“Part 234, paragraph 4, subsection c of ‘meat shield’ needs tightening up,” Perry said, pointing it out. “The part where the contract breaks if I use one of my family as a meat shield is too broad and exploitable by you.”

“Let’s change it to temporarily suspend the terms of the contract for THAT specific person, should I use them as a meat shield, and immediately revert back to standard operation as soon as I stop.” Perry said. “Additionally I’d like an extra subsection prohibiting you from deliberately engineering a situation that causes this temporary suspension of the contract, such as aiming an attack in a manner that it hits them first, or creating an environment, such as an elevator or escape route where I am surrounded by my ‘loved ones’, at which point an attack is directed at me. Social meat shielding should be excluded entirely. You may not attack my family if I am using them to divert attention from people I do not wish to talk to.”

“Mhmm,” Tyrannus said, scratching out the paragraph on the mock document and rendering Perry’s demands in more concise legalese in the wide margins between paragraphs meant for exactly this purpose.

“In that case, I’d like to modify the economic noncompete clauses where we both survive to diminish the value gained by your family, should you not die.”

Tyrannus underlined the paragraphs with a single claw.

T wasn’t just aiming for his family to ‘be okay’ if he died, he was shaping the contract in such a way that if Perry died, his family basically won the lottery.

And if they both survived…then the contract gradually lost value to Perry’s family over time, until Perry died, at which point the sweet benefits would snap back into place, which served the purpose of getting them accustomed to the sweet life of having the run of The Eternal empire for a good two generations, before gradually repealing their privileges until Perry died. In effect the contract would not only give Perry motive to die, but also his children and grandchildren a reason to murder him to maintain the ridiculously advantageous benefits of having a friendly god-emperor.

It was a hell of an insidious contract, even though it only bound one person.

Perry was having more fun than he thought he would.

“That brings to mind, who should be allowed to know the specifics of the contract,” Perry said. “I think it should be restricted to you and me. Change it so that you can’t send copies of the contract to anyone or speak of the contents.”

This included his heirs of course. If they didn’t know the details, they wouldn’t necessarily know that killing Perry would make everything hunky-dory with Tyrannus again. They would assume it was a gradually dissolving contract and that would be that.

Tyrannus paused.

“I understand the need for discretion, but surely your heirs would need to understand the specifics of the contract to which I am bound, lest they stumble across a caveat that would lead to their doom?”

“You’re not wrong.” Perry said. “How about we split the difference and you may send the contract to –and discuss it with– any of my descendants above the age of…let’s say thirty.”

That gave Perry a good thirty years before anyone bothered to try and kill him to secure the contract, minimum, plus most people at the age of thirty and higher were no longer young and dumb. Less likely to try murder to advance their career.

Of course, this protection would thin out the older Perry got. For a normal lifetime, it was more than sufficient, but if Perry lived above three hundred, the word would’ve gotten out, and the family would have leaked the details amongst each other, making the ‘thirty’ restriction meaningless.

The contract didn’t prevent them from talking to each other, after all.

But for the first couple generations, it would work fine. Since Tyrannus was already banking on the long game, he probably wouldn’t be too opposed.

Perry could see these same thoughts going through Tyrannus’s mind, weighing the options.

“Sounds good,” The dragon said, going up to the ‘disclosure’ line and making the appropriate changes.

Perry heard the soft sound of slippers on marble and glanced over his shoulder to see Nat and Heather in their pajamas, blinking at Perry blearily.

Is it morning already?

“Morning,” Nat said, smothering a yawn, glancing between Perry and Tyrannus and the massive, seemingly unending scroll pooling up between the two of them into a veritable lake of highly edited legalese.

“What’s uhh…what’s all this?” Heather asked, frowning.

“We’re working on the first rough draft of the terms of our truce to give ourselves some time to do some work together before we try to murder each other for the secrets we’re keeping. Basically it states if I die, you guys get life on easy street until your great great great great great grandchildren.”

“Why?” Nat asked.

“To guarantee your life and livilihoods if I die and simultaneously strip a large portion of my motivation to win in order to protect you.”

“That’s horrible,” Natalie said with a frown.

“If Perry dies, I wanna share a beachside mansion with Nat.” Heather said. “Replaced or repaired by the state after each High Tide, of course.”

“Heather!” Nat said, horrified.

Tyrannus shrugged and made a note, his ink-dipped claw scratching words into the draft contract.

Scratch, scratch.

“With servants, and a fully stocked and staffed clothing design shop in the nearby town, which must be no more than a ten-minute drive away.”

Scratch scratch.

“And-“

“Okay, you’re done,” Perry said, gently ushering his pregnant rival out of the room. “You guys go get breakfast with Karth, I’ll be done here in a few hours.”

“You sure you want them to go? I could give them even more reasons to hesitate at a critical moment.”

Perry raised a brow.

“Nat wants a farm! With real honeybees!” Heather’s voice came through the closed door.

“Heather!” Natalie admonished.

Scratch, scratch.

Perry closed his eyes and sighed as the two girls retreated from the door, the sounds of their slippers fading into the distance.

“Something bothering you?” Tyrannus asked, with only the faintest hint of smugness.

“No, just making a mental list of things to get the girls so Heather doesn’t kill me in my sleep,” Perry said, only 15% serious.

She had plenty of money in Franklin to get most of that stuff if she really wanted to. She probably wouldn’t kill him for that…probably.

“Let’s move on,” Perry said, making a circular gesture with his finger.

“Next on the list is the protections and privileges afforded to…your grandmother.”

…

Perry and Tyrannus met each other’s gaze, holding the silence for an interminable pause as they allowed the thought to linger in the air…before both of them exploded in uproarious laughter.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it,” Tyrannus said between chuckles, crossing out the paragraph with a huge red X.

“Not having protection from a dragon builds character. I’m sure she’ll understand and thank me when she’s older.” Perry said, waving it off. “We do need to determine how we’ll handle the transition of her assets, including her political power as they will eventually transfer from her to me and from me to my heirs.”

“let’s begin.” Tyrannus said, dabbing his claw in ink and starting a new paragraph.

It took longer than Perry thought. They ran up against the limits of the size of the contract and had to get creative and drop a few niceties in order to assure that there were no major loopholes for either of them to exploit.

The dragon seemed mildly surprised when Perry dictated the entire thing from memory, as well as nailing him on an attempt to omit a comma where it would group things in a manner disadvantageous to Perry.

But eventually they got everything drafted and carved into the contract. Now all Tyrannus had to do was bleed on it.

“Before we begin, would you mind standing on the ritual circle?” Tyrannus said, pointing out a circle carved with deep grooves into the marble floor.

It had symbols of purity, honesty, good intentions, and the spirit of a man’s word.

Perry squinted a bit to make sure it wasn’t an illusion.

It…probably wasn’t.

“What’s it do?”

“It prevents ambient essence you might have clinging to you from deforming the meaning of the contract. In delicate, longwinded contracts like ours, sometimes abberations happen where the grain of the ivory conflicts with ambient essence. It’s not common, but it happens. Think of it as decontamination before working in a bio-lab, or grounding yourself before working on delicate electronics.”

Perry shrugged and stepped inside the circle, facing the dragon.

“You may want to close your eyes. This next part may make you dizzy.”

Perry crossed his arms and raised a brow.

“Your choice,” Tyrannus shrugged, reaching his paw above Perry’s head…

And retrieving a man-sized glass bottle of glowing blue fluid from a high shelf.

He poured the fluid into the lines around Perry, and he felt a light pressure close in around him, with a gentle bubbling sensation, like a hand in hydrogen peroxide.

A moment later it was gone, and Tryannus repeated the process on himself.

“Now, I can sign.”

The dragon moved over to the mattress-sized contract and raised his wrist, peeling up a single scale with visible effort before puncturing his wrist with a claw.

Blood poured out of the wound, and Perry felt himself rock back on his heels at the sheer power. Ever sense he’d gotten the Dimensional Tinker upgrade he could perceive essence, to some extent, since it existed on another dimension, but this was like standing in front of a furnace.

Physical and magical heat blasted him in the face as the blood poured out of the dragon’s wrist before being sucked into the contract, which filled in the text in a matter of seconds.

Once that was done, Tyrannus released his grip on his wrist. The scale folded back down and the blood cut off like a faucet.

Tyrannus took a towel off the wall and dabbed the blood away from his wrist before the fluffy cotton burst into flames, turning to ash in a matter of seconds.

“There you have it.” He said, motioning to the contract, which was then slowly encased in some kind of clear crystal rising from the floor.

+5000 XP!

Perry stopped himself from reacting. He’d overlooked that Tyrannus binding himself to this contract prevented a lot of potential futures, and therefore would give Perry a hefty chunk of XP.

“Well, now that that’s done, let’s talk shop,” Perry said. “What do you know about creating a Table of Essences?”

Tyrannus smiled and crooked a claw.

Perry followed him to what could only be described as a research facility buried under the palace.

Lab coats hustled back and forth from project to project, looking varied amounts of harried and/or maddened.

“Welcome to the university of California, Berkeley.” Tyrannus said, motioning around them. “Or what’s left of it, anyway.”

There was electric lighting, well-appointed labs with all the bells and whistles, recording equipment and digital keypads on all the doors. It was a very modern feeling facility. Save for the skeletal man hanging from a gibbet, staring silently down at the hall.

“That’s our mascot, General Abrams,” Tyrannus said, noticing Perry’s gaze.

The skeletal figure seemed to come alive when he spotted Tyrannus, twitching and groaning when he spotted the dragon beneath him.

Perry could faintly make out silver stars on the shoulders of the man’s rotting clothes.

“He’ll be a hundred and nine this September. What a trooper.” Tyrannus said.

“Does he deserve it?” Perry asked. The man was obviously being kept alive magically, because no one-hundred-and-nine-year-old would survive that kind of treatment.

“He killed my mother.” William said, eyes narrowed.

Perry didn’t have to think twice about that. He probably would’ve done worse.

He filed the general away as a possible emotional weakpoint and moved on.

Perry wasn’t sure if the gibbeted general was a red-herring Tyrannus had planted to waste time and resources…or simply a fixture of the dragon’s life that it’d grown so accustomed to that it no longer registered. Best to play it safe.

The place was candyland. They had practical experiments going on hundreds of things he didn’t have the time to experiment on, doing the legswork that Perry simply didn’t have enough of himself to hammer out.

They had machines designed to manipulate Essence. Not as good as Perry’s, but pretty good.

The thing that really stood out was how much demon-based research was going on. There were lines of braided demon-repellant material embedded in the wall every twenty feet or so, to make it extremely difficult for a runaway demon to trash more than the lab in which they were summoned.

“We call it a Coefficient of performance: how much work you can get out of a demon versus how much sacrifice you need to pay them for said work.” Tyrannus said as they walked past a row of caged imps. “We’re constantly looking for ways to push the envelope. The greatest achievement we’ve made thus far is the self-building road. Well, maybe not the greatest, but the most popular.”

They moved on to a large room, hundreds of feet on a side, with massive steel shelves laden with containers. Each container had a picture and a label to go with it.

Every kind of essence Perry had ever heard of and a few more beside.

“Here is the table of essences as we know it.” Tyrannus said. “They’re sorted alphabetically, but if you were able to sort them by their characteristics in such a way that we could predict the existence of missing essences, and harvest them in the wild, that would…revolutionize ritual-based magic. Do you think you have enough here to get started on a project like that?”

Perry thumbed his chin and weighed his options. He could only contribute a little to the dragon’s research, and he would only get out a little.

Or he could go for broke and let Tyrannus in on the really juicy stuff and allow him to put his finest minds on iterative improvements.

If he gave Tyrannus Gadrevan’s Thesis and his own designs, the dragon’s team would refine it, apply new techniques and methods to it, growing its applicability by leaps and bounds. With that kind of improvement, Perry could go from his simple spell-storage system to something that could create and fire off magic on demand.

This is what I made the contract for. Because I was willing to gamble my life that I’d get the better of him, even after sharing my own work…It was time to roll the dice and advance magical science by leaps and bounds.

“What do you know about Gadrevan’s Thesis?” Perry asked, glancing up at the dragon, who stiffened at the mention of the ancient wizard’s final book. The one Perry had used to create his soul-surgery apparatus.

“…” The dragon’s pupils dilated, looking down at him with hunger.

“Tell me you have it.”

“It’s all up here,” Perry said, tapping the side of his skull. “But I’ll do you one better. I’ve already built a prototype that confirms Gadrevan’s extradimensional physics models work at the exact point where Pecholard’s math falls apart.”

“You’re the prototype, aren’t you?”