Exploring the Lantor Incursion ended up leaving me with more questions than answers. The parts of Lantor the Incursion had struck were covered in patches of wildly different terrain. Adjacent to the ammonia world, for example, was a verdant jungle world, filled with blossoms the sizes of houses growing on towering plants with herbaceous trunks thicker than even the giant redwood trees up Trenton’s western coast. There was also a world of pitch-black plant-forms casting shadows on a blindingly lit plain of dirt. There were entries to what seemed to be underground burrows looming on the surface like giant mouths. Andalon and I wandered among floating islands in a yellow sky, and mountains and through forests of humming crystals in a land of churning fog. We saw things that defied the imagination. And yet, for all the inconceivable variety, every piece of the Incursion’s patchwork landscape shared two common threads: Andalon’s Scary-Shinies were there, crashed somewhere, as was the fungus. It ate through the forest’s crystals. It knitted its threads through corpses of bloated beasts, floating among the yellow clouds.

I had no explanation for it. Catamander Brave said there were worlds beyond the Night. Could these have been them? Or something else, altogether?

Obviously, there was a lot left to explore, but, unfortunately, for the time being, it would have to take a back seat. You see, while I’d been chronicling all those fantastical sights, something had happened to the doppelgenneth manning my body.

It happened while Andalon and I were in the middle of a little village carved into giant red-and-white spotted mushrooms in the middle of a sunlit glade. I’d half-expected to find elves or fairies living inside them. Instead, what I found were the bodies of tall, lithe, four-armed humanoids with deep-blue skin. At least, I thought their skin was deep blue. It was hard to tell, what with most of their flesh having been melted away by the fungus growing from their corpses.

The trees outside had been stripped of all their leaves. The fungus had begun reshaping their branches, thickening them, and making them grow protuberances that reminded of pipes on a pipe organ. Clouds of spores billowed up from the protuberances. They were smoke-stacks, pumping their pollution into the sky.

The spore-clouds glistened in the Sunlight as we stood in glade, staring in shock at the sheer desolation. The things I’d been seeing in Lantor were so incredible, I’d had to decouple myself from my progeny consciousnesses. The sights were simply too much of a distraction for the rest of me.

“Do you think the Scary-Shinies are here, too?” Andalon asked.

I nodded. “They were in all the other places,” I said.

Suddenly, I was assaulted by a wave of lightheadedness.

I fell to one knee.

“Mr. Genneth, what’s wrong?” Andalon asked.

I shook my head. “One of my doppelgenneths… he’s recoupling with me.”

And not just any doppelgenneth, but the one I’d left in charge of my body.

All at once, a storm of information poured into my brain. I could taste my doppelgenneth’s excitement.

Closing my eyes, I re-unified myself. When I next opened them, I was standing in a hallway lined with patients in cots and beds. And, standing in front of me was none other than the ghost of Lord Yuta Uramaru.

He looked like a new person. He was as sharp as an origami crane, and as stolid as steel, wearing a full formal montsuki-haori-hakama—the trifecta of traditional Munine men’s wear. His mustache and stubble had been cleaned up and trimmed, giving a clear view of his swarthy skin—well, swarthy by Munine standards, anyhow. His night-black hair was held back in a tight bun, free from sweat and ooze, with just the faintest speckles of gray here and there. The colors complemented his haori’s dark blue stripes, as did his stormy gray hakama trousers. The thick, white socks he wore along with his sandals looked like fresh snow.

“—It’s… you,” he said.

He spoke in perfect Trenton, without the slightest trace of an accent. You’d have thought he’d lived his whole life in Elpeck.

It seemed language barriers weren’t a problem in the afterlife.

At the moment, my job was to take Yuta to the mind-world I’d been preparing for him, so that the part of my consciousness inside my body could focus on his duties. The doppelgenneth who’d recoupled with me was on his way to talk to the knights when Yuta had suddenly appeared to him. Fortunately, I had Daydream Alley ready and waiting for him. I briefly closed my eyes and focused, imagining my soul projecting out of my body and coming to stand right beside it, doppelgennething myself into a copy of the hallway I’d just built in my mind. I recentered my consciousness into the copy of me inside Daydream Alley and handed control of my body back to the doppelgenneth I’d put in charge of it.

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Just in case, I kept myself coupled to my other selves. Though I was experiencing all of their experiences simultaneously, I still kept a bit of distance between them and my root consciousness; it made it easier to focus on one thing at a time, while also leaving me in the perfect position to recenter and take control in case anything crazy happened.

My body changed from my physical body to a mental copy that had suddenly appeared beside it. I gave myself a wink before pushing my double vision into my subconsciousness and focusing squarely on Daydream Alley.

My physical self vanished from view as I created a mind-world just for Yuta and I. It was a perfect duplicate of the hallway we’d been standing in, only without any interference from the real world (or vice-versa).

I was in full control.

It was really nice to feel my legs again, all the way down to the tips of my toes. More importantly, my neck and hands were back to normal, and my tail was nowhere to be felt. I immediately willed away the heat sink that was my hazmat suit and replaced it with my usual work clothes—white coat, bow-tie, and all.

“Much better,” I muttered, under my breath.

Lord Uramaru’s thick, bushy eyebrows leapt up.

“I don’t understand this,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry things have come to this,” I said, bowing apologetically, with my arms at my side. “I wish I could have done more for you.”

I noticed Yuta leaning forward to look at my lips as I spoke. “I can understand your every word,” he said. “How can this be?”

Suddenly, his attention leapt from my mouth to his hands. He stared at them for a moment, and then spent another surveying himself.

Out of nowhere, Andalon crept out from behind me and stepped forward, giving a little bow, herself.

“I was sad that you were sad, and Mr. Genneth was sad with you too, Mr. Yuta,” she said. Then, cheering up, she looked him in the eye. “Everything’s going to be alright now,” she turned to me, “right, Mr. Genneth? We’re gonna figure stuffs out?” Then, almost like an afterthought, she added, “Oh. I’m Andalon,” and then bowed again, and disappeared.

Blinking, Yuta lowered himself into a squat and crossed his arms. “None of this makes any sense.”

I noticed his sheathed katana hanging from his hip.

“I know exactly how you feel, Mr. Uramaru,” I said. “Welcome to my crazy little world.”

I offered him my hand to help him up. Inside, however, I was worrying that this was not the best way I could have broken the ice.

Wait, I thought. Ice.

That gave me an idea.

“Lord Yuta Uramaru,” I said, stretching out an arm, “I would like to introduce you to a buddy of mine,” I said. “The Ice Cream Sandwich Buddy.” I dared to smile. “I think it will help things go more smoothly.”

He stared at me, first perplexed, and then shocked as the vending machine filled with frozen desserts materialized beside me.

— — —

“I never want to see another plate of honeyed bean curd for as long as I live,” Yuta said.

He took another bite of his ice cream sandwich. He chewed it slowly, closing his eyes, savoring every bite.

Much to Yuta’s shock and my delight, my second-ever attempt to create an ice-cream sandwich with my mind-powers had been a smashing success. I conjured into existence a whole Ice Cream Sandwich Buddy machine, filled to the brim with frozen treats. There’d been a slight hiccup when I noticed the machine wasn’t responding to me—in fact, it wasn’t even on at all—but that was remedied when I realized I’d forgotten to conjure up a wall socket to plug the vending machine’s power cord into, and the device hummed to life as soon as I did.

While I’d been explaining the machine to him, I’d made another copy of myself inside a separate mind world so that that me could figure out which ice cream sandwich to give him. Fortunately, he—well, me—was able to settle on a choice relatively quickly.

It couldn’t be too luxurious—chocolate shells, marshmallows, raspberry purée, etc., it would just overwhelm him—but it couldn’t be too plain, either. I didn’t want to be shooting blanks here.

So, I’d settled on a classic: the Rocky Snow.

The Rocky Snow ice cream sandwich bar was a glorious rectangle of vanilla ice cream sandwiched—what else?—between two soft, delicate Night-black chocolate wafers. The sandwich’s name came from the ice cream that was used: the vanilla had chocolate chips scattered within it, along with thin trails of fudge and caramel.

It turned out to be just the right choice.

As for me, I’d gotten myself a satisfying Chocolate Taco-late, the working man’s favorite taco-based frozen dairy treat.

Yuta held the wrapper in his hands, having licked it clean. He turned to the Ice Cream Sandwich Buddy. “If this wondrous device had existed in my lifetime,” he said, “it would have ended wars, and likely started just as many new ones.”

He moved his arm, ready to wipe his face on the sleeve of his haori when I just willed the mess off of him, sending it to non-existence.

Slowly, Yuta shook his head. “Let me repeat myself: death is not at all what I imagined it to be.” He stared at his hands.

We’d been talking. Well, it had mostly been me, particularly after Yuta had gotten his first bite of the Rocky Snow.

That old proverb, ‘the road to the heart begins in the belly,’ had never been more true. Yes, Yuta had frequently had the “you must be crazy” look on his face while I told him the gist of what was happening to me—all that wyrm stuff—and how it related to what had happened to him—the mind-ghostliness, but then he would take another bite of a frozen treat, and his paranoia went away. Mostly.

I figured it would be too risky to try doing a direct mental transfer of all the information to him, like I had with Kreston’s ghost, so I settled for the old fashioned approach.