“It’s time to test ‘The Scruncher’” Perry said.

“I hate that name.” Gramma said.

“Too bad,” Perry said, pressing the button on The Scruncher.

In that moment all meaning, context and purpose vanished from the world, trapping them in a singular moment like a bug caught in amber.

As time marched forward, Perry’s adrenaline lurched, feeling as though he was slipping off a moving boat navigating rough, black seas. If he fell, he would plunge into that blacknessbetween moments, never to return to the present.

Paradox didn’t know exactly how he did it, but through great effort and mind-bending convolutions of will, he threw himself a rope from the boat.

Perry snagged that lifeline and crawled his way back to the present, then turned around and threw his past the lifeline, completing the paradox.

…

He opened his eyes.

“Did anybody else get the sensation that all of Destiny, Fate and Meaning got squished into a point of infinite density there for a second?” Dave asked, rearing his head and glancing around. He looked a little green around the gills.

“Yech,” Perry said, scraping the taste of Magical Destiny off his tongue and spitting it out. It splattered on the floor and sizzled back into the fifth dimension, taking a bit of the floor with it.

Tastes a bit like blood.

“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” Gramma said, brow cocked thoughtfully.

“Everybody still sane?” Perry asked, glancing around.

“Aye,” Dad said.

“Indeed.” Tyrannus responded. “The sensors show everything in the fifth dimension was a singularity for an instant. This should allow the spell to reach all corners of the world at once.”

“…I’ll be okay in a minute,” Dave said, holding up a hand.

“I’m fine.” Gramma said with a stiff shrug.

“What are you guys talking about?” Brendon asked.

“Well, it looks like it works.” Perry said, inspecting the desktop-sized hunk of reality-warping machinery. “Now we just need to arm it with the spell and we’re good to go.”

“No, wait…”

On a hunch, Perry pried open the side of the machine to reveal that the interior had melted into slag and pulsing life-alternatives.

“Okay, I’ll have to make another, then we can include the spell. I got a few ideas for things we can improve after nearly falling off the speedboat of Time,” Perry said.

What they had designed to integrate with The Scruncher was basically the biggest, most comprehensive Resurrection spell that had ever been devised by mortals, relying on the mimic’s propensity to accurately copy their victims, to target and draw those souls back from the beyond and shove them into the mimic body, which was overwrote by the spell back into the original form of the soul in question using the functionality of Brendon’s superpower.

It was the biggest, most ambitious ‘takesies-backsies’ in the history of magic and science, and they had no idea if it would work.

In the small-scale tests, it worked, piggybacking on the design of Brendon’s power, which made whatever possessed his power into Brendon. They’d modified it once they stripped the ‘brendon’ out of it, bestowing the power onto several objects, making a powerful, highly complex transmutation spell in the process, which could easily turn one thing into another, as long at the caster had the recipe.

What really separated this spell from others was that it made the subject transmute themselves, bypassing many forms of protection and ensuring 100% accuracy.

It had yet to fail or even suffer difficulties.

It was just…a maddeningly complex spell, so large that none of them could grap the entire thing at once, and Perry was sure there would be unintended consequences, and that bits of malicious programming had been inserted by certain parties without his knowledge.

I was like manually scrolling through DNA. Simply not possible with one pair of eyes.

Still…what else could they do? Perry would just have to assume the bits of malicious programming that he’d inserted were enough to counteract theirs. Whatever it was.

“Let’s get started.” Perry said.

****

Meanwhile, Stacy was nearing the end of her rope.

The three of them dropped out of lightspeed as Australia man’s tackle brought them spinning down into the into the slagged concrete.

“Let her go, Tom,” Australia man said as he approached the three of them.

Stacy’s stick-thin arms were trembling as she exerted all of her force to prevent Solaris from choking her out. The arm around her neck was immoveable as solid steel, but it was scratched and bleeding white hot nuclear fission, only tamped down by the environment Paradox had created for them, draining Solaris’s potency.

And they were still having trouble.

“Let’s not waste our breath,” Solaris said, gritting his teeth “You know I’m not gonna kill her. That would just restart this whole charade. No, I’m gonna throw her into space. When she comes out of lightspeed, she’s gonna be on the other side of the universe a billion years from now.”

“That would…also…be less than ideal.” Australia Man said.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Seemingly out of Tom’s sight, Chemestro began creeping closer.

“What do you care, Australia Man? Tom asked. “This spreading cancer doesn’t effect you at all.” He tightened his arm around Stacy’s neck to emphasize his words. “Do you know what this…thing is capable of?”

Whatever Australia man had been about to say seemed to flee as he glanced over to the side.

Solaris tensed, and Stacy just barely managed to see over Solaris’s arm by standing on her tippy-toes.

Paradox stood in between the four of them, beside a shiny black box as tall as his waist, with an ominously large red button on top of it. Behind him were the other magical-based supers, their expressions grim.

The machine felt…ominous.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if this kills us all, I apologize in advance.” Paradox said as his palm slapped down.

“Wait, wha-“

Solaris turned to light and dashed forward. Stacy used the last dregs of her power to catch onto his ankle and try to slow him down, but the mimic tore himself out of her grasp, heedlessly digging furrows through his flesh.

Solaris, in the form of a scouring beam of light, reached Paradox’s hand, frozen in time, his own brilliant hand extended to burn away whatever Paradox intended to unleash on them, when a boomerang moving at the speed of love caught him in the side of the face, knocking him to the side.

Solaris cut through dozens of buildings, and he flickered back to flesh and blood for an instant to try and kill his momentum and reorient…but it was too late.

Click.

***Paradox***

Perry hesitantly peeled his eyes open.

There was a glowing, Solaris-shaped groove in the asphalt, knocked a few degrees off its path, right in front of Perry.

That was a way smoother singularity than last time.

If there was any more definitive feedback that the spell had worked, Perry didn’t know what it was:

Congratulations! You are now a level 19 Potent Thaumaturge!

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Potent Thaumaturge

Level 19

HP: 14

Body: 136

Stability: 137

Nerve: 137

Attunement: 137

Free Points: 1451

XP to next level: 55511

Seems like erasing billions of mimics and bringing back the dead is good XP. Who would’ve thought?

“Get down!” Aussie Man shouted, dragging Perry to the asphalt as a beam of nuclear fire went over his head, straining the city’s ability to absorb it.

Umm…What?

Perry craned his neck and spotted Solaris…no..the thing that was wearing Solaris.

The mimic’s disguise was sloughing off like rotting meat, revealing a familiar figure underneath. Piercing green eyes glared into Perry’s own.

“Solaris refused The Call,” the mimic said with a shrug.

Perry understood instantly. Solaris, the stubborn, paranoid bastard, had chosen to remain in whatever afterlife had claimed him, so the spell had defaulted to destroying the mimic’s control over his disguise.

As the last vestiges of the Solaris disguise sloughed off, the nuclear fire crackling in the dopplegangers fingertips sputtered out.

“Wait…got it.” Perry’s doppleganger whispered.

The nuclear fire flared back into existence, then roared as the mimic fed it more fuel.

“He shouldn’t be able to do that, should he!?” Dave demanded over the roar.

“I don’t freakin’ know!” Dad shouted.

“He doesn’t have a light form,” Perry said, climbing to his feet.

“How do you know?”

“Because we’re still talking,” Perry said, catching a glitter of amusement in the mimic’s expression.

“Is that your real form?” Perry asked, motioning to the younger, somewhat emaciated clone. The Prime. An unholy fusion of himself and Abun’zaul.

What might’ve been if The System had failed him.

“Inasmuch as it can be, I suppose,” The Prime said, glancing down at himself.

“Any last words?” Perry asked as he assigned stats, bringing them up to a nice, even, 198.3k multiplier.

Body: 136 -> 250

Stability: 137 -> 250

Nerve: 137 -> 250

Attunement: 137-> 250

Free Points: 998

Perry’s dimensional senses leapt outward as he became something altogether inhuman. He felt as though he were in freefall, falling untethered through the ocean of spacetime, surrounded by a world made of smoke.

He had a brief glimpse of the planet from far above. Blurry, like someone opening sleep-gummed eyes.

He forced them closed again, stubbornly returning to the dream of being Paradox Zauberer.

If he lost focus for an instant, he would become…something else.

“Last words?” The Prime scoffed, pointing at Professor Replica’s battered body, and Australia man desperately panting for breath. “Your two greatest allies are-“

Paradox’s Static Shock.EXE

Sixteen snakes of lightning, wearing crimson symbols of Gyntax and Astra for scales, representing life and death, slammed into the mimic, rendering the potent creature so much ash. They seized the creature’s young and fragile soul and drew it into Paradox, where the slumbering monster inside him roused long enough to savor the treat, returning the errant shard to its proper place.

Don’t wake up, Perry thought to himself as he turned toward the other five, walking through The Tide’s dream.

“Are you…okay, Perry?” Dad asked.

“He absolutely is not,” Gramma said. “The boy is teetering on the edge of insanity. Thankfully I saw this coming. You are going to be fine, Paradox.”

Perry watched, amused as the clumsy essence threads that Marigold had woven into the scruncher activated, lending her what she perceived as the full force of the fifth dimension as she tried to take control of him.

The cobwebs settled around him, trying to drag him into the wake of her fifth dimensional presence. Bind him to her purpose in a way that would never feel like mind control, because it was destiny control.

“Cut that out,” Perry said brushing the cobwebs off. “I’m fine.”

Boy, she looks pissed.

Don’t wake up.

“We’re gonna need to run some tests to be sure everyone is back to normal, but I think we’ll find that we succeeded.” Perry said, stomach sinking as he walked the tightrope. “Gna’kis is mass-producing my mimic tests, talk to her about getting them delivered in bulk. No cost.”

Don’t wake up.

“Now, I’ve got some business to attend to,” Perry mused as he turned his mind toward another portion of the dream.

His family.

Like the dream it was, the world folded around him, swirling and shifting until he was in a manitian castle with his family. They sat at the dinner table.

A spoonful of stew was frozen halfway to Nat’s mouth as she stared at him.

“Daddy!” Sera and Gareth shouted, the two figments of his imagination sprinting away from their food to hug him. It would be so easy to change them, edit this dream to be more to his liking, like the lucid dreamer he was.

But that would be disrespectful to the beauty of their natural formation.

“Perry, are you…okay?” Heather asked, staring at his face with concern while Sera and Gareth buried their faces in his shirt, tugging on the fabric in their excitement.

They think I might be a mimic.

Don’t wake up.

“No, I don’t think I am,” Perry admitted with a chuckle. “But you can relax. The mimic problem is over, and we can all go home.”

“YAY!” The twins tugged on his shirt harder.

“Is there anything we can do to help you?” Natalie asked, her expression pained.

“I’ve got a plan,” Perry said. “I’ll either be fine in a few hours…or you’ll get that life insurance policy Tyrannus took out against me. Should be fine as long as I don’t wake up.”

Nat and Heather’s brows raised, and they shared a glance.

“What’s a life insurance policy?” Gareth asked.

“It’s when you set aside some money in case something bad happens to you, so your family is okay.” Perry explained.

“Huh.” Gareth mused, frowning as he thought.

“Let’s go home! This place is boring! I wanna ride a giant spider!”

Perry knelt down and tousled Sera’s hair.

“In a moment. First I wanted to ask you guys something You guys like video games, right?”

“Perry…” Natalie said, her voice growing quieter.

“Yeah!”

“Yeah.”

“What if life was like a video game? With stats and special powers and stuff? Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“Yeah, that would be awesome!” Sera shouted.

“I’d like that,” Gareth said, nodding.

Perry nodded and stood.

He met Nat’s gaze, the offer unspoken, but there all the same. She nodded, standing from the table.

Heather nodded, following suit a moment later.

…Don’t wake up.