Enchanting work has reached a mostly-chanting stage. The globe intermittently glows in various colors.

Sable's definitely still enjoying fucking Esme while she does this, though. Multitasking is great.

The lightshow is very pretty and the being constantly fucked is very hot and the in-depth look at how Sable approaches learning about her capabilities is fascinating.

One through-line that becomes clear over the course of Sable's research is that it's an absolute ditz. More than once an experiment shows up twice in the notebook, separated by several months, with the second instance followed by something like, "ink and fucking madness I already did this on page 39." Similarly, there are references at the end of some experiment notes to try a particular idea, and the same idea gets written down three or four different times as though it's completely novel, before eventually getting a "damn it, I need to reorganize my to-do lists."

Eventually she manages to get the individual-tracking enchantment to stick to the globe as well, and steps back with a nod. "Okay, the globe is done. Need to tie the wall display to it for listing alerts and providing zoom functionality, but that's a good bit of progress so far."

"My conclusion from reading your research notes is that you're adorable."

Well that gets a blush out of it. "Hehe, thank you. You do seem to be a bit of an expert on cuteness."

"It's true, I am!"

"Spot anything obvious I missed yet, or just cuteness so far? I know I'm a bit of a scatterbrain, so there's probably something obvious I should've been doing."

"I think... hmm. I haven't gotten there yet, I'm still thinking about..."

It's still a little hard for her to bring up her other life, but it's relevant.

"My other family was involved in politics, on a very local small-town level. And I'm picturing Grandma Vicky on the receiving end of some of the interventions in your list, and for most of the dream visions she's like, okay, reasonable way to communicate if you're a dream-focused moon goddess, and for the ones where you were meddling pretty directly with how somebody felt she's like, hey, family meeting, I'm being haunted by an evil spirit."

She nods and frowns. "I don't like meddling that directly in people's minds. Well, except yours, but that's because you just wiggle cutely about it. For everyone else, I don't want to use it unless there isn't a better way." She sighs.

"Take Mitchell Carter, for example. His company had conducted human trials of a new drug, and some of the subjects were badly harmed by the testing. He ordered his lawyers to bankrupt the families in court so they couldn't cause problems. He laughed off a warning dream. It wasn't illegal, so I couldn't set investigators on him for it. A dream showing him how horrifying and demoralizing it was to be in his victims' shoes didn't phase him either. And I didn't have any blackmail on him.

"What do I do with a man like that?"

"It is very hot when you mind-control me," she says, wiggling a little on Sable's tentacles. "I just... also think one of the biggest systemic issues with magical society was people who didn't see a problem with using magic on the mundanes for whatever they wanted, whenever they could get away with it, because it was the tool they had and because it was—something those people couldn't anticipate or understand, so it didn't matter what you did to them because they were never going to find out. When you ask 'what do I do in this situation, when this is the tool I have', I think it makes it easier to overlook the question of 'when does using this tool cross the line into acting in a way that would be a crime if the people you were using it on could be protected from you by laws'."

It nods. "I just. Don't like letting people like that keep hurting people. I don't like seeing people get hurt when I can stop it. Feel responsible."

A long sigh. "Maybe the solution is to go full chessmaster and throw around enough dreams and non-invasive meddling that most of those classes of harm are disincentivized and the legal loopholes they use to do 'em get closed. I don't know."

...there's a part of her that is distinctly aware that it is objectively a really stupid idea to be having this argument with someone who can rewrite her mind at a whim, but she just... isn't interested in taking that into consideration. If it happens it happens. So far her read on Sable is that this kind of criticism is welcome, and if she's wrong about that she is open to correction, invasive or otherwise.

"I think—I understand feeling responsible for harm that happens on your watch. But I think you're also responsible for setting precedent about how people with mind control powers should police themselves around people who have no ability to resist or identify mind control powers, and experience leads me to believe that we should try setting a pretty strict precedent about that."

She nods. "You're right." It looks down for a long moment. Eventually, it continues, "It makes me sad that my choices are 'allow unnecessary harm', 'set a bad precedent', and 'skill issue'. The obvious answer is 'skill issue' when I look at it like that, but I don't know what the solution is. And if I can't find an answer yet, probably I have to avoid the bad precedent, because if there ever are other people with mind magic — and I can't guarantee there won't be — then there need to be strong norms about that."

It sighs.

"The world is dumb and bad. But the people in it deserve the best I can manage."

"...Do you want a hug?"

"I absolutely want a hug."

So she gets up from the tentacle chair and walks over and hugs her.

She hugs Esme tightly. "Thank you," she murmurs after a moment.

Hug. "I love you. We have a lot of avenues of improvement open to us and we're going to pursue them."

"Love you too. Thank you."

More hug. So much hug.

Trying to do this alone was maybe not very good for it.

Snuggles will continue until morale improves.

Morale does eventually improve. Esme snuggles are highly restorative.

(As is tentaclefucking one's Esme. That doesn't exactly stop.)

The snuggles are very cozy and so is the tentaclefucking.

"Okay. So we have stuff to research over time, I'm half done with the upgraded display, we're making progress."

"Yeah. The next thing I want to do is sit down with your adorable capabilities research notebook and have a good think about what other approaches you could be trying right now."