Definitely the celebration of the millennium.

The Imperial Wedding sort of went off with a hitch, thanks to the thousands of security officers who intercepted and prevented hundreds of attempted assassinations, bombing attempts, demon Summonings, virus releases, terrorist attacks, at least one sabotaged ship that was supposed to fall on the venue and explode, and lots of similar things.

Archvelictor Kroazantiul Malachor, the cleverest and most wheel-spinning of the surviving drow lords, master of Gloomheart for thousands of years, manipulator and spider at the center of a web of galaxy-wide intrigue, was unceremoniously ushered off to the afterlife by a thoughtful Shadowknife who’d had enough of him. He never saw the little fellow coming, and perhaps would have been disgruntled to realize that one of his old, old genetic experiments on hapless humans to breed more slaves had just taken him out.

The wedding still had to deal with another fifty or so of his little disruptions, but there were other Void Brothers there taking care of business, coincidentally.

---

The Ruk Hierophant had completed his quest to bring back the Ruk gods, and popped to Twenty-One, making him the first post-Twenty Caster in the galaxy, remarkably soon after the Emperor was cut off. The Ruk had never been much on arcane magic, but the power of their Churches and Priests had always been the greatest in the galaxy. They were on the way to building that up again.

As said highest-Level Priest, officiating at the ceremony was not an issue for anyone.

Being the inclusive sots we were, anyone who wanted to get married along with the Emperor and his Contessa was invited to do so. Literally thousands of people showed up, with entourages, and crowds of watchers, and we had to build multiple stadiums and drop in extra Bloks just to house them all, effectively making a new metropolis on the spot just for lots of marriages.

The Ruk Hierophant went along with it quite calmly, even if he was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of energy and celebration going on. He had quite an entourage of new human Priests along to assist, and his quiet, gruff lectures on the Divine, their relationship with mortal servants, and a Cleric’s role in the scheme of things, were greatly anticipated.

---

Of course, all the entertainers in the galaxy were ready to shoot one another for the chance to be there and perform, and so there were singers and dangers. The Honest and Dishonest Bureaucrat actors actually hit it off pretty well in person, one-upping one another on stage in a whirlwind of cutting insults, lies, compliments, jokes, and one-liners bouncing off incredibly thick skins. Their show got a LOT of repeats, just to watch them take insults and turn them back on the speaker.

There were even some Legionnaires in discreet attendance, finding themselves blending in, to their astonishment, mostly because of the number of Briggs Boys running around, some bigger than they were.

If there were friendly wrestling matches and brawling contests and drunken songs going off all over the place as the two sets of Big Guys met, well, that only called for more drinking and discussions about power armor and new weapon systems.

---

Briggs and I watched it all from a pleasant hideaway on Hulkamania, where we were idling away doing nothing for the first in a longass time.

Tiberius Briggs and his girl Catherine, both Natural Rulers, won the voting pool, the wrestling matches, and the random dice rolls to take the throne. As it was the first live broadcast of the new Emperor and his Empress, they got to be the faces on the throne. The kids worked out a twenty-to-thirty year rule: twenty minimum, thirty tops. If you wanted to sit on the throne, you had to put up with the shit for two decades, but other sots who thought they could do better wanted their shot, so thirty years max.

It would keep new blood coming in, new ideas, and the urges to shoot all the supercilious curs bugging them mollified.

“He’s still crowing about how I have to call him Your Imperial Majesty now,” Briggs huffed.

“I heard. I told him he has to call you Your Overlording Awesomeness in return. He benignly declared there would a suspension of the protocol for his dear parents,” I replied, taking my snugglies where I could find them. Happily, I was getting a lot of them recently.

Briggs was watching some low-g acrobatic displays between Elvar, Hyn, and Ruk teams, shaking his head. The Ruk teams gamboling around looked fairly hilarious to humans, had been so informed, and were catering to it. The unMarked there would have been a little surprised to learn that the Ruk Entertainers were also the Special Operators of the Ruk, and their Circus the equivalent of a mobile covert ops headquarters.

“You ready to talk about the future?” he grumbled. We both had thoughtstreams working on so many things all the time, so it wasn’t like this was a real vacation, because at our Level, we never stopped the scheming and thinking.

That said, we could totally separate those thoughtstreams off into their own little world of hee-hee-hee calculations, and let the rest just veg out, pretending our brains weren’t working 24/7.

“Sure. What’s your thoughts?” I could advise him, but as the Source, he should be the one to make the decision. He started the river, after all.

“We’ve technically got a long-ass time we’re going to be around. Like, potentially forever. I don’t want to get stuck anywhere sitting on a Throne and making people dance. The kids are the same way. They don’t mind being checks on excesses, but they want to raise more humans to Advanced Fifteens, get them in charge, and spread out the Forsaken, as far as managing things, right?”

“Pretty much,” I agreed. “But really, they all just want to Level and make Twenty-One, now that we’ve opened the way.”

Briggs and I had been far from the only ones to pop Twenty-One. Anatolia had, in the end, managed it as a Warlord. Several of the kids had followed with Levels in Melee. Only Briggs and I had done it with Rantha Racials, as the reqs were just crazy, something to be worked on over large amounts of time... unless you could routinely save galaxies, or went world-slaughtering in Demonium, or something.

It did mean that right now the galaxy had a lot of Twenties, and more post-Twenties than probably in the past hundred thousand years.

Twenties were by definition VERY powerful people, who could and would get shit done in some direction or another. It was fortunate that we had the Markspace around to chat on demand, establishing some cooperation instead of misunderstandings.

If the gods could talk to one another, why couldn’t we?

Coming to a consensus on ‘letting the kids play’ didn’t take much. There would always be conflict, the universe basically required it, and trying to tame it, like the Emperor wanted to, was only going to blow up badly when it finally went pear-shaped. Manage it, accept it, survive it, use it to make the races great.

The universe and the Conflict of Alignments had no mercy, only survival. Mercy was a luxury of the strong... so be strong!

“So, dimension-hopping, now that Creation is open?” he inquired, probing.

I had to shake my head. “I won’t mind wandering around and exploring, but we’re Forsaken. The Prime is our home, and precisely THIS universe. Our place is here, you know it. Plus, we’re in high tech. It’s about exploring our universe, not those of other people.”

“Oh, good. The idea of gallivanting around magical realms as a tourist was okay, but fighting all the shit just turned me off... probably for just that reason.”

“Plenty more Anti-Life left alive. We don’t know how many of the galaxies out there have had to put up with them.” We only knew the ones close by had been wiped clean by them...

“The Banners are working with the Gardeners to set up more Worldminds out in the Magellanics. They won’t have all the xenosym fuel to kickstart them, but with magic around, we should get some elemental diversity in them. Still, even with all the races combining terraforming knowledge, there’s going to be room to grow for millennia... and to do it right as they do.”

We bumped knuckles. Getting rid of the over-industrialized mindset of the Empire was one of the things we wanted to accomplish. There would still be world-cities in the future, but industry we wanted to move into space, leaving the worlds more pristine below.

“So, set out for Andromeda?” None of the Explorers had ventured that way yet, but they were raring to go to do it. There were still a lot of the local clusters to explore... and that included the Canids, where we’d sent the Goblins.

“It has to have an Anti-Life presence.”

“We’ll have to build a new ship. A total Explorer-class, best Printing tech, able to make what we need, without needing resupply from home here.”

The Celestial Tribute was the flagship of the Corunsuns. As Briggs was stepping down, it would pass to the next Duke, naturally.

Ronnie had hit Twenty-One with Melee, mostly on the Craftsman of weapons of war aspect. As Expert didn’t run to Post-Twenty, she was crying at the loss of skill points, and now grabbing up all the Deep Levels that she had the copious amount of time to do now. She even got herself Titled a Baroness so she could take Noble Levels for the extra 4 Skill points per Level...

The Fantastic Kids were going all over the galaxy. There was a lot of work to do, they were the best technos around, and there were always more zany secrets of esoteric branches of tech to ooooh and aaaah over. They just had to go find them!

A new galaxy sounded like a GREAT place to do that...

Building a self-sufficient ship to carry a crew to a new galaxy to tool around in sounded like a great bit of brainwork to indulge in. If it meant they were kicking out a bunch of high-Level people to go bug someone else, that was fine... there were a lot of kids zipping up from behind to take over, and getting their elders out of the way was just a natural progression!

Different layers of people, different problems to deal with.

“One minor problem to deal with before we get started on what it means to be Eternal.”

“What are you... oh!” He smirked as I got up, and Chalice flipped over to my hand.

“Hah! I have found you! You will not escape our duel this time!”

She came whirling out of the trees, bouncing between them and down, off a wall, over some stones, and flowed into position opposite me, long knives up and humming.

I scratched an ear. “You know the only reason you found this place is because I let you, right?”

Madame Lolith’s mouth opened and closed at my complete lack of surprise. She glared at me instead. “You are SO annoying,” she finally managed to get out. Her crimson eyes glanced at Briggs, who was standing there holding up the mountain... and Beat was whirring as he spun the Hammer weightlessly between large fingers.

Briggs was a big lad. One thing he was not was slow...

“But sure, I’ll give you a duel. You want to rest up first? I made sure the route here would be all kinds of fun. Sorry about your escorts, but we really didn’t need them around.”

She closed her eyes, sighed, and said, “Fine, I will bathe first.” And she peeled off her clothes and headed for the pool. “When I am done, we shall fight!”

“Fine by me!” I smirked, knowing what the result of the duel would be...

She had killed the Demon Prince of the Warp World of Glothsmire, engaging in rather unholy amounts of carnage and butchery of his subservient demons and Possessed just to reach him. For some reason, it just hadn’t given her the enlightenment she needed.

Beating on someone who could kill the Emperor, now, that should do it. She definitely had the Karma.

I watched her dive into the pool.

The girls who had picked off her bladewitch escorts now had some sexy drow faces they could use for infiltration and, ah, entertainment purposes.

If she could have found her way to Eternal alone, I would have let her be.

Instead, she had come to find me, ready to die to become Eternal. That was going to happen, just not the way she wanted it to.

I reflected that I was going to get a famous new face to wear pretty soon, too. She probably had no wish at all to head off to Demonium for an afterlife as a true Demon Prince’s entertainment, so she’d probably stick around inside and see what all this being a Hag thing was about... and maaaaybe she might want to be reborn as a Rantha.

I was going to have to tell that daughter she couldn’t Incarnation-dive until she was a Twenty, then...

=========

Our first Legendary Item Construction Project took us about a year once we got started on it, after we figured out how to put it together. We still had to scale it up, as the need for it was great, but that was fine.

The first crystalline disc of solidified concept glittered before us, and there was a murmur from all the watching kids as we held the first working Lens of our universe up to the light, and knew the future was indeed going to be a much better place...

======================

FINIS...

Author’s Notes:

In the Power of Ten metaverse, Sensei Sama’s escapades will largely be restricted to the universe she is in, and not have much greater effect on other realms. Given a Universe is Not Small, this isn’t an issue, no matter how many zeroes of years you are talking about.

However, she has firmly established the power of the Rantha Hag Curse, which will be radiating through Creation, anchored by the existence of her and all her Curselines. This will allow the Curse to reach out into other worlds, and affect other souls who have died at the hands of Evil...

The introduction of the Lens will set up the key parts of an incorruptible, non-duplicable core of lawmen and military agents to defend the new Civilization that is being born. Tellingly, a Lens is not restricted to humanity... and can enable a base Primos to advance as a Psion (although not a Forsaken). The key thing is qualifying for it, of course... but there’s a whole galaxy to draw recruits from. The vast majority of these early candidates will come from the Umbrans and Coronals, of course.

Sage Sama will naturally be returning to her own universe, after getting rid of the ‘gifts’ she has been bestowed by ‘generous’ powers. She is effectively the Exemplar Rantha Hag, as the first and most successful of the replicas. She also sets the metastory for all the Hags, and so is the ‘goddess’ of the Ranthas, in her own way.

Deus Machina’s existence will start going to other realms and worlds with his Clerics and Priests who can worldwalk and proselytize. As a deity uniquely capable of working in high-tech environments, his influence will start spreading in areas that many other deities can’t go, helping achieve his goal of true Immortality.

With the end of the Warp Gods’ influence on the galaxy and magic, the grimdark nature of the Milky Way is shifted towards grimbright. There is still war and dark things, but the balance is in the other direction, and there are now powerful forces on the side of Good backing things, shifting the balance of power away from Law and Evil.

The Emperor may be a god, but one who has so disappointed his own worshippers that he has no foundation at all, and indeed is probably little better than the Eternal he was when alive, if that. He could go looking for power... but he’s now a small fish in a very big, non-finite pond, with no friends, only those as ruthless as he who might be willing to use him.

But He will indeed loathe Ranthas and Briggs’...

The existence of Markspace allowing unprecedented speed of communication and inclusion/understanding among the various races allows for a more cosmopolitan future than Warhammer allows. Grimbright ftw! Its existence will shape the galaxy. Succubi are so OP.

There are surviving undead from among the Emperor’s minions on Gloom, mostly lead by undead survivors of his Imperial Centurions, his House Guard. There’s a lot of kids gunning for them, however, and they are going to need to flee all the eyes looking for them.

=== R E Druin