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.
Sable scoops up some of each of those, along with quite a bit of rosemary, and carries it all to the counter. "Anything else you want to grab?"
She pauses for a moment, and then a sly smirk comes to her face. "I could use a proper athame."
Sable grins wryly. "That'll be at the smith, not here, but certainly."
She turns to the clerk. "All this plus half a cord of firewood?"
"Thanks!" Sable counts out the coins and hands them over, then turns to Sin. "I'll let you hold onto those, sweetie. I can just ask you for the herbs if I need them for cooking."
Awww, she called her sweetie...
Hyacinth nods and smiles and gathers up her herbs and places them in inventory, along with the candles. "It'll be really fun to try this out," she says. "Let's head over to the smith's, then."
Sable squeezes Sin's hand and leads the way outside, then scoops quite a lot of firewood from a stack against the wall of the general store into her inventory. That done, she leads the way to the smith. Soon they're looking at a collection of assorted blades.
"I don't want anything fancy," Hyacinth says. "They say it's best to use your ritual implements in your daily life as well, so something that's easy to handle and generally versatile would be best."
Sable nods and picks out a basic camp and cooking knife from a shelf, tests the edge, and brings it up to the counter.
Sin accepts it and inventories it.
"Thank you, darling," she says. "Now let's go see about the meditation."
Sable smiles a bit sappily, takes Sin's hand, and leads the way out of town. "It's a beautiful afternoon, and I have a beautiful girl accompanying me."
Hyacinth raises an eyebrow. "Who's accompanying who, now?" But she can't keep it up and breaks out into giggles.
"You're beautiful too," she says. "When we get there I'll need you to stand watch for me, okay? I have little awareness of my outside senses when I'm meditating, and there are potentially things out there that could threaten me even while I'm actively on fire."
"Anything that tries will find itself rapidly regretting its life choices," Sable replies confidently.
"That's so you." Hyacinth smiles and looks away.
Then she looks back. "You know, since we're away from the village anyway and have some time to kill before we make it to the rocks, do you want to introduce me to the rest of you all?"
She closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again, and her body begins to shift as she walks. Her hair shifts from violet curls to dark brown waves, her skin darkens, her figure grows curvier, and her eyes turn a vivid copper tone. "Hello, dear. My name is Maya," she says.
Hyacinth takes an appreciative look, then remembers herself and look away. "Um, hi. I'm Hyacinth."
"It's good to meet you." She grins warmly. "And feel free to look, dear Hyacinth. I'm rather proud of my appearance, and the effect it has on people."
This only deepens Hyacinth's blush. "I... Okay."
"So, um, tell me a little more about yourself?"
As it should.
"I am deeply fascinated with old warships, heavy artillery, and vehicles, and I quite enjoy cultivating what Sable describes as 'Succubus Vibes'. I lean rather protective, and appreciate providing people with stability wherever possible," she replies.
Somehow this description does not make Hyacinth blush any less.
"I see..." she says. "So you're one of the reasons Sable's cultivated knowledge of guns, then?"
She flushes slightly. "One of, yes. My ideal would be to be an incarnate spirit of a warship, or something to that effect, and be able to be something along the lines of heavy artillery on two legs. My being something akin to 'shipgirl-gender', along with Sable being my captain, is in fact how we chose our system name, 'Pirates'."