Megusa stood from her seat, taking her blade off the wall and making it disappear in the familiar light of the Life Armament dimension. Turning towards them, she beckoned to follow her. "Now, the shuttle will be here soon. There's a landing pad for smaller craft on the roof of the building for quick extractions." She went to one of the walls that was covered in engraved depictions of ancient stories—something she'd requested and was granted due to its harmless ease—and traced her finger around the "eye" of a warrior that the twins couldn't identify.
That piece of the wall pressed inwards and several click noises were heard before a six foot wide section of the wall protruded outwards and slid to the side to reveal a cylindrical elevator big enough for five Valkyrians or one female and one male Valkyrian. They stepped in and the door moved back into place before they were lifted up to the roof in only a few seconds with no noticeable jerk from the sudden acceleration.
The door opened again and they stepped out onto the roof that let them overlook the majority of the reconstructed village. The sun was peerless in the sky with not a cloud in sight but the atmosphere of the planet gave it a dull, orange glow that created a similarly colored haze around them. With it casting shadows along the gothic structures, it gave the village a feeling of old comfort.
"We still have about nine minutes until the shuttle gets here. Anything you two feel like talking about?" Megusa asked most casually.
Alicia didn't really have much to talk about herself. Her duties were quite monotonous as there weren't many things that ever attacked the Queen. She'd told them to stay back as she personally scouted this planet, to save them from wasting time, probably, and it just so happened to be that she gets into a fight, meets a "God of Death", and adopts a child. There was some sort of wrongness with that.
Beth thought a bit differently to the question. While they may not have much to talk about themselves, Megusa seemed talkative and would probably appreciate having actual conversations with her species after a week of dealing with one nuisance of humans after another.
"You said you wanted to start a family earlier," she brought up, getting the ambassador's attention. "Did you ever get the chance?"
Megusa seemed to look outwards from the building as a warm smile naturally crawled up her face. Her lackadaisical form brightened considerably. Reading body control was a skill hammered into the twins' training for decades among numerous other things. "Yes, I did. I received a Major's sperm to inseminate my eggs during the early years of my transfer. It took me off active duty for a few decades to my relief. I gave birth to a beautiful Valkyrian-Minor. She took after me in looks and was an early wyrm when it came to maturing. Her first accidentally transformation from DNA I passed down to her was that of one particularly violent Echidna I nebladed in my youth during the first contact year with the various serpent natives of Sipholi. It's been her favorite gene transformation and because of that, she has been helping our interaction with that planet for several years now."
She brought out a flat electronic tablet and flitted through the mechanics of it before a high-definition(HD) hologram of her daughter popped up. She was a young beauty like her mother, similar in both skin tone and hair color preference. The hair was past her lower back and a bit wilder with it split into dozens of locks instead of the near single, flowing uniformity of her mother's. Her eyes were reptilian in that they had golden iris around vertically slitted black pupils. Her shirt was of the same visual color scheme as what her mother was wearing now, but instead of covering her body, it was more like an open coat with a strap across the top and bottom of her gifted endowment, leaving most of her breasts and toned stomach visible.
That was where the physical similarities ended as from her hips, instead of legs, she had a massive snake body that, according to the image and their own mental calculations, had to be at least twenty-five feet long. It had a white underbelly bordered by black on the sides while the rest was scales the color of desert sand with black scales making thick lines that made her body look like dried, cracked earth. The end of her tail had a massive, red rattler at least two feet long. The other defining feature of her different body was the pair of matching horns that sprouted from the side of her skulls and curved forward and up over themselves like those of a ram's.
Despite her drastic changes, she had a beautiful, toothy smile on her face as her arms were wrapped around the shoulders of two lamias who looked similar to her Echidna body but with smaller tails and no horns.
"My beautiful Medusa has made a lot of friends over there, she told me. I'm happy for her. I'm actually glad that Sipholi is so far away from being space faring. It'll keep her grounded there and not worrying about all of the messes we face in the universe."
"You don't wish for her to follow your footsteps," Beth assumed. "Though from your words, she is alot like you, like any child raised by a loving mother."
Megusa chuckled a little and turned the tablet off. "Close. She is trained like all of our children are so I know she can take care of herself on that planet or against any reasonable amount of technological enemies. Back during my soldier years, I was not a Minor, nor a Valkyrian. I was just... a soldier… fighting in one battle after the next and only sleeping when I was shipped to the next front. Having her in my life, I could never take pride in my young self, y'know? The V.I.s had more ambition and feeling than I did. All there was in my reality was myself, my weapon, the enemy, and my primals' orders. I'll gladly take up my old persona before I'd ever let my daughter become like me."
The women were silent as they contemplated such words. They weren't mothers. Heck, they never even nebladed the appropriate amount of biological lifeforms to reach their level of powers. It was all artificial and those they did neblade were usually soldiers who weren't parents and just young adults trying to find their way in life. They never knew their own mother since records state that she was killed in that Valkyrian-Ceph/Flood war. She had activated the self-destruct mechanism in her armor to deny its knowledge to the Flood encroaching upon her position.
The teleportation system that would activate upon a Valkyrian's death was still in testing phases so she didn't have such an insurance policy. Her final memories and feelings were lost amidst the fires of a fifty megaton nuclear explosion, never to be received by her daughters and leaving them nearly shells of their former selves. Sometimes, they'd wished to have just killed themselves and donated their bodies, or wished that the experiment had not succeeded in giving them massive amounts of power. What was the point of their new existences if they couldn't share it with their mother? It had taken them over a hundred years of constant training and missions for them to finally grow numb to the sad memories.
"A behavior common among those who are lost," they said in unison, piquing Megusa's curiosity and the details surrounding their statement. Having been a natural at wording sentences and settling disputes—skills honed by training and experience—she could see from their stony expressions that they harbored much… emptiness. She had thought at first glance and hearing that their attitudes were simply professionalism, but that vague, synced statement was that piece of the puzzle that allowed her to see the general image she was trying to put together.