John virtually entered what seemed to be the command room simulation overwatching his stay in this Realm so far. "Hey everyone, I'm baAACK!"

Grace hugged the DICKENS out of him! "Oh my Lord I missed you SO MUCH! And you were so CUTE with your little adopted granddaughter out there, we took SO MANY pictures and we've been secretly hacking servers and hard drives out there to grab baby photos of you both and…"

…COULD John escape this soft squishy hell?

Yes.

Would he?

No. He missed Grace too. "Mrmph murphil."

His sister chuckled. "You're going to have to let him breathe at some point, Grace."

"NEVER!"

Jessica grinned at his distress/happiness and coughed. "Right, just keep it down a little while I catch John up on the shitshow this whole test trip has turned into. Alright?"

The angelic woman pulled him into a chair and sat in his lap, but seemed happy to ignore everything else… Which was just a tad distracting, but at least his mouth was free to talk again. "Temptation is still out there?"

His sister nodded. "Both her and my agents are having trouble tracking this 'Mister Sinister' down, but I'm pretty sure I know why… So I'll cover that after we talk about the madness we went through on this test run."

Fair enough. "How did that fucker get past ALL our security and counter measures so smoothly? Especially with you all basically living in my electronics and surveillance systems?"

Jessica huffed as she began choosing data screens to display. "Basically our anonymous insertion protocol failed critically. When you picked this Realm to visit, the Realm fully noticed immediately and began nudging things to take advantage of us."

The list of people he could have been came up one more time, along with even larger tables of data. "From what I've been able to tell, ALL these people were or recently were annoyances to whatever passes for the Realm's 'guiding force'. Not sure if this entire place is alive technically, or sapient, but it wanted these people dead or at least hindered for various reasons… My agents are still investigating them all, but none of them are good people."

Grace hummed into his neck. "We already know a couple of them were likely being used like Jeremiah Wickles had been, though there's no clear evidence who was pulling THEIR strings."

His sister nodded. "Anyway, most of the chaos was being nudged by the Realm after it directly focused on YOU in the world. People working against you had bad luck and happenstance, those with neutral or even aligned goals managed to get lucky breaks and anonymous donations and such…"

Grace grumbled. "And we're pretty sure that SINNER got in through all your defenses because the Realm wanted you to smash the heathen."

Jessica pointed at her. "Exactly. The man managed to dodge cameras no one on site knew about, miss checkpoints that should have been on duty but suddenly needed a break or whatever, hardware malfunctioned as he got closer that would have set off alerts… Reality itself was HELPING him throw himself at you for you to take care of him."

John considered that… And didn't feel all that salty about it. "I'll be honest, he didn't taste great but I'm glad to have a good target to smash without feeling morally bad about it. Once Temptation finds his real body, I mean."

Grace grumbled. "Except she probably WON'T find him."

He couldn't help but tense up. "I'm sorry, what?"

Grace hugged him tighter. "It's the Realm again. Not only is it currently making ALL sorts of trouble for that man, trouble which also is 'coincidentally' closing off leads that my sister is tracing at the moment, but your sister noticed that this entire scenario is ALSO being used to set off OTHER plans and plots like dominoes…"

Jessica grumbled. "Yep, the Realm is using the bastard as a catspaw or unknowing minion now. Having you scare him shitless makes him VERY easy to manipulate, from what Temptation could tell before more and more setbacks are nearly making her tracking attempts impossible."

Well shit. "Are ALL Realms this active and aware?"

The woman cuddling in his lap sighed. "No idea. All our previous Transfers were done without working modules, and probably SHOULDN'T have worked at all… And Realms normally wouldn't or couldn't focus on one tiny fragment of an influence like us."

Jessica grumbled. "Except the new module basically shouted in the damned thing's ear, saying 'DO NOT MIND US WE BE PASSING THROUGH' while wearing bright neon 'camouflage' and waving spotlights over a huge sign that said 'IGNORE ME I AM NOT SUSPICIOUS'."

Grace winced. "It was our FIRST time using it! I fixed that issue, didn't I? It shouldn't happen next time!"

John on the other hand was mentally reviewing other issues. "What about my integration itself? I was basically forced to be a passenger unless my new Body was high or near death. Not much of an 'insert' if I spend my whole time sleeping through the damned thing."

Jessica nodded. "Next time the Body will basically be transformed into a Soul puppet. That way it can keep all the required brain matter that's expected from the locals but not actually influence you directly, as your Soul will still be able to direct everything while accessing the Body's memories."

Next time, huh? "What happened THIS time? Did we resurrect Jeremiah Wickles? Or did I merge with him? Things got very confusing in the middle somewhere."

Grace pulled up schematics. "Not clear, exactly. Part of the problem is that your System is VERY good at handling odd setups, like your backup Soul hive network and Mind pattern duplication repositories. When your new Soul slotted into Jeremiah Wickles, it treated his original Soul as a 'prior backup' and just kept tabs on it as it passed through the afterlife process… It's still giving us VERY odd data, or at least it was until you both separated and ran the decoupling modules."

Eww. "It's not still connected to me, is it?"

She shook her head. "No my Lord, when you 'separated' from Jeremiah Wickles, the connection passed back to him instead. There is some sort of conceptual connection between you two now, but I'm updating the separation modules to prevent that sort of issue in the future unless you both WANT to keep in contact."

Hmm… He could work with that. "Let's not sever the link for now, I'm going to treat him like my own grandpa and keep annoying him with letters and postcards and stuff when we move on. Besides, I think he LIKES being a grumpy old bastard… Or I did? I do? Like, not ALL the time, but once in a while it feels GOOD to rant about how kids don't respect the sacrifices we've gone through to support their dreams and compensate for their setbacks."

Jessica sighed in her chair. "My brother is his own grandpa… And mine? Maybe? Damn, our family is growing even more bizarre." She accepted a report from one of her agents and hummed. "Temptation will likely have to give up the hunt in a few more hours, another one of Mister Sinister's safe houses 'accidentally' set off the self-destruct sequence and she's running out of leads."

John hugged Grace tighter. "She's staying safe, right?" Not that much could harm his girl, not with his other security modules at least performing somewhat up to expectations.

His sister nodded. "Safe, but more and more enraged. These last few traces didn't blow up until AFTER she decided to investigate them in person… I think the Realm might be teasing her at this point. We probably can't stay here much longer, especially since you separated from your elder half and lost his use to 'integrate' into this place."

He snorted. "Not that using a local actually WORKED for any sort of coverage or secrecy."

Grace hugged him closer. "No, my Lord, it DID work, and splendidly at that! But… You'd already exposed yourself during the insertion process. When the Realm KNOWS who you are before you even arrive, it sort of undermines and invalidates any other attempts we made at being unseen."

….Fair enough. "Not sure I'm going to try insertion like this again any time soon then. At LEAST not until we can confirm I won't just become Fate's playing every time I show up."

Jessica hummed as she passed out commands to her agents. "This isn't as simple as some entity like Fate or Death stepping in, you weren't being led to accomplish some single cause or goal or plan. It was more like reality itself just keeps hurling quest markers at you, to the point where ANY action is accomplishing SOME sort of goal, whether you were aware of the impact of your actions or not."

Grace nodded. "Even if you had stayed in your hospital bed doing nothing, THAT would have triggered some paranoid bastards into thinking you were up to something nefarious and THAT would have set off even further chaos as they all bounced off each other."

His sister pointed at the girl in his arms! "Exactly! The actual Incarnation method should work fine if we can just avoid… You know, your mind being overwhelmed with organic brain memories and reality itself fangirling all over your everything. Also, we need to set up better safety measures in the Undercover modules so you won't be forced to watch people suffer just to 'enhance the believability of the disguise'."

John felt himself try to snarl. "We ALSO need to make sure no module can ever PREVENT you girls from being ALLOWED to help me in the name of 'security'. That was absolute bullshit."

His sister winced. "Yeah, that wasn't so much a malfunction as it was a design flaw. We were worried about Temptation sneaking into your bed with unfortunate timing or Grace secretly opening up a church of worship in your name without considering the consequences when some of those self imposed suggestions were included…"

Grace was blushing. "But we're fixing all that! And all the other stuff and other things that we WILL NOT mention to our Lord, right my Lady?"

Jessica grinned with a teasing smirk… And then sighed when Grace pouted at her. "Fine, I suppose I don't need to bring up some of the arguments you two had when we were configuring all this mess. Not yet at least." "My Laaaady, noooo!" "Anyway, until we see whether or not the Realm itself has decided that grandpa out there is the real you or not it would be best to stay in here with us."

John squeezed the woman in his arms and relaxed. "Sounds like a plan. What should we do about ACK!"

"GRACE! You didn't tell me MASTER was back!" "Mrmph murphil!" "I love you too Master!" "Don't try to push me off, I need more time with my Lord!" "Wasted time if you ask me, look! He's still wearing pants!" "Aaai!?" "Mrmph murphil!?" "Just ignore the Mistress, she's kinky enough to not give us shit about this sort of thing." "Sister, you can't just do something like this in PUBLIC!" "Mrmph murphil?" "Oooh, good point! I'm MORE than happy to ravish… I mean, uh, to bring all three of us somewhere a bit more private. System, load up server instance [Sex_Dungeon_Toys_12b_data] and transfer us over!" "You've made MORE of those things!?" "Mrmph!?" "Bye mistress! Don't wait up!"

And they left his sister behind.

John… John really shouldn't have left Temptation alone for this long, apparently.

"Now who's ready to make some impulsive and erotic decisions about wearing any clothing!?" "Sister!" "Oh, we have a volunteer!" "SISTER!"

Oh my.

~~~Pocket System~~~

Jessica blinked at the now mostly empty command center simulation. "System? How long has she had something like this planned?"

[[User Temptation has established the 'FuckThatItIsNowTime' protocol nine days, eleven hours, twenty two minutes and eleven seconds ago while designating activation to be undocumented.]]

Oh dear. "Are they going to be gone for very long? We still need to go over all these System modules and start fixing them all. Not to mention all the configuration alterations that are needed."

[[Simulation of [Sex_Dungeon_Toys_12b_data] is locked down from external interaction or alteration for the next 48 hours.]]

…Well alright then. "Um, guess I'll just get started on this stuff on my own first then… And probably should update the Agents assigned for grandpa's safety, just in case."

[[HOST incarnation 'Jeremiah Wickles', designated 'Grandpa', is under ongoing monitoring as per modules S1588231, S1588232, S1588233…]]

She snorted. "Maybe, but my Agents offer better support and overwatch in my opinion, even if they are only limited to Soul connected levels of reality. Agent P22, get some people on that for me, will you?" "Yes Ma'am!"

Good. "Let me know if anything comes up. Dismissed."

Now… Sigh, now she had to start reviewing all these stupid modules. Alone, since the Agents were forbidden from getting involved with this mess for System security reasons... Damn it.