“Hehe… hehehe.” For the last five minutes or so, all Vala did was cuddle with our daughter while giggling to herself. She looked so happy that she was literally glowing from it. Her tail kept on wagging and smacking against the ground, too.

And like mother, like daughter, because our daughter was more than happy to just cuddle her back without anything else but the occasional giggle.

“It doesn’t matter if we skipped the baby and kid phase… you’re still my daughter, so that means you have to get infinitely cuddled,” Vala explained.

“Of course!” our daughter replied. “Cuddles make the world rotate, after all!”

“Exactly!”

“I’m pretty sure gravity does that,” I interjected.

Both girls looked at me as if I said one of the dumbest things they ever heard.

“Cuddles create rotations!” Vala asserted.

Our daughter nodded and asked, “Come on, Dad. I thought you’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t even know that basic knowledge?”

“I’m pretty sure I should be asking you two that!” I replied. “What if everybody stops cuddling then? Is the world going to stop spinning?”

“Obviously.”

“Then what if people cuddle too much? What if everybody cuddles and never stops?”

Vala spoke up to explain, “One, then that would be the best thing ever. Two, the world would spin so fast that it would turn into a hyper-cuddle-quasar!”

“I’m pretty sure that’s nonsense.”

“It’s canon now. Hyper-cuddle-quasars exist and they’re some of the most powerful celestial bodies of the universe.”

There was no point in trying to refute them, especially when I had no evidence to actually contradict their outlandish claims, so I let them have it.

Hyper-cuddle-quasars were canon.

“Anyways, hey, Kid,” I said, unsure of what else to call our daughter for the time being.

“Yeah, Dad?” she replied.

Between Luca calling me “Papa” and now my new daughter calling me “Dad,” I was starting to get really fond of being referred to as some form of father. They just sounded nice. They made me feel good. Special. Important. They just hit different from how all the others referred to me.

And it was partly because of my newly expanded duties as a father that I had an idea for what I wanted to do.

“You said I’m basically a god now, right?” I asked.

“Yep!” our daughter confirmed. “You’re probably more OP than basically everything in the universe now. Even stronger than me!”

“Wait, how’s that work?”

“Well, like I said before, your soul is partly touched by a higher plane of existence now that asserts dominance over this plane, so you’re stronger than everything here and can control everything.”

“But you’re the one who was able to rip her way into that existence in the first place to get my soul back.”

“All I did was commit some petty theft! I can break into there, but I wouldn’t be able to actually be on the same power level as anybody or anything in there. But all I had to do was steal your soul back to her, and now you’re here and alive and OP! Umm, okay. Here’s an example. You have a knife. You break your knife and you lose it and it ends up in somebody else’s house. While the knife is in their house, it starts to transform and becomes a super huge and badass sword! And then I break into their house, steal the sword, run away, and give it back to you. Now you have your knife back, but it’s stronger and better than ever before, but I’m still just me.”

“Drake,” Vala said. “I don’t even understand what she’s talking about when she brings up a higher plane of existence, so… it’s probably better that we just nod our heads and trust her.”

“Wait, you don’t even know?” I asked.

“Nope. The stuff that she’s said implies that what us dragons know is only the beginning of reality’s truth. It hurts my head to think about, so I’m just going to not worry about it.”

“Understandable. Anyways, if I’m actually like a god now, then…”

I snapped my fingers.

A beautiful field of flowers featuring petals of every color appeared around us, rapidly spreading throughout the forest until there wasn’t a single piece of dirt visible underneath just how densely packed they were.

“Hehe, this is why you’re the best, Dad,” our daughter said. “You get the powers of a god, and the first thing you do with them is create a bunch of flowers.”

Vala nodded in agreement, still cuddling our daughter.

While they might have thought I was being cute or something, I didn’t feel cute.

If anything… I felt powerful.

I felt in control.

I had the power to create and alter reality as I saw fit! While Vala might not have wanted to abuse her powers, I had absolutely no problem with doing so myself.

“I’ll be back. You two keep cuddling,” I said.

With that, I snapped my fingers and returned to Earth in an instant.

I found myself floating high up in the sky like I was some sort of superhero. Without expending any effort, I was able to zoom in on what I saw while looking all around me in every direction. I was able to watch millions of people all at once.

My target?

A test subject.

It didn’t take long to find one.

Some punk walking with a couple of his friends down the street threw a plastic bottle he was drinking from into the grass next to the sidewalk.

So, with another snap of my fingers, I appeared in front of him.

It just felt right to snap my fingers when using my powers.

“What—what the fu—” the punk who threw the bottle tried to say, but he shut up once I grabbed him by his shirt and lifted him up.

The two friends he was with abandoned him, running back in the direction they came from.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.

“I—I’m just walking, man! Who the fuck are you?!” he shouted at me, his voice full of fear.

He deserved to be afraid for what he did.

Now, I was a father. A father of two perfect daughters and a husband to… probably a dozen or so wives. I was losing track of just how many of them there were. The point is that I needed to be a good role model.

So, that was why all I did was toss him over onto the grass next to the bottle he threw.

“Pick it up,” I ordered him.

The punk, looking like he was about to cry, picked up the plastic bottle and tried to back away from me.

I snapped my fingers and then said, “Now try to throw it again.”

“Wha-what? But—but you just said—”

“Did I stutter?”

The punk gulped, tried to throw the bottle… and got electrocuted. Not severely electrocuted or anything. It was the same kind of zap that a dog wearing one of those shock collars might feel. More importantly, the bottle didn’t leave his hand when he tried to throw it. He was forced to stay holding onto it while he got zapped.

“Good. New law of reality: littering is a crime against existence, and thus has been made impossible. Anybody who tries to do so will be punished via a zap,” I explained.

“Are—you are… are you like a—a god or something?” he asked. “Wait… no, there’s no way… this must be like a prank show or something… I’m being recorded, aren’t I?”

“Gods don’t have as many perfect wives and daughters as me, so I’m better than a god.”

Back to the present, all of my wives in attendance of the showing couldn’t help but to either smile or blush when they heard that, and anybody who had a waggable tail was wagging it. Luca also couldn’t help but to giggle and smile.

Back to the past, I said, “I’ll grant you one wish. You might be a littering bastard, but I used you as a test subject, and I don’t believe in unpaid internships. So, tell me what you want.”

The punk looked around, still not convinced he wasn’t being recorded, and asked, “Anything…?”

“Anything.”

“Then… my—my mom. She got diagnosed with cancer and… they don’t think she’ll live for much longer. If—if you really can do anything… then can you—”

I snapped my fingers. “It pisses me off that you wanted something nice.” After all, I didn’t want to believe that somebody who would dare defile nature by littering could also want good, normal things for those important to them. “But it’s done. Cancer doesn’t exist anymore. In anybody.”

“You’re fucking with me. There’s no way—”

Not being believed was kind of annoying. I wondered if gods ever felt that way before—annoyed over not being believed by normal people. So, to prove it, I snapped my fingers again and the two of us appeared in the hospital room where his mother was staying. She was standing up and checking herself out, looking confused by how good she felt.

“Mo-Mom?” the punk asked.

The mother jumped when she heard his voice and jumped again when she saw the two of us standing in her room.

Right as she opened her mouth, though, I held up my hand to stop her. “Save the tears and happiness for after I’m gone. I don’t want to intrude on something personal. But you,” I looked right into the mother’s eyes, “tell me if you want your hair back or not.” She was bald, after all, presumably because of the cancer treatments.

“My—my hair back?” she asked me.

“Your hair. You lost it. Do you want it back or do you want it to stay as is?”

“I… miss my hair, so…”

I snapped my fingers again, causing her to grow an obnoxious amount of hair atop her head that looked like it belonged in the eighties.

Then I disappeared.

Now, admittedly, I started feeling pretty tired. My soul began to hurt in the same way that some muscles might when straining them too hard. In the same way that somebody could pull a muscle, I was pulling my soul.

But why stop at cancer?

How could I eliminate just one shitty disease and not all the others plaguing people causing so much suffering, breaking up families, and ruining lives?

I couldn’t. I couldn’t eliminate only one.

That was why I eliminated all the others, too. Everything from cancer to dementia, from the common fold to rabies—I eradicated them all.

Making littering impossible was my crowning achievement, though.

Anyways, by the time that I was done eliminating all of them, I felt like I was on the verge of passing out and returned to the forest where Vala and our daughter were.

Our daughter was the first to see that something was wrong and got up off the ground to catch me before I fell over. “Ah, geez, Dad… you can’t just get new powers and then go and abuse them that hard. Your soul still has to recover and get used to the changes.”

“Worth it,” I replied.

Vala got behind me, wrapped her arms around me, and gently lowered me to the ground where she proceeded to use her lap as a pillow for me. Feeling her hand run through my hair felt extra nice. “That’s just how he is,” Vala said. “He’s always so dramatic and takes things too far, but for good reasons.”

“If anything, I didn’t take things far enough. Yet.”

That was when our daughter sat down on her knees next to me and took my hands into her own. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ve got this.”

I turned my head to look at her and asked, “You’ve got what?”

“The universe! Our universe. Maybe it’s cheating, like looking at a strategy guide before even playing the game,” she was definitely like her mother, “but I already know everything about both of you. I know everything you want, how you want the universe to be… and because I’m your daughter, and I want to thank you for bringing me into existence, I want you to let me handle it!”

“No way,” Vala said. “You were just created! We can’t just… let you go and do everything for us.”

“I’m not asking for permission, Mom. It’s something I want to not only do for the two of you, but for myself as well. How could I not? I’ve got the power to do anything, and I have the souls of both of you in me. There’s no way I could settle down and relax here with everybody until I’ve made sure that everybody in the universe is happy. And I can tell how you feel. You don’t need to feel guilty that I’m doing something and you’re not. You just want to be happy with those you love, and that’s okay. Nobody can fault you for that. But I also know you want to make everything better, and I love you and want to do the same, so I’m going to do it!”

I couldn’t help but to laugh a little when I heard that. “This is making me think of those stupid posts on the internet where people in their thirties complain about how much more successful and accomplished people younger than them are. I wonder how they’d feel about somebody less than a day old going around improving the universe.”

“Wait, Drake,” Vala said, “you—you support this?”

“Why wouldn’t I? She’s my daughter. I’d be worried she isn’t really mine if she didn’t want to say ‘screw this’ to the laws of reality and go do exactly what she wants no matter what.”

“But… she’s going to be gone, and then we won’t get to spend time with her…”

“We’re basically immortal. We have all the time in the universe to spend time with her once she gets back. And don’t get me wrong, I’m going to miss her, but she’s my daughter. She’s my daughter who wants to fix everything wrong with the universe. How could I be anything but proud and supportive?”

Vala sighed and said, “I… understand. I’m just going to be—”

“Oh! Idea!” our daughter said. “I have the perfect idea!”

Vala blinked a couple of times and asked, “What is it?”

“I’m going to make us a sub-reality where we can spend as much time together as we want playing video games before I leave! Whether we spend hours or decades in there, only a few minutes will pass in this world, and you’ll get to spend as much time as you want with me to help you not feel sad!”

Vala blinked another couple of times. “That’s—that’s a good idea… you really are my daughter if you thought of something that epic!”

“Hehe, right? We can go have a decades-long vidya binge!”

“Oooh! I’m hyped! Let’s do it!”

That was when I rolled off of Vala’s lap, faceplanting into the flowers below, and mumbled out, “You two go have some mother-daughter bonding time. I’m tired, my body hurts, and my soul hurts, so I’m going to take a nap.”

“Wait, you won’t join us? You could take a nap in there and then wake up and join us once you feel better!”

That was when our daughter hugged onto Vala and said, “Let Dad rest. He strained his soul too much doing all that right away. Besides… I know he’ll make it up to me later! Also, he’d get bored of only playing vidya with us no matter how much he loves us. And even if I make a garden or something for him, he’d just want to come back here to his original garden.”

“Yeah, what she said,” I mumbled.

“Plus it should only take me a few months to fix the entire universe. Well, a few months in your time. Anyways! Let’s go and—wait! I almost forgot!”

Me and Vala both looked at her with curious expressions.

“You need to name me! I can’t just be the daughter of the two most epic people in existence without a name!”

“I’m bad at naming, so this one is up to you, Vala,” I said.

I half expected Vala to pout at me for pushing the responsibility off to her, but she confidently smiled and said, “I think I know the perfect name for you. Because of how you were made and what you want to accomplish… Love-chan!”

“Ooh, perfect!” our daughter, Love—yeah, just “Love” is good enough, said.

“Welcome to the family, Love,” I mumbled. “I’m passing out now, alright?”

Love leaned down to kiss my forehead before saying, “Thanks for making me, Dad.”

“Anytime.”

Love looked at Vala and asked, “Alright! Ready for the most epic vidya binge of all time?”

Vala smirked and said, “You know it! And as your mom, I’ll show you all the classics! Oh, and if you’re going to be taking on the universe… I guess I better teach you all about… well, your extended family, since you’re going to have to go up against dragons…”

“Then it’s time for a decades-long vidya and training montage! And don’t worry, I’m so OP that not even a dragon can beat me!”

Hearing that, Vala let out a slight sigh of relief before the two vanished from my sight.

I was left alone in the forest surrounded by flowers.

Sure, I wanted to spend time with Love, but… she gave me one of the most perfect gifts that a daughter could ever give her dad.

She gave me peace and quiet.

For the first time in as far as I could remember, I had genuine peace and quiet.

I wanted to enjoy it for longer, but I passed out almost instantly.