I kept one hand on Cinder's waist, guiding her across the dark courtyard. Her wings provided the camouflage, their colors matching the shadowed stone so perfectly that we might as well have been ghosts.

The heavy wooden door's lock surrendered easily to my plastic card with a soft click. Old-style locks were hilariously vulnerable to the most simple approach.

We slipped inside, our footsteps echoing softly on the stone floor despite our best efforts to move quietly.

The administrative wing was exactly what I expected - all vaulted ceilings and Gothic arches, illuminated by Kitlix lanterns that cast a warm, flickering light similar to candlelight. The walls were lined with paintings of various Slayer Saints and their heroic deeds, their stern faces seeming to watch our progress disapprovingly.

"This way," I whispered, guiding Cinder down a side corridor and into the head priest's office. According to what Yulia dug up, the Elder Omnid inhabiting this domain was perfect.

With another application of a plastic card and we were in.

I closed the door behind us and slipped out from under Cinder's protective feathers and made my way to the ancient-looking desktop computer that dominated the office's heavy wooden desk. The machine was exactly what I expected - old, rarely used, and probably containing template files for every official document the cathedral produced.

"What are you doing?" Cinder hissed as she kept watch by the door.

"Creating a paper trail," I murmured, booting up the machine. The login screen appeared, demanding a password.

"You're going to hack a church computer?" Her voice was scandalized but also somewhat impressed.

"Pfff," I waved her off. "Obviously not. I'm going to hack a far weaker link - people."

I shuffled through the papers inside the desk for a bit and took photos of everything in the office.

Then I had Yulia look up the latest sermon of the old Archpriest that the office belonged to. In minutes, she applied the man's voice to the Nineteenthlabs API, replicating it exactly.

Then, I picked up the ancient landline phone from the desk.

"Ready," Yulia whispered back in my ear.

I dialed the IT support number listed on a sticky note beside the monitor.

"NazariteNet IT Support, how may I assist you?" a bored voice answered.

"Yes, hello," I typed into my phone. "This is Father..."

"Yes, hello," Yulia's modulated voice emerged from my phone's speaker, sounding exactly like an elderly priest. "This is Father Matthias Jonannes from the Triumvirate Slayer's Cathedral records office. I seem to have forgotten my password again. These darn systems, you know how it is..."

"Of course, Father," the IT person sighed, clearly used to this sort of call. "I'll need to verify your identity. Can you provide your employee ID?"

"Ah yes, let me see..." I made a show of shuffling papers, then Yulia read out the ID number I'd spotted on the paperwork inside the desk. "EX-2024-117..."

"Thank you, Father. And your security question: what was your first parish?"

"St. Nazareth Spire of Lethargic Lake," I replied through Yulia confidently, relying on the AI's reverse-image lookup a photo of that church on the office walls. "Beautiful little place, you know."

Cinder's eyebrows were escaping from her face in a 'what the fuck' look.

"Alright, verified. Your temporary password is 'BlessedGate2025'. Please change it upon login."

"Bless you, my child," Yulia replied.

After disconnecting, I quickly logged into the system. Just as I'd suspected, the computer contained the needed templates.

"Alex," Cinder whispered urgently, looming over me. "Someone's coming!"

I quickly turned the monitor off and slipped under her camo-wings just as footsteps echoed down the hallway. Through the gaps in her feathers, I watched an elderly Omnid priest shuffle past the office, muttering prayers under his breath. He didn't even glance our way through the stained glass office door.

Once the priest's footsteps faded away, I slipped back to the computer and began rapidly editing the templates. My fingers flew across the keyboard as I created a carefully crafted paper trail - letters of recommendation, character references, work permits and most importantly, official documentation of my "charitable work" with the cathedral's youth outreach program.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"What exactly are you doing?" Cinder whispered, peering over my shoulder as I worked.

"Creating the perfect man," I answered.

Cinder choked.

"What were you doing on February 14?"

"What? Why?" Cinder demanded, caught off guard by my question.

"Just answer. Where were you?"

"I was... at the Spring's End Festival," she said. "The one where a bunch of students died from the flesh tree that walked out of the gate. Why?"

"Perfect," I typed rapidly, creating a detailed account of how Alexander Glock had heroically helped evacuate students during the incident, specifically mentioning assistance rendered to one Cassiopeia Nova. "I'm the mixie who helped you during that event."

"But you weren't..." Cinder started.

"Doesn't matter," I said, printing the documents. "What matters is that these records say I was. And they're official church document signed by Father Matthias Jonannes."

"Won't the priest realize none of this happened?" She demanded. "You can't just..."

"Father Matthias Jonannes is 341 years old," I said. "Do you know what happens to old Omnids who repeatedly extend their life using the Lazarus Cavern instead of retiring?"

Cinder looked at me.

"They get super forgetful and confused," I explained, carefully applying the church's ornate seal to each document and signing them with Matthias' signature, replicating it with slight variance. "Even with the incarnator optimizing the body, the subject still ages and the mind decays. Elder Omnids mix up timelines, forget whole decades. Their short term memory is constantly disrupted by the reincarnation process. Nobody questions computer databases and sighed records. Especially not from a respected Arch-Elder. Your dad won't doubt these - if anything he might be a bit concerned about why you never mentioned the 'heroic mixie' who saved you during the Festival."

Cinder's feathers shifted through shades of amazement and concern as she watched me work. "This is... so effin' devious. How do you even know all this stuff? How did you know the answer to the secret question?"

"Oodle, plus the sagely wisdom of my personal open source AI," I shrugged. "The secret questions are actually pretty standard once you break into enough of these churches. Honestly, if I was the school's administration the first thing I'd do is order students to make their own personal AI. There is so much potential in agent-armed LLMs with vision that everyone is utterly blind to."

"Is that how you knew all those students' names earlier? And their connections?"

"Yep," I nodded. "Yulia helps me process and gather information faster, but the real skill is knowing how to use that information within the framework of administrative systems and people."

"Yulia, generate an image of me, Dr. Slate Glock and Father Matthias Jonannes at St. Nazareth Spire of Lethargic Lake," I whisper-ordered in Kaska. "Don't forget the name tags and event date. Use the image on the wall as reference."

I began humming Omnithornication as I worked forging more documents and contracts, slipping them into appropriate folders and shelves.

"Ugh. I can't believe you recorded me singing that," she lamented.

"It's now my favourite song in the universe," I commented, inserting a usb cord from my phone into Father Matthias' computer and sending the image to the printer.

As the printer hummed, I dismounted one of the many pictures off the wall, popped the glass out and then inserted the AI-generated photograph of myself and my Thunderbird 'father' into the frame, hanging it back onto the wall.

"Holy shit," Cinder breathed, staring at the photo. "HOW?! The lighting, the details, the lake in the back... it looks completely real. How did you... do that?"

"Yulia is really good at using Stable Diffusion," I grinned. "It takes her seven seconds to generate pretty much anything."

"But..." Cinder's wings shifted through confused purples as she studied the image. "Your clothes, your expression, even the way the light catches your eyes... It's perfect. Too perfect. It's just like the other photos on the wall. It's like it was there to begin with!"

"That's the point," I said, saving the photo onto the computer into the Nazarite meetup folder that was already there. "How much do you know about current AI capabilities?”

“Umm. I'm in Mr. Murconi's infomatics class, but he's lame and annoying so I skipped most of it. I know that Omnibook released an AI recently but it's like, pretty stupid, just hallucinates nonsense most of the time, so it's not amazing for essays. Asking it to draw something remotely interesting like some celebrity getting their head cut off gets the ‘request denied’ yellow cat picture.”

“Sounds about right,” I said. “Many Omnids like you haven't really caught up to what AI can do these days."

"You're scaring me even more now," Cinder admitted, her wings shifting through uneasy orange-violets. "Like, actually legit freaking me out. You just... Casually walked in here and rewrote reality in what, thirty minutes?"

"Reality is mostly paperwork and photos," I shrugged, gathering the documents into a neat folder. "People believe what they see, especially when memory is imperfect. Your dad might be the Justice of Leviathan's Cradle, but he's still just a person who relies on other systems, other people and documentation to make decisions. I just wrote myself into a month of staying at the church dorms instead of sleeping in the van like a smelly hobo."

"Damn," Cinder muttered. "So... Are we done or…?" She asked as I carefully locked the computer and restored the office to its near-exact previous state.

"We're gonna go to the dorm, so that I can shower and change," I said. "While I do that, you can think of how you met a very brave, nerdy young man on Saint Valentira's Spring's End Day. A choir manager Alexander Glock."

"A choir manager?" Cinder's feathers formed its invisi-canopy over me as we walked to the dorms. "Really?"

"Yep," I grinned, leading her down the corridor towards the dormitory wing. "It explains why I'm so interested in your music, doesn't it? Church choir managers are basically invisible - everyone knows they exist, but nobody pays attention to them."

We reached the dormitory wing, which was exactly what I expected - rows of simple but comfortable rooms meant for visiting clergy and church staff. Most were empty, their doors unlocked and featuring neatly made beds and sparse furnishings.

I picked one of the small rooms in the back, messed up one of the beds and then used a pen to quickly write out "Alexander Glock" onto the sign-in sheet by the door, backdating it to Feb 10.

"Brb," I told Cinder. "Chill in my bed for a bit."

"That's not your..."

"It is now," I winked at her.

The Quetzi watched me with wide ocean-blue eyes as I rushed off to the bathroom.