Epilogue

Author's Note: I decided to do a double post today rather than break up the last chapter and the epilogue over the weekend. On Monday, I will start posting chapters of my new story to this tier along with a note about future plans.

* * * * *

Luke felt the doorway open from the other side of the world, something that should have been impossible. The regularly scheduled maintenance scan wasn’t going to happen for another twenty years, and other than him and System, there was no one who could manually force the door open.

None of the stars that represented people with shards of divinity in them had shifted positions, but Luke knew the location well enough to manifest his avatar there regardless. As expected, he found the doorway wide open. What he wasn’t expecting was the little girl standing nearby looking around.

She was four years old and dressed in a set of overalls with a fuzzy pink shirt underneath and dirty old sneakers. In one hand, she had a wooden rolling pin. The other held the metal lid to a cooking pot. Long, straight blonde hair hung down her back, and her face was set in a determined scowl.

“Emily,” Luke said.

Emily jumped and spun to face him. “Uncle Luke!”

“What are you doing here by yourself?” Luke asked. “It’s very dangerous here. Your father would never forgive me if something happened to you.”

“That’s why I brought this,” she said, her voice serious as she brandished the rolling pin.

“Emily.” Luke’s voice had a note of warning in it.

“It’s… it’s my birthday,” she whined. “I wanted to see you too! Did you get me a present?”

“I…” Luke knew he shouldn’t reward her, but if it really was her birthday… He did some quick math, or rather he queried the system itself to do the math for him, and determined that she wasn’t lying. For the next two years or so on Aros, it would be Emily’s birthday. He’d actually missed the first year completely.

“I’ll tell you what,” Luke said. “For your birthday, you can have anything you want. But! You have to tell me how you got the doorway open first.”

“I don’t know how,” Emily said. “I wanted it to open, so it did. So I ran upstairs and got Aunt Sophie’s rolling pin because everyone always says there are monsters here, even though I never see any when we come visit.”

It had to be a result of Luke purifying Curt’s bloodline all those thousands of years ago so he could help with the system redesign. His daughter would have access to all sorts of bloodline abilities Luke had never even found about during his own journey. Maybe that included the ability to open the doorway somehow.

[Your theory has several holes in it.]

Luke kept the annoyance off his face and pushed a notification back to System.

[I am aware of that. If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.]

[I shall investigate further and inform you of the results.]

“Well, as much as I love getting to see you, it was still very dangerous and you shouldn’t come here without your dad,” Luke said. “What if I’d been busy and hadn’t noticed you arriving? A monster could have eaten you and we never would have known what happened to you.”

That wasn’t true at all, and even in that worst case scenario, he could have resurrected Emily, but Luke thought it’d be a lot better for her to not have to go through that ordeal to begin with.

Emily stuck her tongue out at him and said, “You would never let that happen.”

Luke sighed. She was right, the little brat. “Yeah, yeah. Happy birthday, kiddo. What do you want for your present?”

“I want my class,” she declared.

“Already? It’s a bit early, don’t you think?”

One of the first changes they’d made to the system, aside from implementing the full XP cycling protocols that kept XP from driving anyone insane, was an expansion of the template system used for non-sapient animals and monsters. Nobody had to take a class, but if they did, the system guided their choices along a narrower scope that provided skills well-suited to synergize with each other. Now that people could reach the level cap without concern, advanced skills born from merging their basic starter skills were much more common, and it turned out that a lot of people appreciated being able to decide what they wanted to do without having to spend hundreds of hours researching how skills interacted with each other in order to be good at it.

Curt had lamented the fundamental lack of curiosity loudly and often while gleefully building class after class with System’s help. Within a day, System had reconstructed enough of Curt’s thought processes that he was submitting classes and debating with Curt about proposed changes. It wasn’t long after that Curt was mostly auditing the classes System built just for fun.

These days, the system was a lot fairer to the people who lived with it. It still fulfilled its basic function of circulating pieces of the trapped divine hive consciousness from reforming, but without the gods interfering, things were running a lot smoother. Worship of the old Pantheon had largely disappeared anyway; they’d fled far, far away from Aros thousands of years ago when they’d lost control of the God Machine.

“I want something that can fly,” Emily said. “And shoot laser beams. And I should get a costume. Everything goes all sparkly and shiny with lots of bright colors, and then bam! I’m in costume. So I can fight bad guys.”

“I… don’t think a class like that exists,” Luke said slowly.

“Really? That’s dumb. But you can make it for me, right?”

“I suppose I could see what I can do.”

“Can I help?” Emily asked. “Please? Please? Please, Uncle Luke!”

This was ridiculous. Luke was over six thousand years old now and had administered the system to millions upon millions of individual life forms for uncounted generations. There was absolutely no way he was going to design a magical girl class for his niece, especially not as a reward for sneaking through the doorway without her parents’ permission or even knowledge.

He looked at Emily’s wide eyes and pouting lips and grimaced. It was her birthday. “Damn it,” he muttered under his breath. “Okay, okay. You can help.”

“-ly!” a new voice called out.

Curt burst through the doorway, panic on his face and his chest heaving. He spotted Luke and Emily and nearly collapsed on the spot as the tension drained out of him. “There you are. Thank God. When I saw the doorway open and no one knew where you were…”

“Sorry, Daddy. But I was careful, see?” Emily held up the rolling pin and pot lid.

“Hi,” Luke said, distracting Curt before he could start scolding Emily.

“Hey, Luke. Sorry about this. I don’t know how it happened. The door shouldn’t open for another week,” Curt said.

Once a month, Earth time, the system did its automated check. Even though it was a century between visits from Luke’s perspective, it was always nice to see some of his family again. It wasn’t usually everyone, but at least one person had shown up every time the doorway opened to say hi and chat for a bit. Luke might have been guilty of keeping the doorway open a bit longer than it strictly needed to be, though he always took precautions to prevent anything on the Aros side from wandering through.

Luke shrugged. “System’s working on figuring out how it happened. Could be something Emily did. Could be an anomaly on our side.”

“Pretty big coincidence,” Curt said, peering down at Emily suspiciously.

“We’ll get it figured out. In the meantime, your daughter was just telling me about what she wanted for her birthday,” Luke said. “I take it you’ve been exposing her to your anime collection?”

“What?” Curt asked. “Why would you- Oh. Right. I think I can guess.”

“I’m gonna get a costume, Daddy! And I’ll be able to fly, and shoot lasers.”

Curt groaned. “Sweetie, we talked about this.”

“Oh come on, Curt,” Luke said. “You like helping design new classes, right?”

“Heh, I guess that’s true enough.” Curt considered it for a moment. “Okay, Emily. What color should the outfit be?”