"And?" Beth asked.

  "Well, your sisters formed a group with, uhm, your ex and several others and left for the stars…" Thomas explained a bit abashedly.

  "Well, I can't really be angry at them for doing what I also did," Beth said with a shrug.

  "I thought you might take it harder than that…" said Rachel.

  "I'm not their parents," Beth said to their parents with a grin.

  "Anyway, what's going on in the neighborhood? And on Earth in general?" Beth asked, leaning back and wiggling a slight bit, getting a very light poke.

  "Well, I told you that it's been a bit…hectic here, for lack of a better term," her father said. "We've had a couple people attack the town with less than wholesome intentions, and we've had to deal with that situation. Luckily, we've got Zack and his guards here, and your sisters were still here during the first time people tried to make some trouble."

  "How strong were these bandits?" Beth asked calmly, glancing between her parents.

  "Many of them weren't even level one hundred," Rachel said.

  "Many of them? There were so many that there were big groups?" Beth asked with a slightly quirked eyebrow.

  "Well, there were several times we had to defend ourselves," Thomas said quietly with a serious expression on his face.

  "It doesn't matter how big of a threat beasts are," Sera said. "People will still be bastards sometimes. You can't get so down about occasionally defending yourself."

  "Some of these people were our neighbors! We knew these people," Thomas replied sternly.

  "And they didn't try to work with you, or seek help from the CRA, or any one of a hundred different things they could do to try to improve their lot. They came to your town and wanted to steal and extort and kill. Send them packing, and if they're stubborn, put them six feet under," Sera said with a shrug that made Beth sway slightly in her lap.

  "But enough about all that. Tell us about your new beau, sweetheart," Thomas said firmly, giving Beth a certain stern look.

  "You should hear how they met-" Blood started before being silenced with a swift jab to the ribs.

  "Look, that's not important," Beth said, coughing to clear her throat. "Sera and I had a connection from the moment we met and she actually came to me and asked to date, and I said yes immediately. From there, well, we just really hit it off and she wanted to stay with us, so here we are."

  "And…Neph, is it?" Rachel asked, glancing at the bee girl.

  "Yes, mother," Neph replied brightly.

  "Oh, you're a sweetheart," Rachel said, leaning forward and patting Neph's knee.

  "Thanks! I make honey," Neph replied with a smile.

  "Oh, well, that's lovely," Rachel replied, a bit flummoxed.

  "She's the inheritor of a legacy of some really fancy bees," Beth said with a laugh.

  "Bees? You're a bee?" asked Thomas with some interest.

  "Yes! Just like Blood is a wolf and Sera is a dragon, I'm a bee!" Neph exclaimed happily.

  "Okay, I have to interrupt, but excuse me, did you just say Sera is a dragon?" asked Rachel with slightly wide eyes.

  "You guys all really should get into the habit of Identifying people as soon as you see them," Beth said with a sigh.

  "That didn't answer my question," Rachel shot back a bit crossly.

  "Well, the answer is yes, she is a dragon," Beth said with a laugh. "I think the pretty horns, beautiful scales, lovely claws, and gorgeous tail give it away a bit."

  "I think I just learned several things, one or two of which I might not have wanted to learn," Beth's father muttered as he jotted something down quick.

  "Yes, well, apart from the proclivities of our daughter suddenly being revealed to us, it's nice to know more about who she's interested in," Rachel said.

  "Speaking of which, it would be rather interesting to see your full form," Thomas said, glancing between all of them.

  "You know what, I'd love to see it, too," Beth said with a huge grin.

  "Even you haven't seen it?" Rachel asked with some surprise.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "Well, no, it still hasn’t come up," Beth said a bit abashedly.

  "I prefer my human form much more, anyway," Sera said. "But I'll show you my full form; it's not a problem. I just don't know if you have anywhere large enough that I can transform…"

  "Wait, just how big are you?" Blood asked.

  "She's super big," Beth said, leaning to the side and jerking her thumb behind her, pointing at a specific area between Sera's stomach and neck.

  "Beth," Rachel said with a warning tone.

  "To answer the question," Sera said, adjusting Beth's position in her lap and giving her a quick kiss on the temple. "I'd need at least fifty feet, in your units, and that's just to transform. If you want me to take off and fly, I'd need much more space."

  "We have that much and plenty more behind the town," Thomas said. "We'd just have to be careful of the ants."

  "I don't think they'd be a problem," Sera said with a grin, showing her rather long fangs.

  "Well, let's walk and talk," Beth said, hopping up and pulling Sera up after her, keeping their hands locked afterwards.

  "Sure," said Thomas. "Though, it is getting late."

  "Light isn't a problem. Trust me," Beth said with a laugh, leading the way out of the office.

  "So, what have you been up to? We've met your, uh, employer, but you've been a bit vague on the details," Thomas said.

  "Well, I mean, it's really just been a lot of fighting," Beth replied. "It isn't all that much different than anything else. Just killing beasts and leveling up."

  "And arresting governors," Blood growled.

  "Blood!" Beth snarled.

  "What's that? Arresting someone?" Thomas asked as they left the building.

  "CRA Members have a certain limited power of arrest," Beth explained with a sigh. "I wound up arresting the governor of an entire planet. It's a long story."

  "A story I'd like to hear," Rachel said, giving Beth a serious glare.

  "Fine. So, we went to this planet to help Mortaine…" Beth began to narrate as they walked to the back of town. The wall around the town was quite far back in the wood lot, and she got through most of her story by the time they were at the wall.

  "Didn't we need to go out and around?" Neph asked, looking at the wall before looking at the others.

  "Friendlies can go over the wall without interference," Thomas explained, hopping to the top of the wall. Beth still felt it was a bit strange to see her parents with superhuman abilities, but she was getting more and more used to this new world. She followed, all the others hopping to the top of the wall before hopping down into the clearing at the end of the wood lot. There were a couple people along the length of the wall to watch for ants, but they hadn't asked any questions when they saw that Thomas and Rachel were with the group.

  "Is this enough room?" Thomas asked.

  "Sure. At least, to transform," Sera said, looking at the clearing. She led them to the center of the clearing when Rachel called out to Beth.

  "Beth! Watch out!" she exclaimed.

  Beth turned and saw an ant, about her size, charging at her across the clearing. The ant was rather fast, and she saw that it was just over level one hundred when she scanned it as it approached. The ant tried to bite her when it got to her, but she grabbed its head in one hand, grabbing it right between the eyes. The ant still tried to snap its mandibles on her arm, but she twisted her arm to the left and bent her wrist, avoiding the mandibles. She then gave a massive, quick twist to the right, tearing the ant's head off its neck with a single movement. She lifted the head and flicked it away at the same time that she stepped around the still twitching corpse.

  "Back to ants," she said with a sigh. "Anyway, let's see this transformation."

  "How did you do that?" asked Rachel, looking at the large ant corpse in slight shock.

  "I have over three thousand STR," Beth replied with a shrug. "I could do the same thing to a level two hundred ant, in the same way and the same amount of time."

  "Three thousand?!" both Rachel and Thomas exclaimed in shock.

  "Yeah, I'm pretty strong," Beth said with a grin, flexing her right arm and patting her bicep.

  The other girls rolled their eyes while Beth's parents tried to recover from their shock at her power. Sera moved away from the group and then jumped into the air, a dark swirl of mana surrounding her for a second before her form massively expanded. Beth caught a scent on the wind that very much smelled of Sera, delighting her as she found the dragon girl's scent incredible.

  She was quickly distracted from the scent by the sight, however, as Sera landed on the ground in all her draconic glory. She was almost forty feet long from her nose to the start of her tail, and that tail extended quite far, at least thirty feet, though she quickly curled it up by her side. Sera was quite large in her draconic form, with a big, wedge-shaped head, thick neck, and huge body. Her limbs were thick and powerful, rippling with visible muscle under the scales, and her spine had a series of spiked ridges running down its length. Her claws were the size of a decent sword and her horns were taller than Beth standing at her full height. Even the smallest scales around Sera's nostrils, by her toes, and at the corners of her mouth were the size of Beth's palm, while her largest scales were bigger than Beth's torso. Her wings, which had been spread at first, covering the entire clearing, folded neatly along her muscular back, the effect of black scales on black scales making them hardly visible.

  "Incredible!" Beth exclaimed, leaping onto Sera's head above her eyes with a fast jump. She gave Sera a pat on the head, using quite a bit of force just so that the girl would feel it.

  "That feels nice," Sera said, her voice a deep, melodic rumble in her draconic form.

  "I didn't know that you could talk in your dragon form," Beth said, surprised.

  "Of course. What did you think would happen?" Sera asked, crossing her eyes at the top corners of her eye sockets to try to see Beth.

  "I just thought you would communicate mentally or something like that," Beth said.

  "Too much TV," said Sera with some amusement in her booming voice.

  "This is incredible," Thomas said on the ground, taking several notes and doing a quick pen sketch of Sera's dragon form. "That transformation was particularly interesting. What happened with the mana there?"

  "I'm aspected to void mana," Sera explained. "My connection is strong enough with the mana that it is expressed when I shift forms."

  Beth was sitting on Sera's head, stroking her scales. "When do you think you'll get to the rune stage?"

  "Not for a while. Best not to get into that too much now," Sera replied. Seeing that Thomas was done with his notes, she suddenly went through the transformation again, causing Beth to let out a small yelp. The two of them dropped to the ground, Sera landing on her feet and catching Beth in her arms before walking over to the others while carrying the shorter girl.

  "That was rather…overwhelming," Rachel said, still appearing a bit shell-shocked at Sera's dragon transformation.

  "Let's head back inside," Beth said, the suggestion being undercut just a little by the fact she was still in Sera's arms and snuggling up against the taller girl.

  They returned to the wall, all of them easily able to leap over the barrier and enter the wood lot. Rachel walked in front and led them through the wood lot and to their house instead of the town hall. Beth noted that many of the houses had either new fences around them or even stone walls around their lots, including her family's house. When they leapt that wall from the back, she saw the rear patio had been redone to the same kind of pavers the streets had been paved with and the chairs and tables had been updated.

  They sat at one of the tables, all of them able to fit, especially since Beth didn't leave Sera's lap. She said, "I've got stuff for you guys, by the way."

  "What kind of stuff?" her father asked with some interest.

  "Weapons, for one," Beth said, dumping the weapons in a massive pile on the table.

  "Beth!" her mother exclaimed in frustration, quickly starting to sort through everything.

  "Careful. They're sharp," Beth said, laughing at her mother's put-upon expression.

  "Beth, what is all this?" her mother asked, gaping at the kinds of things she was organizing.

  "I figured you guys might need some weapons," Beth replied with a laugh. "So, I picked just a few up for you."

  "Beth, this is…a lot," Thomas said. "I don't know if we can accept this much."

  "Come on, it's nothing," Beth said, waving her hand. "It's not even a rounding error in terms of how much they're worth compared to what I have."

  "Still," Thomas insisted.

  "This is nothing," Beth said with a big laugh. "Check this out."

  She made a pile of items appear from her necklace. Most of it was pretty cheap stuff, for her at least, but there were a ton of nice potions, several small boxes of pills, a little crate of weak elixirs, and a couple crates of armor. The armor was fairly generic chain shirts and coifs, but it had been cheap and would likely be way better than what most people in the town were using.

  "Beth! My God!" Rachel said, sorting through the new waves of goods piled on the table.

  "Just a bunch of old stuff and some cheap stuff I grabbed," Beth shrugged. "But don't think it's crap; this is all good shit. The armor's probably better than anything you guys've got, unless somebody got something really good as a dungeon reward."

  "The only ones from the neighborhood who have really good stuff are Sabs and your sisters," Rachel said with a slight frown. "We've been getting by, but everybody's weapons and armor are very basic. We also don't have very many consumables, so all of this is pretty amazing."

  "It's nothing, really," Beth said. "You guys said you'd like some stuff on the way back, so I did a bit of shopping when we were out getting some stuff for Neph."

  "The town can't repay you for this, just so you know," Thomas said calmly.

  "It's a gift, Dad, not a sale," Beth said with a small shake of her head.

  "Then, as the de facto leaders of the town, we'll thank you on behalf of everyone," Thomas said with smile and a nod to all four of them.