"Hello, Taylor," I said. "It's... been a weird year so far, hasn't it?"

"A bit," Taylor said, nodding. "You're... Lyn's mom, right?"

It was finally happening- hearing people call my daughter Lyn, short for Evelyn, the name I'd given her that she liked enough to keep, was no longer sparking joy.

"I am," I said, nodding. "I'm also Joe Norman, and Ouroboros. It's complicated."

"Mm."

"And... you are the tragic protagonist of a book Evelyn read last year," I said. "She felt terrible for you- to suffer so much, to do your best and be hated for it... and so she wanted to spare you that fate."

"...That explains it," Taylor said quietly. "I just..." Taylor grunted. "...I'm grateful for what Lyn's done for me. I'm glad she did it. But... for all the months she called me a friend, I never really got the feeling she actually liked me."

"Ah. Okay, yeah, that... That'll hurt."

"It did," Taylor said. "And... let me guess, you're not here because you like me, either."

"Honestly? No," I admitted. "So I'm not going to rub salt in it by pretending otherwise. I... am going to give you whatever you ask for, in the hopes that it'll stop you from going off the rails and breaking things, and because you deserve something nice to compensate for my daughter treating you like a rescue dog, but otherwise, this is all quite impersonal."

Taylor considered this for a long moment.

"...Money," Taylor said. "Financial security, for me and my dad."

"Easy enough," I said, nodding. "I can even land you a part-time office job that'll pay for your college, if you're so inclined."

"Sure," Taylor said.

"What else?" I asked. "The genie feels bad enough about what's happened to give more than three wishes; don't be afraid to milk this."

"What else can you do?" Taylor asked. "What, can you make me pretty and popular?"

"Popular, maybe not, but charismatic, yes," I said. "Also, another yes on the pretty, if you're sure you want it."

"Well, I sure don't want to be ugly," Taylor said, mirthlessly. "I..." Taylor sighed. "...I want my life back, dammit. I want my mom, I want my friend Emma, I want to stop living in this joyless hellscape! Can you do that for me, Genie?"

"...If that's what you really want," I said, nodding.

"Please," Taylor whispered.

"Very well," I said. "I'll get to work on that. It'll happen over the New Year, so if you change your mind between now and then, I can take that into account."

"How are you going to..."

"Ouroboros pushes people back through time," I said. "So, with your permission? Everything that happened to you and Emma these past few years will just... disappear." Did I think Taylor deserved a friend better than Emma? Yeah, probably, but Taylor wanted Emma, specifically, and I wasn't about to argue with her. "You'll forget Eve, but..."

"...Tell her I don't want to remember her," Taylor said.

"Duly noted."

---

Eve, meanwhile... was not taking this whole Taylor business all that well.

"I can't believe I was a worse friend than fucking Emma," Eve wailed, face buried in my shoulder. "Fucking Emma!"

"I'm sorry, angel," I cooed, patting the back of her head. "Sometimes... Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, a relationship just... doesn't work out. Sometimes people just aren't compatible. It happens. It's nobody's fault."

"It is, though!" Eve insisted. "I was so invested in making Taylor's life better that I never actually got to know her! I didn't hang out with her and talk about the books she was reading, or argue about which hero was cooler, I just... I dumped a bunch of Tinkertech in her lap and taught her how to use it, and expected that to be enough! After all, it worked when you did that to me."

"That isn't-"

"I know," Eve said, quietly. "You did a lot more for me than just give me stuff. You... You were actually there for me, you listened to what I had to say, and... I don't know. I just... I took it for granted. I thought it was just assumed, and... then, when it came time to do the same... it didn't work."

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"Plus," I added, gently, "you aren't that much older than Taylor. Trying to play the adult mentor just... wouldn't have worked, because she didn't recognize you as an adult."

Eve just nodded, silently.

"Now..." I hummed, quietly. "...This isn't quite the worst you could've botched befriending Taylor, I will say."

"...Yeah?" Eve asked.

"C'mon, we're going to The Cosmic Library," I said. "I'm gonna introduce you to the first and longest written work of a close personal friend of mine, called Companion Chronicles. Give you a little perspective on how much worse things could've gone if you'd been more selfish."

"You think I'm gonna feel better because I didn't fuck up as bad as your friend did?" Eve asked.

"Honestly? Yes. Also, emotional catharsis."

"Mm. Maybe."

"It can wait, if you're not up for it. My capacity for hugs is infinite."

Eve tightened her grip, and didn't let go for another hour or so.

---

December came, and not a moment too soon. Alexandria felt herself the most responsible for what Cauldron had done with the PRT, out of the Triumvirate, and so had nominated herself as Magpie's final target.

"Alexandria," Magpie declared as she stalked into the hall. "For your crimes, you have been marked for death."

The big, official banquet Ouroboros had been invited to was her last meal. Never let it be said she didn't know how to plan an event.

"For fuck's sake, I just sat down," I said, standing up.

"Hold, Ouroboros," Alexandria said, rising from the table as well, and cracking her knuckles. "I don't exactly need a bodyguard."

Before I could make any smartassed remarks about how I'd successfully stopped Magpie from killing someone, whereas Alexandria had outright lost her fight with Siberian, Magpie was across the hall without crossing the intervening space, her sword now drawn.

She sheathed it.

And Alexandria exploded into mincemeat.

"Turns out, she did," Magpie said dryly. "Now, Ouroboros, I see you're already raring to go for our rematch." She drew the first inch of her sword from the scabbard. "I'm ready when you are."

I paused, taking stock of the situation. The banquet hall was full of people, a lot of whom were quite squishy and fragile. So... gotta move this fight outside, now.

"Tell me how the drywall tastes," I said, before drawing a ray gun and blasting her through the wall.

This fight was preordained, although not divinely; Karasuba and I had loosely planned to have this fight, back in late spring, and while the detail of Alexandria being the one Karasuba was here to kill was a touch more recent, the fact remained that I'd had a full six months to plan out my plan of attack with Eve's help and power.

"Get everyone out of here!" I yelled, before flying after her.

Eve's power was simple, but also absurdly powerful: she gave objects superpowers. There were limits on how quickly she could give objects superpowers, but as she'd shown me, those limits could be bypassed in a lot of different ways, and there was functionally no limit on what the powers themselves could be like.

So, the guiding question was, what were Karasuba's powers, and how would we disable them?

Funnily enough, her Eidolon-like power was, honestly, pretty useless to her. It was a utility power- for straight-up fighting, Karasuba still had her Viltrumite powers, stacked on top of being the Sith Empress, which was, itself, laid atop a very sturdy foundation of her being a Sword-Type Sekirei.

And then, there was the Body Mod; a document that, thanks to a horrendously abusive loophole, would make Karasuba fully immune to any flavor of "elemental" damage, and 90% resistant to more physical damage.

So, how do I beat something like that?

"Clever," Karasuba said, before spear-tackling me upwards into the sky. "A device that disables all shard-based powers that aren't anchored to an item leaves me without my power, and you still with yours. It'd work better if I wasn't still a Viltrumite, though."

"You really think that's my only trick?" I asked, before wrenching myself out of her grasp and catching her chin with an uppercutting knee, flinging her back and giving me some distance. "I'm shocked you think so little of me."

One tool that I already had, and simply hadn't realized would apply here, was Prince of Void. With Prince of Void, fiat guarantees were worthless, and any so-called immunity was really more of a resistance. (Funnily enough, fiat-backed resistances were completely unaffected by Prince of Void, since there was already a built-in way to circumvent them: just hit them harder.)

So when I drew the latest iteration of my lightsaber and flicked it on, it was with the expectation that this time, it would actually work. Sure, she was a Viltrumite. Sure, she'd put herself through enough conditioning to make herself stronger and tougher than even Nolan was when my own lightsaber had failed to do more than scorch him.

But that was then, and this was now.

I ducked under her first swing with her own darksaber, and slashed at her leg, which she was just barely not fast enough to dodge, the tip of my blade catching her ankle with a hiss of searing skin, and a yelp of pain from her followed by a wobble in her flight.

"Oh, you bitch," she purred, turning to face me, re-evaluating the fight. "You made an extradimensional lightsaber, didn't you?"

"One of Eve's new toys lets me do that without having to be good at magic," I said idly, turning the lightsaber in my hands and giving it a visual once-over. It was... honestly, nothing special for a lightsaber. Moderate greebling, otherwise cylindrical... Standard stuff, really. "Remember when I said you'd get to fight the real me? Well, this is a close approximation. With the tools I've got, the real me would've just killed you by now. But you want a fight. So." I readied myself. "Let's dance."