The Overdream, sixteen months into Henry's survey of The Combat System, a simulated training area of a road winding through a summer forest.
Thousands of replicas were lining the road in an orderly queue. Except for variety in their weaponry, each of them were garbed in identical, mass-produced armour, and their faces were anonymised by full-coverage helmets. Statue still, these automata paid no attention to their environment as they waited their turn, not to the purple magnolia petals piling on their shoulders, nor the strange sounds and sights in the woods around them.
There was a moment of quiet, a distant struggle coming to its hysterical conclusion.
Henry blinked into existence at the head of the replica queue. At a thought resetting his avatar, a sticky-goo smearing his palms vanished and the emptied slots in his belt and bandolier were restocked with novelty props. Without delay, he glanced at his next opponent, a lithely-built Cutthroat with a fencing rapier.
On the breastplate of its armour was etched an 8-digit designation number. This stemmed from a workaround to an issue in Henry's research into Npias's prediction methods. After he'd sparred against all the skilled NPCs he could replicate so many times, their traits had been seared permanently into his digitally-expanded memory, making it impossible for him to mimic the ignorance of investigating a new opponent. His solution had been to produce pseudo-unfamiliar combatants. He'd amassed replicas, disguised them, and ordered them to train with multiple same-Class partners while swapping styles until their skills had been blended beyond recognition.
Beginning of research phase. 180…179…178…
Closing his eyes, Henry brought up a recording of a field of sparring replicas. Locating the numbered Cutthroat, he began dissecting its fighting patterns to imprint in his short-term memory its strengths against gags, its weaknesses to gags.
Gags - in the past few weeks, Henry'd advanced from studying the individual combat-gag to the broader task of stringing gags together.
Anyone could fool the enemy once, but what about the second prank, the third, the fourth? A warrior-clown, to put on a truly improper show, needed to tickle the audience's funny bone from the opening pun to the closing punch line.
To achieve this, one had to first understand that combat flowed. A fight was rarely static. It oscillated between stages, the duellists engaging, disengaging, engaging, disengaging. It progressed, with wounds accumulating and each wound branding the lesson of its creation into the fighter's mind. In Saana, one also had powerful abilities that reversed the tide of battle in an instant, that could be employed in combinations or alone, that generated lulls and openings during their cooldowns. Over the twisting, evolving course of a fight, some manoeuvres were only usable at certain bends, others in the rapids, some were sturdy enough to survive until the end, others were broken by a single use.
This dynamism applied especially to the many combat-gags whose viability fluctuated as the opponent's response to them transitioned from surprise to scrutiny, from clarity to caution. Gags, one might say, also flowed.
The Laughing Man, to teach his Sons how to tap into the delicate flow of gags, had devised 'The Boot-Bounty Games' for his Combat System. These fun exercises involved drawing scraps of paper scribbled with random gags from a boot and then trying to execute them in series before a fight's completion. The Sons often fought in these games, competing to one-up each other by completing more gags, by tallying gags and scoring them points based on gag-difficulty and gag-aesthetics. Thus, the sect members grew up to see the broader picture, to comprehend the tiny place every gag had within the deeper, holistic, multi-gag fabric of the universe.
To Henry's astonishment, these Boot-Bounty Games had proven a brilliant method for developing one's sense of flow - not just for gags but for combat in general; he wouldn't have allocated practise slots to this skill if it were useless.
For the purpose of learning flow, The System's combat-gags had the benefit over ordinary fighting techniques of being categorically simpler to perform. With most regular attacks, a continuum of outcomes existed between perfection and failure - a stab dealt more or less damage depending on how closely it struck a vital point or the depth of the thrust. In comparison, gag outcomes tended to be binary - the opponent was either pantsed or not pantsed. The result of this binary outcome simplification was that a combat-gag consumed proportionally less of one's focus. For an ordinary attack, one might invest all their attention chasing perfection, while a combat-gag could be set on auto-pilot after meeting the minimum execution requirements. In turn, the lower need to concentrate on the individual action freed up some of the finite resources of the brain to attend to the wider happenings of battle, the interrelations between actions, the combat flow. A combat-gag simplified one plane of fighting; thereby, it unlocked access to the plane above.
Henry was already acquainted with the connection between action simplicity and flow, both from utilising certain items and spells, like curses, that had binary outcomes and his training in Floating Leaf, which experimented with varying magnifications of focus. Where the unique advantage of The Combat System entered was that many of its gags did not rely on spell or items cooldowns, Stamina, or Energy. These game elements usually gated the number of actions performable within a given space of time, limiting the overall intensity, complexity, and speed of combat flow. But gags, being untethered to these restraints, could always be applied in addition, as something extra. Like barbells adding resistance to a body exercise, packing more combat-gags into a fight could increase its flow demands, enabling one to struggle against this aspect at a harder, more instructive level.
4…3…2…1…Begin visualisation phase.
Opener: A Charitable Endowment.
Fillers: Cheese Beard. Awkward Hug. The Jolly Touch. Worm Sandwich. Yikes, Bro, That's Pretty Cringe – Double. Face Fart. Waterslide. Stink Sardine. Pun Punch. Foot in Mouth. The Welcome Home Soup. Sausage Thermometer. Crouching Pervert, Hidden Beaver. Painful Memory. Insurance Fraud. 20-Second Comedy Special. Stinging Cheeks.
Finisher: The Permanent Smile.
16 seconds until match start. 16…15…14…
And, eventually, the fruits of fighting with flow manifested in the honing of one's visualisation skills, the ability to mentally simulate future combat sequences, like a skilled pianist hearing a phrase before pressing the keys or a chess master picturing the mate ten moves ahead. To visualise with accuracy and depth evinced a peak attunement to the rhythm of battle. One's total neural system had to have been rewired towards the task; one had to have grasped the martial essence of both the enemy, the self, and the capricious, ever-shifting interplay between.
This, too, applied to gags.
Henry, closing the footage, blocked out all external sensation, and the coming conflict with the Cutthroat welled up in his mind's eye. Like kids playing catch, the gags took flight and spread giggling throughout the forest around him. Discontinuities arose, when the apparition of the Cutthroat offered resistance. Henry nudged it onto the next gag with pauses, feints, retreats, he inserted new pranks to distract and false set-ups to misdirect.
1...Fight!
He fixed a predatorial stare upon the Cutthroat. "Come, 13358926. Receive your pranks."
The replica, its stony heart immune to intimidation, replied with a cold hand gesture.
Henry ducked, his opponent materialising behind him and attempting to thrust its sword through his back. In the same motion, as Henry's legs were lowering, he reached for a scabbard on his belt to unsheathe his opening prop: a fresh cucumber.
Paragon Seventeen – Relying on Machines to Give Human-Joy to His Nation – Xivtust The Tinkerer
Xivtust The Tinkerer, for whose recent passing all Togavi weeps, was a master of inventing magical devices. In his youth, he'd had a young bride afflicted with an incurable plague. Whenever her disease flared up and the pain burned like fire in her nerves, Xivtust would dive into a treasure chest of comedic inventions and soothe her aching soul with laughter. When he wasn't by her side, he was in his workshop tinkering with the next gag item.
Following his bride's return to The Cycle, Xivtust became a wandering vagrant. He continued to cherish his former love, and whenever a stranger on the road reminded him of her, whether through a similarity of appearance or manners, he'd produce his useless props and perform until tears of laughter were running down their cheeks. To the farmer with her bronze forearms, he gifted a spade with a watertank-handle that spritzed chilly mist to cool them in the fields. To the hunter with her dimples, he gave a bow with a noisy fan attachment that blew their scent away from their prey. Never would Xivtust relent in this habit.
After joining The Laughing Sons, he was still so focused on gag inventions that he neglected his Class growth, and, Xivtust having never progressed beyond the Arcaneworker's 5th spanner, by his 90th year, the unravelling of life's twilight set upon him. Alchemist Tshuaj, witnessing his brother's senility, used his potions to transform himself into the exact image of the deceased wife, and Xivtust spent his last days joyfully presenting the fake with the thousands of useless inventions collected over his life.
The Tinkerer was, in a way, the greatest paragon of pious mischief. The devotion that drove him to misuse his talents and die prematurely shames any prankster who would talk of this or that barrier impeding their shenaniganery.
His Royal Poop says,
"Soldiers seek glory through action;
Nose doctors, by returning olfaction.
Haunted by a ghost,
Knowing what mattered most,
Xivtust made useless contraptions."
One of the outstanding mysteries of The Laughing Sons had been a uniformity in the sect members' ranges of fighting after their adoption of The Combat System. Irrespective of their Classes and original martial arts, all the Sons converged to favour an identical mid-distance combat style. Their closest point would be the maximum extension of a longsword; the furthest point, where spells could be blocked but not dodged. Some of the sect members even swapped to atypical Class specs, Bowmen for example abandoning their namesake weapon.
Many historians had remarked at the oddity of this convergence, reasoning that the Sons should have been able to fool their opponents at any distance. The prevailing opinion came to be that this range uniformity had been The Laughing Man giving his Sons incomplete instruction in order to stifle their growth. This theory was popularised by Karnon's later assassination of the Maalundi God, which created a retrospective narrative that The Combat System had been a suppression tool to lead The Sons astray and prevent such an incident.
Henry knew this explanation to be false for two reasons.
Firstly, The Laughing Man, despite his eventual demise, had never had much of a logical basis to fear his Sons. Tuure Lamin had been a Tier-8 Halfgod, which granted him both spell augmentation and a second benefit from enhanced cognition and physical skills given to Saana's inhabitants from Tier-8 onwards. Moreover, even before accounting for these advantages, The Laughing Man had always been a martial genius. His innate, rare talent had been refined over his participation in the bloody Maalundi-Rangbit wars, combat experience unavailable to his Sons in the relatively peaceful Togavian islands. The God had sometimes flaunted his prowess through a Combat System technique called The Fatal Lullaby, a supremely-difficult finisher whereby a target was pranked for so long and with such relentlessness that they fainted from exhaustion. No one in Togavi, including his Sons, should have ever been able to touch his level.
Secondly, and here Henry gleaned an answer from the pages of his own story, The Combat System's converged-upon range mapped identically onto that of his own old style, The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo, whose primary weapon had been a mid-distance poisoned-dart blower. His own reason for this choice had been because this range happened to be where the mind mattered most, where the mental gap between oneself and the opponent was most exploitable. Too close to the enemy, and the tempo of battle escalated to such a rapid pace that drilled instincts overwhelmed deliberative, more complex thoughts. Conversely, too far away, and the tempo slowed down enough that both parties had sufficient time to solve the problems being thrown by each other – at least in a 1v1, where the complexity a single person could offer was hard-capped. Between these lay the mental sweet spot. In terms of intellectual demand, the long-range was perhaps equivalent to a game of battleship, the short-range to poker, and the mid-range to chessboxing.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
That same balance applied to The Combat System. Its silly 'combat-gags' were in fact—as one might detect from Henry's awfully unfunny study thus far of the joke art—cerebral manoeuvres whose likelihood of success was a function of the intellectualisable gap between oneself and the opponent.
In other words, the limitation that'd nudged all The Sons into the mid-range was fundamentally the same limitation that Henry'd been attempting to overcome by creating A Thousand Tools: combat, at most ranges and in most respects, was stupid.
So how was one—assuming they had the arrogance to try expand the effective range of The Combat System or mind-oriented martial arts in general—to accomplish this herculean task, to transform the childish games of battleship, poker, and chessboxing into Starcraft 5?
Using the tools.
To begin the neurosurgery of The System, before considering range at all, one must first lobotomise the aforementioned Rule of Parity, the equality of resources that restricts opportunities for calculated manipulations. Here, there are multiple incisionary tools beyond owning more resources or mastering the spatio-temporal nature of combat (i.e. being strictly better).
For the first, we return to the very beginning of Henry's climb, to the art he'd studied in The Cap before all others. Although the standard warrior-clown was limited to two fists for enacting their mischief, what if one had hybridised their studies with The School of Nine Fists, which generated seven extra fists through the weaponisation of the elbows, knees, feet, and head? Incorporating the principle of fist multiplication into The Combat System, a warrior-clown who learned to deliver combat-gags from these alternate platforms could exploit their numerical fist-advantage to both suppress their opponent's fists while using the surplus-fists to set up their gags. By locking up an opponent's arms with your left-actual-fist and blocking their other fist with your forehead-fist, your right-actual-fist would be given complete freedom for a devastating mimicry of a fire-breathing dragon; through this method…
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Paragon Twenty-Four – Strolling Down a Country Path and Stubbing a Toe on a Sapphire – Karnon The Blue
In his final years, the elderly Xivtust met an interesting Earthfriend boy of six or so in a countryside hamlet with porcelain skin and marvellous blue hair the colour of the sky. The locals had found the child playing alone in the forest, and they'd been unable to locate his parents, the boy himself offering no help because he didn't speak their language. Xivtust, reminded by the boy's strange hair of his wife's favourite gemstone, agreed to help.
Taking the mute child with him, The Tinkerer resumed his aimless vagrancy, and he inquired wherever they stopped about any blue-haired foreigners with a lost son. Xivtust also didn't neglect his main priority to invent comedic props and inspire the commonfolk to laughter.
Two days into their journey across Togavi, the boy, having picked up a few sentences from the villages they'd visited, informed The Tinkerer that his name was Karnon and that their search could stop because his parents had been eaten by a giant bat.
Soon, the orphan named Karnon, after seeing a hundred smiles summoned into being by Xivtust's prop shows, decided to join the cause to expand the people's souls. He took to tomfoolery like a petty noble to bed-wenches, shrinking himself into small animals to spy on bathing girls and formulating new shapeshifting gags, including the current sensation, The Topsy-Turvy Mime. The Tinkerer was deeply touched by Karnon's antics. To have such a prodigious deviant as a road-fellow, one untainted by the rules or modelling taught by responsible parental figures, was undoubtedly a blessing. The story of Karnon's misbehaviour spread far and wide. Eventually, his reputation as an exemplary ne'er-do-well reached every home in the isles. "Keep that up, and your hair will turn blue!" has become a popular warning given by mothers to unruly kids.
When Viceroy Lamin met the sapphire scallywag accompanying Xivtust, he immediately acknowledged Karnon by adopting him as the youngest Son. The nation impatiently awaits our newest paragon's developments on the path of pious mischief!
His Royal Poop says,
"In the brothels and bars, grey men grumble
Of the youth, too effete and too humble.
But have hope in your hearts!
There's a blue-haired upstart
With the boldness and genius to bungle!"
Henry's last day of The Laughing Son's Combat System, a recreation of the Togavian highlands.
As if a tornado had ransacked and dumped the contents of a novelty store, the hills were littered with whoopee cushions, silly string, stinky vials, over-sized clothing items, and other hilarious props. Wading through the mess was a replica of a Fighter standing six-foot-four and decked out in plate. The armour, which would normally confer a young warrior an emboldening protection, had become cumbersome in the final minutes of this duel. As the Fighter stumbled through the sea of multi-coloured rubbish—their drooping eyes swaying from left to right in search of the shifty enemy—their arms raising their shield and axe were beginning to sag.
The Fighter stopped, feeling a mischievous sensation on their unarmoured backside.
Behind them, an unstealthed Chameleon Monkey was using its spindly green fingers to squeeze their buttocks.
The Handsy Lord!
Simultaneous to the groping, a Waterworker-controlled geyser erupted from in front of the Fighter and moistened their crotch, while their face rotating to identify the threat collided with a floating plank of Constructionist-controlled plywood.
Triple-pranked: The Handsy Lord! Pee-on-Pants! Floating Nose Bleeder!
The Fighter swung their axe at the Chameleon Monkey's skull, but the swing was too sluggish, the creature easily evading. They tried several more missed swings, each slower than the last. Then the Chameleon Monkey, morphing back into a human, lashed out a jab at the Fighter's inner thigh, the striking fist revealing a dagger at the end of its transfor—
Fooled by the feint, the Fighter failed to raise their shield to intercept the assailant's other fist snapping forward with the rapidity of a chameleon's tongue harvesting a cricket's life.
The Fighter stared at the striking fist, paused and hovering before their face. The knuckles had been gloved in a puppet of a dragon with googly eyes, which opened its mouth and—the teen behind saying, "roar"—spat out a harmless puff of
Imitation Dragon Whispers Calamitous Inferno!
The Fighter, overwhelmed by the exhaustion of such a brutal pranking, blacked out at once. Their eyes rolled back into their head, and their body hit the ground with a thud.
The Fatal Lullaby!
Henry loomed over the defeated replica, gazing down on its snoozing form victoriously. "R.I.P."
Rest in Poo.
The replica's cheek was buried in a horse turd.
The Fatal Lullaby (Poo Pillow Variation)!
Thus, with this final prank, Henry marked the completion of his 33-month education as a Laughing Son.
Once again, as he had for the many arts preceding it, he'd summitted The Combat System, absorbed its vistas, then willed the mountain higher. He'd expanded its 223 stock combat-gags to over four-thousand, formulating gags for groups and gags against groups, gags for Civilian classes, gags that offended specific cultures. Through 'probing-gags', a type of safe, low-commitment gag, he'd moved beyond the paradigm of preparational research, allowing a warrior-clown to test the gag-weaknesses of their victim on the fly with one's favourite tool, the gag. He'd invented gags at every conceivable range: grappling-gags, boxing-gags, fencing-gags, spear-gags, kiting-gags, nuke-gags, sniper-gags. He'd immersed himself deep into the murky flow between gags, and the gags now flowed inside him as naturally as the blood in his veins.
But in all seriousness, Henry's period with this anti-style had been a valuable rehearsal for the eventual synthesis of A Thousand Tools. It'd given him a firmer grip on the problems he was dealing with, the fixes available with the arts he'd mastered, and the unaddressed gaps for later arts to mend.
As a surprise bonus, his adaptations of The Laughing Man's Booty-Bounty Games for exercising combat-flow had yielded substantial personal gains. In duelling, his effective Mechanical GQ had undergone its first increase in half a century, rising 2 points, while his Mental GQ had jumped a whopping 4. Many prior arts had been bolstered by these improvements, most notably Nine Fists with its lengthy combos.
His studies as a warrior-clown had also given him a bit more understanding of Karnon and the peers of the God's youth, especially The Laughing Man.
The design of The Combat System carried many traces of the creator. Much as the higher-rungs of wordplay could only be reached after one had worked up the dryer fundamentals of a language, to deconstruct battle and rebuild it into a semi-coherent farce could only be done by a martial virtuoso. Tuure Lamin, to have constructed this art in remote Togavi, isolated from the resources of The Maalundi capital, had to have possessed a monstrous talent, far above what was superficially apparent in his moronic prankster style.
By Henry's estimation, The Laughing Man had had everything in him to have become one of Saana's pre-eminent, era-defining figures. He should have been equal to The All-Mother, The Maalundi Emperor, or Henry himself. If he'd remained a commander battling with The All-Mother, The Maalundi force with its twin titans of Lamin and Seekubaa would have definitely achieved victory. However, partway through his heroic rise, The Laughing Man had been reassigned from the battlefront to Togavi, where he was tasked with monitoring the locals. Why? Because, if allowed to grow much stronger, he might one day have threatened the place of the sovereign above him. In a cliché but nevertheless common story, The Laughing Man was a subject to a similar oppression he inflicted upon his Sons and their homeland - not that this had made him a good guy; he'd been a callous, violent man, whose irresponsible rule had earned him his death.
Then, reading the saga of The Sons closer still, peering behind anything that'd been recorded explicitly and considering The System's perplexing mixture of genius and stupidity, one could potentially interpret The Laughing Man's actions as covertly training a private force with which to escape from his predicament. Maybe.
Whether or not this last scheme had been true, in the end, Tuure Lamin did escape his bondage, just not in the manner he'd intended, Karnon liberating his suppressed soul from his corpse.
The Laughing Man had been a monster hidden in the world's shadows, a kraken lurking in Saana's depths, so what then was one to make of the blue-gilled guppy who'd swallowed him?
There was a single account of the assassination incident, written in the memoirs of one of The Sons, Tshuaj The Alchemist. It'd taken place during a dual celebration of Karnon's sixteenth birthday and his return from a mission to quell a peasant uprising. The Laughing Man and his Sons, as was their custom, partied hard, imbibing many flavours of exotic drugs and exotic women. At the heights of the orgy, they began competing against each other in friendly combat-gag duels, the contestants wagering titles to various lands and industries. Of these matches, the most spectacular was to be that between The Laughing Man and the birthday boy. The father, tearing the clouds apart with his thunderous laughter, seamlessly wove a warrior's deadly attacks with a clown's humiliating pranks. The blue-haired son meanwhile, who had since his joining the sect been a perfectly disobedient student of his adoptive family, utilised the versatility of his Earthfriend Class to plagiarise the other Sons' trademark tricks through a dizzying multi-domain dance of animal gags, plant gags, elemental gags, celestial gags.
Alchemist Tshuaj wrote that he noticed they were no longer joking when Karnon fumbled an attempt to double-swap a gag poison substitute back to its original poison, a trick he'd taught the blue-haired teen himself. The transition hadn't been apparent because the two combatants had continued laughing manically throughout the increasingly bloody exchange. The Alchemist bore no love for Lamin, but he was too frightened to assist the suicidal teen, so he stood by and watched in silence. The other Sons who cottoned on chose to do the same. The most intoxicated of them didn't realise anything until Karnon,
This feat was all the more impressive because Karnon had been a Tier lower, which meant mathematically that his physical and magical strength had been a fraction of The Laughing Man's.
This early episode in The Trickster God's life would go on to be overshadowed by his later accomplishments. In the centuries and millennia after that party, he'd defended Togavi with The Sons and Sarff from The Maalundi's attempts to retake it, he'd held back a multi-Empire invasion in the wake of The Maelstrom's destruction of his land, and he'd been the one to finish off The All-Mother at the peak of her power. On paper, these achievements all dwarfed the significance of him slaying a low-level Tier-8 God. From what Henry'd seen of The Combat System, though, he wasn't convinced The Laughing Man's assassination had been any easier.
Returning with this knowledge to the present issue, the events unfolding now in Suchi between Henry, Ramiro, and The Pope, this backstory would indicate that Karnon's ultimate purpose in interfering was to destroy him, Henry.
There were a few disconcerting resemblances between The Laughing Man and himself, Henry.
He ran his own kind of Laughing Sons: the cabal of NPCs like Archdeacon Mohon whom he'd raised since childhood to succeed The Company when this Saana instalment concluded. To keep them loyal and prevent them breaking away with the realms he was having them infiltrate, he retained their family members as hostages - an identical position most of The Sons had been in with The Laughing Man. Although a distasteful practise, Henry, who'd been tasked with cleaning up the fallout of many wars of rebellion, knew it to be an insignificant price.
He'd always taken care to organise these successors using an NPC ring identity unconnected with The Company, and only Alex and one other guildmate were privy to the existence of this scheme. Nevertheless, Karnon—with his mind for century-spanning pranks and his ability to spy anywhere at any time using teleporting and shapeshifting—had most likely figured everything out.
From a totally different angle, Henry's A Thousand Tools overlapped in several aspects with The Laughing Man's Combat System. Both cerebralised 1-on-1 fighting in their own way, The System through the impractical extra layer of gags, A Thousand Tools through more productive outlets. There was also a shared tinge of mockery in the motivations for both of them creating the style.
When Henry'd been a kid, challenging himself to become the greatest duellist in the world, a part of him had been frustrated by the dismissal of the item-exploiting techniques he'd devised by the people he defeated and their fans. In retaliation, he'd leaned into their insulting moniker, The Cripple. He'd ironically renamed himself The Invincible Cripple. Parodying the pettiest traits of his enemies, he'd acted like a fool, a cocky shameless try-hard who spouted infantile trash-talk. Thus, when these duellists lost to him, it stung even more, to know they'd been surpassed by someone with no respect for themselves or their sacred cow. This hostility and ridicule had still been around when Henry'd set out to formulate the supreme martial art, although only to a minor degree, the juvenile pettiness having been subdued by the later events of his life.
In The Combat System, this joke of a style, Henry detected a similar sentiment. He could taste a bitter resignation from The Laughing Man at being banished by his Emperor to Togavi while the soldiers he'd commanded continued to expire on a distant battlefield.
And there was the third correspondence. Henry and The Laughing Man were both retired generals, both marked forever by this experience, both—one might reason—better suited in a grave than on a throne.
If Karnon had slain The Laughing Man back then, it made logical sense for him stamp out a reincarnation back to torment the world.
This, however, was a superficial analysis. Despite what parts they might've shared, Henry was not the father. He had no yearning to return to war, and, when he'd detected his own unravelling, he'd had the self-control to step away from power, to retire. In certain respects, he was much closer to Karnon: a former teen prodigy, a slayer of despots, a seeker of 'expanded souls' (albeit through incompatible methods). And on The Trickster God's side, twenty-three hundred years separated the man today from the sixteen-year-old who'd assassinated his adoptive parent. That was a lot of time for a person to evolve and to mature. Part of growing up was learning to distinguish what in the trespasses of one's flawed parents had been genuine evil and what had been wisdom beyond the comprehension of naïve youth.
It would be foolish to try derive the totality of a person from not even 0.5% of their life.
Henry, standing in the hills of this simulated region, weighed these many matters while staring at the sleeping replica a moment longer.
Finally, still not laughing, he removed a red-bulbed clown-nose and spat out a set of fake over-sized dentures. Then, he erased the Fighter, the props around them, and any other evidence of this venture into mischief, before continuing onwards.