“Obviously,” Dabbler ventured, “the DibbImp chose your second alternative.”
“Nearly not,” his host confessed. “It was filled with hate and spite, and determined to reject any course not of its choosing. I offered to let it ruminate on its options for a time and then return to allow it one final opportunity.” Deja Voodoo’s smile metamorphosed into a wry grin. “Its suggestion as to what I might do in reply was, to say the least, anatomically impossible. Therefore I did depart, without leaving any pledge to return.”
“But plainly,” observed Dabbler, “you did return.”
Deja Voodoo nodded. “And encountered a very different attitude. To have a taste of the sentence its own folly might have forced it to serve in perpetuity, and then for me to come back, beyond all hope and expectation, wrought the desired change. It not only agreed to my proposal, but was pathetically eager to escape the punishment to which it believed it had consigned itself. And so it was done.”
The Author paused to reflect. “The first necessity for its healing, I deemed,” he at length went on, “was to undo the damage its own imp’s breath had done on it in utero, a process which proved fiendishly difficult, but was at length accomplished. Gradually it reverted from monster to child, albeit a child bereft of anything akin to sexuality.
“Next I assayed the correction of the accident of its conception, and allow expression of a gender. As its paternity was a matter of Avatorial intent, no paternal X or Y chromosome had been able to act in concert with its mother’s genes. Therefore I extended my power and corporealized the ethereal component in its genetic makeup. I had no true notion as to what effect actualizing Dibbler’s intent might have - whether the outcome would be male or female, or still neuter. As it happened, the result was a baby boy.
“Memory removal followed after, and the DibbImp was now a newborn child, innocent and indeterminate of destiny. It was now my responsibility, as I saw it, to ensure that he was given an opportunity to build a life for himself better than that to which it had been condemned.
“As you are aware, I frequent many universes in addition to this one. I thought it well to place him in a mundane one, blessed with little in the way of magic - there, it was my notion, his heritage of power would find no expression and so be unable to warp his development. Perhaps I went slightly overboard in seeking out a world of powerfully logical premise - that in which the detectives of literature flourish. I deemed, however, that what the child was most in need of was an environment that might serve as a strong antidote to the chaos that had molded his earlier existence.
“And so it was that I placed him in the Victorian era of that world’s England, with a middling and childless couple by the name of Biggs. They had long desired offspring, at it was a matter of small moment to coax the local mindset round to the notion that the boy was their own natural child. I left his naming and upbringing entirely up to them, feeling my own influence might not be conducive to the normal upbringing I had promised him. Yet something I said before leaving must have stuck in their subtly altered minds - I remember remarking that he was quite an imp - and when I returned, many years later as time was measured in that world, I discovered that the two had christened the boy Impey.”
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Thu Jun 03 23:16:32 2004
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