He keeps saying that, in his head. No one else is a person. He's... not as sure as he'd like to be about this, but he's also not sure what exactly people are if not, well, people. Work forces him to interact with them daily and he keeps having the extremely strong impression that there just is no one there. The lights are on, but no one's home. People don't remember things for very long, and when they do it's to be annoyed with his experiments in asking the same question three times in a row just to see what happens.

If he takes a two-minute break and asks the same question again it's fine, though.

A model of it is starting to form in his head. It seems like... people seem to just consider their relationship with him—and each other—to be tracked by some sort of number. He feels slightly guilty at first to experiment, but his job is, again, soul-crushingly boring and lonely, so he gets over himself and starts trying to guess at numerical values. Maybe these people have subjective access to these values, but he doesn't.

It still feels correct, though. If he gets the numbers high enough, people are much more willing to take shit and let it slide, though it does decrease the numbers. And it does seem like there's some discrete categorisation of the number levels here that informs people's overall impressions of him. Stranger, acquaintance, friendly acquaintance, friend, close friend, best friend.

Or something.

The potions keep working—he doesn't sleep, or eat, or use the bathroom, and he only showers to relax. He doesn't have time for all of that, he has magic to learn, and it does turn out useful even for work.

He gets the "small object duplication" spell first of all, since he was aiming for it. The knowledge just appears in his head unbidden, the understanding that if he waves his wand like so and says the word "Copypasto"—he wanted to die when that showed up in his head—he can create an identical copy of anything below a certain volume.

It does work on the damn potions.

He has unlimited supply of a potion of "make everything better".

The literal only reason no one has used spellcasting to take over the world is because no one else is a person.

He gets other spells—levitation, a handful of different options for spells that fix broken objects or appliances, a cleaning spell—and in the process of learning magic he does notice the feeling for "spellcaster charge" pretty quickly. It's like he's getting filled up, and warm inside, and there is a certain feeling of an optimal level and then of it starting to be too much. He stays well below the latter threshold while practising.

And it turns out he does kind of need every advantage he can get, here, because other people have some weird combination of working both faster and slower than he does.

Slower, because everything they do takes hours. It feels like they subjectively experience a minute in the same way he subjectively experiences a second, even though it's not like they're absent for that minute. He can have normal-time conversations and activities and actions involving other people, but they take so, so, so much longer to finish whatever they're doing or to want to change actions or to get bored. He once watched another person take over thirty minutes to finish a goddamn bowl of cereal—and it's not that they were having difficulty, they just took forever to actually take the actions of eating it.

(And there seems to be some weird way in which their slowness is also imposed onto the environment—Peter's cereal becomes soggy a lot more quickly than theirs does.)

Faster, because it seems like despite taking longer to do things they can get things done more quickly than he can. This one he takes longer to understand, but it becomes pretty obvious after a while: they learn skills much faster than he does, they improve at things much faster than he does. At one point he runs an experiment of trying to learn how to play chess with a "friend", and they seem to just get better at playing chess organically by doing it without having to actually learn specific facts about how to do it in the same way he does. He fancies himself a smart person, but he is very quickly outmatched by his chess partner, and eventually gives up on it.

Also faster in that he can make someone like him a lot in only a few hours.

He's... not sure what normal is, really, since his internet searches and ever-wider nets of visiting other places have yet to run into anyone else like him. He's the weird one, he supposes, except the ways in which he's weird feel a lot more—more—mechanistic, to him? You learn chess by understanding facts about how chess works and what kinds of things to pay attention to and techniques to use and getting better at exploring the space of possible future moves, not by just suddenly getting better at choosing the right moves at the right time. But everyone else is like that, so that is what's "normal", definitionally, right?

But it still feels very not normal for people to like him so much after so little time.

He learns how to pull on their heart strings. He learns how to communicate with people in ways that they find pleasant rather than unpleasant, and how many times to repeat it versus change the subject, and how to draw their attention. And by the end of a day spent with a single person, he is suddenly their best friend in the whole damn world.

It's kind of creepy.

Also faster in that they age faster.

That one kind of terrifies him more than he thought he could handle. It's easy to notice after a short time, how everyone else is getting older much faster than he is. They're... getting on with their lives much faster than he is, too. It's like they're in fast-forward—they get promoted at work more quickly than he does, they get better at things more quickly than he does, they meet new people and fall in love and get married and have children (he does not want to think about NPC babies) much faster than he probably would.

Meanwhile he's an unaging beauty watching the world go by.

And no one cares. No one notices, his coworkers and boss age away from him and no one even remarks on it. He tries bringing it up with them and gets only exactly the same kind of non-engagement as always.

No one cares. No one notices.

Anything.

One day, he goes to work shirtless. Some people act shocked at first, and some people are clearly giving him looks (and he is still not ready to engage with that, his hands have been his sole companions for a while), but after the initial reaction they sort of... just accept it. He tries, again, bringing it up with people, and he gets a whole host of reactions—it's inappropriate for the work environment (who cares), isn't he chilly under the AC (no, he's a wizard), has he been working out (yes, absolutely, gotta keep dem abs), maybe he could go with them to that supply closet over there and take everything else off (maybe later)—but then they once again move on and ignore it.

He... kinda hates clothes.

Whoever or whatever created him gave him a rather annoying, persistent awareness of anything touching his skin—or maybe that's just being not-an-NPC, maybe anyone who wakes up in his situation will also be hyperaware of their body. But it does mean he—just always is naked at home, pretty much, because it's so much more comfortable.

Whoever or whatever created him gave him a little bit of a kink for it, which he has been kind of sitting on because it's immoral to subject other people to this stuff but...

...but other people don't seem to quite be people. And more relevantly, they don't seem all that affected by it, do they?

One day, he goes to work wearing only his shoes.

He can't help but be aroused by it. He feels like he—shouldn't be. A huge part of it is actually the sensory stuff. It's uncomfortable, clothes are itchy, they're always there, touching him, and, and...

...and why not.

But he can't help but be aroused by it, at least at first. This does attract a lot more reactions. His boss specifically says this is very inappropriate for the work environment.

Then one minute later his boss is talking to him like nothing's the matter and nothing's wrong. His programming has already gone through the shock of seeing his naked employee, now he can move on with the next parts of his day.

Peter's never putting any clothes on again.

Other people also learn magic more quickly than him, because of course they do, so he spends his time working, and working out, and learning magic, and studying magic, and occasionally studying other stuff, and occasionally jerking off—but not in public, something is still stopping him from doing that.

It becomes normal, for him. He's no longer aroused just by being out naked like that, it becomes... mundane.

Now here's the weird part, folks.

Other people start doing it too.

The first time he sees it—someone just walking their dog in the buff—he can barely believe his eyes. Are they—could they be—like him?

But no. Another NPC, just like everyone else, incapable of holding a real conversation or having any kind of understanding of other minds or anything like that. They just also happened to be naked.

People at work "got used" to his perpetual nudity, in that they no longer even had the initial shock of seeing him like that for the first time today. That was... fine, it even made sense, in a way. Of course you'd get used to it. But seeing other people in public also start getting used to it was... less explainable.

Seeing other people in public also getting nude is a lot less explainable.

Or actually, not even fully nude, with a ton of variation and a lot more daring fashion expression. "Leather chaps" with nothing under them isn't a kink thing in leather bars anymore, it's just a piece of attire that some people wear sometimes. Toplessness is just downright common, and now people have nipple rings, and cock rings, and other combinations that completely ignore the idea that anyone might even consider that any given part of the human body would be off-limits to show.

Now here's the weird part, folks.

Something called "the free bodies movement" springs up out of nowhere. When Peter first runs into a rally for them, a bunch of naked people with signs about freedom of expression and self-acceptance and all that, with someone with a megaphone spouting disconnected sentences out like that, he... starts getting very, very spooked.

Simpedia has a page on them. It has a page dated from before. From before the date Peter thinks of as the day he started existing.

He's absolutely sure that can't have existed.

People are naked on TV now.

People on Raccoon News are having pieces on how the woke youth is taking things too far, how toplessness is fine but going bottomless is just beyond the pale, the degenerates.

What... has he done.

He'd be lying if he ever lightly implied he doesn't have an ego. He does, okay, he likes himself, he thinks he's great, he thinks he's awesome actually, he fucking masturbates looking at himself in the mirror.

But being solely responsible for acausal changes to the fabric of society is a bit much even for him.

(It does occur to him that—if there is someone else out there like him and this also works the same way for them—then maybe he's getting edited and rewritten by their alterations to the fabric of society all the time.)

He talks to his coworkers and "friends" about it, and they all seem to agree that yeah nudity isn't a big deal, why is he talking about this, he's naked, is he not part of that movement of woke youth? So of fucking course their memories got edited too—but his didn't. He doesn't remember all of that, it's not normal for him.

But it's just... normal, now.

That's a lot more power than just being a fucking wizard! It's more than spells to teleport places (he's going to have words with whoever decided to call it "transportalate"), it's more than having a pet dragon, it's more than the goddamn Potion of Prompt Resurrection which he has been tirelessly aiming for since he heard of it, for goodness's sake.

He can alter reality.

He could... maybe... alter it to have more people in it.

He has no idea how he'd do it, and while it was always in the back of his mind while learning magic it didn't seem like its... thing.

Of course, he was determined to make it work somehow anyway. He's pretty sure he'd go crazy or just end up killing himself if there was literally no way to ever get anyone else to have a proper damn conversation with. This level of isolation is torture, magic potion of "make everything better" notwithstanding.

But changing the past, that level of rewriting reality... it suddenly feels so possible it aches.

Except he's really not sure what exactly he did to cause that. When he became a wizard that didn't suddenly cause a lot of people to start wanting to become wizards, so why...

...

...hmm.

He had this thought before: NPCs don't challenge the status quo. And him becoming a wizard didn't, either—people apparently just do become wizards, every now and then. At low enough rates that having just the three Sages doing it is enough, for sure, but it still happens.

So he wasn't changing anything. He was being another number—another cog. Another part of the machine. And he's a different part of the machine, a part that doesn't quite work like the other parts, but from the perspective of the machine he still does his job. Rotates nicely.

Going to work naked threw a wrench into it. Continuing to do it, and acting like it's not a big deal—well, that meant the machine would have to change.

Or so he thinks. It's admittedly just a hypothesis, but he doesn't have any other hypotheses, and it does bear testing... somehow.

What does he do to shake this beehive up a little?

...he feels bad about how the immediate idea he has is going ham on his kink. And then he feels mad at who or whatever created him for giving him a kink and then also making him feel guilty about having that kink. He even kind of agrees with the reasoning, in a world where other people are people and might have opinions about the amount of sex they encounter in their day-to-day lives.

But other people are not people, or at least not the kind of people who seem to be traumatised by things (why does he even have the concept of trauma when it doesn't seem like anyone's memory extends beyond the goddamn numbers they use to keep track of their relationships), and while maybe eventually he'll be able to turn them into proper people, he is pretty sure it is not more morally right to create any given kind of person rather than any other kind. So, if he changes reality to be shaped in such a way that his kink is not harmful to the people that will exist in it, then... it's fine.

Why yes, he has spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the ethics of personhood, why do you ask?

Still, he can't help but want to try to think of some other beehive-shaking activity that might also be within his power.

He's an up-and-coming mook in an investment firm, which is not really the most glamourous or powerful of jobs, and doesn't really give him much of a lever to make any changes to anything. He could keep grinding and eventually help lead the company to effect meaningful change—but that'll take years.

He has some ideas of things he could do by himself, but most of them don't actually make the world any better—making criminal activity become more common and widespread sounds like the opposite of what he wants. The whole endeavour does have the issue that it's much easier to negatively impact everyone's lives than do so in constructive ways, or even neutral-but-weird ways.

He could go poke at vampires and whatever other supernatural forces haunt this world, but he feels he's not particularly well-positioned to do so. He already has an in with supernatural beings via being a wizard, and although there seems to be surprisingly little overlap between them and literally anything else supernatural, he's already reasonably far along in his magic studies and would probably need to sink in just as much time into any other such endeavours.

...and he really wants to not feel guilty about his kink and a world in which sex was normalised and widespread and not a Big Deal^tm would just be a world in which he'd be straightforwardly happier.

But he still dithers, and procrastinates, and waits. Not for anything in particular, it just... takes convincing.

"Be the change you want to see in the world" suddenly sounds a lot scarier.

What if it works? What if he succeeds? What if he confirms that he does, in fact, have the power to individually shift the status quo?

Well, then he... somehow makes the status quo better. No one seems to find it strange that he's so long lived, and by the time he's magically immortal he can just keep working at it. Become a politician, become famous, help sway the world in a better direction.

But also he wants to make being a person like him a more common thing. He's really not sure if it's possible to turn others into people like that or if they have to spontaneously appear but...

Can he make the status quo look like a world in which most people are people?

...what does the world look like if most people are people? There seems to be terrible power lying around for the grabbing with not even a tiny bit of gatekeeping. And there are, in fact, NPCs who are... not... great people.

He might need to rethink his plan.

Also this might be a bit premature, he's not even totally sure he can do what he thinks he can. He needs to run his experiment. And he needs to stop beating himself up for wanting to run that particular experiment and just go do it.

So... he... gathers his wits about him, teleports to a public park—sorry, transportalates to a public park—finds a nice unoccupied bench, gets some porn running on his phone, and starts jerking off.

(click here to skip the explicit section)

The nerves don't help at first, but when the first NPC notices him doing it and gasps in shock it sends a jolt of adrenaline from the tip of his cock to the crown of his head and he's hard as rock in ten seconds flat. That one NPC shakes his head and grumbles something, then immediately resumes going wherever he had been going.

Peter has practice edging himself—look, it's been a stressful year and he's been finding ways to keep himself entertained—and so even though he's finding the increasing stares incredibly arousing he doesn't immediately orgasm. He does put his phone away, though, as clearly he does not need the porn anymore. He just—enjoys himself, and enjoys the people coming to watch. And there are people who are coming specifically to watch, now, and a few of them are even recording it on their phones.

Shit. He's gonna become some kind of perverted celebrity. He... can't... quite bring himself to find that to be a bad thing? Not when he's this horny and so many people are watching...

One of them catches his eye. A man, looking about the same age as him (although given how everyone else ages faster than he does he's probably younger), fit, adorned by an expensive watch and expensive sunglasses, wearing a tight T-shirt and tight jeans that make his own erection rather impossible to ignore. Peter points at him and makes a "come hither" motion with two fingers, biting his lower lip.

The man looks... almost mesmerised, and complies, breaking the involuntary bubble that formed around Peter. "Hi," he says, trying to keep his cool but clearly failing.

"Hello," says Peter, smirking a bit. "I'm Peter."

"I'm Don," says the man, quite unable to keep his eyes off Peter's dick.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Don. Do you want to get on your knees and blow me?"

"No!" he says with his face's mouth, even though he is now staring openly.

"I think you mean 'yes'," Peter nearly purrs. "I think you do want to suck me off. I think you even want to unzip your jeans and free that monster I see right there to stroke yourself while you do it."

"...I... do?"

"You do," Peter confirms. "Now come and do it."

Don seems thoroughly convinced, and does it.

Even more people are recording it, now, but Don seems just as horny as Peter, if the state of his cock is anything to go by, oozing precum onto the ground between Peter's legs. And he's not very good at this—clearly he doesn't have a ton of experience giving blowjobs—but what he lacks in skill he certainly makes up for in confidence and effort.

Peter rolls his head back and starts moaning, petting Don's head and calling his name as well as several other expletives every now and then. He gently nudges Don's head this or that way to indicate what he likes best, and the man does seem eager to please and follows the pointers well. After that while of edging himself and the continued attention he's getting, it does not take him very long to come all over Don's face.

(Don looks very pleased by this and simultaneously confused by his own pleasure. He comes only a couple of seconds after this happens.)

And now, Peter is...

...

...teleporting right back home, leaving a very confused crowd of horny, shocked, or otherwise-curious onlookers behind.

He immediately steps into the shower and turns the water cold, cold, freezing cold, and steps under it before he can think better of it.

That went... a way. He feels, not exactly embarrassed, but guilty. It's always guilty. He's not sure if there were any children there to see him, he didn't look that hard, but what if there were. He could've... could've...

...could've what? He's already thought about this. Why is it even called "post-nut clarity" when all he's clear on is how unhorny he is and how he really doesn't want anything to do with sex anymore.

Don...

.......he feels guilty about Don in particular. He can easily talk himself out of the guilt about generic people watching—that first person was pretty much the prototypical "shocked" interaction he expected, and while he's sure the world will generate some fun online discourse about the scene people will continue to be the way they are. But there's something about Don that makes him feel... worse than he'd been expecting.

Which of course makes no sense. Don was enthusiastically participating. There was no thorny consent issue involved, there, he literally did want to be there and seemed to have his own fun.

...except...

...does he feel like NPCs can't meaningfully consent or something?

(Also: oh man this was the first time he's had sex since... well, being created, actually, memories notwithstanding. He was literally a virgin until now. But he doesn't seem to care so much about that, since he didn't feel like he'd never had sex before, so, whatever.)

Okay, but wait, how the fuck can he simultaneously hold that NPCs aren't properly people and that wait actually that does make sense, does he feel like it's, what, sort of like having sex with a dog or something?

But...

His first response to that is "if they can't consent, who can?", to which obviously one can say "the world doesn't need to be fair and it certainly doesn't owe you the existence of sexual partners". Which, fair enough, brain, touché.

And yet... well...

His intuitions about what dogs are like don't match real dogs. His intuitions about what people are like don't match real people. And what real people are like also doesn't match his intuitions about what dogs should be like. Real people seem to all be, like, he's literally been calling them NPCs in his head. He's literally called people NPCs to their faces and the best they could muster was being offended by being called a name. No one's offered an actual objection or anything.

And every interaction he's had with a person has always been hollow in that way. He's gotta admit that he's been trying to not actually reach the final conclusion that everyone literally is completely and 100% not a person, because 1. that's a fucking villain origin story and he doesn't want to be a villain, 2. principle of caution, he could be wrong and it would be very very bad to be wrong, 3. he has a suspicion or hope that it is possible to, for lack of a better word, uplift NPCs and turn them into people, and 4. it'd be a very difficult habit to break. But the model that keeps correctly predicting his experiences is the model wherein people just are exactly like video game NPCs. He even managed to actually calculate various heuristics for the theory of numerical representation of relationships he came up with early on—it's not a single number, there are some other state variables involved, and while it's not perfect it's good enough that Peter decided to stop working on it because focusing that much on it was just getting depressing.

Okay, let's try to back up and stop thinking about whether people "are people" or not. This question is holding more water than it should be. Let's think about harm instead.

Whatever other people are, they seem to not quite work in the way Peter's intuitions say they should. In particular, even when he's mean to them, people don't seem to be quite hurt in the way he thinks he would be hurt in their place. They most certainly don't hold grudges, or at least any grudges that can't be appropriately summarised by the magical relationship numbers that get constantly updated. Emotional harm definitely doesn't seem to stick, which is a pretty important element in his understanding of morality, he thinks. So, sure, maybe being gratuitously shocking and getting a public blowjob did in fact cause some harm to some people, but unless he is woefully misunderstanding them they will be... well... fine.

They'll be fine.

And Don certainly seemed fine. He is... probably... not going to be irreparably harmed by having had consensual, public sex with Peter. He might get his reputation damaged—Peter will have to see how his actions will reverberate—and, yeah, Peter does want to avoid irreparably harming people's reputation—but to the extent anyone has agency, he should not be holding himself as the ultimate cause of their actions. Don could have refused. If Don wanted to avoid the repercussions of being filmed in a public park blowing a stranger, he could have just said no.

He didn't.

Peter has a huge ego, but it's not so big that he thinks his cock has hypnotic qualities that cause other people to make decisions they don't want to make.

...brrrrrr okay this cold shower is too cold and he wants to warm up instead. He takes a proper shower—potion notwithstanding it is still pretty nice and relaxing to do it—then steps out and dries off before heading to his computer to see what damage his little public display has caused.

Well. His video went viral. The conservatives are going crazy, saying is this what the free bodies movement wants and woke youth going too far and whatever the hell else.

But there are actually "woke youth" who are praising his brave display of self-expression and comfort in his own skin and sexuality. Also, literally no one is even mentioning the way he vanished into thin air. He supposes the existence of wizards isn't a secret or anything but he had the impression it was at least less out-in-the-open than that. He supposes his cock is good enough to steal the scene like that.

Also, from the video: holy fucking shit Don's dick is immense, he hadn't had the opportunity to really look. And it's been long enough that he's getting horny again.

But actually. He. Kind of wants to see if he can find Don and get to know him?

He's. Not sure why. But he does.

Investigative techniques to the rescue, it's actually not hard to find him. Dude's got a huge Simstagram following, big het vibes with hot babes at the beach and all that, but—he actually uploaded one of the videos, himself, to his Simstagram. It's his current active story.

Peter supposes that answers the question of whether Don endorses having done it. That's his bi coming out right there.

He feels oddly warm inside about that.

He messages Don.

hey!

this is Peter, from earlier today

sorry about, uh, vanishing like that

i had fun

Don turns out to be online.

hi peter!

i had fun too

that was my first time

Yyyep, he guessed.

first time with a guy, you mean?

yeah

What does he say next.

Help???

He uh. Uh.

say, do you wanna meet up sometime for coffee or something?

i'd love to

how about tonight at chez deux chats?

Peter has no clue where Chez Deux Chats is but he can figure it out probably.

sure

8 sound fine?

it's a date

...a date??????

He. Supposes it is?????

He is having feelings about this and he's not entirely sure what they are.

He's tired of introspection, though, he's done it enough for today. He can have mysterious feelings he doesn't quite understand, it's fine.

The rest of the afternoon is spent in the near-fugue state that practising magic is, and it helps get him all the way back to recentered. He doesn't learn any new spells, but that's expected—nowadays he has to spend multiple days doing it before he gets a new one. It's still a constant form of exercise that does in fact noticeably improve his prowess at spellcasting over time.

Eventually it's 7:59 so he stops, puts shoes and a tie on (it amuses him), and teleports to the appropriate location after finding it on Siimgle Maps.

Chez Deux Chats is a cafe/restaurant clearly aimed at couples. It's not quite a fancy candlelit style of place, but the vibe is definitely one for romance, with live music and its logo being the silhouette of two cats resting their heads together while their tails meet to form a heart symbol.

Don is already there, in a white suit so well-tailored it's almost more revealing than if he were naked, and when Peter appears out of nowhere Don wastes no time in pulling him in for a rather more passionate kiss than is strictly called for.

Oh. Oh okay. That's. That's happening now, sure.

Peter looks a little bit dazed by the time he pulls away and says, "Well hello to you, too."

"Hi," Don says with a smirk. "Shall we?"

And of course they shall; he doesn't wait for an answer before asking for a table for two and leading the way in.

Peter follows him in, amused, and when they're seated he says, "Interesting choice of venue."

"I like it here," Don replies simply. "It has nice ambiance."

"That it does. Just feels a bit curious, following the blowjob in the park up with this."

"I'm a romantic."

"Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?"

"What do you mean?"

Peter waves a dismissive hand. "Never mind."

The waiter shows up about then and offers them a cute menu to choose from. But Don waves it off and says, "I'll have the lobster and he'll have the duck, please. And get us wine number four."

...uh huh. "What if I didn't like duck?" He does like duck, but he's nevertheless curious.

"You don't like duck? I could get you something else."

"No, I—" Sigh. "Duck is fine."

So off goes the waiter.

"Tell me more about yourself," Don asks.

"I'm a wizard, I work at Dewey, Cheatem & Howe Incorporated, and I'm the only person in the world."

"Ooh, I'd never met a wizard."

He literally teleported in front of you, twice.

"Well, now you have."

Smile.

Right, that's how it works, his turn to make a conversation happen.

"How about you, who is Don Lothario?"

He frowns in slight confusion. "I'm Don Lothario."

"That's not what I—I meant, tell me more about yourself."

"I'm a fitness instructor at Burners & Builders gym in Oasis Springs."

Man.

"Please give me a moment, I need to go to the bathroom."

"Of course!"

Peter goes to the bathroom, walks to one of the sinks, and leans forward against it to stare at himself in the mirror.

He supposes he should have some more introspection today.

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Okay, with that out of the way.

What had he been expecting? Sure, in text Don almost sounded normal, but it would've been very dumb to expect anything more than that given the past ever.

But...

But the thing is...

He's so fucking lonely.

That's the long and the short of it. He's so fucking lonely, all the time, his potion of "make everything better" only works on a felt sense but he still has no real friends, no real human connection, because there are no humans. And there was a part of him, a dumb, foolish, unrealistic part of him that had hoped maybe something like this would... help. Help fill the void, the hole in his heart that craves companionship. Everything is so surface-level, everything is so stale. He needs something real.

But he won't have it. Short of another miracle like himself, some spontaneous emergence of someone, he'll have to work for it. Somehow. He learns magic more slowly than the NPCs, but he's definitely more creative, and there might be a way to do it.

He'll fucking invent artificial intelligence if he has to.

But he might have to. And he needs to stop, stop... hoping. Stop wondering if he'll find something, someone, just around the corner. It's not going to happen.

It's not that he's never going to ever be able to find companionship. Not only are there reams of magic he hasn't explored yet, things beyond his reckoning, but he's literally just finding out about even more powerful things that are completely untreaded ground. It's possible, he's certain of it. He will be able to get more people, to not be the only one in the world.

All it'll take is surviving and not losing himself before he gets there.

But if he wants that, then...

...he'll need to change the way he approaches things. He'll need to push his hopes and dreams into the back of his mind. Keep pursuing them, of course, but... stop staking his day-to-day feelings on them. He can't, he won't... last... if he keeps letting reality get the best of him like that.

He needs to take the world as it comes, no more than it is. Accept it. Let his understanding of the world wash over him, be a citizen in it rather than keep himself as a constant observer and commentator, always outside, always watching, always waiting. He's not going to find real connection, but maybe, if he allows himself to, he'll find company.

He splashes some water on his face and dries it then returns to the table, where Don is fiddling with his phone. Peter catches a flash of Simstagram there before Don puts his phone down, and smiles. Of course.

"Sorry about that," he was feeling some existential depression.

"It's fine," says Don with an easy smile of his own.

"So, I see you posted our video to Simstagram."

"It got so many views, I've never had so many haters before." He seems to find this amusing.

"I'm sure. I imagine your followers were a lot more used to you with the hot beach babes from your page and not really expecting to see someone else's dick."

"I've never been with a guy before."

"Well, I hope I'm a good first impression."

"You're very attractive," he says earnestly.

"Why, thank you, you're very attractive yourself. Maybe you and I could go to the beach together and add some snaps to your Simstagram to start your story as bisexual idol."

"I'd love to go to the beach with you!"

"And for the record I'm also into girls so if you want to bring some of your girlfriends with you..."

He looks—shocked. "You're okay with that?"

"Of course! I'm not expecting to be your only beau, here."

"...wow."

"What?"

"Most people don't like it when I get with other people."

"It's hot," Peter shrugs. "And I don't want to tie you down."

"I'm a free spirit," agrees Don. "I don't want to be tied down."

(Peter has just learned that Don is Noncommittal.)

No shit.

"Well, I'm polyamorous," he thinks, "and I don't feel jealousy."

"You're very attractive."

"Tickling your fancy, am I? Well, maybe you could have me for dessert tonight."

"...here?"

"Here," Peter agrees. "I really want to know how you feel inside me."

Don licks his lips. "I would like that."

Peter... actually has a pretty good time, all things considered.

It's a strange switch to flick in his head, this change in how he approaches interaction with Don. The trick is taking things as they come, and not comparing the things Don says to things that would have felt more natural to say, to him. He has to clamp down on his occasional urge to say... longer sentences, sort of, since it seems like other people will always basically only extract a gist of whatever he says. It's even almost possible to have logical progression in the conversation, so long as he limits each step to a short statement and allows Don to register and react to it.

He has to admit this was... actually the best time he has had with another person ever since the day he came to be.

The way Don rails him against a wall after they're done with the food is a nice bonus, too. He even takes a selfie while doing it to post to his Simstagram.

Don does not remain Peter's only partner, after that. Something something opened the floodgates something. While he doesn't feel like the "memories" from before he woke up are really his, and from some "objective perspective" he can't really miss something he's never had, he really missed sex. His hands are nice and all but they don't really function as a full replacement for another person next to him sharing this climax. He does go to the beach with Don, and they have a ton of fun being absolute sluts, and Don's Simstagram profile becomes a lot closer to a porn profile than it was before.

And the world listens. The thrice-damned experiment works, as after a couple more weeks the Overton Window of the discourse moves to the "free bodies movement" focusing on liberating sexuality rather than literally just fighting against "oppressive dress codes" or whatever the hell. It is, again, completely acausal: it just happens that the world becomes a world where sex is a lot more accepted and widespread and... less of a big deal.

If Peter were to make an analogy of what it feels like, it feels a little bit like playing games with someone else, or singing, or any other regular human activity you might do with another person. There are places and times where it's expected you should refrain from it—if you play games on your phone in the middle of a work meeting people will be put out, you shouldn't eat popcorn in the middle of class, don't whistle loudly in a theatre—but other than that sort of situational appropriateness it's just another way in which humans have needs and wants and might do things. It's... nothing special.

Kind of. Spontaneous public orgies in the middle of a park are still frowned upon, a bit. They can get pretty loud and obnoxious.

He has a ton of fun with people, and almost loses himself in this character of a version of himself that only says short sentences most of the time. And he still has the occasional breakdown about how everything absolutely and completely sucks. But a vague plan starts forming.

The thing he seems to do, most noticeably, is change the status quo, right? It's being different. So, what if high-profile and interesting events start occurring more regularly?

His idea is staging various such events, anonymously. He's not quite sure what such an event could be, but things like large charitable interventions, scientific breakthroughs, magical events, even things like complex heists are all possibilities. And maybe... if those things start happening enough because of him... they'll also start happening without him. And then, maybe, the people who are behind the events that he didn't do... will turn out to be people.

It's a reach, but it's the best he's been able to come up with. At least so far. He needs to understand things better, but until he does, this will have to do.

But Don... ages. Everyone ages. Faster than Peter does, noticeably so, and it does still... get to him.

You know who doesn't age? Vampires.

Maybe it's time to get to know one.

It turns out to be laughably easy to find them. Not that he really expected any different. But for a group of people that's meant to be secretive it really is kind of ridiculous that he can very easily learn about the rumours of creatures of the night in Forgotten Hollow and how there's this one Count who is from a dynasty of Counts who all look extremely physically similar to each other.

Sure thing, Jan. By this point he's just exhausted by everyone's inability to see the obvious.

He transportalates to the town, appearing right in the middle of a park that hilariously has this huge statue of Count Vladislaus Straud I, supposedly the current Count's great-grandfather, who's meant to have founded the place however many years ago.

Well, time to go meet the Count.

Okay, Peter has to admit, Count Straud got the aesthetic down pat. Up a hill overlooking the town he founded and still presides over, big goth mansion decorated with gargoyles, tons of graves decorating it. Very nice.

But five minutes after he rings the bell it occurs to him that... probably... trying to find a vampire out and about in the middle of the day was not his smartest move.

"I am afraid you will not find Count Straud out at this hour."

Peter turns around to look for the source of the voice and sees a young man in a rather fancy red suit wearing recognisably Galce & Dobanna sunglasses standing in the middle of the street, arms folded.

"Yes, I believe I do detect a flaw in my plan," he says as he skips down the stairs to walk over to the man.

"Your plan?"

"What are you doing here?" he asks in lieu of replying. This is rather agentic behaviour for an NPC.

"Following you," he says with a shrug.

"Why were you following me?"

"To save you from Count Straud."

"...save me?"

"He is not who he says he is."

"...what's your name?"

"I am Caleb Vatore," he replies with a bow. "At your service. And yours?"

"Peter Tarleton," he says with an amused headshake. "Count Straud is a vampire," Peter tries.

That—changes things. Caleb sort of straightens up and nods.

(Caleb now knows that Peter is Aware Of The Truth.)

"He is evil and a murderer."

"Isn't that all vampires?"

"No!"

Aha.

"Like you."

"I'm not a vampire!"

"Yes you are."

"...yes, I am. But I am not evil."

"I believe you."

Peter is throwing Caleb's programming for a loop, here.

"Okay."

"I want to know more about vampires."

"I can tell you about vampires."

"Why don't you take me somewhere other than the doorstep of the evil vampire and then tell me about vampires?"

"Do you want to come over to my place?"

"That sounds good to me. Lead the way."

He does.

His place is a charming little also-a-mansion downhill from the Count's. A lot less goth, no gargoyles or graves to speak of, but still unreasonably large and sharing some of the same quaint aesthetic senses with the rest town.

Caleb locks the door behind them, then—superspeeds to the sofa in his living room.

His living room, which has a pipe organ.

So aesthetic.

"Super speed, huh?"

"Some vampires can run very fast," Caleb agrees.

Peter takes a seat on another chair in front of Caleb. "Some?"

"Not all vampires have all the same powers."

"Innnteresting."

"Before anything else, can I get you something to drink or eat?"

"You have food?"

"A little bit!"

"I thought vampires didn't eat food."

"Vampires can survive on blood or some specific types of plants."

Right, silly Peter for assuming other people are capable of drawing cross-sentence logical inferences.

Still... "You're very perky. Are you perchance a person?"

"Of course! Vampires are people just like you."

...right. He has a chip on his shoulder about vampire reputation, it seems.

"I mean a real person, you know, unlike other people who can't have real complex conversations or remember things very specifically." Just in case.

"I think I have a pretty good memory."

It was worth a shot.

Before the conversation can resume, a second vampire superspeeds into the room and stops right in front of Peter's chair. She stares into his eyes and... glows...

...oh. She's gorgeous. Her eyes are so pretty... her presence is so soothing...

"Lilith!" snaps Caleb.

...aaaand the hypnosis breaks. Peter blinks a few times rapidly and as he regains focus he sees a woman who looks very much like Caleb if Caleb had long hair being lectured by the vampire about using glamours on people without asking.

"I wanted to know what he was like!" she protests.

Caleb notices Peter has come to and turns apologetic. "I'm sorry for my sister. She is a bit strange."

"I... can see that. What was she doing?"

"She was evaluating your personality."

"He is good, smart, and ambitious," she declares.

"Not... not false," Peter says.

"Go away Lilith."

"Fine. Bye now."

And she disappears into a side room.

These are the most interesting people he's ever met.

"So vampires can evaluate someone's personality?"

"Some vampires can."

"So can you—" Wait, no, last time he asked for an overview of supernatural stuff went very poorly.

........but Caleb is being so helpful.

"—give me an overview of what being a vampire is like?"

"Most vampires can't be out in the sun or they might die, but some can overcome this weakness."

Why is is that they all interpret all such questions as "please give me one random tidbit of information about $topic"?

Sigh.

"I don't suppose you have any books to recommend on the subject?"

"I do! The best series about vampires is the Encyclopaedia Vampyrica. Most of it is about Count Straud but there is a lot of useful information."

He's the best NPC Peter has met. That was a whole sentence of extra information he added right there for no reason! He's so helpful! Peter is very charmed.

"I don't suppose you'd lend me your copy?"

"Yes, but if you don't return it I will have to hunt you down."

"Is that a threat or a promise?" Peter almost asks, except he's pretty sure Caleb would not actually get it. How to phrase that, the conversational seconds are ticking...

"I think I would like it if you hunted me down," there, direct and to the point and most importantly obviously flirty.

Caleb Vatore raises an eyebrow and leans forward. "Maybe I would also like to have to hunt you down."

"We could skip the part where you need an excuse for that and just get to me right now."

Caleb zips over to inches away from Peter's face and flashes a dangerously toothy grin. "You need to think very carefully about what you are asking for."

"I am asking you to show me your vampiric skills in bed. And then to lend me your book."

Caleb does have some vampiric skills in bed. Super speed is not his only superpower, and he can use those fangs to great effect.

Peter is such a fan of people who fuck on the first not-a-date, like himself.

He's also becoming rather a huge fan of Caleb in particular, and in the afterglow in one of this mansion's multiple beds he starts pestering the vampire about himself. How old is he, how long has he been a vampire, who turned him, who turned his sister (or were they both born vampires?), what does he do for a living, all of that.

Caleb seems to rather enjoy being the center of attention like that. Peter will get the strong impression that Caleb loves talking about himself, in that way NPCs have of talking about things they are interested in in which they say lots of sentences about it that could with some effort and creativity be constructed into a narrative.

He was turned eighty years ago—

 (—which makes Peter almost choke on his spit, since according to his calculation most NPCs live for 13 to 16 years at most and his own life expectancy seems likely to be around like another forty-five to fifty—)

—by a vampire called Miseya Hellic (stage name Miss Hell), who herself had been turned by Count Straud. His sister was turned shortly after by Straud himself. They were the heirs of a rich family that had recently moved to Forgotten Hollow and Straud wanted to seduce them into staying by offers of immortality and power.

He didn't count on Caleb and Lilith actually, you know, caring about people and not wanting to kill others, so that backfired and the siblings moved out soon after.

They've only recently returned, wanting to work towards turning this place into a little bit less of Straud's personal playground and maybe a place where vampires and mortals can coexist in harmony.

Also, Caleb is a Simstagram fashion influencer who's trying to make it big and eventually he wants to start his own brand.

...is it vampirism that makes these people more ambitious and interesting than anyone he's ever met? Maybe the fact that NPCs' lives are so short just curb anyone's desires or something and you do need immortality to fix it, but holy shit this conversation has just placed Caleb and Lilith at the top of Peter's list of people to turn into real people as soon as he figures out how.

It does sort of throw a wrench into his plan of "causing interesting events to happen so that more of them will be caused by other people" because Caleb's ideas are pretty interesting and he's still an NPC. But Caleb hasn't succeeded yet, so maybe not entirely.

Peter is not going to lose hope.

It starts getting late, and although Peter doesn't need to sleep, Caleb actually does. He's mostly diurnal, since he's actually one of the vampires who made himself immune to sunlight, while his sister is mostly nocturnal, because she has not.

Well, really, his sister is whatever she's feeling like at the time with a bias for the night, but whatever.

So Caleb gives Peter his number and lends him his copy of Encyclopaedia Vampyrica, Vol. 1, and restates his threat of hunting Peter down, but this time it's definitely flirty.

(Peter did have to sort of fool around with questions to understand Lilith's situation, there. "My sister isn't immune to the sun." "Then why was she awake during the day?" "Only direct sunlight hurts vampires." "So she's not nocturnal." "Most of the time my sister prefers being awake at night." But good enough.)

He thanks Caleb for the book, says goodbye with a kiss, and transportalates back home to spend the night reading about vampires.

The main relevant things he cares about, there, are:

• Vampires can either be born or turned.
• A vampire will stop aging once they reach the age NPCs call "young adult", which for normal NPCs is around 6 years.
• Any vampires who are turned after that will freeze aging wherever they are but they will not rejuvenate.
• Vampires have some default weaknesses, such as being burnt by sunlight or repelled by garlic or needing invitations to walk into someone's home or turning to dust when a wooden stake is driven through their heart, but a sufficiently powerful vampire can work to overcome most of those.
• Vampires need to drink either blood (human or otherwise) or the juice of a specific species of plant that evolved to mimic it in order to survive.

There are probably more details in the other books, but honestly this is a pretty good introduction to get going. And Caleb was right, a lot of the book is dedicated to narrating the life of a single, specific, unnamed vampire, who probably is in fact Count Straud. It's interesting, if kind of creepy when interpreted as an account of real facts that really happened, but the information is solid.

One thing he is curious about, though, is why there is nearly no overlap between communities of vampires and wizards.

"Vampires can't be wizards, and wizards can't be turned into vampires," Caleb explains when Peter asks him about it.

"...huh. Really? I hadn't expected you to actually know the answer, to be honest, but do you know why?"

A shrug. "No, not really."

"Guess I could ask one of the Sages about it."

"What are Sages?"

"Sages are very powerful wizards that can turn normal people into wizards. They also know a lot about magic in general."

And thankfully Peter can return to the Realm of Magic whenever he wants. He doesn't even need the glimmerstone anymore, he can just transportalate.

He hasn't been spending so much time there, lately. He will need to, soon, to practise potionmaking and eventually learn more stuff, but he lucked out to find a scroll for the Potion of Prompt Resurrection at one of the stores one day, and while he's still not powerful enough to be able to learn it, he's keeping it close to his heart in his inventory.

Also, since he apparently won't be able to turn into a vampire, he'll need to pull for a Potion of Rejuvenation to keep from growing old, but he has a while.

Regardless, when he goes to visit the Realm of Magic he learns that Sage Cara Lane has retired and passed her mantle on to one Ethren Reyes as Sage of Practical Magic. Since he's always had a soft spot for that school of magic, Ethren is the one he asks about vampirism.

Unfortunately Ethren is not much help, either. The long and the short of it is that no one knows why it doesn't work. It is a known fact, for sure, amongst the very very few people who have been interested in it, that vampirism and spellcasting are incompatible, but the reason for it is elusive. There are various hypotheses but no one has a mechanistic understanding of either situation and so no one really "makes predictions" so much as "record observations".

(Not that he used that many words, of course, but Peter is getting pretty good at piecing these things together by now.)

Peter has very little hope, but he decides to talk about the subject with the other Sages, just in case. Sage Faamoana of Mischief Magic is somehow even more useless than Ethren, not knowing about vampires at all, so whatever. Now, Sage Dyer of Untamed magic is... a whole other beast.

She's kind of kooky is what she is, head in the clouds all the time, talking about chakras and spiritual alignment and a bunch of bullshit that he's pretty sure is actually bullshit rather than legit forms of magic. But also, the other two Sages do respect her a lot, she knows more magic than anyone else alive, and she's the most powerful spellcaster in the world. So.

"Peter!" she says when he finally finds her on a broomstick waving her hands around trying to catch space dust. She doesn't look at him but somehow she knows he's there anyway. "What brings you to the clouds?"

"Sage Dyer, hi," he says from his own broomstick. "I've been meaning to talk to you."

"Oh, I know, Petey. I saw it in the dust. Congratulations on the boyfriend."

"...I don't... think I have a boyfriend?"

"But you will," she says, still not looking at him.

"...okay! Uh, I just talked to the other Sages about vampirism and spellcasting."

"Oh, it's impossible!" she says, and giggles. "The laws of magic don't permit it."

Peter sighs. "So I've heard."

"Two magics," she continues, heedless of his disappointment, spreading her hands apart, "can't exist in one body," and she claps them together. "It doesn't fit!"

"That was one of the hypotheses I read about in the book Sage Reyes suggested, yes."

"But one magic," she then adds, bunching her hands together, "can split and multiply!" And she spreads her hands out and opens her arms wide, beaming up into the sky and then, finally, turning to look at him.

"...Sage, you are very strange, and I have no idea what you're talking about or how it is at all relevant to me."

"But you will! You will, Petey, you will—oh!" And her broomstick jerks and then shoots off into the distance as if with a mind of its own, and she holds onto it for dear life, cackling all the while.

Man. The kind of shit she says is almost so crazy it wraps all the way back up to sounding normal. Normal and cuckoo, but still.

He stuffs the broomstick into his inventory and transportalates back home before he's fallen far enough to get hurt when he lands.

The next day after work he finds her experimenting with some potion on the roof of the Magic Manor and interrupts her as soon as he spots her to ask in a wild rush, "You can duplicate people???????"

"Oh yes, Petey, I knew you'd get it!" she says, grinning widely.

"How? Why is this spell not mentioned—anywhere? How do I do it? What do I have to do????"

"It is the ultimate untamed magic! Very secret. You don't tell anyone. They need to figure it out by themselves!"

"...okay but you kinda told me though."

"No! You told you!"

"You—I only thought of it because of what you said yesterday—"

"The currents of time and thought don't run straight, Petey. They are very, very queer."

"I, you, you know what, I don't care. I need it. I need this spell. I have never needed anything more in my life—" He could have another him. The only person who's a person, if he could—could make another one of himself—could—

"Oh, Petey, you already know it. You just need a twist and a think."

"...I'm pretty sure I don't know it, the—wait, are you saying Copypasto works on people?"

"I am not saying anything, Petey! You are saying it. Now goodbye, I must finish this soup."

Soup. Okay.

"...Sage Dyer, are you a person?"

"No, of course not!"

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."

"...are they magical?"

"Oh, no, not at all."

"So... why plant them?"

"Gardening can be very soothing and meditative." She sniffles and wipes her tears with the back of her wrist.

"...Sage Dyer, you realise that if you're an actual person you would solve, like, all of my problems."

"Oh, Petey, you can't use magic to solve all of your problems. That is a lesson we all must learn."

"Okay but that's..." Sigh. "I didn't say anything about that."

"What did you say?"

"I said that I really need a person, I need someone to talk to who isn't a thrice-damned video-game NPC."

"I don't think I've ever played video games. I prefer books."

"I don't know if you're making fun of me."

"I would never make fun of you! That would be terribly rude."

"...fine. Okay. Thank you, Sage Dyer."

    "Anytime, Petey. Anytime." And back to flower picking.

(...and when he gets home he does plant the bloody flowers.)

"Maybe you could change the spell," Caleb suggests. He didn't react the same way Sage Dyer did to the "news", as if Peter had lost a loved one, but rather he acted like he was sympathetic about a failed attempt at something difficult but ultimately possible to overcome.

"That's what Sage Dyer implied," sighs Peter. "I think maybe what I need to make a clone stick is something like enchantment magic."

Although that wouldn't explain why the clone seemed to voluntarily off itself, and not even leave a ghost behind.

"What's enchantment magic?"

This turns out to be one of the days Lilith is being not-entirely-nocturnal. Peter has been trying to convince her to practise her vampiric abilities so she can be diurnal too because that would be much better for her dreams of becoming a great vampire matriarch, but it's been slow going.

"The type of magic that makes things be persistently magical instead of stop being magical after a while."

"Like your magic wand."

"Or my flying broomstick, yeah."

"I didn't know you had a flying broomstick!"

"I did."

Yes, thank you both for your very relevant and valuable contributions to this conversation.

The conversation lulls, but after a couple of minutes Lilith says, "So I met this girl called Morgan Fyres."

Peter perks up at that. "Did you. I thought you didn't want to date."

"I think I do want to date."

"Are you into women, then?"

Lilith pulls a face. "I'm not into anything. Caleb is the family slut."

"I am not a slut! I am a romantic."

Peter nudges Caleb on the side. "You're sitting naked in your couch with me and we are not even official."

Caleb looks at Peter seriously. "Do you want to be my boyfriend?"

wait what

"Iiiiiiiiuhhhh eheheheheheh."

Does he? Does he? He kinda does? Except for how Caleb is still not a person even though he is the most interesting not-a-person around (except for occasionally when Sage Dyer becomes almost reasonable), and... he's hot, and cute, and kind of bossy but Peter kind of likes that, and super opinionated about everything, and a bit hot-headed, and self-assured, and decisive, and wow why has Peter spent so much time analysing all of the details of Caleb's personality like that.

He's seeing a meltdown just like the one he had about having sex with Don years ago fast approaching and he wants to head it off.

Did fucking Sage Dyer see this coming, he swears to plumbob if she did—

No, stop that. He'll. Uh.

"I need a moment in the bathroom, please," he says, and he immediately flees because help.

(Not now, dick, a boy asking to be your boyfriend isn't a reason to get all uppity.)

Hahhhhhh he washes his face and slaps it a couple of times for good measure.

Is this... a crush. Is it love. He had dismissed feeling real emotions for people here because, well, NPCs, but... but...

Is he limiting himself? He's not taking the world as it comes, is he? He's still acting as if this is some sort of "backstory world", a place where things happen before he can get to his real life, with other people like him.

But...

Caleb isn't going to die. And realistically, unless the universe sends a comet his way, neither is Peter. Even though he's not a vampire, he has the Potion of Rejuvenation already, he's not going to die of old age, and the Potion of Plentiful Needs covers almost anything. He has gotten ill, but nothing worse than a mild flu, and spellcasters have plenty of concoctions for general health and specific cures for diseases.

And it's probably going to take Peter years to really crack the code, here. Denying himself sex on the basis of waiting to have it with "real people" would have been the wrong move, he thinks, and a similar logic extends to denying himself emotional companionship. It's not like Caleb is proposing to him, and Caleb is very much just as polyamorous as Peter is so they're not trying to be monogamously tied to each other. And he can let himself... feel things. For people, even. He doesn't need to make everything about his ultimate future eternal life. He can just...

...have a boyfriend.

With that decided, he walks out of the bathroom and back to the Vatores' living room, shuffling his feet sheepishly.

Lilith and Caleb were having a casual if kind of awkward-sounding discussion, but once Peter shows up again Lilith hides behind her phone while Caleb folds his arms and looks... not very happy.

Okay, Peter will walk over to the sofa again and pull both of Caleb's hands into his. "I'm sorry about fleeing like that," he says to start. "I was feeling a bit insecure and needed to think. But... I do want to be your boyfriend."

Caleb mellows down a bit at the apology and goes all the way to soft at the end. "Do you mean it?"

"Yeah." He lifts Caleb's hands to his lips and plants a kiss on Caleb's knuckles. "Yeah, I do."

"D'aaaaaawwwwwwwwww!"

"Shut up, Lilith," Caleb says with no heat as he pulls Peter in for a kiss.

Sage Dyer continues to be approximately useless for anything practical. Peter tries to sound her out about what to do to improve his cloning spell, or even just confirm his hypotheses about enchantment magic, but she does not have anything to say that doesn't sound like woo bullshit. The other Sages indulge her but they can't hope to match her in knowledge and skill, and they sound surprised and awed by the idea of a cloning spell like that. Clearly it is not even known by them.

He gets one extra potion called "of Immortality", but it turns out all it does is make sure you can't die of old age. Experimenting with it, however, turns out to be the breakthrough he needs for the Potion of Prompt Resurrection. It borrows from familiars' ability to protect their spellcaster from death by creating an artificial familiar-like magical construct that does the same. When you drink the potion, it draws some of your energy to create it, and then if anything would happen to kill them the construct is spent to entirely restore the spellcaster to the physical state they were in when they drank it. The construct only lasts for about a day or two, and it's entirely undetectable to any but the most powerful spellcasters—or the person who drank the potion, themself. But it can be Copypasto'd, and so with the combination of the Potion of Plentiful Needs, the Potion of Rejuvenation, the Potion of Prompt Resurrection, and the Copypasto spell, Peter is pretty much entirely immune to dying of anything at all, even meteors thrown at him by a spiteful universe.

Peter makes sure to get enough copies of it going to spare them for the Vatores, even though they are somewhat bemused—the idea of being doubly immortal does not seem like one they quite understand. They're willing to indulge him, anyway, and that's good enough.

And he does make use of the cloning spell every now and then. It kind of finishes killing his already-dwindling social life—the Vatores are much more interesting than anyone else, as he has mentioned in this narration multiple times, and between them and getting fuck buddy clones, he sort of neglects spending time with anyone else. Relationship numbers start decaying over time, and pretty much anyone other than the people he interacts with at work eventually gets reduced to acquaintances.

One day he gets a call from someone he hasn't talked to in a while—Dina Caliente, one of Don's regular Hot Beach Babes^tm and erstwhile fuckbuddy of Peter's. She eventually got married and had her own kids (Peter is still not thinking about NPC babies, aaaah), and Peter mostly lost contact with her since, so it's kind of surprising to see her call him.

"Dina?"

"Hi, Peter. Do you have a moment? It's about Don."

Peter is kind of past being unsure about his feelings. Yeah, he does have feelings for people, even as he yearns for more. He has a boyfriend, now, and Lilith is a really good friend of his, and Lilith's girlfriend Morgan is pretty cool (he's still not sure what they've got going on there but it's cool), and he has whatever the shit he has with Sage Dyer. They may not be quite people but his feelings for them don't really give a fuck about that, not after he started letting them.

And Don is not the first person he's met who's passed away. It's not even that... bad... objectively speaking. Don's ghost will still be there, and resurrection is possible, and if Peter ever finds out how to turn other people into people then everything will be fine.

But he...

"I'm sorry," he says to Don's ghost at the graveyard. They're both sitting on the freshly-planted grass atop Don's grave, next to each other, watching the sunset.

"Hmm? What about?" asks the ghost, his echo-y voice a constant reminder that he's not really of this world.

"I could have... kept you. I chose not to." He knows Don will not really understand what he's saying. But it's fine. He wants to say it anyway. "I chose to let you age and die. To let you go, to not spend that much time with you. I don't know if I regret it. But I'm sorry anyway."

"Well, I forgive you," says Don, even though he definitely does not sound like he really understands it.

"Did you live a good life? Did you have fun, are you proud of the person you were?"

"Yeah! My life was great. I was very happy."

"Well. I'm happy for you, then."

Peter makes a new clone when he gets home, that evening. But this time, he only asks the clone to hold him. Just lie in bed together, hugging, in silence. He wants to pretend, for a moment, again.

His clone emerges in a similarly gloomy mood, and is also happy to just hug in silence. His thoughts may not be as complete and his feelings not as complicated as Peter's, but they're still coming from the same place, and he can offer what solace and comfort he has to offer.

"I wish you could stay," Peter murmurs, a bit too quietly.

"Hmm?" asks the clone.

"I wish you could stay with me," he says, more loudly. "Just, just stay. Stay here. Not leave. I know it wouldn't be enough but... but I think it'd be something. It'd be better."

"I could stay."

"You're lying. But I appreciate it. Say it again. Tell me you'll stay. Or just stay."

"I'll stay. I'll stay for as long as you want me to stay. I can stay forever."

"Please do," he sighs, nestling up into the clone.

"Okay. I will."

"What the fuck—"