“Listen, I totally get what you’re going through. Not like, physically. I’ve never grown hundreds of feet in a few minutes. But mentally. Magic is like puberty.”

  The giant nodded—a nod which shook the entire steel structure he was attached to, but a nod nonetheless—and Momo’s shoulders sagged in relief.

  When she woke up this morning, she hadn’t registered giving “the talk” to a 42-foot tall teenager as something to add to her daily goddess bingo card, especially when “the talk” was not about birds and bees, but about how to navigate life when humans now looked about the same size as insects, and your legs were the length of buildngs, but here she was.

  Surprisingly, she wasn’t mad about it. Well, she was at first, when she initially spotted the guy terrorizing the Golden Gate—it totally ruined the team mojo she was generating with the clone clique—but it always felt good when she could solve something without violence.

  Okay, well—she glanced down at the ruin below her—with minimal violence. She had been forced to tie him with Nether to the steel beams of the Golden Gate’s skeleton, but it was almost like swaddling a naughty toddler.

  Once he was finished nodding, which was a seismic event in itself, the teenager frowned.

  “I really didn’t mean any harm. It was just that those flies were all up in my face, and— I just don’t know where to go where I won’t step on anyone.”

  Momo sighed. A fair concern. All things considered, San Francisco wasn’t really the ideal stomping grounds for a man of forty-two feet. “Let’s see,” Momo said, tapping her chin doctorly. “This is America, so I’m sure you can find a few empty parking lots to test your limbs out in. Or, if you’re lucky, a big field. Just watch out for cows, and farmers.”

  When he nodded again, she began to slowly undo his bindings.

  “There’s also apparently a big government fortification north of here where people who aren’t interested in mass-murder are hanging out,” she said, her hands moving in a flurry of black mana. “Maybe once you have a better handle on your legs, that would be a good place to go. If they give you any heat, just tell them that Momo sent you.”

  That seemed to placate him, so after a few minutes of careful Nether deconstruction, the teenager lowered one foot onto the bridge, then another, the steel bearings squealing as his full weight fell onto the pavement. It was a lucky thing that the bridge had been separated in two parts beforehand, because Momo was fairly confident his landing would have slingshotted Mallmart Momo and all the other clones halfway into the cosmos.

  Thinking of the younger clone, Momo’s eyes glanced downward to see how they were faring. She was a bit disappointed to see that not much had changed in her absence. The Nether Demons that she’d tied up as test dummies remained untouched and unpurified.

  What was new, however, was their clothes. Marie had found herself some wizardly robes not unlike Laura’s from earlier, the goblin was now dressed in a black cloak and nursing two glinting daggers, and Mallmart looked like she had been spit straight out Nam’Dal. Sorry, Mole City. The young clone was wearing tastefully ripped leather from the neck down, with Thieves Guild patches woven into the fabric. Her fists were wrapped in white cloth, and she was currently busying herself by shadowboxing with the air, marveling at the speed her hands flew.

  Momo grinned. They must have gotten their classes.

  This was reason to celebrate. The first part of her roughly eight-step plan was very much relying on the fact that the System would offer her clones classes once they arrived. She had been betting on the fact that the System wouldn’t care to distinguish between actual citizens of Earth and inter-dimensional tourists.

  After all, even she had gotten the initial intro spiel it gave to everyone. It was only after it realized that she already had a class of her own that it stopped populating her interface with messages. So if it had any filter at all, it was only on people (and gods) who had come here with previous System baggage.

  Stolen story; please report.

  She curled her wings in and began to plummet back down to the other side of the bridge, sweeping up once in the air before deftly landing in front of Richard Smith, who gave her only a withering look as the air she carried in buffeted him in the face.

  “Your scheme seems to be going mediocrely,” he grunted, threading his fingers back through his hair to massage it back into place. “They all have their powers now. But none of them have figured out how to—”

  “Purify!” Marie shouted, or rather, squealed. Both Momo and Richard snapped their gazes to her in surprise, finding the most demure of the clones with her eyes closed tightly and her trembling hands raised in front of one of the captured demons. Light blue magic was sputtering in her palms, but not going anywhere fast. After a moment, Marie peeled her eyes open again, and looked at Momo with deep set concern. “Did it work?” she squeaked.

  “Er—no, but good effort!” Momo said, giving her a thumbs up.

  This was starting to get a little depressing. Time for Part Two.

  Momo gathered the clones and Richard in a huddle in the middle of the bridge. Marie came eagerly, Mallmart reluctantly, and the goblin, Kava, wandered over eventually, once she got bored of chewing on the handle of her new dagger.

  “So,” Momo said, clapping her hands together. Doing the gesture—and receiving the immediate attention of her crew—made her spine tickle with a bit of satisfaction. “First off, I need to confess that I led you guys a bit in the wrong direction before. If this version of the System works anything like it does on Alois, you shouldn’t be able to just use skills, like Purify, that you don’t know yet. So you shouldn’t take it personally that you weren’t able to use soul-whiteout on any of these demons. I just wanted you to try, in case it served to trigger you getting your classes.”

  Marie raised her hand, cutting off Momo’s lecture. When her clone didn’t immediately start speaking, Momo nodded at her encouragingly.

  “I think I got my class, but I’m not sure if I chose correctly,” she said, her cheeks reddening. This version of herself definitely wasn't used to talking to other people, if the lab coat had been any indication. “I just chose the one that said Soul Class next to it. It seemed most rational.”

  Mallmart Momo eyed Marie with what looked like a hint of jealousy. When she spoke, her tone was petulant. “Wait, you got Maverick too?”

  “Maverick? No.” Marie frowned. “My Soul Class was called the… err… Chaos Scholar. The chaos part turned me off a bit initially, but the actual description was quite nice. Something about taking unconventional routes to achieve unfounded success in one's field.”

  Soul classes? Momo had never heard of anything like that before.

  “But we’re the same person,” Mallmart Momo said, her arms crossing in front of her chest protectively. “How could we have two different Soul Classes? Don’t we have the same soul? Aren’t we all just slightly worse photocopies of her?”

  Mallmart hooked an accusatory thumb at Momo, who looked back at her with wide eyes, startled by the thought. Is that seriously what she assumed?

  “No, no. Not at all,” Momo said, lowering her voice so the others would understand the gravity in which she meant it. “We all have different souls. I can see them, actually.”

  Younger Momo’s face went from belligerent to unreadable.

  “You can see them?”

  “Yeah,” Momo restated, and opened her Nether Demon eye.

  Slowly, slivers of blue began to reveal themselves to her, chains that latched around the hearts of everyone nearby and floated aimlessly upward.

  She took a gentle step forward toward her younger self, as if approaching a startled animal on the road, and wrapped her hand around Mallmart’s soul chain. The younger girl looked at her with an alarming amount of fear in her eyes as Momo pulled the chain gently upward.

  “Ah— ouch,” the younger Momo mumbled, her hands lifting to her chest. She tried and failed to grab onto whatever Momo was holding, but her hands just fazed through Momo’s own.

  “Your soul,” Momo said, tugging lightly again. “I’m holding it right now. And I promise you, it’s not connected to mine in any way. " She smiled softly. "It stands on its own.”

  The younger clone blinked slowly at her. Something vulnerable and soft passed over her eyes, but just as quickly as it came, it left. What remained was hardened like a nutshell.

  “Well, don’t yank it out,” the younger clone grumbled. “You’ve made your point.”

  Momo shook her head, thinking oh, kids, and let it go. As soon as she did, all the soul chains around her vanished from sight. She had learned to control that skill well.

  “Now,” Momo said, turning to gesture at all the groaning demons. “Shall we? Mallmo, you’re up first.”

  All that unshakeable confidence seemed to vanish in a split second. The girl’s face dropped, and her voice shook with a cross between annoyance and panic.

  “Go first? Go first at what?”

  A devious smile painted Momo’s face.

  This is going to be fun.

  “Well, what else?” Momo said, raising her fists in a battle-ready stance. Younger Momo gawked at her. “You’ve got powers now. Try them on me.”