‘Perry’ was in a pinch.

I must be the stupidest doppleganger to ever exist, to agree to fill in for someone without checking who their family was first.

And now he had ‘kill me’ permanently stapled to his back. Metaphorically.

It was a good body, though. Supernaturally strong and smart. Zeke had never been in a body quite this spicy. If it wasn’t going to get him killed, he wouldn’t mind staying a while. It was that good. Although it seemed…flat, somehow, like soda without the fizz. There was some aspect of Perry’s abilities that simply eating a lock of the boy’s hair hadn’t unlocked for him.

Still, he got enough to convincingly pass as Perry among friends and family for short periods of time.

And he’d better, because his vague impression of Perry’s memories of his grandmother, when combined with Zeke’s own knowledge…was less than promising.

The job was only supposed to be for an afternoon!

Step one: Slip away from Marigold before the dragon’s Fitzgerald’s Deadening expired and allowed the ancient witch to truly perceive him.

Step two: There are no more steps, because he was supposed to be relieved of duty within an hour or two.

That time came and went, so Zeke had to ‘improvise’.

First was figuring out how to access Perry’s lair skin-computer and turn it off. Not too terribly hard for a doppleganger with the same skin and memories. His employer hadn’t known about it, but Zeke had gotten a half- impression from his adopted memories that it might cause problems for him.

He’d accessed it via a backdoor in Paradox’s phone while the humans nattered on in the hospital room, discussing baby names. Zeke had no interest whatsoever.

Sure enough, thousands of pings had hit the magical skin-computer inside the first couple minutes, but they were at a frequency that the computer couldn’t make sense of.

Time dilation probably fouling up the signals. Thank you, smarter brain.

Zeke turned it off, and sighed in relief when another problem presented itself.

“What do you think about Amelia?” the short one asked, looking up at him with a wrinkly human baby. ‘Nat’, she was called.

How would Perry react? Zeke drew on the connection with his host.

“You gotta name at least one of them ‘danger’” He said with a solemn nod.

“Danger’s her middle name.” Nat said, giving him a mischievous grin.

“I always did wonder why parents didn’t take advantage of the middle name more often,” Zeke said. “It’s prime real-estate. How about Lucy? Got a redhead feel to it.”

“Sadly she’d probably going to get my hair,” Nat said, kissing the sleeping baby on the head.

“So, dark hair, danger…Peggy?”

“Peggy?” Nat asked incredulously.

“…yes?” Zeke said, wincing as convincingly as he could.

The tiny brunette’s expression soured.

“Your naming privileges have been revoked.” Nat said, patting him on the shoulder before turning away as the baby girl began fussing in her arms. “I know, it was terrible, wasn’t it, sweety? Dad’s bad at names.”

“Oh, thank god,” Zeke said, going limp, both as a joke that Perry might have done, and because he absolutely DID NOT want to be hunted down for naming someone else’s kids.

I just need to grab one of these nurse’s hair and get lost in the crowd.

Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be.

Zeke couldn’t find a moment get away, and once the two human females named their wriggling human spawn, he was expected to be happy.

It was all he could do not to run away screaming and crying.

Finally, the ordeal was over and Zeke managed to get away, only to find out his one-hour job was about to become a semi-permanent situation, pending further instructions.

I could just fake Paradox’s death and walk away from it all…

He wanted to, but he knew he couldn’t. Given an Iota of reason to investigate, the witch queen could find him and kill him in a matter of minutes. She might not even need to find him.

He needed to blend. And he needed to blend in a way that distanced himself from close friends and family as much as possible.

Seemingly impossible, but Paradox had provided an out.

Paradox was currently studying…Zeke frowned. Some kind of essence thingy? Even with his vague memories and improved intelligence, that was a load of knowledge that skirted the edge of sanity.

All he had to do was avoid everyone by burying himself in his ‘research’ and no one would have cause to look twice, because that was what Paradox had been doing already. At least long enough to figure out step 2.

It’s perfect.

***Natalie***

“So I think Perry got replaced with some kind of lizard-person at some point.” Nat said quietly, as soon as ‘Perry’ was out of earshot. “The soul smudge I got after patting his shoulder had a weird, alien feel to it.”

“Eh, he’ll sort it out. I’m way too tired.” Heather said, reclining in her hospital bed, eyes fluttering from physical exhaustion, Seraphine ‘Danger’ Zauberer and Gareth ‘Power’ Zauberer nestled up against their mother’s chest.

Natalie really wanted to get to the bottom of it, but she also didn’t want to leave Heather alone by herself in the hospital. Not when there were weird things going on.

This is strange enough to consider the nuclear option, Nat thought, pulling out her cell phone. She couldn’t leave Heather and the babies, but there were other people well equipped to handle…whatever this was.

Nat took a deep breath and pressed the button on her screen, holding the phone up to her ear.

“This is Marigold Zauberer, to whom am I speaking?”

***Perry, handling himself***

Perry stretched yawning, rising out of his grass bed that would make a down mattress envious.

Okay, so here’s the plan: Make some fake giant squids, have them unearth Charles et al, use him as nest decoration, have them have fake sex directly on top of him, then have them fling him over towards the island.

Perry would love to arrange the real thing, but even if he found a giant squid he could talk to that was also willing to make love directly on top of his uncle, it wouldn’t be able to fling the crystal with the precision it would require to make him stumbling across him believable. He needed to control every variable.

He needed a sequence of events so outlandish that his uncle wouldn’t question the more unbelievable aspects of the story, like how astronomically slim the odds of a rock buried under the ocean making it to the beach actually were, or how little time had passed. Whenever he got suspicious about the sequence of events, he would get a flash of squid dick and immediately stop thinking about it.

A little magic trick.

I think I might react violently to being spoken to patronizingly, Perry thought.

Aerosolize.

Perry grabbed a can of pressurized coffee out of the ether and squirted it into his glass goblet, heating it up over the fire before enjoying the Manitian sunrise from the porch of his tiny starter cabin.

He wanted to scavenge the scraps of the underwater facility. Lots of good steel there for him to use, plus If he could reverse engineer the time dilation spell that went on under there, he’d be that much closer to making a ‘haste’ spell like he’d been wanting to.

He needed to keep learning new things. Perry had a sneaking suspicion that Tyrannus was indirectly involved in his kidnapping.

There was no such thing as a mechanical counterspell, and there were only two guys on Earth that Perry knew of who could design such a thing. Himself and the dragon.

And Perry sure as hell didn’t do it.

Of course, Tyrannus didn’t actively participate. He simply distracted Gramma with some rude spellcasting for his own privacy, and sold some tech to a dubious buyer with ill-intent.

Nothing Perry could definitively point to and say ‘treachery!’

But he would bet his firstborn child that Tyrannus arranged this sequence of events such that Pery was forced to assign his points sub-optimally in order to survive it.

Of course, Tyrannus probably didn’t know exactly how Perry’s System worked, but forcing him to use his trump card to survive was a simple enough concept.

That was why Perry hadn’t spent any of his points. If he wanted to fly under the radar, he needed to commit to the deception.

It’s the principal of the thing.

The first step was designing a facility in Gretchen’s idyllic Manifestation that could produce giant squid submarines, and his Mk. 8.

Plus, I need to find a member of Terry’s species around here somewhere. And some essences.

Luckily he was on a tropical island, on the planet his pet octopus hailed from, so the chances were…well, Perry didn’t know if they were good or not, but they existed. He was on the right planet, at least.

For both Essences and Terrys.

Perry took a long, contemplative sip of his coffee.

Well, no time like the present.

Dragor’s Kinesis.EXE

Perry lifted himself into the air and surveyed the land he was on, sipping his coffee.

It was a small island, about five miles from side to side, barely enough wildlife to keep someone alive. He recalled this island having several smaller ones nearby, he could stage his little show on one of them and make this island the base of operations, since he would need a pretty big base to…

Wazzat? Perry thought, frowning at an inconsistency in the land under him.

He swooped down and found the ruins of a building, crafted from stone and mortar with a strange hodgepodge of old-timey earth-tech.

Just like magic was an oddity on Earth, old-timey computers with big boxy monitors from the eighties were oddities here.

This must be where they staged the construction of the extraction facility to steal Abun’zaul.

Come to think of it, there was nothing saying that facility couldn’t be used to create more symbiotic spirits, creating more footsoldiers for the Frepon family. Sure, it’s ultimate purpose was to steal Abun’zaul, but it had all the specialized gear it would need to strip the souls from innumerable magical creatures and make them into Symbiotic Spirits.

There’s a distinct possibility that Charles Frepon has access to an army of Mages. Does Gramma have something like this?

Perry shelved that thought and kept exploring.

He found the dilapidated portal room. The only hint was a subtle line of discoloration in the floor where decades of footprint smudges suddenly ended.

Ambush spot located, Perry thought, mentally marking the room.

There was a reading parlor with empty shelves, a moldering recliner and a glass case, with nothing but dust and an atlatl with an ivory-tipped dart.

There was nothing inherently magical about it, just a souvenir that no one bothered to take back through the portal.

Dust and dry-rot.

A half-smoked cigar rested by the arm of the recliner, with a little cap of mold on the top that made it look like it was still burning, but the wrong color.

Perry stepped outside the bounds of the building and surveyed the land. It was an excellent place to make his own base.

I wonder why they stopped coming out here? Perry wondered, spotting a glint of pale white sticking out from under the grass some twenty feet away.

Perry approached, spotting what looked like the edge of a shoulder-blade sticking out of the earth at the base of a weeping willow, Or something similar. It had long, drooping branches with staggered leaves tucked tight to the branch that formed a sawblade pattern.

Well. That looks like a trap.

Perry approached.

Nothing.

Perry got even closer, standing in practically the exact same position the shoulder-blade was in.

He got a strange feeling from the grass under hit toes an instant before the serrated blades hanging from the tree whipped downward with a hiss of displaced air.

Perry ducked out of the way and leap aside before the tree could make a second attack. He paused, watching as the tree mindlessly thrashed the area he’d just been standing with its urumi-like branches.

Yep. Trap.

Perry lifted the tree out of the ground with Dragor’s Kinesis and made some interesting observations.

The roots of the tree grew little patches of ‘grass’ at the top which acted as the triggers for the tree. Not unlike the sensitive hairs inside a venus flytrap.

Well, I need essences, so…apologies.

Perry disassembled the tree.

Multi-tool.

Perry needed more samples to fill out his table of essences.

He pulled out an essence probe and began poking parts of the tree until it lit up, touching a nodule around the base of the thicker branches.

Perry tested the rest to confirm they didn’t have Essence, then dismissed the probe and switched over to his wavelength reader.

The wavelength was similar to that of a Drowner.

Water based, perhaps? Perry thought, studying the knot of wood.

He figured out what it did based on context clues throughout the tree’s limbs. It had chambers for liquid, which could swell and shrink based on water pressure in the limbs.

It used hydraulic pressure to move.

Interesting.

Perry made a quick basket out of grass and deposited the nodules, continuing his walk around the island.

Halfway through he ran into some ugly things about the size of a chihuahua, with one muscular back limb and one scythlike forelimb.

They hid in dimensional pockets, waiting for living things to walk under them, popping out of nothing and slicing into them before devouring their prey.

Thanks to his Dimensional Tinker perk, Perry could make out smudges in reality where they were hiding, and the ambush didn’t turn out well for the little monsters.

He smacked the little guys as they were raining down hard enough to snap their spines, allowing them to rain down on the ground in front of him.

God, you’re ugly, Perry thought, inspecting the uncanny-valley, almost-human look of the creature’s wide, grinning face. Its tongue flopped out of its mouth upon death.

Perry summoned the probe and stabbed the corpse until he located where its body house its residual Essence.

The scythe, of course, but also a small bone along its back.

I wonder how many essences were never discovered because there was no measuring device that could definitively say if something was magic, so everyone was forced to simply experiment through trial and-error?

Perry had already discovered two new ones. The scythe had already been registered in his tool’s database, identifying the monster as a ‘Hopping Butcher’ but no one had ever used the flat piece of bone near its hip for anything.

Were they too preoccupied with the shiny scythe? Perry searched his memories for any mention in his mother’s spellbook of ‘Hopping Butcher’ and realized the scythe was primarily used by hedge-wizards to make a simple sharpening ritual.

Theorist wizards had long assumed the essence in the scythe was used by the Hopping Butcher to cut the dimensional pockets out, and had spent ages trying to figure out the exact combination that would allow the scythe to do so, but the wavelengths he was seeing in the scythe were nowhere near anything purely dimensional in nature.

The tailbone on the other hand… was similar in wavelength to that of a Frambur Caterpillar.

Which is primarily used to adhere and fix things in place. Hmm… Perry mentally subtracted the wavelength of a Frambur Caterpillar from the Hopping Butcher’s and wound up with something remarkably similar to a Space Crystal, one of the expensive ingredients needed for teleportation.

It was a little bit off, because as far as Perry could tell, Space crystal was as close to a pure wavelength as could be, while simply subtracting caterpillar from ugly chihuahua doesn’t make a pure essence.

But it was close.

That makes me wonder…

The mechanical counterspellers that injected precise wavelengths to scramble spells…could they be used to cancel out the noise in the wavelengths to purify essences?

Perry did the mental math.

Maaayybeee….

I need that submarine.

Perry put the bloody essence materials in the basket and moved on, whistling.

He needed the submarine, sure, but he also needed to scour the island for more essences. He needed to stock up on magic before he pulled his uncle up out of the depths. He also needed to find some magical octopi.

You know what this calls for? Drone-swarms.

Perry began planning today’s ‘Idyllic Manifestation’.