Mara hugged the fluffiest, most huggable of her many fluffy friends tightly to her chest. Her eyes, narrowed with a primal dread and fixated on an unassuming section of the sky, slowly started to ease up. Her tiny brows evened out, the frown seeping out of them as the small girl slumped.

  She did not know what had been happening, but it was over now. There was something really, really bad out there, up in the sky just now, and it gave her the creeps.

  She gnced towards the silvery sun shedding light upon her little world, squinting up at it with a slowly growing smile as she felt its warm rays on her skin. For some reason, it always felt like it was watching over her, like a silent guardian. It was nice, though it wasn’t very huggable, so she still liked her fluffy friends much more, even if the sun made her feel warm and comfy.

  The fluffy friend held in her arms, encased in a crushing embrace, squirmed, its snout rearing back to lick at Mara’s cheeks.

  The girl giggled happily, all prior worries forgotten as she squished the fluffiest of fluffy friends and rubbed her cheek against its adorable face. The little fox yipped happily, licking Mara's cheek and wagging its tail.

  Her other fluffy friends, already gathered around her, saw this and grew jealous. Yips, meows, chirps and barks sounded as a tide of fluffy friends buried Mara. The girl continued to giggle, pure joy the sole emotion in her chest as she tried to pet them all at once.

  This fluffy heaven really was the best. It made it so easy to not think about The Before and the memories just barely out of reach that her thoughts sometimes stumbled upon. Dark, twisted memories she didn’t want, but which refused to go away. They were so hazy, barely even impressions and echoes of emotions, but even those were strong enough to ruin Mara’s mood for the day and send her into a panic.

  Stupid nightmares, too. At least she had her very own fluffy ward against those; no nightmares dared to sneak up on her when she was sleeping in a bed of divine fluff.

  That’s right! The Fluff was unbeatable, and she was the Queen of all that was fluffy and good! Anyone who doubted it could look upon her army of fluffy friends and marvel at their own silliness for ever having doubted her!

  *****

  Cat stared owlishly at the visual dispy, unable to even blink. Her mouth hung open, forming a little ‘o’ as her brain worked overtime to make sense of what she’d just seen.

  Sure, she knew Mom was awesome and strong as hell … but knowing it and seeing it were two very different things. That the easygoing woman who usually only used her powers to levitate stuff she didn’t want to stand up to grab, or teleport around to spare herself the hassle of walking like lowly mortals could do that was … hard to grasp.

  “Wow.” A little sound of amazement slipped through her lips, awe filling her gaze as she stared at Mom fighting with that feathery beast, a daemon, a big one at that, if her impnted knowledge held true.

  All around were Tyranids, floating brains encased in carapace, as all bioforms made for psychic tasks were. A veritable swarm of them that could y waste to entire worlds, perhaps sectors entirely if given time.

  The two battling titans all but ignored them. Hell, it was Mom who made them, and wasn’t that a freaky sight, seeing a tide of monsters flowing out of her body!

  The real battle was over; it had been so for minutes now, but Cat was watching the repy, since her pitiful human-grade eyeballs couldn’t hope to track the fight as it happened in real time. Also, Mom hadn’t really thought about including a theatre system in the ‘panic ball’ she’d sealed her and Selene in, so it wasn’t like she could have watched the actual fight even if she had wanted to.

  Speaking of Selene, the woman stood to the side, watching the projection with a put-upon frown on her lips. Mom had checked in with both of them after she was supposedly done with ‘destroying’ the daemon. Her own conversation with Mom had been a quick back and forth, Mom making sure she was alright and such, and Cat pleading to her to set up the theatre system she was currently watching before she went back out to continue her work.

  According to Cat’s amateurish understanding of emotions and stuff, Mom had really needed that mundane distraction after the fight. She’d been freaking out a bit, which probably wasn’t healthy for anything within a few light-years of her.

  On the other hand, Cat only had Selene’s facial expressions to go on to guess how her telepathic conversation with Mom had gone, but she would bet she’d asked Mom to be taken back out to fight now that the big bad daemon was gone, and got denied.

  The daemon seemed to have given Mom the heebie jeebies, so both Cat and Selene were still inside The Ball, as Cat started to call in her head.

  Speaking of Selene … Cat wasn’t sure how to feel about her, how she should feel about her. She was Mom’s lover, her partner, her consort … but she wasn’t Cat’s mother, not in any way that mattered. Never made an effort to be either, she just treated Cat and her sisters like … like they weren’t her business? She certainly left all that ‘parenting stuff’ to Mom, so did that mean she didn’t want to be part of the family?

  Who wouldn’t want that? Cat only had a few months of life under her belt, but she could safely say that hugs, head pats and ear-scratches were the best. Who wouldn’t want to be tied in a societal web where everyone could freely share those things with each other?

  Cat had a feeling Selene had a different view of the situation. Did she even acknowledge Cat and her sisters as Mom’s daughters? Cat knew humans supposedly had ideas about whether artificially created children like her counted as ‘people’. It wouldn’t have bothered her what any silly human thought, but Selene was clearly important to Mom, so that elevated her above the masses.

  Such a conundrum. Should she ask and make sure? But what if her worst fears proved true? Doubt was better than certainty sometimes. Maybe Cat was better off not knowing.

  *****

  The decision between whether I wanted to deal with the Tau, maybe go over and calm them down or something, or if I wanted to head back down to the dreary, daemon-infested swamp was a rather simple one. I might have gotten better at politics and people-stuff since I started receiving impromptu tutoring sessions on the topic from Selene and also incorporated Ethereal DNA in my Avatar, but it didn’t change the fact that I had no patience for it.

  Just imagining having to expin myself and what happened to a bunch of self-important blue pricks so soon after that scare made me want to put my fist through a wall. Thinking about it now, it might have been the smart choice to avoid the Tau for a bit; some therapeutic daemon-sying would calm my nerves and help me rex, recim my bance. Yep. It wouldn’t be conducive to my future pns if I got annoyed at an uppity Tau and punted the fucker into the local star.

  I’d also have to schedule some Selene-time, since my lovely girlfriend was probably pretty cross with me after I kinda-sorta put her in time-out. In my defence, the Veil was still thin, and I was sure I glimpsed at least a handful of Keepers of Secrets and Great Unclean Ones hiding among the daemonic hordes in the Immaterium. It was better if she were far out in orbit, taking shelter in that makeshift bunker. Any Greater Daemon that materialised on the surface would have to fly up to the bunker, giving me some time to react and Blink over.

  I’d probably have to take her to that Void Kraken hunt I’d promised her a few months back. She wouldn’t be truly angry, I think; she knew I just … worried, but she’d probably be sulking a bit in the near future until I appeased her.

  I think.

  Man, even being a telepath didn’t help with figuring out how to properly handle my girlfriend at times. But maybe that was for the best. Little surprises were the spice of life; my life would be so very boring if I could perfectly predict what everyone around me was going to do ahead of time. There is no fun in that.

  First things first, I had to deal with the itsy-bitsy Tyranid swarm I’d unleashed, clean up my trash, as it were.

  The Zoanthropes were capable of brutish forms of Psionics, simple applications of the Hive-Mind’s immense psychic strength, which they were conduits of. Psychic bsts, mental or physical, instilled dread or madness, shields, barriers, those sorts of things. Nothing eborate, nothing needing even the slightest bit of creativity or finesse. They used the simplest manifestations of Psychic powers that had practical use for them.

  In a way, these Psychic Synaptic-Nodes were pretty simir to my Avatars, all things told. Though they went with quantity, where I had to go with quality, since I could only maintain two Avatars at a time.

  And while the Hive-Mind was doubtless intelligent in its own, malicious, bestial way, I had higher cognition, sapience, sentience and a near limitless processing power to go with it.

  All that is to say, the Tyranid swarm was a bit more troublesome to reabsorb than a regur Swarm would have been, but it only made the effort a bit more tedious, not dangerous. I had to go around, pop barriers, then devour the Tyranids sheltering inside with eldritch tendrils. They clumped together, almost as if they were working rituals, pooling together their strength to conjure stronger barriers.

  It didn’t help. I could have blown through them with brute force … but I found some form of amusement in Blinking through the barriers and devouring them, leaving their painstakingly crafted shields unharmed. It had been exactly what that dumb daemonic chicken tried to do to me, and nobody could say I couldn’t learn new tricks from my enemies.

  Though this wasn’t much of a trick, it was just common sense. Go through the path of least resistance. Attack what’s weakest. Attack in a way to force your foe into the pce you want them to be. Act weak when you are strong, and strong when you’re weak. If you can’t go through a wall, go around it.

  I had dedicated a not inconsiderable portion of my mental processing power to run repeated checks over my mental condition, physical state and even that of my Realm to make sure the daemon hadn't left behind any lingering nastiness. But more than anything, I repyed the fight, from start to finish, and analysed everything. Everything the daemon did, how I reacted to it and why. I quickly came to the conclusion that the fucker had been pying me from the start, rushing the Sovereign knowing I’d intercept it. He forced me to face him, to tank his attacks or at least divert them from the ship. Even now, I couldn’t be sure whether the daemon had accomplished its goal.

  Was its end goal erasing my humanity by corrupting those memories I’d since repced? Was it killing Selene and Cat to make me pissed? Was it just a foolish attempt at devouring my soul? Maybe scouting my Realm for ter assaults? Something else entirely? To put a wedge between me and the Tau? To make me overly paranoid and alienate my lover and daughters by growing obsessively overprotective?

  My mind-cores listed all possible reasons, all possible consequences with a dispassionate professionalism. More than a few of them stung, and I made a promise to myself to make sure I knowingly counteracted my impulses in the future to prevent those from becoming a problem.

  Yes, I would be more wary about danger heading for Selene or my daughters from now on, but I wouldn’t become a control freak. I couldn’t. They weren’t pets. They were … family. A weird, strange family that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to make even slightly functional.

  But I’d have to try, and keep that in mind when thinking about any further decisions concerning them.

  I made a quick mental algorithm to poke me in the brain about it when it came up, so I wouldn’t forget it.

  I could almost feel the Hive-Mind’s apocalyptic rage pressing down on the fabric of space around me, but I ignored it as I went about my task. At worst, I’d get another Splinter Fleet thrown my way, and I was never one to look down on a free meal, especially if it was delivered free of charge.

  The pressure fizzled out like a dying candle as the st Synapse creature died, and I felt my reserves of bio-energy soar back to nearly the same level it’d been before the fight. Sure, a good fraction of it got spent on healing my Avatar and boosting its cognitive capacity, but I’d used soul energy primarily, which would be much harder to recover. I’d have to be a bit frugal to make sure I had enough in reserve for another nasty, feathered surprise.

  I tilted my gaze down towards the pnet. There were dozens of rituals, tearing holes into the fabric of reality and letting daemons pour forth. I’d need to close those first, then eradicate the ones present in the Materium, then maybe go for a Warp-dive to grab as many of the lingering hordes there for a quick meal.

  After that … I would have to deal with ‘politics’, and after that I still had a girlfriend to appease. I just hoped she would understand why I freaked out so much. I knew she would, given some time to think and rex. She was rather empathetic and understanding, most of the time, much to my luck.

  So I’d just have to help her rex and let her think. Hmm.

  I think I have some ideas.

  P3t1