After Natalie rolled a strike by throwing a wildly off-course ball with a squeak, dad seemed to catch on to Perry modifying the lane.

He yawned and turned his head to the side, throwing his arm around mom’s shoulders before glancing back at Perry after Heather’s turn.

“Challenge round,” he said, nodding at the scorecards.

Perry glanced up and noticed that the lane occupants had been switched, giving mom and dad the left lane and Perry and friends the other.

“Buh…” Natalie’s jaw dropped. “But we were on this side…right?” she asked, radiating confusion.

“Not what the scorecard says,” dad said with a shrug, standing up and taking over Perry’s lane, rolling his ball without looking, walking back to the bench and flopping down at the same time that Perry’s modification to the oil sucked his ill-thrown ball right into the pocket, giving him another strike.

“Oh, it’s on,” Perry muttered, taking his position and scraping his foot against his new lane.

He was unsurprised to see that dad had modified the lane somehow, and it was now designed to pull the ball strongly off course. It also wasn’t taking to Perry’s modification, either.

Perry frontloaded Nerve and studied the lane.

This isn’t too bad, Perry thought, all I have to do is skip the first ten feet or so, and land a ball with a strong spin to counter.

Perry glided forward and went to launch the ball when his foot slipped and he collapsed to the ground with a squawk, tossing the ball straight into the gutter.

Perry glanced over at mom, who was innocently sipping her root beer, trying her best not to look directly at him.

Perry opened his mouth to unleash delightful imprecations upon his family, when his ball hopped out of the gutter on its own and hit the pins from the side, granting him another strike.

Perry frowned, glancing at Heather and Natalie, who both looked confused.

One of them was faking it.

Perry would bet Heather would be the first to get into the spirit of cheating without getting caught. But how she managed it? No idea.

It went on like this for some time.

Natalie’s ball began pushing aside pins four feet away, giving her strikes despite consistent gutter balls. It was a horribly bad attempt at subtlety, but Nat was a cinnamon bun, so they let it slide.

Somehow dad’s pins refused to fall over for a time, granting Perry a late-game advantage which was corrected when one of the soda machines exploded and a valve knocked Perry’s ball into a different lane entirely.

They were neck and neck all the way through the first game, and into the second one, when Gramma and grampa arrived from breakfast, laughing and chatting.

The old woman’s expression frosted over as soon as she saw the rest of her family.

“Claudette, Paradox,” She said, nodding before glancing at dad. “The other one.”

“Gramma, grab a seat,” Perry said, motioning to one of the benches. “We’re not cheating.”

“As…fascinating as rolling balls like a trained animal would be, I’m afraid that’s all the time I have.”

“before you go,” Perry said, trotting over to his bench, snatching up his binder and and handing gramma his blueprints. “Take a look at this.”

Blueprint was a bit of a misnomer as the entire thing was nearly a hundred pages of diagrams and technical notes describing his plan in detail.

“I’ll be sure to glance over it when I…” Gramma trailed off, her eyebrows raising as she flipped through the document. Unconsciously, the old woman sat down at the table beside the lane, flipping through Perry’s notes.

The attendant, having nothing better to do, swung by with a refill for their root beer.

“Servant,” Gramma said as the young man passed by. “Fetch me a pen, an encyclopedia and a glass of wine.”

“Umm…” The kid took the terse order in good humor, tugging the pun out of his breast pocket and giving it to her before continuing on his way.

“You can use my phone,” Perry said, handing gramma his phone.

“Ah yes, I can use the google.”

Gramma opened up google and began searching ‘capillary action on magical essences’.

That was when Perry knew he had her full attention.

He also knew that google wasn’t going to help her with that question.

Perry glanced back to the lanes and witnessed an illusion of himself throw a gutterball. That was when he noticed he was invisible.

“Hey!” Perry shouted, waving his arms. The illusion moved over to where he was and superimposed itself on him before vanishing, leaving very little evidence it had ever existed.

“Nice try Perry, throwing your voice to distract us,” dad said, grinning evilly.

“Oh, you guys are gonna get it,” Perry fumed as mom giggled while Nat and Heather looked a little perplexed at Perry’s strange behavior.

Grampa came back from the bar with two pairs of shoes and two bottles of wine, pouring the first into plastic dixie cup for gramma.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said wisely.

Gramma just grunted in acknowledgement and knocked back the entire cup before holding it out for a refill, not looking away from Perry’s notebook.

Her other hand was busy writing notes in bright red in the margins.

“Roll for me,” Gramma muttered, crooking a finger. Her bodyguard, one of several living shadows passed down through the Zauberer line, emerged from the floor.

“Fetch me Gadrevan’s thesis and Pecholard’s On The Soul.”

The shadow nodded and sank back into the floor, returning in less than fifteen seconds with the requested documents…straight out of Perry’s vault.

Dangit. Perry did not like the idea that his grandmother could steal from him any time she wanted with a crook of her finger.

Gramma began flipping through both at the same time, comparing the two with an acute eye for detail, as Perry had.

“Hum,” Gramma muttered, motioning Perry over after his turn.

“Yeah?”

“This is so far beyond anything Gadrevan ever considered.”

“But could it work?” Perry asked.

“The theory is sound…If Gadrevan’s single, highly extrapolated theory about the application of physics in the soul is correct, and Pecholard’s is not.” Gramma said.

“Gadrevan was better, wasn’t he?” Perry asked.

“Just because he was the underappreciated underdog does not make him more brilliant. Do not let these ‘movies’ make you soft-headed. Both men were geniuses.”

“You really want to install a molecular filter in your soul?” Gramma asked, looking at him as he slid into the seat across from her.

“Abun’zaul has the potential to produce any Essence, and an insatiable need to grow to match his environment. I say we take advantage of it by setting up a series of essence filters in my soul. Abun’zaul will push into them, until only the essence remains, pumped through the filter by the pressure that the spirit exerts. Similar to capillary action.”

“Yes, I read that,” Gramma said, glancing through his notes. “Do you believe this…System that your reprobate father installed in you will allow this to happen?”

“Hey Perry, you’re up!” Heather said.

“Roll for me!” Perry called back, the amusing cheating game with his parents forgotten.

He was getting to the good stuff now.

“I think it will allow it. Abun’zaul and the System are in a state of constant struggle with each other. If my System moved to prevent Abun’Zaul from pushing itself through the filter, it would be expending unnecessary energy which may lead to Abun’zaul gaining an advantage and spreading uncontrolled, killing me in the process. It is more advantageous to its prime directive to allow me harness energy from Abun’zaul.”

“This tracking system,” gramma said, tapping her fingers on Perry’s proposed soul tracking system. “Do you know if it works?”

Perry took the diagram out of her hand and glanced it over. The tracking system looked like thousands of crystal knives sticking out of a flat plane of glass. Each crystal led back to an electric node which fed information into a computer which used software to decode the input and make a picture of the soul.

“Check this out,” Perry said, spinning his phone around and loading one of the videos he’d taken of his own soul. The constantly fluctuating cloud of personality traits and emotions that represented him, showed up plain as day on the video. Perry could even make out the foreign lumps where Gerome had made additions.

The biggest trick was that the soul fluctuated wildly. It roiled like muddy water, with the individual parts constantly stretching and sliding over each other.

The fact that Gadrevan had made a permanent structure; a box, in that roiling, unpredictable mass, and had accurately targeted one small part to do it, by hand, was all the evidence Perry had needed to know the man was a savant.

Perry was going to do it better:

With a computer.

“That is indeed your soul. Although it looks so much different when rendered into a video format. Stale, almost.”

She turned the page and pointed at Perry’s rig.

“What is this?” Gramma said, pointing out the heavy piece of machinery.

“A robotic arm,” Perry said. “it’ll be connected to the computer which is connected to the tracking system. It’s what will perform the surgery. I’m going to shell out for some state of the art robotics to achieve a level of precision that a human couldn’t possibly replicate.”

Dad meandered over and glanced down at the picture.

“Rent yourself some A-140 robotic arms and room stabilizers from Stable Greg. The ones you’ve proposed here have some jiggle to them, on a molecular scale. Greg can paint the Mona Lisa on an electron cloud. Plus it would be cheaper than buying.”

“A-140…Stable…Greg.” Perry said, borrowing Gramma’s pen and jotting down the name next to the diagram.

“And I see you wanna take my beautiful, hard-earned Death Crystal, and cut it into a variable focus lens in order to do some amateur self-mutilation.”

Gramma regarded dad with a scowl.

“Death crystals are the sole property of the crown.”

“Maybe where you made the laws, sure,” dad said. “There’s just one problem: This is Earth.”

“Bah.” Gramma waved him off with a sullen frown.

“If I know anything about that reprobate, he’s going to hide that crystal and force you to steal it from him in some kind of twisted teachable moment.”

Buzz

Perry’s phone vibrated in his pants, and he discreetly checked it.

Got it!

-Sophie the Elysian Attendant, professional afterlife sweetener.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Perry said, feeling like the smoothest bastard in the whole world.

Buzz

Perry frowned and checked the phone.

Now for my list of demands.

-Sophie the Elysian Attendant, professional afterlife sweetener.

“Dangit,” Perry muttered, scrolling through the list of demands. There was only one, but he no longer felt like the smoothest bastard. A chill went down the back of his neck.

“Perry, you’re up again!” Heather called from the bench, wrenching his gaze away from his phone.

“I’m going to be busy correcting your sloppy refinement methods for at least an hour,” Gramma said, waving Perry away. “You may go play your peasant game.”

Perry performed a cheeky Manitian bow and went back to the bench, checking the score.

His team was trailing by four.

“Hey, boy, you said the stakes were too low with just dinner riding on the line,” dad said with a sinister grin. “How about we make things interesting?” If you win-“

“I can have the Death Crystal, otherwise you won’t let me have it?” Perry guessed, causing dad’s shoulders to slump.

“Am I that predictable?” dad asked, glancing at mom with an exaggerated frown.

“There, there, sweety,” She said, patting his head. “You’re consistently cool, and consistency is predictable.”

“Alright, dad,” Perry said. “Your terms are acceptable.”

The game heated up with Perry’s team trailing by four the entire time, until they got lucky on a split, and mom and dad fell to neck-and-neck.

On the last frame, all of them threw strikes, keeping the pressure on each other…except for Natalie, lowering their average score just a couple point beneath Mom & dad’s.

“Aw, that’s too bad,” dad said with feigned sympathy as Natalie slumped in her seat, biting her lip, eyes watering.

Perry patted her back while Heather took her turn.

“I’m sorry, I dragged you guys down,” Natalie said, a tremor in her voice. The tiny Tinker looked like she was on the edge of breaking down crying.

At this point, it didn’t matter if Heather got three strikes or not, their average score would be lower.

Mom and dad were already done, having less people to cycle through.

“It’s fine, really.” Perry said, patting her on the back. It really was. Dad didn’t even have the Death Crystal anymore.

“Hey, it’s okay, Nat,” Heather said, returning from her last throw. “You don’t have to be that invested in whether this dork gets something he wants.”

Natalie nodded, sniffling as she tucked her phone into her breast pocket.

“And that’s the game, let’s see what…eh?” Dad paused, staring up at the scores.

“Wait a minute,” Dad muttered, his gaze scanning the scoreboard. “Wait a minute!”

“You guys didn’t get a nine there, you got an eight! And there! An eight instead of a six. I know Heather rolled a six there!”

Perry glanced over at Natalie, who was desperately muscling back a smile.

“But, Mr. Z…That’s not what the scoreboard says,” Natalie said.

Perry and Heather exchanged a glance. The little one was capable of carrying a grudge all afternoon specifically for the purpose of throwing someone’s words back in their face.

“You cheated!” Dad complained, while mom laughed into the crook of her elbow, disguising it as a cough.

“But did we get caught?” Perry asked.

“Of course you did! It’s plain as day!”

“Alright then, which one of us did it?” Perry asked, watching Natalie keeping her face as innocent as possible out of the corner of his eye.

“Fine, you can have the Death Crystal…” Dad said, drawing himself up in dramatic fashion. “If you can steal it from me!”

“Sophie already did it for me this afternoon.” Perry said with a shrug. “Stole it ‘fair and square’.”

“BWAHAHAHAH!” mom finally lost her self-control and burst into laughter, slapping her knee.

Dad reached out and patted Perry on the shoulder, expression somber.

“I have nothing more to teach you, grasshopper…now, who wants to get dinner?”

The rest of the night went smoothly. They had dinner, shopped for a while, breaking apart to cruise through separate stores, stopped a robbery by a crew of men in snake-patterned hyperweave with weird fang-launchers on their wrists, and a habit of calling Tinker-tech ‘artifacts from the before-times’. They may have been time-travellers, but it was far more likely they were either brainwashed or sticking to their theme really hard.

They got beat up.

The highlight of that fight was when one of the poorly designed fang-launchers caught the guy in the back of the hand and mom had to save him while he rolled around on the floor, foaming at the mouth. Good times.

The day wound down and they went back home. Gramma simply stepped through a shimmering portal in the air, and the rest of them piled in the van, Nat’s mechsuit following close behind and parking in the driveway.

Mom and dad carried in a couple bags of groceries while chatting, leaving the three of them alone in the driveway of Perry’s house, the porch light illuminating the scene just enough to see.

“Well, I guess I better get home, it’s pretty dark now, and my mom is gonna worry.” Natalie said, scraping her foot against the asphalt and casting an envious glance at Heather.

“Thanks for coming,” Heather said, engulfing Nat in a massive hug that left her feet wiggling a couple inches above the ground.

Heather stepped away and Nat had barely caught her breath when Perry picked her up in his own hug, enjoying the way she melted into his arms.

Perry glanced down and saw Natalie looking up at him, her eyes half-lidded, lips parted. His heart clenched, and every part of him demanded he kiss her right NOW.

“Full disclosure,” Perry murmured, her breath tickling his lips. “Sophie gave me an ultimatum to kiss you.”

“Does that mean you don’t want to?” Natalie asked quietly, tensing in his arms.

Perry answered that question in the most succinct way possible, hoisting her up a little higher and joining his lips with hers.

Natalie let out a desperate moan and pressed back into the kiss, her whole body engaged as she enthusiastically yielded to his lips and tongue.

Perry set Natalie back down and she swayed in place, her gaze unfocused, knees wobbling.

“You have no idea how hard it was not to break that shit up,” Heather muttered. “My turn.”

“Wha-“ Natalie’s yelp of surprise was cut off when Heather grabbed the shorty and dipped her low, taking the raven-haired Tinker’s lips for her own. She seemed determined to put Perry’s kiss to shame by using her superpowers to great advantage, wrapping around Natalie from the neck down.

She winked at Perry past Nat’s hair.

Cheater. Perry thought with a scowl.

When she released Natalie, the freckled Tinker’s knees gave out, dropping her bottom to the ground, where she stared into the distance, seemingly processing what just happened.

“It’s not even eight o’ clock yet. You sure you can’t stay for a while and watch a movie or something?” Heather asked.

Natalie shook her head, then shook it harder, swallowed hard and held up a trembling finger. Give me a minute. She tried and failed several times to push herself to her feet, and wound up crawling to her mechsuit, accessing the compartment on the bottom of the cockpit.

Perry’s brows rose as Natalie withdrew a Bargand’s Favor, hesitating for a protracted moment before she slapped the war paint under her shirt.

Natalie climbed to her feet. Bolstered by the spell magically raising her confidence, Nat held her phone to her ear. “Hi, mom. My friend Heather wants to watch movies tonight. Yeah, just her. Really!? Thank you!”

Natalie hung up the phone, her cheeks blushed, knees shaking. “So…” She asked, tapping her fingers together nervously. “What movie did you guys wanna watch?”

“Schindler’s list,” Perry said.

Heather punched him in the shoulder.

“It was a joke!”