I felt for my connection to Second and Urg through Lunar Scale Dust. Finding it, I pulled on their souls as hard as I could, finding them and their cores next to mine. But they wanted out, they wanted to be free, and they tried to get away from me even under the effects of Lunar Scale Dust. I desperately tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t calm down, and they were too strong for me to hold in place. Then I remembered something.

  I found the piece of Domain that was tied to my skill Slip Away, a little dimensional pocket connected to my soul. Then I shoved Urg and Second into it, alongside my minion.

  When that was finished, I was back in the real world, floating above Earth alongside the angel made of broken glass that had vines slithering throughout it. They looked at me with an amused and happy smile.

  “I thank you for winning, but I can not allow you to smuggle unauthorized aliens onto my body. Also, did you really think that you would be able to get them past me?”

  “Kinda…”

  “You somehow always surprise me.”

  “Pretty please, can’t you just let this slide?”

  They raised a brow.

  “With a cherry on top?”

  They didn’t budge. They sighed and put a hand out towards me, their Domain stirring around me. Then I enacted the second part of my plan, I split my core in half again, taking all of the Domain she gave me, and Bug Jacob took the Domain of Guppy and the Queen who resided in Slip Away.

  I felt Terra's domain give off a vague sense of confusion at what I was doing, but it didn’t stop what it was doing, and touched me. It felt through my Domain that had once been part of it with the familiarity of someone walking through their home, but it wasn’t a one way street.

  I barged through Terra’s Domain, ransacking till I found what I wanted, her core. She didn’t even try to stop me, I was just a dog that had been away from home for a while and was prancing around. No need to stop that, right?

  Her core was a globe of the earth, clouds spinning as they hovered above the Soil, Rock, and Water that made up the planet; that made up her. And when I touched it, she rounded on me, finally noticing what I was doing, her Domain crushing me. But it didn’t do as she intended. It tried to assimilate me, I was just another piece of them, wasn’t I? But I just pushed back.

  I wrapped myself around her core, Bug Jacob inside with it, pressing a knife of a foreign Domain into it, ready to pop it at a moment's notice.

  I cleared my throat, “So, dear bitch face, also known as Terra, I have some demands.”

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!!!”

  “Negotiating, duh. You know, I made a joke a while ago about how you only had one password you used for everything, and didn’t even have two factor authentication. Didn’t think I would be right.”

  She advanced towards me, but Bug Jacob put the tip of the knife up to her core, and she stopped.

  She gritted her teeth, saying, “You said that to the system, not me.”

  “Eh, doesn’t matter. Anyway, I want you to bring every dead contestant back to life and then send all of us back home.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “That’s impossible on every level.”

  I cleared my throat, showing her the knife just an inch away from killing her.

  “I’m not lying.”

  I looked at her core, seeing into it, seeing her. She wasn’t completely lying, not completely, but about what?

  “I guess you don’t care about dying then.”

  I shrugged, gesturing for Bug Jacob to kill her.

  She shrieked, “No, no. I won’t be able to bring the other contestants back to life because they’re dead. There’s no way to reverse that process, even for the eldest and most powerful of gods. And I won't be able to return the remaining ones to their home worlds because their planets are the bodies of the other gods. And I would have to get permission from them to place them there, and then they would learn about… this mess of mine.”

  “Then tell them, your pride ain’t worth shit to me. Less than actually, because at least it has a use as a fertilizer, you’re just a parasite.”

  “Setting aside the fact that I created everything you know, this isn’t a thing of pride. They would just squash you since this domain trick would only work against me, since you’re using my Domain to trick me. Then they would take the chance to kill me.”

  “So sending me and the other to Earth is all you can do.”

  “Yes, it is all I can reasonably do.”

  We locked eyes and tried to find any lie or malicious intent behind them, but I couldn’t find any.

  Then I said, “Ok, before you do that, I want you to promise on everything that you are, on everything that can bind you, that you will not interfere with me or Urg or Second for the rest of our lives.”

  They hesitated for a moment before saying, “I promise on my Name, Soul, Core, and Domain that I will not interfere with the lives of Jacob Davidson, Urg Floaw, and Second of the Snow.”

  Then I felt a shifting in the power around me, something locking it in place.

  I nodded, “Ok, send me and the other back to Earth.”

  I unwrapped around Terra's core, and felt her Domain encase me, the space around me warping. The familiar sight of my home warping around me as I finally returned.

  OOO

  I stood outside the door of my brother's room, holding a bouquet of lavender and Honeysuckle, which had always been Jacob's favorites. Mainly because I found them ugly and he was a prick, but I didn’t mind them as much as I used to.

  I took another deep breath before opening the door. It had been almost two months since I had gotten the call. Apparently, Jacobs' landlord had found him unresponsive and sent him to the hospital, where they called his only emergency contact, me.

  From what the doctors told me, Jacob most likely had some sort of mental break. They originally thought he was brain dead. But they couldn’t find any damage, and everything was all working perfectly fine, including the body. But there had been no progress on the psychological side of things either, since for that to work, you have to have a responsive patient.

  So all that could be done was wait till he was responsive again. And for about the first two weeks, I had practically lived at the hospital. But I had a life I needed to manage, so I slowed down my visits from every day to every other day. Then the time in between visits grew bigger, and during that time, I figured out why this had happened.

  It was because of me. I had hurt him so bad the last time we met, I had broken everything between us because I thought I knew what was best for him. And I had let Jacob pick up those broken pieces of himself alone. I knew he was never the kind that could be alone, live alone, but I still had done it.

  And I had done it again, leaving him in a room, surrounded by nothing he knew or loved. But all I could do was try again, so I composed myself, wiping the tears that had formed in my eyes, and opened the door.

  Seeing Jacob groaning on the floor, gripping their crotch, a bloody catheter on the floor next to them, alongside a fallen IV stand. But that was secondary to the green moth the size of a Great Pyrenees. I thought it was a prop or something until it moved and fucking hissed at me.

  HISSED, LIKE A GODDAMN CAT!

  Then I was broken out of my shock when Jacob waved at me and said with a strained smile, teeth gritted in pain, “Hey Boe, how have you been doing?”