A week of doing business ended with Jo and I finally deciding to leave things to my figments. We had enough competent staff on hand that we could easily leave the work of running the shop to others when we needed to, or simply wanted to. Now we’d be doing exactly that for the next couple of days.

“Hey, Elly?” said Jo.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Will you scratch me behind my ear?” said Jo.

“Can’t you scratch behind your own ear?” I said. One brow raised because I was in the middle of a crossword puzzle from a Server with a fairly complex and distinctly anomalous alphabet.

“It’s different when you do it. Come on, be a pal,” said Josephine.

“Please? Pretty please…?” said Jo.

I sighed. Relenting because my wife was giving me the puppy dog eyes and I was self-aware enough to know I wouldn’t be saying no for long. Jo’s puppy eyes had been getting me to do things since back when we were just kids, just friends, and she was still my maid, personal-assistant, and nurse.

“Fine…” I said. Getting up and walking over to the bed to scratch my wife behind the ears. Moments like this, and the fact a sometimes disturbing amount of our sex life involved things being peanut butter flavored was one of those weird parts about our life together that I’d sometimes have to stop and reassess, before realizing that all things considered if I had to do it all over again, I probably would...Except maybe the part where I was chopped up into a near-infinite number of little pieces and disseminated through the cosmic neighborhood as a name-brand commodity.

In light of all the terrible things that ended up being done to me, and the terrible-terrible things I ended up being forced to do to countless others. Becoming a key villain that the various heavenly-wills and divine playwrights could trust to fulfill its role in a world’s narratives, wasn’t something I can say I’d ever willingly repeat. The worst parts were when I’d lose myself within the role, my ego surfacing only afterward when I was alone and unoccupied, and the memories passed on by that other version of me

I scratched my wife behind the ears, and as her expression loosened up and her tail began to wag, I couldn’t help loosing my own contented sigh.

“Fufufufufufu...Yeah, that’s nice...Thanks, honey,” said Josephine. Lying back on the bed languidly. Giving a full view of her magnificent mounds.

“Uh-huh,” I said. Rolling my eyes curmudgeonly, despite the blush on my own cheeks, and the slight erection in my pants, and returning to my seat on the other side of the room.

Jo turned around and turned on the bedroom’s television. The ultra-high-definition display and audio made it seem less like Josephine was watching an action movie, and more like she’d opened a window to a realm of madness and violence, that she was observing just for the heck of it.

Bothered by all the sounds of screaming, gunfire, and explosions, I was more than a little relieved when she switched the channel to a nature show. Though true to Jo’s nature it was a documentary about the life and habits of a certain species of predator, and she began to drool a little as she watched the six-eyed, eight-legged raptors sink their beaked maws into their prey. Thus another restful evening passed in the Holst house.

*************************************************************************************************************

A few days later, I was doing a routine operation and maintenance inspection on a couple of my factory planets and production plant planets. These facilities were important to Jo, me, and now I guess, they were also important to our new paid employee Brandy. They were important because these factories and production plants not only produced the majority of the wares for the shop, but also because a portion of the items made in my factories would be sold wholesale to the various guilds, sects, and corporations of the myriad servers. Serving as the main source of our family’s income.

Most of those transactions would be handled by teams of thinkers, Bishops, and Pawns. A key part of the process was the creation of a variety of dummy corporations, dummy guilds, and similar fake groups, for the sake of keeping the overly curious, overly troublesome, and overly jealous from finding their way to my doorstep. Of course, if one dove deeply enough one would eventually find ties to those companies that led back to our little Holst Family, but due to the presence of the system, this was all but unavoidable.

The word of the day was always and has always been, “plausible deniability.” So long as most people wouldn’t be able to trace all those wholesale transactions back to our Holst Family, then I’d consider the measures I was taking sufficient for our purposes. I didn’t need us to be completely invisible. In fact, someday in the future, our family might decide to be a lot more transparent about all the figurative pies we had our fingers in. For now, though, we had decided to be as low-key as possible.

I wrapped up the inspections with a quick walk-through of a factory that made the graphics cards for many of the lower-end computers, gaming consoles, tablets, and phones that I, and a number of our company’s “technical” competitors, sold. These processors were far from the fanciest or most advanced tech being produced in my private server, but they were generally at least a few years ahead of what other tech companies were making, as far as servers that were still going through their 21st to 25th century went.

That meant that selling the graphics cards and other similar components that I’d produced in my private server, could reliably make the family a lot of money.

Once the inspections were done, I headed to my house and killed a few hours playing video games. I don’t play horror games because ironically all the awful things I’ve seen and done have made me a bit sensitive to that kind of media.

I’m not big on action-adventure games or role-playing games, because well...the state of our multiverse being what it is. I mean, I don’t imagine most chefs come home from cooking to play cooking games and restaurant management sims, when they want to unwind. Though then again maybe they do if they actually love their work ‘that’ much.

I just knew that I was more in favor of visual novels, puzzle games, and casual doll-house-type life-simulation games. Things one could just sort of zone out while doing, and things that one could lose oneself in, with little to no stress involved. In other words, I was a so-called filthy casual and proud of it.

I was also wealthy enough that I thought nothing of buying all the DLCs and micro-transactions. This was just one more way that I made the world a worse place, by being exactly the kind of “whale” that exploitative gaming companies loved the most.

In any case, I stopped my gaming around dinner time. One of the pawns that I had working in the house as household staff, a butler-pawn, came into the living room to inform me that dinner was ready. I got up and headed over to the dining room to go eat but was a little surprised to find I was the only one at the table. I ate because we weren’t some extra formal household that all needed to be together before we ate and shat.

However, by the time I was done eating I got a bit concerned. I don’t “need” to eat anymore, but when I ate I generally ate a lot. Using the varied fare that made up our house’s meals as fuel and materials for the continual refinement of my body, spirit, and soul. This meant that dinner was usually a pretty long affair if I wasn’t rushing. Taking a minimum of two to three hours, and usually continually long after everyone else has left the table.

Once my plates were cleared, I got up to go look for my wife and our house-guest. Since none of the wards that I’d set up for them were chiming I knew they were safe, so I was just curious as to what they were up to. I found Jo and Brandy in the mansion’s training hall.

Jo had swollen up to eight feet in height. Her bulging muscles threatened to break free from beneath the tank top and sweatpants she wore. Her hair had grown out and spiked out like porcupine quills. Brandy stood against her surrounded on all sides by an encirclement of tightly woven psychic energy. The girl’s final line of defense.

Brandy’s first line of defense lay strewn around the ground in the training hall. Limbs torn off, bodies ripped in half or crushed. It seems Jo was helping Brandy train her newly awakened powers. It had turned out that Brandy was in possession of some highly potent psionic abilities. The only reasons that she didn’t discover them before were the constrained nature of her environment, and certain peculiarities regarding how her powers worked.

Imagine a colander that can constrain a sea. Or more like imagine an entire sea of tangled thread. What’s more, those threads had a special possessive-aspect to them. Aka “puppet-string”. This made it much easier for the girl to attach her threads to things and manipulate and/or affect those things via her threads. This was why her main equipment were the weaponized-dolls and golem-shells that Jo had brutally torn apart.

After living with her for several months, I kind of regretted not finding some opportunity to punch, or otherwise inflict some harm on, Dalton Kane, her father. Psionic powers were one of those supernatural abilities that were closely tied to, and highly affected by, the user’s outlook and mental state.

As such, that particular combination of possessor-type and thread-type psionic abilities was more likely to appear in the hands of those with manipulative personalities, and those who’d been living under tight and oppressive constraints. Puppet-type techniques could be learned, but when it appeared as an innate power, it was usually in the hands of those who saw the world as their plaything, and/or those who were made to believe they were their dolls, or puppets, of others.

My time as a villain meant that it wouldn’t have missed my notice if Brandy was the former type, and many other things that I’d seen about the girl spoke of a past of abuse. Which made me more determined to do right by the girl while she was in Jo and I’s care. Returning to the topic of her powers, after helping her awaken and tap into her abilities, I’d made sure to offer the tutorship of the Bishops and Thinkers, who boasted psionic abilities of their own. While also granting the girl expanded use of our store’s library of ability, skill, and class books. I’d been considering offering the girl some hands-on train as well, but it seems that Jo had beat me to it.

I decided to leave the girls to it, since it didn’t seem like they’d be calling it quits any time soon. I called over a maid-pawn and ordered it to inform the figments working in the kitchen that I wanted them to preserve what was left of the evening’s meal for the two ladies, for when they were finished with their training session. Then I wandered off to do some other things in my workshop because I had a couple of experiments that I’d been running on materials that Jo and I found during our strolls through the wastelands and wilderness.