"Something to think about, perhaps."

Amira taps her fingers together. "Now, shall we go over your alchemy and herblore of the last week?"

"Of course, Amira."

She sets aside the figures and picks up her books. 

And soon it's time for them to go. 

Together, back down the path to Kamryn's camp, Amira leading Lily by the hand.

"I don't know what you even think you're doing."

Yosaphen is straddling the trapper boy on the ground, riding his cock with a hand pressed over his mouth, paying him little attention as she focuses on the spectacle in front of her.

"Outlander customs are so pointless."

"This part isn't complicated. You just have to cover anything that looks like red-glisten. Except in your mouth. See?"

Kamryn is standing there, not entirely nude for a change. She seems to have fitted a plucked leaf over her crotch and another pair of leaves over her nipples, tied in place with improvised twine.

Standing next to Kamryn, Talance is likewise attired in a leaf-bikini, poking at the green leaf on one of her breasts with a nonplussed air.

Talance asks a question in hums and tentacle-noises, a bare few legible words scattered throughout: "Even if this lets Lily take us into the city, Amira's noble might not be the right important person. How are we going to find the important people without being able to sense their princess-authority?"

Several eye-tentacles swivel toward the approaching pair of Lily and Amira, even as Yosaphen herself bites her lip in pleasure and cums, her lithe lavender body trembling as she makes a pleased noise.

"Mm, easy. They don't have princess-authority. So we'll just feel out whoever's the most important by how horny they are. Even Kamryn should be able to do that, right?"

She stands up, her fluttering, quivering pussy dripping a bit on the trapper boy's throbbing cockhead as she turns.

The boy groans in protest, looks around quickly, then rolls to his feet and hurries over to Kamryn. He grabs Kamryn's waist, pushes on her back to bend her over a little, and shoves his cock under the loosely-tied leaf and into Kamryn's pussy, pounding away at her from behind.

Kamryn, unperturbed beyond a soft moan of pleasure, pats the boy's hand even as her attention follows Yosaphen's to the arriving Lily and Amira.

"I don't think the horniest person will be the most important person, Yosaphen. It didn't work like that in my birth tribe. It didn't even work like that in any of the beastmen tribes we met."

Kamryn gives the trapper boy a light push as she slides off his cock and steps forward to greet Lily with a casual wave.

(The trapper boy moves over to Talance and starts fucking her from behind instead, in the same position... until he sees that Lily has brought the other lady with her and gets shy again.)

Amira looks over the assembled group. 

"Getting ready to meet the locals, I see. Well, it's better than nothing... Though real clothing would be better. Lily tells me you wanted to see me?"

Lily stays behind Amira and holds her tongue.

"We have a warning to deliver, and a mission that more people working at would be a good thing."

Kamryn peers around Amira at Lily for a moment, but elects not to go around Amira to welcome-back the doll girl.

"Do you want the whole story now, or do you want to take us to your 'noble' first?"

"I want the whole story. If I think it has merit then we'll buy you some proper clothes to present you to my patron in. What you have there is a good set of clothes to get better clothes with."

Kamryn grimaces openly at the prospect of More Clothes.

"Ignoring that for now."

Kamryn frowns.

"This would be easier if you could understand Lygos. I'll do my best but this is second-hand."

"The Red Queen's motivations are unknown, beyond pure desire for power or dominance. She began as a Lover living in the northern Red. She was popular. And powerful. A few years ago the Red Queen found this place called the Wound, where a huge Heart had been torn out of the Red a long time ago. Whatever she did there gave her incredible psychic power over the Red and the Tentacled. Ever since, she's been consuming the minds of every red-dweller she can, turning them into puppets, and breeding Living Clothes and other Tentacled that are born puppets."

Kamryn's brow furrows in thought.

"If you've heard about attacks, about raids, about Tentacled coming in the night and stealing your people away to become playthings, that's her. That's the Red Queen. And the people she takes, they're not playthings. They're broken drones. The lucky ones are raped and brainwashed into blissful unthinking obedience. The unlucky ones get taken back to the Spire where they're... I don't have the words... they're turned into mindless mana generators. They're consumed by the Red Queen's tentacle pits and... they don't even orgasm. They're pushed so deep into climax that they stop feeling pleasure, stop feeling anything, just one continuous unending note of unbounded peak sensation that lets her feed on them to produce mana at the cost of everything that actually matters."

Kamryn shakes her head.

"The leading princesses in the south are keeping the Red Queen contained with a psychic barrier, but it won't hold forever. Our best hope is the missing Heart. That's our mission. To find it. To find out what happened to it. To find a way to make it able to return home, close the Wound, and take away all the Red Queen's power before it's too late."

"... I see." 

Amira knits her fingers together. "And it's different, for the princesses in the south?"

"Is what different."

"I don't know how the nobility of the Pink work. Do they keep slaves? Is what the Red Queen is doing meaningfully unusual? I am ignorant, and my patron will think of this as... the opinion of one side in a more complicated conflict. If it really is as you say, I need to know why."

"The Red Queen is an abomination who is only barely being held back from continuing her already-halfway-successful genocide of the entire Tentacled population. She's turned half a continent into little more than a sick imitation of life that is no more than a direct extension of herself. So yeah. I'd say that what she's doing is meaningfully unusual."

"We don't have that 'nobility' thing back home, either," Yosaphen contributes blandly. "You utter shit-heel."

"You do recognize that people say things like this about their political enemies even when they are false, yes?"

...

Translated by Kamryn: "Lygos says that the Red Queen is not a political enemy. If she were, we wouldn't be here. The Red Queen is a lone individual with immense, unchecked, psychic and magical power who is using that power to destroy everything that is not herself. She is not conquering us. She is eating us. And soon, she will eat you."

"I see." 

Amira sits down and presses her lips into her fist.

"Then... Assuming for the moment that I believe you, you must produce proof. You say she makes puppets - could one of these puppets be apprehended for inspection by a psychic? To see how their will has been dominated and subverted?" 

"We don't have time for that crap. Did you miss the part where we're on a mission?"

Translated by Kamryn, "Lygos says that if you traveled to the Deep-Heart-Glisten-Palace in the heart of the southern Pink, you'd be able to meet the thousands of rescued drones recovering in its most accommodating tentacle pits. Capturing drones and freeing them from the Red Queen's control is what Lygos used to do, before he was sent on this mission. He's seen them himself, first-hand."

Lygos says something else in a way that comes across legibly sarcastic.

Translated, "Obviously, we didn't bring any of them with us."