A Choice Stalled, and the Price of Justice

Felix gently left Zetsuko's grasp, and walked just far enough away to feel safe. To feel like if worse came to worse, he could yell out a command before the oni attacked him. Taking a bit to think about it made him realize how horrific taking this deal would actually be. How could he have his first child with her? How could he doom that child to be raised by a monster who wanted to slaughter humans and destroy civilization, just so she could end up on top? That was unacceptable, and he was disgusted with himself for considering the deal, even if it was to help his mother.

"I understand your position but..." Felix gathered himself before continuing. "I cannot take that deal. I don't even know if you can hold up your end of the bargain because I have no idea what will happen when you graduate."

"Do you doubt my skills?" Zetsuko stood up while talking to him. "Or is it because you think I'm unworthy of your first child? One of them is stupid, the other wounds me deeply Felix. Do you think I can't protect a child? Raise them? Fe-"

"ENOUGH!" Felix summoned up the voice. "Leave me for the day, Zetsuko Kakuyama."

The oni looked furious, but Zetsuko obeyed and left Felix alone in the mirror room. He wished he could've commanded her without a time limit, so as to avoid the temptation, but he could not. Not only would it be cruel, but it would also be impossible, given they were stuck in a bunker together. He didn't want to think about what would happen if someone tried to follow an impossible order, but he knew the consequences were bad enough to control himself. That was when he heard rather ominous clapping behind him.

"Impressive," Vizrokoth then stopped clapping. "You managed to resist temptation. But then I guess you didn't know enough to be properly tempted."

When Felix turned to face the demon, he did so feeling drained. Zetsuko had poured out her life's story to him, but had done so to manipulate him into a devil's bargain, and one that a part of him wanted to take. He could still remember every time his mother cried in the kitchen when she thought he couldn't hear her, or how he was never home because of his parent's marriage was collapsing. While his life was much, much better than when he had shown up, at the end of the day, the shadow of Austin White still hung over it. Still molested his mother without any consequences, still threatened to bankrupt his mother with court fees,

"For one, Castelilise graduated last night," Vizrokoth walked towards Felix. "Lets see how that went, shall we?"

At that moment, the results of another retroactive reality alteration crashed into Felix's mind. Castelilise had graduated that morning but he hadn't noticed. That graduation did turned out to make his life better, but also made his world far worse off... and showed in the process what was really required to deal with someone like Austin White.

Castelilise had done more than just introduce nereids to Felix's world. She had also introduced dryads and oreads, nature spirits of forests and mountains respectively, which along with the nereids, wrought havoc onto his Earth. These nymphs were all looked like beautiful, naked women who were more than willing to seduce every human who showed even moderate interest in them. However, these same creatures were causing mass destruction to human infrastructure. All of them seemed to have a magical affinity for breaking stuff, and their beauty made it hard in the moment to remember what they were capable of. Worse, if someone did try to use **** against them, it seemed to attract other, more dangerous things that had a tendency to be immune to bullets and slaughtered human troops with the same ruthless efficiency a buzz saw goes through wood.

The specific type of disruption varied depending on the creature in question. Nereids were ferocious in going after oil rigs, and industrial scale fishing, but were also known to destroy particularly dirty sea based shipping. It had gotten to the point where places like The Gulf of Mexico had become useless for harvesting fossil fuels, fishing had to move to a much stricter system to protect the people doing it, and ideas like deep sea mining were laughably impossible. How the nereids accomplished this was unknown, but they seemed to have a knack for sabotaging anything that manipulated liquids, such as oil or water. Pumps would fail, fuel storage would leak at the worst possible moment, and... hulls would breach. But such was the beauty of these creatures that workers often didn't want to believe these creatures were doing what they were doing, even when confronted with clear evidence to the contrary.

Dryads meanwhile complicated logging operations, and made ideas like clear cutting forest to make room for cattle ranching laughably impossible. They had a knack for breaking tools, especially ones made of metal, and making animals stampede in ways that caused disproportionate amounts of ****. Once again, dryads were so gorgeous that it was hard for people to believe they were causing so much havoc. Felix had memories of guys at his school bragging about losing their virginity to dryads, and then reports the next day would roll in of wild animal attacks quadrupling. Human expansion itself was often reigned in because if it involved cutting down or shrinking a forest, it was off the table.

Finally, the oreads had completely shattered the ability to do mountain top removal, which sounded great except they also made mining a far, far more difficult affair in general. That threatened to cripple industrial civilization itself if moonshots like asteroid mining didn't succeed, because the ability to mine anything on Earth was under threat. Before Felix had been taken to the hotel in this timeline, it had mainly shown up in the mass destruction of coal mining, but reports of other types of mines for things like rare minerals getting destroyed began to make themselves known. He remembered a stream of news reports about explosives going off at an inopportune times, or rockslides happening where they should've been impossible. He only knew oreads were responsible because of he knew about nymphs in general, but society more broadly often didn't believe it, despite the evidence.

All of this together put human society at large, and rich countries like the United States specifically, under constant never ending austerity. There were constant jokes about a carbon tax from hell, but it was more than that. Nature had magical defenders, and they had the power to destroy what no one else could. This austerity affected everyone in Felix's life, usually for the worse. Cammy was the least affected, other than that cutting her father had far less cost than it did in earlier timelines. Noah meanwhile had a harder time getting a computer, once she secured one for her various projects, it affected her the least. Smith often seemed exhausted because the constant austerity meant everyone was just more stressed out, all the time, in a way that bad behavior of all types more likely. Hanson was even more of an asshole because the broader economic change was hurting his family's previously unassailable economic position. Hailey seemed stressed out, because her parent's divorce became even worse in a world where they were both hanging by their fingernails from the constant, never ending cost of living crisis. And Austin White...

...had been hurt a lot. Felix realized this retroactive reality change wrecked the world so as to punish one man, and to otherwise make Felix's life slightly better. Austin White had still molested his mother after all. But in this timeline, the corporation wasn't as willing to defend him, nor would Austin's peers. It was far more obvious he was a garbage manager, because he was in an economy where all of his mistakes were far more obvious, and where he had to use all of his political skills just to stay employed. That made him more irritated, and in a way more dangerous to be in the presence of, but it also meant that when Felix's mother sued him, Austin had far fewer people defending him. The end result of that substantial weakening of Austin White's position... was a settlement out of court. Felix's mother was in a far better position, but she was still unemployed, and the cash from the court ruling just kept her out of poverty. It wasn't enough to fix the damage Austin had done to her life.

"Why did you hide that from me?" Felix asked. "Normally retroactive reality changes enter my mind more quickly but I couldn't remember any of this when I was with Z."

"Dear, I know the oni's true name, and have known it much longer than you," Vizrokoth said. "As for why I hid those memories, this was a test of temptation for you Felix. You passed, but I can only give partial credit. The thing you need to know is that all contestant graduations will benefit you, but they all come at a cost."

"What's the cost?" Felix asked. "My world gets worse?"

"Sometimes," Vizrokoth answered. "The real cost is someone has to suffer. Noah's parents had to watch their baby boy lose his humanity, and his original gender. Cammy got out of that because her father had already suffered, and Cameron had to fuse their personality to escape the guilt of their past. Only Castelilise and Kei Winters have been able to escape much suffering themselves, but that's because they made your world worse."

"Why are you telling me?" Felix asked as tears began to well up. "You're now asking me to choose between helping the members of my harem or-"

"There's another way Felix," Vizrokoth walked up to Felix. "But you would have to forgive someone that you hate a lot, because you view them as incompetent, pathetic, and a drain on everyone around them."

"I'm not who I was when I entered the bunker," Felix said. "I don't need to learn how to love myself."

Vizrokoth smirked hearing that. "Oh you still do, but this isn't about your current self. It is precisely the person you were when you came here that you need to forgive Felix. And that's a person you've chosen not to remember, given how you responded to Jamina's offer. If you truly want to help those around you, your world, and ultimately yourself, that must change."

The demon then walked away from Felix. "Go get some lunch Felix, I'm sure you must be famished. After that though, I hope you aren't sick of this room because you need to spend a lot more time in it..."

Janessa Smith had written a letter to Riley. The angel had done it the prior evening, after bawling her eyes out and fleeing Paisley's gaze. So while she was eating lunch, she was shocked to see Paisley again drop off a letter, and even more shocked to see it was from Riley. How had she had gotten a response so soon?

Regardless of why, Janessa Smith after lunch ran back to her room with the letter, and after stripping to respect the nearby altar, got out the letter to read. The message was just as bracing as the angel had expected, but it was still important...

"Janessa,

I'll be honest with you because I think you'd rather have that than something polished.

The infertility part — I hear you, and I'm sorry. Losing a marriage to something that was never anyone's fault is its own kind of grief and I don't want to minimize that. But I have to say it plainly: losing a spouse and losing a child aren't the same thing. One of them you can survive and rebuild from. The other one just — lives in you forever, in a place nothing else can reach. I'm not saying your pain wasn't real. I'm saying the comparison doesn't quite hold, and I think you know that.

The Andy part — we're okay. Better than okay, actually. I got there eventually, which I didn't think I would for a long time. You're right that blaming him wasn't making anything better. It was just easier than sitting with the rest of it.

I want to ask you something, and you don't have to answer. You said Felix hates you, and you said things happened under the influence of your transformations. I've been a teacher. I know what it means when someone in authority abuses it, transformation or not. I'm not going to pretend I didn't notice what you left out of that sentence. I'm also not going to lecture you, because you didn't ask for that and it wouldn't help either of you.

But are you actually doing the work? Not the angel transformation, not the authority — the actual work. Because that's the only thing that ever helps, in my experience. And it sounds like you know that, or you wouldn't have written this letter.

Riley"

The angel knew she needed to do the work to get back into Felix's good graces. But how could she even begin? How could she make up for molesting him, even if Janessa Smith knew he had enjoyed it? Or for that matter every time she had abused her authority, even if in the latest timeline it hadn't happened as much? Once again retroactive reality changes meant the angel wasn't even sure about what she had done as a human to end up in this place. How could she apologize to Felix if she couldn't even fully remember what she had done to him in life?

If the guilt Riley reinforced was cutting, the point she made about Janessa's false comparison was harsh, but only wasn't true because the angel had lied. Smith had destroyed her marriage as a human man, and worse, had done things to Susan she could never make up for. The infertility was just the culmination of Smith's failures as a husband, and that wasn't something she could see until she lost her very humanity. So once again all Janessa Smith could do was wrap herself up in her wings, and bawl her eyes out from the guilt...