I sat in my training room. Meditating. Eyes closed. Legs crossed. Spirit opened and extended from my body. A great spiralling, needle, and straw, made out of the substance of my soul now extended itself through the folds of time and space. Tapping into the maelstrom and madness that was the grand nebula. The nebula was crazily dangerous, but it was also the source and gathering point of most, if not all, anomalous energy within the cosmos. If one didn’t mind taking a bit of a risk, it was one of the best places one could reach out to, for the sake of absorbing eldritch energy.

I’ve never stopped training. I’ve never stopped cultivating. My experiences as a villain, my experiences of being made into a marchen against my will, and my time as a slave of the worlds had left me filled with a certain fear. A fear that one day, someone, or something, would come and take away my ability to choose again. I feared losing control again. I feared having the things that were precious to me taken away.

The happier I became, the more at peace I became, the more afraid I was, because the list of things I had to lose kept rising. Thus I had to keep striving, I had to keep getting stronger to protect the life I’d built and the people I loved. Never mind that no amount of power would ever truly make me perfectly safe. This training was something I did to keep myself sane. It didn’t hurt that it came with actual, tangible benefits, to my overall capabilities.

Between the hours of morning and the late-afternoon, a gathering of youth ranging from the early teens to late toddler-hood would trickle in through the doors of our shop. Some of them were school kids who were either coming in after they’d finished classes, or were here playing hooky. Others were urchins and orphans, youth with no other place to go, who’d made a habit of showing up because they’d learned that this was one place that wouldn’t shoo them away.

“Pups! The pups are here, the pups are here!” sang Jo.

My wife was really big on kids. We weren’t ready to have any kids of our own yet, but I think that if we weren’t running the shop she’d have already found some elementary school, kindergarten, or day-care to work at instead. I...also probably had positive feelings regarding kids.

I know that I always hated it when the various Administrators of the Worlds would make me do bad things to kids, while I was being forced to play various kinds of villains. Once I got strong enough to fight the bindings that held me and forced me to act, I generally took it easier on people the younger they were. Becoming your typical ineffectual villain, who usually somehow avoided doing anything fatal, or irreversible, if one was under a certain age.

Recently, I’d gotten strong enough to make some major upgrades on the layout and operation of the shop. First, I had to expand the scale of my Private Server and change some of its settings and security figures to keep what I was planning from becoming a huge weakness in the security of our home. Then I, essentially extruded the shop a bit, shifting it’s placement in the flow of space, time, and “reality” (as in the realness and imaginariness of a place, person, or thing).

The result of these efforts was that instead of having to move my shop around, I could now simply just set up stable anchor points in various point in the various Servers, and have inter-connected instances of my store operating in those dimensions. With the result being, where once, we had only a few kids and customers per day, nowadays, our little shop was almost constantly busy. Fortunately, the scale of the shop itself was somewhere around the range of an entire planet. A magic-rich planet. Even a small magic-rich planet had tens of billions of miles of surface area.

The layout of the shop was set to change based on the needs and expectations of the shopper, as well as the settings created by the local world and culture. So, at minimum, most people would find themselves walking into a small hole-in-the-wall establishment, or a weird magical department store. I, further, subdivided the space so that unless one entered with someone, or was “with” one of the people who entered, shoppers would find themselves in a personalized instance of the shop. I’d found that many of our shoppers kind of liked having an intimate experience with the store. They liked not having to worry about other people looking over their shoulders.

I also found that some people actually preferred the opposite and wouldn’t be comfortable with it just being them in the store. However, even that could be programmed for, and adjusted for, creating instances where a handful of shoppers would be in the same copy of the store if that's what they wanted and expected. Or if necessary, I could have my pawns pretend to be shoppers, making enough of the right noises, and movements, to set the customer at ease.

One could even have things both ways if one liked. There were instances, where one would be aware of others in the store, but not be forced to actually have to deal with other people. It was easy to cater to all these differing tastes, thanks to the use of quantum duplicates of Jo, myself, and Brandy, as well as the sheer abundance of figments

I had more than enough figments to comfortably man the shop on a busy day, and Jo, myself, and sometimes Brandy, could man multiple counters at once, thanks to some timey-wimey hijinks I was playing using the shop’s unique placement on the timeline. This could make a day feel a bit longer and jam-packed, but there were no other ill effects.

Returning to the subject of children. Jo and I both liked kids. We’d never had to worry about shoplifting, or in-store mischief, because if you try to touch our stuff with the intention to purloin, or harm it, the item either turns non-tangible in your hands, or it’ll vanish and return to the shelf when you exit the shop. We already donated to a bunch of schools, charities, and organizations in the worlds we regularly visited because of our fondness for children, but based on our soft spot for kids, we didn’t mind making a kid-centric area in the store.

Or at the least, it started as just a kid-centric area. It eventually became something close to an expansion and combination of our store’s dining and entertainment area. We called that area the “Arcade”, but it had quickly become far more than that. Becoming something like a themepark, or theme-restaurant.

There was a theater, there was a library, there was an actual arcade with all sorts of games in it, and there were specially set aside aisles for people within that area to shop in. Unlike the normal areas of the store, which only used the local currencies, barter, and time, we primarily ran the Arcade area off a token system. Basically a form of store credit.

The idea was to create a place where children could come hang-out, and buy things, on a kid’s budget. The exact pricing varied, because we catered to different kinds of kids, from different cultures, classes, and walks of life, but the system was generally set up so that even if you only had a few credits, or bits of scrap, or whatever people trade within your server, you could still have a filling snack, a drink, and a few hours of fun, with the tokens that you’d get in exchange. Like with my shop in general, the goal wasn’t economic gain. It was the satisfaction that came from playing a role that I had chosen for myself. Thus tokens could be used to play games, which could, in turn, earn you more tokens.

The tokens generally weren’t physical tokens. I used a mixture of magic and a reality-encoded system based on the Horologia-OS’s code, to keep track of the tokens. Then the magics I set in place over the store would manifest the tokens in whatever form made sense to the user, so if one was from a very primitive world, or very mundane, sleeping world, we’d use actual tokens that would vanish, and leave you with a magic tattoo on the back of your hand that only you could see.

If you were from one of Horologia’ awakened worlds, the token number would just be another stat amongst many that you’d be able to keep track of naturally. If your server was somewhere in between those two standards, the system I’d made would do its best to adjust appropriately.

Similar to my policy with regular customers, a mixture of data-scanning magics, moralistic-analyzers, psychic-filters, and fate-wards made sure that only those would be suitable customers came through the door. Since they were kids, I tried not to discriminate, but it was part of the actual listed rules for the shop, “being a bit of a brat can be forgiven, being an utter prat will result in expulsion and a ban”.

This wasn’t too big an issue because of the expectation and desire-based alterations to the store’s layout when one enters, but if someone was going to be a danger to the other customers, or just ruin things for the other kids, they either generally wouldn’t be able to make their way to the shop, or once they left they’d not only never be able to find the shop again, but they’d find that their memories of our establishment would rapidly fade.

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A little later in the day, most of the kids had gone home, or wherever it is the children head to when they leave my shop. One would think that there would still be plenty of children within the store in light of the differing time-flow, and time zones within the different continents, countries, and servers. However, I had enough control over the shop’s internal timeline that I could sort of synchronize the hours, at least as far as me and Jo’s perception of the hours went. I did so for the sake of our sanity, and not having to constantly, hypothetically, be on the clock, with some quantum duplicate or the other still manning the shop.

One of the store’s smaller, more private, instances opened and in walked a familiar face. The Josephine in that instance of the shop looked up from stacking a bunch of cans and waved at the newcomer.

“Oh, heya, Sawyer! Nice to see ‘you’ again!” said Josephine.

“Uh...Hi,” said the young adventurer and huntress. The normally cool and stony-faced young woman showed hints of awkwardness.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Guillot. I take it your latest little adventure went well,” I said. Appearing from behind a shell that the me in this instance of the store was shifting the layout of.

“Yeah...Yeah, it did. I even got a rare crimson fruit. I was wondering if you’d have any interest in buying it off me. Also, the pistol and knife you sold me last time I was here worked pretty great, but now I’m thinking I should get something a bit bigger, like a rifle. Since I might be going after bigger game pretty soon,” said Sawyer.

“Yeppers-Peppers, if you need a good boomstick check right next to our hardware aisle,” said Jo. Pointing the young woman in the right direction.

“Thanks...And er, well, I don’t suppose you guys also sell gene-mods here?” said Sawyer.

“Ms. Guillot, there are very few things that we don’t sell in this shop. How about you let Jo show you our guns and we can discuss what kind of genetic-augmentations you’re looking for, at length,” I said. Giving my best customer service smile.

A bit of genuine cheer and goodwill leaked through, because I actually kind of liked the girl. She was a bit standoffish and awkward, but the young woman had a stubborn sense of earnestness and determination about her that made me think well of her and want to see her succeed.