"I share a name with the most powerful angel and the central figurehead of your religious worship," I said. "And nobody told me that?!"

"I thought you already knew," Amelia said simply. "And, in fairness, the angel Lucifer is not actually central to our worship. She is certainly an important figure, known to support and maintain the void, but she is also known, often by her own admission, to not be the one who created the void. No, when we worship, it is, most centrally, the void itself that we give thanks to. And when we pray for help, it is to the other, lesser angels, who are far less prohibitive to summon in ways that are actually useful. But Lucifer herself... she is not a central figure of worship."

We both turned to watch as Rachel, book in one hand while she used the other to gesture and telekinetically control the chalk, laid out the ritual to summon the angel Lucifer.

"She is a friend," Amelia said, softly. "A friend who will always be with us."

"Fair enough," I said. "It occurs to me that, given the... circumstances, shall we say, and also my plus 20 bonus to Learning, that I do not have and may never receive a 'proper' void caster's education."

"...Apologies, but did you just say plus 20 bonus to Learning?" Amelia asked, the warmth and piety gone from her voice, replaced with the typical cocktail of emotions that arose when I opened my mouth and said shit that makes people blue-screen.

"Yep," I said, nodding. "I also have a pair of legendary skill books I copied from House Nukem's library in my void space- one that goes to [Teaching, Level 100], and one that goes to [Learning, Level 80]. I'm a little sad they're not symmetrical, but I'll live. With that plus 20 bonus, I bet that, when I finish with the Learning book, I'll be able to write a new one that does go up to 100."

"...So, how does your knight feel about you taking a mistress?" Amelia asked. "If such things interest you, I'm currently at an age where I am expected to contribute to the temple with my own children."

"Aren't you thirty or something?" I asked.

"Thirty five," Amelia said, nodding. "Biosculpting allows us to live much longer and healthier lives, and so, expectations of motherhood only really begin to appear at thirty, once one has had a decade of adulthood to grow truly accustomed to one's self. There is, also, rather a lot of education that happens in one's twenties that is best done earlier than later, and which would be interrupted and inconvenienced by having to raise a child."

"Huh," I said. "That's eminently reasonable. But anyways, I will acknowledge that you would really, really like that [Learning, Level 100] skill book, and note that, while Rachel and I do have an explicit understanding that allows for multiple lovers, and also while I do think you're very attractive and did in fact get a boner when you volunteered yourself to get knocked up, I must admit that I'm not really a fan of that sort of... transactional exchange thing."

"Would it help if I mentioned that I had other motives as well?" Amelia asked.

"I mean, we're probably not going to be sharing a bed anytime soon anyways," I said. "More honesty couldn't hurt."

"The heredity of affinities is well-studied," Amelia said. "A child's affinities come from only three sources: their parents' affinities, the affinity of the environment they are born in... and the void itself. Every so often, someone like Rachel is born- a child of parents with no void affinity, in a land also without a void affinity, yet somehow, still, a void affinity in the child. But there has never been a case recorded by any temple whose records survived to be read by any of our scholars of a child being born with a common affinity that did not come from their parents or the land itself. Void and void alone is that which occurs spontaneously and on its own." She tilted her head, watching in amusement as Rachel swore loudly at the book in her hand, then continued speaking. "The Grand Temple of Kotor itself has been carefully cultivated to be a separate environment from Kotor itself, and rather than the water affinity so common in Kotor, this environment is a Void environment."

"Ah," I said intelligently, once it was all spelled out for me.

"Were I to, say, bear your children... well, with the both of us being Archmages, our children would be guaranteed by all known laws of heredity to be Archmages as well," Amelia said. "And, well... provided that the both of us sow a few more seeds with other Mage mothers, then we just might, with careful record-keeping, manage to finally create a stable, self-sustaining clan of Archmages. You must understand, Lucy- as rare as it is, a secondary void affinity is downright common compared to an Archmage like ourselves. The Grand Temple has some contact with temples in other lands, and right now we know of possibly four living Archmages in the world today who do not live in Nukem. The last Archmage of Kotor had been dead for thirty six years when I was born."

"I see, I see," I murmured. "And it'd be a big political development if you were to, say, squeeze out a set of Archmage octuplets, wouldn't it?"

"...Ah," Amelia said, bashful as she remembered our deal. "...Wait, octuplets?"

"I'm not mad, and I don't think you've gone against your word," I said. "You started this by offering to sleep with me in exchange for a valuable skill book that, in all honesty, would not really be that much more valuable than the one you already have. You didn't ask me to do something politically significant, just offered to let me do something that, done right, could have politically significant consequences."

"Thank you for the assurance but octuplets?" Amelia asked. "Do I look like a rabbit to you?"

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"...Yes, but jokingly, and in a way I have to provide context for," I said. "Mine was an age of cheaply-produced and widely-distributed mass media, and one of these popular periodic publications was a pornographic magazine called Playboy, which had a rabbit symbol for their logo, and whose stars were sometimes called Bunnies, with the occasional headband with fake rabbit ears thrown on. And also, as a well-educated cleric, you bear certain commonalities with the clerics of another religion, who were called rabbis- and in my language, 'rabbi' was spelled exactly like 'rabbit,' with a single consonant removed from the end."

"I still want to hear how, precisely, you expect me to bear eight children at once," Amelia said.

"Oh, that's easy," I said. "There was a well-known case of a wholly mundane woman with no magic whatsoever managing to do, and survive, the same back on my world. I reckon that you, the mortal head of this land's Grand Temple, and an Archmage in your own right, should prooooobably have the personal capability and support staff necessary to carry eight kids at once. Especially if we can figure out a spell to make your womb bigger on the inside."

She stared blankly, faint horror warring with curiosity. I could tell something was awakening within her.

"Five is the traditional limit," she said eventually. "Far more often, when someone of means decides that they need more children from a single pairing in a given amount of time, they feel only the need to go so high as two or three. And that, in and of itself, is very uncommon. Eight is... well, scholars of childbirth may be able to say with certainty whether a thing is possible, but my own, less specialist studies in that area tell me that five is the traditional limit."

"Look, I pulled the number eight out of my asshole because it was a good, clean number to use in conversation."

"Eight is not a clean number. Ten is a clean number."

"Not quite. See, eight is the third power of two. And since one's family tree doubles in size as you move up each row from mother to grandmother to great grandmother, I tend to be primed to think in powers of two whenever breeding kink comes up."

"Breeding ki- what?"

"Long story. Now hush, the summoning is starting."

Rachel finished the summoning circle, and knelt before a locus of lines at the circle's edge, placing her hand on the locus and pouring in just the tiniest drop of mana. The circle barely lit up... until it suddenly blazed with light, almost painfully so, before inverting into deep, consuming shadow that sucked light out of the rest of the room. The shadowy lines swelled until the floor was marked with a thick halo of inky black darkness, which contracted a little as it filled in, before, at long last, out of the shadows rose the silhouette of a human form.

People talked about biblically accurate angels as a way to point at paintings and drawings of wheels within wheels covered with eyes, but in point of fact, the Bible and Torah were both in agreement that, yes, angels could and did appear in the form of humans, or humans with wings. And as wings unfolded from the silhouette, I thought about this smugly as I dunked on people who were not here and never would be, because I'd been brought to a completely different world whose religion bore only coincidental resemblance to Judaism or whatever Yeshua's heretical cult of personality called themselves these days.

The light returned, and the shadows faded, leaving us with a perfectly average-looking beta of local Nukem stock, the only sign of her angelic nature being her jet black and feathery wings.

"Hey, you specified the right Lucifer this time," the angel Lucifer Morningstar said, grinning at Rachel. "I was tempted to correct your error myself, but... well, then I realized that letting that messy bitch go through would work out better. What do you think?" Lucifer looked around. "Oh hey, she's here too. Looks like she's acclimated pretty well. Oh, and Archmage Amelia! Are we in the Grand Temple, Rachel?"

"I- yes, but-" Rachel shook her head, standing up. "Pardon, but... you are why I summoned Lucy?"

"Not quite," Lucifer said. "You fucked up the targeting part of the summoning ritual last time, because the book you were working from had been copied badly and was a bit smudged, and you tried to correct for that but ended up making a different error. That is how and why you summoned Lucy... well, that plus some other cosmic alignments but if I get into that, we won't have time to talk about anything else before I have to go. Short answer is, you did it by miraculous, non-repeatable accident, and I decided not to stop you."

"You talk a hell of a lot like me," I said.

"It's a lot of fun, innit?" Lucifer asked, winking at me. "But, summon me yourself if you wanna chat. This is about Rachel right now."

"Right," Rachel said, nodding. "You... give advice to summoners, correct?"

"Usually pretty trivial advice, but you can use more than that, and I'm aware of a lot more than I implied a minute ago," Lucifer said. "So, with that said... you need to understand Duke Nukem a lot better than you currently do."

"What do I misunderstand about her?" Rachel asked, frowning. "I grew up in her household, after all..."

"You grew up as a knight sworn to House Nukem," Lucifer corrected her. "You didn't see her personally all that often, or get to know her super well, one-on-one. You, honey, are under the impression that Duke Leyla Nukem is warm, friendly, a little crass, and fairly informal, and that these past two days have been aberrations, breaks in her character. Right?"

"Right..." Rachel said, nodding carefully.

"Well, that's not who she is," Lucifer said. "She's a traumatized kid in a fifty year old's body, who thinks social graces and protocols are for pussies who don't know what it's like on the front lines. She's open and friendly and waves off breaches of etiquette, but only if she likes you. When she decides she doesn't like you, she's not restrained by any of the social graces or protocols that the nobility developed specifically to ameliorate and resolve conflicts between them before they turn into bloody messes. You didn't do something so bad it caused her to act unlike herself. You did something that made her stop liking you, and you finally realized what her bad side is really like, because it was pointed at someone you hadn't been told was inherently bad and deserving of the harshest punishment for annoying the Duke."

Rachel stared just a bit past Lucifer, blinking and contemplating. "...Huh. That..." Rachel trailed off. "...That makes rather a lot of sense, because... well, Lucy is also, to an extent, like that."

"Only to an extent," Lucifer said. "Your girlfriend ain't Duke Nukem; she's a lot more capable of forgiveness, for one. Anyhow. My time's running out. Anything else you wanna ask before I split?"

"Where do I really belong?" Rachel asked. "Where should I go, what should I be- what should I do next?"

Lucifer shrugged as she began to fade once more into shadow. "Whatever the fuck you want. You are gifted, and cursed, with freedom." She snapped off a friendly finger-gun before she completely disappeared.

"Cursed with freedom?" Amelia asked, confused.

"Exactly," I said, nodding. "Cursed with freedom."