The twelve-woman superhuman construction crew that is Cameron only fails to outpace the rest of the efforts because working through the night would've kept folks awake from the noise.

That doesn't mean Cameron sleeps.

They finish all the frames early on the third day, and run out of lumber shortly afterwards. Cameron isn't as helpful with the detail work like replacing furniture or installing windows, so she heads back out of town and starts tearing down trees. No one sees her for two whole days, but each morning stacks of stripped logs appear in designated places.

It's mind-numbing, tedious work, but not at all difficult when one can erase physical strain at will. Its easier than being around a bunch of folks that, through no fault of their own, make her feel constantly in debt. She feels bad about not checking in with the Doc, but only because of the off chance someone might need healing. Coded flirting not-withstanding, she has nothing to offer for which he is suffering a lack.

Between trips into town, sitting out in the dark under the fake stars, Cameron turns the glass disc holding Eelesia's bond-signaling array over in her hands, as if it might spontaneously inspire new options. She and Eelesia don't have a standard check in time, but after five days with no contact at all... if Eelesia can't reach Cameron from the other side, this sorcery array could be the only hope Cameron has of getting back to the people who need her.

She almost wishes Viv had demanded Cameron bring in her outside help right then.

No, she does wish that. Which means she really should just get it over with. It's obvious she isn't going to think of anything else or anything that improved the chances of it working. It's time.

Cameron pulls a hex out of her Pocket, fits the little rainbow cube into the disc, and tosses it out over the dirt.

The array it burns into the ground is large. Cameron drops dice into the power cores, and chants the activation sequence, lighting up the lines of the array with aurora light. Laying down naked in the open space at the center of the array, Cameron closes her eyes, and waits.

Time passes.

The wind rustles grass and leaves, punctuated by crickets and the occasional night bird. The ground is cool and damp against her bare skin.

Time passes.

She grows more aware of the sensation of her body, her breathing and her heartbeat and the occasional changes of pressure in her stomach or intestines. The sensation of the earth turning beneath her is, of course, entirely imaginary.

Time passes.

And then—

"Cameron! Can you hear me?"

Cameron bolts upright.

"I'm here. 'Here' is not anywhere in the solar system, may not be in contiguous space, is earthlike."

Cameron wracks her brain for what other information would be most useful for Eelesia. Pleasantries are for when you don't have critical information to get across an unreliable communication channel.

"The warp that brought me here hit the ship just above Ganymede. It dropped me at re-entry speeds in the upper atmosphere. The sky is made of living crystal and is full of something like a Horror aura. It's been six days..."

"That's good, Cameron. Thank you. I've been looking for you since the destruction of the Samayo Laune hit the news. It seems conclusive now that this array doesn't work if either of us are engaged in any active mana use. I've tried from this end several times, and I suspect that's what was wrong. Are you okay?"

"That depends. Can you figure out where I am and how to get to me?"

"Yes. I'm sure, now. The trace I came up with is working. I'll have what I need to find you even if we get cut off. Don't worry. What's it like there?"

"Primitive human-a-likes with some kind of magical dependency. Nice weather."

"The locals are very accommodating. They have multiple sex-positive religions here." Cameron thonks her head on the dirt. "I just don't know how to deal with people who aren't salivating over my body like a starving animal!"

Giggle. "Yes you do. You do it all the time. What's actually wrong?"

"I accidentally destroyed part of their town."

"That sounds like a s---"

"Eelesia?"

Cameron sighs.

It's okay. She'll find me.

Cameron reactivates her Style and hops out of the circle, then manifests her duplicates to help carry the last load of lumber back into town.

It's quiet and still, as usual for the hour. A few windows here and there show light, early risers. Dew gathers on the grass, and light gathers on the horizon.

...and there's Sunny, carrying something over her head – is that a plush footstool?

A dozen Camerons carrying several stripped logs is a bit unwieldy and fails to completely avoid blocking Sunny's path for a few moments. The real Cameron offers a smile of greeting, and a glance at the random footstool.

"Hi Cameron! Haven't seen you round much. You been doing okay?" she says, smiling and completely failing to acknowledge the glance at the stool.

"I am now."

She pauses just long enough for that to come off as ambiguously flirty.

"Got some good news."

"Oooh. Sounds juicy."

"It may be."

"How's that bed that was expecting me, before. Overworked?"

"Oh, ain't you a sweetie. Yeah, I've been filled up real good this last week. Why, you want I should try to squeeze you in? I've been stretched before."

"I wouldn't want to be the one who makes for too much of a good thing..."

(Is it possible to interpret that statement as still being about innkeeping? Yeah, probably. Heheh.)

"Oh, you are a sweetie." Her voice is a little softer and warmer, a little less mile-a-minute.

She briefly bites the side of her lip, her gaze running thoughtfully over Cameron's outfit.

"...I do want you. In more ways than two, I think."

Cameron's smile softens. "You can have me in at least that many ways."

...hmm.

"C'mon, then," she says, turning to face the way she'd been going before she stopped to talk. "We got stuff to get up to!"

Cameron falls in beside her.

If Sunny is angling for a, "yes, all of the above," sort of proposition, Cameron can totally roll with that. A little domesticity would be refreshing right now, actually.

When she and Sunny first met, there was something about the way Tegan acted at the time that is now making Cameron curious. It seemed like Sunny belongs to a different ideology than Tegan.

"What would you say it means, to be a Burner?" Cameron asks.

Even if Sunny isn't one herself, Cameron suspects her answer will be interestingly different than what she's already heard.

"Interesting phrasing."

"I think I'd say, it's about being there for each other. All for all. It's easier to balance on two legs than one, and building a community means standing on a hundred. The Cherries tend to think more in terms of persons, rather than people, if that makes sense."

"I've been given some rather obviously one-sided explanations, during my time here," Cameron elaborates wryly. "I've been told that the civilization I am from sounds like a dystopian story invented to satirize Burners, for example."

Her eyebrows rise, slowly. "...How bad is it, actually? —are you okay?" Her voice is softer, again.

"I have a lot of advantages," Cameron says, reassuring.

"Um, I think that thing was said while talking about how my society runs on performative outrage with the actual law being an afterthought. But I make porn in my mundane job and that is at least stably divisive. With a handful of notable exceptions."

"That sounds like something a Cherry would say, yeah. Sometimes it seems like they care more about dead rules than actual people."

They reach the Inn, approaching from the back. The side and back exterior walls are wood-paneled; Sunny pushes on a particular panel with her knee, and it swings inward to reveal a doorway.

"What do you mean by 'make porn'?"

Neat. Cameron follows her inside.

"I have sex in front of an audio-visual recording device, for the express purpose of distributing and selling those audio-visual recordings to strangers who seek entertainment that is sexually stimulating to watch."

"You're a model for a kind of pornography that can be both seen and heard?"

Nodding, Cameron pulls her tablet out of her Pocket, wakes it up, and brings up a clip from her most recent shoot.

With both competent lighting and cinematography, a Cameron dressed in harem-girl cosplay is depicted creeping through a cave. Suddenly, purple tentacles (stretched and enlarged by an obvious after effect) lash out of the darkness and yank Cameron out of frame. It cuts to a woman in a bulky dress and headpeace, brandishing a wooden ruler as she steps into the now-vacant cave backdrop, then it cuts to a Cameron affecting wide-eyed fearfulness in the grasp of a monstrously masculine purplish four-armed figure with tentacles for a face and one hand tight over Cameron's mouth. The other woman passes into frame, doesn't see Cameron or the monster, then moves on. The monster's tentacles molest Cameron's head as it shushes her, then rips of her gauzy bottoms, the view cutting to his dual dicks as his extra set of hands yank Cameron's hips into position.

Cameron scrubs forward through most of the run time in which Martin pounds her in both holes from behind, then resumes normal speed just before the end of the clip.

The Cameron in the torn harem outfit screams in muffled orgasm, and acts insensate, and then the monster is covered by a glow effect. When it fades, a second Cameron has taken its place. The second Cameron turns the insensate Cameron around, kisses her with an evil grin, then moves out into the cave. Off-screen, the woman from before is heard to scream.

Cameron closes the video and puts her tablet away. "For example."

The after effect is not at all obvious to Sunny, who has never seen digital special effects before in her life.

".....," she totally fails to say, when the video has concluded. She's staring at the screen with something like a deer-in-the-headlights expression, awed and dazed and turned on.

She turns her gaze back to Cameron, and collects herself. Or at least looks less dazed.

"...so. Uh. You're a pornagonist. For pornography."

"That was — I dunno if that was real good costume and prop work, or if ya got an artist that can — I hope ya know what you're doing. There's a fine line — folks gotta be able to trust, y'know? We ain't useta seein — ta stuff that can —"

"— y'know we got stories? Creepy stuff, for when ya wanna — get the creepy. Fey in the foggy woods at twilight, a hundred years in a single night, wandering off and coming back strange, that kinda thing. And illusions. If you got — and it doesn't help that — even if it was just the skypool and not the —"

"— wouldja take offense if I asked — what are ya?"

"Well, firstly, what was actually going on there was that my friend and colleague Martin, who used to be human but got accidentally transplanted into a different body a few years ago, just ducked down so you couldn't see him and then we painted over the image so you couldn't see him do that, then I used my Duplicate ability to pretend to be the monster. In the silly story we made up for this, there's a monster that can take on the form of anything it fucks and is trying to corrupt a convent. In the preceding clip, Martin plays the role of a demon the nuns have locked up in their basement before the monster sneaks in and fucks him to take his form. Real demons don't look anything like Martin, though, that's just for the story."

Cameron isn't immune to bouts of creative pride.

"I can't show you that one because I don't have it in my tablet's memory, though."

Cameron pauses for a moment. She should maybe stay away from the word "god" in addition to the word "soul".

"The thing I am is called a magical girl. Which doesn't mean anything to you, I know. There's this whole cultural concept behind the name, where I'm from it means a much more specific a thing than just a girl with magic. Real magical girls like me, we're, part girl, part machine made of magic? Most of me exists in, extra directions, directions even I can't directly perceive, while my fleshy body acts as the anchor that earths my power. But that rest of me is where I keep my stuff and where my raiment lives."

"Ex-humans, demons, and half-golems?" she says, setting down the stool. "Y'ain't sellin' me on this not bein' a fey story, hon."

"And if folks like to – 'take mortal offense'," this last phrase said slower, and enunciated, and in a subtly different accent, "at stuff that we wouldn't even notice, well that's a fey thing too."

"I've only ever actually taken mortal offense the one time, and believe me, that woman knew exactly what she was provoking. She just overestimated her bodyguards."

You know what, sure. Should be interesting either way.

"So if I was to ask you to help making breakfast... I'm not saying don't try any funny stuff, but — you know?"

Sunny thinks Cameron's joking, doesn't she. That's actually kind of hilarious, itself. And weirdly, nice.

Is it actually weird to be pleased when someone hesitates to believe outright that Cameron has committed cold-blooded murder?

"I'd be glad to. What're we making?"

Sunny perks up, her usual bright-and-bouncy demeanor reasserting itself.

"I wanna get my buns stuffed!"

She opens a door, and firelight spills into the storeroom from a cozy kitchen area, together with the scent of warm fresh buns.

(In Cameron's periphery, the previously-dim shapes in the storeroom resolve into disorganized piles of the sort of especially miscellaneous objects that do not make it easy to say if they are treasure or junk.)

In the kitchen, every wall is covered in cupboards, and every cupboard door has a bundle or two of herbs hanging on it by an iron nail.

Sunny peeks in the oven – "these're gonna be a couple more minutes" – and starts laying out a wide variety of possible fillings, from jams to some sort of nut paste to venison to a single olive.

Sunny's innuendo-fu is strong.

Cameron spares a moment to look around and take in the cozy. It's a scene that wouldn't look out of place in period fiction. It sure has an aesthetic.

On a whim, Cameron resets her Style, veering away from 'alien space babe who doesn't have your quaint taboos' and towards 'alien space maid who doesn't have your quaint taboos'. She's kinda curious how that'll come out, here. Back home that impulse typically shifts her outfit by some percentage towards the 'naked apron' look.

"Alright. Where would you like my hands?"

Cameron's boots shift to a somewhat different style – higher in the front to cover the knee, and dipping lower in the back to expose more of the calf; the heels are slightly more pronounced, the toes slightly squarer, the ankles slightly tighter, the soles smoother and flatter. Her top acquires a built-in corset and ruffled collar, and her shorts gain a dark gray hem.

"Let me show you," Sunny purrs, insinuating herself behind Cameron and into her personal space. As she guides Cameron through the motions of opening jars and handling knives, her hands find their way onto and across Cameron's waist and hips and arms and hands; no individual touch is overtly unrelated to the practicalities of the task, but the overall effect is distinctly warmer and more extensive than quite fits within the bounds of plausibility.

At some point – "did you change your clothes? Without me watching?" There's just the shade of a mock-pout in her voice.

The touching is nice, of course. She follows Sunny's guidance with her typical superhuman dexterity as she leans into her touches. To soft caresses, Cameron's clothes feel like real material, texture and volume both, but firmer contact causes the simulated cloth to break apart like it is little more than mist around Sunny's hands, exposing bare skin beneath.

"I don't know. I wasn't watching either," Cameron teases.

It is funny how all the reasons this kind of slow, plausibly deniable seduction would grate on Cameron don't apply, here. Sunny, after all, rather conspicuously isn't unknowingly (or knowingly) insulting Cameron's integrity by implying that any amount of deniability is necessary. She's just... playing for the sake of playing, because that's fun in its own right.