“It’s beautiful…” Dave said, his nose pressed up against the glass of the tank holding the replacement horn.

The horn was floating in the center of a vat, connected to a hunk of artificial bone marrow by a delicate weave of pulsing veins providing their own pumping action.

It was (Perry assumed) going to be the envy of all other unicorns. It was several inches longer than the prior one had been, smoother, with a graceful upward curve. Dave wanted to go even bigger, but Perry had pointed out that he actually needed to support it with blood, the muscles of his neck, and walk through doorways, so a thirty-pound monstrosity attached to his face was…less than practical.

“Alright, let’s do it.” Dave said with a determined nod.

“Prep the horn for surgery.”

They numbed up Dave’s horn and carefully started cutting with some Paradoxed knives that could split a molecule. The sharpness of a handheld blade generated less magical backlash than using a saw, like the ill-advised previous attempt by the U.S. military, but it didn’t eliminate it completely.

“Vitals are showing an interdiction event. The dampening gear is holding it.” One of the lab assistants said, his eyes glued to the monitor.

Perry’s ears popped as the explosion of magic was largely countered by the surrounding equipment, leaving just a change in air pressure.

“I wish I didn’t have a nose right about now,” Perry muttered through his mask as he carved away putrescent bone, referring back to his map of Dave’s internal structure as he worked.

“Try being me,” Dave replied. “I haven’t smelled right in years.”

“Interdiction event.”

Reality folded, and Perry found a copy of himself on the other side of Dave’s horn, wielding the very same ultra-sharp debriding knife.

“Dampening.”

The copy faded from existence right before its knife plunged through Perry’s eye.

“You’re lucky I’ve got steady hands.” Perry said, continuing his work.

“You’re lucky the horn is mostly dead, or you guys would be toast.” Dave said.

“There we go,” Perry said through his mask as the rotten horn popped off into his hand.

Dave gave a pitiful whimper as he saw the large chunk of dead horn carried away.

“Okay, this is the delicate part,” Perry said, changing gloves. “We’re gonna clamp your skull for this one. We’ve gotta make the base of the horn match the new one exactly.”

They clamped Dave’s skull and one of Perry’s machines was positioned overhead, drilling into the stump until blood began to ooze out of living tissue.

“Interdiction event.” The assistant called just before the physical form of Perry’s custom CNC machine wavered violently.

Perry reached out with superhuman speed and forced the drillhead away from Dave’s horn before any of the wavering could introduce a defect in the work.

“Dampened.”

Perry inspected the machine and found it was fine. He flushed out the wound with sanitizing fluid and got it cutting again.

“Almost done,” Perry muttered as the machine finished the last cut, leaving a perfect joint to attach the new horn to.

A joint which was bleeding profusely.

“Get me the horn and the troll-glue. Four-o and two-o.”

Perry pulled down the suction from the ceiling and pulled enough blood out of the wound to identify the primary vein, grabbing it, pulling it out a fraction of an inch before clamping it, making sure there was a tiny bit of vein available past the clamp for him to bind together with the new horn.

He then received the new horn and began the laborious process of gluing the two together with needlepoint-accurate troll glue. They’d found that troll glue was excellent for certain kinds of surgery, as it would fuse veins and nerves together perfectly without leaving holes or the uncertainty of stitches.

“Interdiction event.”

The glue began glowing with heat, the essence inside literally catching fire and searing the exposed vein while the tiny containers melted into slag.

“Dampened.”

Dave hissed in pain.

“What was that?” The unicorn asked as Perry suppressed a curse.

I was really hoping the tiny amount of Essence in the glue would fly under the radar…But at least the new horn seems to be immune to interdiction events. That means it’s being recognized as non-foreign. Which is good. There shouldn’t be a magical auto-immune attack once it’s on there.

The exposed vein I was planning on working on got fried.

Which is bad. I hope it didn’t do any damage to the nerve.

We’re gonna have to go completely non-magical for the sutures and pray for the best for the nerve tissue to heal back together.

Perry cut the burned portion of vein away and cut the new horn’s veins a little longer than he’d originally planned, accommodating for the difference.

He needed to get a more specialized set of tools to suture the veins together manually while they were buried inside Dave’s skull, but Perry was up to the task.

Eight hours of painstaking effort later, the horn was seated firmly on Dave’s skull, with a small metal band around the outside preventing it from moving until the bones fused together. The specialized sutures would gradually dissolve, leaving no trace of their presence.

“Okay,” Perry said, stepping away. “I recommend you don’t use magic for at least a month, and when you do…start small.”

“Not even to change shape?” Dave asked.

“You’ve got weapons-grade unicorn horn strapped to your head,” Perry said, taking off his bloody gloves and throwing them in the trash. “One whose shape is unfamiliar to you, I might add. Additionally, your soul may take some time to…adapt to the new limb, so to speak. If you must do magic before the horn has had a chance to heal, do it somewhere away from women and children, because the results may be…energetic.”

“…I see. So we’re not going to know if this is all for nothing for an entire month? Perry.”

“Eh?”

“Grab my cell phone out of my bag,” Dave said, nodding towards the black leather bag on the nearby table. “Dial Steve and hold the phone up to my ear.”

Dave’s unicorn face looked a little sheepish.

“No thumbs.”

Perry sighed and did so, overhearing a conversation about how Dave was going to lie low for a month and Steve should handle the day-to-day.

This was probably valuable information, if Perry was a smuggler in the seedy part of Franklin. But he wasn’t, so he ignored them until they were done.

Once Dave was done with the phone call, Perry dropped him off at an unspecified pasture in South Dakota to recover from the surgery.

Before Perry left and turned all the lights off, he paused and glanced back at the dampening equipment he’d used to prevent Dave’s horn from killing them all while they did surgery on it.

They were based on the machine counter-spellers that his uncle had employed in the attempt to kill him on Manita.

“It occurs to me I just invented a bunch of gear that could be easily used to harvest living unicorn horn.” Perry muttered to himself. Unicorn horn was ridiculously rare, and ‘Living’ unicorn horn was much, much rarer, with only one confirmed report of it existing.

The Eclipse Wand and its wielder had been annihilated by a herd of angry unicorns, and the whole debacle proved that evil virgins definitely exist, as vehemently as unicorns like Dave would deny it.

“Hey,” Perry said, grabbing the nearby technician. “Let Tyrannus know if I hear any stories about unicorns disappearing I’m taking it straight to him.”

Destroying the equipment wouldn’t do much: There was already a record of it in the university’s logs. Perry made sure to attach a note describing how violent the fallout could be if the ideas were misused.

There was a possibility this was the dragon’s intended outcome after giving him a piece of Dave.

I’ll have to keep my eye on that. But for now, let’s get to the stuff I wanted to do today.

Portal.exe

Perry stepped through the portal into the wilderness. A wooded mountainside greeted him, offering an excellent view into the valley below.

Somewhere inside, there was a secret.

Perry started walking.

It didn’t take long to detect the presence of human passage. A couple cigarette butts, scuff marks from boots, fire pits, and a trail cut into the forest floor by overenthusiastic zealots of the Eternal Empire tromping back and forth.

This was likely the only advantage Perry had in their cold war…if you could even call it that.

Tyrannus delegated a lot of his work to normal humans, which allowed him to exert his will over a huge swath of west America.

The problem was…people were fallible. They made little mistakes that Perry could pick up on, or take advantage of.

Perry followed the trail, whistling as he walked.

No sense startling a bear and being forced to slap it to death.

Eventually it ended at what had obviously been their base of operations. Food scraps littered the woods, and tire marks indicated that several large mid-sized trucks had stopped here for some time before driving off.

Perry glanced at the trail behind him. If he followed the trail the other direction, he could probably locate the secret military bunker where Dave’s horn dust had been saved.

Chances were they didn’t leave anything there to find.

I’m already a day behind schedule with that surgery, and all the juicy stuff is probably at their main storage facility but…always be thorough.

Perry turned around and headed back.

He nearly walked past the bunker. It was created to be intentionally hard to find, and fifty years of wild growth covering it didn’t do him any favors. If it wasn’t for the trail leading straight into it, it might’ve taken him a while, even knowing it was there.

Props to the original architect, Perry thought, entering the overgrown stairwell hidden behind a bush in the shadow of a stony cliff.

Light.exe

A globe of light sprung up above Perry’s hand, illuminating the research bunker.

As he’d expected, the place had been cleaned out. The dust prints in the floor were a mess of boot-prints and shuffling boxes. There were a few sharp edges in the dust, where Perry could see that documents had laid on the floor for years before the Eternal Empire had arrived.

Perry knelt down, tapped the floor and activated his Spendthrift Perk.

The faint ink molecules that had transferred from paper to concrete floor sprung out in stark relief, allowing him to read them.

Shipping manifest for stuff I’m not interested in, orders, HR complaint…Hmm.

Perry studied the orders and the HR complaint, which revealed the location of the barracks for soldiers, the mess hall, and the Head of Operations office, relative to the mess hall.

Pery glanced up and walked deeper into the lightless pit, the glow above him creating a solitary island of light in an ocean of darkness.

Perry knew he’d found the mess hall when he found a wide-open room with table-shaped rust stains on the floor.

All furniture had been removed by the extraction team to make it more difficult for anyone following after them (Perry, specifically) to figure out the layout of the facility.

After making the faint rust stains burst to life, confirming his location in the mess hall, he oriented himself on the entrance, then pointed left.

There’s Head of Operations.

Perry followed the hall until the end, entering the last office on the left, making the Light globe float forward.

“This is how delegating bites you in the ass,” Perry whispered to himself, suppressing a grin as he studied the panel on the wall that was faintly radiating dimensional energy, clearly visible to his Potent Thaumaturge sight.

To anyone else, it would’ve made them avoid it, or not fixate on it. To look away and ignore. Perry saw the eddies of energy around that obscuring effect.

It’s not like magic didn’t exist in the seventies. Humans just didn’t have access to it. Head of Operations must’ve paid a recent immigrant to put wards on it.

Interesting choice given their general disdain for Manitians in the seventies.

Since Manitians showed up around the same time as The Tide, the finger got pointed at them a lot. Even now, it was still an underlying reason for a lot of the worst violence.

Let’s see what Tyrannus’s footsoldiers missed.

Perry approached the wall. While the magic made his eyes want to slide off the false panel, it wasn’t strong enough to stop him from finding a tiny seem and wiggling a knife into the crack, prying the panel up and away from the wall.

Underneath was a safe, with only a faint tarnish of rust, preserved as it had been inside the wall.

Whistling to cut through the dead silence of the underground tomb, Perry pulled scanners out of the ether and studied the safe for booby-traps, removing a demon that was infused into the iron, who would attack, shoving him into into an eternal purgatory of the demon’s design if he opened the safe.

There was also some thermite connected to a failsafe on the roof of the safe, designed to fry any important documents inside.

Perry disarmed it and unlocked the safe, using Dragor’s Kinesis to open the mechanism from the inside.

Inside were a few letters, some paperwork, and a box full of documents marked ***TOP SECRET***

Inside the box were some research notes, and a shipping manifest that Perry was very interested in.