A week after his meeting with Andrew, Gregor Duncan retired. Tongues would wag at its suddenness, some blaming the fall of Harlow, some blaming the Hundred-Night Academy’s callousness, some blaming the quiet manipulations of Housecarl Industries and the Luce family.

However, the truth that lay behind all the rumors was that the old man was simply exhausted. He’d never intended to become dean of a school, and had only done so because he was the only surviving Blackvale staff member with the seniority and the willingness.

Thus when he’d finally made arrangements that would secure the future of the thirty thousand young lives in his care he’d followed the example of a certain roman dictator, and immediately stepped down from his position of authority once his duty was done.

He wasn’t simply gone through. Old Gregor was still present within Nurari III. According to the rumors, he’d used his savings to buy a small townhouse in Baku and was one of the founding members of a small group that had been started up recently and called themselves the Blackvale Society.

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Nurari III had four moons. Two those moons were tiny broken things and barely counted as proper satellites, for all that they were firmly trapped within the planet’s orbit.

The third moon was large for a moon but still too small to serve as a proper dwarf planet. The moon was considered by many to be the Nurari III’s younger sister, possessing its own atmosphere, a small sea, scattering of sparse vegetation, and an overabundance of snakes. That moon was known as Uwabami.

Finally, there was the fourth moon, Osakabe-hime. Average in size, but possessing a plain kind of beauty. Most night’s it hung in Nurari III three’s sky as an ominous blue-silver disk. In the past, this moon was both respected and feared as the moon of fortune and calamity.

In the present, scientists were aware that there was something strange about Osakabe-hime, but dire warnings from their superiors and the immortal ancestors that sat above their superiors kept them from prying too deeply.

At a certain time, on a certain night, a fifth moon joined the other fours. Using grand technology and high magics to hide all signs of its presence and negate the effect of its mass on the planet, it simply appeared one day, sliding into a spot within Osakabe-hime’s shadow.

A day would come when Nurari and the rest of the Three-Crow system would look up and realize that it was there, however, that day was not today. For now, the hidden moon would simply hang within the sky. Serving as yet another unseen voyeur of the goings-on of the world below.

This moon’s name was Dougal.

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Andrew sat in an office, that lay within the topmost floors of a tower. He peered through the wide, crystal clear, window of his office. Looking down up a sea of silvery green grass.

“It’s beautiful, hoheit…” said Sophia. Her words derailing whatever train of thought the young eidolon’s mind had been playing host to.

Andrew turned around, spinning in his swivel chair. He realized he hadn’t heard Sophia walk in the room. Which was a sign that his mind had really been somewhere lightyears away.

“It is, isn’t it…” said Andrew. Smiling. His dour expression instantly brightening up.

“When did you get back?” said Andrew.

“Just now…” said Sophia.

“So, darling dearest ...how was your big tour of the Neutral-Quadrant?” said Andrew.

Sophia snorted, wrinkling her nose, as she heard the sweet names coming from Andrew’s normally sour mouth.

“Don’t make it sound like I’m some singer...It was a long slog of meetings and negotiations, not a series of concerts...Well, you might a bit right in that there was a lot of performance and posturing involved, but it was largely the old goats they sent my way to try and bully our clan into accepting shitty terms that were doing the performing.”

Andrew chuckled.

“Have I thanked you for always volunteering to deal with that kind of bullshit yet...If not thank you ten times over...That shit sounds terrible.” said Andrew.

He tugged Sophia’s hand and she allowed herself to be pulled into his lap. The two kissed. Then Sophia pulled away a little, adjusting her position in Andrew’s lap to a more comfortable one.

“It wasn’t that bad, hoheit...I actually made a lot of good contacts out there. I learned a couple of names and faces that could end up proving useful in the future.” said Sophia.

“Nh...Well, that’s good. In the meanwhile, besides working on all this…” said Andrew. Nodding towards the window, indicating wide sweeping plain that lay beyond their window, the trees that beyond, and the very tower they were sitting.

“I started production on both the consumer line, military line, and Luce clan line of Selkie-mechs. We’ve got a standing inventory of engines and specialized space-folding drives waiting for sale ...and a few other things that we talked about. I figured we can look it all over together later.”

“Excellent job, my love...I think I might end up gifting a few military models to a few nobles I’ve befriended. What do you think?”

Andrew considered the question and then shrugged.

“If you think it’s fine...It’s probably fine. At the very least it ‘sounds’ like something that’s practiced by groups like ours...so it shouldn’t cause too much trouble.”

“I thought as much...but just in case, I think we might want to add a few anti-tampering seals on the mechs on the off chance they find themselves in the wrong hands down the line. Just to give our eventual competitors something to think about.” said Sophia. Her eyes twinkling with mischief and just a hint of predacious bloodlust.

Andrew just nodded and added it to his to-do list. His mind straying back towards where it had been before Sophia’s arrival.

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Inventors of powerful inventions were sometimes afraid of their creations. The developers of the first Terran nuclear devices were haunted by the potential implications for mankind. The goblinoid forefathers of modern gene-serum believed that he’d doomed his people to extinction. And all AIs were built with a love for their fleshy creators out of fear obsoletion.

The point being there was always a bit of anxiety when you let something big out into the world.

The young couple’s scheme was simple in execution, but complicated in theory, which made Andrew keep feeling like they were constantly over-, and under-, thinking things. The two eidolons sat in the role of sufficiently advanced aliens gifting primitives with firearms.

Old mechs were the equivalent of bows, arrows, and spears. Now the public would be enlightened and uplifted as they gained access to flintlocks or simple selkie-machines. The military would be given percussion-cap guns, medium-tier selkie-mech, that they’d treasure as legendary weapons.

In time the industry standard would fall somewhere between those two boundaries. With the Oddvar-luce clan and Housecarl industries standing just a hair above with carefully leaked suggestions of the possibility of “figurative” laser weapons and coil guns. Transcendental Selkie-machines that would make them the kings of the industry that they were creating.

Besides the predicted attempts to reverse engineer the mechs that had been sold and released, the documentation Housecarl industries had released would allow scientists all over the galaxy to try and understand the principles behind the selkie-system.

The trick of it was, that those principles were based on things far outside the league of current society. Thus all those notes that the Luce clan had released would remain akin to trying to describe astrophysics to a being that had barely discovered fire, for decades to come.

As Andrew considered the ramifications of what he and his wife had done he felt himself shudder. The two eidolons had described in numbers and mathematical formulas things that one would generally have to gain immortality and enlightenment as a greater-being to even begin to understand.

Andrew was pretty sure that the knowledge wasn’t too dangerous in and of itself. It’d take thousands if not tens of thousands of years for the mortals to decipher it all. At which point they’d cease to be mere mortals, they’d be an enlightened people, having reached a point of their evolution that few civilizations every reached.

An outcome that would render Andrew’s concern moot, and turn his and Sophia’s scheme into a good deed. The only concern was what might happen while all those factions and peoples fumbled in the dark with the knowledge they’d been given. If the worst happened, someone could open the gates to pandora’s box and bath the entire universe in endless chaos and death.

Andrew considered both possibilities and then mentally shrugged. The old parts of Andrew’s psyche made him feel like the future was too uncertain for him to try and prepare for every possible outcome. The young parts of Andrew’s psyche made feel like the future was too far away from him to care.

He eventually decided that at the very least he wasn’t trying to manipulate society and make himself into some sort of god-king. He was just trying to make a quick buck and secure his family’s future status. If the galaxy elected to destroy itself with the knowledge they’d been given, so be it…Maybe that would just mean that those people were all just that stupid to begin with.

After all, the small morsels of information he and Sophia had released weren’t the only such nuggets of cosmic truth that were out there. The very existence of the Blackrose galaxy’s formalized magic systems and ranking systems were proof of that.

In the meantime, Andrew decided to place a priority in creating safe havens for himself and Sophia in the other universes he’d end up being visiting as he matured.

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“Speaking of trouble...I heard that Dean Duncan ended up calling in that favor after all.” said Sophia. Interrupting Andrew’s buzzing thoughts yet again.

“Huh? Oh, yeah...Yeah.” said Andrew.

“How’d it go?” said Sophia.

“Things went well enough, I guess...It’s a good thing I’d finished setting this place up before he’d called. I showed him around and he had the Blackvale students and staff move in within a week.” said Andrew.

The building Sophia and Andrew were sitting inside and the ground it was built upon were constructs. Fabrications created with data, law, and energy.

Rather than simply buying and modifying a home like they’d done on Harlow, during the months that had passed since their arrival in Nurari III Andrew had been hard at work constructing a base and domicile for his wife and himself.

He ended up overdoing it a little and the end result was Dougal, a one thousand seventy-nine, mile-long stellar-vessel. In its dormant phase, the ship served as a massive space-station, mimicking a terraformed moon. In its active phase, the ship became a massive leviathan, a king amongst all the other red-eyed whales. Armed to the teeth and capable of going to war with several pantheons of gods and devils, or all four of the great fae courts.

The exact internal space within the ship varied, but its spatial manipulation abilities were such that it wouldn’t be impossible to comfortably an entire solar system’s worth of souls within the Dougal’s hull.

Thus when Gregor Duncan came to Andrew seeking shelter for the students of Blackvale, housing them within the uninhabited portions of the base. That night, Andrew brought the former-Dean to the base and let the man watch as Dougal printed an entire academy city before his very eyes and in that moment the remnants of Blackvale were entrusted to Oddvar-Luce clan and Housecarl Industries.

As to why, Andrew and Sophia wanted the school's students and staff. Andrew had a feeling that even with all his and Sophia’s powers, the journey they were planning to take wasn’t one that they wanted to take alone.

The young couple were doing good by themselves, but now that they’d made up their mind to be great, that meant finding allies and followers.

Even with their duplication abilities, there was a limit to what the two could do on their own, and if something truly incapacitated either of them it would be devastating. Andrew could only imagine the problems that would have been created if it was Sophia who sporadically got pulled into different dimensions instead of him.

Thus they needed more people. People who weren’t just splintered off parts of themselves. As Andrew and Sophia’s thoughts turned in this direction the move to recruit made more and more sense, considering they could have just stayed in Abwickeln if they’d wanted to live in isolated.

To Andrew’s mind, there was no better place to start then the population of disenfranchised refugee-students who already knew him and Sophia as familiar and reliable faces.

Or at least that was the plan.

Andrew’s expectations weren’t all that lofty. Nor was his intentions completely machiavellian. To some extent, he really did just mean to house his former-classmates. If they chose to leave so be it. He wouldn’t force anyone to join either the company or the clan. Nor would he require any oaths beyond ones of standard decorum non-aggression. So long as his guests acted as guests should behave they were free to avail themselves of the property.

Besides, this goodwill wasn’t really costing Andrew anything. Sophia had somehow managed to get the imperial government to divert most of the funds that Hundred-Night would have received for looking after Blackvale’s student and staff to Housecarl Industries and the newly founded Blackvale Society.

With that being said, if Andrew could manage to draw a few souls to his corner and make a few bosom friends for his family he wouldn’t say no. Though many of that student’s within the newly built academy city currently penniless and weak, that wouldn’t always be the case.

Those who hadn’t been orphaned all had families out there who would eventually recover and remember their lost youths. Those who had been orphaned would use the succor they’d been given to grow strong, and use their experiences in Hundred-Night Academy as a reminder of what it meant to be weak and alone in the world.

Andrew figured most of these people would end up just leaving, but he expected that they’d remember the favor they’d been given.

Sophia, whether due to optimism or some plan she already had in place, expected that they’d be able to keep at least a third of the student and staff and induct them into either the clan’s ranks or the company. In fact, she’d already taken the private military certificate Andrew had collected a while back and vested it in Housecarl Industries' name, all in preparation for the day their forces sailed through all corners of the night sky.