Showing inhuman reflexes, Dad switched tracks, turning to grab Sera under the arms and tossing her into the air.

“Hello sweetie!” he shouted as Sera squealed in delight. A tornado caught her in midair and brought her into Hexen’s arms where she nuzzled the little girl while they made their way down to the ground.

“Perry, why didn’t you tell us you were in town?” Dad asked, approaching with Sera riding his shoulders, while Mom gave Gareth a big, suffocating hug.

“Because it was just a quick visit,” Perry said. “Or supposed to be one.”

“Nonsense!” Dad exclaimed. “We haven’t seen you in…”

“Two weeks,” Perry said dryly.

“But…that’s too long!” Dad whined.

“My baby’s babies are growing up so fast, two weeks isn’t nearly enough,” Mom said as Gareth struggled weakly in her arms before finally giving up, going limp and surrendering with all the grace of a wet cat.

“You have to bring them to visit more often.” Mom said.

I’m gonna hate myself for this…

“Well, we were going to Burger Joint for dinner before we head home,” Perry said with a shrug. “Would you guys like to join us?”

“Of course! One second; News vans.” Dad said.

Sera hollered as Dad stomped hard enough to crack the pavement, sending up a cloud of dust along with a patch of jagged concrete that befouled the van’s tires.

Hexen followed it up with a spell that duplicated herself and The Mechanaut. The two copies flew off into the distance, continuing their fight as Dad climbed out of his armor, fetching Sera off the shoulders while mom’s form wavered, returning to T-shirt and jeans.

They stepped aside while the confused news van followed the decoys.

“Well,” Dad said, glancing at Perry. “Lead the way.”

They walked to the Burger Joint Perry had been thinking of and scooted themselves into booths, catching up on what they’d been doing over the last couple weeks.

“You mean neither Nat or Heather cook for you!?” Dad asked. “What kind of piss-poor harem are you-ack!” Mom cut him off with an elbow to the ribs.

“It’s not a harem,” Perry said. “And they would cook if any food I make wasn’t objectively better by every metric.”

The curse of the Spendthrift Perk.

“Sooo…when are you getting married?” mom asked with Gareth on her lap, eating her fries.

“Ummm…Is living together happily not enough?” Perry asked, suddenly nervous.

“No!” Mom cried, aghast. “Just because your Grandmother got what she wanted, doesn’t mean you can quit halfway!”

“Look mom, we’re all millionaires, what does it matter?” Perry asked.

“It matters! I’ll tell you right now, that Nat’s been waiting for a ring.” Mom asserted.

“She said that?” Perry asked. She and Mom got along great whenever they visited, so he wouldn’t be surprised if Natalie confided in her.

“Nnnoooo.” Mom looked aside and guiltily took a sip of her coke. “But she’s a young woman in love!”

“That seems a bit flimsy.” Perry said.

“You better watch out or Heather’ll get to it first,” Dad said around a mouthful of burger. “Then you’ll be the cuck.”

“Cuck!” Sera shouted from Dad’s lap.

“Dad, seriously?” Perry demanded, pointing at Sera.

“Eh,” Dad shrugged. “I prefer my children free-range. She’ll figure out she’s not supposed to say it on her own.”

“You prefer free-range children because you didn’t have to deal with them.” Mom said.

“I dealt with him all the time, more than you did!” Dad protested, pointing at Perry.

“You installed a subroutine in a decoy body and let it do the work, and you know it!” Mom said.

“I was raised by a decoy?” Perry asked.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Dad said, glancing back at Perry. “You Gramma tried to kill your Grampa. But it’s fine now. Misunderstanding.”

Perry’s eyebrows rose.

“Should I be worried?”

“Nah, he’s fine. One of his next-door neighbors was over for dinner, you know Mrs. Smith, the widow? Anyway, Marigold paid him a surprise visit in the middle of dinner, and there was a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“You say misunderstanding, but I think your dad was trying to play the field.” Mom said.

“Eh,” Dad shrugged. “Even if he was, Mrs. Smith told everyone what happened, and now he’s basically radioactive in the senior dating scene. Nobody wants to cross an angry old witch with near godlike power.”

“And what does that make me?” Mom asked.

“A…cute young witch?” Dad said tentatively, his hamburger halfway to his mouth.

“Awww..” Mom blushed and wiggled in her booth seat, making it difficult for Gareth to accurately grab french fries from the table, dipping his fingers in the nearby ketchup instead.

He didn’t seem to mind, cleaning off his fingers with enthusiasm.

“Anything else I should know?” Perry asked, lacing his fingers together.

“Chemestro’s brother’s and sisters are making a huge splash.” Dad said. “What did they do the other week, babe?”

“They formed a voting block in Nexus.” Mom said. “The amount of political power Chemestro has is about equal with Locust now.”

“Damn,” Perry muttered. He’d never been one for politics, content to foist the job off on other people. But Chemestro? In politics? Sure, it made sense given that he was backed by a bumper crop of brainwashed young supers, but still…Chemestro?

“How’s Chicago?”

“We’re pulling ourselves out of the seventies, slowly but surely,” Perry said. “The internet is blowing their minds. I saw a kid Google something on his phone the other day.”

“What are you gonna do for High Tide?” Dad asked.

“Hopefully not much. Chicago is solid,” Perry said. he’d only been available to use Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation about half the time, but that was still nearly five hundred individual buildings he’d created out of thin air.

The walls were thick and simple, unlikely to be overtaken by Tide-based shenanigans. The turrets on top were low tech, man-operated, and stuffed to the gills with ammunition.

The trolls were eager to butcher any attacking megafauna.

Chicago was pretty far inland, but high Tide has a funny way of catching you off guard, so Perry and his team weren’t taking any chances.

“The hard part…is convincing everyone to shelter inside the city for the duration of High Tide. None of the people living there remember any previous High Tide, so it’s damn near impossible to convince them that it’s a problem.” Perry groused.

“Well, after a few of them get eaten by giant spiders, they’ll probably change their tune,” Dad said.

“Darryl!”

“Hey, I’m not saying he should encourage it, but some people only learn the hard way. That’s just how it is.”

“No, I think you’re on to something, there,” Perry said, musing. If he started an ad campaign about how safe and peaceful it was outside the walls that was so OBVIOUSLY a mislead, people might stay inside and think themselves clever for it.

Then again, the really stupid ones, like Brendan, might just accept it as fact.

Perry’s eye twitched.

“Have you guys heard from Brendan recently? I haven’t heard from him in a long time.”

“He’s been keeping tabs on a local blue area for Nexus. He thinks he’s a janitor.”

“…Why?”

“Brendan is the perfect man for the job,” Dad explained. “He’s got this power that kind of makes him…always Brendan, regardless of supernatural outside influences.”

“That’s a shit power.” Perry said, recalling the time Brendan had tipped them off to the deity messing with local reality. He should’ve guessed then.

Why didn’t I guess then?

“Eh, depends on how you look at it.” Dad waggled his hand.

“He’s fine though, right?”

“Oh sure, he’s fine, and making bank too, last I heard.”

“Well that’s good at least,” Perry said, leaning back against the booth.

The rest of the night was strangely peaceful. Hexen and The Mechanaut were able to sneak away from Burger Joint with the news none the wiser and Perry brought the twins home. Then it was getting ready for bed, and the adults had a few minutes to themselves before they too went to bed.

They mostly spent it discussing contingencies for Chicago’s first High Tide.

The next morning, Perry foisted the kids off on Heather and went to pick up Dave, bringing him back to his lab in San Francisco.

This was a calculated risk. A litmus test of sorts.

Unicorns were very protective of their horns for obvious reasons, and the amount on the market was effectively zero. The chance that a unicorn showing up with a damaged horn was unrelated to the dust Tyrannus gave him was very slim.

Perry wanted to see what Tyrannus would do with the information.

That he’d tracked down the source of the horn, and potentially where it came from, in a single day.

“This is some weird shit,” Dave muttered, eyeing Perry’s machinery.

“it’s not that bad,” Perry said with a shrug, glancing at his his biomechanical 3-D printer. It had fleshy, twitching sacks connected to nutrient tubes pumping in the right juices while simultaneously monitoring the Essence wavelengths inside them.

You couldn’t just feed nutrients to your cell-growing slurry and expect it to pump out essences. They had to bake in a specific magical frequency to pick up magical properties and build on them.

The end result had more Essence than what was added in production, even for the other researcher’s Non-Tinker versions, so the result was always more than the sum of its parts. Once they got out of the prototype stage, Perry would be able to make industrialized growing vats for all sorts of rituals.

“This is where I make Realm-Piercing Crystal mother.” Perry said, patting a nearby clear tank with a black algae growing on the surface. “The modified algae disrupts local fate just enough to create a tiny little Realm-piercing Crystal, which gradually falls down here,” Perry pointed at the sludge at the bottom of the tank.

“We siphon the bottom out and run it through a strainer, separating the Realm-piercing Crystal from the dead algae. Then we put the sand in a compression vat which heats it up to the precise temperature required to grow into full-sized crystals.”

“I’m…not sure those should be a renewable resource.” Dave muttered, walking along beside him. The other researchers studying Perry’s machines did double takes at the black-clad biker walking amongst them.

“Yeah, summoning rituals are going to become painfully inexpensive. Like aluminum used to be worth more than gold,” Perry said as they arrived at his desk.

“Okay, here’s the plan –“

“What’s the paperweight?” Dave asked, pointing at the curse-insulated jar on his desk.

“Gna’kis.” Perry said. “Demon Lord of sinful technology, and patron of Earth humans.” Perry said, glancing at the tiny naked woman in a jar on his desk. “She’s had some work done. Don’t take her out of the jar. The jar keeps us from going insane.”

Gna’kis waved, her fingers splitting into multiple biomechanical tendrils before hooking into the ports at the bottom of the jar.

“Wow, I’ve never met a unicorn in person before.” She said cheerfully through the jar’s speakers. “How would you like a heads-up display installed that allows you to find local virgins in your area? Just open the jar for a moment, and I’ll get that hooked up right away!”

“No.” Dave was old-hat at interacting with the obscene.

“Boo,” Gna’kis pouted, crossing her arms.

“She helps with debugging.” Perry said, sitting down at his desk. “Has an effect similar to High Tide on tech, and is amazing at bypassing digital security. She’s probably harmless, since I made her more agreeable, but you never know. Plus the insanity aura of her Portfolio is unrelated to her attitude. We’re still working on cleansing it.”

“Portfolio?” Dave asked, eyes widening. “That’s a real Demon lord?”

“…Yes?” Perry said as he retrieved the plans for today’s operation. He could see the dollar signs moving behind Daves eyes.

“You have a Demon Lord as a paperweight on your desk.” Dave clarified.

“If you try and sell her, I’ll tell people how your horn got damaged,” Perry said, entering the boot-up code for his biomechanical printer.

Dave clicked his tongue and let the matter drop.

“Alright, come look at this,” Perry said, motioning for Dave to join him on the other side of the computer.

“We’re gonna have to cut this dead tissue away until we get to living horn,” Perry said, highlighting the necrotic tissue.

“That’s…almost my entire horn. You want me to let you cut away all of my horn except for a little stub there at the beginning?” Dave’s voice went a bit shrill as he gestured at Perry’s 3-D map of the problem area.

“In short, yes. But Dave, it’s dead tissue. It’s already gone, it’s just hanging on there from the sheer stubbornness of bone. I can’t bring necrotic tissue back to life….yet.”

“Absolutely not. Let’s wait until you can revive dead tissue and do it then.”

“Has your magic been weakening?” Perry asked, turning in his chair to glance up at Dave. “The necrotic tissue is deeper than it was five years ago, isn’t it? If you give it another couple years, you might lose the root. And then you’re fucked.”

Dave’s fist clenched, his face going red. Finally he seemed to make a decision.

“GAH! Fine, let’s do this! Cut my fucking horn off!’” Dave shouted, transforming into a black stallion and thrusting his damaged horn into Perry’s personal space.

“Knock it off, your horn smells like death,” Perry muttered, shoving the emotional unicorn’s nose away from him. “besides, we’re not there yet. We wanna design and produce the new horn first,” Perry said, bringing up the 3-D blueprint of Dave’s new horn, based on his scan of the old ones, with the missing patches filled in and the necrotic tissue replaced with healthy bone and blood vessels.

“See, it’ll be identical to your old horn, and-“

“Wait a moment,” Dave said, approaching to study Perry’s 3-d model. “This is gonna be permanent, right?”

“Yes?” Perry asked.

“Well, then we have an opportunity here. Let’s not be too hasty. Is there any chance we could make it…bigger?”

“…Are you serious?”

“Like four inches longer and a little bit wider.” Dave said, tapping the monitor.

“…fine, whatever,” Perry said, making the adjustments on his CAD program.

“And ribbed, for her pleas-.”