Mira's face is slack and utterly discomposed even before she sinks down on Ralin's dick, but finally, finally, FINALLY having his cock slide into her pussy is the most glorious feeling in the history of the universe (ie: the last few hours). Her walls flutter as her guts clench and her crest tattoo flares pink just above her split vulva.

She wants his hands on her, she wants her hands on him, but her hands are tied and she can't get at his skin or yank his clothes more off than they already are and that's so hot even though she wishes he was naked too. All she can do is channel that urge and that frustration into bouncing harder on his cock, her whole body pumping up and down as her silky-slick canal clenches on and milks his girth.

There's something supernatural about her pussy, too. (More than one thing, but who's counting.) Her insides feel slicker than slick. It isn't just that pleasure is overwhelming mild discomfort as she bounces. There is no mild discomfort. Her flesh glides up and down the length of his shaft with no friction even when her orgasms have her clenching so tightly. And finally, when he can't hold back anymore and fills her full of cum... his cock doesn't even slightly go soft, or feel oversensitive, or anything like that. It's as if any bit of him that reaches beyond the gates of her vulva is immersed in a healing bath of unlimited endurance.

(Oh, don't worry, his hands are very much on her.)

So, from a certain perspective, he has achieved everything he set out to achieve and then some, and now is the time when he planned to stop doing things.

From another perspective, those plans were made according to expectations that have been thoroughly falsified, and he might as well adapt and improvise.

He pulls her close to him and holds her for a moment, enjoying the pleasantly relaxing feeling of having just had an orgasm. It's a really nice feeling.

Then he says, sort of half a suggestion and half a question, "I could tie you up again differently and we could do this all over again?"

Mira giggles. Her head bobbles, nodding and nodding again.

"I... really want to see what you come up with." She wiggles her wrists to indicate the ropes.

He smiles shyly and hugs her.

"Gonna misuse the tent stakes again?" says Orss, amused, from over by the carriage.

"If you don't mind," says Ralin, blushing.

"I'll get 'em."

Tent stakes appear, along with more rope. Orss has a hint of a fond smile about her as she helps Ralin get the stakes in the ground, four of them, such that when he unties Mira's wrists he can then tie her up again with one limb at each corner. She's got plenty of wiggle room in there, since after all it's so good when she wiggles, but not enough to reach any limb with any other.

"Comfortable?" he asks again, running his hands softly over her breasts and stomach.

Mira giggles. Assesses. Nods. (There's a moment of fear, quickly quashed: she didn't used to be able to lay flat on her back and be comfortable, but for her new body that's not a problem.)

Squirm. Honestly she was hoping for something more elaborate. This is objectively more restrictive than before, and that's making her skin tingle with hunger to be touched and making her pussy throb even more, but it's not that much more exciting. Mira doesn't have the heart to tell him that, though. He seems so eager. Probably she should lower her expectations. Ralin, after all, does not have a mental library from over half a terabyte of DeviceBondage porn in his head to compare his ropework against.

He does not at all have that! Instead he has one ordinary person's ordinary imagination, some experience, and some tent stakes. Fantastically elaborate setups are pretty unlikely to ensue.

If she wants to be touched she's in luck, though, because he plans to do a lot of touching. The change in position has a lot of effects on where and how it's most natural to touch her now, and he seems to be really enjoying exploring that difference.

Mira is really enjoying him exploring that difference too.

She's not going to stay hung up on Bondage Art Standards once he starts. Not at all.

And it isn't any more difficult to reduce her to a mess of orgasms than it was before.

This time he's much less structured about the divide between the groping stage and the oral sex stage, and the transition is more gradual and involves more roaming around her body with mouth and hands.

Once she starts having orgasms, at first he rides each one out and spends a minute groping her before moving on to the next, but the delays get shorter and shorter until he's pushing her to cum again as soon as she's done with the last one, and at some point he manages to get most of his clothes off and then starts fucking her while she's still in the middle of the latest in a long chain.

She writhes and moans and arches into his every touch like she's starving for it, and when he finally, finally gets naked and on top of her and starts fucking her once more, having his cock in her is satisfying like nothing else as her orgasms pound through her with every thrust, her pussy slickly gripping his cock, begging for cum.

Her arms and legs tug at the ropes constantly as she writhes and squirms under him, helpless moans torn from her throat by the flaring pink light at her crotch, and she revels in all of it.

It's very very good.

Good enough, in fact, to tempt him into going a second round after the first, and then a third, and at that point he really is starting to get too tired so he stretches out next to her on the rug and cuddles up.

Mira isn't really out of breath but she is sweating a bit and covered in fluids, at least until her living leg-sleeves soak a lot of it up. She presses herself against Ralin as best she can as they cuddle, tugging against the ropes in a way that is still thrilling.

"Okay," she says after a few moments. "Now I'm thirsty a bit."

She doesn't want to move. How can she get water to her mouth without either of them moving. Oh! Huh, would that work? Only one way to find out!

She pushes mana into her core, focuses carefully, and then incants, "Pretkenlo."

A ghostly blue-white apparition of a naked girl appears on the sand next to the rug. Concentrating, Mira carefully puppets it to sit upright on folded legs. Ohhhh, is that her face? She hasn't seen her new face. That's lovely. Okay, water. She has the apparition pick up her Chalice, carry it over to the water, fill it up, and carefully shuffle back over to her. It's a slow process, and a little water still spills, though the construct does seem to do some of the work for her, rather than making her point her mana-control at individual muscles. Once the construct reaches her, she can have her own ghostly puppet-twin lift her head and bring the Chalice to her lips to drink.

(It should at this point be noted that maintaining a full mobile clone of one's own body using Construct Magic for more than a couple of seconds requires a prodigiously above-average mana pool. Or a continuous incoming source of mana. Or a Soulstone Heart, like Mira has, that just spent the last while absorbing all the mana Mira's slime suit produced as it telepathically gorged itself on her copious orgasms.)

Mira gulps all the purified water down, then stops channeling her mana to let the apparition evaporate in a shower of blue-white sparkles. She nuzzles into Ralin with a satisfied hum.

...Ralin is rather torn between being gobsmacked and being too sleepy to be gobsmacked. He settles on cozy nuzzles. They seem like a good default.

It's very cozy.

She manages to wriggle around such that the tension of the ropes is holding her against him, making the cuddles more intense without making them more effortful. Mira is surprisingly comfortable.

But probably at some point they need to conclude the tied-up cuddles and clean up the ropes and the rug and stuff?

They really should. But, you see, Ralin is cozy.

...he yawns and buries his head against her shoulder for a moment and then says, "'kay, up."

A moment passes.

"Up," he says more insistently, and this time manages to disengage. "Gotta... untie you." He sort of paws at the nearest rope. Scowls grumpily. "'m not gonna have to cut the ropes again. We cann' afford to replace it alla time." But despite his determination, his sleepy fingers are too clumsy to make progress on the knots.

"...help," he says plaintively, flopping back down.

Orss, watching them with her arms folded leaning back against the carriage, shakes her head slowly. "I'm not so sure I should, is the thing."

"You jus' enjoy watching me be ridic'lous," mutters Ralin, sulkily, into Mira's shoulder. He's not looking at Orss and so can't see her thoughtful, guarded expression. "C'mon, help me let her out."

Orss does not reply.

A note of paranoia plays in the back of Mira's mind, but probably this is just some thing in how Ralin and Orss are with each other? Just because she's paranoid isn't reason to be rude or read ominousness into other people's social dynamics.

She does try to fumble for the knot with one of her hands. The rope is loose enough that she can sort twist her hand and grasp the knot, but once she gets her fingers on it she finds she just doesn't have the will do anything to the knot. Her fingers just refuse to try.

"Um, yeah, I think we need help," Mira admits sheepishly.

"Did you know that your milk is some kind of incredibly potent mana juice?" says Orss.

"Whaa?" says Ralin.

"I don't want to let her free, I want to lock her up and sell her. For more money than any of us has seen in one place in our lives."

Ralin instinctively wraps his arms around Mira and hugs her. "Nooo," he mumbles. "Be nice."

"I'm trying to think about our future here, Ralin! The oasis jar business is a good comfortable life but it doesn't offer much in the way of savings, you know that! Every time we've gotten a few gems to put by for retirement, it's been by taking slaves out here, isn't that so? What makes this one any different?"

"...I like her!"

Orss rolls her eyes and makes a contemptuous gesture indicating where she expects Ralin's liking for Mira is located, which is totally lost on him because he is still clinging to Mira like a sad sleepy limpet.

Clear Heart Milk, whispers a dream-memory.

Mira stares at Orss, it slowly sinking in that the woman is serious. Ralin seems still on-her-side-ish?

But she's not going to wait. Mira hyper-dodges to... her body just kinds of flops, as the attempt is stymied by a sudden reflexive flinch. Mira tries again to discorporate as she flickers out of the ropes... and again a reflexive flinch stops her.

What?

A surge of fear burns through her afterglow and she starts tugging on the ropes for real now, just trying to wrench one of the tent-stakes free as her mind races for an explanation for why her hyper-dodging isn't working.

Ralin sleepily lets go of her when she starts frantically struggling.

The tent stakes are pretty solid and not going to come up easily.

An enormous shadow displaces the last fading rays of the sun as Aza ambles over from the water to see what all the fuss is about. "Hey, what's the emergency?"

"I want to sell this girl as a slave and Ralin's getting sentimental," says Orss.

"Ah." Aza shakes his head. "You really shouldn't do that sort of thing, you know. Imagine what he'll say the next time you encourage him to flirt with a pretty girl." (Ralin nods vigorously.)

"The next pretty girl won't be worth nearly this much money!"

"...how much money are we talking?" says Aza, maybe a little intrigued.

"A lot, if we find the right buyer. Split five ways we'll still be halfway to retiring on it."

"Hmmm..." Now Aza is also looking speculatively at Mira. Ralin makes a disgruntled noise.

She can't get free, and Mira's not entirely sure she's actually trying to get free, since she's sure she can struggle harder than this, but even now the struggle is thrilling, making her pussy throb, and actually succeeding in getting free feels... blocked?

Mira growls at herself and switches to a different approach, incanting, "Pretlo!"

A simple geometric knife appears in her hand, and she slashes at the rope-

Reflex yanks her mana back at the last instant, the construct blade dissolving into sparkles before it can cut into the rope. Mira tries again. "Pretlo!" Again, she can't stop herself from holding back at the last instant, sparkles passing harmlessly through the rope.

Okay, she's actually really scared now. She's confused and alarmed about why she can't seem to stop sabotaging her own escape attempts, but takes it as a given for now that she can't and instead pays attention to what her captors are saying.

She thinks about attacking Orss and Aza with spells, but manages to think far enough ahead to consider that, for whatever mysterious reason, she needs them to untie her so making them less inclined to do that would be the opposite of helpful.

"What are we doing?" asks Tafi, following Aza toward the source of the excitement.

"Discussing whether to enslave this girl and sell her for an obscene amount of money," says Orss. "Ralin's against. Aza's undecided."

"Oh..." Tafi looks sympathetically at Mira, then at Ralin. "What an awkward situation."

"I really," says Ralin, struggling to enunciate clearly, "think we should just not try to enslave my dates. Aza's right, see if I ever let you encourage me again."

"Think of the money," says Orss. "You'll be thanking me in twenty years when we're all getting a little old for this."

"Gaaaaah," is Ralin's eloquent counterargument.

Think, Mira. Don't go passive. This is not the time. You still have some agency. Use it.

"Look, you want my magic milk, right? What if I just let you take a whole bunch of it for free and then you let me go?"

Even as she says it, she realizes that the source of a valuable thing is priceless compared to a mere stockpile of that thing, but if she can resolve this conflict by being accommodating then that's still her natural impulse: everybody gets something they want, everybody wins.

"Magic milk?" says Tafi.

"Magic milk," Orss confirms. "We don't have much of anywhere to put it, and it won't sell for nearly as much."

Tafi frowns. "...hey, I just had a crazy thought," she says, looking back over at the oasis where Ekeshi is finishing up whatever it is Ekeshi is doing with that jar.

"...that can't possibly work, can it?" says Orss.

"What can't?" says Aza, slower on the uptake.

"Well I just figure," says Tafi, "if magic milk is the problem here, maybe Ekeshi can figure out how to make an oasis jar of it, and then we can sell the jar instead of selling Mira, and everybody walks away happy."

Ralin perks up hopefully. Aza makes a doubtful noise.

"It'd take, like, a lot of milk," Tafi admits. "And I don't know if it'd work. But we could at least ask her to try?"

"...still probably worth less than the girl, but if it works..." says Orss, somewhat grudgingly.

"Oh! That's brilliant! I'm totally on board to help you make an Oasis Jar of Mira-Milk," Mira says eagerly. "I won't even blame you if it doesn't work."

Well, she might regret making that promise, if it in fact doesn't work. But it's such a clever an elegant positive-sum solution to this situation that she's instantly captivated and her disappointment in the possibility of failure momentarily overshadows the whole sold-into-slavery thing.

"If it does work I might stick around and let you make more than one, if you give me a cut?" Mira thinks-out-loud. "If it's really so valuable and it can be dispensed this way, just doing it once seems like a waste..."

Mira is probably getting ahead of herself here.

Tafi bounces on her toes, proudly. "Let's get some light out here so we can see what we're doing. And blankets for our captive. And I'll go bother Ekeshi about my crazy notions."

Orss pulls a couple of lanterns off the far side of the carriage and sets them up on poles next to Mira's rug. Aza ducks into the carriage for a moment and returns with a large comfortable blanket to drape over Mira. Tafi skips down to the water and has a conversation with Ekeshi that's not quite audible at this distance, though Ekeshi's incredulous tone of voice comes across just fine.

Concealed from sight by the blanket, her slime suit melts and spreads evenly over her body again, appearing as nothing more than a layer of lube, like someone dipped her in a pool of tentacle slime and then shook off the excess.

Mira's attention mostly settles on Ralin. While the immediate threat to Mira's future is on hold, she's kind of concerned-curious how he's relating to this turn of events.