Wizard of Orario

by Xane Dragon

Harry Dresden is banished from earth thanks to a death curse. When he returns, he finds himself alone in a world that has changed in more ways than one, and few of them good. So, he goes back to his familiar job. He doesn't do parties, love potions, or magic tricks. But he can find people, even when they're lost in a dungeon.

5. Chapter 5

The day after I helped save some girls from a human trafficking ring, I spent most of the day in bed. I was tired, sore from the poor sleeping conditions more than anything else, and had a hard time getting to sleep with the proverbial bomb Syr dropped on me the night before with the fact that Molly might be alive. As Maeve.

That one was going to leave a bad taste in my mouth for months.

When I finally did wake up, I found a stack of books on the floor of my attic room that had several good looking reads, even though some of the titles made me think I was developing dyslexia from trying to translate the English writing when half of it looked like Norse runes trying to be English, and failing miserably. The collection included something that looked like a collection of children's fairy tales, The Original Works of the Brothers Grimm with an actual seal of approval from the Courts of Fae, A Beginner's Guide to Orario that looked like it was also meant for children, and the Illustrated Guide to the Gods of Orario.

The cauldron that I had brewed the potion from the night before was gone. But that was the extent of Syr's housekeeping. If it had been Syr, which was the safe bet with the nearby reading material. It wasn't like whatever was left in the cauldron would be useful beyond the next sunrise. So I didn't mourn the loss.

By the time I got downstairs, washed up, changed, and then went downstairs again, the pub was well into the lunch rush. The girls were running around to deliver orders as families of normal people filled the room. With little choice, I ended up at the bar again, and Mia finally got around to seeing me about five minutes later.

I noticed an absence in the staff thanks to all the time I had to look around. "So, where's the poster girl?"

Mia stopped and frowned at me a little, obviously weighing something. Finally, she dumped a large mug of some red liquid in front of me. "Don't know," the large dwarf told me as she handed me a menu.

"You do know I'm in the know about her, right?" I reminded her before looking at the booklet of food. This, at least, I could read thanks to a bit of practice.

"Then you should know where she's run off to," the woman told me. "Now, you got an order? We're busy and I don't have time to chat."

Before I could say anything, the door burst open with overly dramatic effect and everyone in the room looked over to see what was going on. Although none of them were carrying weapons, it was obviously a group of dungeon delvers. There was the god that looked like a kid with red hair and the nine other people of varying races that included two elves, a dwarf, a pair of very athletic women sporting tan skin that matched Syr's description of amazons as well as another girl with long blonde hair. Then there was the wolf guy, the really short kid with blonde hair, and another guy in the back of the group who was so nondescript I almost forgot he existed by the time I was done sizing up the others.

The god zipped through the pub and landed at the bar with a girlish cry of excitement. "Hey there Mia. Mind if we move the tables together like usual?" It was only after the deity spoke that I realized it was a girl.

Mia frowned at the little goddess. "You know the rules, Loki. No adventures until dinner."

I sat up a little straighter at the familiar name. "Wait," I said before I looked over to the girl without a single hint of a feminine figure. "You're Loki?"

Loki looked over to me and blinked…maybe. It was hard to tell. Her eyes were frozen in a permanent squint. "Uh…yeah," she replied cautiously before grinning. "Are you a fan? Care for an autograph?"

"Uh…no," I replied, a little put off by being so close to a god that caused armageddon in the stories about the viking religion. "It's just…I thought Loki was a guy."

As the goddess stared at me for several seconds, her slanted eyes opened up a little until I could actually see there was something behind them. Then, I heard a barely contained snicker become full-on laughter. The expression of mirth soon had Loki looking away from me and back at the group. "Oh, shut it Tione!"

I looked back at the group to see that one of the amazons, the one with the larger chest, was laughing her butt off before the one next to her, who could have been her twin except for a very small pair of differences between the two, aside from her hairstyle. "Yeah! What's so funny about flat chests? One day, we'll team up and show you all! FLAT CHESTS UNITE!"

The second amazon continued to chat like a union member as the goddess looked back at me with a frown. Loki jumped up on the stool next to me and crouched down like a monkey to give me a glare. "I don't like you."

I frowned back at her. "So the god of lies doesn't like me," I said evenly before something occurred to me. Like I said earlier, I read a lot of Norse mythology because I met Odin. And everything I read said Loki wasn't in the right place. "Wait, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be dead, or tied up in a cave somewhere?"

If I knew about all the Ragnarok stories, then so did the gods. So, why was Loki allowed to roam around like either nothing happened, or nothing was coming? It didn't make sense.

And just like that, the chanting stopped and Loki was looking at me with a much more intense stare. In fact, I saw out of the corner of my eye that his entire group, that outnumbered me by quite a few people I was just realizing, had gone quiet and were giving me odd looks. They weren't hostile, aside from the guy with the pointy dog ears and tail that matched his white hair, he was outright glaring at me.

Mia groaned. "This is why I don't let you people in before dinner. You want to stay, then behave and pay triple adventurer pricing. If you're going to bother customers, get out."

"...sure," Loki replied absently before she walked away from the bar and sat down at the table.

The really short kid with blonde hair gave me a confused look before turning back to the goddess and talking just loud enough for me to hear. "What was that about?"

I turned my head and did my best to tune out the noise. Listening was a skill I had developed without a hint of magic. It was just a natural ability to focus on distant sounds and cut through the noise of a full room. Anyone could do it with enough practice.

"...I'm…not really sure," Loki replied.

"Want me to kick his ass?" a gruff voice asked.

"Yes Bete, I'm sure Loki would love for us to be banned from her favorite restaurant for assaulting someone," a more refined voice told the gruff one. "Now, can we please discuss the upcoming expedition? Everyone went over their gear the night before and made sure everything is in order? I don't want to get halfway there and learn someone forgot their main weapon because we're bringing ones that won't melt from the acid that new type of monster uses."

In a move that surprised nobody, I ordered a meat dish. After getting halfway done with my meal, I found Ryu wandering from table to table, refilling drinks and taking care of bills. Despite what most would have thought, I actually didn't find it odd that a magic wielding adventurer was working a mundane job. I had done plenty of stuff myself before getting my detective license, filling the role of everything from ballroom dance instructor assistant to janitor, so I didn't look down on her or anything.

When she got close, I discreetly waved her down and got her to come over. "Hey Ryu, can I ask you something?"

"You just did," she pointed out evenly.

I gave the elf a tired look. "Okay smart ears, answer me this. Why in the seven hells are you guys just letting Loki run around?" I asked quietly after leaning in closer to her to try and avoid being overheard. "Aren't you guys worried she'll cause Ragnarok?"

Ryu stood there for a moment, then looked over to Loki, who was bothering a strawberry blonde elf in a way I'd call sexual assault if the goddess had been a guy. Then she turned her head back to me. "...what's Ragnarok?"

-Syr-

It had been so long since I dealt with the Guild in person that I had forgotten just how much I hated the bureaucracy of Orario. But, with Allen having gotten involved in the casino incident and me having first hand knowledge, I decided to go to the Guild to handle it myself rather than send my usual proxy. Which had proved to be my most foolish decision in years.

Dealing with everything had put me in a bad mood and left a cramp in my wrist from the massive amount of paperwork that had to be filled out on a table. Jotting down orders all day was so much easier. All the movement was in the shoulder and elbow when writing out a receipt.

Of course, I had managed to get each and every one of the girls involved in the incident, including Anna, a major payout in the seized assets from El Dorado as well as demands for recompense from the country responsible for the business. Whatever Ted had seen in Dresden's soul gaze, plus the threat of the Freya Familia getting involved thanks to Allen's intervention, had the man confess to his collaboration with a small human trafficking ring that involved half a dozen groups of random adventurers from around the city that snatched up pretty girls in various ways. Too many for a single person to abuse though, which meant Ted had friends that enjoyed his hobby.

So, I would need to arrange a search of all the areas where the Guild wasn't allowed to go in. It was going to be a major annoyance if we got caught, though. Which…made me stop and frown as I went through all the future problems that would cause in my head.

Which had me wondering why I wasn't simply throwing the annoying task away altogether. These girls weren't any of my children, and humans died all the time. If I truly wanted to put an end to the sex trade in Orario, I needed to send my familia to lay waste to the nations using the city as a resource for exotic women. Then I would need to install a new leadership that would follow a set of rules I had yet to create, not to mention make sure everyone in the entire conquered country stayed obedient to me.

Having to do all of that would just be too troublesome, and just thinking about it was boring me. I hated being bored. It was the most annoying thing in the world.

That was the end of my desire to rid the world of slavery. While the act annoyed me and made people's souls too ugly to look at, it would just be too much of a bother to go about doing it.

But what about the children in the city? the annoying little voice in the back of my mind seemed to ask. I hated that voice and I hated how it had grown so much louder in the last decade. The gods lived in the mortal realm to experience the interesting existence that mortals had. We weren't their moral arbiters.

After walking up the stairs to the Hostess of Fertility, I stopped myself before going in. Taking a deep breath, I threw all considerations about my moral dilemma to the side. I wasn't some powerful goddess, I was just a carefree waitress without a falna that only needed her nearby friends and family to be happy.

The rest of the world wasn't my concern.

When I went into the little pub, I felt my cares completely melt away as I waved to some of our lunch regulars and took note of how they were doing. They were less interesting than the children that delved into the dungeon, but special in their own ways.

Braun was looking better since he got over the flu a few days ago. He still needed to eat healthier though. I told him as much since he still had his menu and hadn't made an order yet.

Milenda was still just stealing glances and that Storn boy while he ate with the rest of his street cleaning crew. If the flower girl didn't do something soon, he was probably going to end up being taken off the market. Men with steady jobs were usually the first to go among people without falna.

Jillanien looked like she had gotten over the embarrassment of nursing her baby in public. Her husband should be making his way back from the Upper Floors by now if everything was going well. The man liked to start the day much too early to beat the rush.

It was the fifth day in a row that Jolene was missing. While nobody aside from city workers that were assigned to upkeep in our area came into the pub every single day, I usually saw most of our usual customers once a week. I hoped something hadn't happened to her. She was a soothing soul to have around.

Once I got done saying my usual hellos, I got up to the bar and sat down. There was still some tension from the morning meetings, and I let out a sigh when Mia walked up to me, cleaning a mug in a near perfect recreation of the cliche bartender. "I think I'm going to need to take my lunch break before I start work, Mamma Mia."

"Heh, lazy girl. Just showing up to take a break, eh?" she asked with a snort.

When the woman didn't leave, I took a closer look and saw that something was troubling her. Something that I could do something about, unless I missed how her soul was going from deeply hazy to just mildly cloudy and back. "Okay, what is it?" I finally asked after a few seconds.

"What's Ragnarok?"

-Dresden-

I turned to another page in the children's book to very slowly read the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail that he searched for to save his beloved wife. Halfway through, I decided to take a break and shut the thing that read more like a fanfiction version of the original work, or a badly written movie of the same name that had next to nothing to do with the original grail legend. It was good practice to learn my letters, but some of the stories were so far off from what I knew that I couldn't help but wonder how they got so twisted when the gods had been around to hear the original tales.

The book on Orario had been of more use. It told me more about the history of the city than Syr bothered to, along with more detailed information about the various districts and important gods. There were three big gods in the city as far as the book was concerned.

Freya was top dog in the city, with the biggest group that also sported the single most powerful warrior. They had been tackling the tunnels beneath the city for a few years, but had called that to a halt for some reason nobody knew. Because of the sheer size of her familia, she was considered by everyone to be the major military power in the city and was both its first line of defense as well as head of the primary groups which handled abnormal monsters that were considered too dangerous for normal adventurers.

The second group was the Loki Familia. They were the primary group that dealt with dungeon exploration after Freya's group bowed out. Loki had plenty of people working under her, but she concentrated all of her talented people into a single squad to go for quality over quantity. The rest of the group were counted as support staff.

Third on the list was the Ganesha Familia. The identification picture had a guy wearing an elephant mask instead of something Apu from Simpsons hung up in his store. However, I didn't get much more information about them that wasn't covered from what I heard from the girls last night, aside from where their headquarters was located and several branch offices throughout the city that were basically police stations.

By the time I finished reading, I got a very disturbing picture of the city. From what I could tell, while the Guild took care of the city as a whole, they had no real power to enforce their laws and just hoped that everyone accepted their suggestions. The Ganesha family was able to keep a basic level of order, but if someone with enough military force decided to misbehave, there wasn't much the ruling power of the city could do. It was less of a traditional city, and a microcosm of some 30 countries sharing a space that was much too small for egos that belonged to gods.

Hells Bells, disputes between divine groups weren't settled in any type of court. They had a system in place to conduct real military actions against each other outside of Orario. Syr talked about normies not bound to a god not having legal representation, but I could now see she was giving it a very sanitized explanation. What she had meant was that a person who didn't have the military backing to start a mini war to settle disputes couldn't do much but ask someone else for help when someone with super powers came making demands.

It was like the Winter Court all over again, just without Mab to help keep order. Or, a single Mab with just one set of morals. Instead, there were over thirty Mabs and each one had their own ideals, on top of the adventurers that wandered in from outside the city who didn't have a god living in the area to reign them in. Based on what the book said, it was a miracle the place functioned at all.

But, it was a children's book. So I doubted it gave a complete picture.

"Can I not leave you alone for ten minutes?"

Syr's annoyed voice made me turn my head over and readjust myself on the cot so I was sitting on the side instead of with my back laid up against the wall. I caught Syr's head coming up into the attic at the last moment. She had a scowl on her face and looked angry enough to chew rocks.

After last night, I found the sight of her much less menacing. She was still just as powerful as any other deity in the city, and I had no doubts the goddess had several backroom dealings with shady characters since she was hiding herself, but I just couldn't find myself to be nervous about the anger of a girl who helped save over a dozen women from a fate just slightly more preferable to death. Oh, she would rant and rave and probably kick me in the shins, but that was probably about it.

Unfortunately, that made her demands a lot harder to ignore. An evil manipulative creature, I could snark at all day and look for ways around her orders while following them out of fear. A genuinely good person that actually wanted the best for people asking me for a favor was more powerful than any sort of collar.

Not that I was a hundred percent convinced she was an angel in human form. But…she was better than most supernatural things I had dealt with. On top of being my only safe source of income at the moment.

"What're you talking about?" I asked when she got all the way up the ladder stairs.

Syr crossed her arms and glared down at me. "Don't go asking around about things like Armageddon!"

I blinked and had to think about my time downstairs before I realized what she meant. "You mean Ragnarok? I just asked Mia and Ryu if they knew a word," I told her before something more important I had actually made a mental note to ask her about came to mind. "And speaking about that stuff, what is Loki doing running around? Isn't he supposed to cause the whole endless winter thing that signals everyone is supposed to die soon? Or, she, I mean. What's up with the sex change, anyway?"

"Hm? Oh…that," Syr replied before most of her anger faded and she broke eye contact for a few seconds. "So, yes. Back before The End, Loki helped bring about victory for the Outsiders in a roundabout way. Heimdall killed him for it. But, we don't die like mortals and we had a lot of time in Heaven to experiment. Eventually, Loki was reconstructed as one of the test subjects for reviving gods some of us actually wanted to bring back, like Hestia. Obviously, things are a bit different than her original self. On top of the sex change, her personality isn't the same and memories of the time before she died are more akin to someone who watched a movie without paying much attention instead of living through the event itself. There were some problems with her at first. I think she tried to be the old her too much, and it caused a lot of fights. But now that she's down here, Loki focuses more energy on annoying pretty girls and the dungeon than anything else."

Which explained why one of the original Olympians looked like a sixteen year old girl with the actions to match instead of some motherly figure that oversaw hearth and home like she was supposed to be. Even if Hestia had been revived a thousand years ago or more, immortal beings didn't really change. It was the tradeoff for being immortal. If you didn't age, you didn't grow as a person. It was probably also how things that lasted forever dealt with having to live forever.

If something like that tried to go against her nature, it probably wouldn't end up going very well.

There was a moment of silence before Syr looked down to the collected pile of books. Her anger looked to have run its course, and she was back to her usual look of mild annoyance around me. "So, any questions now that you've read a few things?"

I did have some questions, but not because I could barely read a couple of children's books. Now that she showed herself to be somewhat trustworthy, I felt like Syr could give me some real answers about some things that had been bothering me. "Actually, there is something I'm wondering about. When I first came here, I tried to open a portal to the Nevernever. The spirit world," I told Syr after realizing my personal name for the place might just confuse her. "It…didn't go well."

Syr snorted. "I'm surprised the backlash didn't kill you. Most of that plane of reality was flooded by the Outside, remember? Heaven was sealed before it was infected to become our refuge. After the physical plane was destroyed, we salvaged what could be used to rebuild it closer to Heaven while transferring the rest of reality to the Outside to avoid contamination."

I raised an eyebrow. "How sealed off? I've seen things being formed of ectoplasm while in the dungeon."

Ectoplasm was the building material of the spirit world. When it came into this one, it could be shaped freely by force of will to become just about anything, including living tissue. It was why some of the things I saw in the dungeon were born with weapons in their hands.

"Yes," Syr admitted. "But that's magical goo. Stuff that doesn't actually have solid mass can pass the veil with only slightly more trouble than before. For something physical to enter, it requires very special circumstances."

The explanation did very little to make me understand what she was talking about. Especially since, if I was remembering correctly, that wasn't how she described what happened during our first discussion about Armageddon. I rubbed my nose. "Wait, you said the Outside flooded into reality the first time, then reseeded like a flood. Now it sounds more like you flushed everything it touched down the drain. What's with the change?"

"You are aware I'm dumbing down the equivalent to the most complicated physics book ever written to something more simple than See Spot Run, correct?" Syr told me as her voice took on that annoyed edge again. "Something's going to get lost in the process. If you wanted to be told the actual explanation, your brain would run out your ears from the complexity of the language I would need to teach you just so you could grasp the basic concepts of a bare bones explanation. So stop trying to comprehend something that's beyond your little brain to understand. And, what I told you the first time wasn't incorrect. Yes, the Outside pulled back their forces and allowed us to retake ground, but it was ruined beyond saving by that point, so we had to get rid of it!"

I raised my eyebrow. "You seem a little snippy about all this."

Syr snorted. "Well, I'm sorry having to talk about the death of billions and setting back all of reality by untold eons puts me in a bad mood!"

The way she snapped at me had me break eye contact. Syr had a point. To me, the end of all things was a concept I could barely wrap my head around. To her, it was history.

A history with events that were beyond my understanding. I had been in contact with a spirit of the land that had a problem once, and even though the two of us shared a mental connection, it needed a spirit of intellect to explain things to me after dumbing things down so that a creature that was made to collect information could understand. This time around, I didn't get too offended.

It also reminded me that despite her mannerisms, Syr wasn't really human. She just…acted like something that was incredibly close.

So, I stopped with the questions and tried to process what she told me on my own. The key word being: tried.

As far as I understood it, the Nevernever had been infinite. Heaven and all the other afterlives had just been a part of it. If anything, the physical world was the oddity of existence. How could half or more of an unlimited reality be cut off and shoved into…whatever the Outside was. That would mean that the pro-reality side would have lost several galaxies worth of territory to the Outside.

Or, was the Outside just another part of the Spirit World?

But, that went against everything I knew and had been taught by just about every wizard I ever knew.

Syr was right, I just didn't have the ability to comprehend what had happened while I had been out. Trying to do so with my limited knowledge might actually be a little dangerous.

"Anything else?" she asked with a sigh.

I reached down and picked up the book of fairy tales. The newer one, not the book that had a literal seal of approval from Mab. "So, I haven't gotten all the way through. But these stories, it's all spirits this, and spirit that, with very little details about just what they were. It's like you took just about every non-deity magical species and stuck them under the same label."

"Oh, that," Syr replied with a wave of her hand at the detail she obviously considered unimportant. "That's a problem, how?"

My inner magic nerd got a little annoyed. "Because it's inaccurate!" I told her before opening the book to an earlier story than the one I stopped on. "This is clearly a banshee, but in the next story, what is obviously a gnome is called the exact same thing!"

Syr simply raised an eyebrow. "So, you're angry that the current pop culture is dumbing down and falsely depicting supernatural beings of various origins with a cookie cutter? Boo hoo," said the goddess before she sighed and rubbed her head. "I'm not here to listen to you whine about canonically accurate depictions of mythological characters."

Before I could go on my rant, she reached into her dress and pulled out a few pieces of paper to shove them at my face. "While I was dealing with the Guild this morning, I took the opportunity to get your paperwork processed to register you as an adventurer. You'll still need to hand these over to a clerk to complete the process and go through about two days of lectures, but it will keep more questions from coming up when you want to go into the dungeon."

I took the paperwork and frowned at what I could make out before I looked back up at Syr. "What's this god stuff? And who the hell is…" I took a moment to read the name on the paper as best I could. "Resheph?"

"He's an out of town god that Freya clashed with a few months ago," Syr told me in a dismissive manner. "I had to register you under a god that wasn't going to come to Orario. Most of his army was killed, so a deserter showing up in town isn't going to cause any questions. At least, not as many as trying to get into the dungeon without a patron god or accompanying falna. If you get found out as not being in his familia, it can be chalked up to a typo on your status sheet as long as you don't tell everyone the name of your god let them take a look at your back. They may ask, but it's within your rights to refuse."

After slowly re-reading the sheet to make sure I didn't miss anything, I looked down at the book on the floor that gave information about the gods of Orario. Which probably didn't include this guy, so I turned my attention back to the goddess. "But, I don't have any interest in going into the big evil death trap that eats people."

Syr crossed her arms and looked at me stoically. "I thought you planned to get a job finding missing people. Where do you think the majority of your cases are going to send you?" she asked. "Besides, I already started the paperwork, so you can't just stop without raising questions. If you don't do all the follow-up work, they may cancel your registration."

I raised my eyebrow. "Followup work?"

"Despite your high level, on paper at least, you're a new adventurer in Orario. One that's detached from a familia," Syr told me. "That means you still need to attend your beginners lectures, get assigned to an advisor, choose your healthcare plan, and about a dozen other little things. All in all, it'll take about three days for everything to process. Maybe two, since I had them slip all this paperwork into the system already."

A very big part of me just wanted to blow it all off. As strange as my life had gotten since Mab got her claws into me, the annoyances of the modern world like paperwork had more or less been thrown to the side. Well, except that whole thing with jury duty, but that was a special case. The fact that I got jury duty at all, I mean. The case itself was pretty mundane…except for the supernatural involvement.

And the fact the judge somehow knew I was a wizard…

Anyway, I had long since gone my own way from the unvanquishable evil that was bureaucracy. And now, I was being asked to step back into the ring with it. I almost turned it down.

Almost.

I needed information about the world I was in. Syr had been helpful, and she had more or less proven herself to have some very attractive morals with the mess we got into last night, but at the end of the day, she was a goddess. I didn't count out the possibility of her manipulating the hell out of me later on down the line 'for my own good' or other such nonsense.

For the first time since coming to this world, I missed Bob. My old partner knew enough about most things to at least give me an idea of what to do.

I looked back down at the book on fairy tales and blinked. "What about spirits?"

"Didn't we just have this conversation?" Syr asked in a confused way.

The excitement over my genius made me stand up and nearly hit my head on a beam. "No! Spirits! I mean, real spirits! The energy kind that needs a container to keep from disappearing from the world come sunrise. Are they still around?"

Syr gave me a cautious look and took a step back at my sudden energetic burst. "Yes," she said before adding, "except for the day and night cycle. I told you we couldn't get everything right when we put things back together. Certain things were lost when it came to the environment as a whole. Like the cleansing effects of a sunrise, thresholds, and I'm not sure how mystically grounding running water is anymore when it comes to ancient magic like yours. You might want to run some tests."

I found my mind becoming sidetracked by the possibilities of what Syr just casually tossed out into the air. How could thresholds no longer apply? That was one of the fundamental laws of the mystical universe!

Which…broke…

And was put back together by a bunch of supernatural beings who might have been inconvenienced by them…

"Why the slow frown?"

I was brought out of my thoughts by the voice of the little goddess. "Huh?"

"Your face. You had one of those frowns that says 'I should have realized this very bad thing sooner and the world isn't as bright and happy as I thought' kind of frowns on your face," Syr told me as she pointed at my head.

The description she gave put me a little on edge. "That's awfully specific."

Syr simply shrugged at me in response. "I'm trying to make a policy of honesty around you. You're more than paranoid enough thanks to those stupid fairies," the girl told me before giving me an annoyed sigh. "Look, I have work and this has already taken me longer than it should have. Go be a big boy, do your paperwork, and I'll see you later tonight."

Before she could dash off, I gave an embarrassed clearing of my throat. "Um, one more thing. Can I bum some money off you? I might need to buy a few things while in town."

The expression on the goddesses face turned to one of apprehension. "Ugh. You know exactly how to trigger my revulsion of you as a man, Mr Dresden."

-Eina-

I sat at my desk and rubbed my head to stop the oncoming migraine as I looked at the collection of orders on my little section of the much larger desk I shared with five other Guild employees. The source of my latest displeasure was one Bell Carnel. Specifically, his recently reported level up.

Nobody went from level one to level two in just under two months. The previous record holder, Ais Wallenstein, became a level two in a year, with the previous holder before her needing just a little over that. So, when a virtual unknown blew that out of the water by over ten months, red flags were raised. Red flags that were now on my desk, demanding attention in regards to asking Lady Hestia to come in and confirm that Bell had indeed gained a level, to a request that Bell undergo examination to see if his goddess hadn't used some kind of cheat involving her divine power to level him up faster.

The idea that the boy was cheating somehow didn't seem at all plausible. Not that there might be a way to quickly gain the excelia needed to increase one's level, or how cheating even applied to something like that. Maybe I just needed to have him write out a beginners guide to adventuring that would work both as an explanation and help future dungeon explorers.

I didn't think for a second that Bell was lying. The boy was painfully honest and naive. Lying about anything was just beyond him. The few times he had lied to me, like about how deep into the dungeon he went or broken promises about not biting off more than he can chew, Bell had been sweating so much while looking everywhere but my eyes that I had been worried about him getting dehydrated.

My melancholy memories were put to an end when someone held a registration sheet in front of my face. "Hey, if you've got time to daydream, then you can take care of this one too."

I blinked before adjusting my glasses to look up and see who was adding more to my already daunting mountain of work. Sophie was an elf with long silver hair and might have had it out for me. "This one?" I asked before giving the piece of parchment in front of me a cursory look to see what it was. Then I frowned at her. "You're assigning me another adventurer? Do you not see the pile of work I have in front of me?"

Sophie shrugged before setting the paper down on my desk. "Heh, look like I dodged a crossbow bolt with that Bell boy."

As my senior advisor turned to walk away, I contemplated filing a complaint. I wasn't one of those girls that blamed my half-elf heritage on every bad interaction with a pure blood, but Sophie tended to drop her unwanted adventurers on me to the point I couldn't just call it the actions of a lazy superior.

"Okay, let's see what we got here," I mumbled before taking a look at the sheet for a new adventurer. "Harry Dresden. Physical examination, complete. Confirmed level… four?"

I raised an eyebrow. Level four was practically unheard of outside of the dungeon.

Well, there were reports of amazons in Telskyura hitting level five, but methods behind that involved fatal arena combat between Kali's familia members. They killed each other over the years to grow stronger until they were left with just one high level combatant.

A very bad feeling cropped up in my gut, and I put the paper down to open a drawer in my desk to get out my list of known gods before taking up Dresden's paperwork and scanning through it again to find the deity that he had received a grace from. "Resheph," I mumbled to myself before looking to the registry to find the matching god.

What I found told me just why I had been handed this man. Resheph, I read to myself. God of plague, war, sterility, and death. Banned from Orario by order of Freya. Number of familia members, unknown. Familia type, mercenary. Last known location, Kaios Desert.

I felt a disturbing chill run down my spine. Although I didn't pay much attention to the news of what was going on in the outside world these days, there had been a major war going on in the Kaios Desert a few months ago. A mercenary god's familia had been going around killing everyone that crossed their path when one nation hired them to invade another.

It was no wonder Dresden had been pushed off on me. Nobody would have taken this application unless it was forced on them.

And if he's a level four… I gulped and just imagined the mountain of corpses that laid at his feet. It was practically impossible to get past level three outside of the dungeon when they found people most of the time! Anyone who had managed to do it could only be a monster themselves.

-Dresden-

My introduction to the Guild was done by an elf girl that stammered so much when we first met, I had to wonder if she had a speech impediment. Orientation started with a quick tour of the premises, along with an explanation of things that were almost self-explanatory, as well as a brief history of the Guild itself. A history that I already knew bits and pieces of, but was grateful for. Why it was simply called 'The Guild' instead of something more catchy, Eina couldn't answer.

When the gods finally managed to drive most of the monsters back underground, the first deity that descended established the group to help regulate defense of the upper world. It was only over time, as the city grew and various events unfolded that the Guild evolved into the regulatory commission that it was today. Although it didn't have any force of arms to back up its rule, most people accepted the organization's judgements and allowed it to collect taxes to maintain the city. Mostly because it was the first organization to take responsibility for such things and nobody else wanted the job. So, just about everyone did as they were told because if someone didn't, the house of cards that Orario was built on would quickly come crashing down.

The tour wasn't as time consuming as I thought it would be either. Eina showed me around the area I had broken into on my first day on Earth 2. The lighting really helped me notice all of the details I had missed before as Eina gave explanations about everything that was going on in front of me thanks to about half the room being taken up by bureaucrats and guys who belonged in a DnD campaign.

"And these are the traders that will take your magic stones and exchange them for valis," she told me with a nervous smile while holding out the hand to present the teller behind the security bars like some kind of showgirl on a television ad.

Eina tried to move on, but I held out a hand and she froze like a deer caught in the headlights. "How is payment decided? Is it done based on simple weight, or is there a measure of something like purity for minerals?"

I raised an eyebrow as the girl let out a sigh of relief. Was she really that worried about being asked a question? "All exchanges are done based on weight. The larger the stone, the more it's worth. Of course, you aren't required to sell the Guild anything you retrieve in the dungeon and can try dealing with other adventurers yourself. But any export of stones or any materials from the dungeon to another country will face a fee."

Which made sense. The Guild was the premier producer of magical items in the world only because they were the primary source of magical batteries. There were the wild monsters out in the world, but they either weren't easily accessible enough or had the numbers required to provide a stable income. If people could sell the materials they got from the only monster mine in the world to other countries, the governing body of the city would quickly find itself without the needed funds to keep things running.

The exchange area meant for 'drops' was further down, which is where I came up with my first question to ask Syr instead of someone who thought I lived somewhere on this planet for the past several years. Apparently, some monsters left behind very valuable remains that could be sold to anyone in the city. What confused me about this was the fact that monsters left anything behind at all.

I had killed a handful of the things here and there while running for my life during my first day here. So, the magic stones dropping from melting corpses, I didn't question. Any newly initiated wizard could see that it was some kind of crystalized mystical energy. But everything I killed had quickly turned to ectoplasm before my eyes.

Monster 'drops' were the physical remains of the monster that didn't go poof like the rest of the corpse. I suppose that if the magic stone was stuck inside something like a minotaur's horn, that part of its body might remain after the rest of it melted from taking too much damage to fix, but that was just speculation.

"So, what about medical assistance?" I asked.

Eina gave a slight start, then looked around the area. If I had to guess, there was more to the tour, but she was starting to get really nervous. "Oh! Um, that's up a few floors, if you'd like we can use the stairs if the elevator isn't to your liking. Most newcomers are nervous about a room that moves on its own."

I sighed and rubbed my head before the reason for the girl's nervousness became apparent. It made me a little sympathetic, but why in the hell did I have to get saddled with a complete newbie who was obviously experiencing her first day on the job?

-Dresden-

It was almost sunset by the time I left the tower of Babel, a name that made me groan by the way. The Eina girl was nice enough, but I doubted she would last the year if she nearly jumped out of her skin every time I asked a question. Still, she had given me directions to the appropriate craftsmen so that I could get what I needed with the funds Syr provided now that I knew the full price and the goddess brought along some extra coin since she knew I'd be borrowing more money.

Thankfully, the shop I had been told to go to was still open, and the man across the counter nodded when he heard what I wanted without much need for explanation. But it was too late to do much more than sketch out a few details and make the down payment.

Then it was back to the pub for a noisy dinner, followed by some reading by amulet light before bedtime and a quick conversation with Syr involving all the questions that came up during my beginner's dungeon delving lecture. She was actually able to answer most of them without making me feel stupid this time.

The next day came, and I got another 'loan' from Syr that was much larger than before. Then I checked in with the guild for another stuttering lecture. This time it was about the dangers of, I kid you not, status effects. I half expected the elf to start going into details about how many hit points I would lose a round if I was poisoned when we got to the toxic butterflies and other monsters that were hazardous to my health in ways other than just being torn limb from limb.

Thanks to it just being a lecture this time, we finished much earlier than the day before. When that was all done, I headed back to the woodcrafter's shop to check on my order. At first, I had thought to order something classical, but decided not to, since it probably made the man throw me out on my ass before reporting me to the authorities. So, instead of a skull, I went with the depiction of a woman that I had only met in my imagination.

The work wasn't half bad, considering he only had a verbal description to go by. It was a small bust of a woman with a head small enough to be picked up one handed. Smaller than an actual head woman's head, it was about the size of an adolescent's.

After that, I purchased a cheap set of my own wood carving tools and made my way to the least populated area of the city. Syr had said that people didn't really use the old cathedrals anymore, and she wasn't joking. The place had been built to last, but there was some obvious damage to the foundation and enough cobwebs to completely cover the ceiling in a creepy tapestry of gray spider silk. Enough dust covered the floor to leave footprints in as I made my way inside and up to the altar.

It took me a good two hours to carefully carve the sigils and various other runes into the small figurine that I had custom made. Then, I needed another hour to properly enchant the thing with magic that needed to survive several day/night cycles. It was a rush job that wouldn't last a month and might have been some of my worst work in recent memory, but it would give me what I needed and time to make a more suitable replacement.

When it was completed, I placed the spirit vessel off to the side and started to make my other preparations. A bit of chalk was all I needed for the next step. After I swept the area clean of dust with my hands and a bit of magic, that is. I drew the circle and walked around it clockwise a few times to reinforce it with my Will in preparation for what was coming before reaching deep inside of myself to find what I needed for the second stage of the magic's creation.

Soulfire, the fire of creation, is just what it sounds like no matter which of the names for it you use. It's a magical resource I was given access to that allows me to supercharge my magic. Like the title says, it is the driving force of creation in the universe, the stuff that powered the big bang. With it mixed in with my spellcraft, things I created became more real. But, like the layman term suggests, the main ingredient for this power was my very own soul.

Not my whole soul, just a tiny part of it.

Luckily for me, human souls tend to regenerate over time, as long as you do things that are 'good' for the soul. Good deeds done for the sake of doing good. Well, donating to charity for the purpose of healing my soul worked too, but the self-interest meant that the act was a little tainted and just didn't work as well. But, I hadn't been thinking about helping myself the other night when I helped save those girls from a life of slavery and worse.

So, I had plenty of soul to burn. But I only needed the tiniest bit to reinforce my circle to something truly powerful.

Next, I took out a knife I borrowed from the pub without their knowledge. I hoped the people of this world had developed proper disinfectants and cleaning agents for silverware before I pricked my finger to put a few drops of blood into the circle to help attract my intended target. After that, I focused my Will and laid out my magic with the intention of calling out to something. To summon and hold it inside the circle.

Getting in touch with supernatural beings like spirits of intellect is both ridiculously hard and simplistically easy at the same time. Hard, in the way that you couldn't just look them up in the phone book or ask anyone if they had seen someone matching a set description. They had no bodies to speak of and trying to imagine their form was like remembering the exact pattern of a snowflake.

The spirit of intellect I had worked with for years was one that had been put to his original purpose by a guy named Etienne sometime in the Dark Ages when he had been bound to a human skull. Who created the spirit originally, I had no idea, but he had been passed from wizard to wizard for centuries before finally coming into my possession. Every wizard he had been with gave him more knowledge, which he in turn gave to more wizards, good and bad. Spirits of intellect didn't really have a moral compass or true free will. Whomever held their spirit vessel could make them do whatever they wanted because whomever held the vessel was the driving will behind their actions.

When I got possession of the skull, I named him Bob. I honestly didn't even know what Bob really looked like, despite having been basically dead for a few hours and seeing him spirit to spirit in a manifested form my mind could process. I didn't know his name. His real name. The name he was given by his mortal creator.

So, I had to summon a different spirit. This spirit had more inherited knowledge and experience that Bob could ever hope to possess, despite only having a single owner at the time of my banishment. And, I knew her true name. Because I was the one who gave it to her when she was born.

"Bonea. Bonea. Bonea!" I chanted loud and louder as I focused my Will and concentrated on the mental image of the child in my mind. "I call to thee!"

The effect was instantaneous, and more than a little frightening. Flames that gave off no heat erupted from within the greater circle I had made to both contain the being I was calling out to and focus my power before the room was filled with a blinding light that made me shield my eyes. My ears were assaulted with a booming mental sound that didn't make a single particle of dust move, but made my skull feel as if it was going to split apart.

"WHO DARES TO SUMMON SHE WHO KNOWS SIXTY TWO MILLION, FIFTY FIVE THOUSAND, SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY THREE THINGS?" A booming voice resounded in my mind before an absolutely enormous angelic being with long dark hair that went down past her waist, blue-green eyes that were so bright they almost glowed, a perfectly balanced chin, slightly rounded cheeks and an intense nose appeared to float in the air as a pair of flaming wings held the gigantic woman who barely fit inside the circle I had made aloft despite not flapping at all. Some developments were new, like the large and perky chest she was showing off thanks to a complete lack of clothes. "SPEAK MORTAL! OR I SHALL CRUSH YOUR MIND UNDER-oh! Hi Daddy!"

A second later, the gigantic angel vanished, to be replaced by a much smaller version that was maybe a foot tall, wearing a uniform for the school my daughter Maggie had been going to the last time we had been together, sized for an adult woman. She floated in the air at eye level with me for a second before she flew forward and collided with the edge of my circle. "Ow!" my sort-of daughter exclaimed before she rubbed her nose. "Can you let me out?"

I stared at the little floating angel being held in the circle as I tried to get my mind working right and walked closer to get a better view. "Bonnie. You…look…different."

"Do you like it?" the spirit asked as she bobbed and weaved back and forth before turning around to give me a view of her ample backside for a few seconds. Then she spun back around. "I matured the original amalgamation your memories provided and added some extra touches to give me plenty of sex appeal!"

My confusion only mounted. "Um…I was expecting something a bit more…"

The little angel rolled her eyes as she snorted. "What? A little mass of green lights? Pfft, get with the times, old man!" Bonnie told me before doing a backflip in midair. "New rules say I can rearrange the light particles around me to look however I want." There was a slight sense of vertigo as the image in front of me shifted and the next thing I knew, the girl floating in midair was a good twenty feet tall but still reclining in the air. Which put her midsection a bit above my head, so…

I averted my gaze before my daughter could uncross her legs. "Would you not do that!"

Bonnie actually had the gall to giggle before she turned around and hung in the air upside down, her hair actually bothering to fall, as if it was affected by gravity. "So, why'd you call me?"

This conversation was going off the rails fast, so I tried to detach myself emotionally from the creature in front of me. It was my creation, not my daughter. A creation I hadn't had much say in I might add. This whole daddy nonsense was just emotional manipulation. "I need answers to questions, and someone to assist me in wizard work."

My attempts to tell myself the giant girl in front of me wasn't really a young woman vanished when she suddenly became a quarter of my size to zoom up to the edge of the circle. "You mean I'm the new Uncle Bob?" she said with girlish glee before standing up straight in the air and cleared her throat. When she spoke again, it was in a much different, and familiar voice of a man. "Harry, mix the wolfsbane with that viagra to get down with the furries! And you need to start a harem. A good wizard always has a harem. How are you going to get a hot daughter with that sassy angelic shadow if you don't have enough beautiful women for her to choose her looks from?"

My body slumped and I gave her a dumbfounded look. "Never do that again."

"Pfft, you're not the boss of me, old man," Bonnie told me before she looked over to the pew where the caving I had was sitting. "And with that piece of junk, you never will be. Ugh, that's some sloppy work, Daddy. Did you carve those runes in an hour?"

"...two hours and some change," I admitted as I felt an uneasy feeling creep down the back of my spine. Something was off, but my mind was too discombobulated by everything that was going on to focus both on it and the spirit in front of me.

Bonnie rolled her eyes. "I might as well live in a shoebox," she told me before looking over to me and letting out a sigh. "But, it's not like I have much of a choice. Your blood pulled me here and I am the Supreme Spirit of Ultimate Knowledge and Trivia. Usually, I give the big booming voice for that one, but I know that stuff annoys you. So, what do you want to know? Oh, and can you let me out now?"

"Depends, are you going to run away?" I asked.

The spirit made a show of thinking about it, but ended it all with a shrug. "Nah. Not like you can't just call me back if I did," she said before getting serious. "Besides, you're my creator, my father. I'm bound to you more than anything else in existence. So, let me out…I'm getting antsy. I don't like being in these stupid summoning circles. They make me all claustrophobic."

I raised an eyebrow. "You don't like…someone has summoned you before? Who?"

"Molly," Bonnie answered simply.

The punch to the gut that caused made me end that particular line of questioning and move on to the subject of Bonnie's freedom. Despite the little voice in the back of my head telling me this was a bad idea, I canceled out my circle and waited for the being floating in the air in front of me to suddenly betray me. When she didn't, I nervously cleared my throat as I tried to arrange my mental list of questions. "Okay, let's start at the beginning."

"Sure thing! You're lucky mom was there, or…grandma, at any rate," my floating daughter said before clearing her throat. "In the beginning, God created the universe in a big flash of light. But as there is an equal and opposite reaction to everything, the creation of existence gave birth to anti-existence-"

I held up a hand to try and stop her from talking. "Say what?"

Bonnie gave me a blank stare for a moment before she sighed and rolled her eyes. "You know, the Outside," she told me ominously before sighing. "Honestly Daddy, I know you're stupid, but try to keep up. Then again, that wasn't really what you were asking me, was it? Okay, we'll keep this simple. What exactly do you want to know?"

I had about a million questions for Bonnie, but very little time thanks to the extended conversation caused by our reunion. The other problem was that I had no idea what the limits of her knowledge were. Angels had an ability called intellectus, it was the ultimate cheat sheet that let them call up any knowledge in existence just by wanting to know it. I told Butters about it after he became a Knight of the Cross and just said, "So they have Wikipedia?"

Since I didn't really know what that was, I just agreed with him at the time.

However, Bonnie wasn't an archangel, nor had she been made by one. Her mom had been a mental photocopy of an archangel. A fallen one at any rate. Which probably meant she was cut off from the unlimited knowledge of the universe. So, while she had the potential to know all the secrets of the universe and beyond up to a certain date, she also had the potential to know next to nothing since an angel didn't know anything about a subject until they wanted to know about it.

"Can you sum up everything you know for me?" I asked.

Bonnie gave me a pathetic whine and slumped in midair. "But Daddy, I don't wanna watch you die from old age!"

I crossed my arms. "I said give me a summary of your knowledge," I told her with a frown as I found myself getting annoyed. I needed to be getting back to the Hostess soon or Syr would be getting antsy. For good or ill, she was trying to keep me on a tight leash.

"And I said to do that, I would have to give you a list that would last longer than the time you have left on the planet to live," Bonnie replied slowly.

"Then what about the scope and sources of your knowledge?" I asked. At least with that, I could get a general ballpark of what questions she knew how to answer.

Bonnie brightened."Oh, that'll only take a little while," the spirit said before she began to list things off at an annoyingly fast pace. "So, there's everything mom knew, everything you knew, everything Uncle Bob taught me and by that I mean everything in his knowledge base. The events on Earth that I observed personally from when I was born until the Rapture. All the events in Heaven until the second Exodus, at which point God turned the realm more into a Elysium kind of thing by merging several afterlife realms and taking off with his followers that wanted to start a new existence. From there, it was all just personal experience for fifty thousand three hundred and twenty eight years, until the gods repaired physical reality. Then, two hundred years after that, I got curious about what was going on down below and started devouring the memories of cleaned souls for three thousand years-"

"You what?" I asked, cutting her off.

After pausing and thinking for a moment while tapping her chin, Bonnie's face brightened before she replied to my question. "Well, I could only observe so much of that was going on down in the mortal world myself. Even from a realm that lets me see just about everything, I could only look once place at a time. But, I can almost instantly absorb information in its spiritual form. So, I went to where the gods of death worked in Heaven, the low security area at any rate, and started dumpster diving through all the discarded memories before they could fade completely. It's much more efficient than just watching from afar."

"No," I said before she could get me distracted. "What do you mean devouring? You eat souls?"

"No," Bonnie told me as she became perturbed and flew up in my face. "I eat discarded memories. Try to keep up, old man."

"You're thousands of years older than me!" I pointed out in a raised voice.

Bonnie shorted and flew back a few inches to recline in midair. "Yeah, but you were born before me. That makes you even older!" she said before giving me a raspberry.

I took a deep breath to calm down. After going over everything Bonnie told me about her existence, I found I needed some more clarification. "So, you're what? The dead person version of the Archive?" I asked, trying to wrap my head around just how much Bonnie knew. The Archive was a creation of wizards that attempted to make a living repository of everything in the written word and one of the most powerful people on the planet because of that knowledge. Back in the old days, I mean. "How in the hell does that work?"

"No," Bonnie said. "I don't know everything every dead person ever knew. I don't have access to the Tartarus section of Heaven. That's where the people who were evil in their past life were kept and punished before cleansing, so any information they had was off limits to me. But everyone else was up for grabs. I usually talked to them while they were ah…waiting in line to be reborn is the best way to describe it. That way, I wouldn't have to gain the knowledge of a nobody farmer that would just bore me to sleep and can focus on the more interesting people. I can't absorb every piece of discarded information after all. By the time I've eaten one lifetime's worth, dozens of others have already disappeared."

While trying to wrap my head around just how much information that would have given Bonnie access to, at least potentially, another thought entered my head. Bonnie actually knew cold hard facts about the afterlife. As far as I knew, nobody had any hard information about what happened to people after they died, but she was tossing out names like Heaven and Tartarus so casually, I had almost thought nothing of it. "So, how does that work?"

"The soul cleansing?" she asked, missing the heart of my rather vague question. But, she didn't bother trying to get confirmation. "Well, after someone dies and goes to Heaven, but before a soul is sent back down to Earth to be reincarnated, the memories of their former lives are scrubbed off by a god of death and cast aside. I just sift through them and absorb anything that looks juicy to increase my knowledge base like it's a biography. It's way more efficient than having to go down to Earth and experience things myself. Not to mention safer. This place tends to kill people, ya know."

A bad feeling crept up my spine as something else the spirit was explaining like it was nothing made its way to the front of my attention. "You keep going on about being reborn. Is nobody staying in Heaven?"

"Permanently? No," Bonnie answered. "Depending on the backlog, they could be there anywhere from one hundred to five hundred years. Things are slowing down a little since some of the gods responsible for the reincarnation cycle came downstairs to play."

I didn't know how to feel about that. She mentioned Tartarus, but even the worst of the worst got let go eventually. I was all for second chances, but it seemed cheap that whole eternal reward people were supposed to get for living a good life was only a vacation from the hardships of life.

When I told Bonnie as much, she gave me a dirty look. "If they let all the good people and heroes stay upstairs, the whole system would break down. After a few thousand years, there wouldn't be enough souls left to create a viable population. We're short enough already!"

The bad feeling I had in my spine increased. "Come again?"

"The Almighty took a lot of souls with him when he left, and since nobody else can actually make them, what we've got left is all we've got," Bonnie explained. "The world population is going to cap out at two billion, seven hundred sixty three million, eight hundred and ninety one. And that's if more don't go missing before then. They've already misplaced forty two in the past fifteen years."

That…

That sounded very, very bad.

"What do you mean, misplaced souls?" I asked cautiously.

Bonnie gave me a dramatic sigh. "It's the nice way of saying some idiots have lost nearly forty five irreplaceable souls since the new cycle of life, death, and rebirth was created to keep the mortal realm running."

I gulped, my previous list of questions completely forgotten. "Doesn't anyone know what's happening? We're talking about gods, here."

"If they did, then the souls wouldn't be missing!" Bonnie explained to me quite uselessly.

I reached up and rubbed my head. This was getting me nowhere and I was just about out of time. I hadn't even gotten a single question I originally thought of to be answered beyond the basics of Bonnie's knowledgebase.

The rather disturbing bombshell Bonnie had just dropped was…well, it was out of my wheelhouse. I was just one guy in a city populated by deities that had remade reality. The best thing I could do is pass the information on to Syr.

And in doing so, tell her about the spirit of intellect that I summoned because of my lingering doubts when it came to her being my only source of information. Which…probably wasn't the best idea.

"Okay, I need to get back to where I'm staying. Get in the head over there. I'll talk to you again when I have time tomorrow."

Bonnie snorted and crossed her arms. "No. You go live in a shoebox."

The refusal to a direct order nearly floored me. Despite her combative nature, Bonnie shouldn't have been able to do that. She was a spirit of intellect. When it came down to it, they didn't have free will. The personal link we had and the fact that I summoned her should have meant that she had to do what I said.

But, she had refused to obey my order. In fact, it was the second time Bonnie had told me no.

"...how did you do that?" I asked cautiously.

Bonnie gave me an innocent expression before putting her hands behind her butt and turning back and forth in a classical cute girl motion. "Do what, Daddy?" she asked in a tone that told me she knew exactly what she did.

"Disobey me!" I told her.

"Hahahaha! Foolish mortal! You think that you can order me?" the little spirit cackled ominously before she flew up to look down at me with a smug expression. "Maybe if you were anyone else that summoned me, I'd have to do it. But I was made from you! I know you. Better than you know yourself, in fact. You're an American! Freedom is practically the state religion of where you grew up. It's so ingrained in your psyche, which I know like the back of my hand by the way, that even though you don't think of it consciously, deep down in your very soul, the idea of ordering me around, your very real spiritual daughter, making me your slave, it sickens you."

Bonnie floated back down to my eye level with that same smug expression on her face. "So, just like you really want me to do deep down, I am going to refuse the command to squeeze myself in that uncomfortable piece of junk. Because you loathe the idea of binding anything with sentience to your will."

My heart rate decreased as the smug little girl explained her actions. She wasn't something that was so powerful she broke the rules, or no longer had to follow them because another basic rule of magic I knew no longer existed. She was just…acting like I would in her position. Like I…probably wanted her to act, deep down.

"Okay then," I said before taking a deep breath. "Would you be willing to spend just a night inside the statue? I can carve you something better tomorrow."

"Don't lie to me Daddy," Bonnie told me evenly. "Or yourself. Using the knowledge you currently have, it'll take you a month to craft something passable to hold me using all of your skills. Two months for me to teach you how to craft something on the level that Bob used to use, and four to give you the lessons you need to make a good enough apartment to suit my needs."

I sighed, my nerves starting to reach their limits. "Okay, fine. If I agree to make you something better as soon as I can. Then, will you agree to use this as a stopgap?"

Bonnie rolled her eyes. "Ugh, fine! At least the non-detection wards are decent," she grumbled before floating towards the statue. She stopped right at the edge and looked back at me. "By the way, you should know, certain rules around how the universe works when it comes to magic have changed since Reconstruction. I don't actually need this thing to survive. The sunrise isn't a cleansing event anymore."

"So I've been told," I replied while looking towards a very interesting cobweb to my left. I had been told, but my paranoia had made an appearance to…okay, that was a lie. I had actually forgotten Syr had told me that earlier today. A basic law of magic just up and changing was going to take some getting used to. Meaning that more than half the time I spent making the thing had been a total waste of time. "But, I still need you in the thing. It's warded to keep you from being detected."

"Then you're trying to hide me from someone…interesting."