When Hyacinth comes home to her new apartment for the first time after a long day at university, it's to the sight of moving bots just finishing dropping off the last of her stuff and moving furniture into place. The full-immersion VR pod her parents gave her is safely hooked up in the pod room, her bed is in her bedroom, she has chairs and a desk and some bookshelves. Clothes are mostly still in boxes, waiting to be hung up in the closet. Holovid and a cozy chair occupy the living room. She doesn't have any food in the small kitchen yet.
And then the room fades out, and the Pirates find themselves in a temple to the goddess Creation, stepping out of the mists.
Sable pats herself down and checks her inventory, finding that the only things she lost are some XP and a bit of the meat. Convenient.
She steps out toward the entrance.
Hyacinth is standing by the entrance and stress-optimizing. You can tell by how her eyes make little wiggly motions back and forth at nothing.
She doesn't seem to have noticed Sable.
She lays her head on Sable's chest and smiles softly.
"I was scared for a moment there... It looked real bad."
She squeezes Sable.
"You're back, though."
Her smile lingers as she nuzzles into Sable softly.
Then she smiles softly and squeezes her tightly. "Yep. We're back. Not going anywhere. Wanna head back to our room and hear the story?"
"Yeah. I sorted out Cocoa's gear damage with the funds I had on me. I, uh, kind of shoved a couple crowns at him and told him to take a hike. Not in those words, obviously, but it was stressful to have him standing right there while I was waiting for you. I should probably apologize."
Hyacinth squeezes Sable again. "Love you. Let's head back."
"Love you too," she replies with a squeeze of her own, before starting back toward the inn. "Yeah, probably worth apologizing, ideally we can handle it nice and easy on the way back to our room. Maybe he'll be having a drink to unwind after that."
Sable squeezes Sin's hand with a soft, warm smile. "Turns out she is extremely chill, by the way."
She lets go of Sin's hand to wrap around her waist and squeezes her close, giggling. "You're adorable. Just unbelievably cute at all times."
Sable blushes faintly at the cheek kiss, grins wide, and tightens her grip as Sin bounces up to twirl her around in a circle, laughing delightedly.
Hyacinth lets out a soft "eeeee!" and giggles even more.
Then she flumphs back down to the ground and leads Sable on a little faster in the direction of the inn.
Hyacinth leads the way inside. Cocoa's nowhere to be seen in the front room, so she just tosses a small wave at Jorem and moves on.
Sable waves as well, and smiles eagerly as they head upstairs to their room. When they've got the door closed behind them, she tugs Sin down onto the bed with her, giggling warmly and squeezing her close.
"Well," she starts. "She's an SAI named May, though I get the feeling that's not supposed to be spread around. She can observe most things that happen in the game — and has seen a lot of sex as a result, though I get the impression that she doesn't mean to watch people so much as just catches it incidentally while keeping track of how people are doing. She explicitly said she prefers when people have kinky deaths they enjoy over traumatic deaths in war, too."
"That's, um. Good. Good to hear."
Hyacinth ducks her head and snuggles into Sable a little more.
"It sounds like we should head for the city then..."