"My entire life is a lie," he drawls. "Will there be a boss fight, later? Or is that death itself?"

"Spoilers!" trills Ice.

Cypress laughs and kisses his wife. "I love you."

"So are we always in sets?"

"Prime and I do not constitute a set, and Katydid and Rain, with the country to run, are complicated."

"I believe they're trying very hard to become a set now," says Cypress. "Rain and Katydid, anyway."

Prime does not bring up how Ice and Cypress seem to be shipping him with Spring. That will just be politely ignored.

"It's really cute," laughs Savannah, "how they keep showing up in sets."

"And we're the fifth set, if the sets were all sets, which they are not - am I waiting on Katydid and Rain to provide me their own story for reasons?"

"No, not especially - Rain was a prince, he didn't think Zevros would do a particularly bang-up job of country-running and besides you have to get married to ascend to proper monarch status there. He abdicated a lot of the responsibility involved in finding somebody to marry because he was miserable about it, and his terrible birth father had Katydid's familiar who is, one, her best friend, and two, if he dies she's a vegetable, kidnapped, so that she would hang around the palace, marry Rain, and be queen, because in spite of being that horrible he approved of her for some reason. Rain and Katydid didn't clear up the miscommunication - that the familiar was taken; that Rain didn't do it - until they had been married for months."

"... Oh, wow. Okay then."

"We think that we all just have harrowing experiences before we show up, now."

"Spring managed to escape from harrowing experiences reasonably well."

"Only if you don't count seventeen years of slavery."

"I agree, but her opinion of it is a very valid one, she had - what, eighty years of freedom after that?"

"Not quite that, but the slavery was not that materially unpleasant for me in particular, most of the time. You might as well describe me harrowed by the lack of indoor plumbing."

"Right." Pause. "Also we still need to go fix that place."

"Yes. Although it's possible that it's improved dramatically since I left. It was a long time ago."

"Right, but - checking to make sure is good."

"Yes - but there isn't particularly much to recommend checking Tayane next as opposed to any other inhabited world, and we're picking them up at quite a clip, and I do not expect Tayane to improve our ability to absorb or improve future worlds at all."

"... Fair," sighs Max.

"Immortality," reminds Prime. "Coupled with resurrection. And now we have daeva." He motions to Cam, Adana, and Zane. "Who knows what other types of resources we could gain. It's smarter to gather them first, so we can fix already present problems without issue."

"Daeva are very handy what with the magic powers. We're also indestructible!"

"That's incredibly convenient. If there were a safe way to test it, I would want us all to become daeva. But, the risk involved..."

"So is the plan here 'wait until the dragon gets Max and see if he turns into an angel, too'?"