Jessica checked on her brother again… As he peacefully snored away. "System, how long will it take him to wake up?"

[[Current estimated time till integration completes: 14 hours, 3 minutes, 22 seconds.]]

She sighed. Well, that felt like forever… But the Realm was distracted with all the ongoing chaos outside (To the delight of the zombie armies, apparently), so they had time to spare thankfully.

[[...Full recovery from accelerated integration after HOST awakens is estimated to require 18 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes, 33 seconds. This estimate is subject to change depending on actions of HOST before and during followup recovery process.]]

…She must have not heard that. "What went wrong? I was sure we triple checked the security settings for the integration module… For ALL the modules!"

[[Security settings overridden for integration by HOST.]]

What!? "WHY!?"

[[HOST declared original integration procedure's estimated completion time to be unacceptable.]]

Oh for pete's sake… "Both I AND the girls would rather wait a few days than have him hurt himself to avoid waiting a bit, thank you very much."

[[Users would have been required to wait 301.3 years, 1 month, 13 days, 2 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 seconds for HOST to awaken before adjustment.]]

…Oh. "That… That is much longer than a week or so."

[[Confirmed.]]

She glanced at her slumbering sibling. "But he WILL recover? No side effects or issues?"

[[HOST was prevented from accelerating the integration process to a non-reversible degree.]]

…Thank god. "Can we do anything to help?"

[[The integration module was not developed with consideration of more than 100 instances of HOST being provided for processing. Module has adapted to handle the unexpected processing load for HOST'S numerous instances, but the adapted code requires refinement, enhancement, and optimization.]]

Jessica nodded. "I'll pull the girls in on this too… It won't speed up THIS process though, right?"

[[Confirmed. Ongoing Integration process is locked to prevent any further complications with HOST recovery. Any improvements or optimizations will only benefit HOST in future integrations.]]

…Still better than nothing. "I'll let them know… And please tell me if anything happens with my brother while we are working on that."

[[Confirmed.]]

She glanced at her snoring sibling… And turned to get started.

Right, let's go make sure this sort of thing won't happen in the future.

~~~Pocket System~~~

[[Three. Two… HOST is now fully awake and undergoing second recovery stage.]]

Mewha? "Huh?" "MASTER!" "MY LORD!" "ACK!"

Unexpected smushed snuggles! EEH!? Oh… Damn it, they were close to crying. "Hey girls, I missed you both…"

They both just continued to act as living blankets as his sister sat by his bedside. "We were worried, John. Are you alright?"

He held back a wince. Nope, he wasn't 'alright', not by a longshot. "I will be… I had to accelerate the integration process a bit, so I will need time to fully recover."

[[Full recovery from accelerated integration after HOST awakens is now estimated to require 18 days, 3 hours, 12 minutes, 22 seconds. This estimate is subject to change depending on actions of HOST during followup recovery process.]]

…Thank you VERY much for that System. Sheesh. "Like I said, I'll be better eventually. What did I miss while I was out?"

Jessica leaned back in her chair. "Well, Reality got so exasperated by the chaos you caused on your way out that it already sent you a letter… Somehow. Temptation still isn't sure how you connected the Concept of a mailbox to that afterlife like place you kept visiting, NOR are we clear on how the Realm managed to send information through it… But yeah, we got a letter."

Huh. "Didn't expect that. What did it want to say?"

She snorted. "MOST of the letter was a rant about how unorganized your design process happened to be, followed up by rambling on each new headache the ongoing chaos was going to be to straighten out… But they also wanted to make sure everything was alright. I did respond with your current state and recovery time, which ended up with us exchanging pen pal letters back and forth so I could explain who I was and how I was involved and all that."

Huh. "I'm surprised reality had TIME to do all that."

His sister shrugged. "Turns out they are VERY good at multitasking. And this one is surprisingly compassionate too… Also? A bit of a culinary snob, surprisingly enough."

John tried to free his head from the squish pile unsuccessfully. "What do you mean?"

Jessica nodded towards the angelic woman. "Grace stumbled upon this, actually. See, we can apparently send apple pies to this Realm's mailbox and have reality actually taste it… Somehow. No clue how that works. Grace was stress baking while you were in a healing coma and accidentally sent one of her dishes to the wrong mailing address… You know how she sends baked goods to some of the people we've already met? Right, anyway: Reality likes apple pies. I'm pretty sure that's the MAIN reason they haven't tried to ban you from ever coming back, because we can bribe it with baked goods."

Temptation held up her hand… And black energy SOAKED into the simulation, shoving his sister gently towards the door. "Shh. This is now our time. Talk later."

Then Jessica was gone and John had arms full of responsibilities… Beloved ones. "I'm so sorry I worried you both."

Grace just sniffled, but Temptation hugged tighter. "Blame and stuff later, just… Let us have this for now. Alright?"

Yeah. Alright.

~~~Pocket System~~~

Jessica chuckled as she saw the server instance go into secured mode… And sighed. "Right, I guess I've lost my excuse… Start giving me the reports, please."

And her agents delivered.

An unexpected benefit to having so many SPYRAL agents available? Only a portion of them were field agents. After all, this was a deployment that was to follow her to unknown lands, and thus the talent pool required variety and depth to handle any future issues.

So while THIS Realm didn't require infiltration and exfiltration and so forth, nor all the related paperwork… it DID require something that generated a TON of documents all on its own!

Research.

Almost ALL her teams were now geared to research all the crazy stuff John had stumbled upon in this Realm, and the many agents that normally were out in the field ninja-ing it up? Welp, they were now gofers for the nerdy elite currently dominating the labs.

Examining the solidified spell matrices (plants). Testing the variations of unlife (zombies). Experimenting with totems that somehow could siphon damage away from a being connected with it (equipment). Attempting to decipher the crazy shit John put together (WTF).

Everything was being documented, tested, documented again, retested, documented once more, indexed, compared to other ongoing lab results, documented documented documented!

The massive SECONDARY process of getting all that documentation indexed and then shoved into metrics and pulled into research papers and findings and potential new research topics…

Well, all that required her approval at varied stages. Were these testing conditions acceptable or too immoral? Was this potential data worth more or less investment to study? Was this good enough to work with, or should it get further examined? Now or later? Or both?

And all that was unrelated to her own PERSONAL projects, like ensuring her brother didn't kill himself due to one of his modules being improperly adjusted.

So while John was spending time with his girlfriends, Jessica was going to hopefully catch up a little with the overwhelming mess of reports that had piled up while she had kept an eye on him.

At least this was a USEFUL headache… Already, thanks to the raw data collected by Temptation from John interacting with the Realm, her agents were able to partially crack the whole 'Transform a template into a VERY complicated spell matrix' mystery.

Theoretically, John would be able to convert FUTURE spells they stumbled upon into solid tangible structures too… Even if they'd ALSO be plant like.

Because none of her researchers could figure out WHAT in this whole mess caused the spells to look like plants. And until they could determine where that data was encoded, all future attempts were going to be vegetarian. Vegetable-ian? Planty?

Not that they exactly had a ton of spells to work with just yet aside from the stuff provided locally as examples. But the future potential could be huge! A tree that could cure bruises? A berry bush that generates a magical shield?

The possibilities were fascinating!

…Assuming they could spend more time here to study the local Concepts, Laws, and Powers that ran this Realm.

So best keep on its good side. "Are we still good for pies?"

The agent nodded. "Operation 'Mail Ordered Bribes' is still underway, and the bakery reserves are stockpiled to sufficiently last another three days at current mail transfer rate."

Good. "Make sure the team defending our outgoing mail keeps an eye on Temptation. She nearly got away with mailing out a huge barrel of Rum, and I do NOT want to see a Realm get drunk… Or hiccups." She shivered. "Or a hangover, that would probably kill everyone."

The professional woman winced as well. "They understand the stakes and are on guard, Ma'am."

She nodded… And forced herself to go back to reviewing reports and responding to proposals.

At least the actual data itself was fascinating… Analyzing the zombie animation methods to potentially improve artificial movement and future drone control, studying Sun collection and generation as a potential base for future power modules, studying that impossible lawn grass that could resist explosions and fire and ice while staying beautifully green and gorgeous…

If only it didn't require so many signatures and redundant documental copies.

Eugh. Paperwork.

~~~Pocket System~~~

John stumbled into the conference room, to his sister's amusement.

She smirked. "Everything alright?"

He slumped into a chair. "The only reason I got away without them wearing me out is because they've had almost no sleep while I was out. And they were stressed and worried and… Eugh."

Thank his partially insane Mind that he had accelerated his integration process… If they had both been THIS bad after such a short time frame, the possibility of waiting YEARS would have broken them. "They are both asleep for now, and seem better… But I'm going to have to take things slow and make sure to be there for them while they get over this."

Looking over at his sister and her mountain of paperwork, he sighed. "By the way… Can we talk a bit about what happened to me?"

She put aside some documents. "Sure. Where do you want to start?"

Almost uncontrolled memories of chaos flickered through his head. "Honestly? Everything after I somehow became ALL the flowers. From that moment on, I felt… Drunk? Lost? Confused?"

He considered the options and… "Yes, I felt ALL of that and more. As if every odd thought stream from all my hive Souls and Mind backups were all being followed through at the same time, every momentary distraction became an endless debate and argument… It was a bit much."

John absently began to bounce his leg on the simulated carpet. "There are some bits that overlap, where my memories all reinforce each other… Those are the most clear. Growing. Absorbing Sun… CONSUMING Sun, which I do NOT suggest. Or at least not in those quantities, it tastes and feels amazing but is worse than a sugar rush combined with the strongest drinks I've ever had…"

His eyes blurred out of focus. "No, wait, I've never gotten drunk before… Yes I have? But not yet. Or never? Both, but somewhere else that…"

And then his mind cleared up as certain data sorted itself and some unapproved information was properly deleted from this version of himself. "Point is? Sun is AMAZING and great in small doses."

John pulled up a video clip of his multitude of instances. "THAT was not a small dose."

Jessica couldn't help but chuckle at that. "Yes, and before this we didn't have any limits on how many 'instances' of yourself could be generated within one Realm… I'm really glad we discovered this here, where reality seems to be fondly exasperated at you. If it had happened to me or the girls, we would have broken… Honestly, I'm not sure how you AVOIDED a mental breakdown, from all that I mean."

He shrugged. "Nothing in me to break. I BUILT my existence this way, I'm designed from fundamental principles to exist as a collective of parts and not one contiguous whole in a single timeline. You have to accept certain compromises in your existence to survive outside of everything or beyond specific possibilities… But overall, I'm still happy with how I turned out. All of me, I mean."

She stared at him, into his eyes… Looking for something? But seemed to accept that he was, for SOME definition, 'better'. "As for what you did while 'out of it'... Honestly, I can only give you high level summaries. There were a LOT of you and ALL of you did a LOT of odd things…"

And John listened, enthralled and fascinated and occasionally horrified as he heard a never ending tale of himself saying 'What if I do this?' in every possible way… And then DOING so. With no filters or concept of consequences, with no restrictions or hesitation, with endless energy while high and drunk on raw Sun.

Every tale caused his memories to flicker through THOUSANDS or MILLIONS of related memories, overlapping and merging and conflicting and… Whoo boy.

He sat up, leaned forward, and rested his head on the table. "Is this what 'going on a bender' is like?"

She shrugged. "I mean, I once woke up in the wrong city in my college years after a crazy party… But it can't really compare to you 'accidentally' an entire Realm like this."

John groaned. "Damn it… Reality is going to tease me about this for years, isn't it?"

Jessica smirked. "Probably, since I'm going to be mailing a video of this conversation to them as part of the next apology pie package… Honestly, bro: You are SUPER lucky that the closest thing to this Realm's absolute authority was far too nice and overwhelmingly willing to put up with you instead of just kicking your crazy ass out on the curb."

Oh man! "Just… Let me include an apology note with it too, alright? Damn, this is all so embarrassing…"

She snickered. "And this is BEFORE I show you Temptation's recording… Do you even REMEMBER ranting about whether or not 'Sunny ZZ-Brony' would be transformed into an Alicorn if it ever managed to stumble into the My Little Pony Realm?"

What!? "Nooooo?"

Jessica grinned. "You somehow gave a full presentation. With graphs and charts. While still in the afterlife. Grace had to lock down the multitude of Sun-Johns from accessing the Inventory or Crafting after you somehow pulled THAT off! You sparked a trolling WAR between yourselves!"

He stared at her… And winced as his mind began to provide memories of their endless arguments and hypocritical statements and screaming rage claims and… "It never happened."

She raised an eyebrow.

Nope! "That is my argument. Any evidence to the contrary should be ignored because I was high and drunk and a flower or something…" He coughed. "Speaking of never speaking about this ever again… What's all the paperwork for?"

She flipped through the documents and held up a page. "Research done by SPYRAL agents."

The page in question had an image of a badly drawn cartoon doodle. "What about?"

His sister grinned, wiggling the document. "Mostly about the local magic and stuff, but SOME of it is documenting our attempts of duplicating some of the impossible stuff you achieved while all that 'never happened' was never happening. Too bad it never occurred, or I could share this fascinating stuff with you…?"

…Damn it. "If it is cool enough, I'm willing to compromise down to 'It probably didn't occur'... Alright?"

She chuckled and returned the paper to the pile… "I'm glad you're feeling better, John."

He didn't sniffle. "Thanks, sis."