“Are you sure this is okay?” said Thomas. Looking nervous as he came into my office.

“Huh? Of course, it’s okay...Why wouldn’t it be?” I said. A little perplexed. I understood a little of what he was concerned about. However, where I came from, favouring one’s family, close friends, and allies when it came to appointments and employment was only a bad thing when you were blind to their capabilities and allowed them positions that they were unsuited for.

Clan culture meant looking out for one’s people first and foremost. A little nepotism was only a bad thing when you allowed it to hurt the business. If you ended up hiring encumbrances and burdens, then it probably wasn’t just your idiot spawn who needed to go and clean their desks out.

If the world government and the House of Antipodes were going to let me run Uhrwerk like it was my family’s business then I damn well intended to run it like it actually was my family’s business.

What’s that? What about fairness and meritocracy, you say? The entire universe was innately unfair, to begin with. As for meritocracy, there’s a reason that most businesses ask for thirty references and ten thousand years of experience. Letting strangers prove their stuff on your stuff was a scary proposition, and yes that was meant to sound just a little dirty.

The two hardest things about finding good help was finding people who would stay loyal and people who could excel at the job. Only an idiot would turn their noses if they knew someone who fit both requirements.

Thomas was a more than adequate hero before things soured between him and the guild, and I expected that he’d be even more well suited for the position I’d ended up offering him after our meeting in Japan.

“How’s the arm?” I said. Switching topics.

“Huh? Oh...Yeah, the arm’s fine…” said Thomas. Unconsciously flexing and unflexing the fingers on the limb that I’d given him a few weeks before.

After talking things over with Tommy, I’d immediately wanted to replace the shameful replacement the Heroes Guild had stuck him with. I’d ended up giving the lad another prosthetic. It was bio-organic, technically alive, but still artificial.

I could have just helped Tommy regrow his lost limb, but he’d said that if it was, all the same, he’d rather stay a “cyborg” and have something to remind of the various lessons he’d learned during his short tenure as a hero. He’d smiled as he said it, but there was an acute bitterness in the young man’s gaze as he spoke.

I’d also given Thomas a couple of “lucid dreams” to help him adjust to the use of the limb. The artificial arm was meant to be a near-perfect replacement for the one Thomas loss, but considering how long ago Thomas had lost the arm, and a few of the arm’s other features, it seemed prudent to have Thomas go through a little rehab.

Afterwards, Thomas had gone back home to his foster parent’s place to go spend some time with his family. He’d been avoiding them even longer than he’d been avoiding Margot and me. Not wanting to alarm them with his injuries and have them worry over how poorly the guild was treating him. Which no doubt, made them worry even more, because going dark and barely bothering to pick up the damn phone, wasn’t the way one made the people in one’s life relax.

Now that all that was out of the way, Thomas was back in Arcadia. Back in Prospero, back in me and Margot’s new swank office buildings, and new HQ of the DPAA’s Office of Cosmic Artifice

Differentiable from the DPAA Offices of Otherworld Administration and Otherworld Crisis Management, because it was the only one of its kind, and was solely dedicated towards the administration and observation of Uhrwerk and any other worlds that our new “friends” in the DPAA and the House of Antipodes decided to have us build for them.

The office and title came with the deed to the building. Director Dillan handed us the paperwork herself, looking just as dour as always.

I still held the opinion that everyone was being just a tad hasty by throwing this much at us, but I wasn’t going to say no to getting more benefits for a job I’d already agreed to do and was very invested in seeing completed.

After completing Uhrwerk, Margot and I ended up signing a new contract with generous new terms. Now we’d have an open and clear right to 50% of the resources and power in Uhrwerk, and any other worlds we constructed.

I already mentioned that we were also given a great deal more leeway and control over the project than we’d been given before. In other words, our ‘baby’ would stay our baby.

There were a bunch of other little benefits that were given to us. This included some things that were offered by the Cat Sith company and its myriad branches that would honestly look troublingly like bribes if the rule of law was something that anyone involved was actually concerned about.

All these benefits were offered for a single purpose, the powers-that-be wished to bell the cat. They wanted to tie Margot and me down with a new more firm and final contract because we’d inadvertently ended up showing them a little more than I’d intended to show them.

Again, for the sake of everyone’s peace of mind, and for the simple pleasure of eating free cake, I wasn’t going to turn those offers down. I was fine letting them bell me because I knew that if I really wanted to get moving it wouldn’t take much for me to slip out of the collar they were trying to make us wear. And once I was free, Margot would be free as well.

Director Dillan and the UN World government were likely aware of this reality as well. Which was the US government was so helpfully offering to help us man the office, despite them giving us the deed to the building and near-total control of this new branch of the DPAA.

They’d even made this issue of personnel control, a key part of the new contract. Naturally, Margot and I still held the ultimate power of veto but they were really trying to make sure that they could get their people into our office to keep an eye on us.

Honestly speaking, they’d been so generous and they were all so very keyed up about this whole situation, that Margot and I were willing to let them do their thing. (Up to a limit.) Especially Margot, who still vaguely thought of herself as an “American” and an “Earthling” in some small corner of her heart, even if Director Dillan’s approach had made Margot’s attitude and feelings towards the country and the World Government, a whole lot more ambivalent than they’d been before.

As for me, I just wanted to let all this noise die down so I could get back to focusing on what mattered. There was a universe that needed monitoring. A universe that was still expanding because there were other worlds that were in just as bad a condition as the merged worlds had been. Worlds that normally would have been consigned to deletion but now could be preserved and converted thanks to the Uhrwerk’s reality assimilating powers.

I couldn’t help feeling a surge of anticipation, as I tried to imagine how big the clockwork universe would eventually become. I couldn’t help salivating as I imagined the benefits Margot and I would be able to gain if we properly handled the situation. With this in mind, I quickly began explaining Thomas’ duties to him.

The young man looked a smidge daunted and more than a little intimidated by the scope of what I was describing, but I was pleased to see that inwardly he was getting just a little excited by what I was describing. He was finally starting to see that there were other places where he could spread his wings and make full use of his talents.