Private Finished A Visitor from Home

Chloe had so many other questions. There were a lot of details in here that she was just beginning to process.

"...Wait, so, back up a bit. They replaced their son with you. What was their angle? Did they even know what they were doing?"

Maybe the Sideralises weren't awful people, somehow. Her knee was jerking towards 'these are awful people,' but there was a lot she didn't know. All she knew of the Sideralises was a half-remembered conversation at a fundraiser of theirs, and what she read in the paper.

Ok, that was the last nail in that coffin. They were pretty awful.

"You know, I might have ended up like him, if my dad had an option like that. In fact he might have flipped the switch after just a few months of knowing me... Some of the parents you hear about here are just incredible, huh?

A part of Chloe wondered - were there other Chloes like her, with the kind of potential she represented to her father, out in other worlds? Should she be worried about them?

"How was the switch supposed to work, anyway? Do you know anything about... what they were using, or how long it took to set up?"

Chloe nodded. She could understand how that kind of magic would have worked - at least in theory.

"They were probably working off of your pseudosympathetic connection to alternate reality versions of yourself. Which shouldn't work on me, now that I think about it, since my father dimension-hops, and he only could have been with my mom in one reality. And with an arbitrary target, that would have solved the problem of..."

She went on like this for a little while longer. Mentioning how unlikely she thought it would be for something like this to work on her at all, much less give her a route back home. She would then recognize how lost Evan was and dial it back.

"So, that family business must have been pretty important to them, if they were going to go to all that trouble and sacrifice their kid. What were they even doing?"

Chloe took a deep breath and shook her head. "Well... now I get why my dad liked them, at least. They were kindred spirits. He used to tell me that he actually invented the Faustian deal."

She thought about it a little bit more.

"Actually, scratch that. He probably wanted them out of the game so desperate people would have one less place to go to for help, other than him. That'd be more in character for him." She nodded. It was all coming back to her, the way he operated and the way he thought about these kinds of things. He'd be so proud of her - and honestly, the thought made her feel a little gross.

"Did I even tell you about my bio dad? Because it feels like this is another thing we have in common. Showing up here and moving in with terrible parents."

"Nope, that was probably me. The rumor is that I banished him back to hell, but I actually just kinda..." she sighed, and shook her head. "It's complicated. But the short version is, since I did the thing, he can't control me anymore, he's pissed off at me, and he probably just left this place because if he stayed he'd want to ruin my life out of spite, but I made it too hard for him to do that. So he chose to leave, or something."

Shrug.

"Anyway, he basically wanted me to tear out my human half and help him collect souls forever. Probably would have roped my Amber into it too, and he wouldn't have taken no for an answer. He was also a big businessman on the strip; he had a night club, a strip club, and a brothel. Everyone thought he was involved in organized crime. He was screwing some of my classmates, too, and I'd end up seeing them at breakfast sometimes. I could probably go on forever listing crazy stuff about him."