“Daddy! Why did you come home so early? Normally you’re gone for hours and hours.”

An adorable little dragon girl asked me as she wrapped her serpentine body around my head. My response was somewhat muffled, as I tried to answer her question despite the fact that part of her body was wrapped around my mouth.

“Mph Drphm mmmephl, mph phnk, wevz yonh vovah?”

“Daddy, I can’t understand you, why are you talking so weird?”

I slipped my hand between her and my face, freeing my mouth enough to say, “Goddamn it Mira, how are you gonna be confused that I can’t speak when you’re covering my mouth?! Also, I’m pretty sure I found that Dream Elemental I was looking for, where’s your brother? We gotta go find it!”

Mira unwrapped herself from my head and coiled around my arm instead. Given that she literally is built from a piece of my soul, she knows that I’m not actually angry with her, and that I understand this is just how she hugs. After all, I’ve been spending every night here in Mirage for the past couple years, so I definitely understand the actions of this little daughter of mine.

“Cole went to the beach today, he said he wanted to eat fish later.” I nodded my head in understanding, then waved my hand, making us appear on the shoreline that I’d built a few months ago so I could show my kids the ocean.

These past two years, Mirage has seen a lot of developments. Previously, all that was here was a single mountain, with a river running through it, along with the cave system that I generally stay in, along with the pond that I set up in the valley between the twin peaks of the mountain. Now, however, Mirage has fully blossomed into a world of its own, with different ecosystems, different landscapes, and filled with various kinds of lifeforms. Plants and animals from my original world, from this new world I’ve lived in for the past four years, and purely from my own imagination now travel around all over the place, hunting and surviving completely on their own.

Not only plants and animals though, as I’ve also recently started working on a little town project. Basically, I built all of the homes and structures for a town, and have been trying to populate that town with intelligent lifeforms of my own design. Beastkin, Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Vampires, and Dragons all roaming about, and intermingling with each other. Currently, the only problem is that…they aren’t really…alive. Worried about the effects of constantly crafting new personalities and attaching them to my soul, when I made these people I didn’t use my own soul as the basis, instead only giving them the base subconscious of a living person, as well as a personality that I hand crafted.

If I had to compare these lifeforms to anything, I’d have to say that they honestly remind me a little of NPCs in a video game. Every day, they go out, and accomplish the same tasks. They have the same conversations with each other, and they give the exact same responses whenever you ask them a question. This quality led me to discover that Memories are at least partly connected to the Soul, and without that soul, it seems that you’re incapable of forming long term memories. I tried to develop a memory storage system, similar to how Mira and Cole each have a room where all of their experiences are recorded into books, but all that did was make it so that the NPCs could now remember things that you’ve asked them previously, or odd occurrences that happen outside of their normal routine. It in no way changes the daily routine of having the same conversations that they have.

Ironically, this was actually my original goal when I made Mira. A completely soulless entity that only exists to answer my questions about things that they notice. However, I can’t really say that I regret that initial failure, especially with how adorable my kids actually ended up turning out. My experiments with creating NPCs also ended up answering my biggest question about Mira and Cole.

I had always wondered, Mira’s personality is based on a combination of Sophia, a being over 5000 years old, and Ash, a grown adult woman, and Cole is based on a combination of Ash and Xavier. So why does Cole have the personality of an especially intelligent preteen, and Mira the personality of a young child? Shouldn’t they either be basically newborns or full grown adults?

What I’ve realized is: Rather than an either/or, what seems to have happened is that they averaged themselves out. Basically, imagine a newborn with the memories of an adult, but without the corresponding psychological development. This combination resulted in both of them ending up with roughly a preteen level of development, with puberty being almost a kind of cutoff point, that they would need to specifically undergo, in order to fully grow into adults. But the question still remains, why is Mira’s personality so much younger than a preteen if this is in fact the case?

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

My theory about this answer is actually rather sad. Due to the fact that I didn’t know that her mind was fully aware and conscious immediately after making it, I had ended up leaving it on the table next to the body that I’d prepared for her. Being left alone, and struggling to possess her body by herself, it seems that the mind that I’d originally created…I think it lost something in that process. Functionally giving her something along the lines of a Developmental Disorder, brought about by my own carelessness and ignorance.

What makes this even sadder is the fact that…even after two years of daily interactions, neither Cole nor Mira show any signs of growth. After all, they aren’t actually their own beings, and are in fact closer to my own alternate personalities. As far as I can tell, both of them will remain exactly the same no matter how many years may come to pass. In a way, it’s almost like the pair of them are cursed to forever remain the same age, yet constantly accrue new memories and experiences both through their own lives, and the access they have to my memories. However, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. After all, who doesn’t wish sometimes that they could be a kid again? To just have fun with life, and play around like they used to? For example:

Once we ended up on the beach, we saw Cole sitting on the edge of the pier that I’d built, his feet swinging back and forth and holding a fishing pole. He hadn’t noticed us arriving yet, so Mira made me stay low, and stay quiet, so we could surprise him. We crept closer, and closer, finally making it within 10 feet, before Mira started wiggling her butt rather adorably, like a cat about to pounce. Wait, a cat? Mira, you’re a snake, you should be coiling up and getting ready to spring out! I think Cole has been teaching her how to hunt.

BAM Mira shot out and wrapped herself around Cole’s head, causing him to shout out in alarm and drop his fishing pole, then POP, the little elf boy with a wolf’s tail disappeared, and a little black cat appeared in his place, completely outside of Mira’s grasp. Noticing the pair of us, Cole gave Mira a quick swat with his paw, saying

“You goddamn snake, stop scaring me like that!”

Mira coiled up, and raised her head in defiance, “I am not some puny little snake! I am a Dragon Princess! Bow worthless subjects! HA HA HAA!!”

Am I raising a tyrant? No, that can’t be the case. She’s just pretending, yes.

Cole rubbed his paw on his face, as though performing the feline equivalent of a facepalm. “Mira, you do realize that if you’re a princess, that makes me a prince, right? I wouldn’t be one of your subjects.”

“Waahht? But…But….Who am I supposed to order around then?” Mira recoiled backwards, as though struck by a mighty blow. Okay, maybe I am in fact raising a tyrant.

“I don’t know…maybe the NPC’s? You can try ordering them around I guess, though Dad might have to update their personalities to listen to you.”

Mira turned to me with puppy dog eyes, as though begging me to allow her to fulfill all of her tyrannical fantasies. I rubbed the back of my head and responded, “Later. First thing’s first, I’m pretty sure that I’m here so early due to the work of a Dream Elemental, and I think that it’s currently here in Mirage. I need your guys’ help to find it.”

Mira flew around excitedly, zipping back and forth like a damn comet. “Don’t worry Daddy! I’m gonna hunt that thing down Super Fast, and then you can make the NPCs play with me!!”

She started zooming off, but a hand had grabbed her by the tail before she could. Cole was out of his cat form, and back into his more humanoid body. He sighed, and turned to me and asked, “What exactly does this thing look like? Do you have any idea as to where it is, or how to find it?” I gave a shrug, answering

“Elemental’s don’t really have a distinct body, they just look like whatever concept they embody behaving in a strange manner. For example, the Earth Elemental me and your Mama Ash fought was basically just a bunch of dirt and rocks that moved around chaotically. Judging by that, I assumed that this Dream Elemental was basically something that would knock people unconscious and show them a chaotic dream, however, due to the fact that whenever I fall asleep, I come here to Mirage, I had a hunch that if the Dream Elemental found me, it would end up getting brought here. So just look for anything out of the ordinary. No one knows Mirage better than the two of you, so if anything, you two should probably be telling me what to look for.”

Cole nodded his head in understanding. “Very well, I’ll check out all of the towns and NPCs, and Mira, you check out all of the different Landscapes that dad’s made, and let us know if anything seems weird. Dad, you should try to make some sort of widespread change that affects all of Mirage at the same time.”

I tilted my head in confusion, “What kind of change are you talking about? And why?”

Cole held Mira in his arms to make sure she actually stayed long enough to hear the plan that we would all be following, as she struggled to wriggle free from captivity. “Something simple, like adding a slightly green tint to everything uniformly. Given that it’s a Dream Elemental we’re dealing with, it probably has some amount of control over whatever part of Mirage that it happens to be in. I’m thinking that if you apply a widespread change to affect all of Mirage at once, it won’t work on the part that is currently the Dream Elemental, which should hopefully make it a little more obvious that that’s what we’re looking for.”

Goddamn my son is smart. I took Mira from his arms and started stroking her head so she’d stop trying to run off, “Alright, one green tint coming up. Mira, while you’re looking for anything weird, also make sure to keep an eye out for anything that is Not Green, okay?”

Mira nodded her head, her wings flapping about rather cutely as she said, “Okay Daddy, now lemme Go!! I wanna go find it!!”

Laughing, I released this hyperactive daughter of mine, and she immediately shot off, her long white and golden body giving her the appearance of a comet’s tail as she flew off faster than the eye could see.