Why are you special?

Ah, Death’s office again.

Death looks at me with his twin voids, "Welcome back. So what do you plan to do with him?"

I sigh as I reach for Death’s bookshelf, "Something quite evil, but not quite [Evil]: I'm going to edit him, and give him a potion that will let him 'restore' herself to her 'rightful form'. She'll get to live until something or someone else kills her. And give a lot of work to your sister in the meanwhile."

Death considers, "Why not just leave him on a shelf for eternity?"

Persistent Spell, in Pathfinder, makes a person need to save twice… handy feat, "I could; it's admittedly quite tempting. And in my library, he'd probably sit there for quite some time. But while that would be removing a source of evil from the world, I'd like to add a source of good while I'm at it."

Death considers, "Risky… even your spells can be undone, with enough resources."

Overmind Psionics form the Legendary Medium spirit list… nice, psionics have some things I can't replicate with spells… "Yes, well… I beat him once before. I can do it again if I need to. But I plan to make it very expensive for whoever tries."

Death raises an eyebrow, "Oh?"

Ah, godripper from the godfoe template; ignore hardness and DR, and anything I wield and all my natural weapons are considered Epic and Artifacts for overcoming defenses… good if I run up against another high end Mythic… "Yes. I plan to edit him, entirely, in multiple different ways. Whoever is trying to restore him would need to fix all of them. And because my stuff can't simply be Dispelled, that means Wishes, generally. Can I trust you not to tell?"

Death chuckles, "I don't want to see that rat back in circulation until he's properly scrubbed,  no, I won't blab. But you might give Judgment a headache."

I manage to look away from the books for a moment, "How so?"

Death smiles, "Do we file the soul based on who you forced her to become, or who he was naturally?"

Quickling Casting, from the third party Quickling template: Free Quicken and Full attack with spells? Yes please! "You may need to ask your father to sort that out… but I’m thinking of making her into a priestess of you. How do you feel about 'The Comforter of Souls' as a title?"

Death considers, "I hope it catches on."

Light Body technique progresses… Terrain Glide, I guess? I have a burrow speed from a spell, but the Earth Glide that qualifies me for later is better than what I'm getting from magic, as it's based on my land speed… nah. I'll just grab Expanded Training and get the other two packages… not that I'm liable to use ranks in Climb … ever… "Good to hear… and just to clarify, did the spell to sustain you actually do the job?"

Death pauses, "Mostly, yes. It prevents me from starving, but the… extra… needed for things like your blessing I still need to get honestly. Still… your blessing is pretty lightweight, and it means we have a few years to solve it properly before we stop having these little chats."

Eidolon progresses a lot… I guess claws on my feet, and Bleed for my claws? I can always change it up later with the Transmorgify spell, "Great… so I still need to get Life off your back. All right… well, I was planning to try something for that anyway. I need a little preparation time, though. And just before, I'll need unique identifiers for them."

Death nods, "That's simple. Death dates are my department."

A few spells known, barely matters, but I will try for immediate action spells as much as possible … "That's good. Hopefully reviving them will make it clear to her that it wasn't your will, and at least convince her to stop starving you out. Hmm. Are your other siblings having the same problem? It's also possible she just got greedy at some point."

Death sighs, "I hope it's something we can settle just by talking and giving her back what was lost… otherwise, we'll need to get Dad directly involved."

Lots of numbers… I furrow my brow, "Isn't he already? I'm here because of Him, no?"

Death considers, "He's indirectly involved at the moment. He already knows what's going on - entirely - but He tends not to intervene without invitation. I let Him know I had a problem, and didn't see a way out of it: I levied no accusations or anything… among other things, I didn't know anyone was deliberately starving me out. If I do accuse my sister, He'll evaluate us both, and lay down the law - it's what He does - and while I'm reasonably confident Life will come out the worse… Dad may have some words with me for not being able to settle things without His intervention: I don't expect to come out unscathed."

Aha. "I'm guessing I don't want to know what sorts of things He's done in the past?  Also, I’m done, care to check my work?"

Death gives me a distracted, "Probably not, no…" as he reviews, "So… making it harder for people to resist your spells, psionic powers to go with your spells, treat everything as being soft, and go through spells extra quickly? Also… umm… why bother with climb?"

I shrug, "No real reason, but it might be useful for hanging onto a wall or something. The Athletics Sphere isn't all that strong compared to the things I can already do with spells, so… may as well."

Death nods, "Well, this seems to be in order."

I smile, "Thank you as always."

Death waves, "Be seeing you…."

… and Fred's vault fades in. I spend some time looting all his stuff - keeping the paranoia routine up of identifying everything before touching it - as the naked ice sculpture of me watches.

I also check in with Wendy, 《Got him. How's it going with the swarm?》

《They died out a little bit ago,》she comes back, 《What was causing it?》

《He had an artificial hag coven, with a winter hag,》 I explain, 《Nasty trick. I destroyed them all, as I wasn't confident of keeping them under control… but I know how to make more, so… not a big deal, it would just take a few weeks if I want them.》

《Ah. Well… the flood is gone. Time to loot?》

《Oh, I've been doing that. We can split things up once we've reassembled. For now… yes.》

I finish looting the room, including dropping the Monkey's Paw into my storage, and head back to Wendy and the two golems. We then systemically rob the place blind, stripping it of everything of value. And yes, Fred had expensive tastes.

I also make sure to grab all the clothing I can find. Fred's former zombies will need it, after all.

Of course, I do need to talk that over with Wendy, and do so while we're robbing Fred blind, "So… about the treasure…."

"Hmm… yeah, we'll need to cut in Paula and Christine, but this guy seems loaded, so that’s fine…"

Not what I'm referring to, Wendy, "I was actually thinking about cutting in the revived victims for the coinage and clothing. They've all been dead for a long time, and currently have nothing."

Wendy rolls her eyes at me, "So just make them stuff. You can hook them up with tools, clothes, cash, and your 'basic' equipment for anyone who wants to go into Delving or any other trade, without cutting into anyone else's share."

Yes, but, "I was somewhat hoping to avoid revealing that card to everyone."

Wendy considers, "Well… just pull everything out of a darkened Bag of Holding. If you don't give them the bag itself, they never know what was already in there."

You really don’t want to part with stuff, do you? But I suppose that's doable… "All right, I'll play it that way." We finish looting the place, and I demolish it entirely (The Create Demiplane line of spells has a clause about Dispels, but Limited Wish can explicitly do it with a caster level check).

Oh, and an entire plane disintegrating around you makes for quite the light show. For a brief moment, angles are just wrong, white is black, black is white, and down is up. But we land perfectly fine on the material plane. Most magic in Pathfinder is quite safe to use.

Well, when it isn't intended to kill things, anyway.

I look around, and find I’m standing in the ruins of a castle built via Wall of Stone spells, and I can hear the ocean on all sides - an island, clearly. I guess Fred upgraded at some point? No matter.

I take a look at the book that is Fred. He's had nearly a thousand years as Life’s Champion, and this book has a page for every single day of his life, which covers everything that happened to him from his perspective in excruciating detail, even if he doesn't remember. And despite the well over thirty thousand pages, it only weighs ten pounds. Because it's magic.

Now, I want a method by which I can perfectly restore him if I later regret this choice. There's a skill for that - Autohypnosis from the Expanded Psionics Handbook, which made it into the 3.5 system reference documents. Among other things, it permits a simple skill check to perfectly memorize a page of text, and takes exactly as long to perform as it does to read the page of text. That said, I really don’t have time to actually read this monstrous tome. So… magic! The spell Scholar's Touch permits reading an entire book in a single round. They make for a nice pairing, don't they?

So I commit every thought Fred ever had, every event he ever experienced, to memory, in six seconds.

Fortunately for me, it's just text in a book I read that I happen to be able to recall perfectly (with another autohypnosis check, but I can make that on a natural one thanks to my buffs). I don't need to worry about accidentally becoming him or anything.

But I do have a headache for some reason.