Trouble is relative.

For example, here's a magical girl in a poofy golden raiment, perched on the 'curb' over the endless skylit void... at least from her angle. Her gravity is at a right angle to the path 'below' her, and she seems to be lost in thought.

Aww, that's pretty.

She pauses some distance away, wondering whether she's too socially anxious to say hi. She is probably too socially anxious to say hi. But maybe! She can think about it for a minute and see!

(She is not currently transformed, herself. There's something reassuringly familiar about a completely mundane T-shirt and jeans.)

Jill, carefully, casually, without outward sign she's noticed the girl, casts her mind-probe spell.

It comes down to a risk assessment. An unusually dangerous patron, but a week without contact suggests one that doesn't keep close tabs.

The girl is dithering. This is good. Gives Jill more time to weigh the risks. Patricia will be so disappointed in her if she fucks this up.

The girl's not transformed. That means no need to beat her in a fight to get her to dismiss her raiment. That's rare and unusual, for a magical girl wandering in the Crossroads. Major plus for taking her.

Wait, are those clothes real? Okay, maybe what's left of Jill's conscience is plaguing her lately. Objectively, this job is kind of fucked up. But this girl is practically asking for it. If Jill doesn't take her, probably something even worse will ambush her.

Jill waits for her moment.

Hmmmmm nope too shy. She turns away.

Jill leaps. The transition in gravity pulls her exactly on course.

Splinter Daze comes out and plunges down.

The girl feels a hot prick on the back of her skull, and then nothing.

Scintilla wakes up in a dank but warm cave of purple-gray flesh, shot through with pulsing, glowing green veins.

She's naked, the fleshy floor firm but giving under her back. An eerie green radiance shines from outside the small alcove in which she is... glued to the floor. Hands and feet embedded in rubbery protrusions, holding her bare body spread-eagle for anyone who happens to walk in.

If she tries, she will find that her Style doesn't work at all. And if she tries, she will find that she cannot bring the words of her transformation aria to mind.

...progressing through the sequence of noticing these things takes her from very alarmed to extremely alarmed to REALLY EXCEPTIONALLY ALARMED.

There is movement, outside, shifts in the play of light. Sounds of ripples in water.

But for the moment, nobody (or thing) appears.

...Good??? No??? What??????? Why this??????????????

The Ebon Mint mercenaries have proven themselves once again. When this project began, Vreth had his doubts about involving the very sort of beings they sought to exploit, but the ensouled woman and her minions have proven themselves vicious and efficient.

It is still early in the breeding project, Vreth has scarce few minions capable of leaving the Elder's lake. But eventually he gets back around to checking on the new womb. She's awake.

He steps into the alcove.

His body is grayish purple, with faint green veins underneath, kind of like the walls of this place. Unlike the walls, Vreth is healthy even to mortal eyes. He's sleek, symmetrical, with two lean legs, four smoothly muscled arms, and a tail. Two pits, nothing like eyes, burn vibrant green on his face, which splits into five downward tentacles. His torso is almost human, and gorgeously masculine, the kind of chiseled perfection rarely seen outside artistic exaggerations of the human form, though there is a horizontal crease through the middle of his pectorals, to match the four arms.

He is obviously entirely nude. Two thick, meaty dicks hang from his smooth crotch, one above the other, each as gorgeously perfect an exaggeration of the human penis as his chest.

Powerful thighs blend into inhuman legs with clawed feet. His tail swishes behind him, thin, nimble, with an odd clear bell-tip, like a flower made of cellophane.

AS A RESULT OF THIS NEW INFORMATION, ALARM LEVELS HAVE INCREASED CONSIDERABLY.

Perhaps she should try to ask him what's going on, or something of that nature. Instead she just sort of squeaks.

Vreth drops into a low crouch between the new womb's legs. His tail curls over his hip and the clear bell flattens out as he places it over her abdomen. Nothing detectable seem to happen after that, just the soft transparent material against her skin.

It is somewhat hard to read Vreth's expression, when he barely has a face, but his tentacles writhe slowly, idly, like this is neither exciting nor tedious.

She wiggles. This is, predictably, futile. She stops wiggling.

Plaintively, without much hope of an answer: "...what is going on?"

This is actually the first time he's been asked a direct question by one of the captured wombs. He sees no reason to answer her question, but doing so would be novel, at least.

Vreth's voice is a low, silky hiss as he narrates, without any particular care if the womb understands.

"Hhhh uterine phase is non-cyclic, as with the others. Robust. The soul provides. Useful. It will serve our needs well, with only minor adaptation."

every single thing about this situation is more alarming than the last

Vreth removes his tail from her belly and stands. His clawed feet brush the edges of her breasts as he stands above her. His tail-bell swings over her head, and starts drooling some kind of slime into her hair.

"Even if the mortal body could endure, the mortal brain is unsustainably fragile. Unlike the ensouled. So conveniently reusable."

Wow. "Being a magical girl is considerably more hazardous than advertised," she mutters, mostly to herself.

"You will survive. That is the point. No other thing you might be, would."

The slime soaks down to her scalp, and starts hardening like resin. Much like the glue trapping her hands and feet.

"This honestly does not seem like the kind of situation where immortality is a perk from my perspective!"

"Your perspective is irrelevant."

He crouches down to prod at the setting resin covering her hair. This rather puts his dangling cocks in her face, flopping against her cheek and neck, simply because Vreth does not bother to prevent it.

She tries to move away, which doesn't work; considers biting him, decides that there's no scenario where that ends well for her; sighs.

"When I get out of here I'm gonna retire."

"It is foolish of you to expect you will leave. Our use of you will not diminish with time."

"I'm not especially hopeful, to be clear. But forever's always longer than you think. Eventually something happens other than the things that have been happening before."

Vreth's tentacles twitch in what could be amusement.

"For example, this." He gestures at their surroundings. "Your previous purpose have been superseded by this purpose."

Vreth stands again and moves to leave the alcove.

"I liked the other one better. Can I go back to that?"

"No."

He leaves.

She is left with only her own company for next hour or so.

Yeah, she figured. But it seemed like it couldn't hurt to ask.

Okay. What she said to the tentacle-faced man is... true, actually. This extremely ominous scenario will go on for some amount of time, but that amount of time is objectively really unlikely to be eternity. If they really are kidnapping random magical girls for this, they're eventually going to get someone with better connections than she has. It would probably be pretty hard to find someone with worse connections than she has; she's been a magical girl for a week, has had maybe five conversations with other magical girls none of whom she expects to remember her name, and doesn't even have anybody in the mundane world who'd be especially inclined to investigate if she vanished into thin air. There can't be a lot of girls around in similar situations. So she won't be getting rescued, but at some point somebody will be, and given the deeply upsetting nature of this whole operation, they will probably rescue as many other girls as they can or at least, like, bomb the place on their way out. At which point she can go back to her patron and ask to be retired, and her soul will sit on a probably-figurative shelf for the rest of eternity and she will no longer have to deal with any of this having happened. It might take a while, but she'll get there.

She really wishes she could skip to that part.

Eventually, another horrorspawn, resembling a slightly smaller, softer, just-as-naked Vreth, walks into the alcove. He doesn't respond to words or anything else, as he carries out his task.

First, he does the flattened-tail-on-the-belly thing to her. Only this time, at the same time, the floor comes alive under her butt. A... mouth? Something mouth-like, opens under her and sucks her hips down into wet warmth. The disc of cellophane-esque flesh spasms, and what feels like a mild electric shock shoots into her guts. All of the muscles in her abdomen relax completely, all at once. This has the obvious physical consequence. Then the mouth-thing closes, squeezing her hips back out, shiny and clean.

After that, the wordless horrorspawn strokes his tail over her hands and feet.

And the glue resin melts, freeing her limbs.

She doesn't actually try to talk to him; she is kind of trying to get a headstart on not existing.

...until the floor thing happens, at which point she goes "Gaaahh???", and is too shocked and baffled to even try to do anything with her sudden freedom.

Then the horrorspawn will have no trouble using his four strong arms to pick her up, turn her over, set her on her knees, and glue her legs down. Her hands also get glued together in front of her, the resin hardening fast, only giving her a few seconds in which it is possible to break free.

During this process, the horrorspawn's twin cocks become hugely, throbbingly erect. And Vreth himself returns, looming against that eerie green radiance outside, as he observes. His cocks are also, now, fully erect.

But what actually happens next, is that cap of resin on the magical girl's head is gripped in several hands, and ripped free, taking most of her hair with it.

She makes a high-pitched unhappy sound and then starts crying.

The horrorspawn minion stands aside as Vreth kneels behind her.

He pulls her upright. Tentacles slither around her head from behind. His smooth, toothless mouth closes over her scalp, and his tentacles close up around her ears and face, blinding her and muffling her sobs.

And then the pain... it's still there but she can't feel it anymore, because it's going elsewhere. Drained out of her as fuel for Vreth.

He pulls her head back and down, forcing her spine to bend and her hips to adjust for him. And now she can't feel pain and has a throbbing hard phallus pressing gently and patiently at the cleft of her vulva.

This is definitely grounds for More Crying.

Someday she won't have to deal with this. Someday she won't have to deal with this. (That was her pain, part of her experience of the world, and even though she didn't want it, it feels so wrong to have it taken away—) Someday she won't have to deal with this.

She really really hopes that that day will be soon.

Her body will respond on its own eventually. His four hands shift around her body, caressing her in various ways, stimulating her. The steady pressure remains between her legs, waiting for her flesh to yield.

What? No? Why??? Didn't he say her perspective was irrelevant? Why is—no—

And the worst part is it's working, embarrassingly fast. This should not be hot. There is no part of this scenario that in a reasonable universe could be considered hot. And yet... and yet.

Vreth is only concerned with the state of her body, truly. Provoking her arousal is a matter of simple geometry. He's big enough, that, unaroused, she might as well not even have the relevant anatomy.

And... slowly... ever so slowly... her swelling, slickening hole... fails... to... keep... him... out.

oh no he's hot.

She shouldn't—but—clearly her body has other ideas—and logically speaking isn't pleasure better than the alternative?—but she doesn't want to, she wants not this, she wants to go back to standing alone on a rooftop watching Luna cross the sky and marveling that she could walk there if she knew the way—or even to before she became a magical girl, to being a sad dull uninteresting person with a sad dull uninteresting life—or even to the night she became a magical girl, when her patron found her wandering the streets in tears—or even to the previous weekend, which was on the whole a much less regrettable experience than this—or to not being alive, not being alive sounds great right about now—

But she does enjoy it. Hating that fact doesn't make it stop being true. This experience may be a top candidate for the worst thing that has ever happened to her, and rapidly speeding past the competition, but it is observably the case that she still manages to find it intensely arousing. Not even just on a physical level. The fear and helplessness are doing something for her too.

A little hysterically, she thinks to herself, I think this sexuality is broken. I'd like to return it to the store.

Vreth fucks her. Smoothly. Casually. Impersonally. But effectively. His hands hold her comfortably and his thrusts are neither urgent nor tentative.

He ejaculates. She can feel it, tendrils of prickly unnatural heat creeping up into her gut.

He pulls out and switches cocks, sliding the other into her, and resumes at the same pace.

The diminishing not-pain from her raw scalp finally dies inside her. No longer drained away. No longer existing at all, but left to regenerate at her natural healing rate. Now it's her urge to cry and the feelings behind it that are still there, but which she cannot feel, which are drained out of her as fuel for Vreth.

—and abruptly, in the absence of tears, she's furious. How dare he take her feelings away. Those are hers and she did not give them to him. They're miserable awful shitty feelings but they belong to her, no one else, not ever.

Vreth's grip tightens. Not as a warning. Just as a practical matter of holding her in place as he fucks her.

He, of course, continues to feed on her sorrow. He ejaculates again, and the prickly unnatural warmth inside her is an order of magnitude stronger this time. He switches back to his first cock, and fucks her more. Sorrow is bigger than pain. It takes much longer to eat it all.

She has never been an especially violent person but right now she is deriving some satisfaction from the mental image of cutting him in half with a high-powered water jet.

But is she more angry than she is turned on? Because whatever she's feeling more of, that's what Vreth feeds on next after her need to cry has burned out.

She is definitely more angry than turned on. Until he takes that away, and then—

—if she'd had the time to expect it she would've expected to go blank, with both of her strongest emotions gone. But in fact what happens is that the rest of her feelings expand to fill the available space. And the rest of her feelings are currently like 98% sex.

From bitter fury, she flips directly into orgasm.

Vreth's tentacles tighten around her face, pulsing in time with her pleasure, tasting it even though its not what he's feeding on right now. His cock keeps driving into her at the same pace. Anger isn't nearly as big as sorrow, but it's big enough for this to last a while, and he isn't going to stop in the middle of consuming it.

For once in her whole entire life, she doesn't have a meta-commentary track running in the back of her head, making smart remarks about her thoughts and actions. She is wholly engulfed by the experience of the moment.

Eventually, her ability to feel anger burns out, and Vreth ejaculates a third time.

He stops, extracting himself from her, releasing her face and head from his tentacles, but the lesser horrorspawn is immediately there to replace him, to take his turn. A new set of tentacles slithers around her head, a new set of hands holds her flushed body, a new set of cocks arrive to fuck her one at a time.

The part of her brain that cares about sad things is dead. The part of her brain that cares about status, dignity, indignity, is dead. The part of her brain that understands pain is... slowly regenerating, enough that she could probably feel it again, if there were any to feel.

There's a little. This is not the world's most comfortable activity. But she is kind of preoccupied so she doesn't immediately notice.

The minion slides in, and thrusts.

At first, it feels just as good as before. Better, if she likes how his grip gets painfully tight when she squirms too much and he has to use more force to keep her still.

But the next orgasm won't come. It's there, it feels like its rushing at her, but it drains away before it can reach her. Moving towards her but somehow getting further away. Her vagina is no less wet or engorged, but the feeling of thick dick violating her insides slowly, gradually, becomes less of a sexual feeling (even while remaining a pleasant feeling).

...wh...a...t.

No, that's - that's - something is wrong here. She—she's losing pieces—it wasn't obvious until she got one back—what, actually, lived in the space where her tears used to come from? She doesn't know. It's not gone like her transformation aria, a memory or experience pulled away out of sight; it's gone like entire pieces of her mental architecture are being razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.

Briefly, she feels a sharp spike of fear.

And then some buried instinct comes down like a guillotine on her whole emotional experience, and she feels... nothing much, really. There are sensations in her body but they don't register as especially important. Things are happening. Later some other things will probably happen instead. No reason to get all worked up about it.

It reminds her a little of being tickled until her brain stopped processing the tickling sensation through into the tickle response. And a little of some especially bad days, days that were scary only in retrospect, when she stumbled through the routines of life in a haze of total apathy. There's probably a word for this, but she doesn't remember what it is, and it seems decidedly impractical to look it up.

This must be what Vreth meant when he said magical girls are reusable. She is getting a piece back. A human wouldn't. Human brains don't regenerate, if they're not hooked up to a soul, or if they do the restored areas are blank slates.

As each piece is taken, another grows back.

The minion hurts her, destroys her understanding of pain a second time, and then, when all that's left is... dullness, a brain idling at minimum affect. He pulls his cock out of her, melts the resin off her legs, and glues her down again face up.

After that, she's given water, and then left alone long enough for all of her pieces to regrow and slot into place, long enough to sleep through a night, if such a concept as 'night' holds meaning in the unceasing eerie radiance of this place which is almost certainly not even on Earth.

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.

Vreth is there, perched on one of the fleshspire's tentacles, cellophane tail-bell reaching up to press against her belly.

Her first words, barely intelligible, are: "I do not like it, Sam I Am."

"Hhhh, the germination is still viable."

"I'm very confused by the biology of this whole process," she remarks.

Vreth absently gestures at his crotch, at his pair of idealized humanoid cocks.

"Male. Female. We are not dichotic in this way. Up. Down. One from each recombines in a viable environment, such as a womb without a fertility cycle of its own, steeped in mana... Hhhhh. And the radiance of the Holy One nourishes us all, even as mindless tadpoles."

(Behind him, she can see... unconscious naked men, hung by their feet from strands of resin anchored far above, heads just barely touching the water.)

"That—"

She blinks, catching up with herself. Thoughts. She is having thoughts, like some sort of thinking creature. That's novel. What the hell are they talking about again? Right—

"—implies that you're," c'mon, words, what are the words for the thought she's having, she managed Dr. Seuss why can't she manage this, or maybe the question is how the hell did she manage the Dr. Seuss, "...obligate reproductive parasites? Or are there other suitable environments?"

"Yes."

His facepits flash.

The fleshspire bends down and extends its gelatinous tube-tongue. It squelches its slimy self into her cunt with zero resistance, and begins refilling her womb with fuck-pulses of radiant fluid.

Her body helpfully reminds her that it is stunningly desperate to be fucked. She tries to tell it that she's busy, dammit, having her first coherent conversation in weeks, and this should occupy a much higher priority than—but no. She bursts into tears as her thoughts dissolve in a bright wash of pleasure.

And when it's done, it's back to sensory deprivation for her. The slimy throat swallows her head again and smothers her tears along with her everything else above the neck.

She is

really

really

really

tired

of sensory deprivation.

Not thrilled about the constant sexual torture, either.

Orgasmic birth by orgasmic birth, another month crawls by.

Is she done yet?

She is not done yet.

How about now?

No.

How about—?

At this point she's starting to feel like she is never going to be done, actually. It's getting harder and harder to hold onto the idea that at some point her life is going to be shaped a different way from this. She knows on an intellectual level that forever is a very long time, but on an immediate level, abstractions like eternity are rapidly escaping her grasp. No matter what she does, it comes back to this. No matter what she thinks, it comes back to this. Is the outside world even real, or is it a dream she made up in a futile effort to distract herself from her ongoing torment?

The ongoing torment has no opinion.

Finally, finally, her womb is empty. Ish. She can still feel the something that exists and drinks in the light, flooding her body with carnal urgency.

Finally, finally, her lungs start to burn, and the fleshspire frees her head once more.

Vreth is not there to greet her, this time.

So, before anything else, she's gonna spend like at least a solid ten minutes crying.

Unless something interrupts her in the middle, but she kind of really hopes that nothing will.

Nothing interrupts her.

Distantly, there are faint moans of both pleasure and despair. More men than before are hanging head-first into the lake. There is more going on, now. The brain Horror's operation has evidently progressed. Just barely visible, around the shore, there are other heavily gravid torsos protruding from the bodies of other fleshspires.

Her first glimpse of the things she's been giving birth to all this time: about a foot of greenish jelly-flesh, with four frilled tails propelling them through the water, and a tapering hemi-cylindrical body.

She is almost certain that whatever's up with those men is going to turn out to be really, really bad. Possibly worse than what's going on with her.

Seeing other girls in her same situation doesn't exactly fill her with delight either.

And the eldritch tadpoles... she shudders. She doesn't want to think about them. She doesn't want to remember what it feels like when—she just doesn't want to think about them, okay?

(At some point in the past, she's pretty sure, she wasn't desperately, terrifyingly horny. She is almost completely certain that happened. She has only the vaguest idea what it would have been like.)

There isn't much for her to do, except think.

Well, she may observe as one of those tadpoles swims up to one of the unconscious men who is dangling close enough for her to see it clearly when it wriggles out of the water and latches on to his head.

The man twitches. His hands are glued together behind his back but he doesn't seem to be awake in any case.

And she is left alone to watch, as over the next few hours, the tadpole turns purplish-gray, just like Vreth. Its five limbs grow to resemble Vreth's not-face, and the purplish coloration spreads, to the man's chest, to his legs. Slowly, his arms and penis begin to divide.

Oh.

So that's happening.

She was right, that's worse.

Very early on in this process, she takes a deep breath and summons all the focus she can muster.

They took away her transformation aria. But is it gone, or is it just forgotten? Could she still use it, if she found out what it was?

What would it be, if she still had it? What are the words that define her soul?

She tries out various phrasings, muttering them under her breath whenever she assembles something plausible. From weakness, strength... no, not quite... but she can't wait for something to feel right, she has to try as many guesses as she can because it's very likely that if she manages to stumble on the right one she won't recognize it until it works...

It doesn't seem like it's gone or forgotten, actually. It feels like she still knows it. She can still see the words etched at the center of her soul, figuratively scan them with her figurative eyes, even. The individual words just fail to coalesce when she tries to assemble letters into sounds and meaning.

At the same time, there do not appear to be any words missing from her vocabulary.

Out on the lake, the unfortunate man continues to mutate. His dicks separate, getting bigger and prettier all the while. His arms follow shortly. He has a tail now, but lacks the cellophane bell. His muscles smooth and harden, and his feet widen and sprout claws.

She—

(closes her eyes so she'll stop thinking about how much she wants that poor stranger to fuck her)

—thinks.

It's not erased, not forgotten, it's—obfuscated. Blocked. She can see it but she can't... think it?

Well, which words match the ones she can't quite think?

Piece by piece, she fits a sentence together. Weak and strong are in there, and but, and I—no, I am—and—enough? Weak, but strong enough? That scans. That sounds like a way her soul might choose to describe her.

There's another clause, though, and that one's slipperier. She chases it around in circles for what feels like an hour before she finally figures out that it rhymes.

Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough...

But when she tries to say it, say it properly, she can't. That's blocked too.

She snarls very quietly and tries again. Repeats it over and over in her head, murmurs the phrases quietly without the force of a true incantation, tries to get the rhythm of it installed so deeply in her muscle memory that her voice will say the words without her having to think about it at all.

Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough; I am Hollow Witch Scintilla!

Does she even have all the right words? It's hard to know for sure. But as best she could determine, checking and double-checking, all the words are there and in the right order. It's the best she's got.

She can hold the sentence in her mind just fine, so long as she manages not to think of it as her aria. (A sentence identical to her aria works just fine, though.)

But to bring it out of herself, it is kind of fundamentally required that she think of what she's saying as her aria. (Or is it?)

The new horrorspawn awakens.

He whips his tail around, melting the resin on his feet and wrists. Four arms spring free, and the glue holding him aloft parts. He falls into the lake, flips over, and swims gracefully to shore.

He pauses, at Scintilla's fleshspire.

And his facepits flash.

And the fleshspire bends down to fuck and fill her with its gelatinous tube-tongue again, before swallowing her head and plunging her back into the darkness and silence for another month of frustration and nigh-orgasmic birthing.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE

This time, when the fleshspire releases her from her sensory deprivation, Vreth is there. She can feel herself being unglued, her limbs released, as her lungs start to burn. Strong hands collect her, and the slimy throat spits out her head, leaving her supported in Vreth's arms.

On the way back to the alcoves, away from the lake, it is obvious that they've come a long way. Patrols of the humanoid horrorspawn wander the fleshscape. Through glimpses she can see other girls in the alcoves, bent over, heads wrapped in tentacles as they're fucked from behind, their muffled moans and screams blending into a dull murmur.

She desperately, desperately wants what those girls are getting.

It seems likely that she's in for exactly that.

She can't seem to stop crying, which is annoying because she doesn't want to let them eat any more of her emotions if she can help it. Yes, yes, they all seem to grow back, but it's the principle of the thing.

She'd also like to talk to Vreth again, but she's sobbing too hard to speak even if she could think of anything to say. Dr. Seuss can't save her this time.

She is, indeed, in for exactly that.

Vreth glues her down on her knees, and leaves.

And then a procession of the newer vreth-a-likes line up to...

(They're not trying to impregnate her this time, she's still got that proto-whatever in her womb, so they don't bother to switch off between upper and lower cocks. She's got two holes and is covered in slippery slime. They can and do use both at once.)

...fuck her and suck on her brain. The tentacles are tight and muffling but positively spacious after the fleshspire's throat.

These ones are rougher with her. Acting on instinct rather than experience. But they have decent physical instincts.

Lust, being such a feature of her brain right now, features heavily on the menu, but it's almost like they're too weak to drain it more than she feels it. There's so much that it never quite burns out. They switch to feeding on something else the moment sex falls below 'bigger than everything else in this brain combined'.

She loses... whatever it is she's crying about. Sorrow isn't quite the right word.

It grows back. She loses it again.

The next time around, the thing that eclipses lust first is shame, and she's almost grateful to lose that one, and then furious about being grateful, and then...

It continues much longer than the last time she was up here. There are a lot of hungry horrorspawn.

But eventually, she is watered, glued to the floor, and left alone to rest.

She cries. A lot.

But as soon as she can trust her voice to whisper instead of sob, she's back to repeating her... her new favourite sentence, over and over again. Occasionally she tries to say it properly, and fails, and goes back to the world's quietest chanting. She thinks maybe, if she could just run the 'speaking' part on pure physical autopilot while separately applying the 'this is my aria' part with her thoughts... but it hasn't worked yet, and it might not ever.

It's not like she's got anything better to do, though. Sleep? What even is sleep? She's not sure she remembers how.

No one disturbs her either way.

A figure occasionally passes through the air, out over the lake, distant, but stark against the backdrop with those luminous red wings. A figure with wings, clad in what looks like a raiment.

And, at one point, the magical girl from the Crossroads, in her own fluffy golden raiment, jogs right past the entrance to Scintilla's alcove, clearly visible and under no duress.

Yes, she remembers that first one from earlier.

...the other girl's new.

Well. New around here, anyway. All that gold is pretty distinctive. Scintilla remembers the last time she saw it.

Does she want to call out to her as she passes by?

...mmmno. No, she thinks she in fact does not. It's kind of stupid to be socially anxious at this point, but nevertheless, she finds she is a little.

After a while, it becomes noticeable that the radiance feeds the mostly-dormant thing in her womb even this far away. On the new relative scale of horny, it's nothing, but she's still going to have a little bit of a puddle under her, by the time the next 'day' rolls around.

But when she is next visited, it is not by vreth-a-likes or either of the complicit magical girls she's seen before.

A slightly unreal-looking woman with white hair and lavender skin darts, nude, into the alcove. She straightens up with a smug air, and holds one finger to her lips in a shushing gesture at the bound magical girl. The obvious fey sashays over and drops down between the bound girl's legs. With a smirk, her fingers hover millimeters away from the bound girl's clit.

Scintilla looks warily at the stranger. Whatever's going on here, it seems really unlikely to be meant to benefit her in any way.

The fey holds the girl's eyes, as with a widening smirk, her fingers gets closer... closer... almost touching. Close enough to feel without being a real touch.

Her wary confusion shifts gradually to wry amusement.

At that, the fey's smirk flips into a twisted, angry scowl. She draws her hand back and slaps the girl, right between her legs, hard.

"Is something funny, little cocksleeve?" she virtually snarls.

She yelps, flinching hard—but then snickers softly.

"You've made the classic error of assuming I experience hope."

The fey jams her fingers into the bound girl's drooling quim, fucking her roughly.

"You think you've seen the worst that can happen to you, you worthless cumdump? You think you've hit bottom? You're going to choke on thhurrrckkck" she cuts off abruptly, as a red leather belt comes out of nowhere and coils around her neck seemingly under its own power.

Behind the fey, is the magical girl with the red wings. She's statuesque, has curly dark red hair, and is clad in a skintight black body-stocking with clear glass bead-scale armor over her vital areas, and a writhing skirt made of dozens of moving red leather belts, shiny buckles whipping back and forth.

"Wynorla," the magical girl speaks, her voice hard, as she retracts the belt around the fey's neck and rips the fey off of the captive. "This is the third time I've caught you neglecting your assignment so you can play with the merchandise. What do you have to say for you self."

"Bll-hurrk! Black! Hrrrk! Black Swan!" the fey croaks out, clawing uselessly at the belt around her neck as she dangles in the air. "I hk, I was just, hkkk!" The belt loosens a little. "They need to be reminded! To be afraid! To hate themselves! You let them grow complacent!"

"I told you when we recruited you. I told you the first time this happened. I told you the second time this happened," Black Swan says. "Indulge your obsessions on your own time, when you aren't behind on your quota. But I'm not going to tell you that this time."

"...you're hgkkk! you're not?"

"No," says Black Swan. "You're fired."

And the belt constricts, crushing Wynorla's neck until her head separates from her body. The fey's body dissolves. Black Swan shakes her head in disappointment.

There's a moment where the sensation of something fucking her overrides all other concerns—

But it's remarkable how fast she can get hold of herself when she's got something to make fun of. This is possibly not the world's most virtuous tendency? Eh, she's got bigger problems.

"Hi," she says to the girl with the murderous skirt. "Are all your minions this unprofessional?"

Black Swan gives the bound girl a flat look.

"Didn't you get taken down by one of my minions without even putting up a fight? Because you were wandering around in the Crossroads like a clueless tourist?"

She shakes her head.

"You should sleep while you can. Now that I need to hunt down and hire a new siren, we're going to have a surplus of surrogates for a few days."

For a second she does feel bad about that, but then—

"Aww, give me a break, it was my first week on the job."

—she remembers why. It makes perfect sense to be bad at self-preservation when self-preservation is not on the list of things you care about.

Weirdly, she thinks she feels happier now than she did then. That can't be right, can it? Probably she's just forgotten what normal emotions are like.

"I'd feel bad for you... if I cared at all. Which I don't. So, bye."

Black Swan turns away, her wings of red light materialize, and she launches herself into the air.

A short while later, the vreth-a-likes show up to fuck her and suck on her brain, but there are fewer than yesterday. Afterwards, she gets another full 'night' worth of undisturbed time.

Maybe she will actually sleep this time around. Maybe she should not just try to stay awake indefinitely. Yeah let's go with that.

It's a little tough to get to sleep, but once she's out she gets a nice long solid rest, with an elaborate dream about complex political intrigue in a giant ice castle. If only she could write it down.

The next 'day', the vreth-a-likes come back. Again, they leave her in the alcove instead of taking her back down to the lake, but it is not obvious that they won't.

Scintilla could have plenty of time to dupe the block on her aria, or this could be her last chance for another month, or more. There's no way to tell. Vreth himself never visits her, nor does anyone else who might respond to the question.

Right, she's had her one good night's sleep, back to work it is.

Can she say her aria—properly, meaningfully, magically—without any conscious input into the mechanical process of speech? At this point she... thinks she's got the recitation part down to a decent approximation of perfect. If she has all the words right in the first place. If she hasn't made some other mistake. If she isn't fooling herself about the results somehow, because it's actually pretty hard to tell whether you're saying something properly when you're deliberately not paying any attention to the process of saying it. So all she has to do is try to put the magic in.

Well, the process is often described as 'pulling the aria out into the world and filling it with one's voice' and while that is more poetic than technical, it is more or less true. Priming the aria requires a mental action which is itself independent from the words of the aria, and then the sound that comes out of one's mouth is like a catalyst, that turns the key.

In the middle of that process, is the part that combines the figurative lock and key. It turns out... she can reach the keyhole. She can hold the key and turn it with her voice. But she can't put the key in the keyhole without thinking of those words as her aria, rendering the other two parts useless.

She is very stubborn and does not have much else to do with her time.

She tries again. And again, and again, and again. Small variations in exact mental posture, in how close she lets herself get to the words.

She fails, every time. Sometimes it almost seems like she's got it, and then the words slip away.

Her last resort is to attempt the brain-bending task of reciting the words while thinking of them as her aria even though she can't think them in that context. It's much harder than just thinking 'this is my aria' while deliberately shutting out all awareness of the sounds her voice is making. But until she successfully tries it she can't know whether it's going to work. So she mutters very quietly, over and over, and every time she falters in the middle when the block chases the words from her mind and she has to start again, and she does, and she falters in the middle...

It never quite feels like it can't work. But it doesn't. At least not before the next time she's taken back down to the lake, and reduced to little more than a blind, deaf, limbless sack of eldritch embryos and raging unbearable horniness.

Or the next.

Or the next.

or the next

or the next

orthenext

She does not like being a blind, deaf, limbless sack of eldritch embryos and raging unbearable horniness! She really, really, really doesn't!

At first she spends her breaks relentlessly trying variations on her core strategy, in every moment where she's confident enough in being unobserved.

Then she starts letting herself slip. This one time, she's too tired, too miserable, too ragingly unbearably horny. She just cries continuously until they eat the tears right out of her mind and then dissociates until they take her back down to the lake.

There's something very compelling about doing nothing but get fucked and cry. It simplifies her life considerably. If she isn't trying to escape then she doesn't have a reason to think, and thinking is hard.

On her next break, she vaguely intends to try again, but instead she lets herself go completely. She doesn't even dissociate this time. She feels everything, and all those feelings get burned out of her mind one after another in an extended cycle of rape and brainsucking, and it all grows back, and the whole time she's—not happy, she's never actually happy enough that they eat that one next, she's miserable and furious and ashamed and grieving and terrified and endlessly, intensely aroused—but there's a kind of underlying satisfaction to it. Especially in the moments when they've eaten all her fear and pain and shame and sorrow and her whole mind is nothing but pleasure.

Maybe there's no point in trying to escape. Maybe she should just wait, let them do what they want with her, enjoy her torment as best she can. She still believes what she said to the smart one when she first got here: eventually, something different will happen. They can keep her here for a very long time but they can't keep her forever.

In the meantime, though...

There's a cycle where she starts finding that same strange satisfaction in her time by the lake, and then as soon as they take her down from her fleshspire to carry her back to the alcoves she bursts into tears and the horrorspawns' first meal of the day is an intense all-consuming wave of self-loathing—what is she turning into, how can she enjoy this—isn't enjoying it strictly better than the alternative?—but she doesn't want to be that kind of girl—but has anything in the whole entire world ever turned out the way she wanted it to?—

They feast on her self-hatred, and then on the euphoric bliss she feels when self-hatred is no longer a thing she's capable of, and once she regains that ability it immediately swamps everything else she's feeling all over again, and by the end of that particular break she has reached a whole new level of emotional disorientation.

She hangs from her fleshspire and suffers ecstatically, and lies in her alcove and weeps helplessly, and they fuck her and drink all the feelings out of her brain, and she finds it harder and harder to remember that there was ever a time when she had any agency over her own life. Harder and harder to care that she doesn't want this to be happening to her, that she doesn't want to be the sort of person who enjoys it.

She becomes almost a creature of pure experience, feeling everything, reflecting nothing. When she's birthing eldritch tadpoles by the lake, she is intense arousal and the constant yearning for just a little more pleasure, just enough to finally achieve the orgasm that's hovering just out of reach. When she's lying glued to the alcove floor, she is misery and terror and shame and exhaustion and the desperate need to be fucked. And when the horrorspawn are feeding from her, she is a kaleidoscope of feelings, shifting dizzyingly from one configuration to another as they rip each emotion from her mind and each one slowly returns to her.

After long enough, she unselfconsciously loves the sensation of alien cocks thrusting deep into her helpless body. After long enough, she barely remembers why she spends so much time crying, barely contextualizes her sobbing misery as negative at all; the tears are almost as good a release as the gloriously intense orgasms that she gets to feel every so often when the timing works out. After long enough, she stops even trying to have coherent thoughts; the only time she ever thinks straight anymore is in her dreams.

And then...

Well.

Then something different happens.

Magical girls have been disappearing.

Scyelen is new on the team, but her unique ability to copy a spell from another magical girl makes her useful enough that she's brought in on the investigation.

The ocean breeze bites at her exposed skin as she teleports from rooftop to rooftop, using Samantha the Scattered Moment's primary mobility spell, Paradox Warp. Raiments are supposed to reflect the core values of the magical girl, and she can't exactly argue that "pink microkini armor" isn't appropriate to her heart of hearts, even if she only wishes she was as slutty as it makes her look. But it's cold up here and her new team---okay, their teasing was, if she's honest with herself, in good fun. It still took her more than a week to psyche herself up to holding a conversation with strangers while dressed like this, let alone allowing herself to be seen by mundanes.

She reaches the next Crossroads route. She can't remember its name. She pulls her phone out and checks the map Sylvia the Gravitic Eclipse gave her. Shoreshine. She teleports down, blushing, imagining judging eyes on her, and drops one of Casey the Brave Alloy's devices at the invisible waygate, then teleports back up to a nearby roof.

That was the last one. The trap is set.

The team assembles in their outpost, a commandeered office floor that was under renovation before they had it Veiled.

Sylvia is the leader. A veteran Gravity Mage, active since the 1940s, and more powerful than all the others combined. She has a reputation for being noble and fair, and she certainly looks the part, tall and charismatic in a raiment that could easily pass for a million-dollar red evening gown, contrasting sharply against her ebony skin.

Samantha is the other veteran. She is one the rare magical girls who was ensouled too old, and now has the 'loli' appearance shared by those formerly-elderly girls. She's the quiet one, standing at Sylvia's side where she has been since her first life ended and her second began. Despite being a powerful Time Mage and having the stature of a child, she's the team's melee specialist.

Then there is Shanie the Thundering Skyburst. She's newer, though still more experienced than Scyelen. Her raiment actually covers less skin than Scyelen's but still manages to look far less lewd, all jagged golden lace and delicate white-silver chain. She's tall, lanky, ambiguously dark-skinned, and full of energy, appropriate for a Lightning Mage.

Casey the Brave Alloy was the team's Metal Mage, and a proven badass in her own right. She's new on the team, but has years of experience on her own. She's a friendly, busty ginger, and it's her ability that the current plan hinges on.

The stakeout only lasts a few days, before the horrorspawn they're hunting trips one of Casey's cobbled-together sensors. They ambush it. They attempt to interrogate it. They don't get very far.

Then, that night, while their guards are down, the wall explodes inwards and an army of dolls throws itself upon them. The enemy Spirit Mage doesn't have much raw power, but she's vicious and precise, using her army for cover. They fall one by one, wiping out a dozen dolls for every loss, but there's just too many. Despite nearly obliterating the enemy forces, they all go down in the end.

Scyelen wakes up, naked, glued to a fleshy floor, exposed and vulnerable, in a dank, eldritch fleshscape lit by an eerie green radiance.

Her first thought is that there's no way this is what it looks like.

Her second thought is that, no really, this is way too elaborate and eldritch to be about raping her.

Her third thought is that, she's going to die. Not of anything they do to her. Of embarrassment when they come to do whatever they're going to do and find her laying in a puddle of her own arousal from imagining what she hopes they'll do to her.

When she gets her first look at the vreth-a-likes, her brain chokes on an ejaculation of exclamation points and crashes. When it really really looks like they are there to rape her, she squeezes her eyes shut and holds really still, sure that the instant she relaxes it'll suddenly not be what it looks like, and the entire universe will laugh at her and call her a bimbo.

ohmiholyfuckingodcocksandtentacles

She is sure this is literally the hottest thing that could ever happen. She is sure the illusion will shatter the moment she gives in.

Then the brainsucking starts, and she understands. Then it continues, and she realizes its not as bad as she feared. Her mind, her self, is being violated along with her body, but its not damaging her, and meanwhile she has never in her life felt so deliciously objectified and helpless.

The sensory deprivation and total bondage, her mind full of nothing but need to cum for something like an eternity at a time. It's torture at first, but it's also nirvana. Every birth makes her cum so hard, and the mere idea of being used as a living monster factory just makes it hotter.

A small part of her is terrified. What will her team think. She isn't even trying to help them or find out if they're okay. The rest of her resents them, for never noticing how miserable she was as a person. But then, even she didn't know. The rest of her wants to stay here forever, because it's the only thing that has ever made her feel this right. This... fulfilled.

She wants to tell the horrors, she likes it here, she'll cooperate. But she doesn't, because what if they believe her? They might give her a choice about what happens to her, how much, and when. And the one thing Scyelen is sure of, now, is that she doesn't want that. She can't explain why, even to herself, but she flinches at even imagining it.

She is content.

It's right at the start of a new birthing cycle. She still has a wonderfully fresh sense-memory of being pumped full of fluid, which is her favourite part of this whole process. She's alone here, with nothing but the gestating eldritch tadpoles in her womb for company.

And she feels a new sensation.

At first she can barely contextualize it; she's more startled than anything. There's a gritty texture against her skin, different from the feeling of resin or slime; there's a rippling pressure crawling over her body, starting at the top of her round swollen belly and slipping up under the fleshspire's seals to cover her face, flowing down over all her exposed skin. It pours itself into her mouth, tasting oily and metallic; it floods every orifice, and she silently sobs in frustration at the not-quite-enoughness of the way it glides along her vagina and up into her womb. It fills her nose and her ears and rushes down her throat and pools inside her, everywhere it can reach, but especially one place in particular; she feels the strain in her womb ratchet up and up and up, from stretched to overstretched to drum-tight and beyond, and wonders blurrily if she's going to outright burst. That would definitely be novel. Maybe she'd die. She's not sure how she feels about that.

She doesn't die, though.

She hurts—hurts a surprising amount, hurts enough that it overpowers the constant all-consuming lust—and her belly swells and swells until she's sure it's going to pop, and it doesn't, and if she had any air in her lungs she'd be screaming, and—

All at once, like flipping a switch, the pain cuts out. Something even newer blazes in its place.

Without any input from her sealed and covered eyes, she sees a vista of coloured lights spreading out in every direction. Every living thing within several hundred feet of her - every tadpole, every horrorspawn, every trapped suffering magical girl - glows in this inner vision, radiant with intricate mystifying patterns in every colour of the rainbow and some she wouldn't swear a human eye could ever see. Her own overstuffed womb roils with life.

The gritty slime all over her body is—fading into her, being physically absorbed into her flesh and also merging its fluid red-black patterns with the complicated snarl of light contained inside her skin.

Everything that's happening right now is confusing on levels she doesn't even have the conceptual vocabulary to articulate inside her own head. But in the tangle of new experiences, she finds something that feels like a new power, and flexes that mental limb for the sheer novelty of being able to take any kind of action—

And an egg starts growing inside her, round and warm, swimming in the horrorfluid. It swells and swells and finally nestles against her cervix, and she can feel its readiness to emerge, a potential energy like a handle she could pull or a rock she could kick down a slope.

Quaking with an excitement so intense it's almost terror, she finds the gestate-an-egg power again and activates it over and over, not even bothering to read the pages of the mental library where the potential eggs are stored, just frantically filling herself with things whose emergence she controls; and when two-thirds of them are still growing and she feels weak and dizzy and barely conscious and her womb seems even closer to rupturing than it did at the start of all this, she finds the mental button figuratively labeled 'emit egg' and holds it down as hard as she can and her world whites out with pleasure.

Eggs pile up at the base of the fleshspire as the source of them cums her brains out (both more and significantly less literally than usual).

And then something... bigger... starts moving.

Its been inside her so long it almost feels like losing a part of herself, if she could feel anything other than ALL THE ORGASMS. It bursts out of her, snapping her pelvis like a twig, on the figurative heels of the eggs, a squirming mass of glowing green flesh like nothing biology has seen before. It lands on the eggs, crushing some of them under its bulk, while still more rushes out through her absurdly distended but improbably-intact vagina in a foot-wide river.

There's more of it than could possibly fit in her body. There's more of it than her body. Squirming rippling, folding endlessly in on itself. It is hundreds of pounds of malignant cancer, each cell an eldritch organ, all mashed together, growing and eating itself and growing fast enough to watch.

Once the last of it leaves her, it's like, it was already cancer but now its cancer has cancer. It bubbles out and collapses in, until finally, it falls still and the green glow begins to fade.

Her soul literally feels an empty-ish sense of relief.

Another dozen eggs pour out after it, ranging in size from tennis ball to award-winning watermelon.

Then, finally, the flood stops.

She slowly relaxes. For the first time in... she doesn't know how long, her head feels clear.

What... the fuck... just happened?????

While she's still coming to grips with her new reality, her shattered pelvis knits itself back together with a series of moderately disgusting sounds.

And... she can feel those eggs. Not just in the glow of her life-sight. She can feel them like parts of her body.

Slowly, hesitantly, she commands them to hatch.

The creatures that emerge are many and varied. When she finds one with the twisting patterns of four-dimensional biology, she tells it to die instead, but that still leaves... a bunch of other things. A weird little triceratops-ish critter, a scaly thing with hooves, a skeletal demonic winged monkey sort of deal, a pile of small gross worms with faces like teeny tiny mining drills and another pile of larger, less gross worms that look sort of like wee little sea dragons, blobs of dark red goo innumerable because they merge into each other whenever they touch...

...three entire human infants?????

She does not want three entire human infants!!!

One of the three dies before she gets her instinctive flinch reaction under control. She shudders. What the hell is she going to do with all this?

The creatures all move at her will like they're parts of her own body. She sees through their eyes, hears with their ears, feels with their skin and smells with their noses and tastes with their tongues. It's... intensely weird, still being immobilized while she's suddenly got a pile of babies grafted onto her—not her soul, this doesn't feel like a soul thing, her—for lack of a better word, lifeforce?? Whatever the hell one of those is? She is so very out of her depth.

The blobby red stuff is simplest, because it doesn't really have a body plan. She experiments with that first. It can move around and sort of blobbily pile up on itself and harden to a rocklike consistency that no longer feels alive and eat its dead rocky brethren to regain the lost blobmass—and it can also digest the eggshells and the crushed eggs and the dead baby and the giant pile of terrifying eldritch cancer—there's kind of a lot of red stuff now, and it tastes sweet where it's splashed into the mouths of her little minions, so she has them all eat it.

They grow real fast, on that diet.

She stops feeding the triceratops when it starts weighing more than she does. The two remaining babies, when she feeds them enough, grow into... clones of herself??? That... that almost makes some variety of sense? The cloned Scintillae eye each other warily.

—oh, oh she's an idiot—

She has the red goo eat the fleshspire she's attached to. Not the whole thing, just enough to free herself from it.

Eating the fleshspire takes... rather longer than it should, and the red goo swells by several times the the thing's entire volume before she comes loose in a deluge of viridescent blood. It doesn't actually react much to being maimed, though.

Her soul feels weird. Good weird? It might be a good weird.

She's in more than one body, but not more than one place. She's in all the places, but there's only one her. Except... if she tries, she can think creature thoughts with a creature, self thoughts with her other selves, and run her mind in all those directions at once. Her overarching meta-self has to maintain concentration to do it, but it's like she can will herself multitasking ability just by trying to do two things at once.

Her soul settles down. And suddenly it clicks. She is all of these bodies. The original isn't her 'real' body, just the oldest. Her soul is connected equally to all her human bodies, she can feel that, and she could easily loose track of which of the bodies she showed up in. And all the bodies are still connected to each other through something that isn't her soul. Inter-body coordination is effortless and complete.

Around her, the lake sloshes quietly, rippling against the bony shore.

She hasn't been seen, yet. There is no cry of alarm.

But there are enemy magical girls and horrorspawn on patrol. She will be seen, and she probably doesn't have long.

Right then. Time to do the obvious thing.

Which of her current bodies can make more eggs? Just the three human ones. Fine. The three human ones gestate five human eggs each. She has to have two of her hold down the third and cover her mouth so she can't scream, when it comes time for the laying, because human eggs are some of the biggest ones and it's not a pretty process getting them out of there. But she does it, and while that one is healing the five new clones are shoveling goo into their tiny faces and growing up, and then she's got more of her to make the next generation, and a tide of goo deconstructs the spire while the overflow pours into the lake to go hunting for tadpoles and rolls along the shore to free more girls from their captivity - and she sends some up to the alcoves too, while she's thinking about it - and every fifth Scintilla dedicates herself to producing more creatures from all her non-human non-eldritch templates - and the first batch of creatures scarf down goo as fast as they can eat it, and so do the rest as they come out -

In two minutes she's gone from three clones to thirty. They writhe in a puddle of dark red slime, continually producing more eggs. She finds she still has plenty of spare attention to run the rest of her army. Orgasmic birth is hardly a new concept, and the pain of producing these enormous eggs isn't that wild a variation. At least the egg powers let her come properly every time.

Should she worry about how many selves her soul can sustain? Well, she's not gonna. If she dies, fine. At least she'll have tried.

The red goo expands exponentially, gaining several orders of magnitude more mass than is evident in what it eats. If it eats everything eldritch indiscriminately, it could easily drown the entire lake with a fraction of the resulting mass, it could drown the whole cavern and everyone in it before it even finished eating the Elder Brain.

There are dozens of magical girls, split between the alcoves and the lake, and hundreds of unconscious mortal men hanging head-first into the water from the hive above.

Her soul will keep up with no strain at all until she has exactly 96 human bodies, but the moment she tries to hatch a 97th clone, a sudden debilitating headache strikes down all of her at once, and exactly 24 of her 96 human clones drop dead instantly, as if their entire nervous systems simply cease to exist.

It never got old, like Scyelen feared it might. Just being, this fuck-focused, this wet and ready, constantly, without end. She doesn't have room in her head for anything but FUCKABLE HOLE READY TO CUM, and she doesn't want there to be. She doesn't want any other priorities competing with HORNY. Being this horny is a glorious feeling. She'd fuck anyone, eagerly, and feeling that way is transcendent.

And then something hot and slimy is washing over her body and it feels nice but it's doing things and then she's assailed by light and sound and falling and there's red everwhere which is wrong and different and what is going on?!?!?

"Wh-wha-?????"

There's a... bizarre sensation, when a whole chunk of her network drops dead at once. But it clears up in less than a second, and then she's back in business. She brings the count back up to ninety-six and then doesn't try to fight the limit. Her bodies switch to pure army production.

Her goo targets the minimum amount of eldritch nonsense for its purposes. Just enough of the fleshspires to free the attached girls, just enough of the tadpoles to kill them, eat a little more when it needs more mass nearby. When it's covered the whole surface of the lake, it hardens itself into a shell to keep the tadpoles trapped inside and underneath it so they can't make trouble while they're being absorbed, then starts piling up on itself to grow toward the men and free them - but she reconsiders that when she realizes they're probably not going to be very helpful and might get in the way, so she cocoons them in defensive layers of goo instead.

She can't answer the question of the first girl she frees; she doesn't have any bodies close enough. But actually, she should probably do something about how concentrated in a single spot she is. It's not strategic.

Half her bodies climb aboard creatures, mostly the hoofed scaly ones but some of the armored elephants too. One turns toward the confused girl and heads in her direction while the rest scatter.

"Hi," she says when she arrives, a naked girl with waist-length hair plastered to her body with the same red slime that coats everything else in sight, riding a thing that looks like a bizarre hybrid of a moose, a hyena, and a crocodile and moves like an extension of her will. "I'm rescuing you." A thoughtful pause. "Sorry about the mess."

Hair?! Blink blink.

Wait, there was a word there. An important (terrifying, devastating) word.

Scyelen cradles her diminished but still-glowing belly like her life depends on it

(well, one hand is bent down to reach between her legs at the same time, mindlessly rubbing her swollen vulva)

as the word 'rescue' echoes in her mind over and over and over and over

between small, orgasmic shudders (not masturbating right now is literally inconceivable, the urge is so strong)

Rescue. "Rescue."

There are probably things she should do, but she's kind of forgotten how to make decisions. "Rescue."

(she shrinks back, clinging to one of the fleshspire's tentacles, watching devastated as red ascends over green, bathing the Lair in a bloody dimness, her womb crying out in protest at the numb absence of the radiance)

Maybe she can stay and help the horrorspawn rebuild after everyone else escapes. Is refusing to be rescued a thing she can do? But... she doesn't understand what the hell this other girl is or is doing (she has beasts?! Beast Mage? no raiment?!?!), but it looks rather thoroughly destructive. "Rescue..."

When the last of the green radiance cuts off, Scyelen flinches. Tears fill her eyes as she falls over and starts crawling towards the former lake, guarding her belly, finger-fucking herself even as she crawls on one elbow. She can still feel it. She can still feel the light. She just has to get closer.

And that is about when Vreth and his minions open fire on the horde of monsters and clones. Brilliant emerald beams of horrorlight lance down at the horde, from the hive above, from the rim of the Lair, by the hundreds. The beams feel like agonyecstasyhotcoldpressuretearing like anywhere they touch, all the nerves dial instantly up to their maximum settings and send incoherent noise.

For a moment, the horde falters as her collective consciousness scrambles to deal with the sensory assault—

—but half a second later she finds a way to rebalance it, rerouting incoming pain signals to whoever happens to be giving birth at the moment, and the pain flashes from crippling to exhilarating and she laughs, all of her at once, and turns in perfect coordination to begin her counterattack.

Flocks of slimy red imps with bulging bellies launch from the surface and fly toward the hive, unflinching in the storm of beams. As soon as they get close enough, they vomit red goo at the nearest solid object. Below them, continuous streams of eggs spew from writhing Scintillae, and hatch into more bony winged creatures, and gulp down more goo until they reach adult size and fill their stomachs to maximum capacity, and then they join their brethren in the air.

Any individual Scintilla flinches slightly on a direct hit from a horrorbeam. But if the beam is sustained they can rebalance immediately to compensate, and if not they bounce back just as fast. And none of what she's doing depends on any individual Scintilla.

As for Scyelen...

Goo surges up over her, hardening to a rocklike consistency around her legs. The Scintilla standing over her says distractedly, "Sorry but no," and rides away, leaving Scyelen covered in goo and stuck to the ground but still able to touch herself if that's her jam.

Scyelen lets out a piteous wail... and cums hard, because force was just used to control her and in her current state her experiential discrimination isn't any more granular or forward-thinking than that.

When she can think again, she stares longingly at the covered-over lake, and cries. "Nooo~ooo~o. P-Please! N-No. I don't want to go back."

(She doesn't have a spell. One of the advantages of her experimental soul is that, because she only has one isolated power that doesn't vary at all in what it does, she doesn't need her raiment to use it. She can copy one spell from any magical girl she's touching, and keep it as long as she wants. She can do the same if she touches the spell. If its the sort of effect that can be touched or affect her body. The red goo should qualify, but her soul can't feel it.)

The vreth-a-likes fall, flailing, when they're struck by the goo. Some of them dodge, though. And the ones that do, fight with speed and grace, stunning creatures with their horrorlight and breaking them with martial strikes.

Vreth himself is slippery like a shadow. He moves like a being that has centuries at least of martial arts experience, his face-beams are an order of magnitude more powerful, used with precision, and anywhere his cellophane tail-bell swipes, goo dies.

And he has help. Black Swan is suddenly there, red wings ablaze, belts whipping around them fast enough to produce cracks of thunder as she fights back to back with the horrorspawn.

This would be inconvenient if she was using the imps as anything other than a goo delivery mechanism. They're weak enough that even the horrorspawns' underpowered face lasers can slow them down, and Vreth's can snipe them right out of the air.

As it is, it doesn't actually matter. Dead imps are just handy biomass. The goo splashes against the structures of the hive and crawls up it, splashes against horrorspawn and experiments with which parts of them to eat in order to disable them as fast as possible, splashes against Black Swan's belts and hardens into encumbering rocks or attempts to nibble at them even though Scintilla is fairly sure that the goo's slow absorption is not going to do much damage to a magical girl's raiment. And the horrorspawn, once dead or disabled, are a fantastically convenient source of even more biomass. The hive gradually fills; the goo on the ground piles up, an inch deep, two inches, three, four, even deeper by the lakeshore—she keeps freeing the other magical girls, spares a thought to separate the goo-rock encumbering Scyelen's legs from the ground and pull the girl away from the lake on a rippling wave of goo flowing uphill in defiance of gravity—

This is probably a really stupid strategy. Probably if she'd had ten minutes to think about it she could've come up with something better.

But there's no denying it's effective.

She lets Vreth and Black Swan clear goo and imps from their immediate vicinity. She could push back, but she doesn't want to. If they get an overly optimistic impression of their ability to handle the stuff, she might be able to lure them deeper into the hive, close them off, and drown them. If not... well.

The imps, now that she's got her process streamlined, stop even bothering to fly back down to reload. They just smash themselves bodily into the hive, die, and feed the goo there, glued to the surface by goo-rock until their bodies are fully reclaimed.

Goo is not that great at absorbing hard materials, and the imps are individually pretty pathetic. Neither thing by itself could present a significant threat to the structural integrity of the hive.

But amid the indiscriminate imp assault, as they stream upward to fling themselves against any part of the hive they can reach, the ones that hit near the very top carry tunnel-worm eggs. The little wriggling worms, under cover of the goo-rock that sticks their hosts to the hive, aim their rock-chewing jaws inward and start boring through the connection between hive and ceiling, swallowing goo along the way as it rushes inward to fill the tunnels as fast as they're dug. Each tunnel starts out approximately the diameter of a particularly chubby pencil, but as the tunneler worms grow, the tunnels get bigger; when they reach adult size, after a few minutes each, the holes they dig are wide enough for a crouched human to walk along.

Vreth learns to dissolve the goo-rock as quickly as he learned to snuff the living goo, wiping it out wherever it might start to encumber him. Black Swan, likewise, is pouring all of her mana into her Tentacle mod. Any time a belt gets stuck she simply dispels it and deploys a new one. They can keep a fairly large area clear, and when they move together, they can cut a swathe through the monster army with ease.

But the fact of the matter is, the Elder Brain and its spawn are not prepared for anything like this level of resistance. It is obvious that whatever bio-weapon is being deployed so unexpectedly and effectively has the upper hand.

So when Black Swan slings Vreth onto her back and flies them like a scythe of death through the army of beasts, they ignore the other fighting and go straight to the center. Together, they dive and drill through the shell over the lake, exploding a hole in the goo-rock to reach the Elder Brain.

Still falling at high speed, they never hit the water. The space around them shards apart like a kaleidoscope for a bare second, before snapping back to smoothness as they vanish between the cracks. The Elder Brain folds in on itself, shrinking away in their wake. Not all of it, but enough. And what remains beneath the goo-rock quickly goes inert, plunging the Lair into darkness.

Many of the magical girls are too gravid to fight, even now that they're free. Many of those with manageable bellies are stuck in a frenzy of masturbation and can't contribute either. Of the girls from the alcoves, a decent number just curl up and cry. But even without raiments, even without spells, there are a few who come out swinging.

Sylvia launches herself out of her alcove with the speed and grace of a magical girl with the top-tier physical stats to go with her absurd mana capacity. She can cross fifty meters in a single leap and hit hard enough to liquefy even horrorflesh. She assesses the battlefield in an instant, and slices into the horror-forces wherever the beast army isn't curb-stomping them on its own.

Casey's belly is so swollen she can't even stand up, but she can pull flares and the materials to make floating lanterns out of her hammerspace Storage and send light sources up into the air to increase visibility for those combatants who have eyes.

A handful of others, scattered around, go into battle with nothing but their skin and fists, setting up the horrorspawn to die at the hands of the beast army more often than killing them directly, but.

The hive breaks free from the ceiling, and falls. It smashes through the now-dark lake, mere moments too late to do any damage.

The crash is apocalyptic, like dropping a skyscraper point-first into a football stadium. Except... most of the shockwave goes down, because the superstructure doesn't stop when it hits. It punches through. And the debris begins to fall from above.

Even greatly diminished, the shockwave that does blast outwards is enough to break legs and rupture eardrums, especially when it loops through the closed space multiple times as it fades. Thanks to the cushioning effects of the ocean of goo, nobody dies, but it does stop the battle cold.

The broken hive crumples, and its pieces scatter vertically, continuing to fall through the hole above, into the hole below... and back out of the hole above, forming a continuous, persistent rockfall. (Too slow. Its noticeable. Terminal velocity should be faster than that even in this gravity.)

Well. That happened.

She looks around. With countless eyes and numerous other sensors and ninety-six coherently synthesized instances of her new magical life-seeing power.

Scintillae near pregnant magical girls who don't look too busy ask variations on, "Can I try something to deal with the... that?"

Out of the few pregnant girls who aren't
a) crying or in shock
b) masturbating (or in two girl's one case, vigorously making out and humping)
c) screaming while doing some combination of the above
d) too injured to talk
there are a handful who just stare like they don't understand the question...

...and the ginger who made the lights they're all currently relying on, attempting a sickly smile. "What're you going to try?" Casey asks.

...and a loli. A disturbingly gravid loli, who none-the-less seems relatively collected. Samantha gestures down at her beachball-sized, horribly swollen stomach. "Yes you may. If only because I suspect I must take the year of peace, to fix this."

"Having the goo eat it. It'll probably be at least moderately horrible, sorry." / "Okay. It'll probably be kinda horrible but I'm pretty sure it won't kill you."

And the loli can have a goo abortion. Oh boy. Why this.

It hurts. It hurts like something is eating her internal organs and ripping chunks off her soul. Samantha writhes, screams of pain hissing out between clenched teeth, and her womb refills as fast as its contents can be absorbed.

Sylvia knows this sound. She dashes towards it, crossing the distance in seconds to arrive at Samantha's side.

Okay but what's happening? She slows down and squints mentally at the complicated twisting figures that she suspects are her new power's attempt to project four-dimensional biology into the three-dimensional space of its vision.

It doesn't slow down. The moment the multigirl focuses on her new sense, the loli lets out one last shriek of agony as she rapidly swells... and pops like the worlds most disgusting balloon. Her body cavity bursts open in an eruption of gore and buries her corpse under a fountain of dead cancer.

Meanwhile, a few of the other girls who participated in the fight want to know (from elsewhere located bodies) various variations on what the fuck. And Sylvia is conspicuously not glaring at Scintilla as she gently wipes Samantha's entrails off herself.

That... almost made sense?

She frowns at the mess, lost in thought. There's a space here, a reality, a physical object that just happens to extend in more directions than usual...

What happens if she...

The local instance dismounts her chimera and leans down to touch the pile of horrorcancer. It files itself in her library as a new instance of the same ?species? as the one she emitted earlier.

"They're more fragile when they're dead, looks like. I think I can still figure it out, though."

But for her next experiments she's gonna want to use someone more disposable. One of her instances who was doing imp production a minute ago switches to making a horrorcancer egg, this time on purpose. And she looks more closely at the tangles of lifeforce in the pregnant girls.

The egg is born dead. It refuses to hatch, and the cells inside are inert.

There's certainly something going on in some fourth (and fifth?) direction, with the pregnant girls. Their 'lifeforce' is nonsensical, contradictory, like a shadow of actual life that is somehow more real than the real thing while being fundamentally unlike it. But... the dead horrorcancer, it's there, it's, spilling out over the... there aren't direction words for this. But it fills the womb and then overspills into the... beyond, where the living flesh is pervaded by something... else.

"Um... did you change your mind?" Casey confusedly asks the clone with her, having been too far away to hear Samantha's dying screams.

"Got another volunteer," she says distractedly to Casey, "don't want to try the same experiment twice until I know more, this stuff's pretty dangerous but I'm starting to get a handle on it. Sorry for blanking out on you, I'm used to only being one person at a time, this hivemind stuff is throwing me for a loop. It's like every second I'm just coming out of ninety different daydreams but they're all things that actually happened."

Okay.

It would be stupid if this power did nothing but clone stuff.

All these weird chimeras look, at least partially, like combinations of real creatures in insane ways that she's not sure would actually work in real life, except that here they are, in real life, working.

The goo is not physically fast enough to clear out the horrorcancer before it explodes, and those structures—if she sort of shifts her perspective around a bit, she can peer ?up? into the interweaving of dead parasite with ?living?... soul? Those are almost certainly souls.

(With another part of her splintered attention, she decides that the constantly falling hive is irritating her, and has its goo clump together and intertwine and grow outward to catch the lakeshore on its way past. The way it's moving is weird enough that she takes extra care not to make too much goo in case space is being warped here in some sort of way that would turn out to instantly drown them all in massive quantities of goo if it stopped.)

Right. So.

What if.

She makes goo... and uses the implicit ability to combine different creatures' properties in ways that don't strictly make any sort of biological sense... to change that goo into a form that extends ?outward? in the same directions as the horrorcells?

This turns out to be a thing she can do.

It's really fucking weird, especially since goo doesn't seem to have any native senses of its own besides an extremely rudimentary form of touch/proprioception but it does serve as a relay for her lifesense and her lifesense is a fundamentally three-dimensional phenomenon. The overlapping perspectives threaten to give her a headache.

Four-dimensional goo appears in three dimensions as a darker, denser, slower-moving but much faster-eating version of its natively 3d cousin. And the two kinds turn out to be able to pass mass back and forth, as long as they're in contact. She interleaves them, having the 4d version spread through the 3d until they're marbled like her red-black lifeforce. This will be a good solution to any future goo-drowning issues. Also, it lets her get at considerably more horrorcancer surface area at once.

She eats the dead egg with it, and a handful of horrorspawn corpses, as proof of concept. Kind of a pity she can't do the live-fire test on one of herself, but unfortunately her power doesn't seem to be able to reanimate the dead... yet? Why does "yet" feel like the right word there...? Whatever. One problem at a time.

"Okay," she says to Casey, "further results look promising, do you want to be my test subject for attempt number two? I'm reasonably confident it won't explode this time."

The goo can slide uncomplicatedly over itself in the fourth axis, but it's heavy in a very different way, moving in that direction... but the parts that don't intersect normal space don't seem to have inertia on the first three axes in the normal way either. There is a a pressure, constant, flattening the goo into three-space where it is allowed to do so, but a little leverage can hold against it.

Sylvia gets the last of Samantha's guts off her skin, looks down at her pristine naked body, and adopts a thoughtful expression. A moment later, she is dressed in designer leather hip-huggers and a ruffled red silk blouse.

"So it was the Horror's light. Our Styles work now, since it's gone."

Sylvia folds her arms. "Thank you for freeing us, and thank you for trying, with Samantha here, but I believe I am obligated to ask: Who are you? And what, have you become?"

"What," Casey asks, "is the deal with that? Are you still... you? Because there is a very short list of things that could do half of what I've seen you do and an even shorter list of things that start as something else and none of those things make sense, except for possibly that you were killed and replaced by several gods."

Casey pauses, to wince in pain, because she is still unable to even sit up and her horribly distended belly hurts.

"Is this gonna kill me? Because that's actually tempting right now, but I think we're all gonna need what I've got in Storage to get out of here," she says, staring at the pillar of goo and debris in the middle of the lair. "That is probably a bad sign for getting out being simple. Have your... creatures... tunneled out in any other directions?"

"Hollow Witch Scintilla," she says to Sylvia, "and I have no idea, actually, it just kind of happened. I'm, uh, I actually had only been a magical girl for a week before I got captured and I have forgotten a lot of what my patron told me and none of it covered any of this bullshit," she waves vaguely at herself and the cavern and everything in it, "so I am kinda just super lost right now on like every conceivable level."

To Casey, "Honestly I have no idea what I am at this point but I have close continuity of experience with the person I was before all this and I seem to have basically the same personality adjusting for circumstances so I'm comfortable assuming that if I'm several gods now I'm several gods' worth of me. Yeah if you've got critical supplies in your Storage you probably should not volunteer. I tried reinfecting one of my copies so I could experiment on someone thoroughly expendable but I couldn't get the seed to germinate without the light to nourish it. I had all my tunnelers working on the hive but I can try pointing a bunch outward and see what happens." She does that.

Probably she should put her Style on but actually she kind of hates the whole concept of Style and also if she thinks too hard about how there are ninety-six of her and every single one of them is naked and covered in slime she might have a breakdown and that seems like a suboptimal use of resources.

Sylvia softens outwardly, but she's kind of concerned about the lack of experience in the girl with these bizarre new powers.

"I'm sorry to hear that, Scintilla. I am Sylvia the Gravitic Eclipse." She introduces herself in the classical style, of combining real name and half-title, out of habit.

"I would be glad to answer your questions, about this life. But first, I believe you should explain what you're trying to do, before you make an easily preventable mistake."

Casey lets out a pained chuckle. "That's not how... that's not what 'god' meannevermind. Not important right now. I guess we've got no choice but to trust your self-assessment. What exactly can you do?"

Tunneling into the wall reveals flesh, rock, more rock, flesh, and then... the lair. The tunnelers emerge into the cavern they leave, going the same direction, from the opposite wall.

Also, some of the rescued men are waking up and freaking out, out where Scintilla stashed them.

"So," she says to Sylvia. "I have this goo that eats things. The thing that went wrong with Samantha is that I was expecting the eldritch stuff to come out localized because that's what happened when I got rid of mine, and instead it sort of... fell... into... the rest of her body? Which I'm pretty sure is because it fell apart along the way, and the goo couldn't eat it fast enough to keep up and also couldn't touch it before it got here and it was getting here in bad places. So now I have made four-dimensional goo. Piloting that stuff is kind of a trip. It seems like it's taking care of all the tentacle-faced corpses just about as well as I was hoping, though."

And to Casey: "A... lot... of things? I seem to have acquired, uh... the best way I can describe it is a really fucked up bioengineering power suite from a paradigm totally unrelated to any kind of magic I've ever heard of." She pauses, integrating the sense-data from all her tunnelers. "Oh, uh, all roads appear to lead to Rome. By which I mean that all the tunnelers I sent out have ended up coming back into the cavern from the other side."

Sylvia's eyebrows shoot up at 'four-dimensional goo', but she considers for a moment before speaking.

"I'd be very careful on your next attempt. Imagine we are flat beings, like drawings on a piece of paper. A ring of matter would be an enclosed container. Now imagine you fill in that ring, and then add more and more paint or ink until it starts to form a lump, sticking up off the paper. Now imagine its still liquid, so it runs off, flowing over the ring. Now imagine that the... ring is made of a contiguous series of dots, and a drawing implement exists separately for each dot, a very fragile crystal needle no thicker than the dot, is still pressed to the paper, forming an extrusion of the ring. Now imagine that the extrusion is water-tight, and you can fill the resulting cylinder of needles with ink. Now imagine that ink is left to dry. What happens when you try to remove the dried ink from the wall of needles?"

"Damn," Casey exhales. "I've heard of this. It's a closed space loop." She frowns, trying to remember things she picked up over the years. "There're different kinds? I think we need to figure out what kind of hypergeometry we're dealing with, before we'll even know what we have to do to escape. Is there... gah, this hurts, is there, uh, 'odd kinetic behavior'. Inexplicable forces. That kind of thing?"

(The waking men are kind of freaking out a lot. A few of the other girls from the battle are talking to a few of them, but there're still like a hundred naked dudes figuratively flailing around, angry and confused and scared.)

The instance near Sylvia frowns thoughtfully. "It sort of depends how you're approaching the problem, doesn't it? You shouldn't try to scrape it off but, say, filling the cylinder with water and rinsing it out shouldn't be much of a problem... I really wish I could get this stuff to grow on its own, then I could just keep experimenting on myself until I got it right."

"...The hive was falling weirdly slowly?" she says to Casey. "Not sure if that counts. Where would I be looking for inexplicable forces and what kind of inexplicable behaviours would they have?"

The freaking-out men are kinda spread out, so one or two of them just so happens to wake up to the sight of this particularly fuckable girlbottom, sticking up with a hand between her thighs, moaning into the floor as she fingers her drooling cunt.

She's bound in goo-rock, stuck that way, not able to get away at all if someone decides to take advantage of her...

(The man who happens to wake up behind Scyelen takes in this sight and merely adds it to the MASSIVE TALLY of WEIRD SHIT he totally DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH. He stumbles away towards where there's more light, in search of EXPLANATIONS.)

"I apologize for the overly simplified analogy," Sylvia says. "It rather falls apart in the face of questions like that. The truth is that only the Puchuu really know how souls work. But I would intuitively expect that thinking of this as anything less that extremely delicate surgery will lead to ruin. It may in fact be easier to cart us all to a sufficiently powerful healer, and I anticipate that being nearly as inconvenient as... simply washing our hands of it and spending a year disembodied."

"No, that counts," Casey says. "That's good. That counts. That means... what," wince, "that there's... okay, um... check... top speed? If the same slowdown applies on all axes."

"...If trying to get the stuff out could cause worse damage than just killing us then it makes sense to—wait—I think I can see them?" she says to Sylvia. "The, uh, metaphorical crystal needles? Would there be one for each cell, disconnecting as the cells die...?"

"Okay, I can do that," she says to Casey. She considers and discards a few possible strategies before deciding on 'goo accelerator' as the most straightforward plan. A tunnel of goo-rock assembles itself, extending arrow-straight across the cavern, perfectly level; then a large blob of goo (all three-dimensional, for simplicity's sake) crawls inside and starts glorping itself along. Goo is not very fast on its own, but in an enclosed structure it can do clever tricks with pressure that she for some reason has instincts for. She sets up similar tunnels in a sort of three-dimensional asterisk, vertical and perpendicularly-horizontal, carving through the hive-pillar where necessary.

(Multiple confused guys accost various Scintillae, asking if she knows what the fuck is happening.)

In the life-sense, it is obvious that the 'crystal needle' analogy was a good try but kind of like trying to explain orbital mechanics with a car doing donuts in a parking lot.

Sylvia blinks, impressed. "Yes. You should not be able to see that. That is alarmingly impressive."

Below a certain speed, there is no weirdness. Above that speed, there is no weirdness... at first. But each traveling object seems to collect an increasing amount of inexplicable friction, even as it continues at the same speed. The fastest objects seem to collect resistance at a steeper curve, while the drag on objects in a middle range seems to level out.

"A lot of impressive things have happened to me today. Most if not all of them have also been alarming. Anyway, I think I can see them clearly enough that trying to clear out the stuff around them wouldn't be a completely crazy idea—I really wish I could've known this stuff before I tried what I did with Samantha but actually I think seeing it collapse was what let me figure out how to see it at all... but what happens if the links break, is it anything worse than just disconnecting your soul from your body the same way that happens anyway when you die?"

"Top speed behaves weirdly," she reports to Casey. "But it looks like the same weird is happening in whatever direction I try? It's, uh, up to a certain speed everything's normal and if I push stuff faster than that it collects drag and if I push it even faster than that it collects more drag faster."

(Various Scintillae shrug helplessly and say, "We were all kidnapped by eldritch four-dimensional squid-men? And then a bunch of even crazier bullshit happened?")

(But those aren't things. The world is supposed to make sense. Where even are they? Who is she? Why are there so many of her?!?! How did they get here? This is crazy. This kind of stuff doesn't happen in real life. All those monsters aren't going to eat us, right? Kill the monsters! They're alien too!)

One guy is rather delirious, calls her, "Lisa," and grabs her, clumsily trying to get his dick into her while mumbling about blueballs.

Sylvia hesitates. "I don't know of a reason why it would be different. Souls are pretty resilient. But I don't know exactly what you're seeing or what you think you can try." She glances around. "We ought to gather everyone up, so everyone knows what the options are, and may contribute their own ideas. Once they've... recovered... enough to participate. We're going to need everyone on the same page, regardless."

"Okay," Casey says. "That's promising. Erk! Um, okay, so explanations. Where is the missing kinetic energy going? Probably, its going into a direction we can't perceive. Which is good. Good sign. Is the... is the distance across the cavern, is it the same for the fastest test-objects, or are they covering more distance than should be there?"

"Yeah, that makes sense," she says to Sylvia. "And it'll be less of a headache for me than trying to have multiple conversations at once. Trying to have multiple conversations at once turns out to be kind of hard."

Scintillae around the cavern alert all the magical girls that they're being gathered together for a conference. The goo provides transport for those who can't or don't want to move on their own, or are too unresponsive for whatever reason; people who actually don't want to go, she hesitantly leaves alone. (This also seems like the time to free Scyelen from her rocky encumbrance.)

"That... is a very good question that it might take me a minute to answer," she says to Casey. "In the meantime, we're gathering everybody for a conference over there," she waves Sylviaward. "I can bring you, you don't have to get up."

The men get shrugs. Lots and lots of shrugs. And one or two instances of, "oh, yeah, I have like two hundred pet dinosaurs for unrelated reasons. You can ignore them."

...and one instance of "fuck... off???", whereupon she raises walls of goo to exclude all of the bewildered men from the conference because she just does not want to have to deal with a range of possible responses that includes That while she's attempting public speaking in a crowd of people all of whom know more than her about everything except her insane bullshit magic powers.

There aren't actually any magical girls who flat out refuse to go where Scintilla wants them.

A few of the non-pregnant girls notice Sylvia, and clad themselves in their own simulated outfits, but they're still the minority.

Of more concern is the sudden and egregious exclusion of all but a handful of the men. Before Scintilla can even open (one of) her mouth(s), a bunch of the girls speak up in indignant protest at being separated. Some of them were getting along fine, some of us were in the middle of calming them down, see? What about all the other ones who're even more confused because we didn't get to them yet?! And also there're like three time as many guys as magical girls! This can hardly be called "everyone" can it.

Scyelen herself makes an abortive attempt to stop fucking herself, but notices that she is not actually the last girl still doing that, as they're gathered up, and settles for doing so less enthusiastically and in a more attentive pose.

She isn't one of the girls who speaks up, but she agrees with them.

"We can have a second conference once we've figured out the magic stuff a little better but I am dealing with a lot of things right now and I don't want explaining everything to a bunch of people even more confused and ignorant than I am to be one of those things until after we've looked into whether I can fix the eldritch pregnancy thing and what the fuck is up with the wraparound."

Ugh ugh ugh she hates everything about this situation she should just leave them all alone to argue it out and then kill themselves no she should not do that that would be terrible.

(She doesn't... entirely notice... that when she speaks she does it in near-perfect unison with the dozen or so of her bodies scattered throughout the enclosure.)

The pervasive chorus of her voice is startling enough that her words get listened to. There is grumbling.

"C-can you fix the pregnancy thing?" asks one girl. "It's, it's starting to hurt..."

This gets a small clamor of agreement.

Sylvia steps into the crowd, carrying Samantha's remains. "This was the first attempt. It is an option, but we may have more pressing priorities."

Casey takes advantage of the ensuing silence to gasp out a pained summary of what they've already figured out about the space loop.

"Hey! I know that!" another girl chimes in. "I recognize that behavior. I studied this in topology. I think we're at the bottom of a five dimensional hyperbolic funnel. When we move, we're circling around the funnel's axis, but the faster we go, the higher up the funnel our momentum raises us. That would mean, to break out, we just have to go fast enough to climb the gradient until we reach normal space!"

"I... might be able to accelerate somebody that fast but I'm not sure I can do it survivably for the pregnant ones—it didn't take much damage to the part of the seed that's in our space before the whole thing collapsed, and when they collapse they do, uh, that." The one of her who is speaking gestures at Samantha. "I think I have a way to fix them that won't do that but the dead stuff is kinda tangled up in the connections between your soul and body and letting it move around too much will jostle them and might break a bunch and apparently we're not sure that's safe? Or, like, we're pretty sure it kills you but not sure if it might do anything worse? It didn't do anything worse than kill Samantha when hers collapsed, as far as I can tell, but it was kinda killing her pretty hard already."

"It might be safer for us, to just die and wait to come back," another girl points out, "but what about all the guys? They're just human. If they die, they'll be, y'know actually dead forever."

"I think," says one girl, hispanic and curvy, and on the same level of gravid as Casey, "I think I'll risk it."

Topology girl suddenly bolts upright. "Wait wait wait!!! Disembodied souls have non-euclidean motive force! It's..." she stops herself. "The point is, anyone who dies down here is stuck. You can't climb the gradient as a soul. You can only move in three-space because you basically have no intersecting mass! In higher dimensions it'd be like trying to move a mountain!"

This starts a clamor over whether or not topology girl is actually right about that, or if there's ways to carry souls up with them. Binding to a power artifact? Nobody down here's a spirit mage and they can't use their spells anyway!

"Um!"

Oh crap did she seriously. Why. Now people are looking at her. (Her hand freezes between her legs.)

"Um, I'm an oddball. A mimic. If anyone's got one spell that can solve all our problems. I can. Copy it. And use it. Even with the psychic block."

Oh boy is that ever a relatable expression of social fear on that girl's face.

"........there's... an off chance I might be able to experimentally reembody people but that seems like probably a much worse idea than just leaving one of me here to wait the year and then break out the stragglers," she says. "Anybody got useful spells for the mimic? —Oh, and I figured out how to reconstruct my aria early on but I could never get around the block to say it properly, we might be able to crack that and then—I actually have no idea if transforming with this gunk inside you is any safer than trying to take it out my way, damn. But those of us who aren't currently pregnant could transform if we figured out how and that seems like it expands our options a lot."

What's useful depends on what they're trying to do. What are they trying to do, exactly?

And the general sentiment is that the boredom of being stuck down here for a year without a body would be torture, but if none of them have a way to carry Samantha's soul with them, that ship has already sailed. If they're not going to abandon this place at the first opportunity anyway...

"The transformation is thoroughly unlikely to be inhibited physically. It's designed to chew through anything in its way," Sylvia puts in. "The mind block is not an active spell, of that much I'm certain. Whatever it changed, isn't wearing off naturally, and that is much more concerning, I believe."

All of the girls who fought in the battle and a few more volunteer to try Scintilla's trick anyway. Shanie, the lanky Lightning Mage, is among them. She gives Sylvia a thumbs up.

"It's sort of hard to explain but, um—you can guess-and-check to match words against the ones in your soul and then figure out how to fit them all together. Mine is—" It's been a while but she practiced enough that it comes back to her near-instantly. Her voice drops out of habit, though not quite all the way to the secretive murmur of her early days. "Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough; I am Hollow Witch Scintilla! ...or at least I think so. But I can't get it to work right."

The one's who're trying, try. It's a slow process, and the various sentences they try don't work when they try them.

Meanwhile, topology girl suggests that their best shot at climbing the gradient is probably to use the big hole where the lake and hive used to be, and start out by falling. She does some math, based on the speeds of Scintilla's test objects, and comes to the conclusion that the width of the gradient is going to be more of a problem than the speed. The space around them will seem to stretch out by several orders of magnitude, leaving them in near vacuum by the time they're near the top of the hyperbolic funnel.

One of the few included men is pretty sure the stuff under the fleshscape is lunar rock, which means that even if they survive the gradient, they'll either slam into solid rock or be flung into even more vacuum. At that point, body-death would probably be better than not for the majority of the magical girls, but they need to think of some way to keep the men alive. Is this red goo and goo-rock... air-tight?

"Oh," she realizes, "those of you who know each other could tell your friends their arias if you remember them, that should speed things up—" And she tries a couple of cursory tests and concludes, "The rock is a little porous by itself but the goo can seal it pretty good. I can hold pressure with it."

"For the Valor of humanity, all else shall fall behind the Eclipse," Casey says to Sylvia.

Sylvia gasps. "No. It's that easy?" She repeats the words, her voice echoing with resonance of the words, and her elegant red evening gown raiment kaleidoscopes out onto her body.

With a wide genuine smile, Sylvia gets Shaine's attention and quotes the lanky girl's aria at her, then does the same for Casey, before levitating over to Scyelen and quoting her aria as well. Shanie transforms immediately, jagged golden lace and white-silver chains that leave nothing to the imagination, but Casey knows better than to try with her body in such a gravid state.

Unfortunately, none of the other magical girls knew each other before all this (not even the pair who were making out earlier and are now clinging to each other in a tight cuddle), but this raises their spirits quite a bit, and they set to rediscovering their arias with a will.

...is no one going to quote the Scintillae's aria back at them? Seriously?

Scyelen has complicated and conflicted feelings about their rescuer, but failing to return that knowledge is just... doing it wrong. She isn't even sure what 'it' is, in this context, but.

Scyelen doesn't want to get up, so she crawls, slowly, and plops down at the nearest Scintilla's feet.

"Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough; I am Hollow Witch Scintilla," she says softly.

"...Thanks," she murmurs.

And she repeats the words, this time for real. They click together in her mind and trigger the transformation in her soul.

Her raiment, when it forms, is a flowing black robe or dress... at least at first glance. On a closer look, though, the cloth is patterned in a thousand rippling shades of midnight. Black and blue and green and purple, all so dark that in the low light of the cavern it's almost impossible to tell the different colours apart, and gleaming with a faint iridescence that further confuses the eye. On top of that base, a tracery of metallic blue embroidery sweeps in delicate curves, bringing to mind the movement of smoke or mist or water. Her swirling hems offer glimpses of matte black boots with glossy detailing and accents in that same pale metallic blue, shaped comfortably with a rounded toe and low practical heel. Under her slightly belled sleeves, her wrists and forearms are wrapped in black bracers whose pattern echoes the boots.

The transformation overtakes all her bodies at once, and in unison they take a deep breath and relax considerably. Then they arrange blobs of marbled red goo into accessories - fingerless gloves extending the bracers, or a thick film coating the boots. Slightly different for each instance, and always something that looks at least basically reasonable at a glance, an intentional addition rather than a slimy mess.

"Okay," she says, when it looks like those who are going to recover their arias immediately have managed it. "Where does this leave us in terms of resources?"

Sylvia takes charge. "Clear us a path, in the debris-fall. Enclose us all in something air-tight, sturdy, with a way to see out, and drop us. I will handle the rest."

"But rock splat!" one girl speaks up.

"Do we have a Stone Mage?" Sylvia asks.

The heavily gravid hispanic and curvy girl from before raises her hand. "Quakestrider. I've got a fissure spell. But I can't transform like this, my raiment'd cut me in half."

Sylvia nods. "Malevolent Mirror here will copy your spell and clear the way for us."

"It's touch-range..." Quakestrider points out.

"I have Environment," Sylvia says. "Mirror and I will ride on the outside of Scintilla's vehicle, and clear the way."

Wait, what.

"The only question that remains," Sylvia says, "is if we can do this before Scattered Moment's soul de-earths."

Sylvia pauses. "Scintilla. You can see how fast it is progressing, and you know best how quickly you can work. Can we do this before we lose her?"

"I think so. And I can leave some of me behind in case she doesn't make it."

The pillar of debris shivers slightly. The darker shade of four-dimensional goo spreads quickly through it, and then the whole thing sort of... withers, like cotton candy in hot steam. At the same time, a spherical shell forms on the lakeshore, and the goo walls excluding the men are rapidly consumed by the living goo spread across their surface. The shell is coated inside and out with glistening red slime, and has an opening near the bottom, and—she frowns slightly, and the nearest body to the shell ducks inside— "If you're riding on the outside do we still need windows? I think I can do them but it'll slow down construction a little. Unless somebody around here can make glass really fast."

Noncommittal muttering.

"If you trust me, no, it does not need to have windows," Sylvia says. "Skyburst, go explain what we're doing to the rest of the men."

Shanie goes and orates at the crowd of confused naked guys.

"Okay, then we can start loading now. I'll help anyone who has trouble moving on their own."

Some of the girls who couldn't fit into their raiments are still able to walk, but slowly, while others, like Casey and that Stone Mage can only drag themselves. It would probably be faster to just move everyone together.

Scyelen is definitely the last one still touching herself now. She hisses out her transformation aria, thankful at least that her raiment's absurd skimpiness is finally useful for something besides making her feel like a poseur; it covers so little that her belly doesn't get in the way of it at all. The tiny piece of pink metal between her legs folds into existence and separates her fingers from her vulva.

(The last of the sweltering urgency and throbbing receptiveness that she struggled to keep alive in her core slowly begins to fade away in the face of anxiety and pain and worry and failing not to think about what happens if they make it home. It feels like dying.)

Scyelen wipes away a tear and leaps over the crowd to Sylvia's side.

She starts getting everyone loaded, double-checks the cavern with lifesense, finds a couple of unconscious guys across the lake and drags them in on a tide of slime.

The interior of the sphere is big, and furnished with little covered seats people can tuck themselves into, lined up in rows along the walls; there's a variety of designs to accomodate different body types, pregnancy levels, and seating preferences. She's not sure how bumpy this ride is going to be, so she pulls in plenty of goo, keeping it mostly out of the way but ready to slide into place to cushion people against impacts if necessary.

(She keeps a little of the four-dimensional goo next to everyone with a pregnancy. If somebody's eldritch parasite gets jostled too hard and starts collapsing, she wants to at least have a shot at catching it before it kills them.)

She loads all but a few of herself into the vehicle, along with a bunch of unhatched eggs, and has most of her bodies line themselves up along the ceiling with the eggs and stick themselves in place with goo-rock. Some of her stay free in case they need mobility inside the shell, some of her stay behind in case they can't break out before Samantha's soul finishes detaching from her body, and one of her waits by the outside of the shell and says to Sylvia, "There should probably be one of me on the outside with you for communication purposes?"

"Perhaps. If you are willing to risk one of you to vacuum if I am distracted," Sylvia says, as she picks up Scyelen and levitates them both over the hole.

Three spells reach out and wrap around the goo vehicle. One can freely increase or decrease acceleration due to gravity. The second simply inverts the effects of gravity on the target. And the third spell skews the accelerations off-center, with diminishing returns as the skew approaches a right angle. With her mana capacity, these three spells combined allow arbitrary movement of very large objects.

The goo vehicle rises into the air and drifts out over the center of the hole.

Scintilla sticks herself to the outside of the shell, closes it up, and forms some exterior handholds in case Sylvia and/or Scyelen turn out to need them. She doesn't provide an entrance; she can just airlock people in and out by reshaping the shell as necessary, if they do land in vacuum once they're free.

"Can you make light?" Sylvia asks, glancing around at the floating lanterns that are their only current means of seeing.

"Not currently. And I don't think we have the time to experiment."

Sylvia spins herself and Scyelen upside down, and lands them on the underside (actually the front) of the goo vehicle.

"In that case, this is about to get very exciting," Sylvia says. "Scyelen, I am also going to need you to light the way."

"Um. Okay?"

Deep breath. "Edge Tracer!"

A gleaming metallic pink chakram circles into existence in her hand. She splits it into two identical rings of sharpness, and holds them at the ready. A push on her mana lights the bladed rims of the chakrams with a rippling white glow.

Sylvia cuts the skewing spell, and the inversion spell, and ramps the amplification spell up to dangerous levels.

There is no sense of acceleration, but the goo vehicle abruptly plummets, screaming down into the former lake.

The vast cavern of the lair passes by, once... twice, thrice, and more, accelerating as they pick up more and more speed, wind resistance tearing at the outside of the vehicle.

And then...

It gets dimmer, first. And it seems to take longer to complete the loop through the cavern, even though they're moving faster than ever. It's like they're shinking, or like the cavern is expanding outwards around them. The air gets thinner as the walls of the cavern grow more and more distant, allowing them to pick up even more speed.

Soon, the cavern is nothing but distant shadows, and the edges of the lake-hole are too far away to see as they pass through at what seems like a crawl.

The Scintilla on the outside of the shell watches in fascination.

Abruptly, out of the darkness, come walls of gray stone, screaming by at a terrifying speed. They're in a tube of lunar rock, a tube that is rapidly shrinking.

"We're at the top!" Sylvia calls. "Scye-"

Scyelen doesn't wait for instructions.

She can see exactly what she needs to do, and she has exactly the tools to do it.

Folding her body back to brace herself against the goo, she hurls both chakrams out ahead of them. The blazing discs arc out to either side, closing in on the walls of rock as the walls of rock close in on then.

Scyelen activates her Barrage module.

Hands slam together, a ring of prismatic light forming around her fingers. She pulls her hands apart, the ring rotates and expands. Push. Lines sprout from the ring, new rings form, and the rings of aurora extend down the invisible connection between her and her weapons.

Planar Shear. The Stone Mage's spell. Scyelen waits, waits waits, the light from her discs sharpening against the rock as the distance closes, hand on the first ring of her Barrage

impact

and Scyelen casts with all her might as her chakrams explode, rock flashing over into plasma as she loses the discs... but not before her Barrage's charge lances out and shreds the rock around them just as the tunnel snaps down and meets hypersonic goo.

Scyelen is ripped from her hand-and-foot-holds, loses her grip on Sylvia, tumbling, air rips itself out of her lungs, nothing but absence to replace it.

Stars... and a gleaming blue marble.

Black wings snap outward from Scintilla's back; they come apart fluidly, moving almost more like smoke than any solid material, into twisting strands that reach for Scyelen, catch her, and pull her back in.

(The shell holds up against the rock even better than Scintilla was expecting; she only has to clear a little bit of moon gravel out of the layer of liquid goo in between her inner and outer shells. Well, maybe a moderate amount of moon gravel. But none of it penetrated farther than the surface of that middle layer.)

Scyelen flails and clings to Scintilla, gasping as she tries to breathe the nothingness.

The much-abraded goo vehicle soars south over the lunar surface.

Sylvia reaches out and catches Scyelen's hand, allowing the smaller girl to breathe.

"You can take her back inside," Sylvia says to Scintilla, the words distorted and strange-sounding as they pass through the thin artificial atmosphere around Scyelen's body.

The outer layer opens up, and the goo swallows the girl. Goo-rock seals itself over her and then shrinks inward, being eaten away on the outside and reformed on the inside, while the inner layer splits open and an interior Scintilla pulls her through.

"So," says the exterior Scintilla to Sylvia. "Now what?"

Scyelen resumes clinging. She will stop if Scintilla makes her stop but she's not gonna stop on her own.

"That depends," Sylvia says. "But, getting everyone to a healer should feature."

The lunascape races by beneath.

"For now I'm heading towards Shackleton Crater."

She doesn't know where that is, but it sounds like Sylvia does, so sure.

(It's weird being separated from the herselves remaining in the crater, but it seems to be going fine. Her soul isn't upset about it and neither are her bizarre new powers. With them out of range of her lifesense, she now has two separate sense-areas, one centered on the goo vehicle and the other encompassing the dome.)

Scyelen's clinging is... actually kind of nice. Scintilla does not object.

Oh good. Scyelen kind of needs all the cuddles.

Clingnuzzle.

It just isn't in her to hold an irrational grudge. It is completely unreasonable to resent Scintilla for rescuing her. She probably couldn't have saved everyone else without...

Actually, what in the actual fuck is even up with the Sctintillae Horde? Some bizarre novel interaction between Beast spells and horrorfetus? Except she can feel Scintilla's spells and they're water spells. There's no doubt this is a Water Mage. Nothing about this makes sense at all and that really bothers Scyelen.

It it still several minutes of clinging before she brings herself to mumble, "Your powers don't make sense at all."

"Oh, believe me, I'm well aware."

"There's... nothing? About how they work, or how it feels to use them? That gives you any clue how or why or what the fuck? You just... spontaneously turned into an unprecedented hive-queen-alien for no reason."

"Yeah pretty much! I mean... it, uh, it arrived in a very... noticeable way? There was definitely an event that occurred, before which I did not have inexplicable hive queen powers and after which I did. But they didn't, like, come with a user manual as such. As far as I can tell from my very limited experience so far they do run on coherent principles, they're just principles that have literally nothing to do with any other form of magic I've heard of."

"How much magic have you heard of?"

"Admittedly mostly just magical girls. I did... not have time to get out much before, uh, this. —What year is it?"

...she has to think about this for a moment. "It's.... probably not 2028 yet?"

"And, arrived? Like, what do you mean, arrived?" This sounds like, the only clue. Scyelen has to poke it.

"Uh, arrived like physically. Like, a physical... substance... showed up, attached itself to my body, absorbed itself into my body, and then I had crazy powers."

Blink.

"Okay. That's something."

Pause.

"Where did it come from, though. Do you think it could be, some kind of, rival... horror... thing?"

"May...be? I guess? But why me, why now, why... this?"

"Why anything," Scyelen agrees softly.

Silent, pensive clinging.

And then it slips out, as she runs her fingers over the dead lump in her belly, and she doesn't even care. "I h-hate that it's over, that they're g-gone. I don't know how to go back..."

Scintilla hugs her. Nearby goo ripples and crowds closer, but Scintilla is not really sure if goo snuggles are an appropriate response, so she stifles that instinct.

"That's... yeah," she says. "It was... something."

That... almost sounded like... no, it can't be. Scintilla started the revolt she can't possibly feel the same way Scyelen does. But...

"It was... everything. It w-was... p-per," Well, not literally perfect. In fact, there are a lot of ways it could've been nicer on an emotional level, actually. But... "It was the best thing... that's ever... h-happened to me... and that pr-probably ever will."

"You know," she says, thoughtfully, "I feel like, just in principle, there's got to be a way to improve on it."

Well that's not an egregiously mixed signal or anything.
(Actually, it probably actually isn't. Scintilla is probably just being nice and not a judgmental jerk.)

What it is, in Scyelen's experience, is a useless and irksome sentiment. "In principle, there's ways to do lots of stuff y'can't actually do," she says bitterly.

"—never mind," she says, quiet and small.

That... was not the reaction Scyelen was expecting. But it is painfully familiar.

"Um." More hug? Does more hug help? "Was that a proposition. I... its just that's the kind of thing people usually say to me when they're being dismissive, so..."

More hug is very good.

"Um. That makes sense. I just—I've done a lot of impossible things today and this seems like a much simpler problem to solve and—I think I might understand a little of what you mean because—there's things I miss too. But... I wasn't really thinking about... how to solve it exactly... I'm making a mess of this, sorry."

Pathetically hopeful look. "...you miss it too?"

"I—yeah. Not as much as you but—yeah."

Tiny, sad smile.

"I feel like, I was waiting my whole life for something like that to happen to me. I didn't know I was, but I was."

"I feel..." She sighs. "I don't know. It's complicated."

But... maybe goo snuggles would be okay after all.

"...complicated?"

Goo snuggles would be extremely okay, and also hot.

The goo snuggles up. Sort of tentatively.

"I'm... I was... not a very happy person, when I met my patron and she convinced me to be a magical girl. And then I spent a week still not being a very happy person but sort of adjusting to the idea that I might end up doing something meaningful with my life. And then this. And now... well, I guess I have done something meaningful with my life...? And... it's... it was... it was awful but I think it was awful in mostly exactly the ways I like. Or maybe I didn't like awful things before but I do now. And I really don't know how to feel about any of it. Except that I'm glad I managed to rescue everybody." A pause, a hint of a blush— "And I want you to have nice things."

Scyelen melts in a very encouraging sort of way. Being touched is just Good, no caveats, terms, or conditions. That might've been more ambiguous, before, but after all that's happened? Clear as crystal.

Being touched by someone who 'wants her to have nice things' is separately awesome, and now she's blushing.

"Thanks."

"I... don't think it makes sense to talk about liking awful things? If it's awful, you don't like it. If you like it, it's not awful. If there's some other way for awful to work... well, aren't, like literally all the problems because what is and isn't awful is different for different people?"

"I think you can like and not like something at the same time. Or, I can. And have done a lot of that in the last two years."

"I suppose," Scyelen says doubtfully.

Wiggle. She can wiggle. The goo should squeeze her more.

"I think you can, not like that you like something?" Scyelen offers. "Um, like, I barely've had sex, before all this, not because I didn't want to, but because I... well, in retrospect, because it was awful for me when someone I was dating... tried to respect the boundaries I apparently don't even have? I'd hear about 'awful' things happening to other girls, and I'd feel jealous. And it is awful, feeling like good people would hate me if they knew what I was feeling. But it isn't even slightly awful that I got raped by monsters for months, because... my feelings about it can't hurt anyone by being insufficiently awful, and my feelings are the only place awful can live."

"That makes sense. I... It was awful for me in different ways than that. I don't... I don't think I'm going to retire, now, but for a while I wanted to."

(The goo snuggles closer, cradling them both.)

"I think... there's things about what happened that are going to keep hurting me for a long time. Even though I liked it. And that... liking it doesn't mean it didn't hurt me, and being hurt doesn't mean I didn't like it."

"I guess that makes sense."

It's actually relatable, in a way.

"I... I'm not the same, as I was, either. I could, handle, real life, before, and I don't think I can now. I'm trying not to think about it, but I doubt I'm going to be able to stop myself from... endlessly pining to the exclusion of all else for a new place where I can simply exist as a thing to be fucked."

Sigh.

"I guess the difference is, that's who I want to be. That's who I've always wanted to be, who I've never had the courage to try to be. If I had, like, actual goals, in life, I think I'd feel the way you do?"

...goo snuggles. Goo snuggles seem like the appropriate response here.

"I don't even really have... ambitions, like, as a person, I just... don't seem to be able to..." She sighs, trying and failing to find the right words, and absently pets Scyelen's hair. "Like - there's so much important shit to get done and I've got - maybe not the best tools to do it with but different ones from anyone else, now - and I can't just not? Normally I would be curling up in a corner and crying for days but instead, this. Because things are important."

Mmm, goo snuggles and petting. Shiver.

"Important things are such a drag," she snarks softly. "If you want to cry for days, you should, even if I don't quite know what you'd be crying about...."

Or maybe she does know.

"I don't think I mean ambitions, exactly. I mean, the shape of the parts of who you are that rub against the world around you, which... have been eroded into a new shape for both of us, by what we experienced. I... approve of the result, even if it's going to make my life harder, but you... don't."

Pause, and a tiny smile.

"I understand seeing a problem, knowing you can do something about it, and just having to do the thing, 'cause it would just be distressing for the problem to continue to exist when you know how to solve it, though."

She smiles a little. "Yeah, exactly." Pet pet. "You get it."

Eee. She gets someone's thing! She social successfully.

"This is really nice," she says, wiggling against the embrace of goo and basking in the petting. "You could... do so many fun things with this. I should probably actually stop thinking about how many fun things you could do to me with your goo."

"I think you can think about that if you want."

"Um, you already know how I feel about... things happening to me. If you... wanted to do a thing. To me."

Aww. Awww! She's so cute! Unreasonable amounts of cuteness are happening!

"Well," she says, "but how do I know which things are most fun to do to you, if you don't tell me what you're thinking about?"

Although...

She pays closer attention to how Scyelen's body looks in her lifesense. Much, much closer attention. And she pets her some more, thoughtfully.

A moment passes. Then Scyelen stops resisting the urge to dispel her raiment. It folds out of reality (the retreating metallic c-string releases a flood of juices) and she wiggles more firmly against the goo.

"It doesn't have to be the most fun thing!" she says with a blushing smile. "That's the beauty of it. The most fun thing is being put where I'm wanted."

Her eyes go distant for a moment, and she shivers.

"The thing I liked most, I think, was... my internal experiences not mattering to them being a good thing. All the things I was scared of, at first... those fears were baseless because they treated me like an object, made me feel good things not because they wanted me to feel good but because that was just the kind of object I was. There was no point being proven or emotion being expected of me. My body was into it, so nothing else mattered. It was... freeing, the way being alone with some really good porn and plenty of time, is, except I was the porn..."

Where was she going with this?

(Her body is still in pain, from the dead lump in her womb, but its low-key. She's very aroused, nearly on edge already.)

Scintilla snuggles her and pets her and looks very closely at her lifeforce. If she pays close enough attention, she can watch individual cells divide, individual nerve signals flash from body to brain and back. The flow of hormones, the dilation of blood vessels. She doesn't fully understand it all yet... but she could learn.

"You know," she murmurs, again with that slow thoughtful air, "I bet you could be really useful for investigating my new bullshit magic powers."

Goo presses closer against Scyelen's body, wrapping her up in a firm embrace. Everywhere, leaving just her head free so she can breathe. And—being very careful of that dead lump—Scintilla watches the pretty lights, and... pursues interesting nerve activations.

Scyelen makes an interested noise, and then the goo buries her and starts fondling her, and that is way more important than whatever she was about to say.

Is orgasm an interesting nerve activation? Because that's happening now.

There isn't much outward sign, beyond a little whimper and tremble. It's just a little one that barely counts. But it's very obvious in the life-sense. It's far less obvious, but still discernible, that the nerve-signals driving it could easily be many many orders of magnitude stronger before reaching anything like a pain threshold.

Yes, that definitely qualifies as interesting! But you know, it's not really science until you replicate your results.

Those results are so, so, so replicable.

Scyelen, apparently, has a hair-trigger and no detectable recovery time. (The implications for her experience at the mercy of the horrors maybe explains some things, if not others.)

Gosh. What a way to be.

Scintilla investigates the effects of assorted possible goo behaviours on Scyelen's nervous system. It's honestly fascinating in its own right even if it weren't also really fun to be holding someone in her lap and making them come like a dozen times in a row.

At least a dozen times.

When she's less on edge, she, tautologically, takes longer to cum of course, but it takes barely any stimulation to keep her going, even the lightest, slowest touches eventually make her cum again; there just don't seem to be stimulation levels low enough to find a real plateau. But she isn't sensitive either; fast, hard stimulation has her eyes rolling up in bliss as she cascades from one orgasm right into the next, but it doesn't overwhelm her at any level where remaining discreet in front of the other passengers is remotely plausible.

The band of intensity in which she is genuinely multi-orgasmic is quite narrow, however. Below, the stimulation isn't enough to bring her off again right away, and above, the orgasm is satisfying enough that it winds her down enough for a gap to form. Maybe there's a second, higher island of stability? But reaching it without being rude to everyone else is probably impossible.

She will refrain from being rude. Even though she's terribly curious. Instead she experiments to find the shape of the multi-orgasmic intensity band.

Scintilla is cheating really hard and can find it easily.

Scyelen is lost in ahegao land, and accordingly completely forgets how to keep herself quiet, so Scintilla should probably do something about that herself. (It isn't like anything could be claustrophobic after the fleshspire worm things, and Scyelen was getting off on even that. She may be something of a claustrophile.)

She can keep her Scyelen appropriately muffled.

Something—flickers? Sparkles? Something happens, anyway, when she has that thought. She pauses, rewinds her train of thought, considers her conceptual phrasing. Yes, she was getting a little possessive there. And why did this excite her bullshit magic powers, exactly? That's kind of concerning. She's kind of concerned.

...she is trying to investigate her powers here, though, not just get Scyelen off.

She concentrates on that state of mind, brings it into focus. And something... shifts... and it feels a little like she's holding out her hand poised to scoop up Scyelen's whole self and take it, keep it, make it hers.

She considers whether to ask first. Then she considers everything she knows about Scyelen.

Gently and carefully, tentatively, cautiously, she ?closes? her ?hand?.

If this situation were being represented as a text adventure, then Scyelen would be getting a prompt right about now that looked something like:
DO YOU BELONG TO THE HIVE QUEEN? [ Y / N ]

Scyelen is a little busy cumming her brains out, but the prompt can pluck the wordless (um.... probably not...?) out of her mind.

She feels resistance, and her power's instincts tell her to grab harder, hold tighter, crush that restless spark until it submits to her will—

...she does not think she is going to do that, actually??? That seems bad???

She 'lets go' instead, and returns her focus to the other thing. This has been a worrying interlude.

Muffled moans and whimpering continue to emit faintly from Scyelen's goo-covered mouth.

Gosh she's really cute. So cute. Exceptionally cute.

...Scintilla is tempted to try the thing again.

Is she tempted to try it again because she's discovering some unexpected things about herself, or because her powers have some sort of underlying urge to possess people? Is there even a difference? What if Scyelen doesn't want to be her experimental subject for this particular application of her powers? Scyelen sure seems like she likes being an experimental subject, conceptually as well as practically, but it's kind of hard to know for sure.

...maybe she'll give it one more try and then postpone further attempts until they have had an actual conversation about the extent of Scyelen's consent to participate in powers testing.

She moves more confidently this time, and the power lands with more force, less of a prompt and more of an emphatic suggestion. She's still not going to fight if Scyelen blocks her, though. That definitely seems like it would be going too far.

The resistance is the same as before. It isn't much resistance. It doesn't take a fight to overcome it.

And—

Oh. Oh that's fascinating. Oh that's—

There's a strong sense of this creature is mine, when she looks at Scintilla's lifeforce, and a hint of a marbled red-black shadow overlaying it—not changing anything, just... enfolding, enclosing, marking.

But—it almost looks like—

She tests it on her creatures first, back in the cavern. They don't regenerate rapidly by default but she can heal them, if she pushes on that connection just right. It wasn't obvious until she saw it from this perspective; the connection is similar, but Scyelen isn't a part of herself the same way, and healing your belongings is apparently a more natural and obvious action than healing your body parts.

Ever so carefully, she finds a lingering hint of damage in Scyelen's lungs from her brief adventure with decompression, and...

...heals it.

It's almost frighteningly simple. The new cells link into her soul just the same as naturally produced ones.

Okay, one more question to answer before she proceeds: just to make sure she can, she lets go. The shadow on Scyelen's lifeforce fades, and there are no discernible aftereffects, at least not ones discernible to Scintilla.

The Scintilla outside the vehicle says, "I've been figuring out my powers and I think I might have a way to resurrect Samantha. Or at least I'm pretty sure I can fix her body and since her soul hasn't let go of it yet that'll probably bring her back. I figured I should ask before trying it, though."

Earth has fallen most of the way to the lunar horizon. Sylvia has been cruising at suborbital speed a couple miles above the surface, just in case something happens to her, so the goo vehicle won't go shooting off into interplanetary space.

Tiny, on the lunar horizon ahead of them, is the glint of something artificial.

"If you're sure it won't affect her soul directly, it can hardly make things worse," Sylvia opines.

"Okay."

She sends one of her to sit by Samantha's body, and—takes her.

There's absolutely no resistance at all.

She pours life into the girl's unmoving form. New flesh grows in place of what was damaged or lost. It takes about half a minute to go from crumpled ruin to full health.

Samantha's eyes fly open. She gasps, but it is very reserved. She glances down, sees herself intact and naked, and a simple gray dress materializes on her small body.

The sight of their differently-fleshy, quietly crowded surroundings, leaves her somewhat taken aback, though.

"Are we free?" she asks simply.

"Yeah. Hi. The experiment killed you but then we got out and I figured out how to fix your body before your soul let go of it."

Speaking of which, she detaches her invisible grip. Owning people like that is so weird. Except when they're Scyelen.

Scyelen is doing what Scintilla wants and right now that is having orgasms under a pile of goo.

This has been noticed, and politely ignored, or less-politely ignored.

Samantha blinks at the sight, and also elects to politely ignore it.

Sylvia adjusts her spells and begins to decelerate.

"Did it work?"

The megafactory complex is now visible in the distance. A gargantuan dome is the centerpiece, surrounded by three smaller domes, all sunk into craters, surrounded by solar panels and machinery. The shining white launch rail extends out to the west, vanishing over the horizon.

When they start decelerating, Scintilla stops playing with her Scyelen and goes back to just snuggling her instead.

"Yeah," she says to Sylvia. "She's awake now."

Whimper moan melty snuggle. Mmmmm.

"Perhaps we will not have to acquire a sufficiently powerful healer elsewhere, then," Sylvia says, allowing herself an optimistic smile.

Scintilla smiles tentatively back.

(And pets her Scyelen. What a good Scyelen she has.)

The goo sphere comes to rest above the lip of the eastern dome-crater. Inside, it looks like parks and houses surrounded by two rings of apartment blocks.

"If you can burrow down from here, there should be a dead-end tunnel with its own airlock, beneath us, that you can attach to," Sylvia says, slowly lowering them to the lunar dust. "We should be undisturbed, there, while you heal everyone."

She nods, and passes a few tunneler eggs through the vehicle's shell onto the lunar surface, surrounding them in their own little goo enclosure because otherwise they will hatch into vacuum and die.

Burrowing down goes pretty quick.

And there is indeed a dead-end tunnel section, with a bare airlock at one end she can attach her goovironment to. If she can get the airlock open, its clean, lit, and pressurized on the other side, with a couple of pallets of spare part crates stacked against one wall.

Down they go!

She... cannot really restore the surface to its original appearance, but she can plug the hole with goo-rock once the sphere is down and settled. And it doesn't need to be a very wide tunnel because she can reshape the sphere's walls pretty freely.

"Okay," she says, when everything's settled down at the bottom. "I can fix death now as long as your soul is still hanging onto your body, so I should be able to get all the dead stuff cleared out of everybody and fix anyone who explodes."

Any volunteers leaping to try it after this somewhat lukewarm pitch?

Quakestrider. Her bulging stomach is starting to turn purple and black and sickly-looking. "Me, please."

"Okay. Uh—let's get you separated from everyone else in case of gross outcomes—"

With a swish of goo, she creates an... operating room, she supposes... on the far side of the sphere from the airlock. She has no idea how to open the airlock, but someone else can presumably deal with that if people want to move into the nice tunnel. Meanwhile, her four-dimensional goo huddles up to Quakestrider and starts nibbling away at the dead horrorflesh, working quickly but very carefully from the ?top? ?down? and supporting it where necessary to try to stop it from collapsing mid-removal. It quickly becomes obvious that regardless of her initial intentions, she's going to have to claim Quakestrider and heal her if she wants this to be survivable.

Technically she could just kill her horribly and then bring her back from the dead immediately afterward, but at this point claiming her seems like the less sketchy option. She just hopes the pain covers for whatever sensation the claiming causes on the target side. Scyelen hasn't said anything about it, so it can't be that obvious, right?

Quakestrider chokes on an agonized sob. It hurts, but when it's over, she goes limp, panting for breath, and she's laughing just a little. She sits up, and materializes a set of jeans and a vest, running her hands over her flat abs gratefully.

Casey the Brave Alloy is obviously next. She doesn't speak up immediately on her own behalf, but she looks like she's half dead already.

When she's healed, she calls out her aria with relish, then goes to work on the airlock doors in her cyberpunk-looking raiment. It doesn't take her more than a minute to get through the doors, and most of that was making sure it wouldn't set off an alarm.

It's nice to be helpful. She can get through everyone else in the order in which they volunteer.

(She unclaims them as soon as they don't need healing anymore. Having people claimed still feels weird.)

The rest of the magical girls are restored to health presently.

A few of the guys have minor injuries from the everything-quake back in the lair, but at this point more of them are bothered by the fact that they're all still naked.

Brave Alloy has some towels in her Storage, but nowhere near that many.

It's a problem, because none of them have Worldshift and the Whitewall Alpha waygate is in the Deepwatch Dome. This is the Lifeland Dome. And a hundred inexplicable men streaking through Shackleton is the kind of thing that makes the news and gets governments throwing money at their spy agencies. They're already leaning pretty heavy on the Veil as it is.

(Meanwhile, in the Commercial Operating Center, a technician is quietly panicking because he just saw an alien spaceship land outside the Lifeland Dome and forgot to look at the timestamp and camera ID number and he has  to file a request to search the recording and his boss is gonna fire him if he goes claiming anything half this crazy, the boss has been looking for an excuse. Shit.)

"Uh... maybe I can produce... extremely shitty clothes that are still better than wandering around naked?" says a Scintilla, quietly and hesitantly. (It is one of the two who are now cuddling Scyelen. Scyelen is just very snuggable, okay?)

She experiments, back in the cavern, with making clothes out of Miscellaneous Creature Leather. The cavern has kind of a surplus of Miscellaneous Creatures. Result: extremely shitty, plausibly still better than wandering around naked. Also she can't figure out a manufacturing process that isn't really gross.

Scyelen is so snugly. And having the dead stuff gone is definitely contributing to her boneless flop.

The shitty clothes idea is still probably a much better idea than sending someone on a mission to rob all the tourist shops. Having to rob the tourist shops would just be insult on top of injury at this point.

She hatches one of the crocodile-moose-things in her 'operating room', feeds it goo until it's up to adult size, then reshapes it horrifically using applications of her healing powers that she would honestly kind of prefer never to have discovered. Once processed and cleaned up appropriately, it turns into like thirty pairs of rough, stiff, vaguely sketchy-smelling crocodile-skin shorts. And a heap of viscera which her goo promptly reabsorbs.

Naked dudes appreciate the shorts.

They should probably have shirts and shoes too. They don't have to meet any criteria except passing for plausible at a distance, probably, but a hundred inexplicable dudes in just shorts is only going to get slightly less attention than a hundred nude dudes. They need to make people at least hesitate to think something weird is going on.

She produces shirts and - well, leather slippers, at least. They can mix and match crocodile skin, elephant hide, and imp leather, although the imp leather is too thin and soft to make a reasonable shoe material.

It doesn't occur to her until she's already made all the clothes that someone might be weirded out that she managed to make the right number of the right sizes of everything; it wasn't as obvious with the shorts but shoes are a little more individual that way. Maybe they will have more important things to worry about. She doesn't really want to admit to just how clearly and precisely she can see every living thing in her radius.

If anyone's thinking about it, they're not saying it.

"Alright," Sylvia says, mostly addressing the men. "I know the way. We're going to walk calmly, and act like we're right where we're supposed to be. We're going left through the service dock to the next junction, then through that into the Deepwatch Dome. We're looking for a white habitat module they've got in the campus plaza. I'm sure you'll recognized it. It's quite famous. Wait until we're all there, then hop the fence and make a run for the left side. Remember that, the left side or you'll just end up looking like a fool and getting us caught."

Casey opens the airlock.

"Once you're through, don't wander. The Whitewall route is barely mapped, and if you get lost there is no telling where you'll end up. Stay put, and wait for me and my team to lead you. We'll be coming out in Dubai, from there we can get into the Towerglass route and send you pretty much anywhere. Start practicing your 'I'm supposed to be here' face, because this will be a long walk."

Scyelen... isn't actually relevant to this part.

Her team... can go without her. She's just going to keep being where Scintilla wants her.

Scintilla looks around at all of her numerous selves.

Yeah, the sight of a hundred men in sketchy clothes is not going to be any less suspicious if they're accompanied by ninety identical women, is it. She sends most of herself into her 'operating room' and quietly deconstructs them, leaving her population level at a much more reasonable six, then makes herself a crocodile-skin backpack in which to carry a bunch of eggs in case she needs them for some reason.Then she deconstructs the goo vehicle (and tunnel-worms and remaining eggs) and packs most of its mass away into some four-dimensional goo which she carries with her in a different backpack.

"I don't actually... have anywhere to go," she murmurs to Scyelen. "Do you? Should we go there?"

"I... don't. Not usually? But um. I kind of actually, like. Have. A lot of money. So. Fancy hotel room?"

"Fancy hotel room works for me."

"Okay! We should probably go to San Fran? I don't actually wanna vanish without a trace on my team..."

"Yes that's reasonable. Okay."

The journey through the Crossroads goes without incident. The two of them arrive in downtown San Francisco (along with Brave Alloy and three local men), and it is conveniently early evening, there. Brave Alloy walks the guys home, leaving Scintilla and Scyelen to their own devices.

Scyelen cuddles into Scintilla and is willing to go with whatever hotel she picks. Her Style has by now clad her in a basic skirt and t-shirt.

Scintilla's hotel selection algorithm is pretty much based entirely on where she thinks she can get a bed big enough for all six of her to cuddle Scyelen in.

This may require some googling. Or simply erring on the side of 'penthouse'.

In any case it doesn't take long. Soon, a spacious room is secured, a small dent is put in Scyelen's bank account, and luxurious material comfort is had.

Cuddlepile!!!

Scyelen is naked again as soon as she touches the bed, simulated clothes dissolving away.

The bed, as it happens, is indeed big enough to fit a seven-way girlpile. Scyelen is delighted to be cuddled in a half-dozen-Scintilla girlpile. It has been a long day month year however long. Scyelen is maybe crying a little. She's not even sure why. She's not relieved its over. She's kind of is. She isn't honestly mourning it, either. She probably always will be, at least a little. She clings and squirms, rubbing against all the Scintilla even though she's not desperately horny. Or maybe she is but her scale of horniness has been distorted beyond all reason. She doesn't know. She's not sure she cares.

Six Scintillae all together make for a lot of snuggle. She dismisses her raiment and curls up comfortably and holds Scyelen and pets her and—

—she was kind of lowkey expecting she'd burst into tears as soon as she was no longer being held together by the pressure of an immediate crisis, but instead she seems to... actually relax, in something approaching a normal way. One of her kisses Scyelen's forehead. Everything feels... good and warm and cozy and okay.

Scintilla is good and warm and cozy and...

...could do anything at all to her, right now. They're safe and alone and Scyelen is wildly desensitized to ordinary amounts of being turned on. But her squirming in the mass of naked Scintilla is suspiciously slippery below her waist. They're all wrapped around her and it's so nice she just wants... she just wants...

Unbidden, her lips form two simple words in a dreamy sigh. The two simple words which compose the paradox that has defined everything wrong with her life and everything good about her captivity. The two simple words that she finally understands.

"Rape me."

The Scintillae collectively blush.

And she cuddles her Scyelen, and pets her, and kisses her, and a tendril of goo slithers up onto the bed and coils itself around Scyelen's body and holds her down and swallows her up and grants her wish.