So...Eleven months went by. See? No big deal. In an immortal’s time-line, thirty-three months is basically nothing. Hell, I’m pretty sure I’ve already had one or two eleven-month and twelve-month time-skips in this journal, so this should absolutely be no big deal. It's just three of ‘those’, a little under three years. And as promised, it was a small, minor, absolutely, inconsequential little span of time where nothing of note happened.

I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t have much to tell you here. My life’s been kind of going alright. Works been going okay because at this point Margot, Maci, and I had a fairly solid grasp on the day-to-day running of our little Division of Cosmic Artifice.

Two-fifths of our employees were people we personally trusted. Two-fifths were FC-Helper Units that were absolutely loyal to us by design. The remaining fifth was made up of a small number of plants sent from the outside, that we allowed in the division for reasons of political politeness, and were watching closely.

As a whole, we were well-staffed enough for me not to be worried about how things are going in the Division.

Uhrwerk had reached a hereto unseen level of stability. Margot, my brilliant red star of fortune, managed to come up with a series of algorithms that I could feed to the FC-Observer units that I had watching our artificial multiverse. Now, things like divine and infernal upstarts, and trickster fae and spirits trying to stir the pot, were a thing of the past.

Hell, even my love life has finally stabilized. Margot is as wonderful and charmingly hardworking as she’s even been. Maci, sardonic, stone-faced, and secretly sweet, has basically become someone I couldn’t see living without.

Henrietta, was quirkily prim while in public, and endearingly all over the place, while it was just the two of us...In more ways than one. She has proven to be fun to tease, and I’ve enjoyed watching as she slowly pulls herself out of her shell and integrates with the family. She’d proven herself to be a competent business partner and an adept, surprisingly generous, lover, and potential life partner. Then there was the other one...You know... the fourth one. Whatshername...

I’m mostly joking...mostly. I know my fourth girlfriend’s name. It’s...Prim. Primrose Seth. Younger sister to the esteemed and ever-annoying, Carter Seth. She even looked just like him. Silver hair, tan skin, bright silver eyes. The biggest difference was that she was prettier, less hirsute, and a fair bit, thicker around the hips.

She also had the bombastically fit figure of a superheroine because she’d actually been a superheroine once upon a time. However, I didn't really count 'that' as difference because her brother Carter basically looked like an action figure come to life, underneath those chinos and polo shirts he wore all the time.

I don’t really have much else to say about her at the moment. We met, we had a few dates. I looked into her present and past and found nothing alarming. I made some extrapolations for our most likely futures and found nothing particularly alarming there either.

So I figured, what the hell, why not...At the very least, it would save me from having to go on any more terrible dates. It would also let me sleep with the women I loved, and was coming to love, without worrying about doing them or me, serious harm.

If those sound like fairly unromantic sentiments, it’s because they ‘were’ unromantic sentiments. I was basically giving in to the Seths desire to pull me into a political marriage because I was kind of already balls-deep with them already, and I figured it'd be a convenient solution to my problems as a luxuriae. I even said as much during the second or third date, at which point things between us became refreshingly open.

Of course, that did come with the consequence of slowing down things with our actual relationship. Somehow, knowing that we would eventually, perhaps inevitably, reach a certain destination made us both lazy about actually getting there.

So I’ve been trying to put a little extra work into actually figuring out what makes this woman tick, because even arranged marriages take effort, if you want them to be successful.

Overall, things were going fine in the Kaylan household. I’d been careful to make sure everyone was on board with the addition of each new person. They all seemed to be getting along with each other, with no sign of anyone making any idiotic power plays, and no sign of anyone trying to turn our household into some imperial court drama with needless politicking.

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Most importantly, they were all getting along with Mint and Filomena, which would have been a deal-breaker for multiple reasons. After all, if I can’t trust them to get along with my girls, how could I trust them to treat their eventual step-children in a kind and fair manner.

Work was a go. Homelife was a go. Our cultivations were increasing at a steady rate, thanks to both my and Margot’s efforts. All in all, things seemed to be coming up Monty. There were times I’d start to worry about whether or not my life was going to start becoming boring. Even my cosmic-scale job had started to feel humdrum and routine after enough months of relative peace and quiet.

Then I’d remember all the BS that came before, I’d remember everything I went through before I came to this particular iteration of earth and met Margot, and I find myself deciding that having things be boring and humdrum and...well, nice, was exactly that...Nice. After all, I wasn’t some thrill junkie who needed a little misery in my life, to get my heart pumping.

The door to the waiting room opened and out stepped a doctor, dressed in light blue scrubs, a hair cap, a white mask, and a white apron.

“Sir...You’re wife’s going into labor,” said the doctor.

I was already on my feet, because being out here in the waiting room didn’t mean I wasn’t paying extremely close attention to what was happening in that delivery room.

I mentally reached out to Margot through our tether, doing my best to emanate comforting thoughts, and leech away her pain. I asked her if I could come in now, and she said yes, it was time. The baby was coming, my first child since the one I lost all those many years ago...was about to be born.

Ah, did I not mention that? I would have thought it’d be obvious. Though most people aren’t always so lucky as to be able to plan it out and decide based on their own timing. A nice quiet period in one’s life, where all was well with you and your lover, or lovers, in our case, and you were financially secure, was customarily a period where one might start thinking about having kids.

Roughly ten months ago, Margot started having those kinds of thoughts and things were going well enough with the rest of our lives together that I didn’t see any reason not to go along with it. Now I have a child to go watch, getting delivered into this world.

I followed the doctor in the operating room. The doctor and his nurses were all specially made, specially trained FC-Units. Do you think I’d ever trust something like this to the hands of others? No...Never. Others might want to leave the matter in the hands of professionals, or at least call upon gods and spirits of fertility and childcare, but I trusted the immortals even less than the mortals and I’d have rather seen every single man, woman, and child on earth get hurled into the sun, than risk them betraying my wife and I at this extremely vulnerable.

As soon, Margot and I flipped the switch on our gametes, I spent every spare second in my lab, making the best prenatal and postnatal careworkers and physicians imaginable.

We had the delivery on a heavily fortified planet in my private sub-dimension, in a facility that I built based on the best facilities in the multiverse. I did my best to make sure her every need was seen through, and I tried to anticipate everything that might possibly go wrong. I made all these preparations, yet, there was still no expressing how very afraid I was.

At this point, while she was in the throes of labor, Margot was in her truest-form, an immense shapeless mass of red and white radiance. Like a vaguely humanoid, vaguely amoeboid, massing of stars. A sapient super-galaxy. From the aperture that would have been her vagina, were she still in human form, a massive tangle of black and white tendrils was pushing its way into the world. Everything was being splashed in a mixture of a blood, magical energy, amniotic fluid, and cosmic radiation.

Despite all my powers, I was basically useless right now. All I could do was hold the clump of stars that was roughly analogous to Margot’s hand, and just try to be present and supportive. Thinking supportive and soothing thoughts at her, through our connection. Leeching as much of her pain as I could manage.

I honestly, can’t even say how long we had to wait, because the cosmic radiation was doing weird things to the flow of time in the delivery room. However, eventually, the little one made its way out into the world.

It was a tangled ball of black and white zig-zags. Then as if the cosmos wished to remind me that despite my database, I wasn’t truly all-knowing, that little ball of blindingly bright tendrils split into two masses of black and white tendrils, that each became a small wrinkly skinned child. One a boy and the other a girl. My son, Seren, and my daughter, Dana. My two little stars.

The two, ever-shifting, betentacled masses of deepest darkness and brightest light, and raw probability, quickly took on a human form as they were brought to his mother’s arms.

Margot regained her human form and she was pale and covered and sweat, and frankly looked the worst and best, that I’d ever seen her. She looked down at our two offspring with a tired smile and looked up at me and she chuckled.

“Hon, next time I say I want kids...Talk me out of it, if you can...I love these little guys, but the work to get them here is something I’m not sure I want to go through again,” said Margot.

“Mhm...If you say so dear…No guarantees on my success. You can be pretty convincing when you want to be,” I said. Chuckling as tears spilled down my cheeks. My eyes focused on the four little eyes that darted between me and their mother.

“Tch…” said Margot. Shaking her head and then sort of collapsing into her pillow, lying there exhausted as she held our newborn children.