Perry was babysitting the kids, who were playing with Eugene while he finished up the last of his work for the day. The biomechanical death-machine ran circles around the kids, his arm-blades providing a good grip on the carpeted floor.

Every once in a while they’d catch him, and he’d go down in a tangle of razor-sharp limbs as the two toddlers jumped on him.

Or is Eugene a ‘her’? Perry thought idly over the shrieking. In theory, Eugene reproduced asexually, the cycle was just designed to be pretty slow, so it hadn’t happened yet.

I’ll just call him ‘he’ until he corrects me.

Eugene was a first-generation prototype biomechanical guard dog. It had an insect-like appearance with bladed limbs, and the strange combination of a carapace with a mammalian cardiovascular system.

There was a gimmick Perry was especially proud of. The bladed limbs could be tucked into Eugene’s sides to create an airfoil, allowing him to make predatory jumps onto targets from a hundred feet away or more, along with surviving falls from orbital insertions.

He had the loyalty of a dog, the intelligence of a dolphin, the hardiness of a dragon, and a mean streak a mile wide.

On the intelligence front: Eugene would actually keep getting smarter for a long while as his brain continued to develop along his spine, possibly achieving sapience, which was a big moral conundrum for Perry. Was it okay to make something as smart as a human and then use them as a tool?

Addendum: was it morally acceptable to make aforementioned sapient also a perfect killing machine? A philosopher with knives for hands? Sounds like hell.

That was a huge grey area.

Perry had been too tempted to create his own custom-built intelligent life to not do it, so he’d decided on a compromise, where if Eugene began asking some very pointed questions, then he would offer the little guy his freedom and a paycheck.

Most people would just make a golem and be done with it. You don’t have to feed a golem, or show it how to use a toilet, or emancipate it.

But when Perry saw play behavior from his creation, he knew it was better than a dumbass golem.

Except maybe Boomer.

Boomer Mk1 had ‘died’ three years ago when Nat had scrapped his third lobe and used the soul-smudge inside to Patch Perry’s soul together.

He’d been right there on the edge of falling apart, metaphysically. If she hadn’t done that, he’d probably be on a breathing tube and I.V. right this moment.

Boomer came back to life again about six months later when Nat used another soul smudge to recreate Boomer’s third lobe.

Nat and Heather still did super work with him in Chicago. In fact, that was why he was watching the kids today.

Perry turned his attention back

Perry called what he did at the labs ‘work’ but it was just adding to the pot that would be shared when one of them died. There were no time clocks, no minimum output, no maximum. No pay either, not that he needed it. Perry just worked on whatever caught his fancy and the R&D guys figured out ways to make the prototype practical, then they would send it down the pipeline to Tyrannus, who would bounce back with redesigns and alternate applications of hard-earned theory.

It was fun, actually. Even though Tyrannus would eventually try to kill him.

“Why would you make something like that?” Tyrannus asked, his gaze on Eugene as he ducked his head into Perry’s lab.

“To see if I could?” Perry said with a shrug, following Tyranus’s gaze as he watched Eugene’s smaller forelimbs unpack from his chest and tickle the little ones.

The dragon shrugged, entering the room.

Perry’s lab wasn’t big enough, but the Dragon had taken to wearing a self-made piece of jewelry that increased the space around himself, making doors wider and ceilings higher.

Just like a dragon to change everything else before changing themselves.

“I’ve got some interesting news,” Tyrannus said, dropping some proposals from himself and the R&D guys on Perry’s desk.

“Oh?” Perry asked.

“Someone broke into the Temple over the weekend,” Tyrannus said. “Kidnapped one of my dear acolytes. I can only imagine what horrors they’re being subjected to.”

The meeting between Ava and Nat was pretty awkward, but I wouldn’t call it a horror show...exactly.

“One my speedster Acolytes broke his ankles stepping on some kind of glue trap.”

“Huh.” Perry said. “That’s terrible.” After one possibility had been killed by a speedster with a disintegration gun, Perry had gotten a bit paranoid, spreading nearly invisible sticky lines of the Pernicious Prison along the ground behind him. Apparently it’d worked.

“They got away even with one of your anti-teleportation fields up. You wouldn’t happen to have any idea who could’ve done such a thing?” Tyrannus asked.

“You know, now that you mention it, I did have an idea,” Perry said, leaning back in his chair. “Not about who did it, that’s a total mystery. No, I was out running yesterday, and had an epiphany about the Anti-teleportation field. Since you’re already wobbling dimensional energy with that thing, with a receiver and the right software you could add a radar-like function to it. Maybe tell where people are within the field, and even whether or not they’re intruders.”

“Interesting thought. Do you do much running?” Tyrannus asked.

“Yesterday I did.” Perry said with a shrug. “Sprinting up the side of a mountain carrying a hundred and twenty pound sack of potatoes. Gotta keep fit.”

“Mmm.” Tyrannus nodded. “You know, spells that sacrifice Fate leave a specific residue on the background Essence of an area. Almost like an impression. With the right equipment, we can peek at their effect, even days later. I’ll send you the design later this afternoon.”

“Neat, did you get the guy!?” Perry asked. This was new information, but in the fraction of time he’d known it he’d already determined that Tyrannus couldn’t pin it on him, because of the distortion caused by the Anti-teleport field.

“Sadly I wasn’t able to make a positive ID on the culprit, because the A-T field had scrubbed the impression nearly to nothing by the time I arrived.”

“Bummer. I hope you nail this bastard to the wall,” Perry said.

“But didn’t you do it, Daddy?”

Perry slowly glanced over at Gareth, who’d been listening in on their conversation.

“Gareth, sometimes grown-ups have conversations where one of them suspects the other one did something, but neither of them admit to anything, because they’re trying to probe around the issue to see if they can glean more information.”

“Oh. That’s weird.” Gareth said, turning back to Eugene and rejoining the game of tag.

“So it was you.” Tyrannus said.

“Bah, I admit nothing.” Perry said. “Toddlers say all kinds of weird stuff. He just wants to be in on the game. Besides, you’ve probably already decided who you think did it.”

“True. The pool of potential suspects was quite shallow.”

“Wasn’t me.” Perry said, confidently putting his hands behind his head in a power pose.

“Yes it was!” Sera shouted.

“You don’t even know what we’re talking about!” Perry scolded her.

“You stole mommy’s sandwich!”

“It was just sitting there on the table without a note or anything, how was I supposed to know it was for mommy!?” Perry defended himself. “And that’s not what we’re talking about. Why would Tyrannus care about mommy’s sandwich?”

“Oh.”

Thank you Seraphine. Her off-topic accusation had somewhat blunted Gareth’s earlier statement by demonstrating that three-year-olds were incapable of following the topic of conversation. If she did that on purpose, then she was a genius. Perry was pretty sure it wasn’t on purpose, though.

Tyrannus’s eyes narrowed as he glanced between Perry and his children. Eugene was standing next to the tykes, his chitin armor raised like hackles as he stood halfway between them and the dragon.

“I see. If you have any more ‘epiphanies’ for how to improve security at the Temple, be sure to send them my way.” Tyrannus said.

“Of course,” Perry said with a nod.

Tyrannus made to move away before pausing.

“I just don’t understand what the kidnapper was after. What the true goal was. That particular Acolyte knew quite a few political secrets, but nothing cataclysmic to my rule. I don’t see how she could have been the primary target. Nothing else was disturbed.”

Perry noticed he hadn’t mentioned the pile of meat Perry had left behind when he bolted, next to the concrete-filled basement with old paperwork. Perry had filled it back in and smoothed it out, but he’d also left a pile of meat there, which revealed his presence.

Unless they cleaned it up before Tyrannus saw it? upward communication issue? Perry knew bad news got softened and distorted as it traveled up an organization. Tyrannus was the head of a huge one. Maybe he just didn’t see the evidence of Wayward’s Defensive Diguise.

Or maybe he was giving Perry rope to hang himself with by concealing what he knew about Perry’s true motives.

Best to not touch the subject until I know what he knows.

Tyrannus was only working with half the puzzle though, as he’d never seen the cargo manifest. The dragon could only guess at what Perry wanted with the documents under the Temple, if he even knew Perry had gotten his hands on them.

“People often know more than they realize,” Perry said with a shrug in response to Tyrannus’s statement of confusion over the kidnapper’s motivation. “But…sometimes plain old empathy gets the better of them. Maybe the kidnapper wanted to take the opportunity to give this acolyte a chance at a normal life?”

“I see.” Tyrannus nodded before leaving the room.

Perry waited until the dragon was out of sight before he started plotting how to steal the crown jewel of his hoard:

General Abrams.

The withered, emaciated being that hung above the entrance to the lab like a mascot had obviously been hit with some kind of curse of undeath in order to prolong his suffering for as long as possible.

How then, should I steal the old man? Well, I don’t need to steal him. I just need to steal what he knows. In an undetectable way. Can’t just fly up to him and whisper in his ear. too many witnesses. Too much security. A tiny drone in his ear might work, save for the security around him.

Perry’s eye twitched as he came up with an idea.

I wonder if Tyrannus has ever watched Inception?

Later that night, Perry opened a chest that’d been laying dormant for years. Ever since he got the materials from Dave, he’d never really had a strong reason or opportunity to use them.

The current situation, however, was ideal.

Dream rope, Morpheus moth scales, giant bone doll, giant cornea, lodestone, and a lurker fishhook, Perry thought to himself as he retrieved all the ingredients for a nighttime jaunt into someone else’s dreams.

But first: research.

Before Perry rawdogged an undead creature’s dream, he needed to do some book learnin’ about whether or not they might have some communicable dream-diseases.

Perry opened one of his reference books on the undead and looked real hard for whether they dream, and if so how dangerous it was to connect to them.

He didn’t find anything about it, since the need to subtly acquire information or sway the decision making process of undead abominations was never really an issue in Old Manita. They usually just defaulted to ‘kill it with fire’. And for good reason.

Holy….

Perry was able to find entries in how having sex with an undead could infect you, or getting some of their blood in a wound, or looking at one for too long, or taking their last time in a marriage with their descendants, or casting mind-controlling effects…

That’s the closest thing to dreamwalking, Perry thought, following that entry to its chilling conclusion.

The caster had controlled the undead for a while until the bond between the two flipped, and they began going out at night to kill the innocent and bring the dead flesh to their new undead master.

When the village got together and killed them, the caster’s brain was revealed to be rotted away from the inside.

As it turned out, Perry needed to take some heavy precautions so he didn’t get dragged into whatever curse the dragon had laid on the general.

He spent several days designing what he would thought of of as ‘VPNs and a Firewall’ for dreamwalking into an undead’s dream.

Then he went even further, Casting Paradox’s Probability Dodge to add one more layer of separation between himself and the act.

One version of him spent the night with Natalie.

The other one dove into General Abram’s twisted hellscape of cursed dreams.

Agorant’s Bridge of Dreams.exe