Engines roared blasting blue-white dragon’s flame from their nozzles. A prismatic black tower lifted up into the sky. Tearing apart the clouds as it tore its way free from the planet’s gravitational hold.

On the ground, in the spaceport, a crowd of several thousand refugees and reporters saw the ship off. The refugees waving and calling out in thanks, the reporters recording the towers flight through the heavens and into the outer-void.

Inside the tower, Andrew watched the planet known as Louella, shrink into just another speck in the beige-black astral sea.

“Did it go down like we thought it would?” said Andrew. Turning to his half-elf companion as his sprite fielded and filtered through several calls from various officers and agencies of Louella’s government.

Oliver nodded.

“Pretty much...Luckily even if my family might not exactly have pull or influence there’s still a lot of people who either owe us favors, or need us to keep our mouths shut on things they had us do for them.”

“Nh...Disco.” said Andrew. Nodding. Stroking his chin. Glad that he’d been able to take off before the Louellan government and the Novem Empire as a whole were able to paint them into a corner.

“I’m sorry...The fuck did you just say?” said Oliver. His previously serious expression lost and replaced by a look of semi-false mortification.

“No? No good?” said Andrew.

“No good! Absolutely, no good.” said Oliver. Shaking his head vehemently.

“Fair enough. Anyway, I have to go do...other things… Now that the last of the non-academy passengers are out, there’s a few other things me and the missus have to talk about while we chart a flight to Nurari III.” said Andrew.

“Alright, cool...Er, tell if you wouldn't mind, could you please inform the young mistress that my family’s seniors might want to talk to her later about some of the things we’re working on together?” said Oliver.

“No, problem. You know you could just call her Sophia...She knows we’re friends and I think she’d like to be a friend to you too” said Andrew.

“I...Uh...I guess, that works.” said Oliver. The young half-elf rubbing the back of his neck and looking uncomfortable.

“Cool… See you later then.” said Andrew.

“Wait!”

“What?” said Andrew.

“Er, my family knows that you and I have been doing stuff together in a semi-official capacity. They wanted to know if it’d be alright if my sister helps me out for some of it.” said Oliver. Looking even more uncomfortable. His body language guarded as if he were bracing for something.

Andrew frowned, catching the scent of politics in the air. Then Andrew read the t-data on the situation as a whole and found that whatever the Asceline’s were playing at, it wasn’t anything that would be against his and Sophia’s interests. So he relaxed.

They were just trying to create more connections between the Oddvar-Luces and themselves since they’d decided to fully paint themselves in Oddvar-Luce colors as part of their return to greatness.

Looked at from that angle, Andrew supposed that he was just lucky they hadn’t annoyed him to death by sending out him the hundreds of youths that the family had amongst their number, to try and saturate the young man’s inner circle while it was still relatively easy to become a friend to the person they could sense the young man becoming.

“Nh...I guess that’s okay. What’s her name?” said Andrew. Figuring dealing with the matter would be as simple as getting along with the new person if they were decent or ignoring them completely if they weren’t.

“Olivia.” said Oliver.

“...Huh? But aren’t you already…?”

“Yeah...I know it’s weird that my sister and I basically have the same name but that’s just kind of how my clan is. Traditions, you know?... It’s that kind of thing.” said Oliver. Shrugging.

“Um...Alright. Well,...Since we actually are going to be doing stuff that’s a little more serious than just shooting the breeze, I guess we could do with a hand, you can bring her by...Just make sure she’s someone trustworthy. This is less a loose-lips sink ships situation, and more of a loose-lips end worlds kind of deal.” said Andrew. Mastering his expression, and making sure to hide the pang of sympathy he’d felt, as the numbers that accompanied the Asceline family’s dark history struck him.

“No, worries...Look who’re you talking to, mate. The Asceline’s have been collecting dark secrets for the last thousand years. If you don’t want something shared, then even the dead won’t know about it.” said Oliver. Smiling and waving as Andrew stepped into the elevator that would take him into his and Sophia’s suite.

As he rode upwards, towards the top of the tower, Andrew couldn’t help think about his friend and feeling himself gain some ill-will for the Titania Confederacy on Oliver’s behalf. What had happened to his friend’s family was just plainly monstrous.

The Asceline clan was on the smaller scale of things by Novem standards, with a little under a thousand members, if you didn’t count adopted-members, and employees. Some years their losses were bad enough that there were only a few hundred of them left alive to see the Imperial New Year’s celebration.

Oliver was fifth out of six children. His four elder siblings had died from accidents and conspiracies. Olivia, his twin sister, was the only full-blooded sibling he had left. What made things worse was that this wasn’t a unique story.

If they hadn’t been in the galactic age, the winter-queen’s curse would have been a death sentence. Isolde’s curse stripped the clan of all its relationships and all their luck. Without the gene editing and fertility boosting medicines and treatments available today, the family would have died out. With all their adults dying to accidents and all their children being born unbreathing and malformed.

Instead, thanks to the availability of technologies that fix horrific prenatal mutations, and overcome the natural limits of elven fertility, Asceline family was able to endure. Not only were they able to endure, if one looked away from what was happening after the new Asceline’s were born and grew up. The Ascelines were thriving, or at least thriving for a clan as heavily cursed as they'd been.

The clan dealt with the attrition and loss of life the curse inflicted upon them by having children in large batches of four or more.

Multiple children would be given similar names, if not the same name. Then the children in each batch would be raised to live what essentially the same life. Sharing a kind of communal identity that served a single role within the family, because that kind of “redundancy” had been necessary for the clan’s survival.

*************************************************************************************************************

Andrew made his way to the luxurious and comfortable suite, where he and his wife resided when they weren’t dealing with the galaxy at large. He stood in the elevator, one hand in his pocket, and he leaned against the wall. Sighing.

“Almost there...Almost there.” said Andrew. Not sure if he was talking about getting out of the elevator and into the suite, or whether he was talking about his plans as a whole and how long it'd take before he and Sophia could return to the relatively relaxed way of living they'd enjoyed before the fall of Harlow.

Going from the millions he’d inside the building to the tens of thousands he and Sophia were still playing host too now, was a marked improvement. Even if Andrew ‘could’ meddle with the space within the building so he never had to see a single soul unless he wished to, that didn’t change the fact that he could still feel them. He could still feel their presence within his home.

Even now, with the number of guests within the condominium much reduced Andrew still wasn’t feeling completely comfortable. It occurred to him that if his time in Abwickeln had made him just a touch asocial, spending all that time by himself in Alma had likely exacerbated the issue.

The elevator doors slid open. Andrew shook his head as he stepped out of the elevator and into the suite. The space where he and Sophia lived smelled of lavender and vanilla, and various spices that shifted and changed with the day, and just a little ozone due to the extreme amounts of power that were gathered within the space.

The suite also smelled of them, of Sophia and Andrew. It smelled of the food they cooked, of the perfumes and colognes they wore, of the sweat they shed during work and play. For Andrew, it was a calming smell. The smell of home.

“I’m home…” said Andrew.

“Welcome back, hoheit.” called Sophia’s voice from somewhere deeper within the suite.

Andrew didn’t need to read the t-data in the suite to know where Sophia was. The bond between them was a convenient thing. Allowing one to know where the other was regardless of whether it was a few yards away, or in an entirely different universe.

In this case, Andrew didn’t even need that, because the reason he’d spent the last two weeks taking charge of depositing Harlowan refugees on worlds near the fringe of the empire’s core was because he’d known that Sophia would be preoccupied with other matters. Matters like submerging her half of their fused root network within her core to add its power to her own.

Now Sophia was experiencing her own growth period. Her growth was less dramatic than Andrew’s was but it was still a very crucial, very momentous occasion. Andrew could feel it as she neared the end of the process. He could feel her power, her presence, inside him. He could feel his power, his presence, inside her.

Their bond had been strengthened. Evolved to an even greater level than before. What it meant, Andrew didn’t know, but somehow he doubted it would be a bad thing.

Andrew found her in the playroom. Like the “toybox” this was yet another room birthed by the continual developments of Andrew’s core. A room where they could freely test things and train, without worrying about the passage of time, or having to recover from any ill-effects caused by the activities within.

The current settings of the playroom had Sophia sitting, or rather, levitating, within an empty space. A space with all its negative space configured for the process of power channeling and power amplification. She floated in a fetal position as all the energy that two eidolons could gather from the Blackrose galaxy and the universe of Alma was channeled into the alabaster woman’s core.

Then finally it happened. She broke through, and for a brief moment, the woman ceased to be a woman. Instead, she was a great beautiful structure. A super-massive, super-sentient, equation of power, energy, and law.

Sophia became a radiant, labyrinthine complex of transcendental mathematical truths and creative energies. She became a living platonic ideal that could be best described as what you’d get if every tool that ever was and ever would be was gathered in one place set to the task of building a tool that would make them all obsolete.

Then suddenly she was back to being human. Tall and curvy. Her long white locks matted with sweat. Her pale skin flushed from the great amount of effort and strain she’d been under. Her golden eyes glowing with power and charisma.

Andrew crossed his arms and smirked.

“Nh...I’m not sure which version of you is sexier.”

Sophia smiled back.

“Silly, hoheit...All versions of me are equally attractive by design. If you allow me to clean up a bit, and get the wind back under my wings, I wouldn’t mind demonstrating this to you in a more intimate fashion.”