@Mithrill and I worked on an omake together! He came up with the lion's share of the scenario, details, and plot while I provided editing and a lot of the dialogue. He also provided corrections on some setting-specific terminology. Featuring Laz, Alia's boyfriend.
Enginseer Laz Pi-X-Ryun would probably gasp in shock at the sight of the entire party of cultists and gangers that was watching him and other prisoners switching from tense but triumphant to panicked, if he hadn't have his mouth replaced with rebreather during the subjugation of Thedias. So, they came too late. The Ultimate Sanction was primed and within few days the few bits of the planet that weren't scorching-hot ash would be. Not to mention the lava. And the eruption plumes - if the calculations of the Magi were correct, the hot volcanic particulate could easily reach the stratosphere, spelling doom for every aerostat and floating hab. The noosphere was noisy from the amusement and vindication of other tech-adepts, spite overwhelming the distaste for emotional inefficiency. They were
glad that Thedias was due a sudden extinction event.
He wasn't. He was terrified
He would say he couldn't say why, but he knew clear as a freshly polished lens.
Alia. Lysa.
Two living beings in the dead halls of Forge Thepselion. Two hearts of flesh among thousands of steel. The skittish, but ever curious lexmechanic and calm, yet audatious cybertheurge that he knew since their first apprenticeship, that he sat with for meals, that he...tasted.
It wasn't that long when Lysa caught his eye, flickering noospheric glyphs at the edges of her communicates hinting at her insatiable ambition for microseconds that she let them out—because there was no way it wasn't deliberate. Then came the chromed plates of her cogitators and logis implants, their external beauty only rivaled at the wealth of processing power within. He suspected she was doing it to get closer to his master, a venerable Artisan, but he didn't exactly mind.
But soon he fell for Alia; sweet and delicate and utterly brilliant. That kiss under the glass dome of Forge-Basilica was, he supposed at the time, the closest he could come to the feeling Magos Land must have felt when finding STCs that now bear his name. He remembered agonizing for weeks over the tension tearing him between soaring to stars with Lysa or spending the hours doing quiet ballistic and orbital calculations with Alia, before the latter transferred to the Biologis and whispered to him five words:
"Why not take us both?"
It was heretical. Even a single...bond...like that was a dangerous departure from the logical purity of Machine into irrational failings of flesh. To take two was right out.
Yet that was exactly what he did. And it was even better than under the dome. That, he mused one evening after three of them met together while hooked to the same noospheric channel, could only be topped if he ever found the Holy Standard Template Constructor. They talked on many things the elder priesthood would rather leave forgotten. Lysa always had vision and wisdom, the next step for Thedias and beyond. He found affinity for Machine Spirits, tinkering with devices for whatever arcane purposes they planned. And Alia devoured lore, bombarding them with truths beautiful and terrible about the responsibilities of Mechanicus for the planet. It was mind-boggling how much she cared about menials and how they soon came to do the same. When they ascend to full Magi, they promised each other, they would seek any way to extend the benevolence of Omnissiah onto as many as they could.
And then came the cult. The war. Alia disappeared, and soon Lysa too, and then he was taken with other Artisans and Engineseers to oversee the Lance Battery.
And the Ultimate Sanction with it.
Laz did not share the fervent reverence his compatriots shared at the Ultimate Sanction. He could only think of the millions who would die screaming. But of course he was the minority of minorities in opinions, and kept his mouth both physical and noopsheric shut. He performed his Omnissiah-given duties, but only the bare minimum. He only hoped wherever Alia and Lysa were, they did not curse him for his complicity.
Then came the expected assault. Laz stayed as far as he could from the fighting, until he and the small cohort of others he holed up with were rounded up and marched to this temporary holding location. Now all there was to do was wait for the holiest of fires, and the death of millions.
But...
But that wasn't what he and Alia and Lysa promised during those quiet nights, sweat gracing their biological bodies as they lied together with their flesh and augmetics on display. They promised to create a better future, one where the plights of menials weren't ignored in favor of efficiency, where everyone could benefit from the blessings of the Omnissiah.
He knew what he had to do.
"I want to speak," he called with his meat-voice. "I know what can be done. Let me speak with your leaders"
The rest of the adepts bristled in the noosphere.
%%Traitor!%% they called,
%%Heretic!%% He paid them little mind.
The gangers shuffled and from the crowd a tall, disgusting
ly alluring warrior emerged, three-armed and muscular.
Wait, wasn't that the Keleromorph that Alia...
"Speak, Enginseer" she said "My sisters will hear every word."
He took a breath he didn't need and begun, shifting into more formal patters to keep the facade of confidence.
"For context: Thedias Prime had limited contact with wider Imperium. Tech-priest exchange minimal. In consequence, multipurposity emerged. Many Enginseers not specialize, prefer wider learning. Thus, wide knowledge on Planetary Mantle Generatoria. They seek not just heat. Motive Force dwells within the mantle. Magma motion. Tectonic pressure. This planetary Motive Force can be harnessed. Made to serve Mankind. Ultimate Sanction relies on the same principle, inverted. Power redirected to accumulate Motive Force within mantle. Once critical pressure reached, detonation. Motive Force released to turn the Wrath of Omnissiah upon the planet."
The hall was silent. The kelermorph tilted her head and looked at him, now with something he tentatively called curiosity.
"This... corroborates what we know. But doesn't explain what can we do about it."
"This battery is not the only structure on Thedias with Planetary Mantle Generatorium. Forge Thepselion relies on the same. So does Phlegeton Power Nexus. Approximately 100 across the planet. They are not blocked. With sufficient access, Motive Force can be redirected. Dispersed. Pressure buildup slows. Possible delay of Ultimate Sanction. Possible reduction of power."
Shock. Stunned silence. "So it can be stopped?"
"Unlikely. If Magos Thanatora primed the Sanction, the cells will explode eventually. But depending on how many generatoria can be made to work that way, there may be insufficient Motive Force in the mantle for planetary extinction."
Hope. What Alia and Lysa once gave him, he was going to give back. The kelermorph smiled tantalizingly.
"Excellent," she said. "Prepare the protocol and we'll send the teams."
"No," he said firmly. Now came the hard part. Once again the room fell silent.
She glared at him."Why?"
He took a breath, this time feeling the necessity.
"Other Generatoria excluded from Ultimate Sanction. Impossible to redirect the same way. Must be overridden by direct communion with Machine Spirits. You will need proper Tech-Adepts equipped with high-grade augments and skilled with working with Machine Spirits. And you will need to send them directly to magma tap." What that meant went without saying. "I volunteer."
He almost didn't hear the outrage of other tech-adepts, lost suddenly in the big eyes of kelermorph. He saw emotions fighting within. Denial, anger, then bitter resentment and...awe?
"State your designation," she said after a while.
"Engineseer Laz Pi-X-Ryun, 273rd Creche of Forge Marithilion."
"Magos Laz," she said with a gravitas Laz couldn't process at the moment. "Prepare yourself. What will you require for this?"
Thedias was Hell.
The air was scalding hot and full of choking ash, droplets of acid flew everywhere thrown by cutting winds—and that was on a good day, when there was no ashfall, no earthquake, or lava outflow. But even Hell could have its own Hell, Laz pondered as a rumbling elevator hurtled down Maintenance Shaft 17 of Phlegeton Power Nexus. There wasn't that much acid and dust deep underground, but the heat went from "scorching" to "will kill unprotected humans in minutes," toxic volcanic gases strained even his augmetics, and tectonic events were even more common and even more destructive.
He managed to requisition the best personal repulsor fields that remained in the Mechanicus armories, but even with them, two of his seven companions—all taken from the ranks of most skilled and best augmented tech-priests loyal to Sisterhood who weren't still incapacitated from the previous fighting—almost collapsed from strain in the first generator. But emergency stims kept them conscious long enough to leave and recover in the—by comparison—cool and fresh air on the surface. The second operation went better, and so did third and fourth.
It was during the fifth where everything went wrong. It was the main plant of Site-37, a Geologis outpost in an old caldera on the edge of Golgothan Plateau that focused on researching its post-volcanic materials. The generators there were built not at the bottom of specially-drilled shafts, but in the rifts reaching to the old magma chamber. This allowed the Mechanicus to streamline the construction costs, but also had a side effect of leaving the generators completely open to the full fury of Thedias's mantle—which was now whipped into frenzy by the Sanction.
Sheer bad luck meant they also got caught in a tectonic shift, meaning a face-first contact with magma surge. They managed to complete the operation and escape alive, but at a cost of nearly completely burning out their repulsors. It took Laz the entire way to the next station to salvage working components and cobble together a single functioning system. At least the other priests didn't protest when he took it and asked them to leave. For all that the Sisterhood encouraged emotional expression, their Mechanicus adepts were still used to cold calculation of benefits versus expenses and he need not argue long after pointing out he was best of them in regards to communing with Machine Spirits.
It was simply logical. It still did not stop the pit in his stomach.
The elevator stopped. The doors opened to the catwalk cutting through a thin, tall chasm. Phlegeton Power Nexus was built in close proximity to one of the larger tectonic fault lines on Thedias, specifically above one of secondary rifts. This, again, served a dual purpose: not only to draw vast amounts of geothermic energy, sufficient for Phlegeton to power the entire region on its own, but also to monitor and control the level of lava in the rifts, allowing for more efficient exploitation. According to the calculations of Sisterhood's Logis Priests, if its generators were subverted, they could be synchronized with the rest of the Golgothan installations and, as a single network, create a large enough negative pressure to slow the Motive Force buildup by over 25%.
Keyword being
if.
He marched slowly, with precise steps, stubbornly ignoring the painful heat and the blaring alerts of his mechadendrites' sensor reporting excessive temperature.
Perhaps it will tell me I'm below the surface as well, he thought, taking refuge sarcasm to avoid thinking of the peril he was in. He didn't turn on the repulsor field yet—it was the fourth generator he was operating on alone, and despite his best efforts the jury-rigged apparatus barely held itself together.
We're both pushing our limits, he thought at Machine Spirit, receiving a weak, but determined data ping in response.
His internal chronograph said it took him 378 seconds to reach primary cogitator array, but it sure felt much longer. It was a large cylindrical machine, bigger than a Leman Russ tank. It surrounded a massive metallic pole thicker than a macrocannon shell that was the main geothermic shaft, which dipped down below to drink the heat and Motive Force of Thedias's oceans of magma. High above him he could see the stretched-out wiring of Geopotentia Array: thick bundles of cables reaching to dozens of hypermagnetic coils, each held in carefully prepared casing that kept them stable in the ever churning molten guts of the planet. As the currents of electromagnetic forces coursed through the mantle, the Array remained stationary, power manifesting within kilometers-long copperdymium spools as if by the grace of Omnissiah.
This was the system Laz had to reprogram, inverting its function—where normally the Array was subjected to motions of magma and fed Motive Force to the power plant, now it would have to use the Motive Force to push against the currents of molten rock. Despite doing this eight times already, he was filled with trepidation.
First, he unfolded the antenna of his magnifier vox, upgraded through decidedly non-orthodox means to bounce off facility's system to the Sisterhood command center.
"Enginseer Laz Pi-X-Ryun reporting," he spoke, his augmetics directly transferring the vibrations of his vocal cords to the vox. "I've reached Phlegeton."
"We read you, Enginseer Laz." He knew not who the vox operator was, but he excused their informality given the situation. "Logis are at their posts. They are ready to begin the sequence when you are."
"Affirmative, connecting." Mechadendrites snaked out from beneath the repulsor harness—they learned to leave robes behind after they almost caught fire in the second generatorium—looking for dataports or connectors, while Laz himself gently laid his hand on the cogitator's chassis. Soon he spotted a loose panel. He unscrewed it respectfully, chanting the First Rite of Remaking.
%%Hallowed Machine, thy servant stands before you. Hallowed Machine, thy purpose is recognized. Hallowed Machine, in the name of Omnissiah, I seek thy faults and purge them...%%
Under the panel gleamed crystalline wafers etched with electrical runework. Following their guidance, Laz soon found the point he was looking for: a tiny knot of circuitry extending from the tell-tale biosillicate cubes that were cogitator datacores. With this point accessible, he could connect directly to the systems overseeing the Geopotentia Array.
"Found the connector. Beginning the procedure."
"Copy that. Star Children watch over you"
He flicked on the repulsor field, took one last breath, and plunged a datajack mechadendrite to the connector.
Instantly the installation shivered as the protective force fields failed, doing exactly what they were designed to do in case of override. Even behind his protections he felt the fire of the deeps. He shoved that feeling away and, murmuring the Canticles of Righteous Adjustments, slowly inquired the Machine Spirit for access.
Exactly 37.23 seconds later, the lights dimmed and the hum of the hypermagnets turned into a whine. Motive Force discharge filled the air with smell of ozone.
"Contact established. The Array is ready for the procedure."
"Understood. Preparing the adjustment protocols." There was a moment of silence as the sound of parchment rustling scratched in Laz's vox. "Protocol ready. Step 1: at depth one-seven-seven, induce flow at sixty percent to one-nine degree horizontal, two vertical."
"Confirmed." With gentle prodding, he started readjusting power circulation through the array, bending the massive currents of charged magma according to instructions calculated by Logis. The numbers kept flowing, and he kept working, datajack dendrite sparking from heavy load while the others danced across the chassis, correcting the mechanical failures, inscribing the glyphs of respect, and balancing the ancient systems. Soon he was lost in the process, racing against time to keep the sacred machine working the way it needed to if anything was to remain alive on Thedias.
%%Protocol 25% complete%%
%%Protocol 50% complete%%
Nearing 75%, a dull rumble shook him out of his machine trance. His atmo-sensors registered increased particulate concentration.
"Status report?"
"Auspexes are registering quakes in the Northern Fissures. Do you want to abort?"
"Negative. Continue the sequence." Phlegeton was a lynchpin of their current plan. They
had to control it.
Not a few minutes later the rumble repeated.
"Another quake. Closer. The Magi advice withdrawal."
"Negative. This is critical. Continue the seq-" This time the rumble was no longer dull, but instead thunderous. It was a wall of sound that crashed over him, obscuring anything other than the sensation of the world itself
moving.
There was now a crack in the wall, still echoing and distorted by the distant sound of crushed stone. The rock on the left visibly shifted downwards, tearing out large part of the construction's supports. Light seeped into the chasm from below, eerie and red. For a good while Laz stood paralyzed, alerts from overburdened Machine Spirit of his repulsor harness pushed to the edge of consciousness.
"Enginseer! You need to get out!"
He ignored the call, turning back to the generator. It seemed undamaged. Good.
"It must be done. And it is my responsibility," He rebuffed resolutely while he grabbed onto an undamaged wall with his strongest free mechadendrites. The operator cursed loudly about stupid Imperial martyr syndrome, before giving him another set of coordinates. Minutes passed, filled with horrific crashing and rumbling of crumbling stone, until the walls shook again. This time from the cracks emerged more than just noise.
The whole segment of the wall on his left disappeared in the sudden sea of yellow-red as a wave of magma burst through, an inevitable consequence of already unstable tectonics whipped into frenzy by only half-planned poking and prodding. Laz almost recoiled from heat alone before his and the Machine Spirit's self-preservation routines kicked in and repulsor field shimmered around him, pulling all available Motive Force from the capacitors. Dust and pebbles were kicked away, but first splash of molten rock brought the system to whine. Without much thinking Laz pushed half-assembled instructions through augmetics, turning off what he could and redirecting power, hoping to keep the field as strong as he could as long as he could. All systems spat some sort of warning, but magma stopped inches from his body, almost searing his skin in spite of the barrier reflecting vast majority of heat. When the wave finally splashed only the stim injection kept him standing, but keep him it did. He survived, watching paralyzed as the glowing liquid subsided below, its level slowly rising. Then, the repulsor finally failed.
He screamed.
The sudden feeling of the touch of conflagration upon his body drove agony across his entire body. What little hair he still had after the Mechanicus's ministrations caught fire. His cybernetics cried in pain as well—the collapse of the repulsor projectors was accompanied by voltaic discharge that fried two of his mechadendrites and melted out a few ports of his cyber-mantle. There was also deeper damage, considering something stung like hell in his right hand; most likely the artificial nerves connecting his electoo were burned out. Fortunately, it seemed his vox and antenna still worked.
"Enginseer Laz, do you copy? We detected a quake directly at the Power Nexus! Are you still there?" The operator was frantic, and Laz could barely here some more shouting in background of the vox.
"C-copy," he barely spat out without shouting. The pain was overwhelming. It felt good, finally feeling what he should have for not taking a stance while his supposed "fellows" prepared to kill the world.
"Thank the Star Children, the Magi are ordering you to get out of there, it's too dangerous!" Some more condensers burst on his back. He ignored it. By the Omnissiah, he had to save what he could.
"N-negative," Laz gritted out. "Continue. The sequence." He received more cursing and the yelling increased in the background, but soon the numbers began flowing again.
He lost the vision in his left optic. He smelled burned plastic and seared flesh from where the condensers melted into his shoulder. He heard the whine of servos as the loader dendrite held onto the rock with all power of its hydraulics. But he kept the numbers going. Kept adjusting the system. He won't make it out of the crushing heat before he expired, but he could at least finish his final duty. His final penance. If Alia and Lysa were still alive, they'd be safe. He held onto that as his diagnostics flashed increasing numbers of warnings and errors.
Then a sharp spear of pain struck his left temple and he almost let go.
Time itself seemed to slow down, the rumble of the world lost in the infinity. He blinked sluggishly. Did one of his logis implants gave up? It had to. His head felt heavy, black flakes swam in his vision. And then, on the edge of the abyss, a voice that he though he would never hear again before becoming one with Omnissiah.
"Laz?!"
"Alia?"
Laz was still processing Alia when he heard another impossible voice.
"Laz you idiot!"
"Lysa?! How is this possible?"
"You're asking one of the best cybertheurges in her generation how she and her talented biologis girlfriend managed to create a psychic-noosphere communication mechanism utilizing the Sisterhood's innate xeno psychic connection to talk sense into their stupid, stupid self-sacrificial boyfriend? Could you be any more illogical?" Silence rang for a second.
"I'd hack into the Golden Throne itself if that's what it took, you know?"
Laz couldn't help but bark an incredulous laugh, ringing in the odd pseudo-noosphere. Of course Lysa would brag and berate him in the same breath. He felt his heart lift. He could speak to them one last time.
"Lysa, we did have some help from the Magi," sweet Alia chided.
"But yes, it was mostly Lysa who came up with it."
"I'm glad you two are okay," Laz said thickly.
"I was so worried when you both disappeared."
"Oh Laz," Alia sighed, while Lysa simply said:
"Have some
faith in us, dummy."
By the Motive Force, how could he have ever chosen between them? It was their contrast in personalities and how they complimented each other in both temperament and...physicality...that only heightened their attractiveness. He was glad he had those few short months together. They were memories he was going to bring with him until the end.
"Sweet Omnissiah, Alia, are you getting this? He's still lusting after our bodies even as he's thinking how he's going bravely die melting in a furnace. Laz, you're so lucky you're so cute."
Laz felt embarrassment flush through him.
"W-wait, what?"
Alia giggled over the link, though he could tell it was part releasing tension.
"The link also transfers emotions and, um, 'unspoken' thoughts to an extent. So, u-um, we got some flashes of you, ah-"
"Tonguing Alia's prostate while you were buried to the hilt in my vagina," Lysa completed shamelessly.
"Which was a pretty good one, I'll admit."
His embarrassment turned into mortification. Okay, now dying didn't seem so bad.
"O-okay, but wait," he tried desperately to change the subject while he still could.
"How come I'm not getting the same from you both?"
A short silence, before Alia spoke.
"I-I suppose...it's because you haven't been Kissed yet. The psychic component isn't fully complete on your end."
He sighed. One more thing he wouldn't be able to experience. He had almost forgotten about it, with the levity that his girlfriends brought to him. While his subjective consciousness was clearly accelerated, his physical body was still stuck in the superheated Genatorium.
"Laz, please." He flinched at the pleading tone of Alia's voice, wavering with emotion.
"Stop being so fatalistic. You will make it, you have to."
"Alia, I...I can't. I don't even know if I can complete this sequence."
"Laz..." Oh how she sounded on the verge of tears was tearing at his heart.
"Alia, Lysa, listen," he managed to say.
"The time I had with both of you was the best of my life. Even besides the, um, the sexual aspects," he really hoped he wasn't flashing them with more embarrassing memories.
"Those hours talking, sharing jokes, nourishment, plans for the future...those were what got me through the last couple weeks and through the penance I'm performing now. Even if I had never talked to either of you again, I was happy when I learned you were alive. That was what gave me the resolve to go through with this, so that you both would be safe. Thank you for letting me say goodbye."
Alia choked out a sob over the link.
"No, fuck this," Lysa bit out. He blinked, taken aback over the anger in her voice.
"Enginseer Laz Pi-X-Ryun," she ground out.
"You are going to quit your moping, finish the sequence, and get out of that damned Genatorium to safety."
"L-Lysa-" he tried, but she barreled through.
"You are going to do that so that Alia and I can smack you upside your Holy Omnissiah-given augmetics for being such an idiot before we kiss you stupid, and so that in eight months your children can see their father in the flesh and metal instead of a recording."
There was a beat, and Laz's mind short circuited like an ill-maintained machine spirit.
"W-wait, children
?!"
"
W-well," Lysa's sudden bashfulness only reinforced the truth.
"I'm, as I said, I'm...pregnant."
She's pregnant, Laz thought smartly.
"It's twins," Alia provided, pride and love in her voice.
"From our first time together—all three of us. Magos Lena and Shexi confirmed it. One from me. One from you. A miracle."
He would be a father. Or...parent, at least. "Father" didn't seem to sit rightly the way "parent" did. Something to analyze later, if there was time.
"The Sisterhood have a similar creche system as the Mechanicus, but Alia and I decided to raise them together, and I mean all three of us," Lysa said. It was heretical and illogical in the tenets of the Machine God, but Laz was beyond caring about it at this juncture. He'd be a parent. A parent to twins, that he made with his girlfriends.
"I'm going to be a parent," he breathed out in his mind.
"If we're going to be full Magi, then how would we even find time to raise them?"
"We're the brightest minds of our generation," Lysa said with a sniff.
"We'll figure something out."
"And we have the Sisterhood to help us too," said Alia.
"We're part of a community. As the menials say, it takes a hab to raise a child."
Laz couldn't help it, and let laughter bubble up, incredulous and giddy and love overriding the grim moroseness that was plaguing him since he thought he lost his girls. Soon, his girlfriends joined in, giggling, the feeling of catharsis washing through them all.
"That's why you're making it out, you hear me Laz?" Lysa said.
"Some parent you'd be if you don't even greet them."
"We believe in you Laz," Alia continued. "
You're so, so strong and brave and determined. Please don't give up, not yet. We're waiting for you."
Laz felt a new flash of determination settle in him like freshly-forged alloys into a manufactorum mold. He will make it out. He will see them again. And then, much later, see the children he helped bring into the world.
But first he had to finish the sequence he started.
"Okay. Okay, I can do this. Thank you, Alia, Lysa. I love you both."
"We love you too," the loves of his life replied. He could almost feel it, their emotion and certainty seeping through the link to infuse his whole being.
"See you soon," he said, and he meant it.
Time returned to normal speed, as did pain. Strangely, it was not as shocking as the first time; perhaps his nerve endings already perished.
The better for me, less distractions, he thought, firing the diagnostics. As predicted, most of him was frakked, but he was still connected to the generator and the loader still held, if barely.
"T-the final sequence!" he all but yelled into the vox.
The last coordinates of the protocol came in as rapid as a rivet gun. With internal fire that outblazed the inferno outside, Enginseer Laz Pi-X-Ryun stood on the collapsing catwalk and inserted one set of commands after another.
Finally, the long, expected signal came.
"Protocol complete! Now get out of there!"
He ran. He was not ashamed to say so. Or, more precisely, he hobbled as fast as the ravaged limbs could carry him, fighting exhaustion and wheezing in the hot air that burned his throat and lungs. Each step was a marathon, but he somehow managed to slip into the elevator before he realized it.
Only after the lift doors had closed and the button was pressed did he finally collapse like a servitor whose power unit was shut off. Everything hurt. His flesh probably looked more like a burnt piece of meat. His augmetics were shutting down or blaring warnings. But he made it. He would see them again.
Only then did Laz allow exhaustion to overtake him, the rumble and hum of the lift his lullaby. Before shutting down completely, he recorded in his surviving personal cogitator:
Name them Lux and Geos. Light and Earth.
And then it was nothing but the sweet bliss of darkness.
Laz rose to consciousness with the sluggishness of an ancient cogitator's Machine Spirit. He registered pain, but it was dulled, muted. Many of his augmetics had been removed, such as his mechadendrites. He was surrounded by medicae equipment. He groaned, and heard twin gasps to his right.
Sluggishly, he turned his head. Four eyes met his, the unaugmented ones glistening with tears.
They were here.
For him.
His eyes crinkled in a smile. No matter what would happen, they would be alright.
Sadly too late to give bonuses but it also means Laz doesn't have to die, so he gets to live with his GFs. :3 I also included some nascent gender feelies for Laz because I couldn't help it. If you give me a cis boy to write he won't be one for long.
Once again many thanks to Mithril for the majority of the planning and writing, I just provided editing polish and certain sections of dialogue.
