274, 2/2

There was one thing Erick had forgotten to do when he made Wizard’s Clarity, but he did that now, because now he fully realized why he had not gained Divinity back there. Yggdrasil wasn’t back there at Abarial, and according to all the rules of Fractal Godhood, he should have been Cursed with Power.

But he hadn’t been.

And now, Erick knew why.

With a twist of power, Erick broke the [Telepathy] crystal inside of himself, taking out the Fractal Mark within, and joined that with his new Wizard’s Clarity. The Fractal Mark became one with his hiding-based magic, and Erick Established that it had always been that way. Where better to hide than in Infinity? There was no other place better—

Power melded with power. A fractal gift became one with a glowing corona, and light shattered in every direction, revealing paths through the nothing. Erick became the center of a shifting kaleidoscope of Infinity—

The Fractal Fairy stepped out of the Nothing, and onto Erick’s floating white stone in the middle of his Authority.

They looked the same as before; dense glittercrystal in the shape of a person, each of those glitters a universe unto themselves. Erick hadn’t seen it back then, but he certainly saw it now. He felt it, too. The Fractal Fairy was a weight upon reality that was unlike anything Erick had ever felt, except maybe when he was a tiny human, looking up at Melemizargo, before he knew Melemizargo as a friend.

The stress of having Them here was like he was holding up a world, but Erick was strong enough to hold up a world, now. Maybe even a few worlds.

Erick simply said, “Greetings.”

They held out a stack of papers in one hand, and though Their voice was a terrible, powerful thing, Erick withstood it as They said, “Your duties to battle corruption in whatever ways you see fit.” In Their other hand, They held a glittering diamond that was not a diamond at all, but instead an ever-inward-tumbling fractal of True Power. “A gift of guidance that is usable multiple times.” They gained a second and third arm on that same side of their body, and each hand of those arms grabbed at the fractal diamond and pulled another diamond out of that first one. Three arms became ten arms, which became ten diamonds, and then all of those arms folded into one, and all ten diamonds became one again, having never lost or gained anything in the transaction. “It is like the Mark I gave the previous Incarnation of the Dark before that Sundering business. He ended up using it to make the Mind Mages of Veird. They’re doing well on Margleknot, so you know. They did not choose to Join Together As One, but that is a normal enough choice.”

Erick was stunned for a few reasons. First, he experienced the presence of the Fractal Fairy without convulsing or falling over, even though that is what the entire realm around him tried to do. Erick grounded his realm, though, and it remained strong. And then there were the ‘gifts’ of more work, and a gift that kept on giving. Erick had no idea what to make of those—

And then the Fractal Fairy said, “Feel free to experiment more with your own Fractal Mark; you seem to be a good carrier of my power. I look forward to your cultivation of Life into a Fae existence! That is all!”

And then They left, vanishing from sight, though the papers and the fractal diamond remained; hovering.

… Erick had wanted to ask some questions.

A lot of questions.

In the smallest of ways, but also in a pretty big way, Erick wanted to make sure what he was seeing down there on Abarial was what was really happening; if Erick killing the monsters all in those specific slices of infinity really did clear up the infections that spread throughout all the other slices of infinity, and what it meant to start doing this sort of stuff for Margleknot… Or rather for the Fractal? Not really for Margleknot at all. But then he read the papers, hovering in the air, and the primer in the front of the paper packet that explained that each paper held 1 different infection that needed killing, and that to kill and cleanse that infection was to cleanse that entire small part of those Layers of problems in those specific areas.

And also, the only reason that corruption existed at all was because the Fractal Universe itself turned true problems that would end the universe into monsters that could be fought at all. The Fractal reimagined the danger into something manageable. The Fractal was already doing half the work; They needed someone else to do the real work, and that person was Erick right now.

“Well that’s an interesting mind fuck,” Erick said, as he picked up the papers and looked over his… 11 targets? “That’s all? 11 targets? Very doable.” Erick picked up the diamond next—

The diamond vanished into the air in his grip, disappearing entirely. The trinket had even vanished from the history of the space, and as Erick looked into the future a little, the diamond was still gone… But that wasn’t quite true.

… It was still there, somehow? Erick narrowed his eyes at the space where the diamond had been, and then twisted his hand a little—

The diamond fell into his hand while he was concentrating on it, but when his concentration wavered the fractal gem vanished again. Erick pulled the object in and out of Elsewhere a few times, just to be sure that he could do that without repercussions, and then he held the diamond in his hand and pulled another diamond out of the dense fractal gem. And then he had a second one that vanished or came back as Erick concentrated on the thing.

Erick made a few more of them, and then he packed them all away back into one diamond… And then he decided he wanted two of them, just in case something should happen to the first one, so Erick made two of them, and let both vanish into Elsewhere.

“Neat!”

Erick smiled, and then he looked at his paperwork. Flipping to the first of his issues…

“Let’s see…”

Anomaly #FLATT-1, named after the first assigned problem given to entity designation FLATT, located on Layer 578,927,221, this one requires complete anonymity to solve, but since you are new at this, we will forgive the transgressions of being seen. Try not to make a habit of it, though. You possess capabilities we do not often find, and thus we will keep your assignment list short. Your Valkyries are doing the bulk of the cleanup work, far, far outside of your view. If you wish to view that operation, then return to Margleknot and speak to the Fae Enclave.

You will need to return to them to get a better communication device, but you can do so without alerting them of your presence, too, and you should do that.

To begin, you need to travel back to the year where you started this assignment, back to year Veird 1453, in the war with Nothanganathor. Once you arrive, you are to IGNORE THAT WAR and proceed to the center of the galaxy designated OF-716-B-16. You might need to upgrade your yorddle to navigate there properly.

Once you are there, you are to confront the giant icky thing consuming one of the entrances to universe-designate BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap and then kill it and cleanse that entrance. Such monsters are typically called ‘door munchers’.

And that was the entire assignment.

… Well okay then.

Erick hmm’d as he read, seeing this as a test of willpower and a whole bunch of other tests at the same time. He decided to do it. Even though he would be driving close by the same year as Veird, he wouldn’t be anywhere close at all, and it wasn’t like he was ready to face Nothanganathor yet, anyway.

The Fractal Fairy had said, ‘I look forward to your cultivation of Life into a Fae existence!’ which implied that Erick was not a Fae yet… And he supposed he wasn’t? Hmm. He had kinda thought he was…

Well whatever.

He set the papers on a desk he conjured to the side… and then he looked at the papers and decided he didn’t like to be that messy. After a moment, he set down the papers under a paperweight in the shape of Veird, in a box he labeled ‘IN’. The ‘OUT’ box was empty, for now.

Erick turned to face the front of his floating rock space, whereupon he created a captain’s ship wheel out of stone. He smiled as he put a hand on the wheel and then whipped his hand to the side, sending the wheel spinning hard, and the entire gate space swishing to the side, like a giant ship changing course in an endless ocean.

Upgrade the yorddle? Pshhh! Erick knew his way around the universe without needing that.

Probably.

It was all theoretical knowledge, but Erick needed to work those theories to figure out how they worked, and he had time to do that. So what if he ended up crashing somewhere for a while?

… He wasn’t going to delay the Nothanganathor fight, but he was going to go in prepared.

Erick moved his gate space through the void where Benevolence would eventually exist, until he came to a place that was probably the correct-ish location. He popped out far, far above some sort of nebula-like galaxy, without any real arms to it at all.

Erick checked his Status, but mostly just his yorddle.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1317], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 1869]

“Right universe and Layer!” Erick announced to no one except himself. “Wrong time!”

He swung the steering wheel a little bit to the right, which was completely unnecessary and didn’t actually do anything, but the physical action seemed useful to keep around.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1456], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 2008]

Erick turned the steering wheel just a biiiit to the left.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1453], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 2005]

“Close enough! 1453! Let’s go kill a door muncher.”

The ‘door muncher’ was an ooze the size of a planet and it surrounded a black hole, like a whole lot of clear/black hair stuck in a drain. The muncher was eating the gravity or the time of the black hole, or doing something equally crazy like that, because there was no black hole right now. There was just a door muncher that occasionally slipped out of position around the black hole, briefly exposing the black hole, and briefly sucking in the time and space of the Fractal universe in a really cool lensing effect.

It was all sorts of neat, and Erick was kinda thrilled to be able to see a real black hole, in person.

As for the muncher itself, it was probably slipping back and forth between universes, somehow ‘munching’ on this door to the other universe, which was labeled under the ‘BORING’ classification, which Erick suspected was reserved for stuff which the Fractal found boring. This clean up right here was basically trash duty given to him by the Fractal.

But Erick was only 7 kilometers large at his largest point, and cleaning away the ‘door muncher’ would involve fully exposing the black hole, which would then expose him to the black hole. He was pretty sure he could survive the black hole rather easily…

But he had planned on using the Valkyries to attack the problem, since the problem was so large. It was the anti-Nothanganathor Plan Valkyrie plan; attack, surround, and devour. The problem was that whatever Valkyrie he managed to make out of this land would very much not survive the gravity well. Might not even be sapient, either, since there were no people to use as a base warrior. Also, there was no mana here, so everything would be difficult for people who weren’t as solid as Erick.

Anyway. Erick suspected that universe ‘Blaghargabap’ was called ‘Blaghargabap’ because the Fractal needed to call this place something, and so They had strung together some letters on the fly and attached them to this problem here.

Erick was beginning to think that the Fractal was kinda… not a serious god.

Good to know?

Erick got a move on with some initial tests against the door muncher, flying in close in his dragon form. Hovering in the thousands-of-kilometers-long tangles of not-hair, Erick found he easily warded off the corruptive effects of the door muncher through his natural Benevolence. With that test out of the way, Erick spat some [Benevolent Cleanse]s at the surface of the monster—

The very second that Erick’s anti-corruption magic touched the monster, the monster dipped its tendrils and its body below the event horizon, exposing the event horizon and suddenly filling the space that Erick occupied with crushing gravity and warped time.

Erick was fine. Wizards went through ‘doors’ like this all the time, back in the Old Cosmology days.

He was still inside the doorway to another universe, though.

Far, far below, was a universe that felt slimy, and worlds upon worlds of red-skinned, bipedal aliens with two main arms and two small arms. They looked to be nomads upon planets that were shaped like long cylinders that seemed to have no end and no beginning. Those worlds had hair-monsters, just like the door muncher here, at this entrance to that universe. Those hair beasts were the sizes of cities, and they reached into cities as they ate at the people.

Erick glanced upward and saw a sky with a giant hair-clog in the shape of the sun.

Ah.

So he was a bit inside the doorway, then.

The door muncher was above him right now.

Perspective was kinda wonky right now, here on this side of the door. Erick’s own body started to feel kinda pressured, too, like he was at the bottom of an ocean. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

Erick started throwing around [Benevolent Cleanse]s, but when one of them touched a cylinder world, it ate away at that world, too, exposing a core that ran through the entire cylinder-planet, like a vein of magma—

Oh.

The cylinder worlds were hair.

Erick was currently the size of multiple worlds, and the cylinder worlds were all hair.

… Erick didn’t think too much about whatever thing the hair was attached to, and he ignored the hair, trying not to disrupt that stuff too much. He got to work on the ‘drain’, and on the monster occupying it. The door muncher shifted and died under Erick’s onslaught of dragonfire. The people living on the nearby hair noticed something happening to the ‘sun in the sky’, but they did not see Erick. Maybe a day of burning later, and there was a shift in the muncher. It could no longer fully occupy the drain— the door.

… or was it a drain?

Erick looked backward, briefly, and he saw an eye beyond the hair. It was larger than anything Erick had ever seen before. It was the size of a universe. It had been watching him for an eon.

The eye seemed to approve.

That’s when the door muncher died completely, the parts of its body faltering hard as it got sucked back into the Fractal Universe, and Erick went with it. The last thing he saw of the Hair Universe was water cascading down dry hair, and into the drain.

Erick soon floated in the Fractal Universe, around the door to ‘Blaghargabap’, and the black hole went from being a dead thing, to a spinning thing of brilliance around absolute black, and with two streamers of power shooting off from the top and bottom of the hole. Erick went to investigate one of those streamers, but not too close; that was a lot of water pressure right there.

Erick wasn’t sure what he had done, exactly, but it seemed like a good thing, so he decided to go back into the Hair universe to find out exactly what he had done; what happened. He touched the black hole—

And his claw tips broke away, sheared off from the water pressure.

Erick flexed his Authority… and still got his claws sheared short. Looking at the damage to his claws, Erick tried a different approach. He blunted his claws with an old spell of [Conjure Armor] mixed with anti-Elemental Water properties, along with some resons to make that sort of combination actually work on stuff that obviously wasn’t ‘water’ at all.

He knocked on the door.

The white glows and water pressure around the ‘door’ vanished, leaving a hole to travel through.

Erick went inside—

Suddenly, Erick was sitting in a kitchen from the 80s on Earth. He was still a dragon, but he was human-sized. The sun shone in the window and nice curtains framed a blue sky. Tea steamed in mugs on the kitchen table. The refrigerator was roundish and green… so maybe the 60’s, not the 80’s. And yet there was a flat color television hovering on the wall. So the style was really ‘anachronistic’—

A woman sat across from Erick and her hair was gorgeous and long and every color of the rainbow, but mostly brown. It draped from her head to the floor in rivulets, twisting and draping, and it flowed across the floor, to the edges of the room, where it vanished into the cracks in the floorboards.

The woman was about to say something, but then she paused as she looked at her body, and then at Erick’s body, and said, “You have a very sexually dimorphic species.”

Erick transformed back into a person. “Apologies for the miscommunication.”

“Ah!” The woman’s face lit up. “That makes more sense. Very good. I thought only your women had hair, but it’s good you have hair, too. You want something? Glad you decided to knock instead of trying to push your way in again. Coming in through the floor was bad enough. Gave me quite a scare!”

“… Ah. Apologies. I just wanted to come back in to make sure the problem of the door muncher was resolved. I didn’t see any pieces over there, and I wasn’t sure what was happening over here.”

“Oh yeah. It’s gone. Amazing what a little cleaning can do for the consciousness. You can tell Fractal that we can have tea again if they want, but all they want to do is fight, so I try not to bother with them too much. Their agents are much more pleasant. You want sex?”

“… Ah. No thank you. I am already practically-married twice over.”

“Hmm! Fair enough.” She set a trinket of silver and gold and water onto the table between them, saying, “I was eventually going to raise up one of my own to clear away that plug and I was going to gift them this, but now I guess I gotta talk to the Fractal again. Way before I was ready, too… But I guess this is what is happening now. You can have the thing.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Erick took the gift though he wasn’t sure what it was even as he held it. “Glad to help. I’ll be on my way, now.”

The woman nodded—

Erick was a dragon again, floating beyond the illuminated black hole that was the door into the Hair Universe. Tendrils of light and dark were wrapped around his body for a brief moment, but they were already letting go.

Erick floated backward with something gold/silver/water in his right, clawed hand.

With a quick push through into Benevolence Itself, Erick settled down into his gate space.

The trinket turned into a torc that could go around one of Erick’s arms.

… It didn’t seem dangerous. It wasn’t mana-based magic, though.

It was probably fine.

Erick put it on, and felt out the magic it was trying to do as it touched him. As soon as he realized what was happening, he let it, and then he conjured up a big mirror. Thanks to the torc, Erick now sported a massive black beard and hair that came down to mid-back. With a flick of power, Erick tied the hair into braids and then brushed out the beard. He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled.

“Not a bad look.” He took off the torc, and his hair melted away. “Not for me, though.”

And then Erick looked around at the floating stone platform, and saw he needed to make some improvements to the place.

“A steering wheel and a desk is not enough.”

Erick considered—

“Ah ha! I need a ship.”

– – – –

Ten-thousand years later, and not that long at all, Erick set down the paperwork for mission number 37 into the outgoing box of his new office and smiled as that paperwork vanished through the port he had installed between mission #3 and #4.

That paperwork zipped off to Margleknot, to the archives, where no one would ever see it at all except for those who wanted to get their brains scrambled via time-twisting memetic threats—

A receipt came through the port—

Another piece of paper came through, and this one was a personal note ‘From the desk of Lady Aelorika of the Fae Council’, scribbled in flowing ink that mimicked vines that had met a weed wacker. Erick had gotten several letters from Aelorika so far, but he had been a ‘hidden agent’ until now, apparently. Usually the Lady was rather thankful without actually saying ‘thank you’. Now, she was all perturbed.

Erick laughed as he read it.

‘Fractals and Fate! I cannot believe I did not put it together sooner, but you’re the one doing this job now, Erick?! ERICK FLATT. Who is supposed to be having a war with Nothanganathor right now!’