"I see." Letty says thoughtfully, sitting in the den with my head on her lap, when I finish recounting my meeting with Shiva. "It explains a lot. You don't know when you will be going to hell, right?"

"Nope." I shake my head lightly. "Mom told me she isn't sure herself and that she'll contact me when she will know. Also..." I pinch her side lightly, making her squeak and glare at me. "We'll be going to hell. She even said it herself. There's no way she won't let you in."

"Oh, um, okay." Letty mumbles and rubs her nose in embarrassment. "Anyway, so we won't be meeting her now?"

"No. She said she wouldn't even be meeting me if it wasn't conveniently on her way, so no. She's probably going into another jump any moment." I say, glancing into my perception field at the ship, which, although is right now blank, probably courtesy of Shiva's magic, emits growing fluctuations of Aether since a while ago. "She said she'll contact me when she's free, so you'll probably have a chance soon."

"Okay." My girlfriend nods her head and stays silent for a long while. "It was all really abrupt, wasn't it?"

"Mmm, well, yeah. Feels a little weird, like it came and went and it's gone already and we haven't really done anything. I could talk with her for days, I think." I say quietly and feel my body tensing almost involuntarily when my mind gets reminded of one thing I need to tell Letty. I somewhat explained it already, but I want to tell her more details. "Um, so, I have something to tell you. Not very important, but I feel like it matters because you probably noticed something off."

"What is it?" My girlfriend asks curiously, with a hint of worry.

"So... I've known about Shiva... more or less about Shiva, though I didn't have much to go from at the beginning, since I first went into VOW." I begin and I see as Letty's face becomes more serious in place of the small smile. "She, or mostly her higher Rings, I think, sent me a few messages since then. First was after the introduction to VOW. She told me a few things regarding my race after the system message. And in hindsight, she was probably responsible for where we both spawned..." I muse.

"I wouldn't be surprised." My girlfriend nods with a grin. "No matter how you look at it, chances for that rift, or whatever it was that spat me out of Abyss, to be so close to your spawn would be practically zero if it was random."

"Mhm. Yeah." I nod my head and think for a moment. "The second message was, uh, when I was cleaning myself up and started freaking out if I still have my brain, because it wasn't really possible to link my every new emotion and instinct in my previous brain. And in consequence she made me realize I'm Helia." I finish and smile happily, and I notice Letty grinning.

"So you were born of her words. How poetic. Almost like Greek mythology." She says and I fold over with a laugh as a few inappropriate images pop up in my head.

"Leeetty!" I complain. "Be serious, okay?"

"Nah." She replies with a grin. "It's a happy memory, isn't it? So I should be allowed to have fun with it."

"Ah..." I open my mouth to say something and close it. "Well, I can't really refute that... But it's important! I'm telling you cause I don't want to hide this from you, okay? And it's very far from Greek mythology." I grumble. Mythologies can be real weird in general, and the circumstances of gods' birth are leading in terms of how weird they can be. My case doesn't even come close. I think.

"Mhm. Thanks for telling me." Letty says quietly with a small smile.

"Um, so moving on," I pick up after a while of comfortable silence. "The third time was a quip about Aether... which I'm honestly not sure why she even bothered to tell me, but it helped, and fourth, the most important, was just before your transformation. It was my first actual talk with her, and Shiva reassured me you're fine and told me we'd meet soon."

"Oh, so earlier she was just speaking to you?"

"Mhm." I nod. "The last one was just before I went to Shiva, that one I told you about. I didn't want to say all of this earlier, because I didn't know what I felt myself. Now I'm happy I met my mom."

"And speaking about going to Shiva, you teleported." Letty narrows her eyes. "What was I making my portal for?"

"Oh, it was very important." I shake my head with a smile. "The thing is, even putting aside that you have Space-Time Affinity, that I've no idea how to make a portal. I can only teleport um, manually, and right now I don't know how to teleport to a place I can't perceive. Your portal will be safe, stable, and reusable, plus much more convenient because I'd have no need to search for the destination each time."

"...Hm, yeah." My girlfriend nods and we lapse into silence for a long while. "Let's go explain the situation to my parents."

...

We did as she said, we went to Proton and Dragha and explained basically the same thing I explained Letty, just omitting most details that would only confuse her parents. What it amounted to in short was that there's no need to worry about the ship and that it was only my mom paying me a visit. Or vice versa. No matter.

That of course got us into a talk how the hell do I have another mother than that one I left on Gaia and wanted nothing to do with, and that's sort of much simpler to explain. It actually sounds really neat if I say that Shiva is the mother of my soul. As weird as it sounds, because the concept of parents can't be applied literally to souls, it's essentially the truth, as far as I understand it.

And all I can say is that Letty's parents simply accepted that. It's almost unnatural how cool they are about things. About everything.

"Oh, also, Letty." Dragha perks up when we are heading to the door, having concluded the quick talk. "We'll be arriving on Tau Ceti f in around thirty hours. You can go ashore then, and after we've taken care of everything and we're on the way to Hel, I'll go to VOW with you two. Are you alright with that?"

"Yeah, sure. No problem." My girlfriend nods as she turns back. "What about dad?" She looks at Proton with raised eyebrows.

"I'll refrain for now." He turns to us with a small smile. "Maybe later."

"Okay." Letty nods her head, though her face twitches a bit for some reason. "We'll be going then."

"See ya later, Letty." Dragha grins and Proton smiles lightly, turning back to what he's been doing.

After all that we head to Letty's den under an unspoken agreement.

"Damn, I'm exhausted." I flop onto a jelly cushion as soon as I go in, making Letty giggle as she closes the door behind her.

"I can see that. How's your energy? Or is it only mental exhaustion?" She sits on my side with a smile and I feel her hand in my hair as she starts rubbing it up and down lightly.

"...I'm topped off, I'm regenerating really quickly. It's more like emotional exhaustion." I mumble. "I've had way too much to deal with lately. It's hard to believe that VOW was released not even a month ago."

"Yeah, I can imagine. It's been twenty four days Gaia's time, by the way." Letty nods and relaxes a bit. "Do you want to do anything in particular? I was thinking about switching things up here."

"Nothing. I don't mind, if that's what you're asking about. I'm just gonna cheer you on from here." I say, flipping around to look at Letty.

"You don't look like you're exhausted." My girlfriend comments and pinches my cheeks, and I squeal, turning my head away.

"Hey!" I accuse her and give her a glare, but flop down a moment later. "I just wanna relax..."

"Okay, okay." Letty pats me between my horns with a smile and I purr happily. "I'll get to work then."

...

"Helia~?" I hear a voice that tears me out of my idle thoughts and makes me focus on my perception field.

The first thing I notice is Letty standing in front of me and bending down to look at my face, and the next is a completely different layout of the rooms around me in the block.

Then I feel something soft and pleasantly cold on my lips, and I barely stop a grin worming its way onto my face. Oh dear. I reach out with my arms and wrap them around Letty, then stand up and press her whole body length to mine. All this time connected to her by our lips in a slow, passionate kiss.

Around halfway through it I stand up to my toes and bend forward, ending up in position where I'm basically holding Letty in the air, then slowly open my eyes to her pair of galaxies trapped within marbles. Now half-closed as we're enraptured with the kiss.

When we finally separate a while later, I have a grin on my face and Letty is looking at me with that happy annoyance in her eyes.

"What is it, Letty?" I ask, finally replying to her, and let her down to stand on her own.

"I finished moving things. Do you want me to give you a quick tour?" She asks, stepping back and twirling around with a grin.

"I'll pass, I see it all with my magic sense." I smile lightly. "Just tell me what is where?"

"Sure." Letty nods, sitting down next to me. "So we're now in the den, which remains in the same place, just that it has two levels, among which the lower is only accessible from here." My girlfriend points at a large hole in the floor leading to the lower level, which is currently empty. "So basically it divides both floors into two sections each. The one where the kitchen and living room were is now mine and yours, and I moved all that to the lower floor. On the other side on the lower floor there are guest rooms, and on the upper floor there are our pods, plus some currently empty rooms. I'll see what to do with them later."

"Okay." I nod my head by the end of the explanation, having followed Letty's words in my perception field. "I see. By the way, how is the progress with the portal?"

"Not bad." She shrugs. "I mean, everything works, and I managed to improve a few small things. There were no problems at least, so it should be safe for use."

"Should?" I raise an eyebrow at her.

"Well..." Letty grimaces. "I can't be sure what effect it will have on humans, and I have no way to test it without actually doing it. But at least there is nothing indicating it's not safe."

"It's good then." I smile, patting her head lightly. "What time is it? I mean, how long did I sit there?"

"Uh, like, twenty hours?" My girlfriend mumbles and I freeze in surprise.

"What?" How? I was just thinking a bit about things... "Oh. I got lost in thought. Pretty much. Huh." I stare in space absently for a while and shake my head. "Wow, that was weird."

"What was?" Letty asks, turning to me in both concern and curiosity.

"It was like... I got so immersed in my thoughts that I didn't even notice the passage of time?" I tilt my head, thinking back. "Like sometimes when I was reading books, just that I got lost in my own thoughts."

"Ah. Could that be a side effect of what the Third Ring did to you?"

"Huh?" I look at my girlfriend, who is sitting on my side with a thoughtful expression. "Yeah, that's possible..."

Certainly, what Shiva said was that the higher Rings are incomprehensible for her as the person I talked to. If she pushed me in the direction of higher Rings a bit, my actions might be a bit less... humane? Humane is not exactly accurate, since humans are but one of countless races, but probably conveys the meaning.

Basically, for a normal human, my thought session just now might be impossible to comprehend.

...Or for Letty, for that matter. Damn... or not exactly? Because she will also be developing? That's a concern for later, because if I understood Shiva correctly, it will be many thousands of years till any significant changes take place. So we're safe for now, I think.

"What were you thinking about, by the way?" Letty asks from my side and I glance at her, biting my lip.

"About space... I think." I say quietly.

"You think?" She raises her eyebrows in confusion.

"It's... hard to put into words. But yeah, about space." I close my eyes and rub my face. "It's just that with what's happening recently, I find more and more things impossible to express properly using words, you know? Like Shiva, I met her for the first time now, but I recognized her... impression? Even though I've never seen her before? Does that make sense?"

"...I think it does?" Letty says quietly with a finger over her lips and chuckles. "Yeah, I get the idea, but I don't know what you mean."

"Mhm." I mumble, resting my chin on my palms. "Shiva mentioned that Primordials are called Demons because of the limitations of languages. And that's right. It's like... when you hear about a demon, you actually have no idea what it means, because it's a generalized concept, right?"

"Helia..." I hear from my side and notice my girlfriend reaching to my head with her arms.

I turn to her with raised eyebrows, pondering about a peculiar expression on her face, only to be yanked up by my horns without warning.

"Letty!" I let out in surprise. "Wha-!"

"You're getting philosophical!" Letty interrupts me and starts dragging me out of the den by my horns. "Come on, let's go do something fun!"

...

"What about your paintings, Letty?" I ask curiously sometime later. "Do you have a gallery or something?"

"Hm, actually, yes." My girlfriend nods. "I paint mostly on paper, but I scan all my works and put them in my digital gallery. Wanna see it?"

"Yeah!" I reply enthusiastically, standing up, and she follows a moment later. "I'd love to, actually. Do you have any particular style you're painting in?"

"Um, no, not really." Letty shakes her head as we set out to her room. "Mom introduced me to painting a long time when I was getting annoyed by lack of any versatility in engineering. It's like... I imagined something I wanted to make, but I didn't have the means and appropriate tools to make it, and it was making me incredibly annoyed. I needed to fabricate new tools, adjust them till they worked as intended, and only then I could get to my actual idea, if it was actually possible to do it with technology available to me." She pauses for a while.

"Anyway, that was when mom suggested painting." My girlfriend continues. "I started hesitantly, but I got hooked quickly. It really helped me, even though it was genuinely pissing me off at first." She smiles happily at the memory and turns to me. "You know about that... belief let's say, that photos, AI generated images, and the like, have no value because nothing was invested in creating them? Putting aside if it's correct."

"Yeah." I nod. "I can see how painting something would be immensely more satisfying than taking a photo of it. Some people would say it's not the result, but the process that matters."

"Mhm, exactly. These paintings are really precious to me, especially some of them I spent a lot of time making. It's calming and relaxing to me, to just sit there and paint for hours on end. It doesn't matter much how or what I'm painting. What's important is not just the result I want to achieve, but the meaning behind it and the process I go through with limited tools."

Hm. Isn't it just like me?

It's meaningless if I end a fight with a snap of my fingers. The result is there, but there is no satisfaction, no achievement. Sometimes there was the meaning, like in defeating the goblins and the Beisvart in Riverside, but it still lacked the satisfying, lengthy process. What brings me excitement and enjoyment is the fight itself, the challenge. If I handicap myself... yeah, that would definitely work. I've always had some reason or excuse not to do that, but I'll really need to try.

Before that though...

"Can I model for you?"

"Huh?"

...

"Alright... I'm done, I think." Letty says and I open my eyes to look at her.

She's standing next to a small table and stretching, showing her slim body nicely. Mhm~.

I shake my head to clear it and walk up to my girlfriend as she looks at me with an embarrassed smile. I raise my arms and stretch my back, and she averts her eyes with distinctly reddening cheeks from my naked figure, making me grin.

"Satisfied with your work?" I ask, dropping my arms.

"Mostly, yeah." She nods with a smile, stepping back to let me approach the tilted table, currently covered almost completely by a piece of paper around three by four feet in size and by a large number of paint cans. "I think I could have spent more time thinking about the composition, but it turned out really good nonetheless."

I nod and look at the painting, and I immediately take a deep breath in surprise. I can't say I expected Letty to paint only my figure, but I thought I'd be the only person. I was sorely mistaken, it seems.

The painting in itself is incredibly detailed and vivid, almost lifelike, and in vibrant colors. It depicts cosmic sky, with my figure in the center just like I was standing with hands over my navel and meditating. It's also kinda... ethereal? I think there's some of that unapproachable vibe to me, which Letty did really good job capturing and developing it into whole another realm.

And the quality of this thing is damn good. It's practically photographic, showing every single detail of my body, even the tiny things like... dunno, like my nipples, not to search far. Which feels a bit weird. To look at myself, frozen in paint in such detail. Hm. It's sort of... inevitable, that it would happen sometime, hm?

What catches my attention almost immediately is that apart from my figure in the center, occupying almost two thirds of the whole painting's height, there is also Letty's figure sitting on my shoulder. She's pretty small and has distinctly less details than mine, plus she is hugging my neck and leaning on my cheek.

I look to the side at Letty as she stands on my side and stares into the painting thoughtfully. "Cute." I tell her and go back to the painting, noticing as she turns to me in incomprehension, and a moment later turns away with flushing cheeks.

Apart from me and my girlfriend, there is a huge number of smaller figures around me... hanging on threads. Hundreds, thousands even, though only a small number has any details. They are mostly faceless, held in various poses by threads like those you imagine thinking about puppeteers, sometimes alone, sometimes holding each other, but always only hanging there.

Some of them are larger than the other, though still smaller than Letty, and distinctly show specific people. They are also held by smaller number of threads. I can see Catherine, Daria, and Xethu hanging on one each, the Wolfkin and the demoness close and reaching to the other with their hands, then Vulcan and Crimson hanging on two threads and holding each other's hand. Those are distinctly... conscious, let's say, not hanging on the threads mindlessly.

There are also a few snapped threads visible above each of them.

Wow. And above it all, on the starry sky, there is a barely visible black outline of two massive eyes, somehow managing to look unsettling and ominous while being about as detailed as footage from a security camera. And I'm pretty damn sure they are supposed to be Shiva's eyes.

"When I'm painting, I mostly don't just paint an image that would look good." Letty says quietly. "What I focus on is its meaning, the message it conveys. It can be about anything, be it my feelings about something, my thoughts on the future, or a random thing I saw in FTLN."

"It's about VOW, right?" I ask, turning my eyes to her.

"Mhm. That too, and this world as well. Or more like this universe?" She giggles, looking at me with a soft smile. "And about us."