"Everything is connected. We are all one."

Henry was utterly at peace. His whole experience was nothing but pure bliss and childlike wonder, taking in the entirety of being as it was, merely observing it and not passing judgment in any way. He was traveling alongside millions of others like him, immersed in a great, fiery column of divine light that moved ever upwards at unfathomable speeds. Between the membranes he could perceive other columns like it, repeating infinitely outwards in fractal patterns.

"As above, so below."

At that point a wet, slimy tentacle slung itself around his immortal soul, yanked it out of the spiritual column and reattached it to his mind.

spake the tentacle's owner, conveying its words in psychedelic images that assaulted Henry's thoughts.

Henry couldn't see anything, but he was pretty sure something had gone tits up. The other tentacles finished the body they had been sculpting, and he was shoved inside it. His memories came rushing back.

"Gah! Fuck!" He opened his eyes, and wished he hadn't.

From what he could tell he was submerged in an sea of viscous, semi-translucent pink ooze. Floating ahead of him, impossibly far away and yet filling the boundary of his vision, was an immense, golden eyeball surrounded by green tentacles. Some of its proportions were simply wrong, and Henry could feel a thunderous headache coming on when he tried to make sense of what he saw. He instead turned his attention to the fact that his body now had four of those same tentacles instead of normal human limbs, and that his mouth was not where he had expected it to be. This would not do.

"Oh. Ohohoho! You and I are going to have a long talk. First of all, ass is NOT mouth, and second, what part of "when I give the signal" was so hard for you to understand?! How did you even open the portal yourself? Cause I won't believe for a second that that little punk did it! YOU broke the deal!"

A shuddering wave rippled though Squidface's tentacles, moving them all in unison. Henry wondered if it was the equivalent of a shrug.

Henry would have groaned if he had lungs. Communicating with the thing in its own habitat was going to be just as frustrating as always. "Who was spicy and how many were they? That was a titanic amount of mana you gave me, and I'm curious as to why."

"That's... the longest sentence I've ever heard you say. And it's gibberish as usual. But nevermind that, why am I here at all? I didn't break any rules. Can you show me the Pact?"

One of Squidface's innumerable tentacles extended a great deal and then reached into its... purple rectangle? Henry had absolutely no idea what he was seeing, but it came out again holding a strip of chevroned duct tape with a note attached. His forehead started itching, and he hypothesized that Squidface was actually manipulating his mind to show him what it thought he would recognize as a legal document. Cute. And intriguing. Perhaps he had been too quick to dismiss it as a simpleton.

He slung his own tentacle around the note and read it.

"YOU TELL. YOU BRING. I TAKE. I SELL. THEY BUY. PAY YOU."

"Argh! No not this, you imbecile! The Pact! The one I made with..."

"...yes! Your boss! And mine, not that he's a particularly inspiring teacher. The man has no ambition. Do you have a copy of that document? Can you speak to him somehow?"

A voice rung out from somewhere to his right.

"Well, well... Henry, is it now? Yeah, let's go with that. Can't even remember your original name, though I'm sure it's in here somewhere. I must say, your new look suits you. It's not the first time you've been talking out of your ass."

Henry managed to turn around after flailing his tentacles for a bit, and got a good look at his patron. It appeared to be an immaculately groomed middle-aged man in businesslike attire. The man was standing upright, unaffected by the currents in the ooze, and was busy studying a good old-fashioned magic scroll. It trailed several meters below him as he unrolled it, split off into two parts at one point, and some sections appeared to have been stapled on. Henry hadn't seen that thing in a long while.

"Ah. Yes, thank you for coming, master. Your many-appendaged manservant here seems to have made a bit of a cockup. I'm positive I haven't violated the Pact in any way, as I'm sure you'll find once you've familiarized yourself with the, ah, revisions."

The man looked up from the scroll, and it burst into purple flames. For the first time in several hundred years, Henry felt something akin to uncertainty for his future.

"Null and void, kid. It's for the best, really. It's been a hell of a ride, but I'm calling it quits. If playing poker with the gods was your game, let's just say I'm chickening out." Henry had no idea what poker was, but he knew the Old Ones often spoke in mysterious ways. Still, this did not bode well. Best to double down on the politeness.

"Uh, I beg your pardon, oh Esteemed Old One?"

"Oh, I'm not the guy you signed on with, he quit ages ago. No, I work in a different department, and I'm not even here, this is just an avatar."

A divine simulacrum? Henry mused, and wished he still had his old body so he could have used his mana sense to examine its composition. Very intriguing! He made a point to remember the strange name it had given. Normally he was terrible at names, but new deities didn't come around all that often.

"I gotta hand it to you," Anavatar continued, "you've kept things interesting around here. You're practically a legend around the water cooler. We didn't mind you getting creative and finding loopholes in the Pact, that just meant your Intellect score was doing its job. Some of us got a little worried when you managed to forge our signature and started adding contingencies to it, but your old patron said it just made you a more interesting villain."

The god sighed and continued. "But sneaking in a clause about reincarnation in case of accidental death or dismemberment? That was when things really went south. He let it slide because it said you could only do it once a year and suicide was strictly forbidden, but the world was so violent back then that adventurers surviving a whole year was a huge deal, especially for rogue mages who would be a priority target for Academy hit squads. He sure as hell didn't expect you, an accomplished warlock with a death cult of devoted followers, to proceed taking a job breeding ducks in the tutorial village so you could bank up extra lives for 52 fucking years!

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Ducks?" said Henry, who had begun to doze off, but snapped wide awake at the mentioning of his favorite topic. "Fascinating creatures! Did you know the males have a corkscrew p-"

"So everyone just regarded you as a curiosity and kinda forgot you existed. Then you decided to go back to adventuring at age 86, died to a goblin's pet rat, and poof, one of the Academy wizards-in-training suddenly got proficiency in Warlock skills. We nearly shat our pants at that point, thinking we had ourselves another timeloop scenario, so we stunted your magic skills and hoped you'd telefrag yourself into an elemental plane one day. But of course you only got a job in the cafeteria, stuck around long enough for someone to invent spell rods, and then you stole their invention and made the recipe public! Totally upset the economy, and it never recovered. And then came those fucking console command blocks you call sigils. Lord only knows how you stumbled over the debug functions."

"The... what? Okay I may have left those schematics behind in the tavern one night, but surely it didn't have that much of an impact? Those rods are very time-consuming to make."

"Not when they're being manufactured in the hundreds a day by automated golems in eighteen different factories across the globe, they're not! And THEN you had the balls to write another Pact of your own, with the Fatebinder of all things! That one really raised some eyebrows, I'm told even the main office put their developers on hold for a while. You're not the first one to try that, but those things are dumb as bricks and it shouldn't have worked. I'm honestly impressed it went on for as long as it did. By all accounts it should have ate you as soon as it learned humans are tasty."

Squidface made another shrug-wave when Anavatar gestured at it. Henry couldn't tell if it was scared or happy at being acknowledged by the gods, but looking directly at it still hurt his brain. Anavatar at least had the decency to appear normal.

"But you just had to push it even further, didn't you?" Lemme check the logs again... yeah, look at the most recent one, it says... yeah look at this!" A series of arcane runes snaked out of the man's open palm and hovered in front of him:

23:57:25.826 The Janitor critically hit Professor Plurbinquarg for 1298 damage with a point blank headshot from a Colt .45, yee-haw.

23:57:25.827 Professor Plurbinquarg was killed.

"I had to import a library from a wholly different universe just so it could parse that! What the fuck is a gun doing in a fantasy dungeon crawler, Henry?!!"

"A... Oh, you mean the banger!" said Henry. "I believe it was about 80 years ago, back when I really got cracking with dimensional boundaries. I was working as a scullery maid in the Westreach at the time, this was before they started letting women into academies, so I had to take a more practical approach. Yeah, so I had set up this whole laboratory out in the desert to see if it was possible to stuff a bag of holding inside itself! And I did manage to stabilize it for a while! But then there was an Electric Eagle flying around, this was before Extermination Inc. wiped them all out. And it got attracted to all the discharges, so of couse it got sucked inside the bag when it collapsed, and everything sort of... blew up. And one of the things that flew out of it was that... "gun", as you called it. And a rather strange looking hat, and what I surmise was an ammunition bandolier. But I wasn't gonna show it to anyone! And I spent most of the ammunition getting home from there, that place was really dangerous. It was just a travel memento, really!"

"I... oh for fuck's sake. I knew we should have nerfed the Luck stat. Yeah, I can see how that would have caused some random access to Eagleland. Those things use keywords for lookups don't they? Hmmm..."

"I'm really really sorry. I'll lay low in the future, I promise."

"Ah, it's no matter. You're not even the problem here, it's what you've done to the world itself. Had you just been hellbent on power and domination, that would have been fine. The Fatebinder would have brought in enough heroes to take you down and the project would have gone on as planned. But what you did was so much worse. You've taken a perfectly good, wild and exciting magical world and turned it into a boring, technological paradise! People watch television all night instead of practicing their skills! They rely on sigils and walking computers instead of raising their attributes! Most people don't even know how to open their Status screen, because their slates will tell them anything they want to know. And why bother hunting for artifacts when you can just pick up a Chain Lightning spell rod at the local dispensary? Hell, go get a mutagen at the clinic and start growing LEAVES instead of HAIR, and you won't have to hunt for food ever again!" Anavatar closed his eyes after the outburst, and started massaging his temples.

Henry wasn't quite sure how any of this could be considered a bad thing. "With all respect, I think you're being unreasonable. I just wanted some light entertainment to pass the evenings, so I spent a few decades coming up with designs for a a broadcasting device. Never got it to work myself, but that's how Grandiloquent got their leg up on everyone else, they picked up where I left off. I just give them a tip now and then, that's all. And don't get me started on those mutagens, those were quite difficult to work out, I tell you. Photosynthesis is very complex, you know."

Anavatar only shook his head. "And now you've gone and introduced them to gunpowder. I don't know how or why, but the head researcher of that military-industrial abomination of yours is headed straight for your old lecture hall as we speak. What do you think she'll do when she finds a six-shooter next to your corpse missing half his head, huh? That Academy was on its last legs already and you just gave it the death knell, ushering in a new age of easily accessible mass murder and delegating offensive magic to the junk pile. There's just too many coincidences here. If I didn't know your Luck was exactly 32 I'd swear it was in the triple digits."

Henry didn't have the heart to tell him that he'd long since added a clause to make the Status screen show the temperature of his alcohol still instead of his Luck attribute. Honestly he'd never understood what it even did. But it did worry him that they'd found the manipulator so quickly. How did those new bloodline mutagens work exactly?

"Even when we shut off the mana well it had only minimal effect because of that utterly terrifying communist necrocratic monarchy you instated. Instant rationing, everyone gets a share, armies sent out to strongarm the Qi sects into cranking out spirit stones. Problem solved. People have no incentive to rebel against the government anymore, the Silent Queen is just too damn good at her job! Why would ANYONE ever want to be a hero here? It's completely unmarketable!" Henry had understood less and less of Anavatar's tirades as they went on, but one thing tugged at his attention.

"Hold on, the mana well? That was YOU? You caused the Silence?!"

"Yep. Pulled the plug myself. It's what we do to cause a minor apocalypse when things get out of hand, but here in Henry-land they're just treating it like a temporary pandemic and getting by with no trouble."

Now THAT was just plain insulting. "No trouble! Do you know how inconvenient that was for me? Half my simulacrums just melted in broad daylight, I had to pull SO many strings to cover that up! And I thought it was a sinister plot by one of the sects so they could monopolize spirit stones or... that the servitors had gone rogue and started siphoning it somehow or... Fuck! Why?"

"Because the project got canned, that's why." Anavatar sighed, and some of the vigor seemed to leak out of him. Spell degradation?

"I like your style, Henry, really, I do. In a way you're actually a better villain than any of the others we have. The problem is, a perfect villain leaves no space for heroes. I was supposed to do a soft reset, give it a few more generations and see if any heroes showed up despite all the craziness. But yesterday they told me they'd have to rewrite the entire definition of heroism, or the exterminators would start producing them in droves whenever they paved over a dungeon. And the designers are seriously considering removing the Warlock job entirely for what an unbalanceable nightmare it turned out to be. So congratulations, Henry. You get to stay here in this clownshit insane utopia you've created for yourself. I'm decoupling it from the grid. And thanking my stars I'll never have to deal with any of your bullshit again."

"NO! I was so close to figuring out time travel! You can't-"

"/mute" said Anavatar, and Henry's asscrack smoothed over and disappeared, along with his mouth. Most intriguing.

"Oh, and Fatebinder?"

"Wipe his memory and give him a different designation. No proficiency whatsoever, make him a pig farmer. Ah no, those always end up as heroes for some reason. Make him an innkeeper or something, I don't care!"

Anavatar winked out of existence. Henry screamed in his mind as Squidface proceeded to grab him by the neck and shove dozens of tentacles into his eyes, at which point he mercifully passed out. It regarded him for a second after it had completed its job, and then tossed his soul back inside the spiritual column, completely unaware that it had bent itself into a torus when Anavatar left.

Alone in the void once again, Squidface then lifted a few hundred tentacles up to where a beard would have been, had its tremendous eye been a face. They made a scratching motion.