To stand in the presence of Fernando while almost the entire village celebrated Antonio’s successful ceremony was a heady experience. Not only did the eerie super-being make the joy Antonio felt powerfully contagious, but he was also the font of powerful pheromones which filled the nostrils of all of those around him. 

These pheromones were themselves fonts of joy and sources of blissful unsteadiness to those who were susceptible to them. Well over half of the Madrigals were affected by the pheromones as they crowded around Andrew, including Alma and Julieta, two of the steadfast bulwarks which upheld the reputation of the Madrigal family.  

Both of them were filled with joy, of a range of types, as they gazed at Antonio and occasionally glanced at Fernando. The protagonist of this portion of the story was the little boy, who joyously celebrated that moment with his family. The family friend of the lad was just an unexpected and yet hard to ignore presence at this moment. 

He was one of many faces who was around the child, and his joy was a powerful thing. He was a divinity and a fae, and both of those were uniquely empathetic kinds of beings gifted with the ability to manipulate emotions in a range of ways. His joy was chiefly being spread by the potent pheromones he was emanating, though the casual, invisible aura he passively radiated was partially responsible for this as well. 

This was especially powerful for people who were unhappy. Isabela, a proud and arrogant beauty who was the golden child of the Madrigal family, Alma, an equally heroic and abusive woman whose high expectations filled her children with unhappiness, and Pepa, a quiet, withdrawn, and powerful figure felt the keen effects of Fernando’s prominent powers on their souls. 

At the very same time that this was occurring in Antonio’s paradisiacal room, events were unfolding outside of it. In the prominent mansion owned by Fernando, the clone that he had created was at work. 

The figure sat in the room where Fernando was meant to sleep, though he would simply refuse to do that when the time came, and he was preparing something. The clone silently sat on the opulent bed he owned and he carefully played with a simple-looking yet highly potent artifact. The thing was a tiny obsidian stone, and yet the power it wielded was highly potent. The figure who held the stone was a Master of Death and the stone was the mythical “Resurrection Stone”.

The clone of Andrew gazed at the stone at he possessed. The tiny object was originally crafted to be part of a trap by a witty and perhaps cruel personification of death itself. The version of the stone that Andrew possessed was not a trap, but a true artifact that was greater than the original object that once confounded its owners and tricked many of them. 

Andrew was a clever being and a divinity of death and judgment. He was wielding the stone because he had a plan that involved it, one that would enable a much happier ending for all characters involved in the tale of intergenerational trauma and healing that he was currently living through. 

As the clone fiddled with the stone he silently explored some recent additions to his mind palace. He wordlessly and calmly explored the life of one Alma Madrigal, quietly viewing or rather recalling her life in the depths of his endless mind. 

His powers as a divinity of things like knowledge and judgment allowed him to gleam much with as little as a piercing glance at someone. With regards to Alma Madrigal, he knew of her love story with Pedro, her husband and the father of Bruno, Julieta, and Pepa Madrigal. He also knew of how her heart ached when he perished at the hands of merciless Colombian Conservative soldiers during the very earliest days of the Thousand Days’ War. 

The heartache Pedro’s death caused her was something she had never truly, meaningfully addressed. Andrew knew this, initially due to out-of-context knowledge, but as he silently viewed Alma’s life he began to empathize with her a bit more strongly than he had before. He well and truly experienced many of the highs and lows of her life, both before and after the sacrifice of her husband caused a miracle to occur. 

With the Resurrection Stone in hand or an array of Andrew’s other powers and possessions, Andrew had the ability to give Alma something she ahd long been denied; happiness. And that was only one part of his plan to give the Madrigal family, and those they helped, a much happier ending than Disney had planned for them. 

As he did this he idly practiced a few of his other powers. The room he was in was filled with opulent furniture, all of which was lazily floating just off of the floor around him. This was a very casual demonstration of his powers, and was the first time that he was lifting multiple things as heavy as a wardrobe. 

At the very same time he was idly using potent powers to flex and train the supernatural muscles he possessed. These muscles were both physical things and stranger, esoteric things that served as manifestations of his vast arsenal of superpowers. 

A strange mesh of razor-sharp, almost invisible strings jutted out of him and were connected to some of the objects floating around the room. These strings were exactly the same strings as the ones used by the infamous Donquixote Doflamingo, creations and products of the String-String Fruit. 

This was an attempt to casually train his powers, one which was compounded by the presence of other clones in the home who were silently engaging in similar activities in other rooms. The deity may not have loved that certain essences, many of them actually, needed to be trained to reach the apex of their potential, but he was certainly willing to put in the work needed to master them. 

Fernando was silently listening to the events at Casa Madrigal while he fiddled with the potent stone in his possession. It was shortly after Mirabel first saw the cracks, an event which he could hear and Dolores could not due to his senses not being tied to the house, that the main clone silently sprung to action. 

The cracks were in the process of physically manifesting but they were a flare-up of long-term damage to the magical integrity of the home. The damage itself was caused by the family’s lack of faith in the magic of the home in the wake of Mirabel’s failed ceremony. This damage had been building up for years and was only now manifesting physically, due to the strain on the house in the wake of the latest gift ceremony.

The figure activated the potent powers of the speed force and got up off of the bed that he had been sitting on. He turned in the direction of the door and began to dash towards it, silently observing the frozen world around him as he dashed out the door and leaped to the courtyard below the second floor of his home. 

He softly hit the ground floor of his home and then dashed towards the gate. When he reached the thing he didn’t slow down in the slightest and opted to just phase through the door by activating the intangibility aspect of the handy essence of the ghost. From there it only took him a fraction of a speed, from his perspective, to reach the not-so-distant home. He had moved so quickly that not even a tenth of a second had passed in absolute time from the moment he had started to move! 

Fernando found himself standing in the middle of the courtyard, beside Mirabel, when he shut off the aspect of the speed force he had been using. He felt time beginning to, relative to him, speed up, as Mirabel’s eyes were beginning to widen in fear while she watched her home spontaneously begin to develop enormous cracks along its walls.

“Hello, Mirabel.” I uttered, politely, while I studied the cracks along the side of the home. This caused the young heroine to jump, as she had been in the middle of staring in horror at her home as it was spontaneously showing the signs of great damage. 

“Fernando! Whoa, tell a girl first before you sneak up on her like that.” She replied, while visibly jumping. I chuckled at her snarky response and gently walked to one of the walls. I placed my hand on the thing and took a deep breath. Mirabel watched me curiously, and when I began to glow as I activated my powers I watched her eyes widen thanks to one of my astral selves hovering nearby while I closed my physical eyes. 

I activated the considerable powers of the essence of matter mastery, and coupled that with a mighty usage of the second force power I had unlocked; force healing. I used matter mastery to heal the superficial damages to the home while using my force healing ability to heal the deeper, subtler damages done to the home due to the family’s lack of faith in both Mirabel and the magic of the home due to Mirabel’s apparent powerlessness. 

As I used my power I felt the home sigh subtly, its sounds far more audible to me in my focused state than they would have been otherwise. As I poured energy into the home I felt Mirabel’s astonishment. I was glowing while I was using these powers, a choice I was making to make this seem even more wondrous, and Mirabel gasped as the superficial damage to the home began to visibly disappear. 

“Fernando… How are you doing this?” She asked, as the cracks near my hand began to mend themselves. I opened my eyes and turned my gaze to Mirabel with a soft smile on my face. 

I silently cast a simple spell from the D&D multiverse, Healing Word, as I was doing all of this and I watched the cut Mirabel had just gotten vanish from her hand. She sighed in relief as the stinging pain she felt vanished, even while her heart pounded in her chest. 

“You just… healed me. But how is that possible?” She asked, amazed by what she was seeing. Her inquisitive mind was immediately attempting to figure out what was going on, and almost a split second after she asked me how what I had done was possible she began to speak again.

“Are you… a secret brother of mine?!” She questioned, which made sense but was a truly stunning thing to ask. I actually stopped for a split second to process what I had just heard, because it was such an incredible thing to ask me. I looked her in the eyes and shook my head.

“I… I am not your brother Mirabel. And before you ask,” I began, knowing exactly what she was going to ask next. “I am also not your cousin. We are not related.” I told her, causing her to look at me curiously. 

“I possess powers independent of those of your family.” I explained, cryptically. This news made the heroine fully freeze, but I was telling the truth so I could feel the impact my words were having on Mirabel. 

“Whoa…” Mirabel was able to stammer out, as she learned that there was someone in Encanto who was not a relative of hers that had powers. To the locally-famous family this was an earth-shattering revelation since they had taken it for granted that they’d have powers and, equally importantly that other people did not. 

Mirabel was proof that the family did not always gain powers, and I was proof, in her eyes anyway, that it was possible for people outside of her family to have them. In a small way, I also represented hope for her, since it meant that there was more than one way to gain superpowers. 

“Now Mirabel… I think we need to have a conversation.” I uttered, cryptically. There was a bright smile on my face as I spoke, that suggested that we had much to discuss. 

At the very same time as I was doing this, I silently activated the dreadful power of “Puppet Master” once more. I targeted Alma again, and made her politely say farewell to everyone and walk to her room. 

She did this silently, and I kept her eyes focused straight ahead so that she didn’t notice Mirabel and the other “me” that was on the ground floor of the gorgeous estate. It was only when she was in her room that I used another aspect of being a sanguinarch. 

Sanguinarchs were potent god-like vampires and they had an array of mighty powers. Some of those powers were things like the ability to become incorporeal at will, which was a power that I mixed with “Clonewarp”. 

The “me” that was in Antonio’s room glanced at a relatively unoccupied corner of the room and willed a clone to appear there with ease. The clone turned to the wall it was closest to and activated “Spectral Form” to phase through the wall. The thing then began a short journey to Alma’s room and only stopped when it was hovering in mid-air in front of her. 

“Fernando!” Alma gasped, as she saw me in her plain, somber room. I smiled at her and descended to the ground before landing softly in the space between the door and her. 

“Hello, Alma… I have a present for you.” I told her, as I willed the resurrection stone in the pocket of my clone to appear in my hand. The obsidian stone did not stand out against the general darkness of Alma’s respectfully furnished but not lavish room. 

All around me the house began to shudder, with tiles clapping against each other and paintings softly vibrating. I gazed into Alma’s eyes and readied myself to make the people of this family happier than they had ever been. 

I began to powerfully picture Pedro Madrigal, the deceased husband of Alma Madrigal, and the man whose echoes were magically animating the house I was in. As I did this I began to turn the stone over in my hands, and I was quite grateful for how much stronger this essence artifact was than the actual object that had inspired it. 

As the stone turned over in my hand it began to gently glow and fill the room with the scent of the man it was resurrecting. Alma’s breath hitched in her throat as she recognized the smell that was wafting into the room. When the stone was turned over for the third time the space between Alma and myself began to fill with an inversed silhouette in the shape of the man who had fathered Julieta, Pepa, and Bruno.