Heather.EXE

The spell made an imprint of Heather’s soul, exposing it to the severed piece of Abun’zaul.

Instantly, the sample of the legendary mimic shaped itself to match her. Perry injected it, along with a modified version of his System into Heather.

“That was it?” Heather asked, glancing at the others. Nat shrugged.

“You didn’t get a prompt to choose a class?” Perry asked, frowning. “Maybe you haven’t reached minimum maturity yet?”

Heather punched him in the shoulder, prompting Perry to mentally flip the final switch to initialize her System.

“Whoah,” Heather said, blinking her eyes. “This is what you see all the time?”

“More or less. I removed class limitations, disabled any exponential growth tricks, as well as nerfed the XP for murder.” Now a portion of murder XP would roll into a ‘Bad karma’ fund, that would become increasingly deadly the more ‘bad karma’ was in there. This would gradually fade away over time. People who killed to defend themselves or others would recover, but someone who killed many people in a short time, would find their Fate being eroded, similar to Tyrannus’s fate-burning fire.

Gotta prevent murder-hoboing.

“Laaaame,” Heather said, rolling her eyes.

“I could put the Tinker class limitations back in?” Perry asked.

“Don’t you dare!” Heather said, her eyes going vacant, flickering back and forth as she began scanning her choices. “oooh, Lord of the Dead! That looks awesome! What’s it do?”

“I dunno,” Perry said with a shrug. “It’s automagically generated.”

“oOoOoh,” Heather’s voice began quivering as she salivated over her class choices.

Perry glanced back to Nat.

“What’d you pick?”

“I’m still deciding on if I should double down on a Tinker class for extra power, or choose something else to add secondary benefits for extra flexibility. I’m considering taking ‘Erotic Smith’.”

Perry’s brows rose, immediately imagining Nat in a smithing apron and nothing else.

“I’m messing with you,” Nat said, waving him off with a little blush. “…Mostly.”

“Okay, Lord of the Dead it is,” Heather said, unhesitatingly selecting the class.

“You know there was probably a clothing designer class in there somewhere?” Perry asked.

Heather paused, her jaw hanging slack for an instant before she recovered. “I knew that.”

“You want me to-“

“No, it’s fine, it’s fine,” Heather said, waving him off. “Fighting evil is slightly more important than clothes.” She didn’t sound like she believed that.

“More importantly, how are you?” Nat asked, shifting the topic.

“Better,” Perry said, nodding. “You guys taking a bit of the load off me helps a lot.”

Perry had divided pieces of his power, set them back to factory default and exported them to the rest of his family. Sharing the load had weakened the sensation that he might wake up from this pleasant dream, but it hadn’t completely left him.

Waking up from the dream…

Or in other words, going insane and killing himself in some horrific way or another in an attempt to ‘rejoin’ The Tide. Perry thought back to the magnetic tinker they’d discovered when they’d been first starting out as supers. He had fused his corpse to a magnetic generator in an attempt to ascend to a higher state of being, some rationale that no sane person could grasp.

Perry knew exactly what had been going through the man’s head now. The entire world, at least the supernatural part of it, was a dream of The Tide, and Perry was one small part of that dream, lucid dreaming along with it.

The gravity disturbances that caused the extreme tides every three to five years? That was The Tide’s attention focusing, however briefly, on Earth, as it blearily opened its eyes and turned over in bed, returning to it’s snoring.

It was only his superhuman Nerve, Body and Stability working in tandem to keep him anchored to this reality.

But how long will that work?

Perry was fairly sure now that if he assigned the rest of his free points, he would wake up as The Tide, his identity as Paradox Zauberer eroding away in fractions of a second, like a dream slips through the mind’s grasp.

He wasn’t The Tide, per se. There was no revelation of unimaginable power or specialness unique to him. Perry was merely a dream it was having, as was everyone else, to some extent or other.

He was, however, a dream that was self-aware, dancing on the razor’s edge of evaporating under self-scrutiny.

Not for the first time, Perry wondered if he could distribute all his stat points and in the brief moment before his self ceased to exist, decide to take a nap somewhere else.

Heather and Nat, at their core, were baseline human, and if The Tide left, they would lose their powers, and that would be about the extent of it.

Perry, on the other hand…he came from a long line of weirdness. From the day he was born, his Attunement to The Tide was outrageous. If somehow The Tide left and Perry still existed in the traditional sense, he would wither to nothing in a matter of seconds, or perhaps vanish into thin air.

And the twins…Perry winced. And dad.

Yes, there’s no real merit to the ‘become The Tide for a fraction of a second and decide to leave before my identity is stripped away from me’.

Unlikely to work and if it did it would kill his children.

No, I’ll have to go with plan A.

Perry set aside his thoughts and refocused on the dreamworld around him, moving like tar flows.

Perry reoriented his perception of time and brought things back up to normal speed.

“Are you guys ready?” Perry asked, kneeling down to speak to Sera and Gareth.

“Ready!” Sera shouted, while Gareth nodded.

“Was something supposed to happen to us too? Moms were acting funny.” Gareth asked in that lilting child-voice.

Perceptive little guy.

“Not until you’re a grown-up,” Perry said, tousling Gareth’s hair, causing the soulless ginger to squirm away from him. “You don’t have to worry about it for at least a decade.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Perry glanced over at Sera.

“Maybe longer.”

The backhanded comment went over Sera’s head, where Nat caught it, giving Perry a potent gaze on her daughter’s behalf.

“Alright, now that everyone’s squared away, we have to attend a party!”

“I don’t like parties,” Gareth said, turtling inside his shirt.

“I LOVE PARTIES!” Sera shouted.

“Why don’t you like parties?” Perry asked.

“Nobody’s gonna throw a drink at me are they?” Gareth asked, peeking out of his shirt.

Perry cocked his head in thought, scanning his estimate of the near-future for instances where Gareth got drinks thrown on him.

It wasn’t something as contrived as future-vision, but simply an extention of a human’s natural ability to use pattern recognition to predict the future…multiplied by nearly 200k

Why do you think they test pattern recognition on IQ tests? It’s the uncanny ability to roughly predict and anticipate the future based on past events that separates human from animals.

The most potent prognosticators could predict the rise and fall of nations, the course of wars, droughts, famine, or civil unrest.

Or in this case, whether a quiet, shy, 4-year-old would do something egregious enough to get a drink thrown at him. Typically the answer was a resounding ‘NO’ but supers were all very…intense individuals.

“The chances are very slim, as long as you don’t talk to Mr. Accordion’s girlfriend. Guys’ an idiot that’d get jealous of a 4-year old.” Perry said with a shrug. “Although if you did it on purpose, now knowing the possibility exists, I would be very proud of you.”

“Why?” Gareth asked.

“It would form a cornerstone of risk-taking in your psyche as you grow up,” Perry said, tweaking his nose. “Something that I predict you’ll need in the future.”

“Don’t encourage my son to get into fights at parties,” Heather said, crossing her arms.

“Didn’t we talk about this?” Perry said, thinking back to their conversation about getting Gareth to open up with more risk-taking behavior before he became set in stone as a misanthrope shut-in.

“I was talking about sports!” Heather said.

“Ah. Yeah, I can see that.” Perry said.

WWDD?

What would dad do?

“If you manage to get someone to throw a drink at you at this party, I will get you some land we can build a real tower on,” Perry whispered.

“Paradox!” Nat said.

Crap, she’s using her mom voice.

“What about me, what do I get?” Sera asked.

“Nothing.”

“Awww.” Sera sulked.

“You would do it in a heartbeat, that’s why this exercise is for Gareth and not for you.”

“Can we just go, before you put any more bad ideas in their heads?” Heather asked.

Perry held out his arms, and Heather and Nat looped their own around his, taking the twin’s hands with their other hand.

Together the five of them attended Perry’s ‘you saved the world’ party. The details of how they reverted everyone back to human were left vague, because people would much rather believe they’d been ‘cured’ of a condition rather than their soul had been plucked out of the afterlife and shoved into a perfect facsimile.

All told, the ‘you saved the world’ party was a giant self-congratulatory circle-jerk, but it was also televised to the city-states around the world, a signal that ‘yes, we won, and yes, everything is fine now.’ Political theater. Perry walked around the party on autopilot, modestly downplaying the size of his involvement, talking up the involvement of others, and generally performing his role.

Gna’kis on the other hand, loved the attention and took every opportunity to spread her new religion as the Demon Lord of Sinful Technology, Patron of Humans and Trolls. There were surprisingly a lot of takers.

Gareth, the little shit, sidestepped Perry’s vaguely phrased promise by having Sera throw a drink at him.

Perry gave him points for cleverness.

I’ll have to be more specific next time I bribe him into doing something foolish.

Dad…

Dad sat alone at one of the tables, nursing a bottle of whisky while the party flowed around him, moving around the literal aura of pain he radiated.

Not everyone had come back with the spell.

Perry glanced over his shoulder, spotting Truthslayer, exchanging pleasantries with a rigid mask over her features.

Across the room, Marigold mingled with the best of them, exchanging tittering laughs with some foreign diplomats from across the pond.

If there were any hurt that she’d snuffed out her daughter’s shot at a resurrection, Perry saw no sign of it.

Perry turned back to Dad and slipped into the seat across the table from him.

“You know, I designed my robot body so it could get drunk?” Dad said, glaring at the bottle of whisky.

“…Oh. My bad.” Perry said. The body he’d designed for his Dad was…high-performance, to say the least.

“Don’t worry about it. It is a poison, after all,” Dad said, taking a heavy swig that had no effect on his body.

Perry tapped his finger on the table.

Why not? This is my dream and I can do what I want with it.

The surroundings shifted around them, and they were dead. More accurately, they were in Elysium. The sudden shift in dimensional energies almost jostled Perry awake, but it was fine.

“Eh?” Dad glanced around at the vibrant plants, the insects buzzing, and the birds chirping.

The surroundings were teeming with life, and none of it even wanted to eat them.

“Where are we?” Dad asked, but he got his answer when the wind carried a certain bubbly laughter to them.

He lunged to his feet, his chair toppling behind him before he set off at a sprint.

Perry set the chair upright and followed behind at a more sedate pace to keep himself steady.

When he arrived, Dad was bawling into Mom’s chest, seemingly having tackled her to the ground while she was enjoying a game of cards with some half-man-half-crocodile people.

“There, there,” Mom said, patting Dad’s back before she glared up at Perry.

“I thought I said I didn’t want a fake fam…”

She met his gaze and cocked her head. “What is this, a sending spell of some kind?”

“Existence is…malleable,” Perry said with a shrug, a chair manifesting under his palm as he pulled it out and sat across from the crocodile men, who seemed to be wary of him.

“I’d like to offer you the choice,” Perry said, looking down at his parents tangled up with each other on the unnaturally soft undergrowth.

“The choice for what?” Dad asked, climbing to his feet and helping Mom up. The two of them looked at him curiously.

“I think you know.”

“I’m staying wherever she is,” Dad said.

“I know.” Perry said, glancing from him to Mom. “After tonight, I won’t have the power to do this again, so there’s no take-backs. What do you want to do?”

“Ding!”

A pleasant voice rose above the sounds of nature with a PSA.

“The evening orgy will begin in half an hour, we hope to see you there!”

“Well, I guess we could stay a bit longer-“ Dad was cut off as Mom interjected.

“I want to see my grandkids grow up!”

“We can provide that here,” one of the crocodile men said, their body shifting to human. An Elysian Attendant. “You need not wonder, as we can provide fascimilies that are identical in every way.

“But they’re not real.” Mom said.

The attendant looked back at Perry.

“Her soul is destined to do great things in the future. If you pluck her from the wheel of reincarnation, you are dooming future worlds to great suffering without her guiding light.”

“Bah, a simple thing like reincarnation timing,” Perry muttered, reaching out towards the fabric of spacetime.

He was riding on the edge of waking up as he grabbed his parent’s 4th dimensional form and 5th dimensional Fate and bent it into a loop. When they died, they would return right….here.

A much older looking Mom and dad appeared beside the younger pair, looking confused as they patted themselves down, seemingly searching for wounds.

“Oh,” Older Mom said, pointing out Younger Mom and dad. “I believe we’ve died.”

A glitter of mischief travelled through both dad’s eyes at the same time.

“The winning lottery numbers are-“

Older Mom clapped a gnarled hand over her husband’s mouth.

“I trust this satisfies your reincarnation issue?” Perry asked the shellshocked Attendant.

“Well, yes…but…he’s supposed to go to the Purgatory of mischief-makers.” The attendant pointed out Dad, gulping. “But we can make an exception, milord.”

“Much appreciated,” Perry said, motioning for his younger parents to follow him.

“How are you going to bring me back without a body?” Mom asked as they arrived at the table Perry had brought with him.

Soul-body synthesis.EXE

A gentle wave of essence reached out and engulfed Mom’s soul, running every detail through an algorithm that designed a body to match it perfectly.

He loaded that design into his next spell and cast it.

BrendonTransmute.EXE

Perry generously bestowed the table with the superpower of ‘being Claudette Zauberer’.

“EEP!”

Mom’s soul got sucked into her new body as the table winked out of existence.

A bit unceremonious, making a body out of a plastic table and not some kind of symbolic graven image made of pure marble, but Perry was pragmatic, and he didn’t care if they didn’t.

A moment later, the three of them were back in the party.

Mom’s expression radiated confusion as she glanced around the party.

“What…what just happened? The last thing I remember…”

She spotted her grandchildren chasing each other around the party, trying to splash each other with juice, and her expression crumbled with relief, as if some deeper part of her soul remembered.

Dad held her as she cried into his shoulder.

Perry moved on, gliding through this pleasant dream.

“And now some words from the hero of the hour: Paradox!”

That’s my cue.

Perry made his way to the podium, facing the massive crowd of supers, and more importantly, the cameras that transmitted his image to millions of homes in every city-state across the globe.

You know, it’s kind of funny that things have come full circle since Professor Replica.

Because Perry’s plan was very similar to the inciting incident that had spread The Tide’s dream across the globe.

Perry took a deep breath and began carefully, ever so carefully adding Free Points to his Attunement as he spoke, making his every word divest himself of portions of his power and send them flying across the fifth dimension, lodging in the souls of those billions watching in every remaining megacity.

“…What if life was like a video game?”