He really doesn't know how to respond to that.

And she just returns to her soup, ignoring every further attempt of his to chat.

And Peter returns home and entirely fails to Copypasto himself and gets extremely mad about this and goes jogging until he can't walk anymore and then just transportalates himself back home and sleeps for the first time in over two years.

More time passes, as it is wont to do despite protestations and very persuasive arguments. Peter loses the fire Sage Dyer stoked in him, and every further conversation he has with her... completely fails to be useful in any way. She won't even acknowledge they talked about duplicating people, and acts like she remembers nothing.

Peter moves up the ranks at his company. He finds that the job is soul-crushing enough that he... eventually... stops going in so much.

He still, like, shows up to work and all that. But he lets himself slip, loses focus, and many of his weekdays suddenly miss chunks from when he goes NPC for work. His productivity drops some, but honestly his rate of learning things and earning promotions and raises was lower than other people's anyways due to the way NPCs seem to just magically acquire knowledge and skills that he has to work for, so it doesn't really change that much, relatively speaking. And after another year, he's a regional manager, whatever the fuck that means.

And they continue to age faster than he does. After Peter, Don got way into the gay scene, and as he approaches what NPCs call the "elder" age he's definitely what the young'uns are calling a "DILF". But it's not so much his age that starts making Peter's interest in him—and in most of his other fuckbuddies and acquaintances—wane over time. Or, not in itself. The age is a reminder that they'll die before him unless he does something about it. And that is a reminder that he doesn't... so much... want to do something about it.

Yeah, he does have some fun with people, but they continue to not really be all that engaging, and Caleb and his sister are damned diamonds in the rough. They will live forever, if they aren't particularly reckless, and they are both interesting and ambitious and nearly all-around agentic. They do things.

Peter also does things, and does things to help them. His signal boosts of Caleb's Simstagram posts draw more attention than anything else he does, but of course Caleb doesn't notice it. And he starts writing some stuff about vampires, filling in the Simpedia page on them, adding a tiny voice against misinformation. Caleb isn't ready to "come out" as a vampire, not yet, there is still stigma (which is extremely stupid but whatever), but Peter can try to use his universe-affecting powers to help him.

And it's a year and a half after the conversation with Sage Dyer when he's doing his daily magic practice and not thinking of anything in particular that it clicks.

It is Copypasto but it's also not.

The "three schools of magic" are, obviously, bullshit. "Practical", "Mischief", and "Untamed"? Seriously? Not that it doesn't fit the aesthetic of this damn dumb world he seems to live in, but it's still obviously nonsensical and arbitrary, and the categories are whatever.

But to the extent any of them mean anything, "untamed" is about—not quite just creativity, but also industriousness. Making things work for you, combining things to new effect, breaking the boundaries of existence. And he feels like it's—not so much a new spell. It doesn't come to him as a new spell, as a formed unit of magic with a specific word and specific gestures. It comes to him as... raw magic.

Because this spell doesn't work for just about anyone. It only works—for him. It's a spell that will let him duplicate himself, specifically. It has elements from the dumbly-named Copypasto spell, but also the spells related to keeping plants and animals healthy and alive, and the spells related to mind control (he has no choice over which spells the void sends him when he's practising, okay), and the spells related to ghosts, and even the damn not-a-spell meditation he's doing.

He knows how to combine them all, how to tweak them and change them, in order to project his own mind and to create a clone.

He has never wanted something so badly in his life. It takes every ounce of his free will to wait until Friday evening after work. He actually sleeps every night—or tries to—just to get the weekend to arrive faster. He cancels his date with Caleb, and of course Caleb's fine with it, their relationship number is very high.

He NPCs to work and becomes a person again when he gets home. He takes his potion of "make everything better". He grabs his wand.

He vibrates in place and thinks over the specifics of what he's about to do. He needs to make sure he does it perfectly.

He's as sure as he's ever be. He calms his mind, he focuses on his magic, and he casts.

It works.

It fucking works.

There's another him right, right there.

Also whoa that absolutely drained him, he immediately wobbles over to the wall then slides onto the floor. "H... hi," he says with a little manic giggle. "It worked. It really... really worked. You're here."

    "I am," agrees the clone, kneeling then sitting down in front of Peter. He doesn't look wobbly at all.

"Oh... oh man I'm so... I... you're here? You're really real?"

    "Yeah."

...wait. "No." He blinks a few times, dread creeping up from the pit of his stomach to the center of his chest. There's something... "Please reassure me. Please. Please know how to."

    "...there there?" the clone tries, offering a couple of pats to the original's leg.

"No," he says, voice breaking and face crumpling. "You're. You're like them."

    "Like who?"

"No!" Peter screams, and whether it's a result of the huge feat of magic he just performed or just his heightened emotional state there's a burst of magical energy, a wave of pressure that pushes the clone onto his back and fries every electronic in the house, strong enough to crack the wall right behind him a bit. He draws his knees into his chest and lifts his hands to his hair, grabbing it and pulling. "No, no, no. You were meant to be me! Me, body and soul and magic! All of me!"

    "I am you," the clone says, slowly getting up from where he fell.

"Liar! Liar liar liar! You're just another thing, one, one of them, you're not me!"

    "Peter—please calm down—"

"Don't you dare tell me to calm down you, you, you—! You would know what to say, you would, you'd have more words, you don't have my words, you don't have, don't have," and that's when he breaks down completely. He starts crying, over three years of bottled up crying, body-shaking sobs and snotty hiccups, and he can't stop.

He's alone. He's all alone, he's by himself, he's going to be alone forever. He's been deluding himself with grand plans and ideas to change the world, but the truth is he's just a boy and he's all alone.

    "Peter—I'm sorry—how can I help—?"

"I don't," hic, "just hug me. Hold me. Let me pretend it matters, let me," hic, "let me pretend you're real."

He does, crawling over to Peter and wrapping his arms around him, and Peter leans into him and cries some more. Cries into himself, cries alone, isn't that ironic. He cries for ten minutes, for thirty, for an hour, and his fake other self stays there, stays quiet, because even if he's not a person he's at least smart enough to know that words are not what Peter needs right now.

The sobs die down first, but the tears take a while to stop. Eventually they do, too, though, and he finds himself dry and empty and dead. His clone is still hugging him, but that's not comforting anymore. It just feels like the weight of the world, all over again, like knowing he failed. Like knowing he'll never succeed, like knowing he now has this, this thing attached to him to remind him that even when he's around people he's still alone.

"Why are you here," Peter says eventually.

    "You asked me to hug you."

"Well, I don't want your hugs anymore. Get off me."

    The clone—does, but he actually looks kinda hurt?

"Oh, you'll get over it in five minutes if I just say pretty words at you."

    "That's pretty mean."

"And you're not a person. What even is our relationship number? Is it maxed? Are my deep seated sources of self-hatred reflected in your feelings about me?"

    "...I like you?" tries the clone.

"Joy of joys, my ego has a use." ...it feels kinda cathartic to be bitingly acidic out loud, actually.

"...we are pretty hot, though, aren't we?" Peter says after a minute of looking at his clone in increasingly awkward silence. It's one thing to look at oneself in the mirror and it's a whole nother to do—whatever this is.

    "Thanks?" replies the clone, but he does sound flattered, and why does his voice sound like that. This is worse than listening to recordings of it. It's extra cringe for how well this thing matches his own tone of voice.

"How about some pity sex? Or pick-me-up sex? Hmm I guess this would be I-want-to-forget-my-problems sex."

    "Do you... want to try drinking your potion?"

"Ha!" Peter barks out. "No. I want to feel like garbage, because the world is garbage. Maybe after you've fucked me senseless I'll feel like it."

    "That's not very enticing," and why does he sound like Peter so much, it's driving him mad.

"I haven't known myself to refuse sex like that, which leads me to believe you think this isn't what I want. And you're fucking right, 'cause what I want is for you to have turned out right. But you didn't, so the least you can do is raw me until I forget my name."

    The clone looks politely bemused—of course he does, NPCs don't do well with so many words—but at the end of that tirade just says, "Are you sure?"

"Yes," huffs Peter. "Help me up and throw me onto the bed. Eat my ass, I know you can to it well, then raw dog me. Come on, we don't have all night."

    "If you insist," says the clone with a flirty smirk, and Peter feels like kicking him in the nuts. Of course the goddamn NPC has no context for hatesex, his mood is going to be "horny" for the next while, and he can't do anything more complex than that.

Honestly, that might not be that bad. Peter thinks what he wants right now is some disrespectful, dehumanising, objectifying sex, and then maybe to sleep again because he does not want to exist.

And damn it thrice, his clone is good. Whatever skill in bed Caleb has developed over his decades of existence, it's still an NPC doing what an NPC learned to do. However his own skills transferred to his clone did better than that, and despite himself Peter ends up actually managing to enjoy it and forgets his problems for at least a bit.

He doesn't like the trope of the guy who passes out immediately after coming, but right now he's being completely selfish and he really doesn't want pillow talk with this mockery of a person. He doesn't shower, doesn't clean anything up, just gets rid of the towel he had his clone throw over the bed, turns over, and falls asleep.

He sleeps in, and thankfully his clone doesn't even think of waking him up, so he does it on his own. When he does, his clone is already awake and smiling down at him, and he says a "Morning" that Peter is sure is meant to be sexy and flirty and whatever the hell else but turns out just grating.

Still, he's feeling somewhat better. Somewhat less gloomy and less certain of failure. Sure, his spell didn't work the way he wanted it to, but that doesn't mean there's no possible spell that does it. Like Ethran (sort of) said, no one really has a mechanistic understanding of magic, and even if it takes Peter years he'll still work at it.

Not to mention stuff like neurology—there must be a way in which his brain works differently—and general biology—he's aging more slowly, this has to be detectable somehow. His current soul-crushing job is soul-crushing but it pays well, and he's saving up to never really need to work for money again so that he can focus his time on more useful projects. It just, you know, will take a while.

A swig of the Potion of Plentiful Needs later and he's feeling downright optimistic again. He asks his clone to put their bedsheets in the wash and starts casting repair spells around the house to fix the stuff his magical outburst from yesterday damaged.

In fact, thinking about it, even if the spell didn't really create another him, it actually gave him a pretty perfect servant. Not quite, but still, the clone can probably go to work for him and it'll turn out exactly the same, neatly removing the soul-crushingness from his life. He might even gain skills and learn things—and get promoted at work—at the rate other NPCs do. And looping around to that thought from earlier, whenever Peter gets around to exploring the biological basis for his personhood, he'll have this clone right here who seems to be identical to him in every respect except that one.

So really, it wasn't the best possible outcome, but it's not the end of the world either.

So imagine his surprise when, that evening, exactly twenty-four hours after he cast his spell, his clone says, "It's time for me to go."

Peter looks up from the book he's reading and blinks in confusion. "Excuse me?"

    "My time is up. I must go."

"Go—where?"

    "Away."

And with that, the clone starts casting a spell Peter is very sure he's never seen, and vanishes.

...no, not just vanishes; ceases. He's seen the traces of magic after people who transportalate, the wisps of directionality that indicate they just moved somewhere. This is not that. The clone just completely erased itself from existence, deader than dead since he's leaving no ghost.

His clone spell has a time limit.

"Oh, Petey," cries Sage Dyer as soon as she sees him. "I am so sorry for your loss!"

Peter—once again has no idea how to react. "I'm—sorry?"

She's been picking flowers from the nearby greenhouse and filling them into a bouquet, and as she nearly floats over to him she offers him the flowers. "I can't imagine what you must be going through," she says instead, wrapping her arms around him for a tight hug once he accepts the flowers.

"I—you—are you talking about my clone?"

"It is a difficult spell, and a very personal one," she says instead. "I'm sorry I didn't warn you."

"—so you knew."

"There are many ways in which it can fail, many unpredictable ones," she says, pulling away from the hug and—she's crying. There are clear tear marks down her cheek, and her lip wobbles as she adds, "It's something each individual spellcaster needs to learn for themself."

"I. You." Why is talking to this person always so difficult. "I see."

And he has already cried about this, there are no new feelings here, he's not going to break down in front of this possibly-a-person.

"There, Petey, please take these flowers and plant them."