Perry stared at the photos. He had them all printed out and plastered them across the underground lair, making the inhabitants somewhat nervous, seeing the engine of their downfall so elegantly captured.

“What is different about these!?” Perry demanded to no one in particular, pointing to the area that about 3% of the birds had.

The computer had detected an unnoticeable difference between a small fraction of the gorm and Perry had instructed the computer to highlight the difference.

It was a tiny smudge on the side of those 3%.

When Perry looked at it with his eye, he couldn’t even make out a difference, even with his enhanced senses.

The weirder thing was that a damn machine capable of spotting microscopic differences couldn’t find any other differences.

According to his computer, these birds were all identical.

Except for three percent, who had a tiny dent in their side.

So what the hell does it mean?

Were they cut-outs? Was something producing gorm? Stamping them out like they were on a printing press?

Or perhaps the original Gorm had the ability of self-replication in addition to the other nightmare powers it had.

That felt close…but there was something niggling at Perry. It didn’t quite explain everything to his satisfaction, and until he figured it out, it would continue to bother him.

Agh, I’m so done with this, Perry scowled, turning away from the pictures. It was irritating as hell not being able to solve a problem nigh instantly. He was severely tempted to just throw his hands up and flip the switch on the portal and go home.

See Nat and Heather, meet his kids.

They’ve probably got names already. I don’t even know what their names are.

“Gah,” Perry groaned, dragging his fingers down his face. “knowing my luck, when I got back, the city would probably be stuck under a gigantic black dome again.”

Life didn’t seem to want to give him a break.

Perry paused, his fingers halfway down his face.

The black dome of isolated reality under the control of Gerome the 4-D ‘god’?

The association sparked a memory in Perry’s brain and got it humming along at full speed.

Perry pulled out a pen and drew a straight line and labeled it ‘time’, then drew a carefully choreographed dance in and out of the timeline, where Perry and company had killed the ‘god’ half a dozen times in less than a minute.

He’d elegantly and purposefully moved an unharmed area of his 4-D body into the timestream, such that there was only one of him at any given time. This actually took quite a bit of skill, and made elegant, looping branches outside of the timeline.

But if you were a big dumb bird chasing things around and marking your territory along the timeline…

Perry drew a capera’s ‘territory’ around the timeline, circling back and forth, back and forth.

Holy shit… Perry glanced over at the birds with the microscopic difference, then glanced over at the feather in the corner of his room.

“It’s one bird.” Perry said.

“Eh?” Charles grunted from his hammock.

“It’s one bird!” Perry shouted.

His uncle sat up, peering at him through gummy eyes.

“It is very early in the morning.” Charles said. “What do you mean it’s one bird? Does it make clones of itself, or something?”

“Everything is the original. It’s all one bird.” Perry said.

Charles squinted at him.

Multi-tool.

Perry summoned a dry-erase marker and smoothed out the stone along the side of their hidey-hole into a glass-like surface.

“Okay, so our timeline goes like this,” Perry said, drawing a straight line. “The gorm is following it like this…” He drew a spiral around the timeline, following it forward into the future.

“See, we’re here,” Perry said, making a dot. “And there’s multiple versions of the gorm running parallel with us.” He pulled the dot outward to intersect with the other line in multiple places.

“You see these pictures?” Perry said, moving over to point at the pictures with the highlighted smudge on the side, where he’d taken one of the feathers.

“Yeah?”

“This difference the computer noticed on three percent of them is where I grabbed a feather during our scuffle.”

“On three percent of them? how did you grab three percent of them with one feather?”

Perry sighed and rubbed his temples. Must give normies the benefit of the doubt.

“Alright, the bird is following his own personal timeline, marching back and forth along our timeline, creating multiple instances of itself in the process, that’s what the spiral means.”

“If I were to harm one of the instances…”

Perry switched to a red marker and overwrote part of the spiral. “Every future version of the bird in the same chunk of timeline will show the same injury.”

“In fact,” Perry said, moving the spiral forward even further. “In the future, every instance of the gorm will have the wound.”

“If it’s moving along our timeline forward and not backward,” Charles said, crossing his arms. “What makes you think it’s moving in a pattern like that?”

“Because it’s territorial!” Perry said. “It’s stalking back and forth, patrolling the fourth dimension without any particular conscious effort to resist the flow of time indefinitely, so it moves forward with us.”

“If we kill it,” Perry said, “the spiral ends, and the other copies of the bird will gradually fade away as they become the one that got killed. They’re not smart enough to see it coming and realize the implication, like certain other four dimensional beings with two brain cells to rub together.”

“What if you kill one of the older ones on the spiral?” Charles said. “When there’s already a newer one who didn’t get killed?”

“I’m not sure, could destroy physics and mean the end of existence as we know it for all of us, could send the newer ones into branching timelines, effectively banishing them from ours, or just not work at all…but there is a way to ensure we get the newest version of the gorm. One that doesn’t have any spirals ahead of it yet.”

“It involves bait, doesn’t it,” Charles said.

“Indeed it does,” Perry said with a grin, pointing at Charles with the marker. “But we’re not there yet. We need to make some measurements to make sure it’s moving the way I think it is, and we need a plan for how to kill it. Luckily, I have an idea on that front.”

“Great.” Charles grumbled. “Can I go back to sleep now?”

Perry narrowed his eyes, tempted to say ‘no’.

“Sure. We’ll get started taking measurements in the morning,” Perry said, getting back into bed and staring at the ceiling.

Soon, you little bastard. I got your number now.

The next afternoon, Perry was cackling.

He did have numbers, and they were telling him that there were fifty thousand instances of Gorm at any given time, and if the forerunner got killed, they would all fade from existence in about two months as they caught up to, and became the forerunner.

They were moving through 4-D space exactly the way he thought they were: a mindless, predictable spiral.

Perry was able to measure this by studying the shift in the population of ‘plucked’ gorm, who gradually increased at the hypothesized rate day to day.

“Okay, so even if you’re right,” Charles said, his eyes swimming at the math scrolling Perry’s laptop. “How are you gonna kill it?”

“That…is an excellent question.”

If Gorm is anything like Gerome, then it’ll be damn hard to hit it with anything made of this world. The only reason gramma was able to hurt Gerome was because she took a piece of his power and used it…against himself…

“I’m starting to get an idea,” Perry muttered, glancing at the maddening whorl resting in the corner of the skiff.

Perry glanced back at Charles.

“You remember Gerome?”

“Please, don’t remind me. I spent months as a caricature of myself.”

“Marigold punched him in his fourth-dimensional nuts with his own fist. A powerful sword we’d made inside his false reality.”

“So she used a variant of Geraldi’s Redirection?” Charles said, rubbing his chin. “Maybe with a bit of sympathetic blood magic? I’m surprised she was able to trick the spell into treating the object as a piece of Gerome’s body.”

“Has it ever been tried on Gorm?” Perry asked.

“Nobody’s ever gotten a piece of it before.” Charles said with a shrug.

“Do you think you could?” Perry asked.

Charles looked at him, weighing his response carefully.

“I may be the closest mage in power to your grandmother, but she’s still in a league of her own. The witch is terrifying.

Charles scanned Perry up and down.

“The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, I suppose.”

“Ha-ha,” Perry groused, “Can you do it?”

“Freehand? Against a mindless animal with godlike powers? I don’t like my chances.”

“What if you weren’t freehand?” Perry asked.

“There’s no infrastructure for a ritual circle large and powerful enough to…” Charles paused, meeting Perry’s gaze as his brain caught up to the fact that they’d been cleaning up that exact thing for weeks now.

Perry waggled his eyebrows.

“The Gate?”

“It would only take some minor tweaking to supercharge the spell and fling that feather metaphysically hard enough to cause Gorm to explode. We don’t have to focus on subtlety or it dodging, or it’s mental defenses or contingency spells. It’s a bird. It’s gonna be a stripped down to a bare essentials ritual, multiplied by the most powerful ritual-enhancing circle in existence.”

“Do you think you could do it?” Perry asked.

“…Maybe.” Charles said. “I want some assurances.”

“Speak.”

Charles raised a finger. “Two things. If I attempt this, no humiliating me in front of my family. If the attempt succeeds, I take the credit for killing the Gorm.”

“I don’t know,” Perry hemmed. “I kinda wanna humiliate you in front of your family, at least as much as you wanted Abun’zaul. I mean, if you want something enough, you should just take it, right, uncle?”

Charles stared at him.

He stared at Charles.

“Parad-“

“Right, uncle? Is that not what you did?” Perry broke into a large grin.

“I thought you were undeserving,” Charles said with a sigh. “I…Everyone who does something evil has their own justifications for it. Mine were…ill-founded.”

“Well, at least you can admit that.” Perry said, throwing his arm over his uncle’s shoulder. “My grandmother wouldn’t admit she was wrong about anything until the heat death of the universe.”

Charles chuckled ruefully.

“Alright, I agree to the first term, and for the second, we’re going to have to workshop joint-credit, because I’m going to need all the notoriety I can get when I retake the planet.” Perry said before pausing in thought.

“Since we’re just making shit up, why not say your son did it on my command? Ain’t nobody else gonna be here but me and you who knows otherwise, and Gorm will fade plenty slow enough to bring him on board to take credit. Could be a great start to George’s military career retaking Manita under my colors. Would secure your family legacy another fifty years, at least.”

“Deal.”

“Deal.” Perry grasped his uncle’s hand… and decided not to crush it. “Let’s get to work.”

The plan was such:

They modified the Gate circle on Perry’s design, then George waited at the center with the feather, waiting for Perry to bait the most recent instance of Gorm, henceforth referred to as ‘The Original’

Perry circles the city flaunting his magic while riding a flying platform, gathering the attention of all local instances of Gorm.

The Original pops up beside Perry when it exits 4-D space for an attack, and Perry runs like a bitch, drawing The Original to the trap.

The original meets a juiced-up piece of itself in the center of the royal capital, and explodes.

Everyone lives happily ever after.

It almost worked.

A few days later, Perry was dancing on the platform, practicing his moves while the horde of reality-warping balls of scattered light swept across the sparsely wooded land just outside the crumbling walls of the old capital.

It’s gonna be a tight margin, Perry thought to himself. The Original would only be ahead of the others by a few seconds.

But he had to lure it in close to the trap, because there was a distinct possibility that The Original would only be The Original for a short time. Time was funky when you were dealing with something that could go back and forth through it.

Thank the gods it’s too stupid to do anything worse than destroy a civilization.

The hairs on the back of Perry’s neck went up an instant before Gorm arrived.

Perry ducked low as a massive spear of reality-warping energy flew over his head, having just appeared out of nowhere.

Probably Gorm’s beak.

Perry let go of the dead-man’s switch and the platform bucked wildly underneath him, sending him and the whirling mass of mind-bending nonsense tumbling through the air over the walls of the capital.

“WHOOOOO!”

Perry drew a majestic arc over the capital’s abandoned wall, hit the ancient cobblestone hard and scrambled to his feet.

Nerve 44 -> 50

He boosted his nerve and narrowed his eyes, deciphering Gorm from vague impressions and alterations to his mental state as it climbed to its feet and honked in mindless rage, its voice sending ripples through spacetime rather than the air.

It looked like the shock of the fall might’ve made it lose track of Perry for a moment, so he waved his arms wildly, clapping them together to make noise, while wiggling strands of the Pernicious Prison around like peacock feathers.

“HEY!” Perry shouted. “I’m on your fuckin’ territory! Whaddya gonna do about it, eh!?”

The dual middle finger seemed to get the bird’s attention, and it began charging towards him again, making the abandoned stone buildings slump as it passed by, twisting to peer after the two o them as they passed.

I landed in the east side quarter,” Perry thought as he ran. Gotta find the main road and follow it west to the ritual circle in the city square.

Perry bounded up on top of a building and scanned the surroundings, locating the street just as a wave of Gorm began to flow over the walls of the city. Perry hopped off the roof just before The Original landed behind him, claws shredding the roof.

Perry made a beeline for the road, doing his best to keep The Original ahead of the other Instances.

Run around too long and The Original will disappear into the pack with the rest of them, Perry thought to himself as he sprinted along the main road, Gorm speeding along behind him.

After a solid five minutes of sprinting, Perry was just starting to get winded when the city square came into view, and Charles totally betrayed his expectations.

I can’t believe he’s still here. Perry thought as he hit the spot they’d marked with tape, diving into a slide.

He’d been 60-40 confident that his uncle would simply take the opportunity to change the ritual back to a portal and escape. But he didn’t.

So either he’s braver than I thought, or simply more greedy for power.

Probably the latter.

In the city square, his uncle led his followers as they weaved their power together around Gorm’s feather, compressing the feather into a tiny ball of light a moment before it shot out at mind-boggling speeds, directly above Perry’s head, impacting Gorm in the chest.

Direct hit!

“Did we get it!?” Charles shouted as Perry climbed to his feet, studying the fluctuating mass of twisted light.

Perry narrowed his eyes and watched it.

Gorm was lying collapsed in a heap. For a brief moment, Perry thought it might be dead.

Then it twitched.

Perry’s dimensional senses screamed at him to dodge, and he obeyed, diving aside as The Original burst out of 4-D space and snapped at him.

The Original had become an Instance, and even as the wounded instance climbed to its feet, more and more Originals began popping up around Perry, surrounding him with a reality-warping density that tore at the very fabric of nature, dimming the light of the sun and casting a shadow over time itself.

He had Gorm’s undivided attention.

Predictably, Charles bitched out.

The mages surrounding his uncle combined their power in a reversal spell, resetting the ritual circle to it’s Gate configuration.

An instant later, the portal sprung into being, and they started jumping through it, leaving him to his fate.

Perry wasn’t angry, just disappointed. You could only ask so much of humans.

The surge of power drew Gorm’s attention and the nearest instance of the bird began charging towards the portal, gaping maw wide.

Toward his family.

Fuck that! Plan C!

Perry dumped all his points into Attunement, then used Sliding Stats to max it out as he flew through the air.

Attunement 76 -> 97

Stability 61 -> 55

Attunement 97 -> 103

Perry could barely process what he was seeing. His head pounded, his body ached, and everything faded away as he spear-tackled the side of the massive bird like he was fired out of a cannon.

When he recovered his feet, Perry realized he was standing in The Abyss, the star-studded emptiness that permeated everything and appeared when Attunement was wildly out of whack.

Perry could feel The Tide looming over them, its influence radiating down on them like the sun, ready to whisper eldritch secrets to him if he would just look up at it.

It was a mental state that blurred the line between dream and reality, and one wrong thought risked permanent insanity or lethal soul damage.

But…

He could see Gorm climbing to its feet. Not the wildly distorted path of altered reality that whorled around it, nor one of its instances…he saw the oversized bird itself, the fugly creature tucked into its fluffy plumage with oversized claws for tearing and serrated teeth for sawing off chunks of meat.

The two of them stared at each other. The bird seemed taken aback, seeing something as real as itself for the first time in decades.

“Come on,” Perry said, his voice vibrating the endless space around them as he motioned to the bird. “I’m standing in your territory.”

Sometimes the simplest method is the most effective.