An aggrieved Tommy Yu, stood amidst the clouds, standing on the empty air while surrounded by blades of lights. Below him was a gathering of mortals and immortals who’d come to challenge him.

“Your reign of terror ends today, Dark Administrator Montgomery!” said a spikey, blue-haired, boy with eyes filled with the flames of justice and a sword that was vaguely shaped like a hex key.

“Yeah, this world belongs to us not you, Mister Outsider!” said a pretty, pinked-haired, girl holding a wand topped with a bright blue crystal.

“You’re going down!” said a large and muscular, dark-skinned man, with a frankly awe-inspiring mustache and a body covered in glowing, runic, tattoos.

“Our bonds are our strength, and that’s a power that can overcome anything,” yelled a yellow-haired female knight holding a lance made of dragon bone.

“Kakaka...Dark Lord Montgomery, this time next year will be the anniversary of your death,” said I. Tugging on the brim of the hat I was wearing and adjusting the guitar that was slung across my shoulder.

Here’s a question for the audience. If you find out that you’re a tad behind on your taxes do you: A)Try to work something out with the authorities? B) Admit the fault but argue that you fall under one of the exemptions that would allow a portion of the lapse to be forgiven, C)Obediently go to jail, and or pay whatever fines you owe for your lapse, Or D) Brainwash a bunch of plucky teenagers to kill the taxman for you and try to knock over the government.

While I know option C is a big ask, I think anyone who chose option D, should do the right thing and turn themselves in to the authorities before someone gets hurt. You might end up on some kind of watch list, but you’ll be saving a lot of people a lot of trouble.

On a more serious note, a few weeks ago in the real world, and a year ago in Uhrwerk time, I found out there was a conspiracy that had been put in the works by a few of the clockwork world’s immortal powers-that-be. I crushed most of the credible threats with the FC-fleet. Killing off, and shattering the souls of, all the ringleaders.

Then I crushed the less credible threats because even a long shot can still hit you in the dome if you take it too lightly and I’d already decided to be more diligent in the handling of my affairs.

In the end, I ended up expanding my FC-Fleet and creating a fleet of specialized units that were given heightened powers compared to the standard FC-Unit. Each of these specialized units would be able of going toe-to-toe with a high-level devil or god, and there’d be ten thousand units assigned to each immortal entity and possible threat within Uhrwerk, just to assure that the odds were always weighted in my favor.

While I was setting all that up, I caught wind of another plan to take down the exploitative and greedy dark sovereign of the clockwork world. It was a plan set into motion by the chief goddess of one of the channels in Null of all places, which was kind of galling, considering Null was already pretty well-favored in terms of conditions and benefits. Though in their defense, these were “new” Null worlds. Worlds that were valuable enough in their own right, to be worthy of being brought to Uhrwerk’s core, despite having just been reprocessed and remade.

The goddess had gotten together with the chief deities and fae of a few other channels, and they’d each volunteered their most valuable pieces from the game of doors for the task. Making them into heroes.

I probably should have just pulled a rocks fall and killed everyone involved but there was something so charmingly quaint about how bad the plan was that I couldn’t help just sort of hanging back to see what would happen.

First off, they thought Tommy was me. Apparently, young Thomas had been seen a lot in that part of Uhrwerk, but no one involved in this plan, really knew who he was, because of our policy of not interfering with the running of the channels unless it was absolutely necessary. Their seniors and superiors knew who we were but those guys apparently had failed to pass that information down the ranks.

Second, they thought ‘I’ was one of their pieces. Never mind I literally introduced myself with my actually fucking name. Nevermind, that most of their attempts to attach some of their divine wills to me so they could control my actions, and cloud my judgment, was plainly not working and I wasn’t making any serious attempts to hide this fact. They still somehow hadn’t caught on that I was almost certainly not who they thought I was.

Third of all, their plan relied on me being braindead enough to lower my strength to a level that would allow their mortal puppets to fight me evenly because I was apparently a Saturday morning cartoon character.

I refused to believe this was the actual plan, and there was just enough clouding of the parties’ fate lines and erasure of their footprints in the akashic plane, for me to suspect something more serious was going on.

I knew better than to believe my opponents were complete idiots, so I could only assume there was some kind of next-level plot going on, that was using this inane bullshit as a cover. Which was one of the reasons I didn’t just immediately bring the plot to an end with brute force.

I eventually started to get impatient and used my FC-fleet to create distractions that would allow me to “take custody” of some of the goddess’ co-conspirators so I could question them and search their souls.

Yet all signs seemed to point towards the likely outcome of the goddess having assumed Thomas was me, and them having used their estimation of his strength as the basis for this plan. I wanted to argue against this possibility, but a deep dive of the akashic plane and the collective unconscious of all the involved worlds seemed to confirm this conclusion.

As the great Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, when the impossible has been eliminated, and all other options have been investigated and exhausted, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth.

I’d confirmed that there was no greater plot going on. I’d confirmed that they really thought Tommy was me. I’d confirmed that there was no group of senior immortals planning to take advantage of this, beyond those who quietly approached me to ask if they’d be allowed to apply to become the gods and goddesses of the realms that were involved in this conspiracy after the conspirators had been duly punished.

Yet, my morbid curiosity led me to allow things to unfold until this point, the point of the final clash.

“Boss!? I think this has gone far enough. I mean, look at these kids, if I cut them down I’ll have nightmares,” said Tommy. Speaking to my via a temporary- telepathic connection

“Fine...Alright, I’ll handle the rest,” I said. Relenting as the link between us closed.

Tommy teleported out of there leaving the mortal and immortal witnesses below gaping. I decided to indulge in a final bit of theatrics by calling down one of my FC-units and having them disguise themselves as some kind of scary monster.

The kids defeated the monster and then at the very last second I defeated the kids. Blasting them away with a powerful but non-deadly telekinetic blast.

“Argh! What are you doing?!” said the leader of the young heroes.

“Crushing you?” said I.

“Why would you do this? I thought we were friends?!” said the pink-haired girl.

“Why would you think that? Every time I showed up I literally said ‘Good morning, peons, I can’t wait for the big betrayal’?” I said. With my eyes opened wide and my eyebrows raised.

“We...We thought you were joking,” said the lead hero.

I looked down at my shirt that had the words “Secretly the Bad Guy” printed on the front in big bold letters.

“And this?” I said. Pointing at the shirt.

“We assumed it was just part of your offbeat style,” said the man with the magnificent mustache.

“Well, I wasn’t, and it wasn’t...Now I’m going to tell you all a little tale involving tax fraud, and then you’ll get the choice between death, and a life of rewarding but boring labor, in a respectable bureaucratic position,” I said. My eyes glowing red.

“Never!” said the lead hero.

“Well, fine then,” said I. Snapping my fingers and reducing both his body and soul into ash.

There were a few seconds of silence where no one said anything. Then the pink-haired girl said,

“I’m open to stories…”

Her cohorts and fellow heroes who’d all been through quite a lot during the time playing the game of doors, and were therefore nowhere as pure and naive as their glorious leader, all nodded.

“Good…”

At the end of my brief explanation and presentation, I managed to get three new hires. I called Tommy back so he could take them to our headquarters within Uhrwerk for processing and orientation.

My FC-Fleet were dealing with the immortals who were responsible for this farce because they were frankly just stupid enough to be dangerous.

Meanwhile, I still couldn’t help but feel that there was more to this whole charade and that all this had been someone feeling me out for some reason. Most discomfiting was the sense that whoever had been feeling me out, had been doing so with good intentions. They weren’t trying to seriously bring me down, they were just trying to see me flex a little.

That was annoying and more than a little disconcerting. In either case, it seemed that I’d need to make some changes to how Uhrwerk was run, and how much control the immortal powers-that-be had over the pieces that took part in the game of doors.