Aww.

Shae shoots Ese a warm smile.

And then Shae cums, closing her lips around Velitanar's tentacle dick to muffle her cry of orgasmic bliss.

"She's right, you know."

Velitanar's tentacles flex, repositioning themselves to fuck Shae with even more force and speed.

"None of us want to lose you."

Shae can only moan, but she smiles at vem around veir tentacle and squeezes veir digits before another orgasm takes her and her eyes roll up into her head.

Late that night, Shae hitches the jars of umbra onto a backpack and sneaks out under a dark cloak that hides both her body and her face.

She is patient, moving slowly through shadowed alleyways and across low rooftops. Her destination is an artificial mesa adjacent to the dropoff at the south edge of the city.

The mesa is a gated octagon, with glasswork fencing surrounding a paved yard.

Within, rows of metal pipes sit on racks, while an awning covers crates of canisters wrapped in brightly colored paper. A single guard sits in a watchpost facing into the city, along the only line of approach over flat ground.

In three days, there will be a display of sparkworks to mark the new year. It is a relatively new tradition, begun during Shae's own lifetime with the discovery of some secret method of rendering red aetherlight crystal into a volatile form that can be easily set off or dampened with ordinary sparksliding.

The guard appears to be reading a magazine.

Shae doesn't risk crossing the guard's line of sight. She goes around and scales the cliff. It isn't easy, with the extra weight she's carrying on her back. She misses her Exemplar Harness, but she's a skilled enough exemplar to avoid falling to her death.

The rock is sheer and mossy, with little in the way of natural handholds, but it breaks nicely, holding together without fracturing. If anyone looks closely the handprints will be very obvious, though.

Shae will have to risk it. She flashes her hands and carves handholds into the stone as she climbs.

She reaches the glass fence and climbs over, dropping to the pavement inside. The crates provide cover once she reaches them.

The guard doesn't turn around. She seems to be actually reading that magazine of hers.

The sparkworks come in various shapes and sizes, but they all share the basic design of nose-cone, ballast, payload, nozzle. The ballast is just ordinary clay, and can easily be replaced.

One by one, Shae opens each sparkwork, replaces the clay with umbra, then closes it up and puts it back in its place.

She doesn't rush. She moves in methodical silence.

It takes all night, but she finishes without incident. Shae leaves the way she came, climbing along the cliff face.

She makes it back to Vena'ese's just before the first light of the swell.

The three days until the end of the year pass without incident.

Shae settles in, catching up with the others in passing while she spends most of those three days experimenting with the fragments of the sacrificed Origin Core.

After three days of intense study, Shae discovers how to use the seven crystal eggs in conjunction to access the erovore genesis functions in limited form. It requires linking with all seven individually and then sending slow literal instructions of all of them in parallel, but she can do it.

While rebuilding the link capability, she also discovers a quirk in the logical architecture that she might be able to exploit to create a feedback loop that might possibly be able to trigger a sort of forced pseudo-synchronization, unsettling settled empulse and cycling it to purge gleam from someone's body. Only the possibility is there, but it is at least proof of concept.

Even with a normal resonant link reestablished, the fragments only react to direct literal instructions. Most of the original interface seems to be truly lost.

During those same three days, Ese and Recco organize and advertise a special event: to enjoy the sparkworks display from the roof of the theater while Ese's staff provides warm bodies and skilled flesh for physical entertainment and comfort.

Ese is suspicious of Shae's reaction when she informs Shae of the event, but elects not to confront Shae about why she might find such an event so amusing or ironic.

On the night of the display, the roof of the theater is packed. Several dozen men and women lay nude on reclined fabric chairs to watch the sky, attended in various ways by Ese's tantric practitioners.

Theirs is not the only occupied roof either. The sparkworks fly high, and the display will be visible from anywhere in the city's bounds.

A single sparkling trail suddenly shoots up and explodes into a flowery ring of embers over the city, warning everyone that the display proper will begin in one demimeasure.

Shae is among the practitioners, attending eagerly to a soft-bodied man under the starlight. Covered from head to toe in the slippery nuru gel, Shae sensuously slides her whole body up and down her client's front, rubbing him down with every possible inch of herself. Her slippery skin strokes him. Her breasts slip over his hips. Her shiny butt and drooling pussy glide in circles over his chest. Her mouth fills with his cock, her lips drawing up and down the shaft.

Shae uses the frame of the chair as a toehold, keeping herself in place. It takes practice to stay put when there is so little fiction to work with. Especially when rubbing her slippery skin all over her nude client feels so nice.

"Take me in, watch with me," the client requests, once the warning shot bursts overhead. His hands grope Shae's butt, stilling her undulations.

Shae pivots upright, smiling at him over her shoulder as she slides herself down and curls back, laying down on top him with her back to his chest and her head on his shoulder. Angling her hips just right, she catches his throbbing erection in the cleft of her vulva, and offers up a pleased sigh when the man thrusts up and his cock slides into her waiting sheath. His arms go around her, latching on to play with her and hold her down.

Shae relaxes into it, eager, but pliant and unobtrusive. It's her job to accommodate his intimate preferences, to provide a sexual outlet at his whim without distracting him from the show, and she prides herself on the quality of her work. It is a delicate balance to maintain, after all.

The sparkworks fly, and the bursts of light and paint vivid colors on the star-filled sky.

Invisibly, each detonation scatters a fine mist of umbra over large portions of the city. Tiny amounts that collect like dust on everything in sight, unnoticeable but ubiquitous.

So thin. So spread out. Even where the umbra sublimates into gleam the loss of color is imperceptible, and the umbra does not animate.

Slowly, the gleam will spread, the umbra will grow. It will not happen instantly, but soon, as it feeds on the sexual deprivation of the silent underclass, it will gain enough mass to manifest. At first in small ways, as simple organs sprouting before the most sexually desperate, but eventually it will be strong enough to manifest a longed-for fantasy out of thin air.

Or at least, that's what it was intended to do. Only time will tell if the intention will match the results.

Shae goes back to her life.

And waits.

While their performers play live music, she gives slippery skin massages to clients while they listen. While dancers dance or actors put on thematically-appropriate plays, she bends over the padded benches so her male clients can stand and fuck her from behind while they watch. While tantric shows and sexy games go on up on the stage, she sits on a cushion under a bartop and lavishes oral attention on her client's pussy on demand. Her job involves those and many other variations too. It is often couples or triples pleasured side-by-side by Shae and one or two of her fellow professionals, but not always, and Shae makes a point of getting herself assigned to the clients who come in alone, when she can.

For the most part, the clients are polite and appreciative, and the rude ones make for good stories after closing. Once in a while Shae goes up on stage herself, but only when the performance gives her an excuse to hide her face. Shae enjoys her work, and she's good at it. Maybe the best.

In her off hours, she continues experimenting with the fragments of the Origin Core, sometimes asking Ese or Velitanar or one of the others for help with a specific problem she thinks they might have a comparative advantage at solving. The form of her proposed anti-Isht safeguard begins to reveal itself to her.

After twenty days, it's pretty obvious something is going on. The crime rate has dropped drastically, and there are... rumors.

Twenty-three days into the new year, the first images of the deformed umbral sexcreatures go up on public service announcements all over the city, warning the citizenry to be wary of this new unknown phenomenon, and that the Archonate is investigating.

The rumors get more legible over the following days and pentads.

People who've lost color are loverless, avoid them. People who take advantage and fuck the umbral constructs are vanishing. Fucking the umbral constructs should count as proper sex. Fucking the umbral constructs is something only the loverless would even want to do. People who've lost color are vandalizing things, maliciously breaking pulsebindings and exemplations, only to protest innocence but we all know those loverless freaks are lying. People who've lost color are using the umbral constructs to attack innocent upstanding citizens. People who've lost color are being attacked by the umbral constructs and need help. People who've lost color were all so loverless that now that they've got something to fuck they've stopped doing anything else, and good riddance.

To lose color is to gleam.

Over in this tenement, someone gleamed so hard they spontaneously transformed into a tentacled beast that tried to rape everyone in sight until they were eventually hunted down and killed by an Empyreal Knight.

Wait, what?

Shae is somewhat surprised at how fast the Isht grew. At how quickly the rumors appeared. She's disappointed but not surprised by how many of the rumors seem like attempts to stigmatize the Isht or further put down the loverless, but things mostly seemed to be going to plan until this.

She needs to know if it's true.

Shae only waits to finish her shift at Vena'ese's before she hires a pedicab and goes to talk to the alleged witnesses herself.

On the way there, the pedicab drives towards another tenement. A tower made of Origin Core territory blocks. The glassy material is dull. Colorless. With a massive web of cracks zig-zagging through the whole structure.

A new crack appears as the pedicab approaches. Then another. And another. The sound of it echoes down the street.

The same thing happened to the territory of the Origin Core I sacrificed.

Shae lunges forward over the chauffeur and squeezes the brake lever. Her anti-Isht device isn't ready, but with a hollow dread Shae realizes that she has, in fact, messed up badly enough that it will be necessary, even if the rumor of the rape-crazed transformation isn't true.

"Turn us around. Take me back. Take me back!"

"Get off me!" the chauffeur complains. "I'm going!"

The cracks spread faster. A shard of crystalline material sheers off and falls, stabbing into the street like a knife.

A deafeningly loud bong rings down the street, and the entire tower begins to shift, crumble. And then the entire thing shatters, falling down in a rain of deadly crystal. The noise is incredible. Dust rises. Fragments of rubble go flying out to strike nearby buildings.

The pedicab only barely makes it out of range in time, narrowly avoiding several collisions with other panicked chauffeurs and screaming pedestrians.

Towering umbral creatures climb out of the rubble. Shiny black vaginas and penises writ humongous, amorphous amalgamated limbs, writhing tentacles. At least a dozen of the creatures emerge, each different. Each with hints of grayscale human skin peaking through the umbral growths of its main body.

One, with four limbs like the distorted impression of a man bent backwards to walk on all fours and a tower of tentacles unfurling from its crotch out of the form of a penis taller than an entire person, lunges into the street and snatches up a coughing straggler.

The woman's clothes are torn off in an instant, and tentacles impale her in every hole. She spasms violently, and screams like she's dying.

It is hurting her badly, but it holds back just enough that it doesn't do permanent damage, having been hard-coded not to maim or kill no matter what form it takes.