"I had no idea you could play the piano," Karasuba remarked.

"How many pianos do you see in this galaxy?" I asked, drawing my improvised ragtime piece to an end. "Anyhow. It's something I've grown up around, but never really picked up to the point I could make any claim to being capable of until a few years ago, back when I was still dating Akitsu."

"How do you feel about that whole business?" Karasuba asked.

"...I'll answer that in a moment, but..." I hesitated. "Not sure how to phrase this... okay, it feels weird for you to take so direct an interest in my emotional well-being. I guess it'll feel more normal as I get more used to you as an actual person and not an anime character, but..."

"If it helps, the Force is what prompted me to ask," Karasuba said with a lopsided grin.

I snorted. "Okay, that's more like it. And... Well, I am still a little sad that Akitsu and I didn't work out, as well as sad that Kazehana and I didn't work out, or me and Homura... Matsu was the most willing to come with me, but also had the most compelling reason to stay behind, so..." I hummed quietly. "Yeah. I'm not happy about what happened. But... it did happen, and... well, what am I going to do about it? What can I do about it, besides... move on?" I shrugged. "Past experience holds valuable lessons, but ultimately, the only real way is forwards."

"Debatable," Karasuba said, cocking her head to the side. "I've been doing some reading in my recent downtime, and one thing I read was some of the Jump Docs and Supplements our Jumpchain is made of."

"Are you about to critique my build choices?"

"I wasn't, but now I have to throw in a jab about how you clearly should've taken Charisma so your girlfriends wouldn't dump your ass."

"Teach me to open my mouth..."

"But no," Karasuba said, shaking her head and straightening back up. "What I want to say is that you do have the option to go back to my home reality for a month between Jumps- a month that can, in fact, be extended out to an upper limit of nearly a thousand years."

"Fucking how?"

"The time dilation can cut both ways. There's a designated observer in your Warehouse whose local timeframe determines how long you've been somewhere, so if you put it in a 100x slowdown, and your social circle in a 100x speedup, you get 300,000 days, or about eight centuries, to spend in Sekirei."

"...Huh," I muttered. "Well, if you'll check the SWTOR Jump Doc, you might note that, if I succeed at the Pax Jumperia challenge- and I sure fucking hope I do, for reasons other than the purely selfish- then the reward is a bespoke, customizable pocket universe attached to my Warehouse, which has its own time dilation of up to 400x speedup. Whiiiiiich, when multiplied by those eight centuries, means that I could get enough time back in Sekirei to do a one-to-one timeline recreation of Warhammer 40k from Year Zero to the present day about eight times over."

"...You could've just said you'd get like three hundred thousand years."

"Yeah but I said 'enough time to' and then I had to come up with some metric to compare things by," I said. "Anyhow, none of that matters, because even though I can go back to Sekirei, I would really, really rather not show my face back in that universe, because I assure you, the grace with which I'm handling the breakup now is very much a recent development. I wouldn't say it was acrimonious, but I definitely said a few things I regret, and, uh..." I rubbed the back of my neck. "Well, as much as it would be nice to motorboat a redheaded slimegirl again, I would rather not have to deal with everything else involved with that."

Karasuba shrugged. "Fair enough. You'll just be getting by with little old me, then?"

"Yes, I will somehow have to satisfy myself with the partnership and love someone who shares and even exceeds my passion for fighting for a better tomorrow, and also has tits like cantaloupes and legs up to here." I tilted my head forward to regard her very dryly over the rim of my glasses. "Truly, I am the most put-upon being in the world, having only you as a devoted lover."

"Let the injustice stoke the flames of hatred in your heart," Karasuba said solemnly. "Or the flames of lust, followed by the flames of dejection after I tell you that no, I don't want to have a threesome with one of your weird little busty catgirl minions."

"Eugh, I don't want that either," I said, shaking my head. "They're minions because they work for me. You do not fuck your employees."

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"Of the twelve minions I've seen today alone, fully nine of them had boobs bigger than mine."

"They're all shapeshifters. What they look like is their choice, and if you think about it for long enough, you might realize that I'm not the only person in the galaxy who likes big boobs, and that I did in fact need to give them hypernet access so they could learn skills I didn't have."

Karasuba snorted, but relented, and I stood up from the piano bench.

We were in the little resort inside my secret hidden Hoth town, and I'd learned this morning that yes, this place did have a name.

"Still," Karasuba continued. "You'd think the Red Hand wouldn't be that obsessed with boobs, considering they're all women."

"Women can like boobs too," I said. "Even if you have a fixation on thighs."

See, the population I'd created ended up naming themselves The Red Hand, on account that they viewed themselves as the trusted agents of a woman named Rose. And, unfortunately, they'd developed a sense of humor about it, and so this town, the center of their population and the thing I was possibly the most proud of creating...

...was called The Rosy Palm.

"Legs in general, really," Karasuba said.

Right now, we were in a spacious room with a few hot tubs, a single large pool kept cool, some waterproofed reclining couches- one of which bore a decadently-sprawling Karasuba- and, of course, a piano. Now, some of us may hear that description of a very humid room used primarily by wet people, and then about the presence of a piano, and just immediately shit our pants over it, because very nearly every part of a proper piano is made of something that responds to humidity- wood, leather, felt, even iron. However, in this case, there was no need to soil one's trousers in sympathy for an inanimate object, as this piano was one of those newfangled electric varieties, whose electronics had been designed by skilled engineers from a technologically-advanced culture that could build electronics hardy enough to survive operating on the surface of Hoth, let alone the vacuum of space. Some moisture wasn't going to be a problem.

"Anyway," I continued, walking over to sit down on the reclining couch with Karasuba, "if you really wanted to razz my moral berries, you'd be asking about my policy goals as Sith Emperor."

"Why would I do that?" Karasuba asked, moving exactly enough to make precisely the right amount of room for me to flop back next to her for some poolside cuddles. "I winged myself to you because of your policy goals as the Sith Emperor."

"Well, for one," I said, "having someone to go over moral calculus with is useful, especially when that someone is a person I trust to care quite passionately about justice in the form of striking down oppression. Which dovetails into two: I think it's pretty obvious at this point that I am, thanks to Jumpchain bullshit, prooooobably the most powerful person in the galaxy, and I don't live here, not on a long-term basis. I'm a powerful outsider, using that power to reshape a culture I dislike and kill off members of that culture that I disagree with. And also, I literally have the title of Emperor."

"So, you're worried you're falling into the trap of imperialism and genocide," Karasuba said, snuggling up to me. "Well, good news: one, you're trying to change Sith culture, not just destroy it, so we can safely dismiss the charges of genocide. As for the imperialism... the thing you're most worried about is what it says that you're unreasonably imposing your own values on another culture, right?"

"More or less."

"Well, for that, I'd like to introduce you to a foundational concept in moral philosophy called natural law," my big titty anime waifu with a lightsaber said. "The idea that there are certain laws, a certain set of rights and obligations, that are grounded in reason, and universal to all thinking beings. An idea that, incidentally, is foundational to the concept of universal human rights."

"As an autistic transgender lesbian," I said, "I am a little uncomfortable with the assertion that I'm an advocate for natural law, considering that the phrase 'natural law,' and other variations on it, are most often used as a rhetorical bludgeon by bigots whose own baseless disgust leads them to think I don't fully count as a person anymore."

"Yeah, it turns out bigots aren't always intellectually honest, and sometimes misuse terms to bolster their arguments, sometimes even on purpose," Karasuba said, nodding. "But ultimately, what natural law actually means is a set of universal rights and obligations between thinking beings. It does not mean that literally everything has a divinely-prescribed way of being done; just because there're some universals doesn't mean it's all universals. Natural law doesn't mean there's only one right path. It just means there are wrong paths, like the ones that permit slavery."

"Fair enough," I admitted. "Still..."

"Tell me," Karasuba said, "have you ever encountered a culture you had power over, which had a practice that disgusted you without necessarily being obviously morally reprobate?"

"...In the Warehouse," I said, "there was an elfish grove that used the Body Mod to vastly accelerate childhood development, and I do mean vastly. I arrived in the grove with a pregnant elf I'd brought there to give birth among her people, just in time for her to give birth the next day. And then one month later, that infant was a full-grown adult- who looked uncomfortably like Kazehana, I must say- and Kazehana and I remarked to each other just how gross accelerated aging really was, and then we left. Because... it was gross as hell, and it made me uncomfortable, but... I don't know. It didn't feel like a horrible abrogation of the children's rights. And, as an adult, I try to maintain the distinction in my head between things that make me uncomfortable and things that are actually bad."

"There, see?" Karasuba said. "You're not some sneering imperialist who forbids local 'savage' religions or arts. You just have a moral compass. Now all you need to worry about is keeping it pointed the right way."

"Yeah, like that's an easy task," I said dryly. Still... it was something.