs all surrounding him and then swallowing him.

Atunir had been there, and so had Rozeta. None of that had made a difference. Atunir had been ripped in half and Rozeta was tossed away in the great chomping of that giant, silver piranha. Atunir rapidly reformed, of course. She was just an avatar in that form, but she was also a goddess. While Atunir was reforming, Rozeta acted to clear away the threat before her, opening a portal and dragging forth a brilliant, white Sitnakov, who launched at the fish like a fishmonger, slicing the offensive beast to sashimi.

And there was no Erick.

He was gone.

Was the fish an application of Malevolence?

No. Jane didn’t think so. She had never touched the stuff, but she had seen people who had, and ‘fish manifestation’ was not one of the indicators of Malevolence. Or at least not one of the known ones.

There had been no Red, anyway.

It had been something else.

Evan held onto the screen in front of him, quietly asking, “Where is he? Where is dad?”

Jane paled.

Erick was gone.

Killzone stood at her side, in the center of the Blue Corps, like he used to stand at the center of Spur’s Army, back when such a thing was necessary to guard against the Shades of Ar’Kendrithyst. He spoke the only words that needed to be spoken, “Erick has left the battlefield. I am sure he will return when he can. I believe he was going to say ‘Plan Surround and Consume’. We should proceed to enact that plan. Backup casters of [Seeds of Atunir] are needed—” Killzone rapidly rotated to the side— he stopped. “Oh. Maybe not.”

All of the entire command center turned to look to the left of Jane, between her and Killzone, because something was coming out of that air. Jane felt it, more than she saw it. It certainly didn’t seem like something dangerous… or at least not to Jane. Not to the people here. But this was a warzone and something weird happening in the air next to her was cause for concern.

In the fraction of a second that Killzone identified the new threat, to Jane recognizing the threat, Jane had already lined up a special series of organs in her body, mutating herself and transforming her insides and her left arm into a producer of some of the universe’s strongest magical acids. It took her less than a fraction of a second. The thing was still coming through the ai—

A familiar face, as though appearing out of a flash of light.

A familiar feeling filling the world, like one of power that sang that everything would be alright.

It was dad.

Dad stood in the control center, smiling wide, saying, “Sorry about the interruption of plans.”

Evan yelled, “Dammit, dad! Where the FUCK did you go— Oh fuck I don’t care I’m so ha— oomph!”

Dad grabbed Evan in a big hug, saying, “I missed you, too.”

Evan froze, but then he patted dad’s back, saying, “Uh… You weren’t gone that long?”

“We’ll talk about all that later.” Erick let go, and then he went to Jane and hugged her super tight, too. “Missed you, too.”

… Jane patted her father’s back, but she kept her poison organs. “You’re acting weird.”

“We’ll talk about all that later. So! I believe I was on Plan Surround and Consume until I was so rudely interrupted. Seems like Killzone was about to authorize that continuance, and so let’s get to that. Backup casters are a go, and I will remain here. What did it look like to you guys?”

The guys in the command center rapidly got to work talking through [Telepathy] and more solid communication networks of various kinds.

Killzone narrowed his white eyes at Erick, saying, “Big fish materialized through the Edge. Likely Establishment Wizardry. Went chomp on you. You vanished.” Killzone studied Erick. “… And you changed?”

“A big fish? Weird! Yeah. That sounds like Establishment. There was no fish until there was, and you all only recognized it as ‘a fish’ because it needed to be recognized as something in order to make any amount of sense at all.” Erick thought for a second, and then he looked at everyone. “So much to talk about. We’ll talk later!” And then Erick looked at Killzone and went over and hugged the big guy, saying, “Missed you, too.” Erick let go and then went and hugged Rozeta, who had shown up sometime in the last half second. Rozeta’s normal-sized human body practically vanished under Erick’s large arms and immaculately fancy robe. “Missed you, too.”

“Erick,” Rozeta said, tapping Erick’s arms. “Erick. What happened?”

Erick smiled and let the goddess go. “You deserve explanations, but those explanations aren’t relevant. The short version is that I learned real Time Magic, so let’s go win this time war!”