“Brendon’s power doesn’t seem to exist until the moment it’s activated.” Marigold mused, peering into the still-room. It was difficult pumping out essences and any other sort of supernatural influence, without also having a chilling effect on the room’s temperature.

I.E. subjecting Brendon to absolute zero.

Which, sadly, was not an option.

So instead they allowed very specific dimensional energies to pass through the room, and compensated for them in their recording equipment’s software.

“If his power is ‘to be himself’,” Dad said, in the middle of experimenting with magic hand-getures, “I don’t see why it wouldn’t just be on all the time. It’s a sneaky power, that not only dives under the surface when it’s not in use, but passively diverts attention away from itself. Why? It doesn’t need to be sneaky.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Gramma asked. “I feel as though we’re kicking at the tail of a sleeping dragon, thinking it a rock.”

Tyrannus glanced at his tail, which twitched in response. “A euphemism, I take it?” the dragon asked, his minions bustling around him.

“Obviously,” Gramma said, rolling her eyes.

Perry glanced between the two of them and shrugged. They’d never particularly gotten along, and Perry had more important things to do than make the two most power-hungry people he knew put aside their differences.

That could be a problem in the making.

Perry shuddered at the idea of Tyrannus and Marigold working together and decided to let sleeping dragons lie.

“What’s the progress with applying Brendon’s power to the demon lord spell?” Perry asked.

The one that had crushed the domain of war completely.

It seemed as though a self-replicating curse that spread to every corner of the globe might be a good fit for the mimic cure.

“Predictive models show…complications.” Tyrannus mused.

Perry already knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“While war demons all have a common link, a universal shared identity at the core of their very being, mimics are very different. They can mutate at an alarming rate.” Perry said.

“It’s predicted that a tiny percentage of the mimics may adapt to or avoid the curse altogether and restart the process of assimilating all life on Earth.” Tyrannus offered.

“It would be nice to reduce their numbers down to something manageable, but the goal should be one hundred percent.” Perry said. “Otherwise we’re just kicking this problem years down the road.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Tyrannus replied.

“Then what, just…an explosion of Brendon that reaches every corner of the globe?” Perry asked.

“That sounds less than ideal,” Brendon said from his position strapped into the observation table.

“How are you doing? Need a bathroom break or anything?” Perry asked through the intercom.

“I think I’m good,” Brendon said. “My nose was itchy for a while, but it went away right before I fell asleep.” As if to punctuate his statement, Brendon yawned his head drooping as the automated scanners caught every minute change happening on the dimensional level.

“How would we hit Solaris with an explosion?”

Explosions were too slow.

Light was too dilute.

“What if we just shrank reality down to a single point and applied the cure to that point?” Perry offered. “That way nothing would get missed.”

“recreate the big bang?”

“Not exactly,” Perry said. “We could scrunch up the fifth dimension until it reaches a singularity, where all fate has come to a single point, then apply Brendon’s power to it. once it un-scrunches the cure will apply to everyone and everything simultaneously.”

“And would that…kill everyone?” Tyrannus asked.

“…I’m not sure.” Perry mused. He’d need to test it on something. That reminds me.

“Hey dad.” Perry said, turning over to where his dad had succeeded in making glitter emerge from his hands.

“Eh?”

“Why did Brendon get put up on auction all those years ago?”

“There was a rumor going around that he might be used to study The Tide.” Dad said.

Perry’s eyebrows rose.

“Given the warping nature of the cognitohazard that is The Tide, someone whose inherent power was to remain unwarped by anything, had a massive number of valuable scientific applications, from acting as the perfect control group, studying the effects of The Tide, to potentially reversing them altogether.”

I assume some of the boys wanted to use him to create a de-powering ray to use on their enemies, or something stupid like that, but Nexus had other ideas.” Dad continued. “And that was that.”

“Hence the raid on the auction,” Perry said, turning back to Brendon. What if there was the possibility of just making everything…normal?

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That was Professor Replica’s goal, after all.

But who decides what’s normal and what isn’t? unicorns are normal, and all the manitian wildlife that has bridged the gap is going to stick around for the forseeable future.

If I made humans all powerless, that would only bite us in the ass. Sure we wouldn’t have any supervillains, but people are generally good, and evil people acquire power without superpowers. There are more people who want to help than otherwise.

Even most supervillains want to help when it comes to their own people, Perry thought, his mind lingering on Locust and The Mechanaut.

What if there was a way to standardize the crazy? Perry mused. Brendon might be the key. If they figured out his power, they also figured out a universal reset button…and maybe some enterprising fellow could backdoor some extra programming into the world at large.

I wonder if everyone else is thinking of this?

Gramma was, Perry could see it on her face.

Tyrannus, definitely.

Dave and Dad…not so much.

Dave just looked like he wanted this ordeal to be over, and dad was having a great time just mastering his ‘hippie bullshit’, glitters and sizzling bolts of electricity dancing around his fingertips.

Well, none of it means anything if we can’t figure out a way to reverse engineer Brendon’s power.

Just as Perry thought that, there was a DING from the machine before it began spitting out complex mathemagical formula. Pages and pages of it.

“Now the hard part,” Tyrannus mused as he scanned the description of Brendon’s powers Perry knew exactly what he meant.

The hard part was pulling the ‘Brendon’ out, and leaving the ‘return to default’ effect, allowing it to convert any mimic into the person they were copying.

Perry turned his gaze skyward, where the others were battling Solaris without support, several hundred meters above the surface.

God, I hope we have enough time, Perry thought before focusing himself on the problem in front of him.

“Alright, make copies for everyone,” Perry said, shoving Tyrannus’s nose aside to peer down at the sheet. “We don’t need to be breathing your gasoline-breath.”

Tyrannus chuckled and soon enough, all of them had the bible-thick formula, and they were busily cracking away at it.

It didn’t take Perry long to crack the code, and in the scant time between when he deciphered it and when his two greatest nemeses did, he made…considerations.

He also unstrapped Brendon and showed him himself.

“That’s me?” Brendon asked, peering down at the bits of code that Perry had used a highlighter on.

There were a lot of them.

“Yep,” Perry said, flipping through the pages. “This is your location in spacetime, This here’s your physical body. This is your mind…this is your soul, etcetera, etcetera.”

“Why’s the code for my mind so small?”

They glanced at each other and broke into a laugh.

“because it’s using cryptography to pack up your mind into smaller chunks, Brendon,” Perry explained. “If it weren’t, this section would be the size of a library…Children’s library, at least.”

“Cool.”

“Now, before I go work on reverse engineering this, I have to ask,” Perry said. “Do you want any changes done to…” Perry motioned to The Book of Brendon. “All of this?”

“Nah, I’m good.” Brendon waved him off.

“You don’t wanna be smarter?” Perry asked bluntly.

“Nah. I mean, sure it sucks being dumb and gullible. I know I’m dumb and gullible, but I’m me, and a smarter Brendon would just be a different, more stressed-out person.”

“Maybe you’re not as dumb as you think,” Perry suggested.

“Maybe,” Brendon said with his usual placid shrug.

“Alright, looks like I’m diving back into the den of vipers.” Perry said, glancing up at the other researchers discussing their plans with the animated vigor only seen from autistic hyperfixation.

Or meth.

I wouldn’t put it past Tyrannus to feed his researchers Meth. Or maybe some curse of undeath that delays their aging as long as they continue obsessively researching for him. A bit Like the Nazghuul.

Perry strode back up to the group.

“Gentlemen, What’s the problem?” he asked the closest lab coat.

“Well, originally, the thought was that this power is basically running its own software, and in order to interface with it, we’d have to create a modified version of Pecholard’s Symbiotic Spirit, allowing the spell to draw the information about the subject that it needs, and filling in the gaps left by the removal of the original subject’s information. AKA Brendon.”

“Then we realized that since it’s merely imitating the original, any information we get from it will not turn it back into a human. We will simply draw the mimic blueprint out and reset it to a mimic.”

Perry understood. The mimic copied Brendon’s power whole and unadulterated, which turned the creature into Brendon. Their version had to draw a blueprint out of the mimic, but it had to be the original body’s blueprint.

“Okay, I’ve got two solutions,” Perry said. “Either we modify the spell to include an algorithm to wipe any ‘mimic’ from the subject’s info,” Perry said, pointing at the physical section of The Brendon Recipe. “This is a hackneyed solution that will give us people who look and act exactly like the original, but I feel as though it’s somewhat lacking in elegance.”

“Or…we drop the modified Pecholard’s Symbiotic Spirit ritual entirely and instead plug in Marigold’s soul-summoning spell. Use the physical form that the mimic has adopted to run a search through the planes and drag that soul back here. We then create an algorithm that can translate a person’s soul back into their mind and body.

We then plug in the soul and the physical form that algorithm spits out to the Brendon Reset, and Voila, you get a soul whose body matches them precisely, while erasing the original mimic.”

“That way…seems harder.” Tyrannus said.

“Feels right, though.” Perry said. It was rare for a soul and body not to match up, and of those who didn’t, most of them would be grateful to look the way they felt. Most of them.

“How will that work on inanimate objects? The mimics area also copying cars and news stands, for Chrissakes,” Dad asked.

“We could always layer the two options, apply the soul-summoning first, and if that fizzles, default back to stripping Mimic identity from the mix.” Tyrannus said.

A layered process…yeah, that could work. Now I just gotta figure out a way to bring all of spacetime to a single point without erasing everything in existance. No biggie.

And of course…Perry glanced at the two Main Suspects.

…Deal with whatever surprises those two have for me.

Gramma took a sip of tea, her reading glasses perched on her nose as she browsed through the magical code.

Tyrannus scratched equations with his foreclaw in a marble tablet that reset itself magically, while his other paw squished a squeezy toy the size and shape of a man.

Look at them…plotting.

…Not if I plot better.

Perry glanced over at Dave and Dad, who were playing cards. Dave’s horn glowed as the weapons-grade unicorn horn kept them trapped in the same instant while they worked on Solaris problem.

So Tyrannus will put some kind of backdoor mind control or authority linked to himself. That will be a red herring, as he will include a subtler program which will target some simple advantage that he can reap tremendous dividends from over an extended period of time, such as improving growing conditions east of the rockies, or trade relations. Pragmatic, practical, and difficult to counter.

Marigold will target her bloodline specifically, making us the destined rulers of everything, perhaps enhancing our attunement or natural impact on the fifth dimension. Perhaps tying the fate of our family to that of the world itself. Holding the world hostage on the condition that we are elevated above others.

…Or will she perhaps ensure that her bloodline is forever subservient to her? For all she speaks of raising me to be a fine king, she abhors it when I take power away from her.

Which will win out? Her obsession with her legacy or the need for control?

And me? what will I do?

…I guess I’d better find out, Perry thought as he rejoined the cluster of researchers, who were ironing out the details while Perry, Tyrannus, and Marigold each quietly aimed to checkmate the other two.