“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Nathan told Saucer with a shocking disregard for its hard work in both consuming the cryma and communicating what it had gained. “Absolutely not, no. Tanya! Take this one.”

“That shit is bound,” the warrior-woman pointed out to him, eyes wide open as though she had never before seen a set of fundamental magical essences broken out of their physical casings and reified into a collective manifestation of meta-narratival force. “I can’t take—”

“I apparently break plenty of rules,” Nathan snapped in a completely uncharacteristic manner. “I’m breaking this one too.”

She recovered enough to manifest something of a smirk, by dint of accelerating herself and taking all the time she needed to process what had just happened. “I can’t just take that, it’s your gains!” At his expression, she smirked wider and added, “I mean, I would, but it would look bad for me to take it from the Millionborn I’m about to kill. There’s a disrespect in robbery, you know?”

“It’s a distillation of Elemental Lesbianism,” Nathan said flatly. “I’m a hard aro-ace guy. I insist.”

“Thank you for your gift,” Honeydew said with as much calm as she could muster, the words running together into a single stream of Thankyouforyourgift as she sprinted over at full speed, seeming to teleport over with an afterimage of running motions. “I’m gonna take that now and thank you very much, mine mine mineminemine.”

Cackling, she reached through Saucer’s surface in a manner perpendicular to all three dimensions of space. Grabbing the rainbow, the word Lesbiab, and the emanator of hearts alike in one swift swipe, she raised them up in the air, vibrating with excitement.

Without a further word or more than a hint of a dramatic pause, she ate them.

One second passed. Two seconds. Tanya looked genuinely shocked, Nathan looked vaguely intrigued and amused, and Honeydew looked confused. Three seconds. Four seconds, and Tanya’s face grew less shocked and more wary as Honeydew’s face screwed up in an expression of gastrointestinal distress.

Five seconds, and then she burped.

“That,” she said with a distinct lack of focus, “was quite the strange experience.”

“Dish the details on the dish, Honey, don’t you dare coy out on me. What did it taste like?”

“It tasted like math and tentacles. Lots of tentacles. And… muscles? And books? It tasted as though someone had distilled sapphic mania, dyed it yellow, and convolved it across eldritch dimensions. It tasted of comprehension, if comprehension were quite spectacularly gay.”

“Your comprehensions are spectacularly gay,” Tanya said affectionately. “Because you’re a nerd, and also gay.”

“I am not,” Honeydew objected, whirling on her partner and making a warding gesture. “That’d be sacrilege! Slut be my witness, I don’t turn down men.”

“But you do like to go manmode for them.”

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“Boys deserve to be told they’re beautiful! And not just by girls! They don’t—”

“Ladies,” interrupted Nathan, “I am literally going to kill myself if you keep arguing about this, and then you won’t get the chance to kill me.”

There was a beat between them, a break in the conversation as both the women palpably, tangibly, discernibly, and emphatically took a moment to restart their brains.

“Honey,” Tanya drawled, “he found leverage. That’s terrible. We can’t possibly let that stand. I say we kill him. Before we even leave the Layer and head back to the Nexus!”

“Murther,” Nathan said with equal dryness and a perfectly expressionless face. “Murther most foul. May I be avenged sevenfold unto the betrayers and schemers, and suchlike and whatnot.”

“I hadn’t taken you for a fan of the classics,” Honeydew said, eyes sparkling. “Strange this might be, but I’d hardly call it unnatural.”

“Fuck me,” her partner muttered darkly, shaking her head, “it’s a good thing—”

“Not right now, I’m busy!”

“—that I’m going to kill you soon. She’d be intolerable about it, would drag us all to the theater or something and then I’d end up murdering another stuffy noble prig or two and we’d have to dip down earlier than we’d expected, and we can’t have that, right?”

“How do we have similar enough plays that you recognized the line, anyway?” Nathan frowned, then shook his head. “No, it’s probably—”

“—an almost-compatible cultural framework and lens,” Honeydew interrupted, preventing him from opining that it was most likely an almost-compatible cultural framework and lens which, combined with his translation and language powers, bridged the gap between the two theatrical schools seamlessly. “Your language and translation powers probably just bridged the gap between our theatrical history and yours!”

“Sure, that’s plausible,” Nathan agreed. “I wonder if archetypal stories are just really generic and portable to different universes so long as there’s anything I would recognize as human, or if the mechanisms of being a Millionborn preferentially send me to places that are similar enough to feel comfortable?”

“Is there a difference?”

“Tanya, please.” He gave her a look that was half smirk, half glare. “Of course there’s a difference. I could totally be comfortable with non-human sapient life! Or at least, I think I could. I didn’t exactly get a chance to socialize at length with a lot of them. But there was this one newt-guy, Newt—I mean, he was a newtoform sophont but also his name was Newt—who I got to hang out with for a bit while we relaxed and ate food after I cleared the qualifying rounds of an intra-universal deathgame.”

“A what?”

“An intra-universal deathgame. A broadcasted mass battle to the death with contestants from all over the universe, followed by a set of playoff brackets populated by those who passed through the qualifiers along with those with direct invites?”

“Oh! A tournament.”

“Heh, now that’s familiar.” Tanya’s lips quirked in a narrow smile. “They used to have the playoff champs go up against me as a bonus round.”

“I expect they had about as much chance against you as I did against the girl who killed me. Which was zero, for the record. I didn’t even see the attack that killed me; there wasn’t a perceptible amount of time between the start of the fight and me dying.”

“Sometimes I played with them,” she admitted without rancor. “If they were particularly good, I’d want to see if there was something I could learn from them, or practice my forms in slow motion. Parry their weapons with my eyes closed, that sort of thing.”

They chatted for some time longer, performing the ritual of Shooting The Shit in a manner that Nathan was proficient in and both women were masterful at. While they spoke, Honeydew absently wove the Spell of Continuance, and a freestanding door began to form in the center of the hollowed-out, faded courtyard they had once fought in.

Still chatting, they proceeded through the door to what would become Nathan’s doom.