The cranky old martial-arts instructor who’d lived upstairs, who’d taught me more than I’d understood, strode in through the half-open door, swinging his cane like the prop I’d never known it was. “It’s not her name until you say it to her face; it will change her, and I can’t allow that, not yet. We need her just the way she is for a little while longer, warts and all.”

I’d expected that line to draw an angry remark from her, but a quick glance showed she was more stunned than I was. Apparently the game was four-dimensional Twister.

He misinterpreted my look. “Not physical warts, boy, character flaws. Ones that we’ve carefully nurtured for centuries.”

I didn’t know what he was, but I thought about all the pain and loneliness Angel and Ariel had gone through before I met them. He’d nurtured them, too.

My hands curled into fists. “And what were you nurturing me to be?”

“A hero, like your father before you.”

“My dad was a bank teller.”

“​…who gave up his dreams to love a woman he knew would die young, and raised their child to be a protector, once he found something worth protecting. We do have something like valkyries, son, and they’re never wrong about heroes. I liked him, so I picked up where he left off.”

“Time for you to get back to it, I think. Don’t worry about this one; I’ve got one last job for her before Graduation, and I guarantee it will keep her out of your hair.”

Where do you hide a world? In a room full of doors full of rooms full of… you get the idea. I was being sent back, but at least this time I’d been given a pair of pants. And a whole lot more. I resisted the urge to look in the backpack again; bigger on the inside gave me a headache.

“So there are people there now?”

The old man/god/whatever-he-was chuckled. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Elves, dwarves, goblins, dragons, Demon Lords?”

“That last one’s a bit comic-book for my tastes, but it could happen; you spent a few years looking for one, after all, thanks to her interference. Unfinished worlds are shaped by desire and expectation, which is why I’d left you in stasis. Mortal desire can change even finished worlds, though few ever try, and as the only one there, waking, sleeping, expecting, you shaped this one quite a bit.”

“Are we, then? Mortal, I mean, the three of us.”

“They weren’t, until you named them. They didn’t age because they weren’t finished yet, and you didn’t age because your world wasn’t; you were all missing pieces. It was your mutual desire for completion that reshaped the door to let them in and lock her out.”

“So you’re saying that deep down, I just wanted a loli and a catgirl?”

His eyes twinkled, and I mean that literally. “Is that really what you got?”

He finished making changes to the door, and it opened to reveal a familiar rock, with two even more familiar shapes curled up together on top of it, stirring softly.

“Go home, son, they’re waiting for you. You won’t need to wake them with a kiss, but I recommend it.”

There were still a lot of questions I wanted to ask, for Angel and Ariel as well as for me, but I knew he wouldn’t give me the answers, at least not today. A new one popped into my head as I stepped through the door, though.

“Hey, how did I end up on that rock in the first place?”

“You were run over by a truck.”