She contemplates whether she would be worried about the fact that even with her emotions theoretically back online she still isn't feeling any. Then she decides that in fact that is probably the least worrying thing that has happened all day. Her brain took drastic measures to protect itself against having assorted important pieces of its functionality torn out and eaten? Good. Smart brain. Have a cookie. Well, have several hours of uninterrupted sleep. That's the best approximation of a cookie currently on offer.

The next 'day' a short while after she wakes up on her own, the minion (or possibly a different one) appears. And the whole rape-and-brainsuck ordeal repeats itself, with perhaps some variations on which pieces of her get brainsucked in what order.

There is somewhat less in the way of intense mental states to go around this time, because she is in fact still dissociating heavily. (Dissociation! Right, that's the word.)

For now, that's fine. Animal instincts like pleasure and pain alone are kind of bland, but suffice. It'll probably take more sessions before her womb adapts and the seed takes root, like this, but that shouldn't matter in the grand scheme.

The thing she is doing to suppress her affect interests Vreth, though. During his turns, over the next several 'days', he 'tastes around' in an attempt to identify and isolate it.

It's sort of hard to pick out, because it's not really a mental process as such. She's not doing something to dodge her emotions as they come up; she's just declining to have them in the first place. The mental equivalent of missing all your classes because you were too tired to get out of bed.

Declining is doing, in a sense. It isn't straightforward, but it's there somewhere. Even if trying to find it is kind of like trying to identify the pattern on a serving plate in another room by the taste and smell of the food in your hand.

But on the fourth day, something is different.

After finishing in her and giving her water, Vreth puts his cellophane tail-bell against her belly, and his tentacles writhe in satisfaction.

"Hhhh. You've adapted. The impregnation succeeded."

With those words, he unglues her entirely and picks her up in his arms.

Hmm. Is this worth having feelings about? She suspects it is not. She suspects in fact that if she were to have feelings about this, she would immediately and intensely regret doing so.

Also she's not sure she remembers how. A possible flaw in this approach, if she were planning on ever doing anything with her life besides petition to end it at the earliest opportunity.

It occurs to her to ask, though, "Aren't magical girls supposed to be incapable of pregnancy?"

"The very property of which you speak is what makes you ideal surrogates for our germination."

Outside the alcove... the radiance is omnipresent, seeping into skin.

She can feel it, like sunlight, but concentrated, in her middle, in her womb. Something inside her exists and likes it. It takes more than a few days to malnourish a magical girl, but to the extent that she's weak from hunger, she suddenly isn't. Vitality flows back into her as the thing inside her feeds on the light.

The light comes from a lake, vast and green and filled with ridges and valleys of... brain. Giant luminescent brain matter. The lake is contained by a raised wall, organic but bony, and ringed by... fleshy spires or some sort. Above, a conical superstructure hangs, like a hive made of the resin they've been using to glue her to the floor.

It's... actually sort of pretty.

She would still on the whole prefer not to be here. And she's pretty sure that this vista would be super concerning if she were currently the kind of thing that experiences feelings like concern. But it is sort of pretty, nonetheless.

He walks.

As they approach the lake, the light gets more intense. The warmth and vitality radiating from her womb... isn't just that. It's coursing through her, inflaming her senses, filling her with an urgent horny need as waves of liquid pleasure pulse out from within.

Getting horny sounds exhausting. Can't she take a nap instead?

Apparently not.

She squirms a little, mostly involuntarily.

He carries her across a bridge of resin to reach the bony shore, towards one of those 'spires'.

Up close, it is revealed to be some kind of fleshy monstrosity, like a fat roundworm fused to four tadpoles, then enlarged to the size of a tree. Its slimy, segmented body stands upright on four fleshy, tangled tentacles, tapering to tubular ring-mouth that hangs slack.

(The radiance is intense, right here on the shore, making her whole body feel alive, throbbing with it, as waves of pleasure and aching lust soak into her every cell.)

Vreth's facepits flash at the fleshspire, as he stops and turns so his passenger is facing the lake.

It moves, ponderously. Its round tube-mouth descends from above and closes on the girl's bare scalp. Then, with a convulsive swallowing motion, its slick throat-flesh slides down over her face and neck, smothering her head in wet, dark silence, and it lifts her out of Vreth's arms.

Brainlight-induced lust plus the primal fear of suffocation is enough to wake up her emotions again.

She was right! Feelings are terrible! She doesn't want them! Put them back!!!

Four strong hands arrange her flailing limbs.

Her arms get glued to the worm-segment above her head. Her legs get pushed up and spread, folded at the knee, and pinned wide by muscular folds in the fleshspire's lower body, then also glued in place.

It only takes about twenty seconds. Then, the fleshspire's throat convulses, and slides upwards off of her, freeing her face and leaving her head slimy. Directly in front of her, the radiant lake stretches into the distance.

Vreth stands back, observing. With her limbs secure under flesh and glue, it looks a little like she doesn't have limbs at all.

For the first time since she got here, she's crying.

The fleshspire's ring-mouth hovers in front of the bound girl's face for a moment, before stretching downwards to her groin. A smaller, translucent-ish tube emerges from the mouth, like a gelatinous, serpentine tongue. It presses against the girl's loins, and easily slides through her vulva, entering her and climbing up through her insides to reach her womb.

She feels a spike of dull pain, in her cervix, as the tongue-thing reaches its goal. A bulge of luminous green fluid swells up through the gelatinous tube, the added thickness punching rapidly through her stuffed canal and gushing freely into her womb. Another, and another, fucking through her and swelling her belly with radiant fluid.

Certain parts of her, principally the sex parts, think that this is the best thing that has ever happened to them. She is pretty sure she disagrees, but isn't in much of a position to argue the point. Caught between pleasure and a wrenching sense of wrongness, she gasps, sobs, and comes.

Eventually the bulging flow of fluid-globs slows and stops, leaving her horribly gravid. The tube-tongue retreats and vanishes, then the fleshspire straightens up, bringing its ring-mouth back to the top of the impregnated girl's head.

(A dark figure, aloft on luminous, ethereal red wings, is flying over the lake. There is a naked man dangling from her grip. She is clad in... what could be a raiment. She swoops down towards the shore, and drops the man in the water. She circles back, landing beside Vreth, her wings melting away into auroric mist.)

The hot, slimy throat swallows Scintilla's head, smothering her ability to see, hear, speak, or breathe, depriving her of her primary senses and leaving only the weight in her womb and the rapidly returning vivid sexual ache in her flesh. Eventually, it becomes obvious that she feels no need to breathe.

This is... bad. Yes. Bad is the thing that this is.

She wishes she was—somewhere, anywhere else—she wishes she was still an empty emotionless doll—she wishes she was dead—

(she wishes she was being raped again)

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

She tries to recapture that state of distant apathy.

Unfortunately for her, it doesn't seem to be under her conscious control. She is stuck here in this tortured body and this living mind.

Physically, other than the constant raging throb of carnal thirst, her bondage is actually comfortable. Given the low gravity and the flexibility of her body, the only source of noticeable physical discomfort is just how distended and heavy her abdomen is. This is good, because she is certainly not given breaks.

She is left alone in the dark.

The first time it happens it happens without warning. A spasm in her guts, followed by a sudden ecstatic intrusion into her quivering vagina from the wrong end. Something fist-sized and slimy wriggles inside her, before oozing out from between her walls and falling away.

There are a lot of terrible things about the situation in which she presently finds herself, but her least favourite out of all of them is the part where objectively awful things keep feeling this good.

Someday—someday she won't have to deal with this—someday she will never have to feel like this again—and that day cannot possibly come soon enough—

It doesn't appear to be coming soon at all.

Time passes. Her perpetually aroused body gives birth to horrorspawn, not quite like clockwork, but it isn't like there are any other cues by which to mark time.

It could be days. Weeks. It feels like longer.

She doesn't bother trying to keep track of time. She doesn't bother with much of anything. In her rare lucid moments she mostly tries very hard to go back to dissociating, and when that doesn't work she thinks about how much she would like to be dead, and that's generally all the time she gets before her train of thought shatters and fades away.

Though she has no way to tell, it is a month, somewhere around sixty births later, when her womb has shrunk, and slowly, slowly, she begins to suffocate.

When the fleshspire notices, it releases her head, allowing her to use her eyes, ears, and lungs for the first time in four weeks.