"Okay that's wild. Language processing isn't objectively weirder than generating physical-emotional sensations but still what the fuck."

"Yeah..."

She steps over to glance over her shoulder and blinks. 

"That's... certainly a set of priorities, which I suppose explains why someone would want to give it out. But of course, that doesn't explain how at all." 

She taps her fingers a little nervously against her thigh. 

"Nothing for it but to try it. Hell, here's a cheap test. Let's see how much it depends on the phone's mic."

She gets up, carries her phone off to their bedroom, turns on a white noise generator, sets the phone down, then shuts the door and comes back.

Tell her how she treasures her, right?

"Romana," she whispers, "I love you. I love knowing you're here to come home to, I love knowing you're mine, and I love knowing you trust me with your heart. I love how eager you are to help, how much you look after me, and how sweetly you react when I pamper you. I love how much you care, how you find every way you can to support. You're wonderful, darling."

She blushes, a little soft sigh on her lips. 

"I love you too, my wonderful Sable. And... you know, you're not getting away with that without getting kissed about it, right~?" 

She reaches up to stroke her cheek and kisses her firmly, sighing with satisfaction and grinning shyly with love. 

She sighs into the kiss and buries a hand in Romana's hair.

It takes a few minutes before she gets around to fetching her phone from the bedroom and turning the white noise back off, but eventually she does, checking the app.

It indeed registered! 

Now, the banner at the top is glowing, each of the icons glinting as if in a spotlight. 

"Well. It apparently can tell I said something to you even absent any useful input from the mic."

She sits back down next to Romana and taps the banner of currencies.

She nods and obligingly lays her head on her shoulder, nuzzling up fondly. 

🫟 50🗡️30 💜 50 🪙 30

🫟Ink: The power of your will to corrupt, to make your Mark upon your Mates. Gain it through acts of depravity and seduction. 

Thought Sense 30🫟

Thought Fuzzer 30🫟

Illusory Ink 30🫟

Lust Linker 30🫟

Vibrant Voice 30🫟 (🪞 / 🎁) 

Touch Of Corruption 20🫟

 

🗡️Blades: The power of your pounding heart and thighs, and your visceral joys. Gain it through indulging in your Treasure's bodies and sadistic thrills. 

Blade of Bliss 30🗡️

Sense of Suffering 30🗡️

Charming Curves 30🗡️ (🪞 / 🎁) 

Dolled Up 30🗡️ (🪞 / 🎁) 

Sinful Sex 30🗡️ (🪞 / 🎁) 

Touch of Blades 20🗡️

 

💜 Hearts: The power of your heart to love, to lift up and make whole, and to shape and shake the world. Gain it through taking care of your Treasures and exploring your capacity for earnest love. 

Soothed Soul 30💜 (🪞 / 🎁) 

Instant Delivery 30💜 

Treat Yourself 30💜 

Treat Your Treasure 30💜 

Energized Soul 30💜 (🪞 / 🎁) 

Touch of Hearts 20💜 

 

Coin🪙: Your price (or perhaps your payment, if you prefer), not in silver coins, but in lives uplifted and souls saved. Stain hearts with your passion and purpose, and your cup shall runneth over. 

Moment of Kindness 5🪙

Stalwart Shelters 20🪙

Safe Roads  20🪙

Pretty Places  20🪙

Fed Bellies  20🪙

Bound Hearts 20🪙

Each of the subheadings glows lightly, waiting for her to expand each of them out in turn. 

"I feel personally called out."

"Same," Hailey adds, her voice a touch tighter and sharper than Sable's.

"Ink and Blades? Hearts and Coin? Fuck."

She taps on Soothed Soul.

Soothed Soul 30💜 (🪞 / 🎁) 

Soothes away the worst of the stresses straining your soul. While not a comprehensive panacea for all ills that would ail a heart, this blessing can effectively treat anxiety disorders, compulsive behavior, spikes of shame and stress, and many other minor ailments of the mind. It also gives you a centered place in your heart that makes it easier for the pains of life to roll over you without making your soul roil. Does not reduce your (notional) capacity for pain, creative anguish, or other potentially desirable emotional states, but makes it easier to deploy the thoughts and feelings of a calmer, more comprehensively endorsed you when you need it. 

A little ribbon of ink swirls around the side of the screen, forming a little drop-down menu to show the description of the perk. 

"Oh wow, that's powerful. I wonder if that applies to just one of us, or both. Maybe that's what those icons mean?"

She tries tapping the mirror and present icons.

Notes are quickly jotted in in the fine purple ink in response to each touch, though they fade away when she clicks away. 

🪞: Purchase for Treasurekeeper

🎁: Purchase for Treasures

"I see. Have to pay twice, but it looks bloody worth it. Let's look at the rest before deciding what to buy, though."

She starts tapping her way down the list from the top.

🫟 50🗡️30 💜 50 🪙 30

🫟Ink: The power of your will to corrupt, to make your Mark upon your Mates. Gain it through acts of depravity and seduction. 

Thought Sense 30🫟

Gain a sense for your Treasures thoughts. Through the heartstain app, you can examine their self-conception and surface thoughts, peering into them through the screen, allowing you to feel them with a reality approaching your own thoughts. With time and effort, you can develop an uncanny intuition for exactly what your Treasure is thinking by simply looking at them, or by simply contemplating the question of what is on their mind.

Thought Fuzzer 30🫟

Disrupt your Treasures Thoughts. The effect can be modulated, from a light buzz of distractedness up to a thoughtless daze in which memories are not retained. With effort, it can be used to targetedly disrupt your Treasures' short term memories as well, though safeguards ensure more memories than desired will not be erased.

Illusory Ink 30🫟

Allows the generation and control of the phantasmagoria of Ink. The treasurekeeper can create quasi-real illusions of inks of arbitrary color, texture, taste, viscosity, color and even to an extent temperature, with details designed through the dance of your dreams and/or customization through Heartstain's interface. At the base level, you can select if non-treasures can percieve it, dynamically control conjuration duration, and give yourself a degree of sensation through your conjured ink as if it was your hand. While unreal, even at this level, it can still make minor permanent impacts on the world, if desired.

Lust Linker 30🫟

Bond your Treasures' physiological and psychosexual lust to thoughts and sensations. At first, it replicates the effect strength of a strongly implanted hypnotic suggestion, with work, arbitrary connections and wefts of warps can dramatically alter your Treasures' sexuality and allow for spontaneous hands-free orgasms.

Vibrant Voice 30🫟 (🪞 / 🎁) 

Gifts those so blessed with a voice as sweet as a Siren. While not obviously supernatural, this increases vocal talents to the peak human level, and makes your voice subtly but supernally easy and charming to listen to, while amplifying the force of personality and strength of self as expressed through their words. As a side effect, allows dynamic removal or insertion of an Adam's Apple.

Touch Of Corruption 20🫟

Drink a drop from a well of infinite corruption. Gain (and unlock for additional purchases, if applicable) a random perk of comparable compatibility and utility to listed 30 🫟 perks.

🗡️Blades: The power of your pounding heart and thighs, and your visceral joys. Gain it through indulging in your Treasure's bodies and sadistic thrills. 

Blade of Bliss 30🗡️

Allows you to call up the Phastasm of your Blade. The treasurekeeper can create a quasi-real construct of your Blade and associated accessories, with details designed through the dance of your dreams and/or customization through Heartstain's interface. At the base level, you can select if non-treasures can percieve it, dynamically control the shape, weight, sharpness, materials and to an extent temperature and give yourself a degree of sensation through your conjured Blade as if it was your hand. Your Blade can inflict illusory injuries as if fully real, and leave small lingering traces on the world as if it was fully physical.

Sense of Suffering 30🗡️

Gain a sense for your Treasures' pain. Bypassing Heartstain's interface entirely, you can reflexively feel your Treasures' pain in whatever manner you please - an sense of the schematic of the self, highlighted with pain, a sense of simmering pleasure outside your body, or as something to be shared, as you please, alongside a vastly improved instinctive understanding of how they can and perhaps should be hurt.

Charming Curves 30🗡️ (🪞 / 🎁) 

Gain the silhouette of your dreams. Reshapes the sillhoute and general compositional details of the Treasures' (or the Treasurekeeper) body according to the Treasurekeepers' whims (which may be freely delegated) within the domain of the 'ordinary', allowing for considerable changes within the realm of the humanly plausible. These changes are deep and real and physical, and impossible to discern as unnatural under medical examination.

Dolled Up 30🗡️ (🪞 / 🎁) 

Gives those so blessed a face worthy of fawning over and reprieve from the dreariness of dress. They may freely change outfits, bathe, apply make-up, hairstyle and the like in a moment outside of time and the constraints of fiscal reality, freely conjuring new outfits, perfumes and other preparations within the realm of the barely plausible for them to arrange within their means, though the Treasurekeeper may of course apply and 'lock' specific configurations as they desire upon their Treasures.

Sinful Sex 30🗡️ (🪞 / 🎁) 

Gives those so blessed the finest of the sexes. Allows for arbitrary customization of the attributes of the sexes and sexual differentiation, allowing for example the strength and confident passion of the manliest men to blend into the most fantastically feminine frame freely, alongside significantly superhuman genital beauty, taste, feel, and performance.

Touch of Blades 20🗡️

Sharpen the Blade of your heart upon the cosmic whetstone. Gain (and unlock for additional purchases, if applicable) a random perk of comparable compatibility and utility to listed 30 🗡️ perks.

💜 Hearts: The power of your heart to love, to lift up and make whole, and to shape and shake the world. Gain it through taking care of your Treasures and exploring your capacity for earnest love. 

Soothed Soul 30💜 (🪞 / 🎁) 

Soothes away the worst of the stresses straining your soul. While not a comprehensive panacea for all ills that would ail a heart, this blessing can effectively treat anxiety disorders, compulsive behavior, spikes of shame and stress, and many other minor ailments of the mind. It also gives you a centered place in your heart that makes it easier for the pains of life to roll over you without making your soul roil. Does not reduce your (notional) capacity for pain, creative anguish, or other potentially desirable emotional states, but makes it easier to deploy the thoughts and feelings of a calmer, more comprehensively endorsed you when you need it. 

Instant Delivery 30💜 

Eases away the ills of inconvenience. Any product order you make will arrive within minutes, if not seconds, regardless of the ordinary delay, delivered by an amiable and accepting deliveryperson who has been well-tipped and treated for their work, in perfectly mint condition, regardless of plausibility.

Treat Yourself 30💜 

The right to indulge in personal luxuries. While not at this level an endless fount of effective wealth, it still allows for careless purchases within the realm of preliminarily plausible, and ensures that when you do go to buy such luxuries, you find yourself avoiding lemons and finding your way into the smoothest and most polished versions of the experience on offer.

Treat Your Treasure 30💜 

Pamper your precious things, and find it no burden. While not an infinite well of wealth, it allows you to freely make purchases to treat your Treasures within the realm of plausibility, with the same guarantees as Treat Yourself available. In addition, you may find that sometimes through a slip of psuedo-time, an alternative version of yourself has arranged for your Treasures to be given thoughtful gifts, in a way that you can navigate flawlessly as if it was you in this skein of time that made the arrangements. With time, you may even find yourself gaining the memories of your alternative selves doing the work and making the necessary arrangements to facilitate this.

Energized Soul 30💜 (🪞 / 🎁) 

Soothes away the worst of the weariness weighing down your soul. While not a comprehensive panacea for all ills that would ail a heart, this blessing can effectively treat depression disorders, anhedonia, amotivation, and the many forms of the doldroms of the mind and creative heart. It also gives you an endless well of energy and capacity to feel and create that makes it easier to build things and enjoy life through your troubles. Does not reduce your (notional) capacity for relaxation, cozy weariness, or other potentially desirable emotional states, but makes it easier to deploy the thoughts and feelings of an more engaged, more comprehensively endorsed you when you need it. 

Touch of Hearts 20💜 

Weave something new from the tapestry of Little Red String. Gain (and unlock for additional purchases, if applicable) a random perk of comparable compatibility and utility to listed 30 💜 perks.

Coin🪙: Your price (or perhaps your payment, if you prefer), not in silver coins, but in lives uplifted and souls saved. Stain hearts with your passion and purpose, and your cup shall runneth over. 

Moment of Kindness 5🪙

Offer a kindness, freely given. Relieve the pain of a handful of random souls, somewhere, out there. They may never know that someone reached out, much less that it was you, but they will cherish their better lives nonetheless.

Stalwart Shelters 20🪙

Shelters should keep away the storm, and all too often, they don't. But you can change that. Throughout Canada, make shelters safer, both through the hazards of theft and unsanitary and unsafe conditions within, and the threats of abusers from without, finding themselves often simply turned away, or having the idea never quite occur to them as something to do today.

Safe Roads  20🪙

Roads should be a path to their destination, not to the afterlife. Significantly improve road maintenance funding throughout north america, and guide transportation policy towards sensible integration of autonomous vehicles and safer calmer street design throughout the next few years.

Pretty Places  20🪙

Life happens to you, wherever you are, and there's no reason not to make it beautiful. Significantly improve the direction and funding of urban renewal programs through North America, and give thousands of souls a little more energy and creativity to let them spruce up their homes.

Fed Bellies  20🪙

No soul should starve or wither from such a simple lack. Significantly improve quality food access throughout the third world and worldwide prison systems by improving policy, funding, and dampening the cruelty of warlords and prison guards.

Bound Hearts 20🪙

Love will lift you up and make you whole. Subtly improve the matching of dating apps and coincidental brushings of social networks, putting the world on a path where people can be a little less lonely in these trying times.

Sable blushes. "Thought Sense and Fuzzer look fun, for sure, and Illusory Ink is just... directly calling me out, isn't it?"

"...Mhm!" 

She leans over to kiss her cheek warmly. 

"HHhfuck, okay, Lust Linker has a lot of corruption potential, and Vibrant Voice is just going to make all the rest so much easier. Voice dysphoria be gone, and also make it easier for you to listen while I hypnotize you."

She nods along. 

"It's not necessarily hard but it's... so much less direct than text can be, you know? To... have it feel like You."

She ducks her head a little.

She nods, smiling with a faint flush as she runs her hands through Romana's hair. "Easier on your sensitive ears if my voice sounds like liquid honey, and carries more of my nature in a more recognizable way. Touch of Corruption is clearly just a gacha, but given this selection so far I think it'll be worth it. And then I bet the next set is calling out Hailey a bit more than me."

A little tender shiver rolls through her shoulders. 

"Yeah...~" 

She hums lightly, and nuzzles up into her hand.

"Don't think it's really a gacha, given that it's always giving you the same general pay out? Two-thirds price seems decent to me for the uncertainty, but I think that a lot of these are going to be things that we'll want to nail down early, so..." 

She tilts and rubs her head in a little. 

"We'll just have to try a lot of these quests."

Hailey squeezes Romana possessively and starts flipping through the next set.

A strangled teakettle noise slips out of her. "A customizable phantom knife that is safe? Holy fuck, I think I'm in love with this app."