It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
God damnit, she's trying to sleep. Can't these morons be quieter about their robbery? Wait, shit, fuck. This is Osirion. She's not totally sure how the law works here but she knows they're crazy strict about it. Could she get in trouble for not doing something about it? She remembers hearing a story once about an adventuring party who got in a situation like that, she doesn't remember where exactly it took place, could it have been here? And she does have Sleep, though that might not work if they have high-circle casters. But then, even if they do, dying to stop a robbery might get her ruled Good, which means a cushy afterlife instead of having to put up with a husband and pregnancy and kids and all that. Though it might also get her ruled Lawful and Heaven sounds a lot later than Nirvana or Elysium. Can you go to Heaven against your will? She hopes not. Fuck it, she's not gonna get another chance at this, better seize the moment. She grabs her component pouch and creeps down the stairs as stealthily as she can manage.
If Katie can see in the dark, she'll see people moving around in the Employees Only restricted merchandise room, the heavy door thrown open. [ Apparently these people can all see just fine in the dark; they haven't lit any lamps or cast any light spells. ]
There's a steady rustling noise; if Katie can see, she'll see that the display soybean plant is growing at a visible rate, across the floor, bigger than soybean plants should.
She'll need slightly less perception to hear and see the person inspecting the shelves behind the counter, inches away from moving their head and getting a clear view of her.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. She tosses off a Sleep spell in their general direction, hoping to hit their co-conspirators as well and also she might get ruled Evil if she kills when she could incapacitate and also she would feel kinda gross about it.
A thud as whoever it is falls over.
Sounds of confusion in the merchandise room and the meeting rooms behind it.
"What the--"
"RAN!"
People rush out.
A light flares up.
Someone is kneeling to wake the fallen halfling, there's a bulky cloaked blonde with a sword charging Katie, a horned figure, somebody else.
Oh shit. Here it comes. This is gonna be painful. Briefly, she hopes. She throws off her one remaining spell, Summon Monster 1, and bolts in the other direction, hoping there are some city watch or Abadar clerics or hellknights or whoever the hell enforces the law in this godsforsaken shithole nearby.
A voice of cold command tells the summoned creature to still.
"Just grab her!"
As she passes the soybean plant it lurches up and wraps around her. At the same time, the double-edged sword pierces the side of her thick shirt, missing her body.
Several people are closing in behind her.
Well, this is it. Not much she can do now. "Oh gods please just make it quick!" She really hopes they aren't Zon-Kuthon cultists. Shit, are those even illegal here? He is Lawful.
A whoosh, the creature's screech, a clattering of glass, another screech, and a curse behind her. The monster is still giving them some trouble. But they're hitting it.
In part with expensive fucking concoctions, it sounds like.
The blonde leaves the sword in her left hand and grabs Katie's right shoulder with her right. It's a strong grip.
"Is she safe? Do I need to spare her?"
"Now, come on, guys."
It's the voice that issued the command to the monster, which they're still fighting with vials.
"She deserves a chance to prove she's another gift from Urgathoa."
"Her spirit, like."
"Fine."
She can almost certainly take care of the little shit, but they don't know that.
When this all goes to Heaven it'll serve them as a lesson in prejudice.
If it ends up doing them in, well, she can't take care of them forever. And she doesn't have other worthy successors.
She throws an ordinary metal knife into the beast, which looks pretty hobbled by now.
She does as ordered and scans her captors. Holy shit the tiefling and the blonde are both hot. Is it common for underground evil cultists to be that big? She's never seen any in person before. Also it's just now striking her how weird it is for all these people to be women. Has she died and gone to one of the Good afterlives already? She thinks that would be more overt and also she would have to go through the Boneyard first. Wait, the hot one said Urgathoa. That's the undead one right, not the torture one or the slavery one? Why would they have use for living captives? Wait, shit, she's also the disease one. Are they gonna use her as a test subject for bioweapons? Oh gods, she should've gone down fighting, she's so stupid. "Please, have mercy, my family is wealthy, they can pay a ransom, also do you really wanna mar a pretty girl's face with plague buboes, surely you can find some ugly old guy to experiment on, right?" She has that plea cached in case of a situation like this and is realizing she wasn't really supposed to use it on women, but female evil cultists are probably more likely to be lesbians anyway. Which, y'know, would be nice. Gods damnit, don't kid yourself Katie, it wouldn't be nice, they're gonna replace your spine with a giant parasitic worm from the Abyss, not fuck you.
"Cease your attempts to bargain with fleas. We are not fleas. You will either be remade in our image or you will not leave here."
Huh, well at the very least their image doesn't look obviously gross. "Are you guys, like, vampires? That's the only kind of undead that can pass for living, right? Er, I guess ghouls could maybe pass for living to some really dumb peasant who had never seen an elf before and thought they were all blue and fanged, but you, uh, don't seem skinny enough to be ghouls. Er, no offense, I mean, just that you're not horrifically emaciated and all, which I'm told ghouls are. And also, like, you have hair, I think they don't have that either." She's so going to get tortured.
"Teg is a vampire." She gestures at the blonde woman holding Katie. "The rest of us are a kind of undead you won't find in textbooks."
<Message@(all-Outsider)>"I registered nothing unusual. However it happened, I'm sorry I failed y'all."</Message>
She can't imagine why anyone would bother staking them out. Like no-really-even-taking-a-step-back-and-asking-on-a-meta-level-she-can't-imagine-why. But she's not going to mention that to these lumps of clay [ affectionate ], who don't understand the concept of constant vigilance.
"I have no idea. I'm only a first level wizard, and my Wisdom isn't the best either. Tell me more about this fascinating new kind of undead." Good, good, keep them talking. God, she hopes they have body heat. God, she's so stupid, they're evil undead cultists and she's here hoping for not only sex but cuddles afterward.
"Ah, the normal way that would go is, you would get it explained it to you, willingly sacrificing your ignorance in exchange for the choice whether to become one of us or not. But you're more likely to adapt to a transformation your psyche hasn't already developed antibodies to, and if you sacrifice your ignorance and your will rejects the prospect, your psyche develops antibodies. So, you see, telling you about it probably makes it less likely that you'll survive the ritual!"
She could strangle Tazich right now. There is absolutely nothing she can say to that, but what the fuck.
With an air of grim finality—not so much authority, as resignation—she kneels and starts drawing circles in chalk on the floor.
She follows suit, only she takes pillows out of a bag of holding. Giant-ass pillows, red and all velvety. Pillow after pillow after pillow.
People generally start fumbling around in their packs for things.
"Can I make a last request?" Fuck it. She's fucked anyway. No point holding back.
The little shit is irritating. She wants to gag her. But that would just obviate the whole pageant.
"Chelish, I take it?" Her voice is dry as sand and cold as an Arctic waste.
Meanwhile, people resume scouring the shelves, cataloguing them and murmuring to one another.
What came out of the packs appears to be . . . dishes. Some ceramic, some wooden, some metal. A couple people have matching sets, the rest mismatched.
"How dare you accuse me of such a thing. So like, why am I being picked for this? Whatever's going on here has to be expensive. Is it really a good idea to just use the first lady who walked in on your activities, rather than just killing me and getting someone better?"
"Actually, it's very cheap," says Teg, to whom it has occurred to bind Katie more securely to the plumbing. "At least the way we do it." Not to say they're the best at cutting costs, but you can do an Urgathoa ritual for way less than is popularly believed. Which is probably not an accident.
"So like, are those bowls and plates for my blood and viscera and whatnot?" God, vampire lady has really nice hair. And, y'know, a nice tummy. And tits.
"-- No, that's what we decided not to do." Fuck, does she sound mad about that?
"And other stuff. Mostly other stuff, I mean, come on. There's no fucking meat on it, it flies, it's basically a sparrow." She hears herself sound impatient and it pisses her off. They are now moving at like 30% efficiency towards snacks. Not the outsider's fault she fell through the roof though. "But, yeah, that's the special thing for tonight. That, besides all this—" she waves at the fertilizers, pesticides, growth potions, etc., and seemingly at the optical and biochemistry equipment too "—whatever use we can make of it acutely, that is." She turns back with an intense focus.
"Well I have no idea what you guys are talking about but uuuh, blonde lady, you seem weirdly nice for a vampire. But then, that may just be because you're really pretty."
"I--" not hope, hope is Iomedae's, 'strive for' "--strive for you to make it."
That's it, that's all she can say. Really all she can even think. 'I strive for you to make it.' It's too close, the stranger, to -- too many different things she's learned to accept the loss of, layered on top of one another.
She focuses on looking forward to the Letho blood. And then the other part of what the stranger said catches up with her.
"Oh, some crazy Chelish guy is making giant flying wolves that somehow count as part human for some magical purposes. And I'm an anthropovore, so . . ."
". . . By the way, what's --" BY GOD SHE SHOULDN'T ASK THIS "--your name? Mine's Teg, if you didn't catch it." WHAT ARE THEY DOING, WHAT CONVERSATION IS GOING ON TONIGHT
There's a clattering from one of the back rooms, what mostly looked like meeting rooms.
She runs out.
"Five guinea pigs."
She's holding one out, a black-and-white piebald one. It's squeaking.
???? What do they want guinea pigs in here for? Oh, forget it, Somayyeh, mandarins don't do things for reasons.
"Praise the Gay Patient."
She answers Katie's question before she gets distracted [ actually, should she get distracted? whatever, if Katie escapes that was Urgathoa's will too. plus she's pretty securely bound ].
"Well, they're really good in combat, and they don't answer directly to Hell, but they're smart enough that they can answer directly to Cheliax." She grimaces. "They don't have souls though. He's making other stuff too. Evil phoenixes . . ."
"Hey guys, I don't mean to be a bother, but --"
Teg is showered in a rain of thrown guinea pigs as people remember.
She catches them all, gathers them all up into her cloak and holds it at arm's length.
"Aww, babies! Oh, shit, you're totally gonna sacrifice these things, aren't you. Oh, well, whatever, not like they live very long anyway I guess."
She does not appear to be paying very much attention directly to Katie anymore. She is paying a lot of attention to her cloak.
"Hey, Tazich --" head jerk toward Katie "-- could you --?"
Nod. Though also paying a lot of attention to Teg's cloak, she moves and takes up the watch over Katie's semiprone, bound form, fiddling with one of two hilts with an eyebrow raised.
She edges into a darkish corner, drops all the guinea pigs in her lap, puts up the cloak with one arm as a privacy barrier, and with the other hand breaks their necks before draining them one by one.
People continue sifting through the lab stuff. Ran has put together a makeshift stove on the floor, embanked slightly in the hallway so it won't be seen from outside even through the front-entrance curtains. [ The lamps they've left on are dimmer and softer than the fire. ]
When she lowers the cloak there's still enough blood around her mouth to make it obvious what she's been doing. She's not very conscious of that, though. She nudges the drained guinea pigs a bit away from her so the others can retrieve them.
She picks -- what appear to be not soybeans, actually, but fava beans -- from the tortured, mammoth plant that's been disentangled from Katie and now reaches halfway across the shop floor, and throws them in one of the pans over the fire, which Somayyeh has gotten up to Create Water into.
They generally confer about what to put in the four pots. They toss a [ beheaded, skinned and gutted ] guinea pig in one of them and it starts subtly growing.
They rouse Teg and sub in Ran to watch Katie so Tazich can help too. Out of the bag of holding the non-Ran four heft a dead bat-winged wolf the size of a draft horse, pushing it off to the side of the ritual circle. Its ears resemble a sheep's and its limply rolling eyes resemble a human's.
Teg and Tazich in particular appear distracted by it.
"Wait, are you guys... cooking? The guinea pigs weren't sacrifices, they were ingredients! Is this, like, part of the ritual, or are you just hungry?"
"There's a little-known Neutral Evil saying. 'You can maximize two functions at once.'"
"Y'know, it's considered very rude to not share food with your guests."
??? Is Urgathoa messing with them?
She signals Ran to open up a Whisper, and has Ran signal Teg to Detect Evil on Katie.
Hm, somehow that actually feels more unsettling.
She tries to keep her composure.
"That is the plan. You might live, kid."
Please, Urgathoa, kill her. She will die, right?
She considers framing the outsider for an escape attempt so the skirmish ending in the stranger's execution, which is looking increasingly less likely, can happen as Somayyeh originally envisioned it.
They butcher and enpot the rest of the guinea pigs, to various effects. The pot with the fava beans in it starts boiling over and Tazich smoothly fills several giant glass columns [ that were maybe for hydroponics or growing large plants ]. People generally start looking at Somayyeh with a kind of vaguely impatient, are we underway and free to start eating? look.
" . . . May the offering be of such use as the goddess of appetites intended."
May that use be as meat.
"Smells delicious. You guys are the most hospitable death cultists I've ever met. Also the only death cultists I've ever met."
. . . yes, Tazich, you have to give her a guinea pig. But what if this is going too easy on her to start"Wait, she doesn't have any arms -- never mind, I'll feed her." She feels like an idiot. She also feels hungry.
She starts pulling huge groundfruits out of the bag of holding. Several go in one of the pots, but Ran takes the knife that's with her dishes, carves wedges out of one, and starts eating them raw. It seems to have a texture between melon and ginger, and smells starchy. Ran thinks to season it after starting.
She descends upon the giant dead winged wolf, relaxing into a desperate, feral stance, and tugging it bodily several feet toward herself into the reception area, before disappearing herself and its neck area under a parachute-like flash of cloak.
Whine.
Growl.
Whine.
People watch Teg's area alertly for an odd fraction of a minute, for signs of the tip into feeding frenzy. It's hard to remember to treat the giant wolf, for vampire safety purposes, as if it were a human corpse and had that much live-ammunition gravity. But that's how dangerous it is.
"Wow, I don't even think most monarchs have their servants do that for them! And definitely not by sexy muscular tieflings, me-ow." Fuck it, she's being kidnapped and used as some kind of test subject by cultists, all social taboos are out the window at this point. Well, except the one about complimenting women on the size of their bellies. If this lady actually is into her, that one might put her off.
<Message@Katie>[ through clenched teeth ] "I think she likes you. Like, in an eat-y way. Probably best not to talk until she's done."</Message>
<Message@Ran> "The vampire? Are they more inclined to eat people they like? I'm not exactly an expert." </Message>
<Message@Katie>"Well, it's antibodies, again, kinda. She has appetite antibodies to the rest of us. You're fresh blood."</Message>
The truly absurd amounts of dried meat, starches, and fruit start coming out of the bag and going on tarps vaguely around the center of the ritual circle.
She starts packing up the last of their haul of the instruments, and a few of the potions.
What the hell.
She pulls out two of the guinea pigs, dunks one in cold water and starts eating one sort of like a hot dog herself, and carries the second one over to Katie.
Then realizes she should probably at least salt and cumin it, because there's no way Katie is as hungry as she is.
Then she holds it near Katie's mouth, smiling. She's still eating the other with her other hand. Enjoying it a lot.
Chomp. "Not gonna season your own? Not very Evil of you to treat your captives better than you treat yourself."
Chomp. "Fair enough. I happen to like a woman with an appetite." That can't get her in trouble, can it?
She looks her up and down, most of the way done with her own guinea pig. Katie has taken two bites.
"Mgh you ngmneed to mgheat."
Blush. "Y-yes ma'am." She begins chomping faster. "Ugh, I hate having to eat around the bones."
She rotates the creature so that its boneless flank is in Katie's face, presses it in, and raises her eyebrows.
The stranger eats like she's never seen food before. And not in a way where she's just really hungry, in a way where it looks like she physically doesn't know how to eat.
She finishes her own guinea pig and pulls one of the tarps toward them -- heaps of dried berries and sweet jerky -- and starts eating some of the jerky herself. Only slightly more slowly than she'd been eating the guinea pig, although she is calming down.
It's clear that she's impatient for Katie to finish.
She watches for any signs that Katie's appetite is decreasing, hoping none show up because that would spell doom for her.
Katie is doing her best but not exactly used to pigging out. Her stomach isn't so small that she's full after one measly guinea pig, though, and the berries and jerky look tasty!
Smile.
She's slowed down herself significantly now, and is kneeling next to the stranger in what appears to be a more permanent posture. Katie will be able to see how she takes each piece of jerky and positions it so her sharp teeth are with the grain before pulling a bite out. Clearly savoring the meal.
But she's separated the plunder into two piles, equally large for her and the stranger [ although she plans to get more for herself later ].
And Katie's pile looks . . . like more than a gallon of volume, compacted as far as it could possibly go. Although it does look delicious. There are candied nuts.
"Hm, 'sh a good question. This is trash. R, really, shtolen. I'm not the --" nomch "-- cook."
She teasingly spins a piece of jerky so the stranger's teeth are against the grain, leaning in from the side. Katie can feel her body heat [ it feels like she runs hot ], and almost her belly [ it's impressive ].
"Mmm, hey, aren't you supposed to be an undead? Since when do they produce body heat? Not that I'm complaining, would absolutely love more where that came from."
"I am unfamiliar with this. Evidently you need to eat, but so do ghouls, and they're undead. Does your heart beat? Do you need to breathe? Does negative or positive energy heal you?"
"Fascinating! I've never heard of such a thing before. It seems like most of the existing kinds of undead kind of suck to be for various reasons, but this one seems remarkably liveable. Or, I guess, unliveable, but not unlivable in the sense that- oh, you get what I mean."
The stranger sure can think a lot while she's eating. She'd never quite thought what it was like to be Kari the potions dealer, who was a lich, for example.
"Hey, what is your" mlam "name and where are you from, anyway?"
She snatches a glass and pitcher of boiled milk Ran deposited a bit off the tarp.
"The name's Katie. My dad is the king of this little backwater fiefdom you've probably never heard of in the River Kingdoms. He's in town negotiating some complicated political business I'm far too female to understand. Something about an alliance against Galt."
-- Wow, a little princess!
She probably thinks she's invincible.
That's . . . really hot, actually.
"You know," she says, continuing to administer the food insistently, "you've got to eat all this and a decent amount of the wolf, or you die."
Wait, what was that about—
". . . Far too" hramch "female?"
"Do they not have sexism in Tian Xia? See, around here people are of the opinion that women should focus on popping out babies rather than statecraft and all that, and don't tend to care if we aren't interested."
"My grandparents were from Tian Xia." Nom "I'm from around here, unfortunately. And most women from around here don't know they're breeding cows, because they don't know any other way it could be."
Katie is talking so much, how can she get her to eat
the problem is her words are so fascinating, but Tazich will get no more words if she dies
"Not suicidal, are you?"
"Not gonna lie, I nonzero was before tonight, but having a sexy lady handfeed me succulent meats and break all of the societal taboos I hate at once is making me reconsider. Still a little scared about the whole undeath thing, but I'm probably bound for Limbo anyway and from what I've heard that doesn't sound very nice either."
"Okay, you know what, I'm gonna unbind your hands so you can feed yourself. This is saliently intriguing but we can have this conversation later if you live, you're barely eating anything and right now you have to focus."
She pats Katie down for weapons and then does as promised.
She wants to thank the woman for her kindness but heeds her instructions and eats as fast as she can manage.
Tazich kind of gets lost in the rest of her food herself. There's something special about really high-calorie, delicious trash. Mana from Abaddon. It's starting to make her slightly drowsy, though she isn't anywhere near full yet.
But she knows she only experiences This Much Food this way because, well, she has practice and Urgathoa's favor. For somebody twiggy and nonevil like Teg was, she's given to understand, it would quickly become pain.
She watches Katie, propped up on one arm with her head tilted.
She's doing her best, but her stomach is frail and delicate and it would probably make everything worse if she vomited. Her bites slow to a trickle, then stop, and she's breathing heavily and looking like she's making significant effort to keep it all down.
Fuck, that's hot.
Can she help her?
She glances coolly around at the others while ahe draws Katie close to her comfortingly.
Fine, be that way. If there's any justice in the universe you'll regret it.
If not . . . well, then, there's no sanity in the universe either, and she has better things to worry about.
"Mmm, Katie like cuddles. You're warm. And soft. Fuck it, you're already agreeing with all of my other taboo opinions so I'll just stop beating around the bush and say it: you're fat, and I like it." She pokes the tiefling's fleshy middle flirtatiously.
Purr. [ She can purr! ]
Tazich is not very meltable, but she is somewhat melted. And . . . something else. Katie isn't Evil, if Teg's spell was to be believed, but she seems to see with Evil eyes. Or at least see the world as it is.
"I'm trying to get a status update on you." Silly, she doesn't say.
Return tummypoke, for professional diagnostic purposes.
She clutches her abdomen and clenches her mouth shut. "Can you not, I'm sensitive there right now."
Fuck fuck fuck she's really full, she's going to die
Hold. Hair pet.
". . . Does it hurt if I do this?"
Veeeeeery soooooooft tummypet
"No, that's good, yeah, just, just give me a bit, my stomach will make room. God, your arms are so thick and beefy."
Yes, she could crush Katie with them.
"If you had arms this thick you could also take out cops and Somayyeh wouldn't bother you anymore even though you're annoying. In fact she might stop finding you annoying. I don't find you annoying."
She finds Katie very holdable. And in fact holds her.
But she does find a free arm to keep eating while she does so.
"And your belly is so big and squishy, and your tits are nearly the size of your head, and you have such a cute rounded yet sculpted face and pretty hair and cool horns and did I mention how nice and warm you are?"
Iomedae, Katie's flattery is witchcraft.
—Is it actually? She is a spellcaster.
"And you're very smart and class-conscious and I don't want you to have killed yourself or to die so I'm glad you're here and you should stay with us."
That can't have been some kind of benighted Iomedaean pact-seal, can it?
"Do you actually like food, it's unclear. We're trying to make Law and Good stop weirdly hoarding it."
Experimental slightly firmer tummypat.
"I do. On that note, think I've gotten my second wind, pass me some more. Also you're extra cute when you blush." Wait is this evil cultist actually blushing at her compliments holy shit what the fuck is going on
Cheered, she does as asked, passing Katie an intentionally-slightly-optimistically large wooden bowl of dried fruits.
There's not that much left on the pile. Katie got her second wind fast. They have a bit before anything off the wolf is ready to be eaten.
"If you finish all this . . . well, anything left after that goes toward getting you useful cop-felling arms. After you—can you shoot? And how good are you with magic? If you feel up to answering."
Damn milk is out, and Tazich's pile is dwindling. She hopes they finish the wolf soon.
"Ooh, the undeadification process is gonna make me stronger? Nah, I've had no practice with a bow, and I'm only first circle." The dried fruit is nice and light and a different taste and texture from the meat, so it's easier for her to get it down.
"Well, Ran, Tiar, and Somayyeh are spiritually undead and Urgathoa didn't pick any of them. She might not pick you, although she picked Teg when she became corporeally-undead and she might have picked me for becoming spiritually so.
I just meant, like, bulking you up.
Although there are probably other routes to making Somayyeh stop getting up in your craw."
"Well, to actually put on muscle I'd have to like, exercise and shit, which sounds concerningly like work. Maybe it's easier when you're undead, though. Do you guys still sweat?"
"Yeah. Don't you want to sweat? Oh, I forget, you're not from Osirion." Her pile exhausted, she gnaws the guinea pig bones and tries not to eye Katie's pile covetously, which is the little-death that brings total annihilation of Katie.
"Hm . . . it's true none of us know laundry spells. It's . . . kind of a sore spot around here. We may have overcorrected."
"Oh, I do actually. And like, yeah I guess sweating is preferable to just dying in the heat because your body can't thermoregulate, but like, it still sucks. Makes me itchy. Idk if that's common or just a me thing. God, I love how bottomless your appetite is. I would tell you to go ahead and have some more but apparently my life depends on how full my stomach is right now. Can you explain what's up with that, by the way?"
"Ran, Somayyeh, or Tiar would probably be better positioned to answer. I didn't really choose spiritual undeath, I just sort of wandered into it."
Passably clinical tummyrub.
"I mean, are you any different from when you first came downstairs?"
"Wait, have I, like, already been undeadified?" God, the tiefling's strong, warm hands on her packed gut feel so good.
Fuck, is she interrupting the ritual? Will the fact that she's getting the food down and seeming to acclimatize even matter if Tazich gives her antibodies at the exact wrong moment?
"Er, I don't think it really matters when it happens. Maybe, maybe not. For me, it was, like, I felt—" she thinks better of giving exact details, if she gives exact details Katie will just $&%#ing worry-it's-not-exactly-right herself into failure—"I knew something had changed. You know something's changed. You know you've 'died'. But besides that, it's different for everyone."
Absent-minded continued instinctual tummyrub.
"I don't want to die. I want to be in your big strong arms pressed up against your big soft body for ever and ever and ever." She plants a kiss on the tiefling's chubby cheek. God what the fuck is happening to her right now. She is KISSING an UNDEATH CULTIST and it FEELS LIKE SHE'S IN ELYSIUM.
She notices that she is kissing Katie back, on the mouth. She suddenly realizes Katie called her appetite bottomless. This puzzles her. Yes, she's had practice, but isn't her appetite normal? It surely isn't the little-death that brings total annihilation of Katie if she's hungry for Katie.
The cult does not really have the capacity to stare at this scene jealously, and they really are somewhat wrapped up in their own ecstatic experiences with food, but, well, it is not a usual sight around here.
And, among these folk, has connotations of the divine.
Oh, wow, that's... She's never KISSED kissed a girl before. She likes it. Her hands are about to reach for the tiefling's chest, but there's leather in the way, so instead they move down to her gut and tenderly circle its surface.
She breathes in and out heavily, moving her stomach under the girl's fingers. Her own hands work their way down Katie's sides and legs.
"What do you want most in the world, that the world could never let you have?" she whispers. It bothers her. She can tell it's something.
"I... Um... God, even after all this I'm afraid to say." Her hands stop. She's trembling.
"Fear is what keeps us alive." It comes from a place so deep and unknown within her she couldn't chart the path to it.
"Okay, I want... to be like you. Fat and strong. Beautiful and dangerous. To take up space. To be the sort of woman who's difficult to ignore simply because she takes up twice, no thrice, the space a normal woman does in one's field of view. To have enough strength and inertia that no one can ever push me around again. To be free, uninhibited, feral. To feast, fight, and fuck like a wild fucking sow." The words spill out involuntarily, like a cross between an orgasm and vomiting. She wonders if homosexuality has been observed in pigs, but decided not to ruin the moment by asking out loud.
One hand runs up Katie's back again, and the other goes under her ass and lifts her up into Tazich's lap.
"I would like to still be able to push you around," she says, as though mourning.
"But I can't now, or you'd break," she says, and laughs.
She breathes heavily. "Oh, no, yeah, sorry. You pushing me around would be nice. Extremely nice. No one else, though. Except maybe the vampire. She's cute too. But no one else."
"Well that's good then."
She considers bragging that she can beat Teg up, and decides against it. If she says it, it'll sound like it's not true.
"I'll help you."
"Nnggghhhh, really? You mean it?" Her hips buck. Her clothes are visibly damp around the crotch.
She doesn't notice herself salivating.
She slides her hands under Katie's heroic little tummy, letting one of them pass under Katie's crotch and start soothing it.
With her other hand she does a few passes over Katie's belly, then offers her additional meat.
Chomp. She stares directly into her new lover's eyes. "Nnggghhhh, take me, you overfed sow." She smacks a hand onto the tiefling's belly as forcefully as her twiggy limbs can manage. Grabs onto it with her thumb in the navel and forefingers underneath. Runs the other hand through her hair. "I wanna see all this delicious flesh jiggle."
She doesn't consult anyone or even look at them. She gently picks up Katie, wraps her in one of the giant pillows, deposits the whole thing in one of the meeting rooms [ there're books all over the walls ] and runs back for as much of the food as she'll be able to carry.
She moans and twitches and writhes pathetically. Her frail, delicate, twiglike body is in desperate need of attention.
She sets down a tarp, finally revealing dishes of cooked wolf meat. She picks up a cut and bites it, sighing with relief. "'m underfed," she corrects absent-mindedly.
Her own stomach, seemingly magically, is [ under all that flesh ] obviously a little firmer but not yet what you would call distended.
She takes another cut, bothers to plate it and season it with spices from the tarp, strides over to Katie and straddles her. She sits down on Katie's hips but the pillow takes most of the weight, as intended.
"First things first," she says firmly, "how is this?" Hand on Katie's stomach again, sensing. Are her clothes tight?
"Gods, it's so fucking hot how shamelessly greedy you are. I envy it." Chomp. "Now air out those melons, you insatiable pig." She pokes at her breasts and begins removing her own clothes.
She plates her and Katie's wolfsteak with a frown, takes a hold of both Katie's shoulders, and forces her back.
"How are you doing food-wise?"
"My cunt is screaming at me way too loud for my stomach to be audible."
She wonders if Katie has in fact successfully died. This is mortal talk.
She cocks her head while she assists with Katie removing her own clothes and begins to finger her nether regions.
Her legs twitch. "Gods, you're perfect. Those beefy biceps, those hamhock thighs, that goddess gut, those udders. You can really make me like that?"
She stares in genuine distress. "If you eat!"
Then takes a second look at Katie's denuded little stomach and feels a stab of pity.
"But yes." She appraises her. "What sort of training do you think would best suit you? Do you ever hunt for food? Swordplay?" She grins fiendishly [ it's very convincing, as she's part fiend ].
She looks around, thoughtful. "Conceivably we could just . . ." She gestures vaguely and thrusts her hips with nonlethal force.
"Nnnnggggghhhhh swordplay sounds fun. Normally I'd say I'm too clumsy, but I'm fine with getting maimed as long as you're the one doing it. But yeah, even absent that, I anticipate is getting plenty of exercise together." She rubs the tiefling's belly sensually.
"—Can I train you two-handed?"
She should probably save this question for later, but she doesn't see why they can't multitask. She keeps thrusting her hips nonlethally and working her hands around Katie's clit—over her clothes, at first.
Katie is so small and cute. And Tazich doesn't understand her priorities.
But Katie's hands are really nice, just like that.
"Mmm, you like it when I touch your gut, big girl?" Affectionate tummy pat. "Two-handed? You mean like, weapons, or?" The tiefling's hands are nice, too.
she is not a girl, she is a grown-up cleric, but she doesn't really care
"Mm."
She wishes intensely that she could wrap around Katie like a snake.
She does the closest thing possible and kind of curls around her, spiral-like, and squeeezes Katie against her, taking off her leather bra as she does so.
"Gods, you're squishy. Mmm, and speaking of which." She grabs the tiefling's breasts and gently yet firmly circles the nipples with her thumbs.
Smile.
Maybe that's a human's erogenous zone.
[ Tazich has not actually had all that much sex and does not realize that boobs and not bellies are supposed to be erogenous zones. Boobs are widely sexualized as body parts, sure, and you're supposed to keep them concealed, but the sex ed for women in Osirion is not great and no one has ever told her which areas are supposed to feel nice when touched. ]
It does feel nice, when it's Katie . . .
Fighting the impulse to focus exclusively on Katie's tummy, she removes what little remains of Katie's uppergarments and cups her free hand over Katie's tits successively like a protective half-clamshell, moving it slowly outward until the nipples are under her thumb.
A significant amount of her focus remains on her other hand and Katie's clit. She's gradually moving it more centrally and insistently.
"Mmmhhhh, bet you're eager to see these little bug bites blossom into a proper set of knockers, aren't you." Her hips would be bucking if they weren't currently pinned under her partner's vast bulk. "Fuck, I just realized I haven't been uuh, touching you down there. Do you wanna..."
She nibbles Katie's shoulder and swirls her tongue around. It's a puppy bite but it's possessive.
Little sigh and head shake.
"Suit yourself, fatty. Fuck, you never told me your name. You should probably do that so I can scream it."
Little headbutt. [ Somewhat tactilely similar to a very gentle sheep. ]
"Tazich."
"I'm so happy you're one of us."
Wiggle.
"How ambidextrous are you? --Because of the swords." Tazich is so good at multitasking.
Sounds fittingly intimidating but cute. "Me too, sugar tits. And actually, I needed therapy as a child because I was reverse ambidextrous. If I can learn to write, I can probably learn to swing a sword, if I've got the motivation. And boy, do I."
Reverse ambi-
"You mean left-handed?"
Tazich is left-handed, at least for the finest motor skills, as Katie is hopefully noticing.
She shifts a bit to hopefully restore Katie's blood flow.
Fingertips of her right hand down Katie's tummy as she does so, doesn't mind if she does.
"No, I mean neither-handed. Anyways, considering how Elysian of a lay your fat ass is, if I were you, I'd be more worried we'll be too exhausted from rutting like cows all day to train." Fun fact: cows actually do exhibit homosexual behavior. Her dad having to arbitrate that land dispute between those two dairy farmers helped her figure a lot of stuff out during puberty.
Well she'd obviously been thinking about left-handedness and "Evil", but now the thought flits through her mind that Katie is some kind of marked of Nethys or Pharasma or something. She's never heard of a no-handed person. Katie continues to blow her tiny mind, it's . . .
"You're -- I can't literally directly see your soul, but you're -- consequential. You're supposed to be big. I'm not used to stuff having an impact on me like you do."
". . . oh, gods, Elysium, theology, well, you don't sound like you have that much of an attachment to the Good gods, right?"
"Nah, just, all the sexy outsiders are from either the Abyss or Elysium, and you're replenishing my vitality rather than draining it, so the latter is a better comparison. I like it when you tell me I'm supposed to be big, though."
Speaking of replenishing her vitality. She needs to get Katie eating.
She slips her left hand inside Katie's undergarments and redoes the approach. Draws little lines around Katie's junk and works back up to pressing insistently and rhythmically on her clit.
Her hands begin caressing, appropriately enough, Tazich's love handles. "Mmm, yesssss... I'm getting close. Finish me, Tazich, you gargantuan goddess. Claim me, seize me, make me yours to feed and train and sculpt in your divine image, into the vast, fleshy me you know I was always meant to be."
[ Love handles are erogenous zones in Tazich-land, too! ]
Her hips heave, maybe a little energetically for Katie's comfort. She realizes this and twitches her hand down the affected area to comfort her, but she just looks so delicious.
She keeps her left hand going and encircles Katie in her right, simultaneously pressing Katie against her and leaning down to bite the top of Katie's breast.
She doesn't know, Katie seemed to be offering.
The bite pushes her over the edge. The world spins. She sees stars. She tilts her torso upward, presses her lips against Tazich's and plants her hands on her strong shoulders, and moans quietly as she rides the wave.
Katie tastes good. She's never thought that about a person before. It's so strange, but it's true, somehow.
She revels in it. She headbutts-and-holds Katie steadily as she finishes and will stay still after, gently tracing lines around her hips and thighs with her left hand.
"I'm going to do all that stuff," she mumbles into Katie's chest, and nods, a stretch of rough horn brushing Katie's skin.
"Mmmhhhh, yeah, that'd be nice. Gods. They told me Evil would be seductive, but I didn't think they meant like this. Maybe succubi can fake this, but here I am with my life un-drained, which means you must just really be this crazy about a girl you just met." Nuzzle. Forehead kiss. The fear that there's a catch to all this comes back, but at this point, she doesn't fucking care. She's been punished for everything she does her whole life anyway, but none of the things she's been punished for have ever felt this good.
Mm. She likes the forehead kiss.
"Your life is still un-drained?" Her low, languid voice tries to find its tones of concern. "I guess I don't know whether it happens at the actual technical end of the ritual somehow." She pets Katie's hair. "You do still have to eat at least a couple more things." Technically-technically just one, but she's worried it won't work if she doesn't metaphorically warm Katie up first.
"I mean, um, like, does whatever's supposed to happen to me feel bad? Because from what I'm aware, succubus life drain feels really bad, and I haven't felt anything like that."
". . . What exactly have you read?" She doesn't know what Katie is talking about. Is there more Good propaganda where she's from? She doesn't know. It's not like plenty of things demons do don't tend to be painful.
"I don't know, just, y'know, stuff about when you do naughty things with a succubus something happens that feels bad but in a way which is unlike regular pain and closer to being starving but not quite, less localized in your stomach, and casters can lose spell circles from it. How are you an Evil cleric and don't know this. Well, I guess apparently you're NE, I don't think Abaddon really has any sexy outsiders. Weird how Hell, the Abyss and Elysium all do but not the Maelstrom or Abaddon."
"True about the Maelstrom and Abbadon!" She's thought so many times herself.
"Lose spell circles? --Only while being romanced, right?"
"You haven't--?"
"Haven't experienced it firsthand, no. And if I recall correctly, sometimes it goes away on its own after a few days and sometimes it's permanent unless you can get a high circle cleric to remove it with a spell that costs a bunch of diamond dust."
"Huh. They have a library here, you know" -- snuggle -- "Abadar and Nethys are both kind of gods of libraries, but maybe they're too poor and/or somebody's too tight-assed to have included that particular warning about succubi. Good to know, and now I'm even more put out with Sothis than usual." These last words are ground out harshly. Tazich is always very put out with Sothis.
Hair pet.
"True. Fuck them ayrabs. 'Oooohhhhhh we can't let women have rights, that'd be inefficient and make the heckin line go down', go back to Tian Xia, slip. Fuck, sorry, fuck, that's just like, something I say about anyone I don't like, I don't actually have anything against Tian people, or halflings, I just combine the two contradictory slurs to indicate that it's like, not meant to be genuine or coherent, y'know." She got so caught up in this woman's bold destruction of all society's taboos that she forgot for a second there might still be some she's sensitive about.
"There are a lot of things they say would make the heckin line go down. . . . I think you would be shocked at the intelligence of some of the people who genuinely believe it. Because if they disbelieve it they get told to go back to Tian Xia slip for real.
. . . What's it like, where you're from?" She feels a pang of anticipatory jealousy, even though she knows basically what the River Kingdoms are like already, and that it's better than Osirion in some ways for women specifically but overall has fewer powerful people and therefore less nice everything and so quality of life is worse.
"Well, for one thing, it snows in the winter, so that automatically makes it better than here. Especially for someone so... Well-insulated." Belly poke. She couldn't bear to pass that opportunity up.
Purr. Head pat.
Tentative offer of dried meat.
"Tell me more. What about the people?"
She has the sufficiently-tainted, ritual-clinching raw wolf cut, for whenever she gets Katie ready.
"They're not the best, but they've got a hell of a lot less of a stick up their collective asses than these heatbrained Lawtards. Gods, you're still eager to feed me? Fine, I guess the lovemaking freed up enough space for one more bite."
-- That doesn't sound like it's very much space.
It doesn't feel like it's very much space, either.
"You do have to eat this--" she holds up the plated cut of raw wolf, which looks at least human-manageable "to pledge yourself to Urgathoa, but we've got plenty of time."
"Lawtards. Heh.
Where you're from--can people just build things, iterate on ideas, experiment freely and sell the fruits of their labor?" That doesn't square with Tazich's understanding of the River Kingdoms, or with logic, frankly. How would anyone stay Good, or Lawful?
"Well, it depends, but like, mostly. There is this one country that I think is considered part of the RKs that's run by a ninth circle wizard who claims he's a god and will execute anyone who says otherwise and is basically mini-Cheliax, but they don't count. Lots of leaders that petty and egotistical, but most of them don't have the capacity to prevent their subjects from leaving because they're not ninth circle wizards, so even if their citizens can't gang up and kill them they can usually just leave and the next warlord over will be grateful for the extra hands. People die a lot so we've got more arable land than people to work it."
The "people die a lot" part is familiar but the RK rate still sounds worryingly high.
"Is he a god? Why don't the actual gods just smite him? Who do people worship up there, anyway? How do they stop you from building better plows, isn't anybody working on that?"
"Probably not but you never know, why doesn't Pharasma smite you, mostly the big Chaotic gods plus our local patroness Hanspur, and I don't know but probably because all the smart people are too busy learning wizardry so they can fight in all the constant wars."
Hm. It doesn't sound that bad, actually . . . stop it, Tazich, the Abyss would in fact be that bad.
"Pharasma doesn't smite me because I'm not stealing mindshare from Her.
Those sure do sound like some constant wars."
[ Squirm. ]
Katie is warm. Tazich wants to throw her around. Instead she just runs her warm hands firmly over what little muscle Katie has, down her arms and then back and then legs, like a carpenter checking the integrity of her project.
"Appraising what you've got to work with, are we?" She playfully squeezes the tiefling's meaty upper arm.
Flex. Smile.
"-- I suppose so."
Mainly what she's got to work with is Katie's tummy. She does appraise it, then. Eyes and hands.
"Mmm, yeah, this thing's gonna be important. Gonna have to stretch it out a lot before I can eat enough to maintain a physique like that." She moved her hand from Tazich's bicep to her tummy to indicate that she means both the muscle and the fat.
Hum. Tummytrace.
"That's the other thing. I think Somayyeh noticed. You have an attitude toward food and an appetite like one of us, already, without even trying. The other three eat a lot and don't look like Teg and I, sure, but--and I'm not saying you're a lost cause even if you are a difficult case, medically--I would have assumed they had lots of food in the River Kingdoms if people are dying all the time." Inquisitive look.
"Well, y'know, I'm picky, and I have a tendency to self-neglect, and like, I'm a princess in the sense that my dad bosses around a bunch of guys with swords but it's not really quite like being a princess here or in Cheliax or Taldor. People die a lot, but crops get trampled or burnt or neglected because the farmers die. Weird that they eat as much as you and don't gain weight even though the kind of undead they are can, though. "
"Not as much as us. Maybe half? Still a lot more than ordinary Osirians. It's actually a subject of great research interest for all of us."
Tummytrace.
aaaaaaagh so is Katie hungry all the time oh no that's too terrible she can't be hungry
"Picky? What do you like?"
dude that's exactly what Tazich likes
wait
"Do they have dairy products up there?"
"That's the only major thing you're missing from my list of favorite foods. If you count pastries among sweets."
"Oh, yeah, I like cheese too, but mainly as a component of larger meals, rather than just with bread or crackers or whatever, because the kinds of cheese I like are the really salty ones and those need moisture to balance out the saltiness."
This makes a lot of sense. She mentally notes it down. "What about cream and butter and stuff? I mean, butter's kind of a seasoning, but."
"Yes and yes. Well, I like cream in savories. Not so much in sweets. Gods, if you're surprised I'm skinny, have you always been this girthsome, or were you just a little twig like me before the vampire or some other zaftig cultist swept you off your feet, turned you into a weird living-undead hybrid, and bulked you out 'til your arms could fell cops in one strike and your arse couldn't fit in chairs? Is that how Urgathoanism works?"
The way Katie describes her life is so pleasantly hagiographic. She could get used to it!
"I was always fat, though like a third of this--" she gestures at her body in general "is courtesy of the lifestyle. Teg's the former-twig quasi-abductee."
Substantial snuggle to emphasize how peripheral Teg is to the whole conversation.
"You did a good job, if indeed it was you. She's got a nice body. Damn shame it doesn't produce any heat. Hey wait, hold on, did you wait to have her turned until after she'd fattened up or can vampires gain weight?"
Argh. Months of Teg being a problem for Tazich on account of being ridiculously physically hot while spiritually weak and useless, and now she's going to get between her and her girl, too. Fuck Iomedae to Hell and back a thousand times. And then back to Hell again.
And of course the first thing she thinks of to say is "well, the lack of body heat is actually a plus, this is Osirion". Fuck Teg!!! Fuck Iomedae!!!!
"Teg . . . listen. I'm gonna be honest. She . . . looks fully committed to the mission, but she's multiply unstable. There's the bloodlust, since she was just turned seven months ago, and then there's . . . her likely remaining divided loyalties, partly to Iomedae. Just gonna air that out before we start talking about the fascinating biology behind her giant tits."
"Wonderful, I'm not the only one who noticed. I take it you're doubly pissed at her for being a liability because it's in the way of you two putting the 'heavy' in 'hot and heavy'? Or is it just that the two of you combined would probably break the bed, and those are expensive? If it's the latter, you're gonna have to figure out a solution in any case if you plan for me to stick around."
"I resent the implication that I would lose to mere furniture! Or lack of it."
"A lot of Evil people think there's no one who can't be seduced. They think if you protest that you can't tempt someone to the dark side, it's merely a sign of your own weakness, and not the insufficiency of the starting material. Since starting material could never be insufficient," she gripes.
"Teg is insufficient starting material." She considers outing Teg's old name to set up the obvious joke, and then decides against. Not worth the risk to their bond. "I don't exactly feel about her the way Somayyeh probably does about you, but . . . it's just not gonna end well."
"What's wrong with her? Is she uuuh, not like us, y'know?" Maybe she's not insufficient starting material. Maybe Tazich, sexy as she is, is just the wrong woman for the job.
"We're trying to free Sothis. Or at least central-southeastern Sothis. Central-southeastern Sothis first."
Fuck, how much should she say? The next natural parts of the story really leverage them if Katie escapes and betrays them. And though Tazich is rock-solid confident in Katie's sanity and attraction to the vital things only Urgathoa can offer, and arrogant, she's not so entirely loose-screwed as to disregard basic opsec practice here.
"Beyond that, each of us individually has a bunch of tangentially-connected subgoals we're working toward." There. Frame it as being about unity and power, rather than liability and fractiousness.
And sell out Teg's backstory. They need the leverage on Teg, honestly. If Katie is an informant from Lastwall, well, too bad for Teg. In Tazich's opinion, where the whole "adopted paladin" situation is concerned, it's only postponing the inevitable.
"Teg was an Iomedaean paladin from Lastwall before she got turned in battle" and abandoned by her superiors "and, in her confused prayers after technically turning Evil knocked her out of alignment with Iomedae I guess, she was clericed by Urgathoa for her inordinate latent gluttonous capacity that the transformation had revealed." Fuck every unknown plane for making there be no way to tell that story that doesn't sound sexy! Fuck the heavens and the depths!
"At least," she says with heavy intonation, "that's the ostensible story."
"Wow, yeah, I would be suspicious that something was up, that sounds too hot to be true. Then again, so do you." Tummypoke.
She does not visibly drool.
"Anyway," she ostensibly fought the vampires who found her and tried to entreat her, seeing that she was god-touched, and only gave in when they offered her giant monsters to eat, sparing the lives of would-have-been victims "even though this is emphatically against Iomedaean edict and thus weakness even by her own culture's standards, she did not kill herself, out of hope that she could return home and--well, I would say 'be with someone she loved', but she doesn't put it that way. She does understand that it's a 'personal loyalty', a 'selfish attachment', and that by 'her own' standards it's a vice.
She still wants to go home someday. She says she hopes working with us will bring her closer."
"Fascinating. You wanna know something about me, Tazich? I'm unable to give up. I don't even mean that as a brag. If I want something badly enough, even if I know for a fact it's impossible, I'll just keep trying at it because giving up is like killing yourself by holding your breath. My brain just won't let me do it. If I were you, I wouldn't be able to give on Teg even if I had confirmed via truth spell and Detect Thoughts that she was straight. Maybe here, with you, this tendency of mine will be an asset."
"I don't know, establishing my own kingdom and making it a haven for dykes who want to escape patriarchy? Is that too Good? We can feed shoplifters to ghouls too if that pleases Urgathoa."
"--That suits." God, she's so perfect. "Well, so long as there's not an artificial quota on shoplifters, such as some meddlesome god might find it necessary to enforce by indirect methods. Such as it is." Actually, why should there be any shoplifters, after they end world hunger? Does Urgathoa even dislike shoplifters? She's Neutral Evil. So is Norgorber. They're shoplifters. "Or they might have to be like, I don't know, a principled advocate for ooze swarm welfare, or something."
"But you see how—if you want to successfully do that, successfully create dyke heaven—
I mean as Ran said earlier, it is a little-known Neutral Evil saying that you can maximize two functions at once.
But you see how, as an imperfect mortal being, you might find yourself unable to not-give-up on seducing Teg, while also not giving up on creating dyke heaven."
"To be honest, I think in a situation like that, my inability to give up would just result in me losing both. Anyways, what I'm getting at is, she's too beautiful to let go to waste. Maybe I can take a crack at her."
She squishes Katie into her.
"You're mine though." It sounds almost offhand.
She rests her head against Tazich's juicy tit. "Sure, but you're Urgathoa's. Would she approve of you denying me the cardinal pleasure of being crushed between the two of your vast, fleshy forms?"
???
She reflexively offers the raw wolf and realizes she's doing it because she's afraid Katie might be possessed by a daemon and wants to stop pretending as quickly as possible. Realizing Katie might be put off by this, she conceals the motion by turning to put some honey on it instead.
"Fuck if I know," she says. Probably best not to lie about the wishes of your patron deity. She'd offer to pray about it later, but she doesn't want to know.
"Gods. They told me Evil would be seductive. They told me it'd offer sex, and power, and probably tasty food too. But they never mentioned post-coital cuddles. That is, to me, my sign that maybe I've been lied to my whole life. Everyone should be on the lookout for those, y'know. The people in Cheliax are. You could be too. Whenever I get myself off, I feel this sense of dissatisfaction. Guilt, even. Like I'm wasting something precious and beautiful because I have no better option. For the first time in my life, I don't feel that. Evil isn't supposed to feel that way. If it does, then what else were they lying about?"
"I don't know what specific lies you were told." She grins. "If you hadn't already proven yourself free of it, I'd disabuse you of the notion that this" she gestures down at herself "is meaningfully 'a kind of cancer'.
But that's not really about Evil.
Honestly, I don't think those things are particularly Evil's. I think Good just dislikes them the way Evil dislikes--principled advocates for ooze swarm welfare."
"A kind of cancer? Do you mean, like, undeath, or fatness, or tieflings, or what? Hey, what kind of tiefling are you, anyway?"
"The fat. Undeath might qualify. As cancer.
Dad said oni-spawn, and it seems correct enough, though I don't actually know."
"Holy shit, who said that to you? That's meaner than I've ever heard anyone be about it."
"It's just something the nutritional and medical authorities claim about fat Evil-looking foreigners--which is a decent percentage of the fat people around here."
"You poor thing. You poor, sweet, innocent thing. I'm so glad I can be here to give every inch of you the glorious love it deserves." Her hand makes slow, sensual circles around the tiefling's tummy. "Now I have to get jacked so I can beat the shit out of anyone who's mean to you."
"--they don't--say it particularly to me, I don't care what the bureaucrats think."
Purr.
"But you do need to get jacked."
Wiggle.
"You deserve better than to live in a society like that. You should be lounging on fancy cushions being fed fresh raspberries by servants. Your girth should be the envy of every woman in a hundred mile radius. But I like it when you tell me what I need to do. Anything in particular about my enbulkening you're looking forward to?"
She licks her lips and nods.
"I'm a simple woman."
[ It's something she's heard male foreigners say, about being 'boob guys' or 'ass guys'. In Tazich-land, this is the lesbian version of that. ]
She draws the fingertips of both hands around Katie's valiant belly in a diamond.
"I'm certainly looking forward to the rest of me growing too, but that's a solid choice. Go ahead. Tell me how much you like my belly."
"It's trying so hard" She doesn't feel obliged to admit to being a sadist.
"And it's . . . going to succeed."
"Against all the odds."
"And look, it's very smooth and soft and round".
She luxuriates in it and kisses it.
"Paint me a picture of the Katie you see in your mind's eye. The one whose belly succeeded against all the odds." She nibbles Tazich's earlobe and grinds her crotch against her meaty thigh.
"If I do, you'll be tempted to try and become that person. And I need you." Fighting the inanity and lies of the world alongside her.
She reflects.
"But I guess I'm going to tell you sometime anyway.
I'm going to love having to get you new clothes. Have you ever seen a crab molt out of its shell?" Fuck, why would she say that? Now Katie is going to know she's waiting for her to become weak and vulnerable and soft so she can—she can't even eat her! She's not a daemon, she's not Teg . . . This distresses her somewhat.
"It's like, they have a whole bright new future."
She looks down at Katie's distended tummy.
"If you must know, I can't wait until you're trying to fit this shape inside your clothes all the time. And one day you can't, and it's inevitable evidence of progress, of accretion, of stepping on to the board, one step at a time."
Facetummynuzzle.
"You're adorable. Imagine the sex, though. Imagine all that soft, pliant fresh pushing against each other with the force of toned, steely muscle. Imagine trying to get our cunts to touch with several feet of belly fat in the way. Imagine all the jiggling. We'll be going at it for so long we need snack breaks."
This reminds Tezich, she's still quite hungry. She delicately keeps her jerky-holding hand apart from her Katie-holding hand.
"But we can still cuddle, right?"
"Touching cunts through several feet of belly fat sounds easy. One thing the System doesn't want you to know is how easy it is to run fast when fat if you're strong."
"It's just a physical feat that's considered impossible from within a fat body by people who live their lives with their minds in chains."
"Good to know. You continue to be based as hell. Anyways," she massages the tiefling's love handles as the grinding intensifies, "I'm not into men, but there is something appealing about being... Filled, so to speak, and I don't mean my stomach. I'm aware there are workarounds though. Maybe someday you can employ one and fuck me on all fours, make me feel it all hang and wobble., the weight of your gut atop my shelf of an arse as you thrust into me.."
"And lock my arms around your shoulders, yes."
Hip jerk.
"Pin you to the ground."
She finishes off the jerky, washes her mouth out. Bites Katie's neck and digs her fingers into her boob and shoulder.
"Steely muscle, you said earlier. Pliant flesh. I like that. I hope you don't mind if I play to win."
Grin against Katie's skin.
"Some people mind."
"I don't. So will I. I hear they have a sport in some part of Tian Xia involving people of similar stature grappling. They don't let women compete, though. Yet another taboo we'll be crushing under our weight."
She clings to Tazich like a baby koala to its mother. "I believe so. Am I to infer that I too will be needing the same workarounds?"
She presses Katie into her.
"If you wish, and I fail to stop you, it is only right. Don't they teach you any morals up there?"
"How poetic. The strong, independent woman, reduced to the same position as the rest of her sex, grunting and squealing like the sow you are." She tests the waters with a slightly forceful shoulder bite.
Very loud growl.
"It might be nice. I wouldn't know. I haven't been beaten hand-to-hand since I was a teenager."
A second bite, harder this time. "How sad. You've never known what it feels like to have your body shaken and rocked and overwhelmed with force like an oak in a hurricane. Must be incredible with all this flesh to move. Don't worry, my love. Katie will show you."
"Perhaps she shall." She sounds entranced by the prospect.
She writhes her spine and leans over Katie, pinning her to herself.
"I'm going to gorge and train until I can show you what it's like to be utterly overwhelmed with weight and force. And when I do, I'm not going to stop until the pleasure in your cunt and the pain in your muscles makes you scream loud enough to hurt my ears."
Husky. "I like it when you talk."
She licks Katie's neck. Thumbs a boob. Leans further downward.
"So do I. Anyways, the million times I'll have to lose to you on the way will still be fun, though. As will having to get new clothes, yes. If you're picking them out, I humbly suggest you making me dress more and more like a whore every time I have to go up a size. It's only proper."
Grind. Grind. Hump. Heavy breathing. She opens her mouth eagerly. She's so fucking full but she's too in the zone to worry about vomiting at this point. Her stomach is in Tazich's strong, capable hands.
—She is a healer.
Not really, but she's the closest actually-legitimate thing. She figures.
Feed.
Cup hand around tummy.
Bite chomp chew swallow. Forehead kiss. Hump grind hump. "You're so insistent. I'm gonna have trouble fitting through doorways by the end of the year."
"We can't have that. I've got to be able to pick you up and carry you places." Might be an excuse to finally put on some Strength.
She puts her hands around Katie's hips and presses them into hers as hard as she can while still being confident Katie won't break. She doesn't move her hips herself, for that reason. Squirm.
Is she doing this right? She doesn't know. It feels amazing. Katie has potential. She likes Katie. Katie is eating diligently.
"Well. Depends on the doorway. Some of them are breakable . . ."
She nuzzles Katie's neck. It occurs to her that Katie would like to hear that this will feel nicer when she's fat, and says so.
And then she says, unbidden, "You have to survive.
Like, with us. The . . . cops, and everything. Poachers."
"Mmmhhhhhhh, aren't I supposed to like, die soon, technically?" She just kinda licks Tazich's face and neck in lieu of tongue-kissing her so as not to prevent her from speaking.
Amazing technique!
Bellyrub, hipsquirm.
"Right. Just eat." She tries not to smile and show that she thinks it'll be fine. That would jinx it.
"You have to keep it down, and then you're in the clear." Tazich is not aware of people who vomit that easily. For a cleric of Urgathoa, she doesn't do a whole lot of poisoning.
"No, just, full, and warm, and horny, and I don't want it to end..." Gods, her face is so precious. She undulates her pathetic, bony hips as best she can and feels up Tazich's back with her hands.
[ Her back arcs reflexively. If Katie doesn't seem to mind, she'll lean into it and do it again. ]
She doesn't understand.
". . . That's different, isn't it?"
She traces her thumb all the way over Katie's boob down her abdomen with light pressure.
"I want it to end, but only so we can conquer the world, get you fat, dyke heaven, all that . . ." Smiiiiile.
"I mean, obviously we can't keep fucking literally forever, but like, will I still be able to feel all this after it happens. Will I still feel myself melt when I see you smile? Will I be able to fall asleep in your arms? Gods, I hope so, I'm so fucking tired, I'm probably gonna collapse as soon as I come."
"You'll be able to feel more. If you can't already."
She leans over and kisses Katie's tit.
"Gods, I hope you're telling the truth. Y'know, I often have trouble sleeping because my ribs poke into the bed. I can't wait for you to fix that." Tazich is so fucking touchable. The fat and muscle combine into an absolute paradise of texture. Katie's hands frolic across her body joyously.
"That's so horrible." She can't help it, her hands immediately go to Katie's sad little ribs. Oh my god, she's a bag of bones.
For her part, Tazich is trying not to break Katie. She's so damn crushable. Tazich does not know the phrase "prey coded".
"And when I sit on wooden chairs, I can feel my butt bones poking into the wood. My bones are so exposed, it constantly feels like they're in danger of snapping. Something must be done." Her hand seizes the overhang of the tiefling's belly and jiggle it provocatively, the other grabbing a handful of thigh, as close to the crotch as possible.
"Something . . ."
She bites Katie's leg.
Oh right.
"Stomach capacity." She shakes her head disapprovingly of Nature.
"Every night I'm going to go to sleep safe in your arms with a full belly and an orgasm-saturated brain, and every morning I'm going to wake up a little more than I was before." Her grinding grows more desperate. Her feeble abs ache. She's as eager for the sleep part as she is for the orgasm part.
Mm, feeble aching abs.
Tazich can give her both. One at a time.
"Well, you don't have to say it like 'little'. You've done very well your first night. Glass half full."
She can't help winding in synchrony with Katie's stick-figure-plus-beach-ball shape [ nonetheless soft and feminine and . . . ], but it doesn't seem harmful.
"More like glass spilling onto the countertop, really." She pants. Sweat drips down her back. Closer... Closer... Gods, she needs it...
She sees.
"I like your desperation," she says, since they seem to be complimenting each other.
She reaches down and attacks Katie's crotch.
She's happy to provide. "Please... Please... I need it. Please, gods, I'm so fucking tired and horny, it hurts, please just make me come..."
The wave breaks. Her eyes shut and she goes limp as joy and comfort and the overwhelming feeling that everything is going to be alright wash over her.
She feels it and hooks herself over Katie in a warm slump of vicarious relief. Pets her hair.
Does nothing to disabuse her of her contentment.
"Am I good to just fall asleep here and you'll carry me to wherever you actually live?"
Now is normally the point where she would become paralyzed with fear that she's damned herself and all that, but she's way too tired for that. She snuggles up to Tazich and blissfully dozes off.
She holds Katie.
And purrs.
Soft, feedable stick-human.
Conquerable, even. [ Fuck Teg. ]
She wonders what Katie will do when the rest of them have to go to Cheliax. She rotates it around in her mind, and can't think of anything better than "come with". She tries not to be troubled by this. She continues eating, in a way that doesn't interfere with Katie. It helps.
"Would you mind packing up for me?"
She stands up very gently with Katie in her arms, raising her eyebrows to demonstrate that she doesn't want to disturb the psychic state of the vulnerable new inductee.
She barely assents verbally, but sets about it.
She's used to being told what to do. She was raised to believe it doesn't damage one's pride, although she's since learned she was really taught not to have any pride in the first place.
"What will she do during—?" She doesn't say it aloud to preserve opsec, but her implication is obvious. She has her own ideas, but she's afraid of what Tazich has already decided.
"I've been thinking about it. She's safer with us. Hostage liability." Fifty thousand gold piece operation, hundred thousand gold pieces in capital risked, she doesn't say.
"We should talk about this with Ran." And her Message spell.
The crypto-Good brat has crossed a line. Sure, hogtie Tazich's tongue and force her to defend the plausibility of the liberation of Hell. Almost like Teg doesn't actually have any stake in the keikaku herself.
"Who could you possibly be talking about."
There's nothing she can say. She prays for Katie's soul.
". . . Right, never mind, sorry."
She occupies the bottom right quadrant of the doorway, bag of holding extended.
She sees how close Teg is to Tazich—oh, and Tazich is holding the stranger—and decides not to chance a Message to Tazich, despite ?????. She's not sure what she'd say anyway. Damn her wasted Detect Thoughts!
It's certainly something. The limp stranger's chest is moving.
"Oh? Tell me more."
"She is one of us already." Ambiguation between Katie's personality and Urgathoa's blessing, already granted. Question your god, Somayyeh.
"Believe it or not, some of my female childhood friends have found love, though it were with their parents' chosen beaus."
"Well, this is different." I'm not failing your stupid hetero-brained dipstick test, you poor self-dreamed spinster. Imagine her asking me these questions if I'd ended up with Teg!
Lights are extinguished. They cloak up and move out the way they came, through the ordinary door, using only mundane stealth but re-locking it as they leave. Much has been stolen; no point trying to rectify the mess. But better to let the proprietors wonder if they even touched the door.
Cloaked, they blend into the shadows, avoiding streetlights and loud gravel.
It's not the absolute most frictionless thing in the world, when you've just done the equivalent of a strenuous eating competition, but these are hardened women and hardened devotees of Urgathoa.
They leave the thick of town; the streetlights become fewer.
With several hours to spare before sunrise and suspicion [ notwithstanding their blackout curtains for sleep and privacy ], the building they've established to disappear into swallows them.
If Katie wakes before sunrise, it will be in deep darkness. Otherwise, some gray will leak through around the blackout curtains over the window on the wall above her.
Tazich will be holding her, on a thick mattress on the floor in an alcove stacked with books.
Gauzy curtains will wall off the alcove, obscuring the rest of the room, but Katie might be able to see another set of cheap hangings, a clean work table, dense cupboards.
The blankets are thin, and Katie's clothes are still off. A breeze blows through angled slats in the wall. It's comfortably cool.
She wakes. Upon noticing the feeling of warm, soft flesh pressed up against her, she opens her eyes. Waits for them to adjust. Fuck, that wasn't a dream, was it? Oh gods. What the fuck did she do? She fucked an Urgathoa cultist. She may or may not be an actual fucking undead now. She's going to die horribly and spend eternity in the Abyss or Abaddon or shit, maybe even Hell, maybe this is all some really complicated Chelish psyop somehow. Wait, aren't you most likely to just get your soul annihilated entirely in Abaddon? That's... well, it's certainly better than Hell. Probably better than the Abyss. May even be better than Limbo. And it's not like she was gonna make it into Axis or one of the Good afterlives anyway. She does her best to calm down. Just do the same thing you've always done and avoid thinking about anything other than the immediate present and/or arcane trivia that has nothing to do with your life at all, she reminds herself. Yesterday, you would've never expected to be where you are now. Who knows where you'll end up tomorrow. Just focus on where you are today. And at the moment, where she is today doesn't seem half bad. "You're awfully cuddly for a literal hellspawn."
"Mrrphgh?"
Nibble.
"Oh. Hi . . . Katie. Sorry for nibbling on you."
Snuggle. Squeeze.
"Uh, if you need to pee I can show you where the bathroom is. Do you need water?" It's dawn, fuck, she's groggy. But she looooooooves Katie. "We have a lot of food too, on the off chance . . ." Kind of a lie. "Or if you need anything else, just say. The others won't be up for like four hours, and we'll all explain some shit to you then. I can answer questions now, too."
"Yeah, all three of those things would be appreciated. On the questions, first of all, so, am I an undead now?" She tenses up. She's scared to hear the answer. She still sort of wants to hear a no, even though she doesn't feel any different. She's just scared of- permanence, of making big decisions that can't be undone. Of being stuck. Y'know, as if she wasn't stuck before.
It's such a . . . question, coming from someone as quick as Katie, who's obviously already undead. Tazich had thought Katie would know it of herself instantly, as she did.
She regretfully disentangles and passes Katie one of Tiar's stolen jumpers [ it should fit, Tiar's almost exactly Katie's size ].
"You . . . can't really be uncertain about what you are." Right? "'Undead' isn't something you aren't. If you're asking if Urgathoa's still gonna smite ya, She isn't. You belong."
The confusing wording is concerning. Is it deliberate? "Why the speaking in riddles? I don't feel any different, seemingly I still need to drink water and pee, and to my understanding those are in general not things undead need, so like, it would be a surprise if I am, but I'm surprised by a lot of stuff that's happened lately. Wait, what do you mean, 'still gonna smite me'? She was going to smite me before?"
"Asleep", in the main room, the thought occurs to her that Katie has never heard of the concept of 'when in Hell, do as the devils do'.
She's quickly acquired the impression that she's underestimated the River Kingdoms' level of disorder.
Which bodes very well for her ends.
"The wolf would have killed you, if you were offending Her instead of pleasing Her. It was dosed with a living plague to that effect. All of ours were.
You abandoned your previous life, sacrificing part of yourself. Urgathoa almost always finds such a shedding is necessary, to join Her.
Theoretically not always. Maybe She didn't find that, with you. You don't feel like you've lost anything? There's no sense of absence?"
"Well, uuuh, to tell the truth, I feel a mild sense of terror that I've done something that cannot be undone and damned myself for all eternity and all that, but like, internally at least that just feels like an ordinary emotional response to my circumstances, not something directly supernatural. Other than that, I feel basically normal. Is that good or bad?"
"It's neutral. You're safe either way. I'm jealous of how much my goddess likes you if you're not undead by now, though. I can pray about it and see if She says anything after we get something to eat."
She holds out her hand, plausibly to make Katie following her in the dim light easier.
She gets up and follows, and for a moment, her fears are melted away by the transcendent joy of holding hands with a pretty lady whose thighs are each wider than her whole body.
There's a chamber pot situation, with a door and a little washbasin with cups. She waits for Katie to go first. When they're both done, she looks at Katie.
"Sorry, Urgathoa's blessing doesn't guarantee our opsec. I'm gonna have to tie you to something while I run out and dump the toilet."
"Okay so I know this is kind of an awkward question, but given how much I ate last night it's probably gonna be relevant soon. What do Osirioni people wipe their butts with?"
". . . Water? There was soap in there.
Sorry, we don't have that many rags. You're not one of those people who comes in under the impression that Osirion is in constant dire drought, right?
Wait, didn't you say you know a laundry spell?"
"See, this is why having a big fancy organized efficient government sucks. Back home, there's enough paper currency printed by failed regimes floating around at any given time that we just use that. At some point, would-be warlords started competing for support by promising to print softer banknotes, so even if their reign didn't last, people would at least have a more comfortable time on the stool. 'Soldiers want war, peasants want peace, nobles want power, but everybody shits', as the saying goes."
She blinks. She very dearly wants to kiss Katie right now.
"I don't think I'm going to have to pray about this. I'm going to, but I don't think I have to. It seems like you were just born to teach the likes of us how to, you know, reject the order of creation and revel in the annihilation of man as the image of God, and all that. Fuck, you don't even know! But you do. Pharasma."
"Well, I have very little idea what you're talking about, but on my end, I'm told you know it's really love when you get that warm fuzzy feeling from being around them even if you're doing or discussing something really gross, and we are and I do, so that's a good sign."
"In what context were you told something like that?
Here they teach us, more practical stuff, than that, about mortal relationships, and less fun stuff, than that, about the divine."
"Oh, I wasn't, like, told it, y'know, by a person, I just read it in a book at some point I think. I love books. Easily in my top 3 things. Fuck, how much access to books am I gonna have as you guys's hostage? I might be feeling that deep sense of loss coming on."
Oh, no, she wants more books than she saw in the alcove?
"Besides just what you can see around here, Ran's friends let us sub-borrow books from the library in the big fancy Nethysian temple pretty regularly, and—fuck it, wanna break in with me as practice?"
"I am extremely clumsy and terrible at being subtle in just about any respect. Are you sure that's a good idea?" It does sound fun, though.
"It'll have to be fixed eventually!"
She ties Katie to a door handle for the brief sojourn to empty the chamberpot, letting her re-wash herself the Osirian way first if she desires.
Then takes her to the kitchen.
Lights a candle, nods at water pitcher, cups and dishes.
She starts and stokes a fire under the flat metal stovetop, then opens a waistpouch triumphantly. "I found these in the gutter!" It's three huge purple eggs.
Cough.
"Sorry, Ran still has to unpack a lot of the stuff from last night."
She demonstrates that the cupboards contain any sacks of dried fruit, nuts, jerky, honey, spices. There are also some oats, rice, and beans, on the lower levels.
"This is pathetic. Help yourself though.
We really do have a lot of leftovevers waiting. We just hunted-and-gathered. That's how we get most of our stuff. Surprisingly, there was wolf left. We'll set most of it curing, but we'll cook some. It keeps in the bag." God, she wishes she had some right now.
"Eggs are yours." She starts them frying. No embryos!
"Not normally the biggest fan of eggs, but I've never had ones like this before. What laid these?" She's not really hungry but does her best to please Taz by nibbling idly on some dried fruit anyway."
"Rainbow bustard. They're kinda like, I can show you later, either in real life or a picture, but they're these huge groundbirds. The female is way bigger than the male and has this reflective black neck frill and the male is the one that sits on the eggs."
"Fascinating! Do people, like, raise those as livestock here, or are you going out to the savannah or whatever and stealing their eggs out of their nest?"
"Oh, they're just feral. People tolerate them because they make good eating and they tolerate people because people food makes good eating, I suppose."
She decides not to mention her feelings about the local taboo on eating cats. The superstition seems to be an attractor even for foreigners.
"Did food just show up on the table where you're from? Sorry, that sounded kind of rude . . . what do you want on these? Here, cheese!"
"Mmm, smells tasty. Gods, I want to get big and all, but being this stuffed all the time is gonna be an ordeal at first. And you expect me to do, like, heists and shit like this?"
Oh, right, Katie's definitely still uncomfortable and claiming hunger out of solemn duty.
This is very hot!
"Umm, there are things we can do. First, you should probably try praying to Urgathoa, like, right here right now. to see if She clerics you right away. That makes the whole process of remolding your mortal form to Her whim somewhat easier. Do you have general prayer knowledge? Like, knowledge of how to pray that generalizes across deities? It's fine if you don't, they don't teach it in most places for obvious reasons." But they probably do in the River Kingdoms, from the sound of it.
Gods, she wants to pull Katie against her, but that would just be creepy now, right.
"Not really. Probably not gonna be useful, though, I almost certainly have too low of wisdom to even be a first circle cleric. Also, by remolding my mortal form, do you just mean fatter, or like, making it all gross and rotting or something?"
"Very much healthy. Just fatter. And stronger, and various kinds of more emotionally attuned and happier, if your body's currently bad at any of those things and you desire an upgrade."
She eats some of the no-cook stuff out of the cupboard. Salts/peppers/paprikas the frying eggs absent Katie's input.
She still thinks Katie should try it, but she's not gonna push it now. She has a feeling her own not-incredibly-impressive Wisdom won't sell the unholy life to Katie like it would to most people.
"Alright then. Have you literally ever gained fat mass before, that you've noticed?" Repeating past successes is a good place to start.
God that sounds nice. "I mean, uh, I grew tits during puberty. Uh, if you can call these" she gestures to them "tits. Does that count?" She takes a tiny nibble of the egg.
"—I'm hazy, I really need my reference book. I think it means you're less hopeless than you could conceivably be."
don't drool at the egg or Katie or the whole situation
"Do you know your alignment? Where your soul is destined, all that?"
"Not 100%, but probably Chaotic Neutral. The plurality of people in the River Kingdoms are. Wait, how does having been a twig my whole life mean I'm less hopeless."
"Well, you grew boobs at all. Some women don't. Sucks to be them, because Urgathoa doesn't like them as much.
She obviously likes you, in any case.
Do you feel the urge to eat at any particular time of day, or in response to anything in particular?"
[ Nom. She didn't even finish eating earlier. ]
"I uuh, not really, to be honest. I do generally get horny when I'm nice and full though, which is rare, or was before now. But when I'm hungry it's usually difficult to concentrate on anything. Sometimes my body just screams at me to fuel it and I do my best to shut it up and on rare occasions when the harvest is good this actually feels pleasurable rather than just alleviating pain. Those occasions are nice, though. Easily one of my top 3 things. Right up there with books and women."
Golarion is going to kill and soul-destroy this perfect soft creature to teach Tazich one of its interminable pointless lessons.
"Pattern to when you get hungry? Does using magic affect it? How are you doing now?"
"Uh, when I haven't eaten in a while. Idk like, when I'm really focused on something I tend to forget I need to eat and stuff until I'm about to collapse from hunger, and that can include magic but also reading and other things. I'm not as painfully stuffed as I was last night but I'm still feeling pretty satiated."
"Well, we'll solve the 'forgetting to eat' part . . ."
She flops her arms and head against a table and looks at Katie sideways.
"You still sleepy?"
"Eh. I am, like, half the time. Why?" God she's so cute. She hopes she's being invited to more cuddles.
". . . I think humanoids usually sleep like eight consecutive hours. I thought non-desert people were even more diurnal than us. It was like 3 hours past midnight when we fell asleep, and the sun is just coming up now."
"See, the impact of that is hard for me to judge because there aren't seasons in this godsforsaken shithole so I have no idea when the sun is supposed to rise and set."
"Oh. Yeah probably more sleep at some point good then. Not complaining if it means I get to cuddle you more, though."
"If you think you can balance the egg plate I can start carrying you back now. Any other immediate questions?
I can try and explain why I was asking the stuff I was about your hunger patterns if you're interested. The answers you gave were informative but not conclusive. Full explanation will come later anyway."
"Carry away. And I am indeed interested. I'd be interested in anything if you were explaining it, frankly."
Carry.
Nnnuzzle Katie's side. [ She is such a soft little creature! And other things which Tazich must keep from thinking about lest her concentration waver! ]
"I wish I could carry you one-handed and feed you eggs.
So, there's a cluster of divinity, which is not about Good, Evil, Law, or Chaos, but kind of like those other clusters it has its own internal patterns, works in its own self-consistent way. Urgathoa's part of it . . . you'll hear different opinions about Who and What else is part of it." She's not sure how much to say, about this. She's not sure what's true herself. "They think Lamashtu," she says vaguely. And Sarenrae. And Desna. And Rovagug.
"It goes by different names. Some are lurid, others pretentiously technical. Paradise, id . . . I still haven't figured out a good one." The others having their own ideas.
"Just like Lawful gods intervene with the Mortal Plane through a particular logic which is attached to self-prediction, and Abadar in specific intervenes through a logic which is attached to currency, these gods intervene through a logic which is attached to the day/night cycle."
She becomes quieter as they re-enter the more inhabited areas, then pauses a moment to see if Katie has anything to say.
"Huh, are Sarenrae and Desna part of it too, then? And like, Groetus, and Shinjuku or whatever that Tian sun goddess is called?"
She reflexively extends Katie out from her like a live bomb.
"Maybe?
. . . Listen, I really like you, if you're some kind of plant please just tell me now. We can work something out."
What kind of plant would she be, though?! Virtually nobody knows this stuff but them and a few cloistered scholars! She was really sure!
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. She's getting a bad grade in girlfriend, something which is both normal to not want and possible to achieve. "I swear on my life, I'm not plant, truth spell me if you can. I just, like, extrapolated, because Sarenrae is the sun goddess, or, well, a sun goddess, and Desna is the goddess of the stars, which is weird because some high circle wizards who have studied the heavens say the sun is the same kind of thing as the stars, just way closer."
"That's bizarre and seems unlikely, but you seem to be some kind of undiscovered genius who just fell through the roof of some shop we were in, which is its own, overshadowing, kind of implausible."
She would really rather snuggle than interrogate right now. She's really tired, even if not quite full. Aren't they going to liberate Hell anyway? Fuck it, nothing matters.
"Sarenrae and Desna are—I thought, at least—primarily candidates for other reasons, reasons I haven't told you about yet. But that's true."
Having reached the bed, she lies back and shifts so Katie is sort of half on top of her.
"Gods, you're squishy. I would say I'm excited to be able to return the favor, but having the weight of a similarly-sized person on top of me might be painful even with the extra padding. Do you know from experience if it is?"
"Not from experience.
It feels like it shouldn't be. That would be outrageous of the universe."
"Someone's eager to sink into my soft expanse of flesh." Thigh squeeze.
Wiggle! Carefully, so as not to disturb the eggs.
"So, the day/night cycle thing.
There's a pattern to how They act through it. We haven't been able to figure it all out yet. The whole thing is generally strongest in the very ill as well as those with unusually high mental abilities. Usually it's correlated with how your mood changes over the day/night cycle. I'd heard there were also people who experienced all the same mood signs but with no apparent correlation to the sky at all, and I didn't believe them, but now that I say this I realize that you didn't talk like you habitually sleep eight hours at night, and you were no-handed."
"Does that count as 'very ill'? I'd think I'd at least need to have, like, leprosy or something."
"Hm? No, I don't think you're one of the ill ones. You know magic, how dumb could you think you are?"
"Oh, yeah, sure, just, why is that relevant then?" She nibbles tepidly at the eggs. She's still not the biggest fan but if she wants to actually get big she's gonna need all the calories she can get.
"You don't have to finish those, I know you said you liked fresh meat and sweets, and Ran has all of that to unpack tomorrow." Snuggle.
"People it affects in unusual ways tend more than most to be left-handed or taste colors or some other weird thing."
Oh my god that's so cute!
She's sleepy.
"Maybe? I think that's just called being a woman and not turning your brain into a cage," she says thoughtfully.
"Has anyone told you you're the coolest and sexiest person on the planet?"
"No? Generally when I say that they look at me like I'm compost. I'd been starting to wonder if it was true."
—Oh, balls. Of course she doesn't know what this means, but it can't be good.
"No one else gets it. It's like, men get to be strong and in charge and stuff, but they waste it by being ugly. Women get to be beautiful, but they waste it by being subservient livestock. I get to be free mentally, but waste it by being a pathetic stick bug with neither muscles nor curves. But you? You've got it all." She grabs Taz's belly with one hand and her bicep with another to illustrate. "I envy that."
She likes being objectified! Happy noise.
Squiiiiirm.
"I must say, you hardly seem pathetic." Hold. "But I'm probably too sleepy to convince you that your 'mere' mental liberation is anything special now."
She sets Katie down on the cushion beside her, on the wall side of the bed, with her arm underneath, setting the egg plate on the floor.
"Are you OK like that? Not too warm or anything?"
"I'm perfect. It feels good to be able to lie down and rest with a big, strong, squishy barrier in between me and the world."
She runs her hands down the front of Katie's abdomen.
"I think they would love you in Cheliax. They'd be fools to, of course."
Tazich's relationship with the foreigner who fell through the roof on them is quickly turning from an exploitable loophole into a first-class national security crisis.
She would be thinking things, but she doesn't even know what to think.
If this is all part of Mendev's grand plan, then what is she even useful for? She feels like she's reading one of those terrible novels the Queen started throwing money at, where the entire point is to be confused by hypothetical puppeteers and nobody ever just takes an action, until the very end when everything demurely explodes and it's like, what was all that hand-wringing for, then?
"You're submersible. Er, subservient. You fawn. You're a flatterer. I'm not explaining it right. They have a thing for natural slaves. You know?"
"Well, I said they'd be fools to think of you like that. And they don't like pathetic slaves, at all, see. They like . . . steely ones. Of course slaves still can't have any creativity. Except, they insist, sometimes, but it's not really clear to me when. Wish Tiar was awake . . . she understands Asmodeanism better than me."
"Anyways, I just want... to confuse people, as soon as they look at me, because I don't fit into their categories. Because they can tell from my tits and hips that I'm obviously a woman, but also from my biceps and the fuckoff huge weapon on my back and the way I carry myself that I'm dangerous and powerful and not to be trifled with, and those two things aren't supposed to go together. I want them to not know how to interact with me because I break the core assumptions of their worldmodel."
Mouthkiss.
Snuggle. [ Katie is a dumpling! ]
Lazily, drifting off, she says, "Yeah they don't like that in Cheliax. The convenient part is, anywhere sufficiently Lawful, they also can't notice it for the life of them, in the first place."
Right right right what the fuck does she do now
don't use any spells it's too early in the morning you don't know what's gonna happen it's not worth it
Not worth it to send the crow out, either. Someone will hear it and wonder why.
She'll just have to wait to leave a message at her usual drop-off location. She feels so helpless, but she can't act without approval from higher up here. She's got no idea what's going on. Maybe Katie is a plant, and Tiar just didn't rank high enough to be worth notifying, which would be offensive but understandable.
She writes the note in her head. [ She'll translate it into code, of course. ]
Commander Doe,
——————— — ——— ———— ———— ———————— routine looting mission ———————— unidentified female wizard, claiming ——————— River Kingdoms ————————— — ——— ———— ———— —— — ——— ———— ———— ———— ————— Zaftig Arrow ——————— — ——— ———— ———— ——————— 'romantic-love' ————————— — ——— ———— ———— —————————————— explaining Moth ontology ———— ——— ————— ——— wants to take her with us into Cheliax —————————————— personality is disordered, but ————————— —— —— ———— ————— "natural slaves" ———— "they'd be fools to think of you that way" ————— — ——— ———— ———— —— ———— ————— security————— ——— ——— ——— Victory—————— ———— ———compassion. Orders?
Forever with the many,
Fawn
She goes over and over it in her head, rolling over a couple times after she's first drafted the whole thing.
She's a little tempted to start fingering Taz while she sleeps just to see what happens, but she's too damn tired herself. She cuddles up and dozes off alongside her.
Shoulder boop.
"Are you slept? They're making the wolf, I didn't even have to help."
"I'm as slept as I ever am. Wolf sounds nice. Probably got a lot more room in my gut now."
Is this true on Tazich's sly method of physical inspection by slightly wiggling her own body against Katie's tummy?
What stat does she need to grind to be able to determine organ fullness on skinny people with gross-somatosensory skin areas alone?
Hhhgh Katie doesn't seem as bloated, so that's probably a good sign. She's probably still marginally lying about having room left though. Tazich knows slippery when she sees it. Katie is slippery.
She helps Katie up.
People are spread out around the house with [ admittedly modest ] bits of breakfast. Somayyeh is wearing nothing more than a small sheer nightgown, her posture relaxed but her eyes still sharp. Teg is standing in a corner, facing into the walls, gnawing on a piece of meat. Tiar is reading something.
She brings Teg a rare but strangely dry cut of meat larger in circumference than Ran's own ribcage the big way around, with extras for the stranger.
She supplements Katie's plate with some sour berries stolen off Ran's haul where it's dumped on the table.
All except Tiar are eating with their hands but there are some forks clearly available if Katie wants one.
In fact something tells Tazich it would be wisest to bother with a knife and a fork in front of Katie, at least for the first 60 seconds of breakfast.
"So?" she asks Katie, "what do you know?"
It's not a rhetorical question, but neither does it hold the imminent threat of death behind it.
"Well uuuh, I know you worship Urgathoa. And you rob the local Nethysian library for books. And you're weird technical edge case undead. And I know Tazich's crazy about me". She pats the tiefling's tummy affectionately. "Hey, the blonde one is a vampire, how is she eating solid food?"
"Do you have much experience with vampires? Aren't you undead yourself, at this point?"
"We think Urgathoa might have picked her and not even needed to make that improvement. Chaotic Neutral, or so she thinks. She wasn't very attached to her previous life, and as you might have noticed she was already very us-like."
"No, I just read a lot of books, though not many about vampires specifically. I only know the basics. Undead, drink blood, burn in the sun, can hypnotize people, weak to garlic, yadda yadda yadda."
"There's a weird amount of misinformation about vampires. I guess they're not very common, but even so, why would you write a book saying that they can't digest solids or be awoken during the day or take damage to holy symbols?"
"We don't take damage to garlic either. But it is super unpleasant.
And this is not ideal food."
"Well, if she doesn't think she understands it, I won't do her the disservice of acting as though she'd made that claim."
'Paradise.' They're so fucking naïve. Seeing a pile of gold and an oasis with leopards in the servants of Rovagug plus some abstruse metaphysical trivia is one thing, but they give it such cult-brained names. She always wants to protest. Luckily, sometimes the others besides Tazich are sensible and do so for her.
To Stranger.
"How familiar are you with general alignment theories? What's your name, by the way?"
The words 'third tank' being used in reference to future!her make her wiggle and blush. "Katie. And uuuhhhh, not much. Law are boring sticks in the mud, Chaos are cool, and Good and Evil are both deranged masochists, or at least I thought so before I met you guys."
"Mm. So nothing.
Well, about some things you seem perceptive.
Tell me, what is an opposite?"
"Uh, that's one of those words which is so, like, basic that I can't even really define it except by just listing examples. Night and day, short and tall, thin and fat, bald and hairy, do I need to keep going?"
"How do you tell when something's really the opposite of something else and when it isn't? Tazich has accused me of being 'skinnyfat'—that is, notably having the physical characteristics of a fat person, and notably having the physical characteristics of a thin person, at the same time. Normally, with opposites, it is not considered that such a thing should be possible. Can a time be nightday? Can a single thing be blackwhite?"
"I think 'blackwhite' is just called grey. And like, 'nightday' is just dawn and dusk. Things can be in between opposites, but I don't think 'in between' is the same thing as 'both at once'."
They're not getting anywhere with this.
"Is Law the opposite of Chaos?"
"I would think so, but I get the vibe that I'm about to be told that's total bullshit and I'm stupid for believing it. And what does 'skinnyfat' even mean, then?"
"It's like, when you're all flab in terms of texture and strength, like in terms of body composition you have a lot of fat of the type that's under the skin, but you're tiny."
"You guessed correctly."
Katie is Chaotic. More Chaotic than anyone she's ever talked to, actually. She doesn't seem to have any need to verbally structure her opinions in terms of principles.
But, of course, that is not all there is, to being Chaotic. Katie is un-Lawful, at least.
"How much belief do you even have in the first place that the conventional alignment system reflects reality?"
"Well uuuh, you guys haven't at all treated me like I'd expect Evil cultists to, so, at this point not much?"
Extremists will grasp at anything to imagine they're important.
She's not going to disabuse Katie of her illusions.
"Not just that the categories contain what people say they contain", she pipes up, "but that there are four alignments structured on two axes."
"Well from the fact that you're asking I gather that there aren't. What, is there a secret third axis and eighteen more Outer Planes that Pharasma doesn't want you to know about?"
"Or your reading, as the case may be.
I mean, Ran, clearly She wants people to know about those particular four alignments."
"There's a science to it. Seeing things regardless of whether Pharasma wants you to or not."
She's drinking hot milk out of a kettle now. It's calming her down.
"It's like anything, if's complicated. Everything that it's possible to think of as an alignment is a solution to a superposition of divine domains."
"A shared factor or base or component godsight-pattern that resolves strongly out of several much fainter godsight-patterns, layered on top of one another."
"So like, 'Good' resolves out of shared elements between Iomedae, Sarenrae, Cayden Cailean, etc. And it's the size of the 'etc.' that makes Good be more of a thing than the stuff they don't have in common. Equivalently, it's Good being more of a thing than the stuff they don't have in common, that makes the 'etc.' of 'Good' gods a long list. Outside the Mortal Plane, causality doesn't have a direction."
"So if I understand correctly, 'Good' 'Evil' 'Law' and 'Chaos' aren't entirely fundamental principles of the universe, they're just, like, divine alliances, and there are other, smaller alliances that overlap with those four big ones, in the same way that Good overlaps with Law and Chaos and so does Evil."
"Heh, that's how my brother would doubtless put it, too." To Katie, "He's a Nobility cleric of Abadar.
'Alliances', at least to me, implies, like, this sort of dramatically precarious and particularly humanoid stack of emotions, forming the bond. I don't think that's quite the right way to think about alignments. They're sets of preferences added up, so it sort of looks like their sub-patterns are working toward a common goal, but . . . there's no collaboration, no congeniality? They just are.
But maybe some people don't see 'alliances' like that. Maybe some people really do just think of them like 'common desires, realized by any means'."
Maybe some people think of it accurately, stripped of wretched delusions, indeed!
"And so there's one of these that's something to do with day/night cycles and shared between Urgathoa, Sarenrae, Desna, and I think Taz also said Lamashtu, among others?
"After I'd told her just about Urgathoa and Lamashtu, and that there was some relation to day/night cycles, Katie got Sarenrae and Desna and I flipped out at first, but she said she was just basing it on who the gods of day and night were."
". . . Most people wouldn't see it that way.
I'm tempted to put you on the spot to generate your own hack ontology, and maybe teach us some things we don't know, but I'm not here to make you hate the cult and hate learning. Your choice."
"I'm not totally sure what you mean by that, but like, in Lamashtu's case, I guess she's a motherhood/fertility goddess, and like, the female reproductive system has cycles, they're roughly in synch with the moon's cycles which now that I think about it is weird enough of a coincidence that it may be isn't one at all. Urgathoa feels like more of a stretch, I guess many kinds of undead are nocturnal, but like, is Erastil part of the group too because farming is dependent on the cycles of day/night and seasons?"
"I think it's just day/night, not the moon. Tazich might have given you the wrong impression. Cayden Cailean unambiguously ranks; people don't usually notice the circadian element to His godsight because it's not also one of His explicit domains.
I was really more talking about what other alignments you think exist, if you can name any, but it's okay if you don't want to right now."
Them explaining the way they see things will probably just piss Katie off with how wrong it is and drive her to do it better than she would have before.
"Hm, well, I think there's a three-way division into "boring sticks in the mud", "batshit insane", and "actually fun and cool", and while these might sound to a casual observer like synonyms for one end of the traditional alignment grid or the other depending on one's persuasion, they don't quite fall cleanly along alignment lines. The rest of the Lawful gods are boring sticks in the mud, but Zon-Kuthon's batshit insane, and of course the two big CE gods are batshit insane, but so are Gorum (CN), Nethys (N), and even Desna (CG), and the actually cool category consists of both major CN gods, both major NE gods apparently, and maaaaybe Shelyn, the jury's still out on her."
"Uhhh, I guess domains are kind of similar, and gods with different traditional alignments can have the same domains, like I think Erastil (LG) and Gozreh (TN) both have Nature? Are domains and alignments actually just the same thing?"
"But at the bottom of everything, everything in the world is exactly the same."
"The interesting part comes in where you figure out the differences, but alignments versus domains isn't as hard a boundary as some people make it out to be. It's sort of like, people used to have a big thing about night air versus day air, or, I mean, some people are more normal about tieflings and halflings now . . ."
"Terrible examples! Male versus female blood, people used to think those were entirely different, but they're exactly the same medically."
"Or sun dogs and sun rods and haloes.
Anyway, domain is like, an imprecise term for talking about a large segment of the metaphysical pattern of godhood that's closer to the Mortal Plane than alignment, but even if you name all a god's domains you still can't predict all the ways they'll be able and unable to act. Alignment describes what they'll want to do, but not fully, just according to Pharasma. And there are clusters that go more by domain than Pharasma's alignments and seem to share goals."
They've never actually gotten to this point with someone who seemed to grasp the concepts so easily and yet be uninterested in trying to pull any of the intellectual weight themselves.
"She's from the River Kingdoms. I guess they have a lot of farmland because people are always dying in the endless wars.
Do they, like, bother breeding pigs out there, or no?"
"Don't tell me you know agronomy doesn't technically include animals and know nothing about agronomy."
"Technically.
I'm just trying to figure out what we're going to use you for."
"I think Tazich has some idea." She squeezes the tiefling's love handle to better communicate what she means.
She waves her arms around Katie in the shape of Tank!Katie.
Then she says to Katie, "She means, like, in terms of your mental abilities, though."
"Idk, maybe I could do magical research or something? Don't blame me for having no discernible skills, I didn't submit an application for anything, you're the ones who kidnapped me."
and she can feel that Somayyeh is about to start complaining about Urgathoa's decisions and Tazich and demanding that if she's going to protect the newcomer she figure out how to make use of her
"She's good at telling us things we don't know! And I can literally carry her until she gets strong enough to keep up.
We don't need to teach her the normal way and she doesn't need to do scut work to help, she can just linger around and osmose things and help us by telling us things we don't already know."
eeeeee she likes being picked up and feeling special and important and valuable. "What's a scut?"
"I'm learning so much today!" Gods, Teg is cute. If she's so fancy and special and shit, she can have two girlfriends, right?
She puts on multifocals and turns back to a strange little silkweaving project. "Katie is making me think. Most recent thoughts on why energy production remains as inefficient as it does?"
"Primordial god-coalition is the only thing that explains it. That's why we can trust that Paradise has the leverage to win, it's a metastable configuration."
"Wait, what do you mean by 'energy production'? Like, coal mining, or something to do with the way the gods give their clerics Channel Energy?"
"The mundane food-energy needed to keep mortal bodies breathing."
Really, Katie's brain is so giant?
"Energy production per land area, I should have said. There's no known limitation on making more food if you have more land."
"I still would've said 'farming'. Of course you get more food if you have more land, but producing more output per unit of input is what 'efficiency' means."
"Right, and there's not an apparent hard cap in how much all of mortal civilization working together can increase the efficiency of most 'simple' processes."
Having nothing more to say on this, she awkwardly ignores Somayyeh and sidles over to the vampire. "Hey. Heard a lot about you from Taz, but I wanna hear your side of the story. Tell me about yourself."
She's fucking famished, it's not entirely trivial to think straight.
"Me? It's pretty simple. I found out through a series of hard ways that Iomedae doesn't stand for what She claims to.
Are you feeling alright?"
Somehow it's easy to talk to Katie.
Teg has taken a step closer.
. . . Fuck.
Well, she can't just jump back now and leave Katie all betrayed and confused!
"Of course I'm alright, a pretty girl is expressing vulnerability to me! Care to go on?"
Oh, right, 'vulnerability' is a Lastwallian tactic. Um. Fuck.
"I—" didn't mean to be vulnerable "—wait, are you serious?"
"That I think you're pretty, that you're expressing vulnerability, or that I want you to go on?"
"That the main influence on your present wellbeing is that I'm expressing vulnerability."
"I mean, ok yeah, there are a lot of other factors at play, but it is really nice when cute girls feel comfortable talking about their emotionally sensitive tragic backstories around me."
"I—" was raised in a cult where that's an obligation and not a choice
no, can't say that, that's also emotionally manipulative vulnerability—
. . . 'like I said, I'm really not that complicated'? Somehow that feels like the wrong thing to say.
"—think you're aesthetically appealing too."
Of course she does. Eyeroll. The interloper is about to start telling Katie she likes her exactly the way she is.
She tries to focus on her work. If Katie has chosen Teg to assist for the first few minutes, well, she's a damn traitor, but so be it.
God this girl is adorably traumatized. Katie wants to hold her and kiss her chubby cheeks and tell her everything is going to be alright. She needs to give her an opportunity to open up without feeling like a burden. "Thank you! Now, I don't want to invade your privacy, but I'm curious how exactly your beliefs about Iomedae failed to match up to reality. I don't actually know all that much about her, truth be told. Cayden is the main 'violently confronting Evil' god where I'm from."
If Cayden Cailean wants to be the main god of anything He should be able to fucking feed Teg properly. Why is Katie so appetizing?
"I thought She . . . cared, at all, about happiness winning, I suppose." About love winning.
She doesn't know how much more she should say. How much does Katie know?
"And she doesn't? What does she care about, then? Must be something. Totally apathetic people don't tend to become gods."
"If you're asking me what the former-mortal part of my Iomedae-model cares about, that part wants people to acknowledge that She had no other choice than, effectively, mercilessness. And She doesn't want people to do anything else, ever, really, other than acknowledge that, because doing anything else sort of invalidates Her obsession with not being at fault for having become who She became.
But there are other parts of Iomedae, that are less human, and some of them were there before she actually became a god. She made herself that way deliberately. Or you could say the god is reflected in Her own mortal past."
"I suppose so. It's funny to think of it that way, since of course She doesn't think of Herself as feeling or certainly being particularly guilty at all. Rather the opposite. She thinks She's minimized Her actual and subjective guilt impeccably.
But yes."
"That's fucked up. I can imagine what it would be like to be subject to that sort of emotional manipulation. You deserve better. Do you like your new surroundings, new companions, new circumstances?" That's it, give her opportunity to bring up the fat thing if she wants to while maintaining plausible deniability. God, Katie really wants to talk about the fat thing though. She's so big and hot and Katie really wants to know what it felt like to balloon up like that.
"Well," she stands closer and whispers, "i can understand why you wouldn't want to badmouth your comrades within earshot of them, but whatever you don't like about them, feel free to talk to me about whenever you feel comfortable, and i aim to do better. you deserve better."
"they're all blood donors" FUCK WHY WOULD SHE SAY THAT SHE KNOWS WHY SHE WOULD SAY THAT, KATIE IS STANDING REALLY CLOSE AAAAAGH
God, she tries to be good about it in her thoughts but Teg is just so hilariously disgusting sometimes. What an oaf.
"uh, no, I'm insulting you by unfavorably comparing you to them" JUST BE INEPT ENOUGH AND IT'LL DRIVE HER SAFELY AWAY, IS THAT YOUR PLAN?
"i can feed you. does it- who am I kidding, I don't care if it hurts, being pressed up against your big soft body would be elysium anyway."
What, like it's her job to understand and control the Teg? Like she's the goddamn Teg whisperer? The Teg wrangler?
"fuck, are you freezing because you're shy or because you're creeped out, i can back off if you're creeped out."
"Katie, I can't make out what you're saying, but—sorry—Teg's not actually safe to feed on you without you having emergency self-defense training first. Even then . . ."
"Okay, apparently you guys can hear me anyway so I'll drop the whispering. Teg, regrettably it is apparently not safe for you to feed on me yet. I am sorry and I will do my best to fix that as soon as possible. In the meantime, now I'm curious if different people's blood tastes different."
"Is there any observable correlation between people's appearances or personality traits and the way their blood tastes?"
For once, she wants to say something incisive about their double standard for making sure the Moth members have enough to eat. But she knows she's a utility devil.
"Mm."
"Okay, fuck, sorry for asking, you're just really interesting and I want to get to know you better." God fuck shit she's so stupid teg hates her now she made a beautiful woman cry she's worse than Razmir she belongs in the deepest pit of Hell
"I want to get to know you better." Thin smile. Step back.
"I've been wondering, do they eat guinea pigs where you're from?
Hey, where are you from?"
"River Kingdoms," she says dryly. She, was eavesdropping on the sex, at least that much.
"As far as I know they don't raise them for food up there, or at least not many, but if you offered one to people there they probably wouldn't turn it down."
"People here are weird about what animals you eat. I know that's less up there, where you have fewer diseases."
She wants to ask why Katie thinks that is, but they're not supposed to be quizzing her.
Why is it, that they have fewer diseases in the River Kingdoms? It touches on things she's irritated not to be able to figure out.
"It was a bit of a challenge, but I managed. No need to apologize, by the way, forwardness is much appreciated."
"—Financially? I, ah, couldn't help but hear you were a princess."
"Oh. Idk, struggling isn't the right word. More like... neglected. Mainly self-neglected, to be honest."
<Message@Tiar>"Is she a masochist?"</Message>
If Katie's hearing is good she may be able to hear. She knows she's chancing it, but she's too curious.
Internal sigh.
"Since everyone is wondering right now, are you sexually aroused by your own pain?
The reason they consider this important has to do with a certain level of ambient public superstition about the validity of Cheliax's brainwashing procedures."
"Well, to be perfectly honest, I've fantasized about it from time to time, but I've never had the opportunity to actually try it, so I don't know if I'd actually enjoy it in real life."
Internal facepalm.
"Everyone, stop considering this a salient ambiguity right now. This is not a salient ambiguity."
"We have read that masochism is common among women. Teg insists she's not a masochist, although certain people are convinced she secretly is and it's relevant."
She throws a knife through the loose part of Somayyeh's cloak, pinning her to the wall.
"Ugh, don't lump me in with those romance novel reading heteros. It's different when I do it."
"Are you unfamiliar with the concept of heterosexuality? Do they not have it where you're from? If so, where is it and can I move there?"
". . . Lastwall. No.
Why would you want to?
And I . . . know what heterosexuality is. Especially through Tazich. I just don't know why you'd despise someone for it."
Shit, Katie thinks Teg mentioned that earlier and she just forgot because she's an idiot. She hopes she isn't judged for it. "Because it's gross and boring and pathetic. Men are gross and ugly and they aren't really capable of loving women, that's why they need marriage to force them to cooperate long enough to pop out more little serflings to till the fields."
"Male serflings and female weavers, you mean."
She hasn't heard anyone ever talk this way about men before. It's incredibly offensive.
"Serfs are still serfs even if they're weaving rather than plowing the fields, definitely spiritually and I'm pretty sure legally."
"You would know better than I.
Serfdom implies, like, a sort of responsibility, though, a custody of the land and a liability for it, which weavers don't have.
Not that I'm from a place that actually has serfs, and this isn't either. I'm not even from a place where most women are weavers. They're teachers and nurses and store-tenders and bookkeepers and bureaucrats, apart from being mothers and wives."
"Having a job doesn't make you less of a docile broodmare, just means you're subserviently obeying two masters instead of one."
Two . . . ?
The husband.
Her stomach is getting cold. She still hasn't had the chance to drop off the letter to Doe. What exactly is she dealing with here?
"Dividing unilateral holdings does reduce tyranny, just as a matter of how things work, but that's not what I was talking about.
What . . . is life supposed to be, if not work? Never mind about the masters."
"Would you like a hands-on demonstration?" Teg apologized for being forward, so she hopes she doesn't mind if she is as well.
"Well, not just sex specifically, but pleasure in general. Also winning, and spiting the haters, which I suppose is its own kind of pleasure."
She really wants to interject with something about how Urgathoa would love Katie, but holds her tongue for now and again tries to concentrate on her project. Give her breathing space.
"I don't know exactly. Good things instead of bad. People being free to do what they want." Glance at Tazich.
"But then what's the point of people being free to do what they want, if pleasure that doesn't guide is a waste?"
"I don't know. Maybe aimless pleasure will be a good thing then. It isn't now."
"So no one's allowed to have fun until the world is perfect? Sounds worse than what Asmodeus or Zon-Kuthon are preaching, at least they don't give you false hope that you'll get to have fun one day."
". . . Good things are good and bad things are bad, regardless of what's pleasurable. My pleasure is just one kind of good, and it's swamped by all the other stuff that's out there. We could make that not be the case if it's true right now."
"Like, you have this group of things which you have labeled 'good'. Why are they preferable to the other group which you've labeled 'bad'?"
Why is she in the fucking hot seat about this
It's no different from one versus two, how does Katie not understand!
"Why do we label green things green and blue things blue? Do you have no sense of good?
Oh, I just remembered what word I'm using. Silly me.
Lastwall lumps them together, good and preferable. It makes sense if you're from there . . . but if I were to translate it into alignment-neutral language, I'd say something like 'the world being the way that everyone enduringly prefers ranks above just the world being the way I prefer right now, because everyone else being happy is" good "also going to make me happy."
This is a more interesting exercise than she would have thought.
"Yeah, but if everyone just did whatever felt good in the moment, we wouldn't get that nice thing where everyone's happier and it, what's the word . . . compounds."
"But if everyone is constantly sacrificing themselves for the Greater Good, no one will ever get to actually enjoy the Greater Good!"
Hasn't Katie been listening?
"It happens in the future. Which is different from the past. Because the whole thing here is that we're putting in effort to change the present. Over time."
"But how will you know when you're done? What if one day, Heaven has taken over the world, but no one's able to actually have any fun, because you're all still, like, manually arranging grains of sand until the beach is absolutely perfect for swimming?"
"Heaven doesn't even care about arrangements of grains of sand, it's already lost its way in a more interesting way. I'm not actually on their side anymore, you know. Otherwise I wouldn't be here.
I'm making the case for -- some things about what I was taught about how to organize the world, that I think are correct."
"I'm just saying, the world is never going to be perfect, if you wait to enjoy yourself until it is, you're gonna be waiting forever. No one else is going to put you first, so you have to do it yourself."
"I don't think we're talking about the same thing anymore."
She goes back to work silently.
She's noting down the growth of what appear to be miniature nut plants in a glass tub, against marks ruled on the tub's outside.
"Well if that topic of conversation's exhausted... is it true that you were not always so... vast?"
"Yes. I looked normal before I was turned."
She doesn't say it with particular happiness or any kind of particular gravity.
"But that doesn't normally happen with vampires, does it?" She resents the use of 'normal' but isn't gonna language-police Teg about it, she has standards. "I'm aware that ghouls always appear emaciated, regardless of their physique in life, but I haven't yet heard of any undead which are the reverse."
Shrug. "Urgathoa says it's just something about me. Apparently there exists a stronger connection between the soul and the body than Good would have us know. Undead have partial continuity with the body, total continuity with the soul . . ." yeah this is veering into territory where if she keeps getting prompted for further explication it's gonna get uncomfortable real quick.
"Didn't know who was or wasn't a cleric out of this little group but not a surprise you are, but I thought only really big important high circle clerics got direct communications from their gods."
"I mean, She didn't say it in so many words, but . . . without getting any communications from your god, how could you be a cleric? And that stuff about the soul vs the body isn't stuff She told me, it's stuff Somayyeh and them -- The Moth -- have figured out other ways. Well, I'm part of the Moth now, but."
"Beats me. I kind of assumed that if you weren't part of a centralized hierarchical church, you just kind of went with your gut, and the gods are smart enough to pick people whose guts align with their goals. Literally, in Urgathoa's case."
"She's pulling something fiendishly strange with me, then." Gods she's going to have to get into it, isn't she. She couldn't just not say anything.
"Yeah, like, do you know why she would cleric an Iomedaean, because I sure don't."
"I guess because I was really hungry.
I don't really understand it either.
I should really eat before we talk about it any more." More than I ever have, ideally . . .
you could, I mean
if they weren't all watching
idiot, use this
"Well, if you ever--find anything I could drink--I would be very happy." Probably not actually for very long, but that's obvious to Katie, right?
"Aren't we--supposed to be talking--philosophy, or at least things I don't already know?"
"I do what I want. If any of you don't like it, feel free to kill me about it."
For a second, she thinks Katie is responding to her mental pleas.
Reality crashes in. Ah, she thinks she doesn't have to help. Because Urgathoa OK-ed her.
Why can't they all be like Somayyeh? But she likes Katie.
"I can't say that attitude will get you killed--or that it won't, really--but it probably won't make anybody very happy." Evenly, offered in the manner of advice, not a challenge. Teg's only the [ now second- ]greenest cultist, it's not her cult, and the norm of Katie telling them things they didn't know wasn't Teg's idea. The only thing Teg has to defend is the peace.
"Well, you guys are sweet, and pretty, and I like you, so I'll do my best to be nice to you, but ultimately I don't let anyone tell me what to do. Anyways, so like, did it" she gestures at Teg's rotund body "happen all at once, or gradually?"
"And uuuhhh... how did it feel? How do you feel about it?" God she's so stupid for asking but this is so hot, Teg is so hot, God she wants Teg to tackle her and bite into her neck while tenderly stroking her hair.
Unexpectedly, Katie's framing helps her pull it together and out of herself without too much fuss.
"It feels correct, like I'm supposed to be more this shape. And also very distressing, because -- uh.
Because it's foreign and involuntary and because I want to eat so much more than I do." A twinge of resentment at having said so much. Resentment for herself or Katie, she doesn't know.
"Well, I can't claim to know how you're supposed to be shaped, but I must say it is a lovely shape. Gods, you're good at getting my sympathy. I don't even care if it would kill me to feed you, I just can't stand to see you go hungry. Are all paladins like this?"
"Most of them aren't as cute as me." She says it with the desolate factuality of someone who's long since accepted that cuteness is the vilest perversion of morality and has forgotten that there exist people to whom she's just complimented herself.
come on guys let me eat let me eat come on
noooo don't how about you don't kill her don't kill her
She can't map them to known divinities, but these two voices often war, within Teg.
She hadn't known how to react, internally, when Katie had blithely asserted that she wouldn't be told what to do.
Would it be better . . . to throw her to Teg and maybe get her out of the picture? But what about Teg's mental stability in the aftermath of killing an [ another? ] innocent? What if there's a prophecy or something? She knows prophecy has been broken for dozens of years, but . . . there'd been rumors, about Project Lawful . . . but there had been every kind of rumor . . .
She needs to go drop off that fucking letter.
She kicks herself. Prophecy. Horseshit. The prophecy might be of Katie's death if there is one. It's stupid to protect Katie's existence just because it's the status quo. She's clearly a volatile element where Lastwall is concerned, without advance directive to the contrary. And if Katie really is all part of the plan, and Tiar is fucking something up by acting as though everything is exactly as it seems, well . . . morally sacrificing yourself in the one complicated world to save yourself in the nine normal ones is exactly the sort of thing the winning coalition is about. She thinks.
Fuck it, might as well make a pass at getting rid of Katie. It probably won't end like that, but. 'Work on the margins.'
"We should let Teg take advantage. It would help corrupt her."
There's no risk of confusing who the final pronoun refers to at this point.
There's rather different expected marginal return on effort, at Teg's vs Katie's respective current levels of corruption.
Danger, to Katie.
But . . . she suddenly realizes that she can't argue with the sum of in-play logic. Think, Tazich, think.
"Fuck the sun . . ." she mutters under her breath. She'd be fleeing and finding something else to eat right now if it weren't for that. And she would just go to sleep and realign her schedule with night after yesterday, but . . . she can't sleep when she's hungry. She feels the usual white-hot flash of pure rage at this, and as usual stamps it down.
She looks at Katie pleadingly, feeling like a tragic heroine, in a very low-status way.
The rationalization her brain constructs to give to Mabel later is a cross-hurricane of Katie's not that important and probably wouldn't have survived and stood a significant chance of damaging the mission and it's fine we'll reverse everything anyway [ ?? ] and I instrumentally needed to, right just then, if nothing else to show them what happens when they don't feed me
. . . even though that last is objectively insane.
She sidles up to Teg. "If I die, there's no better way to do it than in the arms of a beautiful woman. I'd prefer not to, though. Would be a shame to never get to see your face again."
well, I guess this is going the bad way, then
She leans slowly, fear stalling her desperate need. Will anyone object?
She pulls Katie against her, her left arm firmly around Katie's waist. She loosens it judderingly, apologetically. But it's still there as a barrier to Katie's escape.
With her right, she grips Katie's right forearm and brings its wrist up to her mouth. Her mind is nearly half gone now to the wall, the haze, of acutely painful need, punishing her stomach, throat, and teeth, always present, but almost never directly acknowledged, lest she slip to this.
Blinking quickly, she finds the lucidity to swallow drool.
Her body is a marauding beast and her soul heaves back the reins with all its strength, slowing her teeth to merely destroy skin and not flesh, as she bites.
The way she's holding on to Katie is promising. Her hunger . . . Tiar only pays attention because it's strategically vital, Teg's hunger is enough to make even Tiar feel pity
-- her hunger levels seem promising as well.
She has to look away. What she feels for Teg is not for this life.
Sweet blood, sweet nourishment, sweet analgesic, against violent effort to slow down, for some vague and ill-combined set of precommitments and convictions.
Three long pulls and swallows in, the voice that always fights on the side of abstaining breaks through and flashes her a white-hot image of Tazich charging in and wrenching her off. It's not exactly a greater pain than the hunger, but the thought unties something within her, and she slackens enough for Katie to escape, jerking her head in a half-willed command to that effect.
She is, in general, very proud that she can do this, even when dinner has some recourse.
Katie cries out in a mix of pleasure and pain. She clings tightly to Teg's soft, plush body with her free arm. When her wrist is released from the grip of the vampire's fangs, she collapses to the floor and gurgles weakly. "Cuddles..."
Emergency procedure engages.
She darts in and sweeps Katie into her own arms.
"Mmmgghhh." It's the noise a cerberus makes, not a human being. But she doesn't twitch, stays frozen in place and slightly slumped over.
She was talking to Teg, but she eagerly accepts the cuddles nonetheless. "There's gonna be more where that came from, y'know. More flesh means more blood. I hope soon I can sate you properly."
<Message@(Katie+Tazich)>"stop talking about food"</Message>
especially like that, what the fuck?
Her credence that Katie is a plant increases marginally, and her credence that if she is a plant she was sent to the Moth to torture Teg increases by a lot.
Looking at Teg once more, she wishes fervently that there was something she could do. She wishes she could immunize her from the sun somehow, right now so she could go out and get something to eat. They really thought last night would be enough?
It doesn't occur to Somayyeh that Katie's intrusion was a surprise wildly outside their range of expectation and thus constitutes an excuse.
On Golarion, the saying isn't "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong", it's "Things will go worse than they could possibly go."
Her brain tries to make the motion to increase their Teg-food budget, and aborts in the middle, crashing against the same futility of scarcity that was the reason she wasn't feeding Teg more already. This is too much . . . something in her cried. There must be some way, how can I . . .
She wants to go over to Teg and say some soft words of comfort. She'd be safe. She's a third-circle druid, ten times over Teg's ability in combat.
She stays where she is.
<Message@(Ran+Tazich)>"oh fuck, sorry. I just want to help her. She's so cute and round and I don't want her to go hungry. I guess when you're that hungry any talk of food when you're not allowed to have more is torture."</Message>
<Message@(Katie+Ran)>"You haven't been around vampires before, have you."</Message> She sends it to Ran but murmurs it into Katie's ear.
<Message@(Ran+Tazich)>"I have not. Only read books. They weren't this cute in the books."</Message>
<Message@(Katie+Ran)>"You might think, Ran, that this means she's read only propaganda books, but apparently you can read just about anything as a minor princess in the River Kingdoms. She just fancies Teg."</Message>
<Message@(Tazich+Ran)>"How couldn't I? She's so angsty and tortured and have you SEEN her thighs?"</Message>
She shoots a look at Ran.
This, she whispers, privately, to Katie. "'Angsty and tortured' is appealing to you?"
"I just wanna hold her and kiss her and tell her everything is gonna be alright and she deserves better."
"--You don't even know her, how would you know if she deserved better or not?"
"Right answer."
Right, of course, that's what an Evil deity would say. I was just testing you.
#$@^%
"Yeah. And snacks. Gotta replenish all that blood. I wish I could give Teg some cuddles but I assume it's not safe right now."
"It is not! Fuck, did she get to you, are you feeling okay?
Do you want me to tuck you in while I go grab you some food?
After we nap we can go spar in the cellar. Well, you with the practice dummy mostly. And I can teach you how to nock and draw, at least. There's somewhere we can go to practice shooting, later, if you're up for it."
"What do you mean, get to me?" Katie wiggles excitedly at the prospect of sparring. She hopes the 'mostly' means she will in fact get to get her ass kicked by Tazich at some point.
"I'm practically a skeleton, when don't I feel faint? But seriously though, I'm a little woozy maybe, but I'm fine, I just need snacks and cuddles."
"That, I can do."
She ferries Katie back to the bed and balances her in fireman's carry while she re-fluffs the pillows, then nestles her in, runs off, and comes back with three plates of wolf and two of sour berries [ the wolf mostly dry-seasoned, so it's easier for Katie to eat in bed ].
"Sorry, I wish I could get you some milk -- do you like milk? -- but Teg drinks it all."
She grabs a handful of berries. "Not straight up. Also, if she can derive nutrition from milk, why does she need blood, and if she can't, why does she drink it all?"
"You can derive nutrition from cabbage, so why do you eat anything else? And if you can't derive nutrition from cabbage, then why would you eat it if you were starving?"
"Ah, okay, that makes sense. So sensually handfeeding her regular food is an option too?"
"It would be funny to watch you sensually handfeed her the equivalent of tree bark." She skewers a piece of wolf on a thin knife and handfeeds it to Katie. "Which is the status, to vampires, of most regular food. I guess milk is the least-bad pinch blood substitute. And still terrible." Shrug.
"Aww. Guess my only option is to increase my blood supply. What a shame."
"You have a long ways to go before you're her favorite ahead of me." Nom. Feed.
"Blood supply." She's scooted in under the blankets; she wriggles her hips against Katie.