He giggles. "Just too big for you, huh?" he says to Nerine, ruffling her hair.

She leans into his hand. "The joke has been made. But unlike in certain other areas of life, I do actually prefer to have a pen that fits me."

"Sure, lemme see that and I'll make you a smaller one."

Khythen hands him the brush. Conveniently, not having a pen in his hand anymore makes it easier to snuggle Nerine.

He studies it for a minute, and then puts it down and pulls a bit of stone out of the floor (smoothing it out afterward so there's only barely a visible dip) and picks up Nerine's hand, the better to examine it for sizing purposes. The lump of stone shapes itself into a brush, and he kisses Nerine's hand and gives it an affectionate squeeze that makes the bones creak audibly and then gives her the new pen and lets go.

She shivers happily when he squeezes her hand, and then grins up at him. "Thanks."

Khythen kisses her, since she is so delightfully kissably arranged.

Mmmmmmmmkiss. She is maybe a little distracted from calligraphy at this point.

Kiss. Khythen's claws have not quite broken skin before it occurs to him that he should probably not do that in public.

She snuggles into his lap with a rueful sigh. "Oh, look at me getting all distracted. I've been having sex for like a month straight, and great as it has been, I miss art."

"I can completely empathize with that."

Art! Demon calligraphy looks completely different from what she's familiar with, both in terms of having a different alphabet and having different prettying techniques.

...She kind of double-takes the first time he writes something. "So apparently dream lady taught me your language while I wasn't looking, or something? Thanks, dream lady?"

"What, really?"

She switches languages. "Seems like it! This is, uh, surreal. But in a cool way?"

"...Yeah, wow.

I wonder if she did it for Mezeidai, too."

"That'd sure be useful. I sort of get the impression she was in a hurry to be gone, though, so if she didn't stop to chat..."

"Oh well. She can learn it the long way."

"Yeah."

Art! Snuggles!

And elsewhere--

they really don't let you sleep enough, when you're a captive being raped every waking moment. She dozed off again cozily on Kamar and Talyr.

The noises she's started to make are less cozy.

"No," she mutters in her sleep. "No, don't. I don't want it. No. No!"

...oh, dear.

"Mezeidai," he murmurs. "Wake up, love, you're having a nightmare."

She doesn't seem to hear him. She makes an unhappy whining noise and shivers and doesn't wake up.

He shifts so he is snuggled up to her without doing anything that restricts her freedom of movement, and pets her hair worriedly.

(Kemar is already appropriately snuggled.)

The whining gets higher-pitched and more intense. Her back arches and she screams, and apparently this is enough to finally wake her because her eyes fly open. She collapses, whimpering, for a moment, before she levers herself up and crawls to the edge of the bed and vomits over it, dry-heaving long after there isn't anything left in her stomach to disgorge.