By the time we got off the tram, the sun had pretty much completely set, and combined with us being in the mostly-abandoned industrial district, we were more or less free to continue the conversation.

“So, Mom, I was wondering… My memories from the last couple of days are pretty wonky, do you know why that is, other than, you know, general being out of it?” I asked.

“I am not sure, to be entirely honest, your awakening was pretty strange, all things considered… My best guess is the sense that lets us sense the corruption potential of those around us, what they’d be doing without their inhibitions. It’s kinda like how you could tell your mother and Lottie were Magical Knights even though their magic obscures their identities – Magical Knights are creatures of truth, and keeping secret identities, while necessary, is not something they like doing. Most people, however, are not beacons of truth, so their desires are harder to sense, but as you haven’t stabilized yet, you have no choice but to sense them. So basically, I think that you were overwhelmed, especially at school, by all the signals coming from people around you, which was made worse by the fact your brain couldn’t make sense of them before you awakened. Basically, just a very bad case of sensory overload,” she explained.

Huh, so that explained how I could tell that Mom was Mom, this oddly specific new sense did some psychic interference and told me that’s what she really wanted, what she really was.

I got a brief glimmer of hope before shaking my head. I wasn’t like her. Even if I was, I didn’t deserve to be, but I wasn’t, I was just a guy, a rather shitty one at that.

That’s why I had to make it up to people around me, starting with letting my Moms be free to be themselves without all those lies.

Not by corrupting them though, of course. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to do that even if I tried. Though there were a couple non-suspicious questions I could ask that would help me with this situation, as well as my own curiosity.

“So, why was my awakening strange?”

“Well, for a start, the thing that happened to you today shouldn’t have happened for months… You don’t make that much dark energy, and that shouldn’t have happened before you had a lot in store, and sure enough, when you were out I checked, and it seems the amount you have is way too low for the necessity to transform, normally it wouldn’t happen until you were halfway full. Well, at least the risk was lower that way, even if I didn’t know it in the moment – if you hadn’t transformed, you would have released all the dark energy at once in what would essentially be an explosion. You wouldn’t have been harmed other than passing out, but our apartment…” she explained.

I was almost halfway full… Could she not sense that? I had a feeling I should keep that private.

“The other thing was that you somehow managed to corrupt multiple without meaning to – that should just straight up not be possible. At least, it never was for me, nor any other Demon Queen I remember. I guess you’re just not made for this in the way that I am…”

“Mom said I was releasing dark energy too fast for me to do anything with, so before I started holding it in, I think I was just releasing all of it… And I think it just sort of… jumped from me to those girls upon physical contact? Mom also said that the corruption wasn’t complete, at least the first time, so I didn’t emit that much in the first place?” I responded.

She looked to be deep in thought.

“That… I guess it makes sense, but I still don’t have any idea why you’re this way… We need to figure it out, before it causes any more trouble, I wouldn’t want you to get wrapped up in all this mess…” she said.

That in turn got me thinking… Maybe I wasn’t the first one?

“You mentioned previous Demon Queens, but maybe it’s not them you need to look at – what if I’m a reincarnation too?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, from my experience, you’d have way too many new old memories to not be able to tell at this point. Not to mention that, while it can be tricky to remember after enough lives, with memories of memories being finicky and not everything being passed down, I cannot recall any of the Demon Queens having children, let alone a daughter that inherited her power. Can’t know for sure, of course, but a Demon Princess would be a pretty notable thing to keep track of,” she said.

My face heated up at being given a title of my own, and I again turned away, as if she couldn’t sense it using her powers.

With the totally natural pause in the conversation, I started giving more attention to our surroundings. By now, we’ve made it to the abandoned abandoned part of the district, which was becoming pretty apparent by the street lights – a worryingly large portion of them didn’t seem to work at all, and a lot of the ones that did seemed to flicker at least occasionally.

“M-mom, are you sure this is safe?” I asked, sounding much smaller than intended as I huddled closer to her.

“Don’t worry darling, your mother is fearsome in battle, and I was able to keep up with her – whoever tries to mess with you, while I’m in this form, I can kick their ass so hard they land in the next region over,” she gloated, pushing a fist into her palm.

I wanted to make a comment about how this is exactly the sort of place that supervillains would hang out around, and we definitely lived in a large enough city for that to be a real problem, but I let her have this one.

That comment did make me think though. If both of them were so powerful and skilled with magic despite the fact they haven’t really used it since before I was alive… How much did they fight exactly?

“Wait, so the two of you did your battle of good and evil… while also keeping up with school and repeatedly travelling to video game tournaments?” I asked.

“I guess now that I have you to compare to, I admit that we might have had a little bit much on our plates back then… But hey, we managed. It was tough, too, the gaming communities back then were rancidly sexist, but your mother was just about taller than ninety percent of the guys at these, so she did manage just fine.”

Okay, I’d heard this story a million times before.

Luckily, we seemed to have arrived at our destination, as Mom took a sudden turn and entered a seemingly unlocked warehouse. As I came in after her, it was empty, deserted of all valuable equipment, and overall painfully stereotypical, like a set out of a superhero movie.

“So, at the risk of asking… Why this place? Isn’t there anywhere closer by?” I asked.

“Not if you want to be isolated, and you do – as you already discovered, dark energy is very attracted to people, and will jump to a person if you give it even the smallest chance – that’s exactly why we’re not giving it that. It’s not only this place that’s abandoned, but also all the ones around it. Moreover, look at this!” she explained, pointing at the ceiling.

“A skylight?”

“Not just a skylight, a skylight without glass! There aren't even any shards, somebody had to have removed it before this place was completely ditched, and it’s excellent for one very important thing!” she exclaimed.

She walked up to be straight under the center of the hole in the ceiling, before raising up her hand and summoning a lot of dark energy to it.

“It is in our nature to keep generating dark energy without stopping, but we don’t have the capacity to store endless amounts of it – that’s why I initially went out to find this place. Every couple of months I come here to shoot my excess dark energy into the sky. Not all of it, mind you, I do tend to keep some backup in case I need to use magic in an emergency, but outside of that, I just…”

She decided to show instead of telling, as was evidenced by the gigantic beam of dark energy that went out of her and into the sky.

Holy shit, she was insanely powerful. Seeing the extent of her power was like staring into the ocean on a particularly windy day – it gave me a feeling I was witnessing something incomprehensibly large and powerful, to which I wouldn’t be even a speck if it decided to end me. I had to admit I had difficulty buying that she had the capacity to corrupt the entirety of humanity without some super convoluted supergenius plan that probably wouldn’t work anyways, but now I saw it as clear as day – she could have actually done it.

And she’d lost.

Processing that my parents were superhuman and could probably kill a normal person with a single hit wasn’t that hard, it was an odd world we lived in. Processing that my parents could probably wipe the floor with the vast majority of superhumans, that they were practically forces of nature, however, was proving difficult, to the point where I stood in awe and shock for so long I lost track of time.

Mom smiled at me, and when I eventually came back to, she invited me to walk up beside her.

“Come on, I know you don’t have as much dark energy as me, and you probably won’t be able to control how much you shoot, but I promise you it’s not that hard, and it’s still a good skill to learn if you want to avoid corrupting people,” she said softly.

As I stood next to her and looked up, I couldn’t see the stars. For some reason I’d convinced myself that the failing streetlights would mean no light pollution, but then I remembered that we’d have to get far further away from the city to even have a chance.

But also, the light pollution made it easier to spot two vaguely human-shaped shadows at a side of the skylight.

“M-mom, I don’t think we’re alone anymore…” I mumbled quietly.

She looked up, and then put her hand in front of me as she started backing away from the figures, urging me to go with her.

Something that in retrospect I should have expected, but was a huge surprise to me at the moment, was that the two figures actually jumped down onto the ground, and with the ambient lighting now evened out between the four of us, I could see as clear as day that they were none other than Mom and Lottie.

Well, other Mom.

The knight Mom.

I, of course, reacted in an appropriate, calm manner, and totally did not jump back, letting out a terribly loud and squeaky “EEP!!!” while hugging my tail.

It was obviously too girly a thing for me to do. Not because it was out of character for me, but because I knew better that I shouldn’t do such things.

What ensued was a staredown between the former (hopefully) enemies, with Lottie feeling visibly awkward, and me still in the totally defensive position of hugging my tail.

Gosh, I was going to miss that thing so much.

Eventually, the stalemate of Moms was broken by the demon mom giving an awkward nod.

“Knight,” she said.

“Queen,” knight Mom responded as she nodded back.

Gosh, they were so awkward when talking as their secret identities, it’s almost as if they never actually tried talking to each other like normal people back in the day!

Wait.

There’s no way, right?

…

Oh my goddess, they totally never tried just talking it out before.

How was that even possible? They knew better than this.

“You know, back in the day, I probably would have just started fighting, but… I can’t help but remember how things ended last time…” knight Mom started. “So, while this doesn’t look good from where I’m standing, I’m going to give you the benefit of doubt – please say this doesn’t need to end in a fight.”

“I know my word probably doesn’t mean much, but I do swear it’s not what it looks like. See, my daughter here, she’s had her sixteenth birthday recently, and she’s awoken to her powers, just like I had all those years back. At first, she had no idea what was happening and accidentally corrupted some people at her school, and really, I had no idea my powers even could get passed on, so until today, I truly haven’t known. However, now she’s figured out how to stop more accidents from happening, and I instructed her on how to manage her powers, so I can promise it won’t happen again,” demon Mom responded.

There were a lot of feelings in my tummy about being so insistently gendered in such a way, but I made an executive decision to ignore those, and no, that was not a pun on executive dysfunction.

“And how about the giant beam to the sky that we tracked the two of you by?”

“Well… The sky is the only place I can put excess dark energy that can ensure no one will get affected, I assure you I haven’t broken my promise to you. I was simply showing my daughter how to do it, so that she wouldn’t get in any accidents,” demon Mom admitted.

At that point I realized that both of my Moms were taking steps towards each other, and were now at an arm’s length.

“Don’t worry, I can tell you’re telling the truth… But wow, a daughter… You’ve really settled down, huh?” knight Mom said.

Demon Mom responded, but she was talking too quietly for me to hear, and knight Mom joined her in that tone.

They were actually chatting like they were old friends, not enemies!

Progress!

Paying attention to progress, however, distracted me from a certain Lottie, who has decided to once again make herself known.

“Hey, are you okay?” she asked, suddenly right in front of me.

I let out a smaller “eep” and jumped a smaller jump backwards while realizing I was still hugging my tail as I squeezed it tighter.

Lottie was not really tall, at least for the standards of where we lived, but she definitely wasn’t short either, and she was also built like a regular girl our age, which made it especially shocking to find myself feeling so tiny and compact even compared to her…

“Wow, wow, don’t worry, I promise I won’t hurt you, you just seemed… really overwhelmed, and I wanted to check in on you, because, you know…” Lottie clarified.

For some reason, putting on a mask was proving much harder than usual at the moment, but maybe… I could use a different mask?

“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

I sounded so tiny and fragile and it was doing things to my brain I couldn’t quite process, but I made a decision that continuing with it might be useful… Not that I had much of a choice.

“It’s just… this is really not my scene…” I continued.

“Yeah, I can tell… You give off vibes of such a sweet, innocent girl, I don’t think I could bring myself to fight you even if you were doing evil…” She laughed, rubbing the back of her head.

I could not even begin to comprehend what I just heard enough to form a proper response, unless my face heating up a lot and a tingly fluffiness in my chest counted.

“I-I see…” I mumbled, somehow even smaller.

“I’m sorry, I hope I’m not making this too weird, it’s just… You really don’t seem like a villain type, and neither does your Mom now that I think about it… What’s up with that?” she asked.

That broke through my emotional overstimulation just enough to get my gears going! This was the golden opportunity! I could get Lottie on board with my plan of big Mom honesty without her even realizing.

“O-oh, I don’t think Mom wanted anything bad to happen, she didn’t even come up with the plan she used, she was just… I think in her head, Mom tied doing the whole Demon Queen thing together with her getting to be her true self, and that’s what she was actually fighting for… And so when she lost, she gave up on that too…” I explained, trying my best to sound quiet, so that neither Mom would hear.

Unfortunately, as I glanced towards them, I realized that both of them were staring right at us while in shock.

Lottie, to her credit, picked up on it quickly, and turned back, before turning back towards me.

“Umm… I think both of them have super hearing… For some reason… Heh…” she sounded extremely awkward.

The silence lasted for fifteen seconds after that, but eventually, it was demon Mom who made the move.

“We’re leaving,” she said, before walking up to me, moving us away from Lottie, and teleporting both of us home.

It was all too fast to process, but it was transparently clear even without any extra senses that she was mad. I attempted to apologise, but she untransformed and locked herself in her office before I could get any words out.

Remembering that, apparently, both of my Moms could teleport, I untransformed before I could even process the pain of loss, before going to my room to once again collapse into my bed and wallow in my own guilty misery.

Rainbow

Sometimes, things are going exactly the way you want, but you just need to make sure they do, and then you accidentally screw everything up... Not directly related, but this chapter and the previous one were meant to be one chapter, and it was when I accidentally realized that chapter 5 was almost 3k words long and I had to figure out how to split what I already wrote in a somewhat natural way that I realized that I've underestimated the scope of this project... Oh well, at least we have gae women and gae girls in this one!

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I hope you enjoyed this chapter and have a great day! ❤️?????