The flow of time between different parts of the cosmos was inconsistent and even the handful of days after we’d decided to quit ended up being stretched into decades in cosmic time. The delay was because we’d ended up getting caught up in a dispute between a cosmic worm and some elder gods.

The cosmic worm hailued us as it saw us passing through. The worm called us in, so it could argue its case for a chance at spreading its spawn in an empty region of the cosmos that the elder gods had been low-key trying to boggart for themselves.

Parenthood had made me into a bit of a soft-touch, so even though I was supposed to be impartial I was inclined to side with the cosmic worm. A single mother doing her best to look for a safe home for her and her kids. Especially when the space she was asking for wasn’t much, both in quality and quantity, and her species was relatively benign in reputation and not known for creating undue havoc.

My decision was also likely influenced by the fact that the dumpster fire that Prim and I had just left, was one of the universes that this particular group of elder gods had mismanaged. I had already seen their handy work and wasn’t impressed. Thus I was, all the more, willing to give the Cosmic Worm a chance to show what she and her children were made of.

The negotiation and arbitration that followed as we settled the dispute between the cosmic worm and the elder gods was simultaneously lengthy and brief in the cosmic sense. We were done in a few hours but those few hours lasted subjective decades.

The material plane was four dimensional, mortals just happened to only experience in a limited fashion. This meant that absolute time didn’t really exist as far as the cosmos was concerned, and for immortals like us, everything always took forever, while simultaneously happening in the blink of an eye.

Thus it should be no surprise that despite Prim and I, having determined that we were going to quit, it took awhile before we could actually put down our mantles as heads of the House of Antipodes.

I might or might not have mentioned it before, but above, or rather “behind,” the Misters, there was a grand collection of hyper-dimensional entities that sort of watched the HOA’s operations from a distance. We called them “Council of Grand Executives,” they were also known as the “Council of Grandpas and Grandmas”...The Shorter term would be the “Grans”.

The Grans technically held no authority, but they were the backing that HOA turned to, when the beings that were above the HOA tried to overstep, and a lot of them were former Misters. That gave them some pull.

When Primrose and I announced our desire to quit, we simply went to the liaison amongst the number to inform them that a new Mister Dark and Mister Gray would be needed.

Normally, a Mister was supposed to find and choose their own replacement before quitting, but that was more of a custom than an actual rule. Its not like I’d wanted this damn job to begin with and they’d already known that I was going to get them back for shitting this job onto my lap because I’d said as much when I was being sworn in as Mister Gray. As a result, I had no need to play nice. Add to this the karmic virtue Primrose and I had accumulated together, and Prim had no need to play nice either.

Many tears were shed once, Primrose and I announced we were living. We gave our two weeks notice, and the beard old man with a thousand butterfly wings and sword-shaped eyebrows that served as the Houses. He tried to demand we follow protocol and find replacements for ourselves before leaving.

However, like I said we had no intention of playing around so long, and beyond that, I’m a being of living-probability so it wasn’t too hard for me to spit out two coordinates to go look at.

Then the old man tried to change stance and demand we give the HOA at least two thousand years more service before leaving. We declined and maintained that we’d be leaving in two weeks. Then he compromised a bit and asked for two hundred years. We declined and maintained we’d be leaving in two weeks.

Then he compromised again and asked for two decades. We stuck our ground and said we’d be leaving in two weeks. With tears in his eyes, he eventually asked for two years. After some conferring, Primrose and I finally felt bad for the old man and agreed to give him two months.

He let us go after that. Then the sneaky bastards proceeded to entangle us in some relativistic nonsense, where the two years of earth time was conflated into two decades in cosmic time, but honestly, we’d kind of expected something like that would happen even if we'd walked away after only giving them two weeks.

Eventually, we did get out of the HOA, and once we were out, they threw us a nice party and gave us a golden parachute that made even the most corrupt of corporations look stingy.

I ‘did’ end up getting ‘suckered’ into agreeing to join the council of Grans, which is damn annoying because that meant once a month I’d get stuck doing to a meeting that’d last for about a year or so, in cosmic time. A meeting that’d decide absolutely nothing because ‘again’ the Grans had no actual power beyond occasionally helping out with the HOAs internal administrative stuff and acting as plot armor for the organization that served as plot armor our section of the material plane.

I was also grossed out by the idea of people calling me “Gran Kaylan”, considering that none of my kids were old enough to have their own kids yet. On the upside however, I didn’t mind too much because it meant I gained an increased freedom in my ability to travel between the higher and lower planes to hang out with some of my old buddies who’d already ascended.

This naturally also gave me the opportunity to set things up ahead of time, for the eventual ascendance of the Kaylan clan. Our graduation from the material plane was probably eons way still, but a little preparation never hurt.

As for Primrose, once Primrose was done with her duties as Miss Dark and she’d said goodbye to the House of Antipodes, she settled in for a nice long relaxing vacation with nothing taxing.

I’m just joking. She spent roughly one and half weeks taking it easy and almost immediately became antsy again. Fortunately, me and the other wives had already planned for that. Margot, Maci, and I, pulled Primrose into working with us as the Division of Cosmic Artifice.

We expanded our already robust world-crisis intervention programs and ironically got even more involved with the HOA, because our expanded capacity for dealing with worlds that would normally be unsaveable lead to them just tossing more and more of their problems onto our plate.

We then basically sat Primrose at the helm of it all, freeing Tommy, and Ashley, who’d both been wanting to step back a bit so they could take care of their young clan and the children that they were either raising already, or were on the way, because Marie, Tommy and Ashley’s second significant other, was pregnant again.

Primrose was supported by Bernadette and Sevestion, who’d worked their way far enough up the ladder to be put in charge of double-checking a world’s state after its refinement and before its integration into Uhrwerk.

Maci, Margot, and I were then able to look at Uhrwerk’s future and plan for what its expanded form would look like. Margot still focused on Uhrwerk’s internal-coding. I was set to work in overseeing the general operation and stability of Uhrwerk as a whole. Maci sort of did a bit of everything. Helping out wherever help was needed, while also keeping an eye on the various supervisory departments to make sure nothing was slipping through the cracks.