When living inside the Ark, it is easy to take for granted the systems that keep us safe, healthy, and free of the threats of the outside world. Students might ask why the civics curriculum spends so much time on things that ‘just work.’ The answer is simple: life within the Ark would be impossible without the Twelve Axioms. Systems that operate to support life at the civilizational scale across centuries of use can’t be effectively managed by Humans.
Axiom Three ensures that your family has access to water for drinking and bathing. Axiom Two ensures breathable air within the city. This pattern repeats across all twelve: Axiom One keeps the structure secure and intact, Four keeps the city nutritionally stable, and Five manages the entire city’s electrical systems.
By the end of this unit, you will be able to name all Twelve Axioms and their domains, and will prepare a term paper explaining the Civil Defense Authority’s emergency response layers.
Excerpt, Ark Civics & Infrastructure, Third Edition.
Two weeks. Not even; I was still a couple of days short. I’d made it two weeks, and I felt like I was either going to explode, attempt to strangle Lael to death, or break down into incoherent sobbing.
Vael and I had been remarkably active in our pleasure sharing before I consigned myself to coming up to X-1 to train. The first couple of days, I’d been simmering, but dedicating all my attention and effort into training, which was a literal cycle of rising before dawn, training until collapse, waking up still sore, and starting the whole thing over again.
Giving 100%, mind, body and soul, all day, every day, wasn’t helping; it was gleefully lobbing mollies at an already problematic fire.
I was so unbearably fucking in need of…
But there was no time, and no privacy. The pressure in the boiler just continued past the redline.
I’d passed the fuck out for my afternoon nap. Cardio, strength, and flexibility training had destroyed me, and I was fighting like hell to keep my eyelids open walking into the bedroom. Lael used this brief downtime to handle her private matters. But I was just too damn tired to do anything.
Sleep took me the moment I came to a halt in the bed.
I had extremely vivid dreams of a particularly enjoyable spice level.
I was being held tightly by my lover, unable to move more than my fingers, toes, and neck. They were pressing me into the mattress and squeezing me tightly in a way that was making fireworks go off in my head. Slow, methodical pleasure. Too slow, almost torturous. I wanted to come, but my lover never sped up, no matter how much I whined or pleaded for more stimulation. I wasn’t being edged, but the results were similar: a growing knot of tension winding through my muscles and my belly. Insufferable as an AC failure. I wriggled and tried to move myself, grind back against them. They just squeezed me so tightly that it was hard to breathe. I didn’t know how much I needed that very thing.
I woke with my hips still rolling in small circles, grinding my crotch against…
I blinked rapidly, batting away sleepy thoughts of lovemaking.
Eughhhh!
My tail was tucked between my thighs, and I’d been humping the underside into a slimy mess. It came up and around my front, where it coiled around my body and had been squeezing me tightly in loops of contracting muscle.
For a brief moment, I thought about the alien organism fucking me, and wanted to throw up.
It had no right being as good as it had been.
Gen’s words dive-bombed me.
Stop treating it as an other, and treat it as yourself. Functionally no difference between you.
It… it wasn’t fucking me, I was… masturbating with myself?
The thought rumbled around inside my skull. It was self-pleasure. The low, rolling inferno in my system was still burning just as brightly as it had been before I’d woken. It would be… easy to handle.
I can’t, I need this, I need relief.
I made a decision. I closed my eyes, and my hips resumed moving. Undulations between my thighs and squeezing pressure around my abdomen, chest, and arms resumed, the extremely heavy mass of my tail pushing me down and squishing me in a way that really activated my neurons. I wasn’t telling it how to move, or what to do; it was moving like my imagined lover of its own accord.
When I hit my peak, it hit me so hard that I nearly–
It was happening, finally, things clicking into place and pushing past the barrier I’d been stuck behind. Taste, sound, tactile sensation: all of it folded inward, collapsing toward a single point of awareness. One perfect instant of unity, and then–
Awareness returned to me slowly. My chest heaved, trying to fill an oxygen deficit. My lower belly and abdomen were still intermittently spasming with aftershocks, and my thighs fired off sympathetic quivers. My tail shivered and twitched all around me. I was drooling on myself, and I couldn’t care less. I was still riding the neurotransmitter explosion down, back into normal consciousness.
That was a top five, maybe even top three. Every other one on the list was Vael. Never just… solo. What the actual fuck.
My tail slithered around me, squeezing in places, cradling in others. Firm in some places, as gentle as a caress in others.
I unwrapped myself and used my tail to push myself into an upright sitting position, where I ran my fingertips along the surface of its skin. Lael had been putting me through hours of soul-crushing physical training every single day. For cardio, I was doing a lot of swimming, mostly using my tail to propel me through the currents. My tail was the largest muscle group in my body by a huge margin, and it stressed my body far more effectively than running did. Lael still made me vary my cardio.
I felt like it was getting stronger on a nearly daily basis. I’d do pullups and pushups using my tail to support the rest of my body. The counts crept higher each time.
I yawned and scrubbed my eyes with my palms. I had to get up and get ready for my next session, but first… I had to handle something that was bothering me, my own self-consciousness nagging the back of my mind.
I grabbed my slate and called Vael. She picked up on the second buzz, and I heard Rui in the background. I couldn’t help but smile, even as my chest twisted with a longing to be there.
We’d already spoken about the revelations from Veris and Genesis. I told her about what happened when I woke up from my post-training nap.
She sighed when I finished, and I could hear the frustration in it.
“You’re mad at me.” It wasn’t an accusation. Not exactly.
“No, I… Yes, a little.”
My cheeks burned with shame.
I should have been able to wait for her to come visit next week. She’s disappointed in me.
“I’m frustrated, more than anything, because you keep insisting on hurting yourself, and it makes me want to shake you until the bad ideas rattle out of your ears.”
What?
I echoed the question back, only this time out loud.
Another sigh, additional frustration. “Listen, Kiera. I don’t know how to put this gently. You’ve got this, quite frankly, idiotic Human shame architecture drilled into you when it comes to basic bodily functions involving sex and intercourse. You know as well as I do that you’re in the immediate proximity to someone who would be practically overjoyed at the prospect of sharing closeness with you. And you’re still hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, for some reason. You think Lael can’t tell when you’re suffering?”
I swallowed past the giant knot in my throat.
“You know I’ve been trying my best to learn your culture and language. It’s not easy to get over some of my hangups. This is something I’ve been taught is fundamentally wrong and immoral my entire life. I wish I could just do what you said and shake them loose and not get stuck on it.” I drew a breath and held it a moment. “I don’t want to ruin our friendship,” I murmured.
“You aren’t going to. Stop thinking you will. And you’ve been doing an amazing job at picking things up. Even my mom has commented on it,” Vael said, and I heard Rui speaking in the background. “Rui says hello, also!”
“Tell her I said hello. Are you two er…” I let the question linger.
“Excuse me, I need to go to the other room to gossip,” Vael said, and I heard rustling and motion. “First of all, would it bother you if I was? I thought we were pretty clear about the dreaded M-word.”
“Can I think for a minute before I answer? I need to untangle things internally,” I told her.
“Of course!” Vael said with a laugh.
I knew I was getting caught up in my own feelings, but what those feelings were mattered a whole lot. It took me a few minutes of fiddling with my fingernails in bed before I felt confident in my reply.
“I… don’t think that I’m jealous of you being intimate with others. That is sort of what I defaulted to thinking, but I’m not sure it’s accurate. I think it’s more like…” My voice grew unexpectedly tight. “Like I’m afraid of being left out, or that I won’t be good enough, or you’ll get bored of me? Mostly like I feel bad about being excluded, even though I know that isn’t what it is. But my brain doesn’t want to be rational about these things, either.”
Vael laughed, quite loudly, directly into my ear through the wireless connection.
“Kiera, I’m sorry, but that’s so dumb it’s actually funny. I’m sorry for laughing, but only a little. You’re phenomenal in bed. Don’t ever think otherwise. You’re doing the shame and hiding thing again, but instead of trying to hide in a tent-sized hoodie, you’re doing it with your sexuality. I am begging you to make sure you’re taking care of yourself, whatever that might look like.”
I wiped some tears from my eyes and nodded to someone who couldn’t see me. “Okay. I’ll try. Promise.”
Vael did that thing she always did, which was to make me feel silly about my own self-consciousness while shoring up the parts I felt were crumbling.
Fuck, I miss her so much.
“In other, more salacious news, Rui might have a bit of a crush,” Vael told me in a rolling purr. I could almost picture her lying in bed, tail flicking back and forth in the air.
I was totally drawing a blank. After several moments of grasping at straws, I broke down and asked. “Okay, who?”
“Ellen. And it’s mutual. They’re being such bashful lesbians that I want to mush their faces together and make them smooch until they pass out!”
I blinked, but the gears were fully engaged and turning.
“No, no. That actually makes a lot of sense. I think I pissed Ellen off last time we talked, because she stormed off without a word. I get the impression she sort of defines herself by being a protector, and Rui’s right there, just starting to bounce back. I thought Rui was, err, straight, though?”
I heard a hissing snicker on the other end of the connection. “She is, mostly. I might have accidentally let a few things slip in casual conversation, like mentioning that Ellen is packing a massiv–”
“Vael!” I practically shouted, and I couldn’t help it; I burst out laughing, imagining Rui’s face in the moment. “You’re fucking awful, you know that, right?”
“Ooh, have I been bad?”
“I’ll throttle you, I swear,” I shot back.
“That costs extra, Kiera…”
***
I only had a couple of weeks of training time remaining with Lael. I’d say it had been hellish, but that wouldn’t be a good representation of the full picture. Not exactly.
Lael was an extremely talented instructor. She knew exactly how to push me to my limits, then break them, and set new benchmarks. And she never allowed me to feel any sense of complacency or completion. The goals always moved, no matter how much I improved at any given thing. I’d start getting close to reaching a milestone, and she’d casually drop a new one, even further away.
I think I would have absolutely hated my time spent training, but there was one major catch. I wanted to feel like I had some agency, a droplet of power all to myself. I was breaking personal records on a near-daily basis, and I got a deep, low-level sense of satisfaction each time I did.
Every extra kilo I could lift. Every minute I added on cardio sprints. The moments when I didn’t totally faceplant in combat drills, where I could act without thinking, off of instinct she was trying to shove into my brain and muscle memory.
Imir came into the picture, hired by Lael for dedicated training time. Lael’s training was brutal. Imir’s training was razor-edge precise. Lael had me train with a bo staff, which I felt like wasn’t quite what I was after at first. Her insistence made sense, but it also made me feel like I was splitting my time.
“It’s not about the staff, Kiera. It’s about learning how to move and think. What will you do if you are without mana, without your blade, or gun? Will you concede and die? A staff can be a short baton, a weapon with reach, a pole to climb or vault with. Found anywhere, made anywhere.”
I tried to complain to Imir about it. “Wouldn’t my time be better spent training with the partisan, all the time, and not just part of it?”
I received one of those stoic glares of hers when I’d asked. “Lael’Mira is a master of her craft. Do you question her judgement because you think you know better?”
She’d softened the gut-punch with a proverbial pat on the back after delivering it. “It is good to learn other forms. The point is not to memorize kata, but to change the way you think. Learning how to handle a challenge in diverse ways.”
I was being challenged in more ways than just swinging a big stick or sharp stick around.
Eating was a major struggle for me.
When I first came up and started training with Lael, she started putting out prepared meals of increasingly absurd sizes and densities, and like with my training milestones, it felt like every day they got bigger.
I pushed back. I didn’t want to eat that much. I’d get part of the way through, feeling satisfied, and Lael would insist I finish the remaining portions. We butted heads about it, and on more than one occasion.
The thing was… I was terrified.
The memories of feeling distinctly wrong in my own skin, and that driving me to not only disregard, but actively hate my reflection in the mirror. Of being obese and not caring, because the rest of me was gross in myriad ways. Feeling more comfortable wearing virtual faces than showing my own.
I thought I was going to get fat from eating so much. And Lael was tracking my training progress, and that involved regularly stepping on a digital scale. Seeing a number that I already wasn’t comfortable with on my first weigh-in: 68kg.
It’s the tail. 18 kilos of butt snake.
A week later it was 74. I almost had a panic attack. Pinching my abdomen and hefting my chest. They still felt huge. There didn’t seem to be more skin coming away from my core than normal.
I convinced myself it was water weight. Too much salt with all the electrolytes she was packing in the far-too-large meals.
The next week it was 81 kilograms, and I actually did have a meltdown and turn into a tear-streaked mess in the privacy of the bathroom. I panic-called Gen on my visor. It had audio and visual links; she scanned my reflection and compared it to her last records. I wasn’t getting fat; I was growing both muscle and more tail, and more impactfully, my body tissue was fundamentally changing. “Baseline” muscle, bone, connective tissue: it was being broken down and replaced, and that replacement was in turn being stressed in ways that encouraged the kind of growth you’d expect from being active.
Every week, the number on the scale went up. Three to five kilograms per week. It was unnatural, freakish, and something that would have made me want to curl up in the corner and cry under most circumstances. But that side of me warred with the side of me that was exuberant over the fact I could not just lift my own body weight off the ground; I could clean and jerk it clear over my head. As much as I was sweating becoming fat as I steadily outgrew my clothing, I was overjoyed with the feelings of not feeling weak and defenseless, no matter how much of a false pretense that might be.
I was a User. Users are innately dangerous people. Users also barely meet the definition of what most would consider Human in the first place. Humans couldn’t punch a hole through a tank, cut a cargo truck in half with their mind, or fly. Users could, and most made it look easy.
I just wished that it was as easy to actually feel what I was being told, knew, and rationalized. There was a disconnect between my brain and my gut, and it took conscious effort on my part to not let it get out of control when my anxieties about my shape reared up like monsters in the dark.
My last ‘in person’ scan with Gen was three days ago. My growth: the tail’s length, the measuring tape numbers, the digits on the scale? It was all leveling off. The number itself still managed to suck the air from my lungs: 140 kilos. I didn’t feel it, not remotely, and that mismatch was almost more unsettling to me than the number itself.
When I’d first started training with Lael, 15 kilos had been a goal, something I was supposed to work up to being able to curl one-handed. Now I weighed damn near ten times that, and I did sets of pull-ups with it every morning before breakfast. My growing strength had exceeded my insane weight gain, and I figured it would have shown itself in other areas–sore joints, back or foot pain, or something–but it didn’t.
My tail hadn’t added any additional length in two weeks. It was twice my length, and over three times its previous weight at what I thought was its ‘adult’ shape. I should have felt like I had a loaded barbell strapped to my lower back, but I didn’t. Same with the dimensions; I would have figured I’d find it getting in the way more, being more bothersome. It wasn’t, and, in fact, the opposite was true. It felt lighter and more agile and reactive than previously.
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I gazed at my reflection in Lael’s full-size mirror. A fit woman with glowing yellow eyes and a large additional appendage was staring back at me. She looked like someone who had been going to the gym regularly for several years. Not muscular in the way a bodybuilder was, but there was visible muscle definition when she twisted and looked at herself from various angles.
Muscles I knew the names of because of my training.
Biceps, triceps. Deltoids, traps. Her entire upper body is broader, more… predatory. Quads, hamstrings, glutes, gastros.
I let out a sigh. “I’m never getting over the accusations of having a fat ass, am I?” I murmured to my reflection. Other-me looked over her shoulder with her body twisted to stare at her ass. It was big, and so were her thighs. I reached back and gave it a squeeze: soft under my fingertips and palm, still with give to it, but there was no mistaking the hard swell of muscle underneath. Not fat. Just… big. The muscles along her spine popped into major definition and visibility, like towing straps. The tail growing out of my lower back and upper butt didn’t help with the mental image in my head: me getting stuck trying to squeeze through a narrow opening between tree trunks in a portal world environment.
The mental image was contaminated by matrix memes and media.
“Help me, Vael, I’m stuck!”
“Quiet, Kiera, or your butt is going to alert the Guardian!”
I laughed at myself, a touch of warmth on the cheeks of my reflection. I was really looking forward to being able to spend time with her back home.
The extreme training had transformed my body in other ways. A few months ago, I had a little bit of softness around my waistband, which usually didn’t bother me because I simply couldn’t see it 90% of the time with my chest obstructions in the way. That had gone away. My belly was tight, but still soft to the touch. I wasn’t Lael; it didn’t look like you could smash dinnerware off my core muscles. But every so often, I’d be twisted, turned, or flexing, and you could see bulk appear under the layer of padding.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about having visible abs. Don’t get me wrong, they were something that made me salivate over other people, but I worried they’d make my hourglass figure look a little odd.
Gen told me that I’d lost double-digit percentage body fat, and I believed her. My boobs had dropped in volume by a considerable amount: I was wearing a bra that was two full cup sizes smaller on average. Like with my fears about getting fat, I worried that I’d get saggy, but that hadn’t come to pass. Quite the opposite, actually. I wasn’t sure if it was the vitality aspect rearing its head and enforcing the supernaturally healthy theme, but they’d actually perked up with the loss of mass, so although I had gone down in size somewhat dramatically, I still had a lot of projection going on.
It was a bit of a mixed blessing in my opinion. On one hand, I hated how they got in the way and made everyday tasks more difficult at times. On the other, the exaggerated curves of my figure made me squeal internally. I still looked curvy; it’s just that the ratios and dimensions had changed some. New-me was still busty, just to a less extreme degree.
I adjusted my bra band and pulled my shirt over my head. Enough navel gazing for one day. Lael told me that we had some things to do this afternoon, and that post-nap, I wouldn’t be doing my normal afternoon training.
I left the bathroom and set out to find her. It wouldn’t be hard; even when she was heavily suppressing her circuit, I could still feel her, and with the Bond I’d been given, my ability to locate and pinpoint that feeling was extremely accurate. She was outside, behind the estate.
My feelings about Lael were… complicated.
After I’d had my call with Vael, where she’d verbally boxed my ears about how stupid I was being, I worked up my nerve to approach Lael. A couple of days ago, I was wearing comfy, stretchy PJs and wandered through the estate to find her in the big lounge. She was sitting by herself on a loveseat with her feet drawn up and staring at the fireplace. The gas burner was lighting her in an orange glow, and she had a wineglass in her hand and what looked like a mostly-empty bottle of dark red wine on the stand next to where she was sitting.
It was hard to tell with her at times, but I got the distinct impression that she was sad. Her aura was off, too, compared to how it normally presented. She had an insane level of control over it: my ability to read her was spotty at best. She knew I was there, but hadn’t reacted. Maybe lost in thought or distracted. I fought my sudden nervousness down and forced myself to walk over and sit next to her.
She emptied her glass just before I sat down, and used her tail to guide me in until the two of us were side-to-side. Her arm wrapped around my shoulder and pulled me in tightly to her, but she didn’t look my way. We sat like that without speaking for maybe half an hour, with only the sound of the fireplace burning to fill the space. It was nice, and would have been relaxing, if not for the vibes I was feeling radiating off her.
I rested against her side for long minutes, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself or how to approach. So I let my free hand wander, reaching down and rotating her toe rings, running my fingers over her claws, grazing her bare thigh with my fingertips. My own gold bracelet glinted in the firelight.
Her aura shifted, and I tasted saltiness. I glanced up at her face to see tears running down her cheeks. I immediately wrapped my arms around her muscular chest and squeezed her in a tight hug, and didn’t let go. Her tail pulled against me, and we sat just like that while I felt, saw, and tasted her aura wandering through a confusing jumble of emotions.
“(What’s wrong, Lael?)” I asked her at a volume not much over the sound of the fire.
She sniffed and cleared her throat.
“My thoughts wander tonight. I was thinking of you, Vael’Sura, and of Rill’Thir.”
I swallowed. It was the first time she’d talked about her deceased daughter with me, and I wasn’t sure how I fit into that context.
She turned and kissed me on top of the wild mess of my hair.
“Having you here has reminded me of how things were, and how they are now. You have been a good student.” She shifted her hand, and her claws came into contact with my bracelet. “...and a good daughter of my house.”
“But those weren’t happy tears, Lael. I can tell the difference. What’s upsetting you?”
She let her head rest against the back of the loveseat and resumed her distant stare. Her hand guided mine up and off her thigh, until my palm was resting against her lower abdomen. Even at rest, the definition of her hard, muscled abdomen was plainly obvious under my fingers. I let them trace along the valleys and ridges, my touch as light as a breeze.
She didn’t speak for a long time, and the tears resumed. When she finally spoke, her voice was laden with emotion that sounded and felt like grief to me.
“It has been a very long time since I’ve had children. Rill’thir was well on her way, and I was planning on having more before she died. Vael’Sura and I had an argument, a terrible fight after her death. It was the first time we’d ever had a major rift between us, and both of us said things. Awful things.”
She drew an unsteady breath. “She asked me to suspend my plans. Said that she couldn’t handle more sisters while she was still grieving. I told her it was fair.” Lael paused, swallowed, waited several moments before she continued. “It’s been so long, Kiera, and it weighs on me.”
I thought about all the empty rooms upstairs. About how Vael must have felt at the time. It was hard for me to wrap my head around Sul’vari family dynamics; they were very foreign, and in a number of different ways. I reached up with my hand and wiped the tears from her cheek with my thumb. Her teal eyes dropped down to meet mine, and she smiled, but it was a faint thing.
When I spoke, I did the same thing I’d done with Ellen; talking without any form of a filter. Speaking with my gut and the resonance of her aura guiding my words.
“You love being a mother and having a large family. You promised Vael something because you wanted to protect her when she was hurting. But she’s been inconsiderate, even if she hasn’t meant to be.”
She nodded. “It’s not… There is more to it than that. Politics, outside pressures. It's not only my own desires conflicting with hers. My house has remained at a fixed number for decades, while others grow and flourish. More members of a house bring prestige, but also real wealth and power. Generations producing their own. I have a duty as the head, and the whispers behind my back grow louder. I want my house to succeed on your planet, Kiera. As we are today, we will inevitably fail on Earth when I move on or perish.”
I sat with that for a few minutes and did my best to console Lael non-verbally. Holding her, squeezing her, wiping away her tears.
She can be seven thousand years old and still have fears, anxieties, and nightmares. Does she feel like she’s failed here? Is this what Sul’vari aging looks like, when you don’t grow infertile and infirm with years?
“I will talk to her. I don’t know if she wants to have children; it’s not something we’ve really talked about because… well, you know. It’s awkward. I don’t know if she has any other people that she’s interested in, in that way. I think she works too hard to be starting a family on the side she hasn’t told me about. But she can’t expect you to suspend your life and plans forever, either. That’s not fair.”
Lael kissed me on the head again and squeezed me tightly.
I decided at that moment that I was going to try and do something to cheer her up, and I had a half-formed idea in my head slowly swirling around. It was dumb, but it was the least I could do for someone I owed.
I stuck a pin in my plan and dragged her to bed. It wouldn’t do for her to continue moping on her own feelings all alone.
After she’d climbed into bed, I gave myself a pep rally in the mirror, took my PJs off, and climbed into bed with her. She seemed surprised at my nudity, but tenderly appreciative of the added level of skin contact.
Her aura felt like warmth and affection to me.
She was like putty in my arms. I rolled her onto her back, and her feelings of surprise washed over me. She hadn’t expected me to want more than just sleep, and a tiny spark of excitement followed right along behind it.
I pleasured her until she cried out and hot and spicy warmth flooded my mouth. It left my tongue and throat tingling and sizzling when I was done. Then I worked her other half with a slow deliberateness, paying close attention to what my senses were telling me until she climaxed again.
It was funny, or maybe I should say, slightly ironic to me. Vael was very generously proportioned, and she must have taken after her other mother, because Lael was petite in every sense of the word. It wasn’t my first time noticing; she slept nude every night, but it was my first experience with someone with a very different bodily shape. The difference was something I could appreciate.
I wiped myself off as she lay there panting and with her limbs in a state of disarray. Her eyes were closed, and her aura felt like serenity to me. A cool, pleasant breeze over my senses.
I wasn’t done. I had bled the grief and tension out of her, and those had felt like necessary things. It had also awoken a low, slithering hunger in the back of my skull and the bottom of my gut. Now that I’d noticed its presence, I couldn’t ignore it.
I climbed over her, knees planted on either side of her hips, and for a second, I just looked down at her.
Lael’Mira Sul’Vethik. A person whose name was spoken about in terms of respect and deference.
She was trapped under me, hair cast around her head like a broken halo. Staring up at me with wide, glowing teal eyes, waiting to see what I’d do with her.
I pushed myself toward discovery.
I reached down and took a fistful of her straight, indigo hair, just to see her reaction. Her breath hitched. I did it again, a bigger handful, pulling more tightly. Her lower back and butt rose off the surface of the bed below me like a live current had been run through her. I kept going, tasting and feeling her energy as I did. Rolling her over, my palm finding her ass hard enough to leave a handprint behind. She cried out and pressed herself back and into my hand.
I let my senses continue to guide me, and I made more discoveries as I did. There were a variety of things that she liked, but there was one that outshone all the others to such a degree that it made the rest barely register. She loved being used. It brought out something I honestly didn’t know I had in me, but when her system lit up with a radioactive glow and the taste of citrus candy, I found I couldn’t get enough. I was rough with her; grabbing her by her hair was good, spanking her raw was great.
My wandering thoughts connected to form a coherent thought between moments. It was like a slow dawning realization peeking over the lip of the Ark’s walls.
Who else got to do this with her? Who else would dare to? She spent every waking hour being the matriarch of Sul’Vethik. Nobody stuck their fingers in her hair and yanked. Nobody left marks on her skin outside a training area.
I was just some ignorant Human woman who is younger than a piece of her clothing, and one who didn’t know any better. One who was treating her like just another woman in a bed instead of the head of an institution. And it was unmaking her.
The thought did something to me, something I didn’t have words for, but I felt like a burning coal in my gut, flaring heat that pulsed in time with my heartbeat.
She looked up at me from her sprawl on the surface of the bed, and we made eye contact. Her cheeks were a dusky crimson hue, lips still wet with the last bout of kissing.
I reached down and grabbed her by the horns.
She made a sound I’d never heard out of her before. Raw and involuntary, nothing of her composed self present in the moment. I pulled her head up exactly where I wanted it, and I rode her face like she was just an object for my pleasure and nothing else. She hummed into me as her tongue made my toes flex and splay. Her tone sounded like she’d been starving for this exact thing and hadn’t known it until it was already happening.
Maybe I was imagining it.
I didn’t hold back, grinding against her, chasing my own pleasure shamelessly. When the climax hit me, it came up hard and fast, and tore through my nervous system like a wildfire. I could feel her earrings against my thighs, little hard points of pressure in a sea of sensation as I rode it out, gasping and crying out, not caring a single iota how loud I was being.
When I finally came back down, I was twitchy and trembling. I slid down her and then laid myself over her taller form so we were mostly eye-to-eye. She was shivering under me nearly as hard as I was. I hadn’t touched her, and apparently, I hadn’t needed to. I could smell and feel the aftershocks of her orgasm washing over me from below.
I didn’t know I’d had this in me. Not the being on top part, or the roughness, but the something else, which was wanting to take.
With Vael, I gave as much as I took, and we were both comfortable with swapping around, either way. We didn’t think about it, we didn’t talk about it, because we didn’t have to. What I’d had with Lael just now wasn’t that back-and-forth, at least, not at the end. I’d wanted, and I’d taken, and the way she pressed herself against me and embraced me told me she’d wanted–maybe needed-it as much as I did.
Her face was a total mess. She had sticky wet streaks all down her front, now squished between us. I still pressed my palms into her cheeks and kissed her like my life depended on it. She squeezed me tightly in her arms and legs and held me.
We fell asleep in a pile of limbs, sweat, and clinging sheets.
I walked outside and into the blazing sunlight. I had my visor on, and the lenses automatically shifted to keep me from having to squint. I knew that getting irradiated wasn’t exactly the best thing for me, but I couldn’t deny the way it made my skin feel.
Part of my training had been forcibly filling and emptying my mana pool as often as possible. Wake up, dump. Eat, refill. Train. Dump again. Eat, nap. Wake up, dump again, go to the next form of training, be it studying, sparring, and so on.
I’d been taught that this was the most effective way of building not just my capacity, but also the ability of my circuit to improve the rate at which it refilled my pool.
My go-to had been my makeshift mana-horticulture. As I’d progressed, my ability to grow plants had improved, and in a similarly dramatic manner to how my physical training had yielded results.
I blamed the delicious mana-packed foods that Lael exclusively ate, which tended to hit my system like someone clobbering a rival ganger over the head with a bottle. Like the rest of my training, it wasn’t pleasant, but it was effective, and I loved feeling like I was making tangible gains.
I’d converted part of the back of Lael’s estate into my garden training grounds. I’d grown all sorts of wild and crazy shit back there in my quest to improve my skills and level of control. I’d started small. My pepper plants–Lael, like her daughter, adored the peppers that tasted like bioweapons to me–looked like short trees. Plants with woody and bark-like trunks, thick, heavy branches, all to support limbs laden with kilograms of fruit.
I’d moved on from there to setting up the required hardware for a tiny vineyard. The normal methods of supporting such things in a greenhouse had already failed. Now, braided steel ropes and welded structural posts supported vines that produced freakish mutant-levels of grapes. In fact, freakish mana-mutated plants were precisely what they were. I was a little proud of the fact, because I’d gotten creative with the ways that I’d driven the plant’s growth and adaptations. I started with just growing a grape vine to maturity, which had been challenging, because a mature grape vine with a full load of grapes was a lot of raw biomass for me to grow.
I stopped at my vine on my way over to Lael, and pressed my palm against the trunk. I fed it a tiny amount of mana, and I felt the plant respond to me. I say trunk, as opposed to vine, because it looked more like images of trees I’d seen. It was nearly 15cm thick near the roots. The leaves were the size of manhole covers, vibrantly green, and I’d tweaked them so they actively watched the sun. I’d had to make a lot of changes to the vine’s guts to get it to where it would uniformly produce and ripen fruit across the full length and not just in various hot spots.
When I’d cut it last week, it had produced enough grapes to fill an entire industrial drum, with enough left over to fill Lael’s kitchen with about five kilos worth of tasty snacks.
Lael had talked to some friends of hers in high society and arranged a sale. I nearly shit when I got paid the first time. Turns out rich assholes like slurping down wine that was vastly expensive to produce with the constraints we had on our agricultural abilities. Making products like this was something some of the biotech corporations like Veris did, and I could see why.
I couldn’t imagine having this be my actual career, though. No way, no how. It was a fun and challenging hobby, but I wanted to kill monsters.
I checked on my cannabis plants next. Those had come about after a conversation with Lael.
“It is good to train your capacity as you are doing, but you need to train your control, as well. You’ve done a little with these, but I think it’s time for you to move on to a more complicated subject.”
She’d talked to some of her contacts, and the suggestion had come through to grow weed. I was stumped about the how and why of it at first. Weed was one of the plants that virtually everyone in X-3 had access to. Between cheap hydro setups people grew in their cubes, to more organized operations. It was like a lot of consumables in X-3: you could get it extremely cheaply and in large quantities, if you didn’t mind shit qualities, limited flavors, and so on.
I wasn’t much into the stuff myself. Tried it once with Cee, felt like I was having a panic attack, and felt like I was good from there out.
Weed was really, really complicated when it came to ‘making the good stuff.’ I presented my work to a local boutique shop near the estate for review each time I was done growing a batch. The trial and error made me want to rip my hair out, and I had to start doing reading on technical stuff to figure out what I was doing wrong.
If a weed bud was good, then a weed bud three times the size was three times as good, right?
Wrong, Kiera. “Weak shit,” the shop had told me.
The crystals were the part that made you high. Wouldn’t more be better?
Only to an extent, Kiera. “Some people want to get fucked, but it’s not always the best feeling,” they’d said.
So there was more than just the THC that went into what was good versus what was dumpster material. Getting the plant to grow one thing, and not screw up some other part of the increasingly complex myriad of ratios that I was getting a better understanding of made me want to scream. But of course, that was entirely the point.
The jury was still out on whether I was producing worthwhile weed. There were as many different market demands as there were people looking for some specific or niche curated experience as dictated by the exact ratio of constituent parts.
Lael was squatting next to my latest pet project, dressed in her usual selection of jewelry and just enough strips of cloth to not draw citations.
The Sul’vari had a lot of little artifacts they’d taken with them from their homeworld out into the wider portal network. Part of their society had been dedicated to the preservation of native species, so biological samples had been faithfully carried forward through the millennia.
There was a major problem with attempts to revive these species. The Sul’vari homeworld had been unique in the level of ambient mana it had, and virtually all the life had some level of bioluminescence from the mana running through it. The species that had evolved in that environment simply couldn’t prosper outside mana-rich environments, and there were remarkably few places out there that had comparable mana densities that weren’t also enormous death traps.
So it was through similar methods to what I was doing that small selections were grown, bred, and carried on to the next place their species ventured into.
My half-baked plan to try and cheer her up was to try growing one of the strange yellow-orange fruits she’d get on occasion. I picked some seeds out and tried to grow them. It took me dumping my entire pool to get a single plant to even a somewhat decent state of development, and when I stopped nourishing it, you could damn-near see the thing wither and die in real time.
I’d spent weeks trying to make tweaks on further attempts. Nothing was working very well. I’d made some progress, but the results were more depressing than promising. A spotty little weed that lasted longer than the others, but not by much.
I had an idea after helping, or trying to help, cook one evening.
I made a bin out of junk I found lying around, partially filled it with the most active dirt I could find, and then started mixing in gross shit. Monster meat trimmings, and the inedible parts of portal flora.
Mix in a handful of waste management bugs, add decay heat, and let simmer until steeped.
I’d gotten my ratty weed to actually grow and produce a couple of the weird alien fruit. They were a quarter of the size, more of a cherry instead of an apple. It wasn’t economically viable. Mid- to high-tier plant and animal waste was still quite valuable, and the resulting yield was almost embarrassing, but Lael wasn’t having it.
She cherished them as if they were made out of solid portal platinum. She insisted I try one. It was sweet and juicy, with a delayed-onset spice intense enough that I worried that had I not had an alien symbiote that replaced my human gut, it would have burned a hole straight through me. I’d have been standing there, trying to hold in bubbling and melting guts that spilled out and melted through the floor.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to withstand Sul’vari taste preferences. It had been very tasty, before I thought I was going to die.
She stood up and brushed a few flecks of soil off her fingertips, then turned to face me. She looked smiling, radiant, and more energetic than she had since I’d arrived. I did the salute I’d been taught as appropriate: bringing my right hand up and placing it on my left shoulder, so my bracelet was centered on my chest. Her smile shifted from happiness to mirth. It was an inside joke between us, saluting her in private. She hated the decorum that was so often expected of people of her station.
“(You called for your bonded attendant?)”
She corrected my pronunciation, and I did it two more times until I got a solid nod out of her.
She pointed at the AV parked on the rooftop landing pad of the estate. “(We are travelling.)”
“(Where? Do I need better dress?)”
A mischievous glint in her eye showed through, and I felt a chill run down my back. I knew that look.
“(One-Three. We have a meeting to attend.)”
I blinked rapidly, thinking of what was in 1-3. Sector one on the surface was the university and education district. Full of corporate liaison offices, administrative facilities, and some very exclusive residential areas. In X-3, Sector One had a lot of logistical hubs, repacking and shipping for things bound for other sectors across all three levels. It was also the single underground shaft that connected to the outside world that wasn’t closed on a semi-permanent basis. Where all surface-level traffic into or out of the city took place.
There had been a news article I’d read: the Wildlands convoy had been docked with the city for the past month and a half. Selling down the vast amount of cargo they’d hauled into the Ark, and packing in their purchases. They were supposed to be leaving soon.
I fired off my best guess. It wasn’t the most eloquent, but it was one of the words I was familiar with.
“(Traders.)”
Her grinning expression answered that question in the affirmative before she spoke.
“(Good. You must pay close attention while we meet.)”
Wildlanders. I’ve heard stories about them, but never met any. Now’s as good a time as any, I guess.