As Bath hovered above the car, Avery unfastened her seatbelt and stood up. "Bath!" she cried out once more. "I missed you, too."

"Now you guys will all be here, with me," Bath said in reassurance. "Come; we should return to the Spire before we cause too much of a spectacle."

Before Samantha or Brian could get in any shocked words, the car was already accelerating towards the city at a far faster speed than they'd previously been driving. Within a minute, the car was already passing over the city's walls.

Samantha clutched Brian reflexively as stringy tentacles rapidly ripped the car apart like thin paper. They moved hungrily over the car, shredding and internalizing any non-human things. Within the time it took for the car to pass over the wall--at the speed they were going, not more than a second--the tentacles had completely disintegrated the car.

Instead of plummeting to the ground, Bath suspended each of the McLanes in the air. He looked at Samantha and Brina's cowering forms, then snorted humorously. "I'm never going to let you fall," he assured them. "Stand up."

Samantha and Brian opened their clamped eyes. They felt as though they would fall over at any second, unable to find any grip on the ground--or rather, air. 'How are we supposed to stand?' Samantha wondered.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Avery quickly found her legs and stood, no hesitation in her eyes. "I've been waiting for this," she said.

"Oh?"

"I want to fly," she smiled. "This is a dream come true."

Bath's eyes softened. "Perfect. Come, everyone, let's get inside where we can talk." Without waiting for Samantha and Brian to wobble to their legs, Bath dragged the rest of his family over to the Anima's upper balcony.

"This is the Spire," he motioned in introduction. "This is where we run the city and everything else." He looked back at them. "We should probably start at the beginning."

"Probably," Brian said shakily, leaning against the Spire's hallway.

"Follow me," Bath said as he strode down the hallway. "This is the office, and that's Lepochim. He's an alien called a deepthink." Bath gave Lepochim an icy stare. "He'll be leaving for the next few minutes."

Lepochim affixed Bath with an incredulous stare. "Leave? My office?"

Before Lepochim could utter another word of complaint, Bath shoved him out of the office like refuse on a dustpan. Now, the only people present were the McLanes.

"To avoid any confusion whatsoever, I will clarify a few things," Bath began, taking a seat in one of the plush blue chairs of the office room. He motioned with his hand for everyone to sit, rather than stand stiffly like transplanted statues. "The couch is nice," he said as further encouragement. Samantha and Brian robotically took their seats on the couch, while Avery nonchalantly plopped down

"First: I am the Dragon. Second: I am not human. Third: I am Bath McLane." Bath gazed at all of them intently, trying to gauge their reactions. "I'm going to tell you the truth about everything. You'll be the first aside from Lisa to understand.

"My memory starts around 500 million years ago. I don't know where I came from, nor how I came to be. Since that time, I've largely lived a peaceful, carefree life, free of aspirations. However, when humanity began to display its might by changing the planet's climate, I took notice of the disturbance. As a result, I wanted to understand humanity.

"That's when I met you," Bath smiled, eyes bright and affectionate. "You adopted me, an ancient alien masquerading as an infant." Bath broke out into a laugh. "I was a terrible baby, in the beginning."

Suddenly, Samantha's expressionless exterior melted. She laughed along with Bath in reminiscence. "I didn't know what was wrong with you. You were too smart for your age," she smiled sadly.

"In all my long life," Bath began, making eye contact with the three McLanes before him, "I never conceived of a notion of family. As you can guess, I was always alone." He sighed, then averted his eyes to a corner of the room. "Ignorance is bliss, when you don't know what you're missing. Needless to say, I've enjoyed being part of this family."

Bath hadn't planned what he was going to say. He was speaking his mind, trying to vocalize his appreciation for the McLanes. Before them, he had never understood the concept of love. Many avian and mammalian animal species displayed affection and love for one another, but Bath had always thought them weak, misguided. He saw love as a pitiful chemical reaction that facilitated mating and community behavior, only necessary for those two ends...and thus wholly useless to himself.

Bath couldn't put it into words, but he felt as though love was an evolutionary adaptation gone astray. Just as human intelligence was such a leap as to enable them to create excesses of food and devote their time to the creation of flourishing civilizations, human love...human love was irrational.

"You seem tired," Avery observed. Bath had been lost in his thoughts for the past few seconds, staring off into space.

He snapped his eyes to Avery's, then replied, "I don't get tired." He chuckled. "Who has time to sleep?"

Avery beamed devilishly, Bath having given her an opening for one of her favorite lines. "Ain't nobody got time for that." She jerked her head to the side, displaying as much sass as a middle school eighth-grader could conjure.

Bath smirked. "Lisa doesn't really need to sleep anymore."

Avery's eyes grew wide. "What!? No fair!"

"So, everything..." Brian said softly. "Basketball? School?" Brian exhaled slowly. "Why?" He couldn't articulate his thoughts. 'Was everything a lie? Why lead us on?' He felt oddly empty.

"Because I was bored," Bath said after a moment of quiet contemplation, face serious. "Trying out humanity has been, perhaps, the most entertaining thing I've ever done." Bath truly meant this. "Everything I did with you, I did with genuine earnestness. I really was a child, trying to adapt to human society, trying to learn about the first sapient species I came into contact with."

Bath sighed, realizing that he needed to begin discussing why he began COTD. "I'm certain you're all wondering why I formed COTD."

Samantha nodded her head slowly; Brian didn't move at all. Avery, on the other hand, moved her head up and down voraciously.

"Long story short, I found out that all over the universe, there exist gates that connect incredibly distant locations together. One such gate is on Earth, here, in Basalith...under our feet. Lisa and I passed through the gate and passed through several alien planets on our way back to Earth."

Bath then looked at them all sheepishly. "Well, then...we both decided that we wanted to conquer the universe. You know, explore the entire place, and make it our own along the way."

Samantha gave him a look. "Why?"

Bath's brow furrowed. "Boredom? It's the greatest challenge I can think of." Bath knew that there wasn't really a good explanation for why he and Lisa wanted to conquer the universe. In a sense, Bath simply wanted to know if he could. He figured it was the same for Lisa.

Samantha gave him a long, probing look, then nodded. "I think I understand. So, how should we treat you now?"

Bath cocked his head. "Treat me?"

Avery giggled, then rocketed out of her seat and tackled Bath out of the chair to the floor. She turned back towards her parents, pouting. "Don't you get it?" she glowered. "Treat him like Bath. He just said that he loves us 'cause we're family...because we love each other. The worst thing you could do," Avery explained haughtily, "is to treat him as anything less." Finished speaking, Avery turned back towards Bath and cuddled up against his chest.

Samantha's stony facade broke. "Oh, honey," she murmured, then walked over to where Avery was pinning Bath to the floor. She leaned over, then ran and outstretched hand through Bath's hair. Brian followed a moment later, silent, but no longer brooding.

"With myself and COTD, we'll never need to fear being separated, nor any of our number dying," Bath said softly. "Who would dare to cross the Dragon, after all?"

---

Dean hadn't realized how difficult determining divisions would be for sports, now that boons were added into the mix. In the beginning of the effort to center Jerboaland around sports, Dean didn't have even a basic understanding of all the different boons attainable through the hierarchy. Even referencing volunteer-written guides to the different boons online, Dean was quickly overwhelmed by the vast number of boons.

Every boon, because they changed the way people thought, moved, and sensed, had a nuanced impact on their ability to compete. While Dean knew that, in the long run, this wouldn't matter, given that everyone would one day attain all boons...he was also aware of complications inherent in people specializing down different profession paths. Was a chef of a hypothetical fifth tier more potent than a land-shaper of the third tier? Or would they match up the same, irrespective of chosen profession?

What Dean really needed to know was whether the professions would be balanced. His gut feeling told him that Bath wouldn't settle for anything less than a supposed "perfect" system where all paths were viable, but he had no idea how Bath would achieve such a thing. For instance, how could any other profession compete with a long range manipulator in archery?

Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose, then crossed his arms, staring at the cluttered whiteboard in front of him. "We could always just rank people on an individual basis," he mused. "Have people serve as judges, then determine people's ballpark power. Then, let them form teams and compete."

The idea didn't sound terribly bad to Dean. Of course, ranking people was going to take a ton of work and personnel, but Dean wasn't too worried on this front. He had no doubts that people would be eager--in particular administrators--to judge the abilities of others. It was great practice for any administrators hoping to gain a better sense of how to use their abilities. For everyone else, the ability to see one's own ranking in comparison to everyone else...

Dean felt like the people of the COTD would quickly grow to like such a modification.

Dean hummed under his breath as he began to write. "Test 1..."