Now Lygos is getting looks.

Despite being metal, the way his shoulders drop is very expressive.

He opens up and blue tentacles lash out to yank Yosephen off her feet and into the confines of the armor. A thick tentacle slams itself down her throat as the metal closes up around her, sealing the Gazer inside with a muffled wet squelch and a pleased moan.

"Sorry about her," Kamryn says with some affection. "Uuloo, could you?"

Uuloo detaches from Kamryn's crotch and lifts her upper body. Her maw then destroys any illusion that there's anything like a human neck in there as it bends backwards and swallows the trapper boy's head.

The trapper boy cums immediately, spurting deep into Uuloo's insides.

"He can't hear us now. Let's let Talance cradle us while we talk, how about, and you can explain the thing you don't want anyone from your town to know?"

Kamryn can relate, with what happened between her and her former tribe.

Talance's human shape unfurls into squirming tendrils of slick red flesh, roiling like a thundercloud in slow, gooey motion.

She expands, growing out into a large blob of slick, glistening meat, before forming a soft, cushioned berth in her middle for a pair of girls to lay within. As her shape stabilizes, it reveals itself to be an oddly symmetrical and clean design, with suggestions of hips or butts or thighs or breasts pressing up in a suggestion of tangled humanoid bodies coming together to form the contoured fleshy bed.

"Okay, that's weird. But I'm weird too, so..."

Carefully, Lily takes a seat on the bed. 

Then she takes off one of her gloves, and offers a hand to Kamryn. Her hands are one of the most complex and delicate parts of her body, with several overlapping doll joints of fine ceramic. They give her away almost instantly. 

"... I'm not human. I was created to be... a sex toy for a particular powerful man. I objected, and left, but he still technically owns me. So I have to hide."

"What went wrong?" Kamryn asks, like someone who 'creates' life all the time and has never once encountered the concept that being human is somehow special.

Kamryn takes the hand and caresses it, then gently tugs Lily closer, offering skinship and physical affection as though to a skittish animal. Talance is careful to follow Kamryn's lead, about this, after the incident with the bunnygirl tribe. Kamryn herself doesn't really know what she's doing either, but her lust-sense and some deep-rooted instinct shows her the edges of the path she's navigating. She doesn't have to understand the novel danger zone present in Lily, to sense it and skirt around it. Somehow she just can.

She shrugs away her cloak, and exposes the tattoos at her neck. 

"He marked me as a lesser than him from the moment I existed. He... lied, and took advantage of my not knowing better... and tried to fit me into the mold of his perfect lover. He never really saw me... he just saw the woman he wanted to have."

She touches the tattoos at her throat. "A servant tattoo, so I would leap to his praise and his happiness... and a resonance tattoo, so I would put his pleasure first and serve my purpose as his plaything. He never asked if I wanted to enjoy those things, he just decided it for me."

"Oh, he built you? Like a spell?"

That's a fascinating concept, but it make sense. If you were good enough at fleshcrafting, why couldn't you build an entire person... Then another thought percolates and Kamryn frowns.

"Wait, he built you," Kamryn says with an entirely different emphasis. "If he was building his lover anyway why did he build you instead of the perfect lover he wanted? That makes no sense at all. Why would he build a different person and then try to force that other person to act like the person he actually wanted?"

"He commissioned me; he doesn't have the ability to make people himself. I don't know why he didn't just make me... naturally the kind of person he wanted. He certainly made my body to his tastes. I think he maybe isn't good at knowing what he really wants, or maybe he wasn't willing to say everything to the person who made me... Or maybe it wasn't in their control in the first place. I don't know. But I was different from the person he imagined."

"He didn't even... himself... what a... what did he think would happen..."

Shaking her head, Kamryn carefully assesses Lily's mood.

"I have two separate but related questions. Have you ever had sex with anything besides him? Have you ever had sex that required nothing of you and put no expectations on you?"

"... no and no." She looks at Kamryn thoughtfully.

"Want to?"

Behind them, the soft wet clapping sound of the trapper boy's hips against Uuloo's ass. The muffled squelching and moaning from inside Lygos. The slow, gentle rippling of the contoured flesh-bed as Talance quietly masturbates.

Kamryn herself speaks with utter sincerity.

"Every living being in this camp wants to make you have orgasms, wants to see you enjoy that pleasure, for no other reason than because we want to. The only reason we're holding back is because I can tell sex would upset you for some reason, right now. But if you decide not to be upset about it, you can have any Variety of sexual pleasure you want, right now, with no consequences, and nothing asked in return."

"I..." 

Lily closes her eyes. 

"... the thought did cross my mind, but it's fraught, between the resonance tattoo and the... hurt Maxwell left me with..."

She presses in against Kamryn, and takes a deep breath. 

There is definite heat in her psychic signature, now, but her thoughts are confused. 

What does she want. Honestly. 

... she wants Kamryn to touch her. The tentacles are... too strange and alien, to her, but... she could start with something small...

"... Please hold me a little closer," she asks.

Kamryn reclines into the contoured flesh-bed and gently pulls Lily onto her lap, allowing their bodies to lay flush as they meet each other. The feel of Lily's clothes on her bare skin is unpleasant, but Kamryn ignores that because she can sense that she needs to. She holds Lily in a gentle embrace, sliding her hands under Lily's clothes where that doesn't require awkward angles or noticeable amounts of force.

"I'd hope new sex would cleanse it, the hurt he left you with."

"The resonance crest. I know of it. It, when you give someone else pleasure, it reflects that pleasure on to you. But if you're merely basking in the pleasure someone else is giving you, anything that comes through the tattoo is... aligned with what you're already doing, don't you think?"

Kamryn translates this the rest of the way into words so Lily can understand it.

"... That does seem to follow...?"

She touches the hand on her waist, and - hesitates. 

She doesn't breathe, but the tension in her is... strong. 

She presses in her fingers between Kamryn's, and holds her hand.

"Yeah."

A more worldly, well-read version of Kamryn might have better or additional advice at this point, but unfortunately this Kamryn doesn't know how to read and learned almost everything she knows from Tentacled who'd never been out of the Red before.

Kamryn merely squeezes Lily's hand, and waits, feeling vaguely frustrated that she can't understand or do anything to help with whatever deadlock has formed in Lily's head.

Lily... isn't sure either what's wrong with her. 

It just feels scary. 

"I... feel like it can't be that simple. People... always want things, they never just... do things because they can. Sometimes wants like that can be good, but... the only example I have for sex is my former lord. So I can't... I..."

Her head falls forwards and she presses in harder against Kamryn. 

"... he - he touched me and I felt sick, and awful, even as he... made me feel good. And I - can't shake the feeling that you could be like that, that you could not care -" 

She shudders, but she presses in closer and stays there.

Something is deeply wrong here, and Kamryn's inward frustration grows as she once more finds herself lacking the mental tools to see how it works. This isn't like the tribesmen who wanted to fuck her and pretended they didn't. This isn't like the tribeswoman who got disgusted about Kamryn enjoying things she wouldn't enjoy. This is something else entirely that Kamryn has no reference frame for, but the shape of it is crystal clear.

"If you want to know what I want... I want you, I want everyone, free to act on their sexual urges. Free from, from reasons not to, free from things exactly like this, where someone, where your former lord forced you to build yourself a cage around your inner radiance I mean lust, to keep it trapped and-"

It occurs to Kamryn that she knows important facts that Lily doesn't, and explaining her own motivations probably ought to be secondary. She cuts herself off and starts over.

"The others, all four of them, the Tentacled work differently than we do. They're all telepathic and their food is a kind of psychic energy. When you're feeling sexual pleasure of any kind, a Tentacled can read that pleasure in your mind. It's like, lust is sunlight for them, they're blind without it, but when it shines in someone's mind it illuminates and warms and nourishes them. I'm what Eydow called a 'Lust-Esper' so I can see the same light they do and understand them more easily than most people. So what they want is, truly, for you to enjoy the sex you want. Even if they didn't know better, which they do, and only paid attention to the light inside you, well, that would be as opposite from what your former lord did wrong as a thing can get, even if it too would be a mistake."

"... little sparks." 

She nods to herself. "So you do get something out of this. You want things for me too. But at least you don't hide it. That's better. Like Amira..." 

She fidgets with her fingers against the palm of Kamryn's hand, and thinks. 

"I think... there's different kinds of wanting..."

Lily bites the inside of her lip. 

"... I just need to decide if... I want to be the person reflected in your eyes..."

"... When I think about it that way it's obvious."

She shifts in, and chastely kisses Kamryn.

"Promise you won't try to keep me?"

"I wouldn't even know how." This is sentiment more than literal truth, but even more true for that.

Kamryn kisses Lily in turn, just as gently but less chastely. Her free hand roams over Lily's backside.

"There's no rush. When you're ready, just take off your clothes, close your eyes, and let the cage around your inner light shatter. We'll do the rest. You won't have to do anything but want and feel, until you're satisfied."

Lily sits up, and pulls off her shoes. Tossing them aside, she gets her socks next; then it's up a little to peel off her dress, neatly fold it, and set it aside. She's wearing simple cotton bloomers underneath, and no bra. 

She hesitates. It's... not like with Maxwell...