Bella carries on nudging up in piecemeal increments of ten when prompted and snuggling her boyfriend.
Until, eventually, he takes a mana-coloured star out of his coin sorter and starts playing with it.
"Is that how much stars are?" he muses. "It doesn't seem like a lot."
"Yeah, stars are everything from ten thousand to just shy of a hundred thousand," says Bella. "It doesn't seem like a lot? Wow."
"It's nice," he says dreamily, putting the coin away and wrapping his arms around her again. "I like it. But it's, you know, middle of the road."
"It should not come as a surprise to me that Elspeth wasn't kidding when she judged the Joker Trauma Olympics, should it."
"Guess not," shrugs Brilliance. "I wanna have sex like this, do you wanna have sex?"
The agony beam requires no attention to maintain! How convenient.
Not literally, since there's that convenient coin storage feature.
She'll approve of the fact that he's racking them up at a handful per second for about an hour, though. Won't she.
They might have to go back and make more hexes to declaw them with, but yes. Yes she will.
Some time later, when they are back to cuddling, Brilliance murmurs, "Could you go up to an evil so I can declaw all these?"
"Okay." She pecks him on the cheek and starts hopping up in hundred-triangle increments toward evil range.
"Mmm, yeah, there we go," he says when she reaches the appropriate level. Hex to declaw one of the stars, star to declaw one of the new evils, evil to declaw all of his currently undeclawed coins of smaller-than-evil denomination.
As an afterthought, he shows her the love, the way it feels right now with what they're doing.
It is very nice.
Love love love.