Stepping out of the Portal from Remnant, I began to make my way over to the kitchen.

I had finally gotten around to finishing the preparation for our attack on the Lands of Darkness this weekend, and I was a little hungry.

Drawing some energy from the conduits in the ceiling, I began preparing a simple animation spell that would have a nack ready is a few moments.

As I turned the corner, I heard The sound of running water. Peering into the kitchen, I saw Angela washing up a plate, Her hair done up in a loose bun with one of my hairpins.

~~ CENSORED ~~

Leaving her slumped over the sink, I took a moment to pull the pizza out of the pizza oven and grab my mezzaluna off the wall. "Want some?"

"I… I just ate. And I think I need some rest."

I nodded, nodded and carried her over to the chairs, Eating a slice of the small pie.

"So, how are things going?" I asked.

"Pretty much the same as it has been for the past couple of weeks. More meeting for the biotic pills. They're in production right now, so that I have stock ready for when I hit the market."

I nod, "Any trouble with the other companies?"

"Not really, it helps a lot that I'm manufacturing everything myself, basically. Simple sugar pills have enough of a crystalline structure to stabilize the biotic energy for about two years. It's not perfect, I've had to tweak the enchantment and simplify it a lot, so it's basically useless for anything other than directly consuming the pills."

"Oh, no topical application?"

"The sugar actually works well enough for that. It doesn't do any real damage as it dissolves into the wound, actually gives the body a little more energy locally, so the powered pills work well enough for that."

I raise an eyebrow in surprise, "Really?"

"Yeah, I was quite surprised. The crystalline structure of the stabilised biotic energy is dependent on the integrity of the sugar crystals, so I'm actually surprisingly adaptable if you are willing to work around some of those limitations with some mundane work."

"You have those gel capsules full of glowing crystals do you?"

She facepalmed, "Yes."

I broke out laughing/

"Yeah, laugh it up, I was trying not to have randomly glowing pills, but I can't pull it off. So I'm just embracing it and increasing the sugar crystal size in the pills. It actually helps a bit with shelf-stability."

"Nice, what's the drop off on that?"

"Calculations say that It maintains about ninety-five percent efficacy for those first two years, and then you start seeing a serious speed up in degradations. It's about seventy-ish percent efficient at the end of three years and it's barely 20% after four. That said, the glow of the pills is relative to how much healing potential they have left, so it's fairly easy to tell how potent they are."

"Oh? I guess that does help."

"Yeah, we had to make use of some precedents surrounding integrated freshness testing to avoid having to delay the release by three years to confirm how long the pills maintained functionality. Since we confirmed that the efficacy is dependent on the glow, we can use that as an integrated testing measure and avoid having to do long term testing."

I nod, "Not messing with time dilation?"

"Oh, of course, I've put this in time dilators to check, but a lot of people put some sot of strange stock into doing things 'naturally' as though anti-grav time-dilation is somehow less real than letting something sit around for a few years."

I shook my head, "Yeah, I know what you mean."

"I mean, seriously, we've tested it for decades at this point. We've even aged wine but you still get people bitching about how it's 'artificial' and how anti-gravity fields will corrupt the results… somehow. Despite the fact that such fears have been disproven again and again."

I roll my eyes, "Do you know how much I've had to deal with the bullshit of people not trusting my fusion technology? There have been over three dozen separate labs confirming that they can replicate the base effect, and all of them agree that there's no chance of a melt-down, but I'm still getting that nuclear fearmongering nonsense!"

We commiserated in silence for a while.

Sending my plate off to clean itself, I picked angela up in a princess carry, and began to make my way to her room.

"You know… I'm thinking of making these," she waggled her wings, "permanent. Starfire's tissues mean I could even make them functional."

I chuckled and smiled at her, "So you want to truly become an angel?"

"Well, sort of? I'm thinking of incorporating some biotic reactors too. Tameranean biology is so fascinating, and being able to produce that much energy with a biological system…"

"I know what you mean. It's not like Mutants, who cheat and just grab their energy from elsewhere. Starfire legitimately produces that energy, somehow."

"Oh, it's quite fascinating. While she might seem solar-powered, she's actually using that energy to catalyse nuclear reactions in the body, producing energy far in excess of what the chemicals in the food are capable of normally providing. It's quite fascinating."

"Indeed, I might need to take another look at it. I was quite disheartened when learned that Kryptonian tissues are basically magical. And hat the magic doesn't really carry over to many other worlds."

"Ah yes, I ran into that too, they're the ones that were descended from their gods, sort of. Right?"

"Yeah, apparently that was enough to make them all a little bit magic. Enough to forge a sympathetic link to the star that they are orbiting and draw energy from them directly."

"Was that how it worked?"

"It's a little more complicated than that, but more or less."

She stared at me, "So… could we use something similar to power our own bodies?"

"Maybe. Their's work because they are all technically descended from a sun-god. But we could theoretically forge a sympathetic link to power plants of our own design, assuming that we do some work on both ends, but it's probably going to take longer than the first iteration. Might require that we do a full body-swap. So yeah, not the next iteration, but definitely something to keep in mind down the line."

"I guess that makes sense."

The door to Angela's room slid open in front of us, and I carried her to the bed. As I begin to unbuckle the harness holding her wings to her body, she stops me.

"Could you… stay for a while?"

I nodded, before beginning to run my hand through her hair.

She slowly nodded off, curling into my side as she fell asleep. The glow of her wings slowly fading out into the darkness of the room.

Carefully extricating myself from her grip, I headed back to my room to sleep.

Before leaving the room, I pause for a minute, looking at her wings, before deciding against it.

As I cooked breakfast the next morning, I heard Angela walk up to me. Walking up next to me, she pulled herself up to give me a kiss on the cheek, "Thank you for yesterday, that helped a lot."

"Glad I could help. If I may ask, what was bothering you?"

She grimaced, "It's this whole certification process. It reminds me too much of all those people who promised me that I would see biotic technology in civilian applications before this, but just kinda flaked."

"Ah, say no more."

She nods, taking a plate to the table as I slide a serving of scrambled eggs onto it.