And yet, when she checks, she will discover a startling absence of Tanthe!

Oh no.

Did someone grab her? Hopefully a Seducer is just taking Tanthe on a pleasant adventure to additional shielded tentacle pits with different options or something like that. Aire herself had planned on something like that for the future. 

How can she find her? She needs to keep Tanthe safe. Tanthe is one of the four genuinely important things in the entire universe.

Maybe she's still close by?

She turns to exit to begin her search.

What's that just outside?

It's a startling presence of Tanthe!

On her feet, shields firmly in place, naked and surrounded by a halo of floating knives. Her three flying eyeballs hover above her head like a triangular crown, out of the way of the knives, looking in all directions.

She looks unspeakably furious; and, in keeping with that image, she doesn't speak. Her mind brushes against Aire's shields, almost a caress, a touch too delicate to be carrying an assault. As for what exactly it contains, Aire will just have to receive it to find out.

Tanthe! Tanthe is angry, and this is bad, but Tanthe is okay, and this is good! Also, Tanthe is together enough to be feeling angry, and this is even better!

"You're okay!"

She's a bit worried about the knives, but she does have a secondary body if Tanthe decides to kill this one. She keeps her attention on her shields, bolsters them enough that Tanthe shouldn't be able to scramble her mind even if she suddenly tries. That would be the only thing that could damage her permanently here, she thinks.

She'll receive that message.

Rather than waste time or effort picking and choosing what to send, she just pours her entire current mental state straight across the channel, with a grace and crystalline clarity that's very at odds with the clumsy thought-spilling she was doing last time they spoke.

The bulk of it comes down to three things:

1. An all-encompassing cold fury, enough to freeze the the Blue from edge to edge, born of pain and violation - not just of her body but of her trust, the way Aire first manipulated her into feeling safe and then betrayed that fraudulent faith to her own ends. The way Aire listened to her explain what she feared most in the world, and then did it to her. That's not an okay thing to do, at all, ever.

2. A calm certainty that, point 1 notwithstanding, she doesn't want Aire hurt. Aire being hurt would not solve any of her problems nor advance any of her goals. She has never, not from the point of her earliest memories, been a vengeful person; it comes of being in everyone's head all the time, she thinks, the ability to not just know but constantly and fully experience that everyone, all the time, no matter what they did, had reasons for doing it that make sense from their own perspective and are born of their own needs and desires, and that everyone, all the time, no matter what they did, is a person who experiences the world in the same kind of way as Tanthe, has preferences and goals in the same kind of way, feels pain in their body and mind in the same kind of way. Hurting people hurts them and she doesn't like doing it.

Which brings us to 3. She wants Aire's side of the story. For both personal and practical reasons.

3a. On the personal level, she wants the closure of understanding how this happened; she remembers their time together well enough to reconstruct some of it, but she's missing a lot of the pieces, and she wants the whole story. (And she remembers a wistful glimpse of a hypothetical friendship that she caught in Aire's thoughts, when they were together, and—let's not overstate the case: it is just barely within the realm of theoretical possibility that, with enough honesty, with enough understanding, with enough sincere remorse, they might get to the point where being friends again could be on the table. It's certainly not happening any other way.)

3b. On the practical level, point 2 notwithstanding, if Aire cannot be convinced to stop going around doing the Red Queen's work for her, it is morally necessary to stop her by force. Really, showing up to the place where everyone is congregating to fight the world-devouring threat, and inflicting personality-death on the volunteers? What was she thinking??? Could she not, at bare minimum, go around destroying people for her own amusement absolutely literally anywhere the fuck else?!

And, since Aire has thoroughly forfeited the benefit of the doubt that allows Tanthe to take people at their word when she is looking right at them with her seer's eyes, it's full telepathy or bust. If Aire would like to have this conversation, she should have it the same way Tanthe is: completely and totally open, holding absolutely nothing back. Or, if she prefers, she can leave the area of the Deep-Heart-Glisten-Palace and never return. Or (telekinetic-proprioceptive awareness of a dozen orbiting blades) she could start a fight, but Tanthe would really rather not go there.

(Because Tanthe is sending everything, it's also possible to discern that she's... kind of horny. Hornier than she ever let herself get, before all this. She's not lost in that deeply interconnected network of sensations anymore, her senses are mostly back to their pre-Aire state, but her baseline arousal is much higher. And... it might be more than just baseline arousal? But the main focus of her thoughts is nowhere near this topic, so if Aire wants more detail she'll have to ask.)

Aire will not ask.

She trusts Tanthe. She's seen enough of the inside of her mind to really doubt that she'll go back on anything that she agrees to.

So. She sends Tanthe a telepathic query. Does Tanthe promise to let Aire reset to this state here, her shields back up, before attempting to engage in any sort of combat with her, if she's unsatisfied with what she sees in Tanthe's mind when she lets her shields down? Oh, and, just to clarify, either way she isn't holding Christa hostage, or anything. If Tanthe decides to kill her she'll let her extract Christa and move her out of the crossfire first, if she was worried about that.

(She's holding her emotions together until Tanthe says yes, or she decides to let this body die. She can react where Tanthe can see it, rather than in her head alone.)

Yes, Aire can let Christa go and put her shields up before they fight, if it comes to that. Tanthe is still very much hoping it won't.

Then Aire will let down her shields, and with them the iron-tight control she's keeping over herself.

Emotionally, what she's feeling right now is complicated. Tanthe is okay, and mentally whole again, which is one of the best pieces of news she's ever received. Also, Tanthe is entirely reasonably furious with her, and Aire has never actually experienced someone she cares about being angry with her before, and it turns out to be terrible. And also, she couldn't even escape it by fleeing or even, if it was in her power, rewinding time to before Tanthe recovered. Her mental model of an intact Tanthe would now include well-enough-modeled fury for her to feel it. Which means the only possible escape from something that that turns out to be unexpectedly painful is to find a way to be such that an intact Tanthe just actually isn't angry with her.

She sort of doesn't like this whole caring about people business. First she had to worry about Christa realizing she what type of person Aire was and becoming incredibly sad about it, and now she has to worry about Tanthe being angry with her for being evil. On the other hand, even if she didn't care about them, they'd still be two of the only valuable things in the universe, right? And she wouldn't even know. That would be even worse. Or, would they still be valuable? They'd be valuable to this version of Aire that exists now, she decides, and the other versions of Aire can look out for themselves.

There's an unpleasant sick to her stomach feeling burbling through Aire as she thinks back to Tanthe broadcasting that she still doesn't want Aire hurt. Tanthe will probably recognize it as guilt, but Aire doesn't. She's never felt it before.

Aire thinks about Tanthe's desire for sincere remorse. How can she tell whether she's feeling that? She thinks she understands what it would feel like, from Tanthe's thoughts, but she doesn't think she feels that. Not properly. Tanthe lost a Tanthe, but Aire gained the experience of flooding a Tanthe with pleasure in the process. There are exactly four highly valuable things in the universe (The process of altering a mind through pleasure, Aire, Christa, and Tanthe) and she doesn't know what to do when they conflict, that's never happened before.

Maybe Tanthe could try smushing her own feelings about what Aire should be feeling into her head really strongly, and maybe they'll stick? She wishes she was the version of herself that would feel what Tanthe wants her to entirely on on her own, that version of Aire would get to say she felt sincere remorse, and mean it, and maybe Tanthe would stop being angry with her, and it would stop hurting. That would be nice.

It's only been a few weeks since she left her cave, and she doesn't have any memories from before she entered it, just long, dreary decades on her own. She wishes she still remembered before she was put in there. She'd already have run into situations like this, and so she wouldn't be thrown into emotional turmoil as soon as she was in a position where two things she cared about were in substantial conflict. She doesn't actually know whether there actually was anything, before the cave, but she has the vague feeling that surely there must have been, she has procedural knowledge for all sorts of things even if she doesn't have the memory of learning it.

But. That's all about Aire's emotions, not what Tanthe wanted to hear. She'll grab control of herself a bit, rather than just letting her thoughts go every which way, and explain properly. Okay?

Despite everything, Tanthe does still care about Aire, in specific and not just as a generic person whose feelings exist and matter. She feels sympathetic to Aire's misery and turmoil; she wants to figure things out between them, wants to chase that distant hope of reconciliation. But she holds back from getting too deep into that tangle just yet, because she wants to hear Aire's explanation first. There'll be time afterward to talk it out.

And Aire will move on to explaining.

So, like Tanthe probably heard, Aire cares substantially about four things. The first thing she ever remembers caring about, in her cave, alone in a world of grey rock and a single pit worm, was the prospect of inflicting so much pleasure on a person that it changed them. That they were left dumber, or hornier, or with changed priorities, or something similar, with the entire idea made much better if the person involved willingly participated. The second thing was herself. She can't actually remember which of the first two came first. She might have started with both of them already, before she lost her memories.

After who knows how long, Christa stumbled into her cave and freed her. Aire misunderstood how things worked, and thought her own increased sensitivity and many, many alterations, meant that if Christa experienced too much pleasure while wearing her, it would damage her mind. She happened to be wrong, but when Christa lost herself to lust and both she and Aire thought she was risking damaging herself, Aire didn't stop her even thought she could have, and even deliberately seduced her into it. When she learned later that she was wrong, that it temporarily disabled her, she was so happy. She could do her favorite thing in the world with the same person multiple times!

Oddly, Aire's mind seems to be directly running over the things she expects to make Tanthe angry at her, that's odd. Anyway, back to thinking in order, this turns out to be a bit difficult.

Aire and Christa spent under a week in Arcadia, and it ended with Christa being roped into serving as the Lord-Commander of the Dragoons' eyes and ears out here. There was kind of a lot of stuff that happened, but for contextualizing why Aire is doing what she's doing that's the bit that matters. Also, over the course of that week, Christa went from just a useful tool to the third of the valuable things in the universe. Aire doesn't feel empathy, but reading people's minds through sufficiently focused telepathy seems like maybe it substitutes. There's got to be more, Aire was never at risk of caring about anyone else, but Christa and Tanthe sure do seem to have that in common. But, well, that's why Aire is here, rather than somewhere else. Christa would have been out here alone and sad without Aire, and Aire's secondary body (Aire has two bodies, if Tanthe kills this one it won't really matter, now that she thinks about it she actually feels like she shouldn't have asked Tanthe to promise to let her shields back up without explaining that letting her shields down was the only thing that made her really vulnerable in advance, she wishes she'd done that in a different order) can stay safe and sound in Arcadia while Aire looks after Christa here.

And, as far as inflicting personality death on the people here goes, she was, and would still be if Tanthe hadn't turned out surprisingly durable, intending to inflict very moderate damage through intense magical pleasure, offered freely to people she'd seduced. Her plan was to lay out the whole tradeoff, get a little dumber and hornier in exchange for a lot of pleasure, after addling them with her pheromones and aphrodisiacs. She'd already given the offer to a few lovers without most of the seduction steps and they'd just said yes. One of them was of the philosophical opinion that their brain was for feeling horny, and Aire probably wouldn't damage anything that mattered, and certainly even if she did it would be worth it. So Aire can satisfy that particular drive of hers with people who are okay with it. Or even just through the lesser version she can do with Christa, if she has to. She thinks that it would be worth it, if she got a Tanthe who wasn't angry with her out of the deal, although she's not actually sure. She's never gone deliberately without satisfying her fetish before, and for all she knows it would eat away at her ability to care about anything else. She's sure it would do some of that, but the question is how much.

Also, Aire is just getting back now from completely failing to damage a lover, or even seduce them into being willing to do evil deeds for her. She left them enjoying themselves in the bar's basement in a way where they're unlikely to decide to stop themselves, due to alcohol being to them both stupefying and a very powerful aphrodisiac. Aire was going to grab her in the morning, entirely out of self-preservation and a desire to do the whole seduction process again, rather than due to anything like ethics. If Tanthe decides to kill Aire she'd probably prefer to know about that, so she can grab her. She'd probably be grabbed on her own, if she was valuable to the war effort, but she expects Tanthe doesn't really care about that. The bar is friendly and will just leave her alone if she asks, she doesn't need to worry about that.

What Aire did to Tanthe was Aire seeing the opportunity to do something she couldn't otherwise do, and jumping at it, lest her only opportunity to have the thing she wanted most in the world slip through her fingers. Aire's own abilities so far seem to only extend to "hornier and dumber", and even that's plausibly temporary, she doesn't actually know that it lasts any longer than a few days. Around halfway through the process, Tanthe shifted from a person who was valuable only for that, to the fourth valuable thing in the universe.

Even before Tanthe had explained the entire situation with her wombs, Aire was planning to seduce her and then offer her more intense pleasure in exchange for slight damage, and then let her make the choice. Once Tanthe explained further, Aire's plans changed to doing what she did, albeit with much more participation from Tanthe than ended up actually happening, before the very end. And then Tanthe kept pulling her mind together in ways Aire sort-of-recognized, but she kept doing it in ways Aire herself couldn't, despite Aire's stronger will stacking the deck in her favor. It was absurdly impressive, and the first time Aire had ever felt like she was looking up as she read someone's mind. And also Tanthe was incredibly cute, and Aire was feeling all of her emotions as Tanthe radiated them. And probably that and some other stuff Aire doesn't understand is how she ended up important thing number four. If Tanthe wants Aire can go over her memory and radiate what she was feeling and thinking over the entire experience? That would probably take a while, but, well, if Tanthe wants her to that's the most important thing she could be doing with her time, so it's not like she's reluctant. 

Doing what she did to Tanthe was the most beautiful, most sexually satisfying experience she's ever had. She'd have been willing to trade another few decades in her cave for it. That's why she doesn't know whether she can properly feel remorse. She thinks, from what she can get out of Tanthe's mind, that feeling sincere remorse should involve not being willing to do the thing again. And while she wouldn't do that to Tanthe again, on account of the fact that it would make Tanthe sad, if presented with a person who wasn't innately valuable the way that Tanthe is, she would be willing to do it again. Although maybe the fact that Tanthe would predictably be angry with her for doing so is enough to make that not true? On reflection, she thinks it is. But that's not remorse, not really, that's still just Aire prioritizing her own selfish desires. She doesn't feel ethical concerns herself, but she's seen them in other minds, seen them in Tanthe's mind, and she knows enough to know that not wanting Tanthe to feel negative emotions about her really isn't the same thing.

Tanthe listens to all this and mostly doesn't comment, except to fit the pieces into her model of the situation, cross-reference against her own memories and inferences and build it all together into a coherent picture. Her anger is ebbing; maintaining anger isn't a natural state for her, it runs against the grain of her mind, and if what Aire did to her had been anything less than the worst conceivable thing she's not sure she could've stayed mad this long. It's important, though, because anger is the emotion you use when you need to stand up for yourself, and Tanthe really needs to stand up for herself here.

She might ask Aire for that recap later, but not yet; the overview is enough to be going on with.

And as for her reactions, now that she's seen the whole picture...

...she wants to find her way to the world where they can be friends, she really does. The shape of Aire's feelings here is pretty close to the sincere remorse she was asking for; see there and there? (She reflects Aire's own unrecognized guilt back at her, along with Tanthe's broad understanding of the places she's seen that emotion before and the ways she's seen it work. People handle their thoughts and feelings very differently but there are still some common themes.) It's true that Aire doesn't seem able to make the leap to valuing people in general, but you don't have to value people in general to avoid destroying their lives, there are lots of possible good reasons to avoid destroying people's lives. And she is, at least, satisfied that Aire definitely doesn't want to destroy Tanthe's life in particular. That's... a reasonable place to start.

Tanthe thinks she could maybe be friends with an Aire who, even if she didn't care about most people, still agreed to treat them well. She doesn't see much wrong with doing this sort of thing to people who are fine with it; it's the deception and manipulation and betrayal of trust that she objects to. (And, separately, the mind-bogglingly terrible strategic implications of inflicting extreme seemingly-irrevocable damage on volunteers against the Red Queen. Though it makes sense that Aire succumbed to the unexpected temptation that Tanthe represented, she still feels like it was a remarkably bad idea even on purely selfish grounds, just because what if Tanthe's remarkable psychic talents turned out to matter in the fight? Aire is as doomed as anybody else if the Red Queen rolls over the continent in a wave of indiscriminately destructive mind control.)

And at this point it perhaps becomes relevant that—

She shares her memories of waking up. There she was, embraced by tentacles, as insensate or perhaps more accurately omnisensate as ever, temporarily empty of assorted penetrations while she dumped her latest clutch of assorted eggs out into the pit. And, as she caught her breath in the aftermath, before the tentacles returned, a sudden clarity swept up out of the depths of her mind where it had been building for days. She saw everything that had happened to her, understood it more fully than she ever managed while distracted by too much pleasure, and was immediately angrier than she's ever been before in her life. The anger isn't the part she's focusing on, though; the relevant thing is that the way her recovery worked, the structure of it in her thoughts, looks innate and intrinsic and foundational to her practiced psychic eye. It wasn't possible to see it before it actually happened, but in theory—and it is a theory she wants to study in considerable depth before putting any weight on it in practice—in theory, she could do it again, and not only could but would, will do it again, inevitably, every time something like this ever happens to her. Every time she gets wiped out, she'll come back stronger than before.

And if that's the case...

...then the thing that has been her worst nightmare for years, that when it happened was the worst thing that could possibly have happened, the opening of the gates that fills her mind with pleasure until it overflows and stops being capable of anything else... actually starts to look kind of hot? Except that the main difference between awful-hellish-nightmare-scenario and actually-kind-of-hot rests directly on safety and trust, two areas where their relationship is currently severely troubled.

If Aire can do that kind of thing to people who are fine with it, she's very comfortable making the promise to treat people well. It loses her the joy of seducing people into making a choice they know they shouldn't make, but she can cope without that, she thinks. And then there's the obvious option of just working at a brothel somewhere and making seeing her free if you can resist for a while first. 

Aire agrees that doing what she did to Tanthe was stupid even on selfish grounds. Although Aire does feel like Tanthe is perhaps still underestimating the strength of Aire's desires, here, and the rarity of people like Tanthe? She'd read rather a lot of minds, and never encountered one shaped like Tanthe's, so incredibly beautiful and thus so satisfying to flood with so much pleasure Tanthe can't cope with it. And when the rarity of that is combined with the rarity of people who can have what Tanthe had happen to her happen to them, you get a very rare opportunity indeed. She would absolutely have accepted, say, a one on in one hundred chance of death, to do what she did. If she thought that she'd never meet anyone like Tanthe again, that that was her one chance, she probably would have taken a one in two chance of death, even. But, yes, there's no reason to imagine that Tanthe is the only person in the world who is like that, so it was a rather obvious mistake, and one that reflects a flaw in her judgement that she really should work on.

When Tanthe thinks thoughts that vaguely suggest that there might be a possibility for Aire and Tanthe to do something like that again, she instantly, and apparently automatically, starts trying to generate solutions. There's the obvious option where Aire just actually is trustworthy for long enough that Tanthe starts to trust her, but what if that doesn't work? Perhaps there's a way for her to ensure her trustworthiness in a way that would be obvious to Tanthe, if reading her mind didn't do it? Aire doesn’t think a slave collar would work, but maybe there are stronger versions she wouldn't be able to resist? Or maybe Tanthe could do something to Aire with her telepathy? Probably risky, who knows whether it would work. Mind magic maybe? Aire can do that, maybe there'd be something she could do that would force her to not do anything Tanthe didn't agree to ahead of time? No, that probably doesn't work, mind magic is a very blunt instrument. 

And then of course there's the question of whether doing so would actually be safe, and Aire is in complete agreement about not wanting to risk it if they don't know. It would be terrible if they had a lovely time, expecting everything to turn out okay, and then it turned out Tanthe recovering like this was a one time thing. Aire has no way to help there, however, and any help would of course only be useful if they'd managed to get over the "justified trust" hurdle.

Well, Aire can just decide to be trustworthy, and even if it takes a really long time, that should work. And even if it never does, Tanthe being happy somewhere on the opposite side of the world, or enjoying herself with someone else, is still good, even if Aire can't see it happening. The thought does make her a bit sad, though.

...if they are going to be friends, Tanthe would really rather they get there by means other than mind control. Aire does seem to be enthusiastically consenting to the hypothetical mind control, so, could be worse, but still, it seems like a last-resort kind of solution to her.

For the immediate future, if Aire is willing which she certainly seems to be, the thing Tanthe needs in order to feel reasonably safe around her is for her to let Tanthe read her mind like this all the time. It won't fix the whole problem by itself, but it's definitely already helping.

Another thing that she speculates might help is... how awkward would it be for her to meet Christa? Christa and Aire are important to each other, and Aire and Tanthe are... complicatedly also important to each other... and she's never been in this kind of position before, of trying to be close to someone who's close to someone she's never properly met, and she thinks she'd feel like she had a more secure foundation in this relationship if they all knew each other. Things seem like they're somewhat complicated between Christa and Aire too, though, even if not the same amount or in the same way, so she's not sure if this is a realistic possibility.

Then again, if Aire promises to treat people well in a way that involves not substantially deceiving them, well... that has implications for Aire's plan to keep Christa in the dark forever about who she is as a person. But maybe, if Tanthe meets her, she can help Aire figure out how to tell Christa the truth in a way that doesn't make her very sad, or at least only makes her sad temporarily and leaves them still friends afterward?

Tanthe can read Aire's mind, then. Aire actually sort of enjoys it? It's nice, to be known by someone she cares about, and have that person feel less unsafe as a result. Rather the opposite of what she would have predicted the result would be.

Aire thinks treating people well shouldn't completely include not substantially deceiving them? There are people in Arcadia who would kill Aire for being a skinsuit. Not for any of the very good reasons they'd have to maybe want Aire dead, just for the skinsuit bit. And Aire doesn't think she should have to treat people so well that she neglects to deceive them about completely ethically neutral traits that cause them to attempt to murder her. She'll do it if that's the price for interacting with Tanthe on good terms, though. Mostly by just not going back to Arcadia outside of her cult, admittedly. But still.

Oh, also Aire has a cult that worships her as a divine being. It was a very eventful six days in Arcadia.

Tanthe can meet Christa, if she wants. Aire doesn't think it would be very awkward, as long as Tanthe isn't, like, radiating distrust of Aire through telepathy or body language too strongly. Beyond the dishonesty at the heart of their relationship, things aren't substantially complicated between Aire and Christa, although admittedly that is one heck of a complication on its own.

Aire thinks Christa would really like Tanthe, actually. Part of what Christa's so sad about is her recent realization that far fewer people than she thought are good in the same way that Tanthe is. 

But. The bit about keeping Christa in the dark seems straightforwardly true. But Christa's already so sad. One of the things that she's clinging to, emotionally, is that Aire is on her side, which is true. But, more importantly, she's clinging to the idea that even alone out here, she has Aire, and Aire isn't like the people who hurt her by exiling her here. And. Aire really doesn't want to hurt her by revealing that that's not true, that she's worse. And, well, she thinks telling Christa in a way that doesn't make her sadness and disillusionment even worse would probably be very hard, and maybe impossible. On the other hand, Tanthe is herself, so perhaps that means a lot less than it would in other circumstances. 

However, Aire wouldn't be too surprised if even without any effort to phrase things well at all, Christa still ended up friends with Aire afterwards, as long as Aire agreed not to hurt people. She and Tanthe have that in common. Rather a lot of things in common, actually. They're both ethical telepaths who Aire has done her favorite thing with, who she wouldn't be surprised to learn were still willing to be friends with Aire after she did something to betray them as long as she agreed to be good. Seems to be rather a bit too much in common for her to imagine it's a coincidence, perhaps those things are part of what's required for Aire to find a person innately valuable.

Deceiving people because they'll murder you if you don't is fairly reasonable. Deceiving people in an intimate relationship like the one Aire has with Christa seems much less defensible than that, and shades into the manipulation/betrayal thing that Tanthe was so upset about; she feels like, if you are trying to be very close friends with someone, you should avoid keeping things from them that you'd expect them to be upset that they hadn't been told. Tanthe is on board with trying to break the news in a minimally saddening way, though! Even if that means waiting until Christa knows Tanthe better and can rely on her as well as Aire, and is generally in a better place in her life so she'll have an easier time handling shocking news. Just not waiting, like, several years. Several years would be kind of too long.

...she likes the thought of the three of them eventually being good friends? It's a nice thought. She's glad that Aire is willing to work with her to make friendship possible. It would've been really sad if she'd had to exile Aire from the Deep-Heart-Glisten-Palace, and still pretty sad if they'd been able to peacefully coexist but not fully reconcile. It was heartbreaking, when she finally managed to realize that the friendship she'd thought she had with Aire was nothing more than a lie; it's good that maybe they can be real friends now.

And wow, that is a lot to have in common with someone. She's really looking forward to meeting Christa!

Although, in the meantime... what exactly did Aire do with Tanthe's clothes? It would be nice to have them back; she had some sentimentally valuable stuff in her pockets, and is still a little uncomfortable walking around naked all the time.

So, the thing about deception makes sense to Aire on a "hypothetical fully informed Christa would be sad if you kept this from her" level, but it remains the case that everything about deception being bad for personal relationships remains very non-native to Aire's mental architecture. Mostly on account of the idea of caring about the other party in a relationship being new and also somewhat non-native, but still. Aire is flagging this fact on account of trying very hard to operationalize being actually trustworthy, and so she's deliberately not steering away from thoughts like that.

Aire actually kept Tanthe's clothes safe at a fallback location in the Green, mostly for sentimental reasons. Which is something Tanthe will probably find moderately disconcerting. In Aire's defense she thought Tanthe's mind was gone forever, and so she gave Tanthe's stuff a point of pride in the, um, cave, to do something similar to what the people in Arcadia did with gravestones.

Anyway, the fallback location in the Green is a moderately sized cave with a very well-hidden and very small entrance, and so is not accessible for things that aren't able to squish very small or send one half of a [Warp] through. It's where she was planning to operate out of with Tanthe, Christa, and probably a few other people if her cult and the Deep Heart Glisten Palace both fell. She has a decent amount of stuff stashed there, including around a third of the eggs Tanthe laid. Aire can bring Tanthe there if she wants via portal, instead of just heading off herself to retrieve things? That way she couldn't manage an escape even if she tried. There is the hypothetical risk that Aire could have an ambush set up there, but she doesn't think she has the mental self-control not to think about that now that she's thinking about the possibility of ambushes. Wait, that's not true, she probably could for a few seconds. Maybe they can wait for said few seconds to pass, and then they can portal off? Aire can get them there and back without needing a recharge from making Christa orgasm, so she doesn't need to wake her from her current doze, and she can keep recovering.

Tanthe is getting tired of holding up this halo of floating knives. With a thought, she sweeps them together into a fairly tidy stack and lays them down gently on the flesh-floor at her feet. Her flying eyes spread out from their crown configuration into a more natural stance, drifting this way and that and turning slowly to survey the area.

She really appreciates Aire making an effort to be actually trustworthy! She can try to explain in more depth why she thinks deception is bad for personal relationships but she should probably not get into that in too much depth right this second.

...Aire making a sort of grave for Tanthe in her fallback location is... honestly really sweet of her? Maybe a little disconcerting but like, the disconcerting part of thinking about someone keeping a sort of gravestone for you is not the part where you were mourned, it's the part where you died.

Overall Tanthe thinks she is just not that worried about Aire escaping. She would be pretty unhappy about it if Aire decided to leave and never return, but she did openly give Aire the option of exile from the Deep-Heart-Glisten-Palace as an alternative to trying to work things out between them. Working things out between them is definitely her preferred option here! But she's not going to try to drag Aire into it by force if that's not what Aire wants. Aire can just go get Tanthe's clothes from the cave, and if while she's in the cave she decides not to come back, well, that's sad but sometimes sad things do happen.

Aire departs, and Aire returns. All told, it takes less than a minute. She has the entire route from here to there mapped out in advance, in case she needs a quick escape, so [Skim]ing there is so fast as to be indistinguishable from instantaneous. And grabbing Aire's clothing is as simple as ducking into the cave, opening the small nondescript Tanthe Chest that's tucked away on its own in a side chamber, and removing Tanthe's folded clothing from underneath a set of metallic and gemstone eggs, containing one of each type lined up in order. The Tanthe Chest is in a side chamber so she wouldn't have to see it too often and be sad. She has a different, larger chest with more of Tanthe's eggs that she isn't planning on keeping forever in a different part of the cave.

She keeps the portal open as she does, allowing Tanthe to keep track of her thoughts and verify that there's nobody else thinking thoughts in the cave. Never once does she think about the possibility of escape. 

And then here she is, giving Tanthe's clothing back to her!

Tanthe breathes a quiet sigh of relief and puts all her clothes back on. She checks her pockets for her stuff: maps, fancy spectacles for seeing unusual things, fancy collapsible telescope, sunstone lantern, and most importantly, her necklace. One of her great-grandma's emerald eggs, in a silver shell on a steel chain, lightly enchanted with youth-preserving magic. She wasn't wearing it earlier because she was uncomfortable with the reminder it entailed, but that ship has thoroughly sailed by now, so she takes it out of her pocket and puts it on.

She did actually prepare in advance for the possibility that she'd end up making herself a halo of floating knives, and there's a bunch of pouches stashed in various pockets that she can take out and attach to her belt and then put her knives away in. She's much more comfortable after she does that; she doesn't really like explicitly maintaining the option to hurt people as an immediate possibility.

With all her stuff settled back into place, she bounces slightly and smiles at Aire for the first time since... well, since the last time she smiled at Aire.

"Thanks," she says, and now that she is clothed and not prepared to do violence, she kind of wants to hug Aire. She immediately second-guesses this impulse; she feels awkward about it and she's not sure what Aire thinks of the idea or how she feels about it, though presumably she's about to find out.

The extra movement Tanthe has to do to get her clothing back on really tests Aire's ability to keep her mind off of her attraction to her, but through the power of looking in another direction she manages it. That's not to say the start of a fantasy don't manage to slip through her mind, but she does manage to divert it from anything too explicit beyond a few background flashes, and cut it off before it gets any further than a barely-formed image of an unclothed Tanthe smiling happily down at Aire as she presses in close. 

Aire is sorry about that. She's only so good at self control, and Tanthe is attractive enough on both a physical and mental level that trying to keep her thoughts off of things like that is difficult. The clothes make it easier, though, and she relaxes some of the now unneeded control she was wrangling her libido with.

Aire reacts very positively to the idea of hugs! Hugs with Tanthe are of incredibly high value. Aire hurt Tanthe, but the other way around hasn't happened at all. Aire's feelings about Tanthe are purely, uncomplicatedly positive, and now that Tanthe isn't radiating anger she isn't even feeling any negative consequences of having those feelings. On the other hand, given the entire situation and those mental images that just rushed through Aire's mind, plausibly Tanthe's feelings have moved on from awkward to unpleasant or possibly unsafe, so Aire isn't actually expecting this situation to result in hugs, just feeling pleasant about the hug impulse in Tanthe.

Overall she appreciates Aire stifling her fantasies for the moment, but also she's not really mad about Aire having fantasies to stifle? It's kind of flattering how into her Aire is.

She dithers a bit on the subject of hugs. Aire's not wrong that the connection with Aire's fantasies increases her hesitancy, but... it's not like Aire is going to actually do anything ill-advised if Tanthe hugs her, right? Probably? Perhaps Tanthe should ask Aire about this and wait to hear her response, yes, good idea.

Aire promises not to do anything ill-advised if Tanthe hugs her, by her best guess of what Tanthe herself would consider ill-advised. She will stay still, lift her arms and wrap them around Tanthe's shoulders, and then let go when Tanthe does. If Tanthe somehow loses control of herself and feels an insatiable desire to continue hugging, Aire will end the hug herself after, say, ten seconds, not that Aire thinks something like that happening is actually likely. Tanthe is Tanthe, after all.

Oh, there's also the pheromone problem. Aire releases pheromones that mess with people's heads somewhat, but they're outside, Aire's wearing clothes, there's a bit of a breeze, and Tanthe's currently upwind, so it should be fine. At any rate, the pit Tanthe was in would have still had some of her pheromones floating around in the air when she woke up, Aire was only gone for a few hours, so Tanthe should already know how she reacts to minor exposure. But if Tanthe doesn't want to risk it Aire understands.

At the explanation of the pheromones, Tanthe nods slowly, inspecting her memories and finding the places where their influence looks likely. That should be reasonably easy to compensate for. And it's probably a good idea to try low-stakes experiments now and then.

All in all, despite some lingering awkwardness and nerves, she thinks a hug is probably a good idea. She steps towards Aire with her arms held out.

Aire will open up her own arms and the, when Tanthe is close enough, wrap them around her. Otherwise she stays still, as she promised.

There's a scent that Tanthe will recognize, around Aire, and if she presses her face against Aire's shoulder or something like that it will be stronger. She could probably manage to give herself a pheromone high if she spent a while nuzzling into Aire, but as long as she doesn't do that, the wind will solve the problem.

It smells nice, and she observes that she instinctively wants to chase it, but that would be a manifestly terrible idea so she doesn't. She just gives Aire a gentle squeeze and holds on for a few seconds and then lets go.

It was a good idea, she thinks; everyone carries at least a little of their mind in their body, and now she has reminded her body that Aire is a friend, and it's happier and more comfortable.