Tanthe grows up amid the bustle of the inn, meeting strangers from faraway places every day. Her Papa greets the customers, and her Mama does the accounting, and her Auntie Meri is in charge of housekeeping, and her Grandma and Grandpa are jointly responsible for the kitchens. Cousin Faro, whose parents live down the street, tends the bar most days.

It is an accepted fact of Tanthe's life that, as Edron and Lia Coiner's only child, she's going to inherit all this one day. She knows it from almost before she can talk, and she starts talking very young, because while Papa's family lays the golden eggs, Mama's family are telepaths and seers.

Her earliest memory is of breaking up a fight between two other children on the playground, running in between them to shove them apart and explaining tearfully that Brin didn't steal Luko's ball and Luko didn't shove Brin into the dirt for no reason—because she can see it, in both their minds, the way each believes their own story but the stories fit together to show the shape of the truth between them. Shortly afterward, though as she grows up the memory of this part fades, her Auntie Meri took her aside to start teaching her how to control her power.

She's the most powerful psychic her mother's family has seen in generations. Auntie Meri is impressed and a little concerned. She teaches little Tanthe the best shielding techniques she knows, and meditations and exercises to calm her emotions and pull back her power from others' minds. She is unsurprised to discover that Tanthe is as strong a telekinetic as a telepath, and helps her develop that talent as well.

That memory, of the two children fighting on the playground, returns to her thoughts often as she grows older. At five, eight, ten, twelve, it only becomes clearer and clearer that that's how nearly all conflict works—oh, sometimes someone will do something genuinely selfish or cruel, but by far, she observes, the commonest explanation for any conflict is that both parties think the other wronged them first, and neither is entirely right. Brin did knock the ball out of Luko's hand without noticing, and Luko saw an attack and responded in kind. She becomes the social linchpin of her generation, the keystone in a solid arch of friendships, always talking people out of arguing and helping them explain themselves to each other. Brin and Luko end up best friends, and sometimes she hardly even remembers that it was her work, because it just seems so obvious to her that everyone could get along if they were just a little more patient, a little more kind, a little more willing to stop and talk things out. Even once she finally learns to stop constantly reading everyone's minds (at the age of ten or so), it's still often obvious to her exactly what they're thinking.

About six months after she turns fourteen, it all comes crashing down.

She's already been wondering for a year when her first clutch of eggs will come. Fourteen and a half is late enough that her parents are starting to genuinely worry, not just lightly fret about her being a late-bloomer. Maybe the Coiner gold is going to stop breeding true after all this time - but if that's so, she should've started menstruating by now, and she hasn't done that either. She is completely untouched by the sexual hormones that have all her peers starting to clumsily court each other.

Then one morning she discovers that she has had an... interesting dream, and her mind and body are experiencing some novel urges. She takes her mother aside for a quiet, embarrassed word, and her mother sends for Aunt Barla down the street, who as Edron's sister is the only remaining Coiner of egg-laying age. Aunt Barla has some suggestions about how to handle the process, and soon Tanthe is emerging from the bathroom with a small clutch of shiny copper orbs.

She's never heard of a Coiner laying copper, and truth be told she's a little disappointed, but she's not at all ready for Aunt Barla's shocked gasp. Even Mama puts her hands over her mouth in shock, and her eyes dart to the side the way they do when she's filling her head with math to hide her thoughts, even though Tanthe hasn't accidentally read her mama's mind in years.

"What's wrong?" she asks, alarmed, and they explain about the Coiner curse.

Most women of the Coiner line—eight in ten, say—lay eggs of impure gold, mingled with copper and silver in varying quantities. The more sex they have during their laying time when the urges are strongest, the more eggs they lay, and often the more valuable the eggs as well.

Some Coiner women lay silver eggs, and that used to be all they knew. Just an odd little quirk, that about a fifth of them lay slightly worse eggs. The eggs still had a little gold in them, and a substantial amount of copper, but they were silver enough that that's what they looked like to a casual inspection. Their laying times are often more intense, and they're quicker to arouse even when it's not that time of the month; they can get a little silly about sex.

Maybe one or two in a hundred, out of all the Coiner women, lay copper eggs. And that's where the trouble starts. A copper Coiner, once she has sex for the first time, is insatiable for the rest of her days; and copper Coiners are how the family discovered the true secret of the "worse" eggs, that every Coiner who lays less than gold has another womb gated behind the first, and another behind that, and so on; and the deeper you reach, the better the eggs. Silver Coiners have three, for silver and gold and platinum. Copper Coiners have five, copper silver gold platinum and emerald—and here Aunt Barla pauses, and takes Tanthe upstairs to show her a locked chest buried deep in the attic, filled with sparkling emerald eggs. Those were from Aunt Barla's own grandmother, who unlocked all five of her wombs in an encounter with a tentacle plant and then went to work at the Peach for the rest of her life because the only thing she cared about anymore was getting fucked as deep as possible. That's the curse part: the deeper you can go, the hornier you are at baseline and in potential, and the deeper you do go, the hornier you get. It's said, though nobody was exactly taking detailed statistics in the earlier generations, that each womb unlocked doubles your libido.

There are stories handed down over the generations, and a bigger chest locked even tighter and buried even deeper in the attic: copper Coiners with seven wombs, who make eggs of pure metal and flawless gemstone, copper silver gold platinum emerald sapphire diamond. There have only been a handful of them over the centuries, and they have, without exception, been even more insatiable than Great-Grandma Ferannith. Once they start, they don't stop. Great-Grandma Ferannith got unlucky; regular copper Coiners, whose copper eggs are alloyed with silver and gold, can pull themselves out of the spiral with luck and hard work and lead normal if horny lives. A Coiner with seven wombs can't, not in all the family's recorded history. One taste and they're gone. From the moment they first give in, let themselves get carried away just once and be penetrated sexually even in the ordinary way without opening a single womb, their laying time doesn't end until they die; and the more they give in, the stronger the urges get, in a terrible spiral of unending lust.

They test her first clutch of eggs, to make sure. Then they test them again, and then three more times. Pure copper. Not so much as a hint of another metal. She's a pure-copper Coiner, the most cursed of them all.

...she might have a chance, even so. Because, from her mother's line, she inherited psychic powers and an iron will to go with them. It's possible, barely, that she could survive having sex with her mind and will intact. If she was a mere ordinary copper, with only five wombs, she'd in all likelihood be fine.

But her family urges her not to try it. Mama looks ready to cry. They buy her sex toys that she can use alone, nothing that will reach deep enough to even tickle her first womb; inert toys aren't said to be able to trigger disaster, but they're not taking chances. As long as she's careful, as long as she manages and controls her urges, as long as she never ever has sex and so never starts down the path, she can grow up to inherit the inn like she's always known she would.

She makes it through her first laying time. She spends hours every day meditating, cutting into the time she usually spends helping her mother with the accounts. She stops helping the waitstaff in the tavern, because the occasional glance at her still-developing breasts is enough to have her running upstairs to her room to first take the edge off her urges and then meditate away what remains.

As the weeks pass until her second laying time, she makes Aunt Barla show her all the written records of pure-copper Coiners that the family has. She reads them over and over, learning everything she can about her condition. It turns out that the thing she already suspects about herself is a common thread among all of them: pure-copper Coiners can't masturbate to orgasm, they need a partner to achieve full release. Well, all the better, because an orgasm would be a serious risk. Tanthe satisfies herself in other ways. There's a lot of meditation involved, and carefully curating her nascent sexuality to respond well to safer things. She manages to coax herself into a deep and genuine enjoyment of slow gentle teasing touches, so that as her second laying time passes, and her third and her fourth and her fifth, she feels increasingly satisfied and fulfilled by her anorgasmic masturbation sessions. It gets easier every time, to content herself safely.

Her family gets her a Purity tattoo—it's not hard to afford, with Coiner money—to help her stay in control, and it's a breath of fresh air, helping her focus her meditation to recover faster and more cleanly from difficult moments. And... it's okay. It's hard, but it's okay. It'll be hard, but she'll be okay.

Probably. She hopes.

When she's sixteen and really starting to feel like she has a handle on her life, she makes the mistake of kissing a boy.

It isn't even the Coiner curse that gets her, or not exactly. She suspects it's the Coiner curse that makes her melt so thoroughly when his lips and tongue meet hers; without her Coiner ancestors' sensitivity and libido, a kiss might have been safe.

But the problem is actually her psychic powers, which start to escape her control as things get more heated. At first she manages to keep a lid on it. Brin the blacksmith's son is really quite charming, and he's been sweet on her for years, and she wants to have a nice time with him, and maybe even think about courting someday, if the kissing works out—they couldn't have children unless they find a way around her curse, but they'd have plenty of time to think about that, years or decades from now, now can just be about kissing—

But somehow their light exploration turns to Tanthe in his lap grabbing him by the tusks and thrusting her tongue between his lips, melting melting melting, wanting this, wanting more, wanting things she shouldn't dare to want, feeling things she shouldn't dare to feel—and then she realizes some of those things are his feelings, his desires, she's let all her barriers down and she's all the way in his head, and she can feel his thoughts warping under the weight of hers, she can feel herself bending him into shape with the force of her desire.

The realization hits her like a bucket of cold water and she tears herself out of his mind and his lap and leaves him moaning in lust and confusion as she bolts down the street to lock herself in her room and meditate until her shields are all back in place.

She's doomed from both sides. Even if kissing was safe for her, and she's not at all sure that it was, it wasn't safe for him. She slid into his mind without even noticing, and all he'll get from those few minutes of meddling is some blurred memories and a headache, but if they'd done more? If she'd gone farther? She doesn't know what she might have done. She's never been that deep in someone's mind before. Maybe it would be fine and she doesn't have the power to change much even if she tried, but that's not how it felt, it felt like she was dragging her hands through soft clay and leaving it furrowed in her wake and she could have shaped it any way she pleased if she'd stayed longer.

Her mother's family has no secret lore to offer her. There's rumours of telepaths this strong, but not, actually, records. All her mother and Auntie Meri can tell her is that they don't know the answers to her questions and don't know who does.

She buries herself even deeper in work and meditation and anything at all that's not remotely like a sex life. She apologizes to Brin and accepts one very chaste hug and then keeps all further conversation between them confined to the topic of smith-work, which they both love enough to build a friendship on even if they can't build anything more. She stops dancing, which she loved as a child, and starts getting more serious about cooking and crafting and herblore instead, because dancing attracts a kind of attention she can't afford, especially now that her body is getting to the point of being fully mature. She wears looser, heavier, more concealing clothing. If she just erases sex from her life completely, she can still make it work. She can. There's all this life in her life and she wants to live it. She wants to read the stars and work the forge and keep the books and bake the cakes and read and sing and laugh and subtly rearrange the social landscape of the town into nicer patterns and, just, live a full whole life that doesn't consist entirely of a frenzied search for the next phallic object.

She spends enough time trying and failing to cry herself to sleep that she realizes the all-nighters of her early teens weren't a fluke: she actually doesn't need to sleep, at least not every night. After some experimentation she discovers that her limit is about three solid days, 72 hours of wakefulness: for the next six hours after that, her body keeps going but her concentration gradually starts to waver until it's completely shot, and she can push only about three more hours past that point before she simply keels over and sleeps a whole night through whether she likes it or not.

She starts learning magic, out of a desire to Live Her Life. It's not uncommon for the Coiners, men and women both, to dabble in Metal magic; they seem to have a knack for it. The runenode implantations are a potentially delicate business, requiring as they do that she produce 'magically charged bodily fluids', but thankfully Chirr goes off without a hitch, and six months later the Tik filter for the element of Metal, and six months later the Vin runenode for basic utility magic. She practices eagerly, and shows off her new metalshaping powers to Brin.

That brings her almost to eighteen, and she's maybe starting to finally feel like she has her life figured out again, when a rumour comes down the river that the Pink is being taken over by an evil mind-controlling sex witch.

When she first hears it she's uneasy, afraid, but it's a distant threat. Nothing to do with her. There's the whole Fringe between here and there.

That itches at her, though, because a problem doesn't stop being bad just because it's someone else's problem and solving it would be hard. The people of the Pink are as real as the people of Peachport, and deserve just as much to be saved from mindslavers.

So, as much as the topic makes her uncomfortable, she asks for more details.

They don't have a lot. This story has passed through numerous hands on its way south, and many of them were confused about its origins. They can't tell her exactly what the Red Queen is doing, besides that it's very bad, akin to devouring people's very souls and turning them into mindless extensions of her will. They can't tell her exactly where the resistance is meeting; it sounded like Deep-Heart-Glisten-Place, or maybe that was Palace? They're not sure what the Pink's defenses look like, or what exactly the resistance is looking for besides general awareness and support.

But she can't get it out of her head.

Her mother corners her in the hallway the next morning. "You're not thinking of going, are you?"

She hesitates. She's never been fully comfortable talking about what happened between her and Brin. She doesn't know how to tell her mother that she's hoping, if she goes, she will find someone with a solution to at least half of her problem. She's hoping, if she goes, someone will be able to help her not be a mind-controlling sex witch.

"...I want to help," she says instead. "I think I might be able to help."

"It's in the Pink," her mother reminds her. The Pink, full of tentacles with hazy-at-best understandings of consent. The Pink, where around any corner could be the lurking parasite that awakens Tanthe's sexuality and sends her careening down into the same metaphorical pit as her unlucky ancestors, and probably into a real physical tentacle pit to boot.

"I know." She fidgets. "I just... if it's really that bad... how can I not help? Even if it's dangerous? And... I don't know. Maybe I'll learn things. About being a psychic."

The halting way she says it is enough to tell her mother exactly what she's talking about. "Oh, Tanthe..."

Folded into her mother's warm embrace, she sniffles. Tears prickle at the corners of her eyes. "I'm sorry, Mother. I want to stay. I wish I could stay. But if there's a chance I can be—better—I need it. And if there's not? Those people still need help. If half of what those traders said they heard is true, people are dying or worse out there, and I could be helping them."

"Maybe it's all overblown," her mother says hopefully. "Rumours without substance."

"Tell you what, then," Tanthe suggests, "let's cast the stars." Astrology with her mother has always been a comfortable and comforting enterprise. "See what the gods have to say about it."

She's on the road the next day.