"Ow, don't squeeze that hard, Thomas."

"I was talking about the mate magic," she says, rolling her eyes then grinning.

"I guess it does streamline the process, but I could see it happening the natural way too."

"That's pretty much the point, if it wouldn't happen the natural way then I wouldn't have mated on you at all."

"I meant it could happen fast the natural way too. Not a lot of people with multiverse spanning prosocial ambitions around."

She props her head up on her elbow and looks around at the bed. "There's at least six of them, it appears."

"Yes, but divided between three to four planets, that averages to less than two per planet."

"For what it's worth I'm sure the Empress Regnant would be interested."

"Fine, seven people out of three-to-four planets." Kiss?

Giggle kiss.

"I love you."

"I will be able to reciprocate that soon."

They snuggle and kiss and make the most out of the fact that time's stopped in their home universes but, being who they are, eventually do get itchy to start working on their large-scale prosocial projects.

"...so I guess the inevitable conclusion is that one of the four of you should hold the door while Sadde and I serve as foci for portals in Elsewhere to our home worlds, yeah? Then we don't need to rely on Milliways."

"I can do that."

"It might be worth it to have two people on this side of Milliways just in case, likely me as the second since I am on super-fast book-translation duty."

"Sadde, mind loaning us a bit of youth for spell-casting purposes?"

"Why, since you ask so politely—" he figures out how to do it and "—here you go, a duckton of youth." He proceeds to dump a fuckton of youth on every one of them.

"Wow, an entire fuckton of youth! Just for me? Gosh, thanks. That is so swell."

Kaede's frowning, though. "What did you say just now?" she asks Sadde.

"Hm? 'Here you go, a duckton of youth'? Did that not translate? It means—"

"'Fuckton,' yes, which includes a swearword which you did not say and instead replaced with a similar word in your language."

"—right, yeah, I don't really swear. My mum used to tell me not to, when I was little, she used to say that you should only swear when you really mean it, but I'm pretty sure that—"

"—she only said that so you wouldn't fall in the habit."

"Er, yeah, that, exactly. And nowadays I still refrain from swearing as, I dunno, a form of—"

"—remembrance," she says at the same time he does.

Felix looks between Kaede and Sadde. He squints. Then he goes to Bar, asks a question and returns with a napkin.

"Okay, this is weird," Felix says offering the napkin to Sadde.