The sound of baby screams cut through the night, as Seraphine woke up angry and startled Gareth awake with her flailing.

They tried separating them, but then Gareth would cry inconsolably, and that would make Seraphine cry.

Heather tucked Nat back in and snatched the two up, bouncing them in her arm stretched out into a cradle made of Mom while she headed towards the kitchen.

“Shhhh, it’s okay to have big feelings,” Heather said, rubbing the sand out of her eyes as she walked. “Mommy’s here, Sara.”

Something about walking through a dark hallway while comforting her babies felt magical. Felt right. Like waking up on a crisp fall morning, the combination of bright light and cold air while snuggled tight against the ones you love.

I think I might be cut out for this Mom thing, Heather thought as Seraphine began to quiet down, turning her gaze up to the fri-

“Jesus Christ!” Heather gasped at the bloody mess rummaging through the fridge, just quietly enough not to upset the twins.

“Oh hey,” Perry said, pulling out a bottle of milk for the cereal bowl clutched in his left hand. His entire body looked like it’d gotten caught in a meatgrinder and fouled up the machine. His clothes were…made of some kind of hemp or burlap soaked in blood, and scabbed up lacerations covered his entire body.

“Is that you?” Heather asked, her eyes stinging, voice wavering against her will.

“…Yes.” Perry said, his gaze dead and cold.

Something’s wrong.

It sure as hell wasn’t the doppleganger that had camped out in Tyrannus’ lab pretending to be Perry. That thing didn’t feel an iota as dangerous as whatever plopped down in front of her and began munching on frosted mini-wheats like a hunched over caveman in the middle of the night.

“What happened?” Heather asked, her hair standing on end.

“Paternity leave,” Perry said, giving a half chuckle as he continued to eat, the sound of the spoon against the bowl ringing through the kitchen.

Those cold green eyes glanced up at her.

“I was just stopping by to get something to eat and a shower before I visit my uncle.”

“You gonna kill him?” Heather asked.

“Maybe.” Perry said.

“You know, your Gramma already knows what your uncle did and was planning on-“

“May I borrow your phone?” Perry asked, his tone flat and lifeless.

“…Sure.” Heather said, stretching out and handing it to him. Perry’s finger blurred as he dialed up a number before holding it up to his ear.

“This is Paradox Zauberer speaking.” Perry said. “Yes. Yeah, I’m alive. Just got back home actually. Listen, could you not do anything about Charles? I know. I know, but it would be advantageous to me if I did it myself. Alright. Thanks gramma, I owe you one. Sorry about the people watching the house, they thought I might be a revenant or something. I don’t think they’re dead, no. Alright. Buh-bye.”

Perry hung up and handed the phone back.

“Perry, you’re scaring me,” Heather said.

“How so?” he asked, frowning in confusion.

“You’re acting like a total psycho.”

Perry paused mid-spoon, seemingly processing that.

“Eh,” he shrugged and kept eating. “I don’t think you guys have anything to worry about. There’s only disincentives to kill you aside from XP, and I could get that from killing people anywhere.”

Perry paused, looking thoughtful.

“Perry, what happened?” Heather repeated herself as sternly as she could manage.

Perry glanced to the side staring at the wall with his dead eyes. He glanced back at her, then inhaled.

***Paradox***

Gorm charged forward and Perry warmed up his slapping hand.

Sure it was much bigger than a typical capera, but Perry was optimistic.

Unfortunately his entire palm only covered a small section of the terror-bird’s lower jaw, and it nearly bit off his hand after the impact barely moved it.

Well, shit. Body doesn’t seem to be doing anything for me. in The Abyss, it was Attunement that determined the nature of your physicality.

The bird leapt forward with its talons spread wide like a makeshift net underneath it’s gaping maw, trying to catch him darting to either side like a small prey animal.

Perry jumped up, intending to leap over the creature’s mouth, but it was too fast, whipping it’s beak up and clamping down around him.

Perry tucked his limbs in at the last second, barely avoiding losing his arm as a cage of teeth closed around him.

A raspy, serrated tongue tried to snag him and pull him in, hooking into the meat of his legs and pulling.

Perry cursed, his heart hammering in his chest as he grabbed one of Gorm’s teeth with both hands and yanked it out, stabbing the bottom of the bird’s mouth.

A harsh screech filled the bird’s mouth and it reached a talon into its mouth like someone picking their teeth, prying him out and delivering a deep gash to his side as he tumbled to the ground.

HOOONK!

Why does this thing have teeth anyway? Perry wondered as he desperately tried to pick himself up off the ground as Gorm charged. Practically half-dinosaur.

Perry flung the bloody tooth at the bird’s eye about two arm-lengths away, causing Gorm to flinch and allowing him to slip between two talons without getting skewered as the bird slid to a halt, shaking it’s head to dislodge the foreign object.

Perry snatched up the tooth as it clattered against the invisible floor of The Abyss, thrusting it into Gorm’s side.

Gorm flailed out and bashed Perry away, lacerating his other side, and possibly breaking a rib.

This stupid bird is just bred for fighting and I have a stupid ape body with no weapons of any kind, save a brain that understands how badly I’m losing, Perry thought with a scowl.

At the thought of ‘weapons’, Perry’s fingers darkened and elongated.

Oh, hell no. stay in your cage, Abun’zaul. Perry tersely snapped his fingers back to normal, lunging forward to grab Gorms leg before scampering up it’s side, an instant before the creature could scrape him off with it’s other foot.

…Or was it simply The Abyss?

Was Perry’s perception of self and his body itself malleable because he was in the Abyss?

Or-

Gorm’s head swivelled back nearly one hundred and eighty degrees and took a chunk out of his shoulder.

In response Perry tore out some more feathers, nestling deeper into the creature’s fluff as he angled to stab its spine.

“What do you think about that!?” Perry demanded, cackling as he shanked the bird over and over.

Gorm bolted.

In every direction at once.

Perry’s consciousness became a cloud of possibilities, thicker on the horizontal plane as most Gorm ran on foot, but a few possibilities included jumping into the air and just…floated away, while others sank into the Abyss. In some of the possibilities, Perry killed it with a lucky strike to the spine, while in others,

What the f-

Like a bolt of lightning finding the path of least resistance, the cloud collapsed darting along a single path, filling it in and making it reality: a path where Gorm bolted to the side in just the right way to unseat Perry from his feather nest.

As he tumbled down, Perry grabbed Gorm’s feathers to get his feet pointed at the ground, kicking off the monster’s snout as it tried to reach around and snap him up before he even made it.

Perry spun, but managed to hit the ground feet first and immediately bounced backwards, his body vacating the area an instant before Gorm’s claws slammed down on it.

Rather than run, Perry attempted to re-seat himself on Gorm’s back, nearly getting disemboweled for his trouble, forcing him to back off again, a position that was more advantageous for the massive bird.

Light.EXE

Perry tried to flashbang the creature, but nothing happened, other than Perry’s guts writhing about in a mechanical way.

Perry took a brief instant to glance down at one of the cuts in his chest and saw bright metal tubing underneath the laceration.

I get it.

Perry’s soul and his body had merged in the Abyss, and the solid internal infrastructure had prevented Gorm’s claws from doing more than superficial damage.

Still hurts like a bitch, Perry thought sourly as he dodged out of the way of another attempted grab.

Thank God the creature didn’t learn. The only things keeping him alive were that his soul was significantly less squishy than it should’ve been, and Gorm’s attacks were terrifically repetitive.

Perry managed to burrow himself like a tick on the creature’s back again, waiting for the exact moment we was –

There it is!

The bird dodged everywhere, splitting Perry into infinite copies, creating a cloud of potential. A tiny fraction of them simply went still, doing nothing at all as Gorm tossed him off and ate him…Those ones seemed to blacken and fade away even as the bird feasted.

Am I witnessing The System harvesting potential futures? A large amount of Perry near the center of the cloud thought, watching the ones at the farthest edge of the cloud cease to exist.

He felt the cloud of potential tense, preparing to choose an advantageous outcome. At the exact moment, Perry wrenched with everything he had, trying to shift the course of the possibility cloud’s outcome.

The lightning-bolt path through the cloud of possibilities was diverted and Perry almost fell off, but manage to retain his grip on the bird.

Gorm gave an indignant HONK and tried again, scattering them both into infinite possibilities.

You know, this is kinda like what Mom described a proper Mage’s duel looked like, Perry thought as he hauled on Gorm’s Fate like reigns, steering it towards the outcome he wanted. I wonder if we’re just staring at each other on the material plane.

Perry regained his grip even faster than the last time, before Gorm even had a chance to recover. He tried to take the opportunity to stab Gorm’s spine, but he’d lost his makeshift knife at some point.

Perry gritted his teeth, pulled his fingers together tightly before burying his hand in the creature’s back, using a blood-oozing feather bump as the entry point.

“SQUAWK!” Gorm’s honks turned from ferocious to scared, then absolutely feral as it began thrashing wildly, breaking into possibility clouds even more turbulant and thicker than before as it included thrashing rolls meant to crush him underneath the creature’s bulk.

Perry focused on the task at hand.

Every time Gorm tried to escape, he muscled it onto another path. If there was one thing his big brain was good for, it was exerting more control over a possibility cloud than an idiotic territorial death machine.

Perry dug his hand into Gorm’s back and grabbed the creature’s spine.

“Fuck. YOU!” Perry shouted as he crushed the monster’s spine between his fingers, hauling it out with every fiber in his soul and body, until he heard a POP.

Gorm went limp and tumbled forward, unseating Perry, and sending him tumbling across the starry landscape of the Abyss.

Perry landed on his back, staring up at the sky. Exhausted.

There, Perry could pick out The Tide, hovering invisibly above them.

That’s not The Tide, Perry thought as foreign thoughts began to flicker across his consciousness. That’s what The Tide is thinking about.

The Tide’s Attention itself causes gravity. It’s real body is…everywhere. It’s not in one place, we’re suspended inside it like…

A horrifying realization began to creep up into Perry’s forebrain, and he knew if he allowed himself to know it, Perry would cease to exist.

He knew it, but he couldn’t look away from The Truth.

Not until the gaping maw of Gorm interrupted his sight, driving the six-inch daggers on the roof of it’s mouth down into his chest.

Perry let out a pained grunt and shoved the bloody teeth away from his chest even as Gorm’s tongue tried to hook into his skin, fold him in half and tug him into the monster’s mouth.

Perry broke his knuckles on the monster’s snout and shoved himself aside, losing a lot of skin in the process.

Perry climbed shakily to his feet, panting as he stared down at Gorm. The bird had left a trail of blood across the Abyss where it had dragged itself to him using its vestigial forelimbs and lower jaw.

“Thanks for that,” Perry muttered, dripping blood as he limped across The Abyss, letting out a pained grunt as he dipped to pick up Gorm’s bloody tooth.

Gorm’s eyes followed him the entire time, radiating raw fury.

“And goodbye,” Perry said, standing above the creature’s limp body and raising the tooth.

Gorm reared up for a last-ditch bite, but Perry was faster.

***Heather***

“And then I got back to the real world, set the portal to spit me out on our doorstep, disarmed a couple of Gramma’s bodyguards watching the place, and here we are,” Perry said.

“I’m gonna go get Nat,” Heather said, standing.

“You got until I finish this bowl of cereal.” Perry said.

When Heather got back to the room, Nat was already getting dressed, sensing something was wrong.

When she followed Heather out into the hallway, tears immediately began streaming down her face.

“Perry, you’re hurt.” She said.

“Nah, these’ll heal in a couple days.” Perry said, motioning to himself. “Not that bad.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Nat said, sitting in his lap and drawing his attention away from the cereal with her hands.

“Do you know why you love me?” she asked.

“Sure, cuz, umm…” Perry frowned. “Crap.”

“You’ve got some major soul-damage. Don’t stress about it, that’ll only make it worse.” Nat said, turning to Heather. “I’m gonna make you some hot chocolate. Heather, you grab the Perry necklaces and Boomer’s CPU. I’m going to try making some bandages with some of the impressions in them, and maybe he won’t die.”

“Roger,” Heather said, breaking into a sprint towards the door.

“I don’t really feel that bad,” Perry muttered as she left.

“That’s kinda the problem,” Nat’s voice faded into nothing as Heather darted down into the lair and snatched up the CPU before grabbing the necklaces from the bedroom.

“I like the beard, by the way,” Heather said as she handed the requested items to Natalie. Anya had it right. He looks almost nothing like the evil kid who dumped milk in my hair in middle-school.

The last of the baby fat seemed to have been seared out of him by his month-long absence.

Marigold said he would live, said that the worst danger had already passed in the first few minutes of his disappearance, but seeing him like this…makes me wonder if we should’ve trusted her. Even if they hadn’t trusted her, it would’ve been impossible to find him within a month, if at all. She knew all those things, but staring into those dead eyes made her heart sink.

“Thanks,” Perry said, blushing faintly as he scratched the thick black beard. “Took a while to grow out. I gotta go talk to my uncle about-“

“Paradox Zauberer,” Natalie said sternly. “You are going to stay here until I’m certain you’re not going to do something suicidal or simply forget to breathe. Your soul is shredded. If you leave before I tell you otherwise, I’ll be very disappointed with you.”

“Ah, well, that’s against my ethics model,” Perry said robotically. “I’ll stay until you clear me, Doctor Smith.”

“Damn right,” Nat said, kissing him on the cheek. “I like the beard too. Drink your hot chocolate.”