Perry’s hand hovered over the phone.

“What are you doing?” Natalie asked, staring at him from the war-map where the city captains were coordinating defense from High Tide.

“Waiting.” Perry said.

“Waiting for what?”

“I proved that a Demon lord had a room-temperature I.Q. and alienated him from Tyrannus in the process.” Perry said. “Unfortunately, this particular demon has a lot of raw power, so dealing with him alone is suicidal. Especially given his domain, which can collapse an empire in a rather short amount of time.”

“What does that have to do with the –“

RIIING.

Perry snatched up the phone.

“Ayup?”

“You absolute punk.” Tyrannus snarled over the phone.

“It’s not my fault nobody ever insulted the guy before. You’d think he have a thicker skin, But when you kill and consume anyone who disagrees with you, you eventually become surrounded by sycophants and assume all your ideas are great.”

“I feel as though that was misdirected at me.”

“I take it you’re calling me to discuss what we should do about the ‘demon lord’ problem?” Perry asked.

“Indeed. I’d like to offer an armistice on account of the ‘demon lord’ situation you’ve subjected both of us to.”

Perry thought about it for a moment. While he could argue that the demon lord of war could probably screw Tyrannus over harder than Perry given that Perry was only responsible for a city rather than an empire, that line of thinking was juvenile, and made no difference to the four million people inside his city. If he didn’t want his city to be engulfed in a war and lose people by the millions, he should negotiate a way out of it.

If he continued fighting with Tyrannus, the Demon Lord would use his influence over War itself to ramp up the violence and cause way, WAY too many people to suffer, just to get back at the two of them.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’ll work together with you to feed the demon lord to Gna’kis, and in exchange, Gna’kis will ascend to become the patron demon of Earth and Humans, and a neutral party in our conflict.”

“What, are your computers not working?” Perry asked, barely suppressing a smile. Gna’kis’s power had expanded to cover most of the globe, and The Eternal empire was no exception. Perry now had a world-spanning computer virus in his back pocket.

Since she was loathe to actually brick a computer, he’d had Gna’kis tweak infinitesimally small numbers deep in the dragon’s experiments.

Throw off Pi by one digit six numerals in and suddenly all your experiments are grinding themselves into metal shavings and regret.

“I had to exorcise my computers. Literally perform an exorcism. On a computer.”

This time Perry didn’t hold the laughter in, chortling and kicking his heels as the Chicago captains stared at him.

“That being said, I did learn a bit more about what is antithetical to the Demon Lord of Sinful technology. So I did gain some benefit. Here, let me show you.”

“Gna’kis, move.”

“Eh?” Gna’kis asked, glancing up from where she was taking a selfie in front of the top-secret battle-map that detailed the city’s defenses.

Perry kicked Gna’kis’s feet out from under her, causing the demon lord to topple to the ground with an alarmed squawk. Somehow she kept the phone pointing at herself, pursing her lips the entire way to the ground.

A puff of vibrant green smoke appeared in the wake of Gna’kis’s head, radiating primal energy.

Perry sucked some into his mouth and Sampled it for later study. It tasted of animal musk, rust, and the unstoppable push of nature and time to degrade technology. Interesting.

“Ow, ow ow!” Gna’kis said, scuttling backwards, itching her scalp where some of the dust had made contact. “Is this what itchiness feels like!? I hate it!”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Perry said, putting the phone back up to his ear. “Impressive you set up an anti-Gna’kis clean-room for your long-range manifester already.”

“Of course. I find it’s always appreciated to fire a warning shot first. Now, about my offer.

“Honestly? I don’t wanna feed Gna’kis the demon lord of war. His power dwarfs hers, and there’s a distinct possibility that it’ll drastically influence her personality and cause her to just become Hotexul number 2.”

“I see. Well, destroying the demon lord will scatter his essence across Nargosh, and he will eventually reform as carriers of his essence devour each other. The time-frame for this is in the thousands of years, and he likely won’t remember his grudge against us. Does that work for you?”

“Yeah, we can deal with it in a couple thousand years.” Perry said, tapping the side of his desk idly.

“Now, I have a spell I’ve been developing for you that would, with some minor tweaking, work quite well at destroying a demon lord, given we can get a piece of his soul. To do that, I need you to-“

“I’mma stop you right there,” Perry said, holding up a hand. “On a conceptual level, attacking the demon lord of war with a weaponized spell is exactly the wrong move. ‘attacking’ anything is part of his domain, and so he’d see us coming a mile away, and likely have some influence over our actions. Killing him with violence is basically impossible.”

“What do you want to do, kill him with kindness? Wait…”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Heather,” Perry said, glancing up at the redhead who was playing with Sera and Gareth.

“Eh?” She asked, glancing up at him.

“We must break out…the spell that shall not be named.”

Heather paled.

“You swore we would take that to the grave.”

“Take what to the grave?” Nat asked, suddenly highly interested.

“Nothing.” Heather hastily said, causing Nat to home in on her like a shark smelling blood in the water.

“What nothing?” Nat pried.

“I’ve got something that might work,” Perry said ignoring Nat breaking Heather down in the background. “Say, one week armistice to collaborate on ideas?”

“That’s fair. Where?”

“Why don’t you visit us in Chicago?” Perry asked. “I swear not to try anything while you’re here.”

“like you swore to forfeit your soul?”

“For reals this time,” Perry said.

“Fine. You do realize starting anything will play into Hotexul’s hands?”

“Of course.”

“See you soon, then.”

Click.

“Everybody start cleaning up, we’re having guests over!” Perry said, spreading his arms to encompass the onlookers.

***Paradox, Soon***

“Welcome to Chicago!” Perry said, standing at the opened front gate of the Chicago Wall.

Tyrannus swooped down to land in front of the city, his wings snapping open to halt his descent, causing a thunderclap to echo across the city of Chicago as his claws touched down on the road. Behind him a retinue of flying supers, or Acolytes, as they were called in the eternal Empire, descended, carrying a palanquin of non-flying supers and scientists.

“Did he get bigger?” Heather asked, craning her neck to see Tyrannus’s face.

“He’s probably juicing.” Perry said sagely as the dragon approached.

“Paradox Zauberer, thank you for inviting me to tour your lovely city.” The dragon said, scanning the oversized walls with the lead-spraying turrets dotting the surface. The turrets were at a height where if the dragon wasn’t careful he could get one up his nose. If he stood on his tip-toes, he could probably see over them with that goose-neck of his.

“I love what you’ve done with the place.”

“Well, Chicago is primarily Androids, so you got both an interesting opportunity and challenge to make everything operable by standard humans.”

“What’s the opportunity?”

“They don’t make tinker tech explode during High Tide.” Perry said.

You hand a death ray to an android and whatever shielded them from High Tide weirdness extended to the objects in their hands or on their person, interesting and valuable in some very specific contexts.

In this context, each and every person on the wall had one of his Paradoxed laser guns trained on the dragon at that very moment. They made things with water in them explode.

“Ah, the perfect control group. Interesting observation.”

“I thought so. Shall we?” Perry said, motioning toward the approaching dragon-sized limousine.

Tyrannus’s lips peeled back from razor sharp semi-serrated teeth, perfectly designed for cleaving through meat and bone.

“I’ve never ridden in a limousine before.” He said.

“First time for everything,” Perry said with a shrug.

“Sadly I must decline, since there isn’t any transportation for my honor guard. I would hate to leave them without transport.”

Perry glanced at the ‘honor guard’, a group of hard-bitten looking supers with one or two fresh faces who must’ve been extremely powerful to unseat the people they’d replaced.

They were probably some of the most unfair powers Tyrannus had access to. Sweeper level or higher.

Cute.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

Perry clapped his hands together over the scrying sphere, and four identical, albeit smaller limousines manifested beside the primary one, matching the design of the dragon-sized one.

“Shall we?” Perry asked, motioning again to the limousine.

“Yes. I’m eager to see this thing you claim will single-handedly resolve our…issue.”

They gave Tyrannus a quick tour of Chicago as they made a bee-line to Perry’s temporary lab, set up for this encounter.

Tyrannus was most interested in the pay-to-play blessing altars on every street corner, but Perry was only able to give him the basics before they arrived at the lab. A few minutes later, He guided them into the large hall sized for a dragon, filled with machining and lab equipment, with the piece de resistance on an altar in the center.

“This, my friend, is the hair of an Elysian Attendant.” Perry said, uncovering the glittering strands of blond hair he’d taken from Sophie to experiment with years ago.

“Interesting. Where does it fall on the spectrum?”

“Deep in Emotional, with Connection and Harmony overtures.” Perry said. “I made a piece of clothing with an enchantment made out of this once and-“

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Heather clench her fist, spikes growing out of it.

“I was trying for a charisma enchantment, but it wound up being a bit more of an emotional mind-meld.”

“Interesting. You mean to use this as the principal alignment for a weapon against War demons?”

“I use the term ‘weapon’ loosely.” Perry said, adding quotation marks. “basically this is a study of a concept: What causes war?”

“Tribalism, greed, and finite resources, primarily,”

“Don’t forget language barriers,” Perry said. “War demons are born when something REALLY bad happens to a lot of people at the hands of a lot of other people, and the underlying causes are the things you listed.”

“Elysian attendant’s primary job is to care for heroic souls wounded by the horrors of war, who rest in Elysium for eternity. If I’m right, this is War Demon kryptonite.”

“Interesting. And how do you plan on weaponizing it?” Tyrannus asked.

“I hadn’t gotten much further than a ray-gun that makes people hug it out,” Perry said with a shrug. He’d been too busy prepping Chicago for a dragon visit.

“Perhaps as proof of concept to establish that it has the desired effect on demons. My team has been working on something a little more efficacious.”

Tyrannus opened a screen on his table-sized tablet and set it down in front of Perry.

In front of him was a blueprint for a weaponized viral essence curse, filled top to bottom with dense equations with essence annotations in the system the two of them had invented.

Perry was able to read the dense script at the same pace a normal genius might read an interesting paragraph or lines of computer code.

The design would in effect give the curse the ability to spread, course correct and even selectively delay its manifestation of symptoms depending on the situation, having a clever way of internally creating computation through the interplay of conflicting essences en masse to create swarm-like decision making, mimicking human brain function.

It was…DAMN close to a living curse, designed to bedevil whoever the subject was, till the end of time. It could even hide out in the ground, lying dormant waiting for the subject to come back, even if they’d already been killed.

In short, it was the meanest curse design Perry had ever seen.

“Your function could be a bit more elegant by changing this,” Perry said, highlighting the function and adding in one that looked a bit more complex, but would make the computation tighter, allowing the spell to think faster.

“Ah.” Tyrannus murmured, scratching his scaly chin as he studied the modification. “I see.”

“Oh, and here, here, here…”

Perry fell into the tinker twitch as he edited the spell’s formulae to make it more fuel-efficient, smarter, more responsive, and pack more of a punch.

“And this part is like an appendix now, we can get rid of it entirely since it’s being handled by the extended function we modified over here…”

Perry cut some more dead weight off the spell.

“Add the wavelength from Sophie here,” Perry said, entering Sophie’s hair’s notation into the ‘Effect’ aspect.

“And now, the finishing touch,” Perry murmured, pulling out his reward from Mars. The orb of Improvement.

He paused.

“How are you at resisting the mind-altering effects of fourth-dimensional beings destabilizing your personal reality?” Perry asked, glancing up at Tyrannus.

“Excellent,” the dragon rumbled.

Perry glanced around at the onlookers, many of whom were Tyrannus’s followers, others of which were his family. None of which should be driven to madness lightly.

“Actually…Maybe we should make that proof of concept first to make sure this actually works,” Perry said, putting the sphere back in his pocket. “Hate to break out the good stuff for a failed concept.”

The dragon’s gaze lingered on Perry’s pocket for a moment longer, seemingly deciding on whether or not Perry had tossed him a red herring.

“Indeed.”