I think I make a better Uncle than a father. I can’t remember if I’d left behind any sibling in my original word, but I’m pretty sure on this.

I’m not very good with kids and I’m not generally very unsociable by nature, but those aren’t things you need if you want to be a decent Uncle.

Unless you’re wearing two hats and switch hitting as a substitute parent, all a good Uncle needs to do, is occasionally give the kid pocket money, occasionally be available to provide babysitting and transportation and avoid being creepy.

That’s pretty much it, at least that’s what I’ve found in my experience anyway. Really if you can just avoid being creepy, the rest is pretty much optional…

*****

Driving felt different, sharing the roads with animals like horse, donkeys and goats, made me feel just a tad nervous. Though that might have just been because it had been ages since I’d driven, period.

A week had passed and Innes’ spring break vacation, it just so happened, that this was one of Agnes’s few days off, so I decided to help her out and drop Innes at school.

Innes would normally go by bus, since her ‘Mom’ Agnes usually worked and ‘Dad’ was usually sleeping off a hangover.

Today though... I don’t know...letting a kid who wasn’t even twelve yet travel, far distances on their own, seemed somehow iffy to me. But that might just be me and the influence of my...Corny’s parents speaking.

Especially a little girl. Our city, Radomir was a fairly affluent place, even if we were apparently just barely recovering from a depression, as the news channels kept saying. Something to do with the war that kingdom, Alvis, had just barely won.

Things were fairly safe here, at least we didn’t have open militias roving about or anything. But like I’ve said, the Inner-Territories of Novem were approximately like what you’d find for a collection modern, highly fractious, third world countries.

So even in Radomir things could get dicey, depending on what part of the city you’re in.

The point is, my conscience and a bit of probably misplaced, parental(?), anxiety had me decide to drop the kid at school. We didn’t say much during the drive. At least ‘she’ didn’t say much. But that was just fine with me.

I got to her school, a place called St.Vincent’s Academy. A moderately posh institution that looked like cross between a luxury hotel, and military prison fort.

A sturdy stone structure with surrounded an odd mixture of sharp spires, ornate architecture, wrought-iron fences, and thick brick walls, that made it hard to tell if they were trying to keep the kids in or keep people out.(Probably both).

I helped her get her bags out of the car. Then I slipped her a two hundred bucks because I didn’t know what else to do and things had been going pretty good for me, cash-wise.

Then we hugged, which was awkward, because by then I was pretty sure, we both knew that neither of us was who we were pretending to be. She wasn’t my daughter, and somehow, I knew that she knew that ‘I’, wasn’t Corny, the guy she’d grown-up calling dad.

Still, we hugged, and it was exactly as awkward as you’d imagine, but oddly enough, it wasn’t quite as awful as a full on stranger-hug.

I saw her off and then I drop back home.

******

I’m bleeding, bleeding badly. A pool of red, spreading out beneath me. My gut burns, and there’s a numbness where one of the bullet’s went through my spine. I...I think I might be dying, I can actually feel my organs shutting down. Maybe? Probably?

My heart doesn’t pump blood as it should, my breath grows thin and raspy. I’m sitting in the sunshine and yet I feel I’m freezing My vision, is fading, my strength is seeping out of me.

I want to get up, but I’m paralyzed from the legs down, thanks to the work of the shotgun, and someone’s machete.

“Hehehe…Look at this boys.”

I can hear them laughing at me, as they go through my things. The assholes discuss, what they think my gear is worth and how much they’ll make with all the essence stones I’d collected.

******

Agnes, or the woman that thinks she’s Agnes, despite knowing that she’s really not, isn’t Innes’s mom. I learned this during the first dinner, where all three of us, were present at the table.

I used my ability to perceive and appraise and found that while the two were genetically related, it was something closer to twins, or possibly even clones. It was actually quite fascinating.

I wouldn’t have realized it if I hadn’t peeped at Innes’ background data as a start, but neither of the two ladies in my life, were human. Or at least they weren’t properly human.

If I wanted to describe what they were it’d be best to say that there were something akin to a very complex, high-tier imitation made out of either sand, or clay or twigs, or maybe even legos.

The key to it, was that they were a very high fidelity, complex model. With everything down the very smallest model being modelled. As for their souls or thing that made them ‘alive’, It was actually pretty ghastly.

The two were even closer than clones, they were in fact the same person. The same exact person.The original, the original Agnes, had had her soul, mutilated and split in two.

Cutting along some classical divide, like good and evil, or yin and yang, in a process that was probably pretty awful. While the girl herself didn’t survive, her soul did, because souls were damn tough, and one of the few truly indestructible items in the known and unknown universes.

So these two half souls were put into two fake bodies, and then the monster responsible used its own essence to supply the other half of their beings. A process, that among our lot is called parasitic seeding, or dark avatar creation.

You put your essence, or monster-ness in a living being from proper reality and let them grow and develop for a bit, so that later you can harvest that accumulated power and the firm inner-logic that comes from having your essence exist in a stable reality.

As to how I know all this, half it is because I’m a monster and while I’ve never done something profane myself, I have known other monsters that have. The other half is all down to my ability to [perceive] and [appraise].

Knowing things I have no right to know because I just happen to be an existence of living thought and universal metadata, that can swim in similar waters. Collecting thoughts, and memories, and random details and skills from the others around me, as the consequence of something that was effectively psychic equivalent of static cling.

The only thing I don’t know is why one of the sisters ended up becoming a baby or how it got inside Agnes. Or if it was ever inside her to begin with and she just hid it somehow. All that was kind of vague and wasn’t coming out clear for some reason.

The rest could be put down to some logical leaps and guesses. I guessed that at some point a very confused, very scared young woman would return to relatively idyllic town with a baby in tow. Either holding it, or pregnant.

The monster likely didn’t like that its two seed beds had escaped and Agnes' city was destroyed because the dark whatever was looking for her. Then a few weeks later, She found herself alone.

With no assets, and no status, citizenship or otherwise. A refugee with a child, and little options.

Then Cornelius proposed and with a surprising amount of guilt considering, considering that she ‘knew’ about his involvement in her cousin's death, she decided to accept. Becoming his wife, and pretending that Innes was his child.

Messed up as it is she would have put up with worse, she would have accepted she’d been ‘that’ afraid and ‘that’ desperate.

It was either that or going to the indenture offices, which was the equivalent selling oneself as a slave. In theory you had right, in practice not so much.

Again, the rest is a bit murky, but I didn’t really care about the rest, I didn’t really about any of it, actually. All that was between Corny and her, and Corny was dead.

As far as I could remember, she’d tried to be as good a wife as she could be, better then a junkie brute like Corny, had deserved at the least. He’d known ‘that’ much.

She put up with his abusive bullshit as if it were some kind of atonement.

Taking his worst and still sticking around, toiling away with that shy, slightly mysterious, little Mona Lisa smile that she’d sometimes wear.

She sent the kid off to school, as soon as she could because separation was the best way to keep the dark whatever from finding them again.

If it weren’t for Corny’s extreme attachment to the girl, Agnes would be the one paying for all of it, as had been her intent. Instead she paid for everything else, supporting the two of them while Corny smoked and drank their savings away. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Considering that Innes seems to be pretty okay as a kid, and I’m kind of still crushing on Agnes, despite the unsettling revelations,(if only because I have my own issues going on), I’m content to let it all ‘stay’ history.

As for what all that has to do with my current situation. Absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything. This was just me ruminating on my home life and trying to keep a cool head while I waited for my healing to kick in and keep me alive. Good news is, it worked.

*****

I heard them pack my stuff up into their bags and heard the squeal of tires and the rev of engines as they hopped on their motorbikes and peeled.

As my vision returned I could only sigh. My camp was ruined, my pack was torn. I had nothing, save the bullet ridden clothes on my back.

It was my own fault really, maybe it was the decades of only being afraid of creatures with either too many or too few eyes and limbs.

Maybe it was the fact that one long term human connection since I’d come back to this world, had been fairly decent. Maybe I was just stupid and careless. (Probably because I was stupid and careless.) Whatever the case was it had resulted in me letting my guard down and letting the bandits run off with my stuff.

Hunters weren’t the only human’s wandering the outer-wastes. There were salvagers who wandered through the ruins looking for useful loot. Then there were the exiles.

People who got kicked out for political reasons or had to flee the territories to save their own lives. Exile was also a prefered form of capital punishment among the inner-territories, since unless you were high level and well trained being out here was pretty much a death sentence.

Those who made it, usually settled down in small camps and villages. Others did what they’d done inside the territories forming gangs, looting, murdering, raping. Running wild as they aimlessly wandered the outer-wastes, looking for wealth, power and a good time.

I’d kinda forgotten about all this though, Corny had known it, but since I’d yet to run into one of them, it had kind of slipped my mind.(Whoops.)

Fortunately I was A)undead as all the people of Novem were and therefore fairly hard to kill except by complete destruction of my brain or dismemberment. And B)I was monster and thus much, much sturdier than your average undead.

The good news was that I’d at least gotten to find out what my leveling up had down for me. It turns out that leveling up, incremental raises all you ‘stats’ by ten percent. Never mind that there are no actual formal stats to raise.

Each and every person on Novem is born level zero, turning level one shortly after birth, unless they’ve been cursed or crippled.

And for each additional level they became one tenth smarter, stronger, faster more magical, until that tenth level comes around and their bodies, and base stats are changed becoming twice as capable. Their essence and beings refined into something more formidable than ever before. With the pattern repeating every ten levels.

I should have been one-shotted, the bandit’s magical shotgun should have splattered me across the walls. I or at least Corny and every other red blooded male that had access to a tv, knew what his gun was.

It was a Jack-Cannon, the weapon of choice for the heroes and giant killers everywhere. Corny had kind of thought they were just made up.

The kick from the cannon’s discharge was enough to rattle the entire building was real enough though. The explosion of the bullets nearly brought the whole house down around our heads.

I feel fairly secure in saying that had I been a normal person I would have been vaporized. My body transforming into a cloud of charred meat and red vapor. Instead I was merely blown away. Blasted out of sight, flying through a wall, and into a hallway.

*****

Still the news was more good than bad. First of all I was still alive, which was almost always good news in my book. Second, I now knew that leveling up was well worth my time and would be ardently pursuing that goal in the new future.

Third, I’d been firmly reminded that like all the schlock, sci fi-movies I’d watched as a kid had taught me, ‘humans were the real monsters’ or at least they were another sort of monster.

Which meant I would at least be keeping my guard up from now on. Maybe not to the hyper-reactive, hyper-vigilant, hyper-violent levels that I’d had while I was in the bad place. But some caution and wariness was necessary.

Fourth and finally, a few of the bandits had made the mistake of letting me, A)see their faces, B)hear their names, and C)decide to take a personal interest in their affairs. I now knew where they were and knew they were headed.

If I wanted to, I could use this power to learn all their secrets and fears, and all the things that made them tick. It’d be like I’d known them for years, knowing them better than they knew themselves. In other words, I was pretty sure I’d be getting my gear back soon.