A young woman sat in a combination bedroom and workshop. The young woman was petite and slender, though there was a growing degree of fullness and muscle-tone to her figure as months of filling nutritious meals, and training regimes had their effect. The young woman had a long face with a rounded jaw, somewhat chubby cheeks, a flat nose, and small rounded lips. Her light blue eyes were large and she had smooth, tapered, eyebrows like brush strokes. Her red hair was shoulder-length, straight, and neatly braided.

Brenna “Brandy” Kane sat in her room. Quietly humming to herself as she worked. Maybe it would be more accurate to say she sat in her apartment. However, if one really wanted to get technical about it, it wouldn’t be wrong to say she was actually sitting in one room, in a mansion she’d been given, that was itself part of an even bigger mansion. A mansion that she could do with as she pleased. Her authority as the space’s owner allowed her to not only play with the layout of the domicile, but to also alter its contents with near-complete freedom. Even if that meant separating the space from the larger mansion, though Brandy somehow couldn’t ever see herself doing that.

Brandy sat in front of a large collection of shelved dolls. Some of them were the size of a child, or you know...an actual doll. Other dolls, on the larger shelves, were much bigger in scale. Ranging from human-sized to the size of a bear, or troll. There was a table sitting at Brandy’s side. A work-table with all sorts of sockets, impressions, and shelves. With all sorts of tools and components in those sockets, impressions, and shelves. With a mere thought, and a practiced hand, Brandy used her powers, and the tools and pieces from the worktable, to take apart, clean, and then reassemble, the “female” doll. That she then dressed as a ballerina and put back up onto itself place amongst the grand collection of dolls.

Brandy then used her telekinesis to pull down another doll. This time a doll that was male in form. Taking off its stained policeman’s uniform and proceeding to her tools and powers to take it apart. A cursory examination of this particular doll led to Brandy opening a few more shelves on her worktable, pulling out a few replacement parts for that particular model of doll because it seemed this doll had somehow sustained some damage. Likely from either a recent hunt or a recent training session. Though it was unusual for Brandy to miss such things during the post-battle check-ups she always did, occasionally something would slip through the cracks.

Once Brandy was done repairing the doll, she reassembled and returned it to the shelving of her collection, this time dressed as a fireman. Brandy did these kinds of in-depth check-ups of her full collection every few months or so. Before the evening was over Brandy would work her way through at least 3000 dolls within her ever-expanding collection. She’d finish making her way through her collection over a few days. Retiring those dolls she either wasn’t able to give, or chose not to give, any tender loving care to. Turning them into “display” dolls rather than “use” dolls. Though she’d sometimes change her mind, if she started feeling nostalgic.

Brandy had become quite practiced at doing this kind of in-depth maintenance work. Gradually increasing her skill until she could repair all but the most complicated dolls in a mere handful of minutes. With only the most fiddly of dolls requiring more than an hour for Brandy to look them over and repair them. It reminded her of the small doll collection she used to have back in her old world. They were the only gift that her father ever brought her. Actually, Brandy was 90% certain that it wasn’t her father who got the dolls for her, but the people under him that tried giving her gifts as part of an attempt to suck up to her father.

All the same, it was Dalton who gave Brandy the dolls, and she’d loved them. Seeing them as one of the few times her father treated her as his child rather than just some asset he was raising just to flip for future gains. Of course, that memory was marred by all the times, her father would use his powers to destroy said dolls whenever he was angry, or just wanted to cow her into following his will. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Brandy was finding that at her core, she was someone who likes dolls.

Dolls, figurines, action figures, models, and statues. Whatever one wanted to call them, if it was something that looked like a living thing, but wasn’t she probably found them kind of nifty. It was like being around people, but without the pressure, bullying, judgment, or shouting. Not that she’d experienced a lot of those negatives with her real friends, thankfully enough. Brandy could easily see this little hobby turning into something of an obsession, if she didn’t have so many other things going on in her life.

Brandy was slowly studying up on necromancy and the creation of cyborgs, robots, and golem. Ellis had many, many, books on both subjects and had given Brandy free access to all of them. The more Brandy learned on those subjects, and others, the more Brandy felt that she wasn’t using her puppet-strings to their full potential. She was grateful for all the help and advice she was being given when it came to the exploration of her powers. Brandy wasn’t entirely sure where else to take the use of her powers, but lately, she’d been thinking about making her own doll.

There was a knock on the door of Brandy’s apartment. With a thought, Brandy rearranged the space within the apartment so that the door to Brandy’s apartment was the door to the room she was in.

“Come in,” said Brandy. Still humming softly to herself.

A pretty head of top in bright sunflower-yellow hair popped into the room. It was Josephine. Wearing her usual smile.

“Heya, Brandy. Ellis wants to know if you’ve got any requests for dinner,” said Josephine.

“Please tell Ellis, that anything’s fine, Jo. No need to be over conscious of me,” said Brandy. Smiling as well.

“Ah, no need to be shy, Brandy-kins...Elli-poo, is in a cooking mood,” said Josephine.

“Hm...Okay, in that case, some kind of savory pie would be good...Either pot pie, or shepherd's pie or something along those lines,” said Brandy. Relenting because by this point, she’d grown used to the Holsts’ somewhat overly familiar tendencies.

“Okie-doke! I’ll let him know,” said Josephine. Giving Brandy a jovial salute and quickly disappearing.

“Th-.... Thank you,” said Brandy. Speaking to the empty air, and then returning to her work with new haste because dinner would be soon, and she was now looking forward to seeing what Ellis ended up making.

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I had a good meal with the girls. Then we all watched a movie that had recently come out in one of the servers we did business in. It was a horror-comedy flick, but it was more comedy than horror, and it was a comedy with heart on top of that. The kind of comedy that makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. Normally, Brandy would sit by herself on a couch beside the sofa Jo and I sat in, but tonight we all ended up sitting on the sofa together. Sitting next to Jo and clinging to her during the film’s scarier parts. The two women laughed together till there were tears in their eyes, whenever the movie took a turn for the ridiculous and the humorous. I guess she was getting used to us or something.

After the movie ended, everyone went their own way for the evening. Jo wanted to do some meditating, to stabilize her cultivation and soul. Brandy headed back to her room to do whatever she did with her free time when she wasn’t with us. I headed back to the shop, because I could feel something annoying on its way, so I intended to cut off the trouble before it turned into something serious and upgrade the shop’s security measures and protections.

I was going to redo all the protective wards tonight, and I’d re-refine the materials that made up the shop. The hope was to ensure that by the night’s end, if my little shop had been secure enough to take on the end of the world before, it’d now be able to survive the end of tens of trillions of worlds, no sweat. Honestly, I should have done this security upgrade before, but sometimes it takes someone lighting a fire under your ass for a body to put this much work into a matter. Especially, since on paper, even in light of the threat I could sense on the horizon, what I’d done would still be considered a bit excessive. I wasn’t just making sure I could weather the coming storm, I was rendering the wind and rain that might come into something completely negligible.

My actions were a bit akin to hearing that someone might egg your house, and then turning said house into a castle, complete with a moat as big as an ocean, and a security-dragon that absolutely would, and could, turn a nation to ash if pushed. It was a bit overkill, yes, but I’d seen enough to know that life could throw some unbelievable curveballs at you. Miracles and calamities were supposed to be rare, yet one might run into clusters of them with a frightening frequency. In fact, now that I was thinking about some of the things I’d witnessed, I found myself going over the work I’d just done minutes ago, and adding extra layers to the protections I’d set. I also decided that when I got back home, I’d do a similar security upgrade for our entire private server.