275, 2/2

Erick stepped onto the stony shore of Lake Michigan. The air was cold and the waters dark. A storm held on the horizon, blowing waves Erick’s way, the wind catching on the crests of waves and sending droplets onto his face, and hiking clothes. It had taken him two weeks to get there, but it wasn’t like it was a destination or anything like that. It was just part of the journey, and Erick had been testing out his life and his power and the world around him the entire time. Mostly, he was helping people without them knowing how much he was helping them. There was that one time that he gave that kid a sandwich, two sodas, and a talk, and told him to go back home, as well as a few other incidents that would remain for-life memories in the minds of those he helped. But mostly, people got help without knowing it.

Earth was filled with problems.

Erick had his own problems. Every time he interacted with people, changing the world in a small, good way, he felt a little tear. That tear was Young Erick getting knocked off course on his trip to Veird. And then the tear would heal… or something like that, and Young Erick would go back to being on the right path to Veird. Erick wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but he was trying to find out.

Perhaps Erick was strengthening his own history by tearing at it a little, like how a muscle grew bigger and stronger through exercise?

Who knew.

The little rips had first happened when he prevented that kid from getting his eye poked out, but then it kept happening, because Erick kept helping people. Every time Erick helped people, the gap between Young Erick and him would tear, but then it healed soon after. Actions done further away from Young Erick seemed to tear less, though. Erick’s initial idea to go all the way to Australia for a while was probably an instinctive desire to get away from his own past, to prevent any big tears.

Erick was absolutely sure that if he changed the world a whole lot, then that tear would truly rip, and there was no putting that genie back in that bottle.

… Should he test that theory? Maybe. Maybe, if he did rip this past from his own past, he could also go back and change that rip, and undo whatever he had done to majorly change the world?

Erick stared at the waters ahead of him…

“Let’s test that theory.”

Erick raised a finger and pointed at Lake Michigan—

Another Erick stepped to his side, and gently put a hand on Erick’s outstretched arm. “Nope. That breaks the timeline for sure. Big rip. Unrepairable, except by me doing this right now and stopping you.”

Other Erick wore the same clothes as Erick did right now, so he couldn’t have actually lived enough of a life here on post-incident Earth to really check things out… And yet, Erick believed Other Erick. Mostly.

Erick asked, “You didn’t try and check to see if it was actually unrepairable?”

Other Erick smiled a little. “Nope. I felt it, though. I saw enough. And so I came back and stopped it. Also! Can you feel it now? The weakening of the world? With two of us here, infinity starts to spiral and we create an even larger nexus event than we already are, changing the world to make it revolve around us.” Other Erick stepped back from where he stood. “So let’s not make a Big Rip.”

Erick considered…

The world was kinda… thin right now. It was hard to explain, but yeah, this was the start of a nexus event, though Erick himself was already a walking nexus event, so… Hmm.

Other Erick nodded, and then gestured at the ground where he had been standing; where he put his arm on top of Erick’s, to stop nuclear explosion magic from detonating off the coast of Michigan.

Erick didn’t need to hear more. He nodded, and then he stepped just to the right of the spot where Other Erick had stood, and then Erick stepped through time, directly onto the spot where Other Erick had stood. Into the near past.

The first Erick was where Erick had been, and now Erick put a hand onto that Erick’s arm, saying, “Nope. That breaks the timeline for sure. Big rip. Unrepairable, except by me doing this right now and stopping you.”

The first Erick looked Erick up and down, and said, “You didn’t try and check to see if it was actually unrepairable?”

Erick smiled softly.

And then he went through the whole event from the older perspective, and then the other Erick went back in time, and Erick wondered if there had ever been a version of him that dropped an atomic bomb on Lake Michigan, to see what would happen. Did he need to go forward with that experiment, anyway?

… Nah.

Erick stepped further down the beach, continuing on his walk, practicing his slang.

“G’day mate. G’day matey… What’sa bloke gotta do to get a beer? … No. That’s not Australian…”

The further Erick got from Younger Erick, the easier it was to do good for others without twinging on the fabric of reality that made this Earth Erick’s past, so Erick was going to be far away, and yet, he saw that he needed to remain close, to ensure that this world remained, and that Erick kept his life exactly as it had been. So maybe Erick would try to help the world through intermediaries, instead of directly? Maybe he could do the same for Young Erick, too.

Maybe he should stick around to figure out whatever happened between 2019 and 2047, that removed all the magic on Earth, but he certainly wouldn’t be living any of that life chronologically.

Mostly, Erick was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Gods were extra-chronological entities, operating outside of time when they wanted, after all, and in some ways, they determined how time actually worked. In the Old Cosmology, the gods did exactly that, ensuring that their guarded worlds were all a part of the same time frame.

So while Melemizargo was (maybe) the God of Magic of the Dark right now, Nothanganathor was also the God of Magic of the Dark, too. He’d be showing up… maybe.

Erick considered the tiny Dark Mark in his own soul, as he walked the stony beach, and stepped over some driftwood. Should he ‘get rid’ of his Dark Mark? Hand it over to Young Erick right now? Would either of those scenarios be absolutely ruinous? How ruinous, though?

At least there were no magical societies on Earth. That’d probably end up as a whole thing if Erick stumbled into one of those. He was ready to get back to Veird…

Mostly.

Erick pulled a soda out of his backpack, which was connected to Benevolence Itself, his gate space. Figuring out a ‘bag of holding’ had been easy, and Jane had been right about how nice it was to have easy access to sodas and beers and fruits and meats and all sorts of food, whenever he wanted, without having to make them himself, or haul them around directly. Enjoying his powers and the taste of fizzy orange drink, Erick walked the stony beach—

Erick’s Lightning Path flickered hard, pointing back the way he had come. Back to the community college. Back to Young Erick.

Erick ignored the idea of being quiet and unassuming and turned to light to Step all the way back to the college, just in time to see Young Erick almost die due to a series of events, like he had stepped into a Rube Goldberg killing machine that looked nothing like a killing machine at all.

Erick had entered the scene on the far side of a street.

On the other side of the street, Young Erick walked on the sidewalk with some girl, beside a park. Malevolence flickered beside a squirrel up a tree. The squirrel flipped the fuck out, falling out of the tree and onto the ground, where it then ran across the road. Some grandpa, driving his car, panicked at the sight of the squirrel and turned off the road, aiming right for Young Erick and that girl. That grandpa pressed on the accelerator instead of the brakes. Young Erick and the girl didn’t notice the car speeding at them for the car was only 5 yards away when the driver decided he didn’t know how to drive. Young Erick and the girl noticed as fast as humanly possible, though.

Young Erick pushed the girl out of the way.

Erick had arrived right when the car was about to crash into Young Erick.

And then Another Erick waved from his seat on a nearby bench. He flickered some magic underneath Young Erick’s feet, and Young Erick did the only thing he could do, which was to leap up. Young Erick leapt, and then he crashed right onto the car’s hood and windshield. That was when the driver realized he should press the brake instead of the gas.

Young Erick skidded off of the car, into the grass.

Erick’s heart had been in his throat the whole time. It was like watching one’s own life flash before their eyes, but in a disconnected sort of way that made Erick sweat anyway.

What followed after the crash was Young Erick getting out of the ordeal with a few scrapes and a ‘wicked tale’ to tell, according to him, as he smiled and told the apologetic and very-worried driver that nothing was broken. ‘Everything was fine!’ he said. The girl thought Young Erick was amazing, though she had gotten a few scrapes from when he pushed her. The driver had no insurance, and as soon as he saw that Young Erick wanted to play off this whole thing as nothing, the driver quickly worried over his own driver’s license being taken away, so he got in his car and left the scene. The girl with Young Erick was too young to realize what was happening, while Young Erick himself merely thought he truly was fine, so he shouldn’t press charges or anything like that.

None of them thought about getting the old guy off the road, because he clearly wasn’t fit for driving anymore.

In the course of several more years, that old man would get into several more accidents, and end up killing a family driving to church. He shouldn’t be driving, but he also had no one in his life to help him with anything, so he had to drive to get around. Erick would do something about that, later. Maybe get him to move to a bigger city where he wouldn’t need a car.

But for now…

The fabric of the world was thin; what with two Fae Erick and Young Erick all together. The older Fae Erick vanished behind a tree, leaving Erick to go back in time and do exactly what he had done to save Young Erick’s life.

So Erick did that.

As Erick cast a tiny spell that pushed against the soles of Young Erick’s feet, helping him get some air, he felt Infinity spread wide, like a loose sweater. Erick casting magic upon Young Erick was the culprit. The world relaxed back down to a normal Path when the magic was done and Young Erick was profusely telling the old man he was fine. All Erick really learned in that moment was that directly helping Young Erick was off the table.

Soon enough, Erick waved at himself, across the road, and then he stepped away behind a tree, and stepped out where the Older Erick had vanished from, neatly closing a loop.

And apparently Young Erick’s life was still fine, though he would be feeling this crash for a while. That had fucking hurt.

Current Erick remembered that close-call. He remembered leaping up when the car had come for him. He also remembered how much pain he had actually been in, and the gnarly bruise across his back and left leg that he never got treated for. He remembered blowing off the girl whom he had saved, too, because he was in too much pain to have sex.

Erick hadn’t recalled it at first because it was a long time ago and he had partied way too hard back then, but yeah, that had happened.

… Erick spent the next few hours sitting on a bench by a lake near the college —the one he had fed the ducks on— thinking about what parts of his life he was going to interfere with, that his Lightning Path pointed toward, telling him that interference was necessary. Most of the time Erick would stay away, but…

Erick began writing on a piece of paper to organize his thoughts better, and to plumb the depths of memory that was already riddled with holes, thanks to drugs and booze, women and men, and not nearly enough schoolwork. A short while later, the list of possible deaths turned out to be a long list.

129 incidents.

31 were solid ‘this needs to not happen’ sort of things. The rest were iffy.

Did Nothanganathor do this?

Some of them, yes. Like that squirrel incident. That was not Nothanganathor’s direct working, though. Not really. That was an Establishment, cast from the future. Nothanganathor was trying to kill Erick from the future. Erick was literally on the other end of Establishment Magic right now, and he could see how the world was altering in the past to bring about an event an uncountable number of lightyears and 98,292 Layers away.

Erick was in the middle of the Wizard War, and though he was —for the first time!— in an advantageous position, he couldn’t see nearly enough of what was to come, and Erick was absolutely sure that when he started to foil enough of these little Red Plots, that the Red would start to act in side-directions. Not only that, but Erick’s eventual return to Veird and all of that was cloudy; obscured by whatever events would unfold when they unfolded. Right now, the war was rather slow and imprecise, and Erick would likely bounce around a lot through time…

But he’d also stick around, having a bit of a slow life for a while. He had earned that. Maybe he’d go back to some other slice of Earth, in some early year, or something, and play around in the Gardens of Babylon, or see what being a real cowboy was like, or… Or do something besides race around and save his own dumb ass from death.

Erick looked at the list, and knew that most of these incidents were just normal human stupidity.

Young Erick was a dumbass.

Erick set the list aside and looked out across the lake in front of him, muttering to himself, “Did I really have that many close calls? Shit. I almost die when I fall through that floor in a month, too, right next to that broken pipe. Then there’s the leaf fall incident, where I jump into that pile of leaves and narrowly miss braining myself on that fire hydrant. Even when I was 38, with that one gangster who was always waving that gun around and it went off, missing my leg by inches…” He paused. He looked at the list again. “I think I relate to Jane a whole lot more.”

And then there were the bad incidents. The ones that Erick didn’t write down at all.

It was amazing that Erick didn’t catch HIV like George and his boyfriend, both of whom died in 5 years. It was amazing that Erick didn’t die from those random drugs at that one party in two weeks, where those same drugs had killed a girl. A hiking incident in two years involving a rabid bear, or something like that; Erick had never found out. Boating trouble in 10, when that engine exploded and the boat sank off the coast of Florida, and Erick swam to shore with three other guys, and all of them were bleeding.

That decision in that dark room, while holding a gun and baby Jane screamed at the top of her little lungs because there were no more diapers and Erick had no money to buy anything else, and it was either go out and rob that convenience store or to try something else. Anything else.

Young Erick was a dumbass, but he was also plagued by Malevolence.

Erick crumpled the list in his hands, saying, “Not while I’m around.”

– – – –

1997, not much later:

Erick lay in bed, staring at the posters on his wall, feeling so weird. Like the world was fake and everything was wrong. He had failed his midterms in biology, and he was now on academic probation. Everything had been going so well, too… Well. No. Everything was going wrong. Everything in his life was a horror and a failure. He was a failure. Tears crowded his eyes and he sobbed, alone, in the twisted covers of his bed. How much money did he have left to pay the bills of even going to college, anyway? He had saved up some, but it all went away too fast and he had no scholarships and he had just been fired from his part-time job—

The door knocked.

Erick breathed deep and steadied himself, saying, “One moment!”

Someone said something on the other side, and Erick had no idea who it was. Maybe a man’s voice? Erick got up and put on his nightshirt. Boxers were good enough to answer the door, so that’s what he did. “Hel— George? What’s wrong?”

George was a big guy. Muscular and very gay, though only a few people really knew that last part. Best friend to all at the gym, too, and willing to raise fists against the bigots at that same gym. He had beaten up and kicked out more than a few assholes since Erick had known him. George had been feeling under the weather for a little while, though, so Erick hadn’t seen him in a few weeks. Right now he looked like a beaten dog as he stood outside of Erick’s room. With dark circles under his eyes, George was looking skinny even though he wasn’t skinny at all.

George softly said, “I need to come inside and tell you something important.”

Erick stepped back.

George came in.

And without waiting for anything else to happen, George started to tell Erick how he needed to go get tested, and how he and his boyfriend were both Positive.

Erick’s world crashed down on him for the second time in as many days. And then Erick held George, and told him that they had new antivirals out, and that everything was going to be okay. George sobbed hard, telling Erick not to touch him, not to be near him at all, because he could catch it. But Erick held on, saying that Princess Diana touched Positive people all the time, and nothing happened. George could still hug people, and Erick could still hug him right back.

George sobbed onto Erick’s shoulders.

– –

Erick watched from a lab in London, and then he got back to work on the next generation of HIV antivirals, which was mostly just getting the right people into the right places. Erick wasn’t great at this particular kind of science, and he didn’t feel the desire to learn that much, because it wasn’t important for him to learn this stuff, anyway. It was important for the people of Earth to learn this stuff.

These particular antivirals wouldn’t come out for a decade or more. It wouldn’t be fast enough to save George or his boyfriend, or the millions of other people who suffered from that hated disease, or all the other viruses on Earth.

But Erick had a plan to save everyone, anyway, in other ways.

– – – –

1997, later:

Erick laughed as he got out of the shower, saying, “You shouldn’t worry so much about it, Margaret!”

Margaret followed him, soon ruffling her towel all over herself as she said, “It’s a big deal, Erick! This internship might be more important for me than college. I might just need to take it!”

“Then you should take it,” Erick said, smiling as he watched his girlfriend put on clothes. “College is for getting a good job, right? Take the connection with your cousin’s boss and just do it.”

Margaret paused… and then she pulled her shirt down and looked at Erick. “It means I’ll leave college. I’ll leave you.”

Erick nodded. “Yup. And when I graduate, maybe I’ll look you up, and we can get back together, for real. Maybe your cousin’s boss will have an opening for a business major. You said he was like, some big shot with 10,000 employees, right? What’s one more.”

Margaret’s eyes went wide and her lips stretched into the most wonderful of smiles. “Really?!”

“Yeah. Let’s make a plan for it.”

“Oh my god, Erick,” Margaret started to cry tears of joy.

Erick chuckled a little, and then he hugged the love of his life, and then they did a lot more than hugging.

– –

Erick downed half a bottle of whiskey from his office as he watched Young Erick and Margaret get to making Jane. The office was a pretty good office. It was a Social Services office in Detroit, not too far away from Erick and Margaret.

The Malevolence in Margaret’s body sparked Red and powerful as it mutated what was to come, turning Jane into an ectopic pregnancy. Margaret would die rather than get an abortion, even when she knew it was killing her, and by the time she went and got it done, it was too late. Or at least that’s what Erick foresaw.

The world almost did a Big Rip right then and there, or rather, over the next few days, when the sperm actually met the egg in the completely wrong place.

But Erick meddled.

He might not be able to cast invasive magics on Young Erick himself, but Erick could certainly create a successful pregnancy in Margaret, instead of death.

Jane would happen, exactly as she had happened.

Erick finished off the bottle of whiskey in his office of Social Services, and then he rapidly stuffed the bottle into the drawer, acting like a kid who had been caught—

The door to his office slammed open, and Erick’s boss, Manfield, stared down at him. He sniffed the air. “I smelled whiskey, Kevin. I know I did.”

Manfield had some Malevolence inside him, too. A lot of the world did. Half of Erick’s accepted job right now was cleaning it up and setting the stage for good things to come, and whooooh boy, did Erick need to set stages. Erick had messed up more than once when confronting Malevolence on Earth, and he had needed to redo things here and there, but the Malevolence here on Earth didn’t seem to have any sort of consciousness behind it, so that was great. It made confrontations with the stuff… easier. Even so, Erick suspected he would be redoing this confrontation with Manfield several times while he worked here.

Manfield would actually be the man who saved Erick, when Erick walked into these offices a year from now, begging for any kind of real help he could get. Young Erick wouldn’t start at Detroit, but he would end up here, when all the other Social Services offices hinted that they might need to take Jane away from him if he couldn’t hack it as a single father. Manfield would be the man who helped when no others could.

But right now, Erick needed to save Manfield, first. Manfield was at his wits; end with his alcoholism, and he was furious at everyone who dared to drink around him for whatever reason. And drinking on the job? Right out.

Erick breathed out, and then said, “I had a rough day.” He pulled open his desk drawer, and pulled out the empty bottle. Manfield’s eyes went wide at the offensive thing, but his pupils dilated, and he almost licked his lips. Erick said, “A woman I’ve been sleeping with is pregnant and she won’t let me know anything about the kid, or anything at all. She ran away to her family and I’m not wanted. She wants to keep it, and cut me out of her life. I thought we were going to get married.”

Manfield’s entire demeanor changed, but he still looked at the bottle. He grabbed the bottle, saying, “I’m throwing this away, and then I’ll be right back.”

Erick nodded.

Manfield took the bottle out of Erick’s sight. He stared at the container for a long minute, moving it back and forth, watching the drops of golden liquid at the bottom of the container move around. And then he shuddered and opened the window at the south side of the building. The open dumpster was just one story down. He held the empty out, and then dropped it. It clattered into broken glass inside the dumpster, and Manfield shut the window.

Walking back into Erick’s office, Manfield sat down with Erick, saying, “Tell me about it.”

Erick wove together a few different stories of his own time working in offices like this one, but he didn’t give Manfield anything to actually work with. In the end, Manfield left feeling like he wanted to help, but he had no way to help, because Erick wasn’t allowing it. They both knew it, too. Manfield would try to work on Erick, to get him to open up, but Erick would shut those attempts down.

Erick stayed in those Social Services offices for a month, and then he left without a word to anyone.

He did not move on, though. He just changed his face, and his position in the world, and how he helped people. Sometimes he was closer to that social services office, and sometimes he was rather far away.

Some days he was a helping hand at a church. Some days he was a janitor, telling someone that he didn’t know that the mole on their neck was suspicious because he ‘had a cousin like that; turned out to be cancer’. And sometimes Erick just gave people extra money in their wallets, or pockets.

Manfield was on his way to healing from his own demons inside of 4 months.

– – – –

1998, January 5th:

Erick lay on his bed, phone in his hand, twirling the coiled cord in his fingers as he smiled and said, “Margaret! How’s your new job?”

Margaret was in California, in one of her father’s rental houses, holding the enormity of her belly as she pretended everything was okay, her voice full of false cheer as she said, “It’s going great, Erick. I’m just working the mail room right now. Sorting stuff for the guys upstairs.” She touched a pink slip beside her on the table and ignored the tears falling from her face. They had been falling for a while. “Soon I’ll be moving up to secretary for this one big lawyer, or at least that’s the talk around the room— Say. Uh. Do you want to get married? How about on the 15th? In ten days? Before your birthday on the 20th.”

Erick breathed deep. He sat up. He chuckled, and then asked, “That’s a pretty weird thing to ask over the phone, but heck yeah! I love you, Margaret. But. Uh.” He dropped his voice a little, trying to be playful-serious, even though his heart was beating a thousand times a second, “You’re gonna have to let me get on my knees in front of you and get you a ring, though.”

Erick hadn’t been sure about his feelings until he had said them, but yeah.

Yeah.

He loved Margaret, and yeah.

Marriage!

Yeah.

Erick could upend his life. College wasn’t going that great, but he had a few years under him, and maybe he could complete it later? Yeah. That would work. He could go back to doing… anything at all, really? Maybe something in the mailroom of Margaret’s work. She was doing well, and they’d need to put someone into her current position, wouldn’t they?

Yeah.

This could work!

Margaret giggled on the other end of the phone and wiped away a tear, saying, “I’m joking, but I’m glad to know where you stand.”

From the highest highs, to sudden, abyssal lows, Erick soared and then fell.

Splat.

Erick’s eyes watered, but he blew off that emotion like it wasn’t real, “Okay. Well… Of course I knew you were joking! Ha! Ha… right.”

“How do you feel about kids?”

Like punches coming from every direction, Erick had no idea how to move, or even what to do.

So he was honest.

“Uh. Kids? Yeah. I kinda want kids. I’m probably gonna die of genetic-based cancer or some shit like my sister and mom did, though, so maybe I shouldn’t be making babies. Dad is not doing hot, either, but at least I got him to go to the doctor. Hopefully it turns out to be nothing. How do you feel about adoption?” Erick smiled. “We could get a pair or trio of—”

Margaret hung up.

“… Margaret?”

Erick stared at the phone in his hands. There was no dial tone, so maybe she was still there?

He held up the phone again, softly asking, “… Margaret? Are you—”

The phone started whining.

Erick hung up.

He laid in the bed, unsure of anything anymore.

– –

Erick watched Young Erick from four states over—

“Sir?” asked Erick’s lawyer. “If you don’t want to do this, then we shouldn’t do this.”

Erick looked at his lawyer, and focused on himself, and his own plans, as he said, “I had a scare the other day. Even the press is talking about it. I was asleep before now, but I woke up. I don’t want to go to hell so I’m changing my ways.”

Erick was currently pretending to be a billionaire that died… Well. More like ‘been murdered’. It certainly wasn’t how Erick remembered this happening, but he had only ever heard the story from the press. Now, he was an insider to the tale, and he knew a lot more than anyone else would ever know.

Once upon a time, Young Erick had read about a billionaire that changed his ways after a close call with death in the Bahamas. That story had inspired Young Erick to know that people can change. And so, Current Erick went to go see the incident that had once inspired him.

Under the waters of the Bahamas, the billionaire went fishing with a harpoon, aiming to kill and fry up some angelfish, just because some locals had told them they were too beautiful to hunt and that they didn’t taste good anyway. That harpoon had failed in his hands and ended up somehow backfiring, right into the billionaire’s air tubes. The guy had died drowning to a few cupfulls of water.

The people on scene didn’t even notice he was dead. They weren’t looking. They hated their boss, and for good reason. Oh, sure, they’d check on him soon, but until then, Erick had a decision to make that he never expected to have to make.

To Erick’s perspective, Malevolence had flickered Red under the water, causing the malfunction in the first place. Sometimes Malevolence just did that. It just killed people.

Most of the time, Erick stopped it.

Sometimes he stepped backward in time and stopped it more easily.

Erick didn’t stop the Red this time, because he could already See what was going to happen.

If the guy went back home after experiencing nothing wrong with this trip, nothing would change. If Erick saved the guy after he started drowning, then he would fire some maintenance crew and then sue a few different people into oblivion.

But if Erick stepped into this vacancy of life…

The guy was dead, and yet, the guy would return from his fishing trip a changed man, but it wouldn’t be the guy at all. It would be Erick. The guy’s big change of heart was a big story that had inspired Erick, and now Erick would be his own inspiration, though he wouldn’t know that for a very long time; not until today.

If Erick hadn’t stepped in, and just let the guy be dead, then the guy’s money would have gone into ten different organizations, each of which were poised to fuck over the world in a myriad of ways, mostly through funding rather evil lobbying efforts against equality and a bunch of hate groups that had been a part of the billionaire’s whole life. And that wasn’t going to happen. Not on Erick’s watch.

And so Erick had stepped into the billionaire’s life.

That old asshole was both dead and feeding the fishes due to his own bad luck. The bastard didn’t deserve the good public memory that Erick was going to give him, but he was going to get that good public memory anyway.

The lawyer said, “I don’t believe that you actually want this, though, sir. Perhaps we should wait a month and see if you—”

“You can stop right there.” Erick said, “I am quite alright. And yes, I do want to fund those cancer and disease research programs. Take all the money out of that propagandist news fund and move it around, and if you cannot do that, then perhaps I should be getting new lawyers. Let’s defund those lobbying efforts, too. Redistribute that toward solar power and other stuff like that.”

Erick might not have been this guy, but he was still the Apparent King, and it was rather easy to adjust his countenance to quell all opposition. The lawyer and the financial guy both started sweating.

“At— at once, sir—”

The doors banged open and in strode a man in his 60s —the billionaire’s son— roaring, “What the fuck are you doing, father?! That’s my company you’re fucking over!”

Erick said, “I am doing the right thing, and I don’t give a fuck about your company, because I’ve seen what your company does, and it is horrible. Now sit your ass down, and if you can adjust yourself to doing good in this world and you can prove that you’d actually do those things, then I’ll keep you in the will.”

The billionaire’s son glared, saying, “I have worked hard for…”

The son explained himself, all the while displaying a lot of anger and fury.

Erick listened.

And then Erick did what he wanted to do, anyway. Over the next few days, Erick did some politicking and dynasty shaping, casting down the firstborn and raising up a few daughters and sons that were further down the inheritance line, but who had much better morals. The firstborn would come around eventually, but it would take a while. Erick was changing the world in a deep, fundamental way, into what it had been changed into during Erick’s own timeline.

Erick was saving a lot of people, left, right, and center…

But some guys didn’t deserve saving.

At least not yet.

Those people went into the bigger plans, that Erick would eventually get around to.

– – – –

1998, January 20th:

Young Erick was having a birthday party with some friends, but his mind was still on Margaret, so when George arrived at the party, Erick was not prepared to welcome him. Rapidly, out of Erick’s sight, people started talking about how George had HIV. Erick had not been able to step in in time, to tell people to stop being jerks. The party died as an HIV scare went through the entire group. George left. Everyone left.

And then Erick sat on a stool in his room. A cake with candles held to the side, on a foldout table. The candles remained unlit. The booze was unopened.

It was, perhaps, his worst birthday party ever.

It was also Jane’s birthday, but Young Erick didn’t know that.

– –

Erick was in ‘his’ office, signing papers, only a fraction of his attention on his surroundings, on the opulence of his view of Central Park, and on the secretaries and otherwise outside his office, rearranging everything to suit their boss’s new needs. Soon, the shareholders would be on him, and then the government would be coming after him, too. He was changing too much, moving too much around. And yet, Erick could and would outmaneuver them all, using a fraction of his true power.

Mostly, he was watching Young Erick have a crisis, and also Margaret in a hospital on the other side of the country, for Jane was being born at that very moment, the Malevolence in Margaret flowing into—

The world began to thin.

A Future Erick walked into his office without preamble, saying, “Hey. I’ll take over from here. You should watch that stuff more closely and then do what you need to do.”

Current Erick had already expected to need to show up personally to the birth of his daughter at some point in time, and it appeared that he would finally get to do that. Erick stood from his desk, and said, “Thanks.”

Future Erick looked like he had a whole lot he wanted to say, but he chose not to say it. He simply nodded.

Erick decided to leave that as it was.

He Stepped away and the Future Erick shifted into the shape of the billionaire.

The billionaire’s secretary walked into the open doorway just in time to see the Older Erick looking like her boss. She paused, then said, “Sorry. I thought I heard… Nevermind.”

Older Erick said, “I’m going to do another shakeup. Call the lawyers, and my niece Deborah; the really weird one. I believe she has that Witch Coven group happening this weekend, and I want to attend.”

The secretary had absolutely no fucking clue what to make of that, but her ever-more-eccentric boss was just being his usual self, and so she said, “At once.”

– – – –

At a hospital in California, Erick stepped out of a janitor’s closet, pulling a cart of cleaning supplies. The smells of hospitals hadn’t really changed in Erick’s entire lifetime. The air was clean and smelled of disinfectant, and it was cold; all the better to inhibit bacteria development. In this part of the hospital, the air was also filled with the sounds of babies wailing and mothers grunting and doctors fussing. Some woman was about to die three doors down, about two hours after giving birth, because she was having a massive internal bleed that no one caught, and that no one would catch. Erick fixed that complication as he walked down the hall.

He fixed about 387 complications while he was there, and then he focused on the reason he was here.

The delivery center was two walls beyond his right side. Erick saw everything happening over there, as it was happening. Margaret was on the table, dilated wide, the doctor telling her to push. Margaret screamed—

The world thinned, as Another Erick stepped out from behind a counter on the other side of Jane’s birthing room, outside of the room. A lot of things happened, including several more Ericks stepping out of the walls here and there, some of them yelling, trying to stop the Erick closest to Jane from interfering, but other Ericks stepped in the way of those yelling ones, and shut them up, telling them to stop it.

Erick wasn’t sure what was going on, but he solidified the space around Jane’s birth, just like the Other Erick closest to her was doing. The multitude of Erick’s fighting to interfere or stop the interference faded away, back to whenever they came from. What were they trying to stop? Erick wasn’t sure, but he saw what he would have done in this moment, where his Lightning Path flickered in ten million different directions. He would have erased the Malevolence happening between mother and dying daughter, to save them both. But he wasn’t in position to do that. Future Erick was, and Future Erick probably knew more about what needed to be done than Current Erick.

Jane’s soul was barely there.

She was going to be born dead if she wasn’t born and saved soon.

Erick watched as Future Erick stepped into the light near the doctor, near Margaret, and, unseen and unfelt by all the people there, he reached out, and he waited for the moment to act.

Jane came out in a flush of body fluids. Margaret screamed and then cried in relief. The doctor cheered. Erick barely heard that; he only had eyes for Jane’s tiny, shriveled purple body. He only had ears, listening to the absence of breath and cry. But he sensed the thread of Malevolence that connected her to Margaret, through the umbilical cord. That thread held Jane’s soul together. It was the only thing holding her soul together.

And then the doctor said, “A beautiful baby girl!”

Margaret, half lulled into relief, suddenly gasped, her eyes going wide, her mouth turning into a deep frown as she yelled, “A girl?! It can’t be a girl! Not a girl!”

The other people in the room thought the mother was hysterical and worried and not really meaning what she was saying. Margaret meant every word, and a million more hateful words besides. Margaret was too tired to know that she should not be speaking so openly, though. She was too tired to see the doctor’s frown behind his mask, to see how the nurses who took Jane, trying to wake her up, had no idea what to make of Margaret, but they did not like her at all.

None of them saw how Margaret’s words echoed in her Malevolent soul, causing a cascading failure-to-thrive to shoot down Jane’s umbilical cord, into her body. Margaret had made a curse without meaning to, and then the doctor cut the cord, sealing the curse into Jane like a Malevolent tumor, her entire, barely-there soul turning Malevolent, and Red.

That Red curse became Jane’s entire soul.

And then Future Erick was there.

While the nurses fussed over Jane, trying to wake her up, Other Erick wove magic, but it was not Benevolence at all. Jane was Jane, and also Malevolence, and Benevolence would have killed her. So Future Erick’s Benevolence turned from iridescent white to shadowy, sparking Red, and it began to touch Jane, to pull at the threads of Malevolence in her soul, to undo the curse while it was still young—

Current Erick almost rushed the man. He almost stopped him. He wanted to, but he didn’t know enough, and—

—Jane’s tiny soul flexed to strength, the Red clearing away like a clot falling apart, revealing a simple soul of dust and light, like everyone else in the room.

Future Erick locked eyes with Current Erick, three walls away, and said, “Good luck learning how to do that. The Red will try to worm into you. Don’t let it.”

Future Erick stepped away.

Erick, as the janitor, stood in the hall outside of the delivery rooms, listening to the cries of Jane for a little while longer, while trying to ignore the cries of Margaret, and her soft, hate-filled words about how her father wouldn’t accept a girl granddaughter. By now, the doctor and nurses actually believed her when she said she didn’t want a girl. It was wrong. It was evil of her.

But the nurses and doctor had seen similar things in their life. Perhaps not as bad as with Margaret, who had come into the hospital alone to give birth. But they had seen some shit.

Shit like that was just a part of humanity.

Young Erick, bemoaning his bad birthday party half a country away, didn’t know it at the time, but Margaret’s job that she had taken and gotten fired from was a job from her very rich father, not some cousin’s simple boss, and that as soon as he found out Margaret was pregnant, he had given her some ultimatums. None of that excused anything she had done, but she was just a young woman in a bad situation, trying to do what was best for herself, without knowing how to do that without hurting others.

Young Erick never blamed Margaret for her decisions except for at his darkest points, and those were still years away.

What mattered to Current Erick, and what would always matter to Erick, was that Jane was alive. She was whole. She had soul damage, but it would heal.

And that was good enough.

Erick stepped away, casting himself through time.

He needed to learn how to do whatever Future Erick had done to save Jane.

– – – –

Erick Flatt, [75-ish] [Current Location: Layer 99,081; Earth, year 1541]

It took Erick three days to find a large collection of Malevolence upon Earth, in this year where most of his actions wouldn’t be affecting anyone at all in the future. He was also a good infinity of slices of layers away from Erick’s Earth, so whatever he did here probably wouldn’t affect there, at all.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

… It probably would affect Young Erick’s slice of Infinity, considering Malevolence wormed through Infinity all the time, but Erick needed to take that risk. Even aside from Jane being born with Malevolence problems, it was quite possible that Erick’s experiments with the Red stuff would allow Jane to exist in the first place. And once he figured out this shit, then it would be easier to undo it later.

Probably.

That was Erick’s rationale for touching this shit, anyway.

The collection of separated Malevolence he found was on a tiny island shaped like a fishhook, when seen from high, high above. It was the island of Bermuda, though it would only be called that next century, and a slice of Infinity away. This particular part of Infinity was nearly completely devoid of people, so it made this version of Earth a good place to begin.

Erick stepped out onto a sandy beach and plucked a dirty glass bottle out of the waves, where it had been half-buried in the surf. The bottle was corked and waxed, but it was also adorned with barnacles and the insides were blackened mush. Whatever letters existed inside did not exist anymore, but Malevolence still clung to the putrid contents of the bottle like a Red poison.

Erick wondered if the letter was from some person tainted with Malevolence, or if it was from Nothanganathor himself, sent to Erick through Establishment. A lot of people passed Malevolence around like a curse, because it was easy for them to do so, because Malevolence didn’t dissipate in a manaless atmosphere like most mana did.

Which had some implications that Erick was following in Nothanganathor’s footsteps again.

Which was. You know. Ick.

Assuming no direct Nothaganathor involvement… Was this letter from someone who strongly cursed someone else, and they wanted this letter to get to them, to curse that person? Or was it the other way around, and the person who the letter was to didn’t want to receive the letter, so it got waylaid onto Bermuda? Erick suspected the second was most likely. He had some good guesses as to how Malevolence worked when outside of Nothanganathor’s control, but he hadn’t done any actual experiments himself.

The old Erick would have tried to reconstruct the letter, to figure out what it had said, and where it was going to. Erick didn’t care for that impetus right now. Nothanganathor was corruptive, even if he wasn’t actually corruptive, and so there was no point in reading this letter. So Erick gripped the Malevolent contents of the bottle and held onto them, pulling them out of the glass—

The Malevolence struggled and almost dissipated, but Erick flowed resons through his aura, into the Malevolence, to hold it there, to tell it that he wanted to learn how to use it.

The Malevolence struggled harder to get away.

At least it wasn’t Nothanganthor’s direct Malevolence. If that were the case, then it would have tried to meld with Erick directly, to influence him in whatever ways Nothanganathor desired. But, no; it tried to escape… Hmm. Erick had a thought. Was it trying to escape because it realized that Erick would try to use it against Nothanganathor?

No.

That was overthinking it.

Erick commanded the Malevolence, “You will bend to my will.”

The bunch of Red Sparks stilled, and then they sunk into Erick’s aura—

Erick almost vomited, such was his first metaphysical taste of Malevolence. It was like swallowing pure putrescence. Like Erick was human again, and seeing a mirror in a dark room and seeing a terrible reflection of himself, and feeling a rising heat that made him want to kill, kill, kill the impostor. It was like watching Margaret hate Jane, the moment she was born, and feeling an overriding need to hurt Margaret in order to make her feel the pain she was making others feel—

No.

That hadn’t happened.

The Red had infected him that fast, eh?

Erick pushed away at the Red and his soul cleared from the center outward.

Red splashed into the world all around him as Erick expelled a small nova of the stuff. It had already infected him that badly, in that little amount of time, that now all the world around Erick was filled with Red, and now the Red rained down upon everything.

Erick blasted the land with Benevolence and got rid of most of the problem, but some of it managed to get away, into Elsewhere, because of course it did. That shit spread like poison.

“Fuck,” Erick said, scowling at the blasted sand and trees. The ocean rapidly refilled the hole Erick had made, and Erick floated over to the part of the beach that was still existent. He settled down and grabbed a Red-infused rock, telling the rock, “Don’t do that again.”

Now that Erick understood Malevolence a little, when it slipped into his soul and he felt it try to do its thing, Erick pushed back on those feelings, cordoning the Red to the rim of his power. Once that was achieved, Erick began playing around with the stuff. He started, as always, with the basics, twisting his aura into a packet of power that would deliver a strike against a distant target.

[Malevolence Bolt].

A bright Red strike of lightning arced from his aura, impacting a tree. The initial damage was almost nothing at all, but the Malevolence did not dissipate like normal. It sank into the tree, into the very heartwood at the center, where it infected the fruiting bodies at the top. This was some sort of berry tree, and those berries turned Red with Malevolence, as they swelled to fullness. It was not a [Grow] spell, but it acted sort of like that…

“Are those fucking strawberries?”

It was a goddamned strawberry tree, which Erick was absolutely certain did not exist in this year of our lord, 1541, on this here island chain of Bermuda, in the middle of the Atlantic-fucking-ocean. But… Erick liked strawberries? So the tree made strawberries? Maybe?

With a new theory in hand, Erick thought of coconuts and shot another [Malevolence Bolt] at the tree.

The strawberries turned into coconuts.

“Holy shit. No wonder people were drawn to use Malevolence all the fucking time. What the fuck??”

Erick threw another [Malevolence Bolt] at the tree, thinking about cheesecake—

The tree started spilling out complex fats and carbs from holes in its upper branches, like some sort of white pus falling out of the places where the fruits had been, and then the tree died. It died fast, almost shriveling in front of Erick, and then it actually did shrivel and curl, dropping its leaves to the ground in a rush of fallen life. It had tried to do more than it was capable of doing, and so, it had perished.

Erick felt dirty about that, and yet, this was fine? Sure, this was fine. Malevolence looked to be truly use… ful…

Erick looked into his soul, and found the Malevolence trying to infiltrate again. Erick had somehow dulled his Benevolence sense to allow himself to work with Malevolence, and that had allowed another infection. Once again, Erick pulsed with power, throwing the Malevolence out of his body, and then cleansing the land of everything he could before the Red got away.

He continued to experiment with Malevolence, but he was even more careful as he went forward with animal trials, and then cursing trials, and then mother-child propagation trials of Malevolence, to see if he could replicate what happened with Jane’s birth. After 5 months of constant vigilance and more than one eruption of Red, Erick managed to replicate the cursing circumstances of Jane’s birth with some bats and with some insects.

A Red-infected bat gave birth to a bat that was fully Red.

A Red-infected spider carried babies on its back that became Red like the mother.

Erick’s first attempt to clean up the Red in the newborn bat was one of Benevolence, to simply wipe out the Red. This, predictably, killed the newborn bat. He had to use Malevolence to undo the curse, obviously. It took Erick another 4 attempts to accomplish that, and by then he was more than done with Malevolence, and Erick had learned how to Erase things with the stuff, too.