There's a lovely young lady taking a walk in the park this fine morning, early enough that the sun has only just started sweeping away the veil of fog that hangs between the trees.

Sable isn't in this particular park, or indeed any park, or in fact on the planet, so it's not clear why she knows this.

It's also not clear why she knows that the lovely young lady would be absolutely enchanted, so to speak, if a beautiful inky tentacle demon goddess were to abduct her and do terrible wonderful things to her helpless mortal mind and body. Nor is it clear why she knows that the lovely young lady is absolutely guaranteed not to suffer permanent harm from anything up to and including complete physical destruction or full-blast concentrated divine eldritch madness.

Nevertheless, her sourceless intuition is quite firm on all these points.

Up to her what she does with this newfound knowledge.

Bwuh?

That is not something she expected her mysterious divine intuition to ever tell her.

Her intuition has not historically provided unprompted information about random mortals that aren't trying to badly derail her plans.

This is a very confusing event.

That's a familiar park, though, and she knows of a small nook in the trees that is reliably unobserved. She checks her outcome-intuition for whether portaling to the little copse will blow her cover. No? Great.

Vworp.

So, human disguise up, a tall, busty blonde in jeans and a scoop-necked tee strolls through the park. She doesn't get close to the inexplicable girl, but she gets in range to positively identify her.

And then she stealthily applies every means of divination she has to this girl: what are her desires, her kinks, her thoughts about magic, her opinions about monsterfucking, her openness to new kinks, her opinions about mind control, her opinions about spooky meddlesome demons that interfere benevolently in mortal society, and so on? What's her outcome-sense have to say about kidnapping this girl (assuming she does something to make sure any attached mortals don't worry about her disappearance)? What's it have to say about having very destructive fun with her?

As usual for a human, her kinks and desires are a hard-to-verbalize tangle of associations. She likes danger, but prefers specific kinds of danger; she wants someone else to hold absolute power over her, but the best forms of that are when that person likes her and wants her to have nice things, even though other forms of it are also tempting. Mind control fits in nicely there, especially mind control to enforce loyalty or obedience (or love, or worship...)

She is actively enthusiastic about being mind-controlled into new kinks as long as, and this is crucial, the person mind-controlling her into a new kink is paying close attention to how the new kink fits in with her existing landscape of attraction and making sure it fits seamlessly and has all appropriate cross-connections. Ideally they would collaborate with her about it in detail, though there's also something alluring about the idea of being altered without warning or the opportunity to object - it's just that there's something even more alluring about spending hours doing deep analysis of her own psyche. Perhaps there could be flowcharts. She likes flowcharts.

Monsterfucking is a big plus, especially the kind of monster that has psychic or psychic-adjacent elements, like a hypnotic vampire or an alluring succubus or an eldritch tentacle horror that can literally and figuratively fuck your brains out. In her opinion, it would be very romantic to have her mind turned inside-out and then carefully put back together again, optionally with some changes.

There is notably something she doesn't want, and that's to be put in a position of conflict with the person wielding power over her. She doesn't want to belong to someone who she dislikes, or who dislikes her; she wants to be happy and proud to be a mind-controlled slave. This does mean that it's much better, all things considered, if the person keeping her as a mind-controlled slave is a generally pleasant and benevolent sort. (Though it's fine and in fact fun if they want to put her through harrowing experiences, as long as she's allowed to enjoy it, and doesn't have to feel like she needs to fight back. She never wants to feel like she needs to fight back.)

Spooky meddlesome demons that interfere benevolently in mortal society sound great, assuming they're doing a good job. (How many flowcharts are involved? Is this hypothetical demon in need of a secretary...? She may in fact have some preexisting fantasies about being the happily mind-controlled kinky secretary of a spooky yet benevolent magical being.)

As for her thoughts on magic, that turns out to be a topic with hidden depths: specifically, all her life she's been dreaming about another life in a different world, where she had magic and a family she liked better than her current family. She doesn't know exactly what happened to that other self, because the dreams come all out of order, but she's seen enough to be reasonably sure she's not just making it all up inside her own head. She has never dared try any of the magic she remembers because all the magic she remembers comes with dire safety warnings about what happens if you mess it up, and while her memory is good, she isn't willing to bet that it's good enough for this. Magic is cool, though, and she's kind of wistful about this world seemingly not having any.

Sable's outcome-sense thinks kidnapping this girl would be a fantastic idea, possibly the best idea she's ever had, and even better if she arranges for her not to be missed first. Having very destructive fun with her might lead to extended periods spent waiting nervously for her to recover, but seems otherwise fine.

What.

What.

That's. 

Ink and madness. Did she just win the lottery?

Literally the only way this girl could be a more-perfect kidnap target is if she had a pre-existing vore kink, and kinking on carefully-integrated kink-insertion via mind magic is just as good.

Fuck.

This is possibly too good to be true.

A secretary helping her organize her meddling sounds great, and not wanting to ever be adversarial sounds great, and putting her through terribly harrowing kinky experiences while making sure she enjoys them sounds great.

Literally everything about this sounds great.

Ink and fucking madness.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Calm.

The waves in the ink sea wash in and out. Focus on her realm. Focus on the slow swish of the ink in the sea.

How sure is she that all this information is correctly and truthfully backed by her divine/demonic intuition, that it's accurate, that she's not being fucked with somehow?

All feedback from Sable's psychic senses feels normal and in agreement with all the rest. To all appearances, the girl hasn't even noticed that there's someone else in the park. She sweeps some dew off a park bench and sits down, looking up at the early morning sky.

Okay.

Okay.

Well.

Fuck she has a lot of feelings about this.

She knows what she needs to do, though. She's verified this, she's checked it against every kind of divination and truth magic and outcome magic.

She memorizes this girl, memorizes the feel of her soul, so she can find her from anywhere.

And then she gets to work.

Step one: identify everyone who knows her, everyone who'd miss her, everyone who'd even notice her absence. Observe them, skim their minds, figure out what sort of sudden disappearance would be believable.

Okay, she's a dutiful and talented student, eager and organized, the kind people would totally believe could get into a great university far away. And she's the right age to go into university soon, and it's the right time of year for acceptance letters to show up soon. That's perfect.

Sable starts fabricating documentation, carefully conjuring paperwork and offer letters and acceptance letters and unlisted websites. She takes her time about this. It's now her new hobby, in between her various feats of meddling.

Selunia Institute of Technology gains a lot of official recognition very quickly, and no one notices this fact at all. No one can notice it — the knowledge and all the documentation has a very subtle antimemetic curse on it such that people can't share it unless she lets them and forget to care about this fact. She makes sure no one will ever have the idea to apply, no one will ever consider contacting the school, no one will think about it at all.

But everyone who hears about it knows that Selunia Tech is extremely prestigious, with the best professors, and a wider selection of arts and sciences majors than any other school. This is an unarguable fact that no one would even think to dispute.

Inkstained madness, it's even true. Sable mysteriously knows a lot about the universe, about technology, about art and science and biology and politics and changing things. She can certainly teach Esme anything the girl would like to know, in between doing gorgeously horrible things to her. The girl will get the best education available in anything and everything she wants. 

The offer letters talk about a full-ride scholarship with a generous stipend, about the opportunity to start early, about special summer programs available to select students. The school is known to provide transportation for scholarship students like Esme, so the family doesn't need to go tour or arrange Esme's travel.

And all of it is enchanted so that no one will question any of it. Carefully-crafted memories are inserted where needed, alongside online reviews, entries in ranking sites, and further documentation, to provide evidence why Esme should be thrilled with this offer. All the memories are delicately integrated, every piece of the story of Esme's life hangs together seamlessly.

It's a good thing Sable is putting the work in, because when Esme gets an unexpected offer from a prestigious university she does extensive research. It's not enough that everyone knows the place is great; the place had better be great in specific, concrete, quantifiable ways that she can put into a spreadsheet and check against her other options.

When she does, though, Selunia reliably comes out on top. It's not long before she accepts.

Good, good. All according to keikaku. 

(Humans have such neat memes.)

Sable spends the remainder of the school year preparing a suitably scarousing (but also luxurious) cell for Esme to land in. It's inescapable, even if she tries the magic she remembers. And it's designed down to the last detail to communicate "you have been kidnapped by a terrifyingly powerful entity who wants you to be cozy in between doing enjoyably horrible things to you", on a conscious and subconscious level. 

It's in Sable's private tower in the very heart of her Realm. There's a nice window, too.

In between furnishing a suite for a very precious captive, and keeping up with her usual meddling, Sable also gives Esme a series of very sexy nightmares over the remainder of the school year. The dreams are different every time, only having two themes in common: she gets kidnapped, and horribly dangerous and terrifyingly pleasurable things either happen to her in the dream, or are implied to be looming.

Sometimes she's grabbed off the street by faceless figures. Sometimes a door she recognizes leads to luxurious captivity instead of the usual destination, and promptly locks behind her. Sometimes her body is mysteriously puppeted to walk her away from home and into a limousine that pulls up when she's out of sight. Sometimes a portal opens up under her feet. Sometimes she comes home from school to find her parents cheerfully signing paperwork to sell her off to a mysterious and beautiful woman, their eyes glazed over with signs of mind control. 

Sometimes she's whipped raw. Sometimes she's cut to pieces. Sometimes she's raped by slick, dexterous tentacles of inky, gelatinous substance. Sometimes she's lavished with a sensuous massage of spiced oils while she watches a grill heat up over a crackling firepit. Sometimes she's choked while she's fucked, breath scarce, lungs screaming as her body is violated. Sometimes she's run through with countless needles, none thicker than a millimeter or two, none shorter than a handspan. Sometimes she's slowly dissolved in a vat of corrosive, inky goop, pain and pleasure smoldering through her body as the goop sinks deeper into her flesh. Sometimes the tentacles penetrate her deeper than she should be able to survive, or in ways that should break her. Often it does break her.

Sometimes she sees her captor. The face looks different in every dream, as does her height and figure, but she has pointed ears, violet eyes with pie-cut pupils, a wickedly fanged smile, and curving horns that remind her of the crescent moon. 

In every dream, she can't help but enjoy every minute, even the horrible parts. (Especially the horrible parts.)

And every time, she wakes up shuddering with arousal, panties soaked, an electric thrill dancing through her body.

After the second of those, she starts keeping a dream journal, meticulously recording every detail she can remember as soon as she wakes up.

After the third, she goes out and buys a new locking diary and copies the first three entries into it, and the Sexy Abductions Dream Journal lives on her nightstand for the rest of the school year, being updated every time she gets a new one.

The dreams keep coming intermittently, no clear schedule, no way to predict when she'll have have an abduction nightmare and when she won't. It tends to be at least once a week, sometimes several nights a week, but once she goes more than two weeks without one, long enough be a hanging, open question in her mind. 

The next dream after the gap is thunderously intense, perhaps trying to make up for the absence.

Meanwhile, Sable keeps preparing and keeps meddling, keeps up her duties. 

A week or two after the school year ends, she receives a letter at home informing her and her family that Selunia will be in contact with her directly to arrange transportation. Everything she finds online reports that this is very normal for Selunia's intake process.

(She investigates that open question thoroughly, going back to count the days between each dream and forming a tentative statistical model of how often they usually show up so she knows how late the next one is. When it does finally show up, she writes it down as meticulously as ever, then makes time to reread it that evening before going to bed.)

Right, so, the thing about Selunia—

It could just be the normal, very prestigious university that everyone claims it is. It's just that... a strange and powerful entity about which she has no direct evidence has unexpectedly taken an interest in her; this interest is plausibly deniable as nothing out of the ordinary, but has tangible effects that were completely unanticipated up until they became the new normal; and, come on, 'parents mind-controlled to facilitate her retrieval by the Sexy Dream Kidnapper' and 'made to leave her home in a vehicle sent by the Sexy Dream Kidnapper' have both appeared in the text.

She's still going to go, of course. It is a very prestigious university. She's just saying (privately, in her Sexy Abduction Dream Journal) that there are certain undeniable thematic parallels between these two novel elements in her life.

Yeah, she's totally meant to see those parallels. Only her, though. Esme gets to privately note the foreshadowing, as a treat.

One morning, most of the way through Esme's first month of summer, things get a little more openly weird.

As she's checking herself over in the mirror before going out to start her day, black-violet ink starts to flow down her reflection's face from her hair and eyes.

A startled yelp seems appropriate to the occasion!

No sound comes out. 

Well, that's hot no, focus.

She studies her face in the mirror, touching a spot of ink to see what it feels like.

It's not there in reality, her hands come away clean, but she can still clearly see it in the mirror.

It doesn't last long, maybe a second and a half, before her reflection winks at her, and puts a finger to its lips in a shushing motion.

Then the ink vanishes, and her reflection resumes normal physical behavior.

Okay, so that just happened.

First things first: write it down in the Sexy Abduction Dream Journal, framed as a Sexy Abduction Dream, which it basically is.

She heads back to her room, attentive to further unexplained phenomena and especially to anything that suggests a course of action, such as the literal and gestural shushing which have already conveyed "don't tell anyone about this".

No, nothing more happens just yet. She can savor the anticipation for now.

She jots down her notes about mirror ink and then rereads them thoughtfully.

So, this could be the first move in a long game, but she doesn't think so. All the Sexy Abduction Dreams have had a pretty short timeline from first overt supernatural phenomenon to removal from normal life. That could just be the necessity of fitting things into a one-night timeline, but dreams can feel longer than that. Therefore she should assume she's being told to, figuratively speaking, pack for her trip to Selunia. (Sorry, Selunia, even though you might still be just a normal university, you have become a euphemism for Sexy Abduction.)

The obvious thing to do in this scenario is... pack for her trip to Selunia. Just as though she got the call a more normal way. Think it through, just to be sure: in the worst case, if this turns out to be nothing or a much slower-rolled sexy abduction than she predicted, and Selunia turns out to be innocent, then she ends up having lied to her parents for no reason and when the real call comes she takes it and goes to Selunia while waiting for the Sexy Abductor to sort themselves out, and maybe has to cover for the lie by claiming she got prank-called by an impostor. If it's a slow-rolled sexy abduction and Selunia is not innocent then she might be rudely pushing the Sexy Abductor's timeline forward by calling on their excuse too early, which they may not appreciate, so she should give them a chance to stop her first. But if she's right about the timeline, then whether innocent or not Selunia really is the perfect cover; and if Selunia is not innocent and the timeline is short then presumably the Sexy Abductor would end up mind-controlling her parents to believe she told them she was being called, which seems pointless when she can just do it herself and save everyone the trouble. Heck, even if Selunia is innocent, the Sexy Abductor would have to be a fool not to mind-control her parents into thinking she went there anyway. The cover is just too good.

She closes and pockets her Sexy Abduction Dream Journal, which should not leave her person again while she's still anticipating imminent Sexy Abduction, because it would be rude to leave that kind of loose end for her captor to clean up. She goes back to the bathroom mirror, as the only point of verified contact; it seems really likely that the Abductor can read her mind, but it wouldn't do to assume it.

Now, how best to ask the question? She studies her reflection with a slight frown. She's so unprepared for this situation, it's terrible. Then again there would definitely be some loss to the Sexy Abduction premise if she got to spend several months studying her abductor ahead of time to formulate an approach. No, focus...

In a coffee shop across town, Sable very nearly falls out of her chair.

She did not expect her sexy abduction victim to cooperate this thoroughly.

Wow. Honestly this girl is kind of perfect for this?

Okay focus what's the best way to communicate approval of this plan quickly?

Quick quick she's heading to the bathroom—

Ah! That's it.

As Esme looks into the mirror, ink starts running down her reflection's face, before collecting in mirror-Esme's hand and then solidifying into a Selunia tote bag. Mirror-Esme holds up the bag and gives real Esme a nod.

Oh good!

She grins and gives her reflection a little wave, then heads out. At this time of day, her mother is probably just starting her morning swim; she tries the pool first.

Got it in one.

She pauses between laps when she sees her daughter waiting by the poolside. "What is it, dear?"

"I got the call from Selunia!" she says, bouncing on her toes with undisguised delight.

"Oh, wonderful! Do you need any help packing?"

"You know me. Help would just get in the way."

"Just as long as you don't forget your goodbye hug."

"Last item on the checklist," she promises.

And back to her room to get started. She does, of course, already have a "pack for Selunia" checklist, but it wasn't written with Sexy Abduction in mind so she sits down to make a few edits before she starts putting things in suitcases.

Goodness. She's really very convenient, isn't she? Truly excellent sexy abduction victim, ten out of ten, would abduct again.

After several hours with a break for lunch, she swings by her mother's reading room to check off "goodbye hug", then rolls her suitcases out the door: a huge bulky one in one hand, a smaller compact one in the other. The family chauffeur asks if she needs a lift anywhere and she waves him off. This morning's walk was probably going to be in the farther of the two nearby parks, so she heads there in case her Sexy Abductor has made any preparations that relied on that plan.

Along the way she is thinking about expectation management.

She shouldn't get too caught up in assuming she knows what this person is about just from their delightful dream messages and overall very polite and collaborative abduction approach. If she starts spinning wild fantasies only to be disappointed later, that's just going to be upsetting for her and annoying for her captor who has not asked to be pedestalized ahead of time. She should be prepared to have a difficult time without making it anyone else's problem, and to adapt to many possible scenarios without demanding a lot of guidance but also without making unwarranted assumptions that might need correcting. Adaptability on short timescales in low-information environments is not her strongest suit, but that's fine, it just means she needs to apply herself. She's good at applying herself.

Also it's a lovely afternoon in the park.

Goodness. Maximally convenient kidnap victim. Yes, Sable is in fact trying to be exactly the polite and collaborative abductor she's presented herself as, but not having as high of expectations in case she fucks up is quite helpful. Even weird demonic godlings can make mistakes. Quite easily, in fact.

Midway through the very nice walk in the park, Esme finds her body is no longer hers to control. She turns off her route, walking toward a secluded copse. Once she's fully and thoroughly out of sight, a tree turns out to have an elegant door growing in the wood. She opens the door.

It's full of stars and swirling ink.

She passes through and blacks out.

Esme really did a lot of the work for her, here. Sable doesn't have nearly as much to do as she expected. A quick portal jaunt back to Esme's parents' house, and she enchants them and her school friends to gradually think less and less about Esme, to not worry about keeping in touch, it's okay, Esme's busy with her prestigious scholarship. Within a week, nobody Esme knew will think about her unprompted at all, and there will be no one but Sable and Esme to prompt them.

Absurdly convenient girl.

Okay, back to her Realm.

When Esme wakes up, she's lying atop an exquisitely comfortable four-poster bed, the purpleheart wood finely carved. The canopy and curtains are made of elaborate and delicate-looking lace. Luxuriously soft rugs in floral patterns cover the stone floor, and richly detailed tapestries depicting impossible geometries hang from the walls, somehow realer than any textbook depiction of a multidimensional figure ever was, mindbending to look at too long. The walls and floor themselves are a curious black stone reminiscent of onyx but shimmering faintly in silvery-purple, seemingly carved or grown of a single piece, and engraved with subtle, fractal patterns, fine enough to be unnoticeable without close inspection.

A pair of ornate purpleheart wardrobes stand at the far end of the room, a full-length mirror on a matching wooden stand between them, and if inspected prove to have plenty of room for all her clothes.

On the wall to her left, as she lies in bed, is an imposing door that does not open. Across from the bed, to the right of the wardrobes, is another door that does open. On the wall to her right is a large window, looking out upon an alien landscape. The sky is a deep purple, spotted with pink clouds, and studded with twinkling stars in every color of the rainbow and more besides. The moon glows radiantly, lighting the whole landscape, though the sky itself seems to provide some inexplicable illumination as well. Hundreds of feet below her room, an ocean of ink washes gently against a gemsand beach, amethyst and rose quartz swirling through each other. Distant islands can be seen in the ocean, dotted with trees in purples and reds and pinks.

To one side of the window is a gorgeous wooden desk, purpleheart with swirling sugar maple inlay, with plenty of drawers, and shelves overtop.

"Somebody really went all-out," she remarks as she sits up and looks around. These are not her pajamas she's wearing and that is hot, but before she examines that question too deeply she wants to check out the room.

Her Sexy Abductions Dream Journal is on her nightstand, which is a lovely touch; her suitcases and backpack are over by the wardrobes, and her backpack doesn't look deflated so her best guess is that she's been left to unpack her stuff herself, which she appreciates. The pile of clothes on top of the biggest suitcase seems at a glance to be a full inventory of everything she was wearing when she got here, though she can't see from this angle if it includes her underwear down, girl.

By the fact that her coat is hanging next to the door on the left, she deduces it leads outside, so she heads for the other one to see if it opens and if so what's behind it.

Behind this door is a luxuriously-appointed bathroom. Another window, a wall-filling mirror over the sink, plenty of counter space on either side of the sink for any supplies, a frankly enormous bathtub of polished amethyst, a shower curtain that can be pulled closed around the tub, and a detachable showerhead that looks to be one of those fancy multi-function kinds. There also seems to be an extra tap on the bathtub that has an engraved icon of bubbles on it. All the taps and pipes seem to be a gleaming, silvery metal.

A little cupboard to one side holds exquisitely soft and absorbent-seeming towels, lovely washcloths, and some cute hand towels as well, all in a matching purple.

She is sure taking note of that fancy showerhead again, not the time. Though she does endorse taking a moment to admire her new pajamas in the mirror.

Well, that sure seems to be a cute little lacy negligee in translucent purple. It has built-in support, and she doesn't appear to be wearing a separate bra. Her panties seem to have been replaced with a matching lacy purple set. All of this seems to be silk, on further inspection, as well.

Cute and hot! She's so pleased with her Sexy Abduction experience thus far.

Next up, the window seat. She wants to sit in it and take a good look out at the view.

There are subtle cushions in the window seat, and just enough space to lounge cozily and admire the view.

Outside, the stars really do seem to be in every color she's ever seen, and several she hasn't. They twinkle cheerfully in the purple sky, adding enough illumination alongside the moon that it's nearly as bright as day.

The moon seems to hang lower in the sky than she's used to, huge and full and gleaming, spilling gentle moonlight across the land. It looks like the same moon, though.

Far below, the beach is made of swirling, sparkling gemsand, amethyst and rose quartz. The ocean seems to be the same color of ink her reflection dripped with, earlier, and faintly iridescent in the moonlight. 

Everything about the landscape just drips with "cozy-dark".

If everything about this Sexy Abduction continues to be so charming she's going to have a hard time managing her expectations. Oh well, let no one accuse her of asking for her Sexy Abductions to be easy.

There is a sudden voice from behind her, a playful purr.

"What if your spooky captor aspires to live up to both your spookiest and most luxurious expectations?"

Standing near the door is a tall, blonde woman. Pointed purple horns curve up from her head, hinting at the shape of the crescent moon. Her face is sultry and warm, with soft lips and a delicate nose. Her eyes are a bright, vivid purple, with pie-cut pupils.

She's wearing a swooshy, black sundress with a lace-up bodice that shows off her cleavage over a pair of simple black flats.

A spade-tipped tail pokes out from the knee-length hem of the dress, and a handful of tentacles curl behind her back.

"You're doing a great job so far, I have to say."

'Spookiest and most luxurious' has some implications, as a pair of adjectives to name here. (Is it impolite to stare at the tentacles? She may be staring at the tentacles. Discreetly, but odds are this person can read her mind, so...) She actually had not been expecting a purple goth fairy tale castle at all, so her most luxurious expectations are already being wildly exceeded. Her spookiest expectations can get pretty damn spooky, but then, she's talking to the author behind all the lovely things she's written in her Sexy Abductions Dream Journal, so she has every confidence her spooky captor will be able to deliver. And there is, notably, not anything in that short list that implies her captor is planning to be nice. This is an abduction, not a date. She reminds herself again to be adaptable.

Staring at the tentacles is fine as long as it's not horrified staring. Admiring or lewd staring might even get a grin.

Spooky captor steps closer, hips swaying. "I'm pleased to impress. And there's no reason I can't steal the best parts of abductions and dates to make my own new better thing, is there? I find your thoughts on collaboration and enjoying the horrors thoroughly delightful, and your cooperation this morning was a marvelous surprise."

By the time she finishes her reply, she's crossed the room, her right hand rising to caress Esme's cheek, tentacles arcing forward just a bit.

(So that's a yes on the mindreading. Cool, cool. Hot.)

"Was it really that surprising? It seemed perfectly logical to me."

Stealing the best parts of abductions and dates sounds like a great idea she does not know this person and should be managing her expectations until she does. No matter how hot they keep being.

It giggles. "Well, to be completely honest, this is my first time abducting anyone. All I had to go on was human media, what I could see in your mind, and a few other powers assuring me that kidnapping you would be a great idea. I kept trying to temper my expectations, you see. But here you are, exceeding them."

Its thumb brushes gently against Esme's cheek, and the tentacles curl a bit closer to her.

"I suppose I should introduce myself. Sable Luna, ink-themed and moon-empowered demoness, gradually growing in power, trying to benevolently meddle in human progress, enjoyer of sexy horrors. She/it, if I want to take advantage of humanity's adorable recent habit of providing pronouns during introductions."

Oh, no, her Sexy Abductor is adorable. She was not prepared for this.

"And I'm Esme, but you already knew that." And, come to think of it, probably also knows about her secret dream name from her secret dream life that she's never told anyone about. That's honestly pretty weird. A lifelong habit of never openly acknowledging something can be a powerful thing, turns out. "I would definitely consider myself an enjoyer of your sexy horrors."

She may be leaning into Sable's hand a little. This is probably a homegrown response, but it's hot to imagine it might not be.

"I do in fact know that, as well as the secret dream name," she replies with a contented grin. "I also know a few fun tidbits about your past life, but those will keep. More fun to focus on sexy horrors and cozy collaboration for now, I expect."

Sable's tentacles wrap around Esme's back and hold her close, gently warm to the touch and very soft.

And since Esme is having such fun imagining the coziness being magically encouraged, Sable adds a subtle, barely-noticeable mental nudge to lean further into her embrace.

"You know, this sexy abduction has been much less violent than advertised, and yet I can't find it in myself to complain." As much fun as tentacle rape and other assorted horrors from the sexy abduction compendium are, ambiguously mind-controlled tentacuddles are just so sweet. It really sets a mood. "What kind of collaboration are you thinking of, exactly?" Sexy mind-controlled secretary? Is it sexy mind-controlled secretary? Sexy mind-controlled secretary to powerful benevolent inky moon demon? She reminds herself once again to manage her expectations.

"The violence can come after we've got you settled in and talked about how much accompanying mind control or other mental magics would make it most enjoyable," she teases. "And yes, I am in fact envisioning a sexy mind-controlled secretary who helps me plan my meddling and organize all the information I've collected in doing so. Also, if you'd like to actually study anything, I know a fair bit about the arts, very nearly everything about programming and electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, far too much about biology, and an assortment of otherworldly knowledge. I can actually back up the claims I made with the Selunia cover."

"I would love to be your sexy mind-controlled secretary and/or student." Oh good, she wasn't using an innocent normal university as cover for her sexy abduction. That would've been awkward. "Please tell me all about your meddling. Not necessarily right now, I'm going to want to take notes and I would be so distracted from my notes by the lovely mildly threatening snuggles."

"Wonderful," it purrs. "We can get into detailed analysis of the meddling later, then. Also, if there are any supplies or clothes or such that you'd like, my control of my domain is fairly absolute, including the ability to conjure things. You may be noticing a theme here, in fact: while I certainly can keep you here by force, it's so much more fun for us both if I make good use of your talents, and make sure you like all the sexily horrifying things that happen to you, via a mixture of luxury, mind control, and kink integration. Then the very sturdy gilded cage can just be mildly-threatening ambience."

"It's such good mildly threatening ambiance!"

"Oh good. Also, you should probably know that I can offer you a deal for three wishes in exchange for your soul, if you're interested. There are some limitations on the wishes, because I'm not omnipotent, and they need to be specified up front, but they're pretty open-ended. The only results of my owning your soul are that I could examine it, trivially use all my powers on you from any distance, and guarantee that you come here if you ever die."

"Then we should talk about what makes a good wish after you've caught me up on your plans and capabilities." Obviously Sable could have her soul for the asking, but if there's any benefit to efficacy from wishing for something then Esme had better spend a good long while thinking through her wishes, that's just common sense.

She nods and runs her fingers gently through Esme's hair. "Clever and careful and thoughtful. You're such a delight. It's going to be so fun to delicately integrate kinks for the various horrors into your existing desires. I bet you'll have delicious reactions if I let you feel the process as it's happening."

Well now she's bouncing excitedly, even though this makes petting her more difficult.

"Ink and madness, you're even more adorable in person. It's a good things demons can't die of cuteness overload."

"I feel like by kidnapping me you're implicitly taking responsibility for the consequences of experiencing my adorableness."

"Oh absolutely. That would be such a silly way to die, underestimating your cuteness and collapsing from the overload. It would be entirely my fault, though."

"Glad to know we're in agreement here." (Charming banter aside, if Sable had pushed back on that, Esme would've had to do a whole lot of expectation management about how well this is going to go. But also the charming banter is really fun.)

"Thoroughly. The job title of 'sexy kidnap victim' comes with a pretty dramatically reduced range of responsibilities. Most things fundamentally can't be anyone's fault but mine here. With all the mind-reading, even communication failures are my fault."

"Hey, that's not fair. Communication failures could totally be my fault if I relied too hard on assuming you're reading my mind all the time and forgot to check that you were following what I meant."

"True!" It laughs cheerfully. "Which is why only most things are my fault. It's technically possible for things to be your fault. Just unlikely."

"I can live with that." Listen, it's very hot to be a sexy kidnap victim who doesn't have enough power to be responsible for anything. "Though I have to warn you, I'm going to be trying my best to be a useful sexy mind-controlled secretary." And the more useful she is, the more responsibility she will presumably accumulate. That's just the price she pays for being well-organized and eager to help.

"I look forward to it. What's the point of kidnapping a clever, capable, and organized cutie if I'm not going to make use of her talents, right? Well, in so far as you enjoy having your talents put to use, which it certainly seems you do."

"Once again we are in agreement." If her Sexy Abductor had been all about the horrors and had no interest at all in her organizational skills, that would've been, well, still hot but also kind of a waste.

And then Sable sweeps its tentacles forward and scoops Esme into a princess carry, snuggling her to its chest with its arms and tentacles both, plants a kiss on her forehead, and carries her over to the bed.

"I think it would be quite fun to start talking about fun things to do to your mind," it says as it settles her into its lap and sits on the bed.

"Oh, come on, I just used the line 'once again we are in agreement', now what am I supposed to say?" she jokingly complains, snuggling into Sable's lap.

She giggles and squeezes Esme. "Oops. We just agree too much. Clearly we need new agreement-flavored phrases. Some people would try to find things to argue about, but that's silly."

"I'm sure disagreements will arise naturally, but I'm definitely having a good time with the amount of agreement we're discovering to start with. Anyway! What fun things would you like to do to my mind?"

"Well," it explains with a grin, "to start with, there's the simple fact that spending enough time around me is going to slowly and steadily break your mind, while all the sex will put you back together."

"That is fun."

"Ah, the joy of finding a girl who's into my only-temporarily-suppressible madness aura. You'll just wind up seeing beyond the veil a bit, worshiping me, and a bit manic. And eventually delirious and overwhelmed from seeing past the veil altogether." She grins and winks. "Beyond that, there are a number of kinks you're not particularly into yet: being eaten, being cut to pieces, being cooked. I think most of this should settle in tidily if we build up from the mind control kink and ownership kink as a foundation, integrating it from a perspective of 'it's hot when your owner uses you roughly', and using how hot you find the process of altering your mind as additional glue to stick it better. Probably we'll tweak your sensorium on a more basic level too, while I'm in there, just because most humans don't have nearly enough masochism built-in."

...having this conversation in Sable's lap appears to be recontextualizing some things, such as: she seems to find the idea of being eaten romantic now, where previously it has been not centrally her thing but still pretty hot on general principle. And, hmm— "Not that I'm opposed to adding more masochism, you understand, but I'm wary of doing it too indiscriminately because I feel like I'd miss having easy access to the 'this is too much, but it should be too much' reaction? Do you know the one I'm talking about?"

"Okay watching you notice a kink is romantic in real time is kind of great?"

"But hm. I'm not personally familiar with it? But I think I've seen it in human minds ever? I can see why it would be worth keeping, though."

"So maybe hold off on installing more masochism just yet. You can play around with my sensorium after we get a sense for how the factory model performs under stress."

"You just keep being more and more of a delightful surprise. I did not expect interest in trying out the level of pain several of my kinks involve without a modded sensorium, but I'm absolutely open to trying that with you."

"And you should definitely get so much cozy aftercare after, with or without the modding."

... she's instinctively wary of the concept of aftercare but, hmm, managing your expectations goes both ways, right, she should be open to things going well and not just to them going poorly. It's just that there's a kind of trust you don't need to extend if all you're expecting is the sexy horrors, and very much do need to extend in order to expect to be taken care of afterward.

"Oh." She squeezes Esme tighter. "That makes sense. Okay, we're going to need to work up to the aftercare thing. Ease you into that, probably with gradually-increasing intensity of both scene and aftercare."

Now is the time of hugging her Esme about the trust issues.

"—I mean, you don't have to—like, it's not that I find aftercare aversive per se, it's just that I... need to adjust my expectations." She shakes her head slightly. "But if you want to be careful and escalate slowly, I'm not going to complain." She definitely has an impulse to complain but it is not a sane impulse and she will not be humouring it.

"It's not like I'm not getting anything out of the gradual escalation, either. We get to go easier on my worries about breaking my fragile mortal girl in a lasting way. Sure, maybe you bounce back implausibly well, my powers sure seem to think you will, but I've literally never seen a human that durable before, so it's probably wise to do this gradually, and soothes my anxiety."

She laughs sheepishly. "Yes, apparently demons get anxiety too."

"That does not surprise me in the slightest."

Why is she having so many feelings about this?

How about she just hugs Esme tighter for a moment?

Well how about Esme hugs back, how about that?

That will produce a soothed, cuddly demon.

After a long moment, it speaks again. "Thanks for that." It runs its fingers through her hair.

"So I think we were talking about delicately wiring kinks into your mind, among other possible things we could do to that pretty little head of yours."

Blushy wiggles. "Indeed. ...as silly as this is coming from someone who specifically kinks on being mind-controlled, I actually think I want to try a bunch of that stuff without the mind control first? To get a baseline." She waves at the Sexy Abduction Dream Journal. "I know you already made me dream about a bunch of it, but dreaming about something is not a valid baseline, it's too different of a mental state. ...and, even leaving aside the calibration question, now that I've had the thought that it would be romantic if you ate me, I want to see what that's like without additional factors."

Sable giggles and squeezes her. "You're absolutely adorable, and that's very smart."

"I like that plan. We'll work our way through a whole range without any tweaks, that way we can plan out together exactly what tweaks will make all the sexy horrors as fun as possible."

It strokes her hair some more.

"As plans go, I think it has a lot to recommend it!" She leans into Sable's hand a little.

"It really does. But how about a little teaser, hm?"

She increases the sensitivity of Esme's scalp and adjusts the valence a little, carefully turning hair-petting into an erogenous sensation for her.

Pet pet pet~

"Ooooh." That's both hot and fascinating. A lot of arousal is about narrative and she doesn't have a narrative for this experience, at least not yet, but "it's hot that Sable can casually adjust my sensorium" is a very serviceable starting point and she can see other narratives she could lean into alongside it—it's hot (and romantic) to be treated like a pet in the sense of something that is kept and doted on and cared for; it's hot to be physically in someone's power and have them express both the capability and the right to touch you however they want... she doesn't push for either of them just yet, because she's having too much fun enjoying the sensation on its own merits without extra layers of interpretation.

It presses a gentle kiss to the top of Esme's head and keeps petting her. "Watching your mind at work while you process this is fascinating. You are unreasonably cute. My cute, precious Esme."

The cozy possessiveness makes the petting feel even better. She wiggles happily.

Oh good. She tightens her grip on her adorably wigglesome Esme. "Keeping you. Keeping you and treating you to new joys and new sexy horrors until the stars burn out."

Who knows. Maybe she'll do something about the stars burning out, too.

"I don't see why we should let the heat death of the universe stop us."

"Once again we agree~," she replies with a giggle. "Give us a few millennia and I'm sure we can figure out a way to apply my magic to the task of keeping the lights on."

"You definitely seem to be able to do some pretty impressive stuff with it," she says, gesturing out the window.

"Oh, in here I'm cheating. This is my realm, my domain. I can approximate omnipotence a whole lot closer in here than outside on Earth. My power out there is definitely growing, though, so I'm sure we'll figure it out."

"Still, as proofs of concept go, it's a pretty compelling one." Nestle.

"It is that."

Warm squeeze, pet pet pet.

"Do you want me to end up with a hairpetting fetish?" she wonders.

"Not necessarily hairpetting specifically, but various forms of cozy snuggles?"

"Okay!" she says cheerfully, snuggling up and turning her thoughts to how hot it is to be wrapped up in the arms (and tentacles) of a powerful demon who wants to keep her.

Such a good Esme she has.

How about she just increases Esme's sensitivity all over, for a bit, and also pets her back, and her arms and shoulders, and her legs, in addition to her hair?

Oooooh.

Esme is a little too busy squirming and whimpering to say this out loud, but she would just like to point out that the cute lingerie Sable put her in is really adding to this experience on a number of levels. What a good and cozy demon to belong to, ten out of ten, would be kidnapped again.

Ooh, such lovely squirming and whimpering. 

"I'm so glad you like it," Sable murmurs as it continues to pet and caress her. Then it has a fun idea, and murmurs the next bit telepathically. {I'm so glad you're enjoying being mine.}

💖💖💖

She presses gentle kisses all over Esme's face — her cheeks, her forehead, her nose, her temples, her jaw — and continues petting, continues stroking soft fingers and dexterous tentacles across her body in caress after tender caress. Then she kisses a line down the side of her neck, and mixes little teasing nips in as well.

{You have such delicious reactions. I'm so glad I abducted you. So glad I stole you away to keep and savor.}

This is an excellent way to keep one's happy squirmy puddle of Esme too immersed in sensation to articulate her thoughts.

She'll want her squirmy puddle of Esme to be able to articulate thoughts eventually, but for now the overwhelming sensations and resultant wriggles are extremely delightful. She caresses and nips and teases and savors her marvelous captive, 

After a few minutes of this, she starts slowly ramping down the sensitivity, smoothly and gently, while continuing to pet Esme and hold her tenderly.

"Precious, wonderful girl," she murmurs. 

Words, right, yes, words relating to thoughts, she has some of those, she's sure they're around here somewhere, perhaps she should check under the couch? Okay, and we're back.

Blinking up at Sable with a slightly dazed smile, she says, "Now would be an excellent time to visit some sexy horrors upon me, if you're wondering." She is both cozily puddlesome and also very turned on and particularly enjoying being a sexy kidnap victim with no hope of resisting her powerful mind-controlling demonic abductor. 💖

Well that sounds like a fun idea. A tentacle wraps each of Esme's limbs, securing her snugly in its coils and lifting her up. Another twists around her waist. A narrower tentacle wraps around the base of each breast, squeezing tightly. 

Sable steps close, a wicked grin displaying her sharp fangs, and squeezes Esme's right breast roughly, while her other hand caresses her cheek. "You have a point," Sable purrs. "You are so very tempting. I should take advantage of this lovely treat I've captured."

Another tentacle slips under her lacy panties and rips them off.

Well this is all much hotter when it's happening outside a dream, turns out.

(Oh no, what if the cute underwear gets damaged? —no, presumably Sable has some sort of solution to that—)

"Oh good," she says, squirming. "Yes please." Will there be fangs involved? Because she is definitely noticing the fangs.

(The solution for the cute clothes getting damaged is that they're conjured, just like everything here that isn't Esme or Sable, and can thus be re-conjured in an undamaged state at will. Which will occur sometime after Sable is done ravishing Esme.)

A thick, purple tentacle, slick with inky lube and as big around as Esme's wrist, teases along her folds, caressing wetly against her for a long moment, before forcing its way inside her. 

Sable leans closer, nuzzling her face into the crook of Esme's neck. "Yes, there will be," she purrs, nipping her neck teasingly.

On some level she appreciates how the teasing nibbles make such a lovely counterpoint to the tentacle's merciless violence, but by far the majority of what she's feeling is the deep satisfaction of being owned and overwhelmed. Feeling Sable's tentacles on and around and in her is a visceral demonstration of how powerless she is in this relationship, and she loves it.

And that is when Sable sinks its fangs into Esme's neck, sharply piercing through her skin, blood welling up into its mouth.

It drinks, the feeling almost like a tug through Esme's veins.

The tentacle inside her starts thrusting in and out, getting deeper each thrust until it's deeper than she could take without magic, the stretch of it a spark of pain to accompany the pleasure.

—oh—oh it's perfect. Perfect, perfect, caught and held and fucked and kept and treasured. Every part of her belongs to this beautiful demon and all is right with the world. It hurts, and it should hurt, she should be ravaged beyond her body's capacity to bear, every thrust another inescapable reminder that she's a helpless toy who breathes at her captor's mercy. She should be bitten and drained, giving up her blood—having it taken from her—for Sable's pleasure. She wants to give anything and everything for Sable's pleasure.

Also, she was right. Being eaten is very romantic. 💖

Ink and madness. How does it get to be this lucky?

It lines up two more tentacles, a one claiming Esme's lips, thrusting deep into her throat, while another plunges into her ass.

The aphrodisiac fluids dripping from the tentacles drag her arousal still higher, overwhelming her with more pleasure, and the thick insertions stretch her painfully, her throat and abdomen bulging with every thrust.

Sable drinks, and drinks, savoring every drop of Esme's blood, taking enough that she starts to feel a little dizzy from the lack.

She loses her words again somewhere in there, so that by the time she starts to feel dizzy from lack of blood she isn't coherent enough to articulate how more-than-perfect it is, how good, how right, how beautiful. All she can do is be overwhelmed all over again with pain and pleasure and belonging and warmth and need and love.

The feeling of her overwhelmed, love-filled mind is beautiful. Utterly gorgeous. Sable basks in it as she drinks, letting Esme feel her presence within her mind, and uses just enough of her healing and her biomancy to keep Esme wobbling back and forth over the edge of lightheadedness, so she gets intermittent rushes of it. 

She lets her madness aura out a bit, relaxing her control of it and letting her eldritch nature spill over Esme.

Her claws prick at Esme's skin as she gropes her breasts and ass, her tentacles pound mercilessly into her body, stretching her beyond what a human should be able to take.

There are a lot of ways eldritch madness can manifest, and worshipful ecstasy is only one of them.

But given the circumstances, it's kind of a foregone conclusion.

The edges of her thoughts blur together, one sensation cascading into the next. Nothing is solid, nothing is stable, except the steady comforting pressure of Sable's mind against hers; and she turns toward it like a sunflower, and basks.

Sable savors Esme, drinking its fill of her, basking in the worshipful bliss of her mind, pounding into her again and again.

Eventually, when it is thoroughly satisfied, though not spent (it's not sure it can be fully spent), it slows down, reduces the intensity. It folds its aura back in, shifts its claws away, pulls its fangs out of her neck. It slows its tentacles, and then pulls out the ones in her mouth and her ass.

Slowly, tenderly, it keeps gently fucking her while petting her warmly, and restoring the lost blood with biomancy, taking advantage of its passive sexual healing effect to gradually ease her mind back down from the high of the madness.

She makes a dazed noise of complaint when there are fewer tentacles. Fewer is not the number of tentacles she prefers.

As Sable puts her mind back together, though, she gradually feels more and more satisfied by what just happened to her. A gorgeous eldritch tentacle demon just fucked her brains out; there's really no cause for complaint here.

She remembers their conversation about aftercare, and tentatively decides not to make pulling herself together an urgent priority. This seems unlikely to be the sort of relationship where she's expected to bounce back from this kind of thing and be ready to resume secretarial work as soon as her head stops spinning.

Sable cozily holds Esme in her arms and tentacles, murmuring sweet fondness and adoration into her ears and petting her softly. "You did so well," she coos. "You are wonderful and precious and utterly captivating. I love you so much."

Continued gentle fucking is not traditionally a part of aftercare, but she literally has a sexual healing ability, so she's going to abuse it mercilessly to fix what her aura does to her Esme's mind. She'll stop when either Esme shows signs of wanting that to stop, or seems sufficiently put back together not to need it.

And no, Esme is not remotely expected to perform any kind of work right now. She's expected to just relax and recover and enjoy the coze. If she happens to form a preference about anything, it would be nice if she would say so, or think it with some minimal degree of coherence, so Sable can do something about fulfilling it. That is the entirety of the expectations on her.

Mmmmm. Being held and petted and gently fucked feels very nice, but being loved feels even nicer.

"You're very pretty," she mumbles into Sable's shoulder, remembering the way Sable's mind felt. It wasn't an experience that translates to any of her normal senses—she's having trouble even translating it into her normal thoughts, given what was happening to her mind at the time—but she feels that 'pretty' is the right word nonetheless.

It squeezes her warmly and continues petting and gently fucking. "So are you, my lovely darling," it coos. "So are you. Ink and madness... Your mind, during that, was just beautiful to watch. I was downright basking in you."

"Oh good! Very important to be a pleasing sexy kidnap victim." Nuzzle.

"Incredibly pleasing and astoundingly sexy kidnap victim," it replies, pressing a soft kiss to her forehead. "I didn't know kidnap victims came this pleasing and sexy."

It squeezes her and holds her and pets her and adores her. "How in the void am I this lucky?"

"I feel like I'm the lucky one, here!" She gets to be fucked in ways her mortal mind cannot fully comprehend, and she gets cuddles afterward? Best eldritch demon abductor.

She giggles. "Ah, but see most people wouldn't want my possessive streak, or the telepathy I need to make sure they aren't planning to reveal me to the world, or the sexy horrors, or the mildly threatening gilded cage. Finding a girl who's extremely into all that is pretty special too." She shakes her head, smiling happily.

"If we both think we're fabulously lucky, clearly something's going very right."

"Once again," she kisses Sable's shoulder, "we are in agreement."

It siiiiiighs happily and squeezes Esme warmly.

"My Esme. My wonderful, precious, delightful Esme. Keeeeeping you."

It runs its hands and tentacles along her back in a gentle caress. 

All the sticky mess from earlier quietly vanishes as they snuggle.

"I am so very glad to be kept." Cozy nuzzle.

Okay, she feels... mostly like her brain has resumed fitting into her skull. If Sable has any immediate plans for her, of course those should take precedence, but in the absence of any such plans... "What do you say to letting me take a shower, get dressed, have some sort of breakfast, and unpack my stationery, and then I can start taking notes on your capabilities, plans, and accomplishments?"

Sable's immediate plans were "cuddlefuck her until her brain is working properly," so if she thinks she's good, then that's done.

"I like that plan! Shall I rifle through your memories for breakfast preferences and put together a spread?"

"Please do!" She kisses her on the cheek.

Sable beams giddily, kisses Esme's forehead, and sets her gently on her feet, bereft of tentacles. Off she goes to vanish through a swirling, black-violet portal with a wave. Time to make breakfast!

Alas to be bereft of tentacles!

She stretches, opens up her biggest suitcase, and sets about her morning routine. Does being kidnapped by a magical ink demon with sexy healing powers mean she doesn't need to brush her teeth anymore? Well she's doing it anyway. Various toiletries are unpacked, a luxurious bathing experience is had, and she pulls out her first prepared outfit: a cute knee-length dress with a pattern of overlapping flower petals in pink and purple and blue, with matching pale pink bra-and-underwear set, and knee-high white socks with lacy trim. She takes a moment to admire the tiny pink ribbon bows in the mirror before she puts on the dress, then goes back to her luggage to start unpacking stationery into that lovely desk.

And that's when Sable returns — through the door this time, even!

She looks different, though. Still horns and violet eyes and pie-cut pupils and tail and tentacles, but now with violet hair, a little bit shorter (more like 5'7" than the 6'1" she was earlier), a bit bustier, slightly rounder face.

"Unpacking, I see. You look absolutely adorable," she greets Esme. "Oh, by the way, did I give you enough room for everything?"

"Mhm!" she says cheerfully. "Nice hair, I love the colour!"

"Thank you! It's one of my favorite colors. I think if I had to stick to only one appearance, I'd probably pick this hair color."

It offers her a hand. "Would you like a tour of the rest of this floor of the tower on the way to breakfast?"

"Absolutely!" she says, taking Sable's hand.

Sable leads the way out the door that previously would not open, revealing a hallway, with a spiral staircase several meters away to the left, a pretty balcony to the right, and another door across the hall.

"That's the central staircase to reach everything, and I can give you a tour of the rest of the tower after we eat. I expect you'll quite like the library," she explains with a smile. "After this morning, and how much I've read your mind and your reactions, I trust you and love you enough that you've got the run of the tower, so your door is unlocked now, and I've moved your suite up here to my floor."

Then she points at the door across from them. "That's the door to my suite, and where we're going next."

"Awwww! I want to make a joke about how I'm disappointed not to be locked in but I'm too charmed by being put on your floor to muster the appropriate mock-disappointment." And being given the run of the place does make her feel like she has been a successful kidnap victim. If she's doing her job right it should be obvious that she can be trusted with privileges!

Sable snugs Esme close and kisses her cheek, then leads the way into her suite. The first room features luxurious couches and sofas in reds and purples, a pillow pit in the middle with discreet hardpoints on the edges, a large media center on a wall, a cozy fireplace, and a spacious balcony overlooking the ocean. The room is big enough to really showcase the tower's circular floor-plan, the left and right walls curving noticeably.

"This is the lounge, for casual relaxation. Hasn't seen that much use, because I haven't invited people up here before, really."

"If only there were five of me, we could have a cuddlepile."

Well that's a tempting thought.

One thing thing Esme might notice about Sable is that when she's not trying to pretend to be a human, she blushes lavender-violet rather than pink.

She tilts her head thoughtfully.

Huh. She hadn't thought about that before, but maybe it's possible? Be a lot of work, though. 

"Something for later, if it's possible at all. For now I'm very delighted with the one Esme I have."

"Me too!"

"Oh good!"

It scoops Esme into its arms, kissing and twirling her playfully.

Delighted spinny giggles!!

It laughs as it sets her down. "You're such a delight."

And on they go into the next room.

This appears to be a reasonably fancy dining room. The table is enormous. The top is carved from a single enormous round slab of purpleheart, and finished to a warm gloss. Plush, high-backed chairs ring the edges, and an elegant silver candelabra with pink flames stands in the center.

"Dining room, in case I put on a proper dinner for several people."

"That's a big imaginary tree you made that table out of. I mean, I'm presuming it was imaginary."

It nods. "Yeah, imaginary tree. I modeled the growth process so I'd get realistic rings, but there was no actual tree cut down for this. I suppose I could make an enormous grove of these, each rivaling this tower, but there's no one else living in my realm to enjoy it yet."

"I mean, I would definitely enjoy going for a walk in that forest."

"Good point!"

She summons a notebook through a small portal, writes a note in it, and then drops it through another portal.

"That'll take some focus to get right, so it'll have to wait for later."

"You have notebook-summoning portals. Of course you do. Is 'I want my own notebook-summoning portals' a viable wish?"

"So that's complicated. Notebook portals are just a clever trick with the big portal power, and it's easy for me because I know where everything is here. You could do the same if you were very precise about where you put away your notebooks, and had the portal magic."

It rubs the back of its head and hums. "That's where the problem comes in. My powers are made of multiple thematic parts, and the different chunks are complicated in different ways. The portals draw from one of the themes that I haven't figured out the internals of as thoroughly yet, but I'm slowly working out how to distill grantable empowerments connected to each theme. Wishes for the three biggest empowerments might accelerate the process of figuring them out, though."

"That sounds like a potentially valuable wish, then!"

"It really does! It would take me a long time to grant it, but your wish would be quite the kickstart."

She leads the way to the next room while they talk, which turns out to be the biggest kitchen Esme has seen outside of some large restaurants depicted in movies. Black stone countertops ring the edges of the room, broken up by doors and various appliances. The center features an island big enough for her to lie down atop it, with a handful of cushion-topped stools scattered around the edges, and a large firepit she may recognize from a few dreams where it had a large grill over it, or a pair of Y-topped supports at either end. Currently occupying the island is an arrangement of covered plates and pitchers and glasses, curls of steam frozen mid-air above the food. Along the edges of the room, she can see a large refrigerator, an enormous oven, an air fryer, a milk frother, and so many more kitchen gadgets. The firepit appears to be covered with magically reinforced glass at the moment, making it safe to walk across.

"Gee, I wonder where I've seen that extremely specific kitchen fixture before," she says, not at all innocently.

"Oh, I can't possibly guess," it laughs. "Surely there must be several people with firepits longer than you are tall in their kitchens. I can't possibly be that unique."

It whips out a tentacle and tugs Esme into an embrace, squeezes her tightly to its chest, savoring the closeness and grinning.

"We prooobably shouldn't get too distracted here. And also probably shouldn't do certain things until you own my soul. But be it known that I am very tempted to get distracted by that firepit." She's trying not to think too hard about it so as not to create the distraction she's trying to avoid, but she has some very fond memories of those dreams and she wants to find out how much better they are in real life.

Sable crooks a finger under Esme's chin, tilts her head up to meet its own, and kisses her tenderly. "You're absolutely right. We'll save that for later. For now, there's the rest of the tour, and then the breakfast sitting over there under stasis, and more-detailed information and plans."

"Mmm." She kisses back. "Good plan."

"Plus, what kind of cozy captor would delay your enjoyment of all the notes and charts you'll doubtless make about everything."

And they continue on. The next room is a capacious bedroom with an enormous bed. The frame is ornately-carved purpleheart, the sheets are silvery silk, and the comforter is dark purple and down-filled. A door near the the headboard leads to an enormous bathroom, while a door opposite the bed opens onto a cozy balcony. A few wardrobes and cozy armchairs fill out the rest of the room.

"Aww, it looks so comfy in here!"

"It really is! I certainly enjoy it. Kind of a big bed for just one little demon, though."

"You should put five of me in it. And cuddle us," she suggests.

"A cozy idea," she giggles. "That requires having five of you, though, which remains a longer-term project. I think one of the empowerments would allow that as an option for you, once I can grant those."

"Ooh! Fun! Don't worry, I'm not in a rush to be duplicated."

"Oh good. I'd hate to disappoint." It kisses her softly again. "I certainly wouldn't mind putting one Esme in my bed, though."

"Anytime you like!" she says, grinning.

"You may wind up spending very few nights in your suite, then."

It runs a hand through her hair, holding her close.

Sable may in fact have been a little bit of a lonely demon previously. Big secrets are not conducive to getting close to people, and being a demon is an awfully big secret.

"Fine by me." She's totally going to make good use of that desk regardless, though. It's a very good desk.

"I'm very glad you like the desk so much," she murmurs into Esme's hair, holding her close.

After a long moment, it straightens and smiles gently. "Okay, one more room and then it's breakfast time."

Bounce bounce!!

The last room is a medium-sized dungeon! The walls, ceiling, and floor are padded and dotted with hardpoints. A steel cage stands in one corner, a St. Andrew's cross in another. A leather-upholstered lounger sits against the nearest wall, and a cabinet holds a large collection of toys and ropes.

"This dungeon used to be bigger, but I needed the space on this floor to move your suite up here. So I shrank this dungeon and took the opportunity to make an enormous one as a basement."

"Oh fun," she says. "I'm torn between 'please show me the enormous basement dungeon immediately' and 'let's not get distracted with sex until after the introductory tour'."

"Agreed, but I think we should stick to the plan. Breakfast, down to the office to show you all the fancy information and make some plans, and then we see about fucking you senseless again."

"Excellent. I look forward to it." Both the fancy information and plans, and the getting fucked senseless.

Isn't that just a delightful thought.

Well, back to the kitchen they go. As they approach the island, the frozen steam resumes wafting up to the ceiling.

Sable pulls out a stool for Esme, then sits down next to her. 

The contents of breakfast turn out to be: a plate with a tall stack of Belgian waffles, charmed to keep them warm, small plates and bowls and carafes of an impressive variety of toppings, a large plate of poached eggs, another plate of sausages, a bowl of exquisitely fresh and ripe fruit salad, and a pitcher each or milk and orange juice.

"Tada," she grins as she reveals the food.

"Waffle Chaos! My favourite! That's a lie, I have dozens of favourites. But Waffle Chaos is a classic."

"Oh good," it replies. "I'm so glad."

It plates up a waffle, tops it with butter and strawberries and chocolate chips and maple syrup and a sprinkling of espresso powder. Alongside that it takes two eggs, three sausages, and a tall glass of orange juice.

"I clearly don't take the time to make human food often enough. This is tasty," she comments as she digs in.

She will just be over here putting more toppings on this waffle. No, more toppings than that. A truly absurd quantity of toppings. There's plenty of whipped cream, right? It will be required as mortar.

Yes, there is a frankly ridiculous quantity of whipped cream. It suspected this would be necessary.

Don't mind Sable, it's just going to be over here gazing sappily at Esme while it eats its own breakfast.

Eventually she gets around to the part where the waffle goes in the face. This is a bit of a delicate operation considering the amount of nonsense she has piled onto said waffle, but it's totally worth it. (She also grabs an egg and a couple of sausages, in between waffle shenanigans. And a glass of milk to wash it all down.)

"You are an unreasonably adorable creature," she comments between bites. "And that is an absurdly cute breakfast."

"I try!"

"It's a good thing I kidnapped you when I did," it teases. "This much cuteness is too powerful for the mortal world. I have to keep you all to myself. For everyone's safety." 

"You even have a fairy tale wizard's tower to keep me locked safely away in! With a dungeon!" And now she is thinking about spending time recreationally locked in a dungeon.

"I'm so prepared for this job! I even have elaborate, torturous rituals to drain your terrible power."

"Better and better."

"The secret to draining your terrible power is rough sex and romantic violence, you see."

"I don't know, I'm skeptical that those will make me any less cute. You might just have to demonstrate."

"And if those demonstrations fail, we will just have to try different variations."

"Each more elaborate and torturous than the last?"

"Exactly. It will be a process with heavy demands on our imaginations and kinks, but we will find a way. For the sake of the world."

And then it breaks down giggling.

Esme snickers into her glass of milk.

Sable sighs fondly and wraps its tail possessively around her leg as it continues to eat, cutting a bite of a poached egg.

She is making steady progress on her Waffle of Chaos.

"...I have to admit," she says, a little shyly, "the phrase 'elaborate and torturous rituals' is definitely conjuring some mental images that I... normally wouldn't talk about." Because they involve her other life. She's been operating for so long on the assumption that she'll never be able to recover the magic she remembers, but if Sable can really make her thoroughly immortal via soul ownership - and maybe help her delve into her memories in more precise detail than she could manage alone - then they could, in fact, rederive enough ritual magic to be able to safely construct new rituals, and could, potentially, involve such rituals in their sex life. It's such a shame that she's pretty sure the vassalage ritual won't work outside her family's one true original forest.

"Immortality is easy, and recreating ritual magic from your past life memories is... complicated. I don't know if enough information persisted. I do know that however much is there, I can collect and organize every bit of it for you."

She reaches out and gives Esme's shoulder a squeeze.

"I—" wow, this is hard to say. "I did spend a whole lot of time in the family library. There's probably enough to work with. I guess the big question is just how much I'm going to have to rebuild from scratch, and... I guess also whether I still—count as a Blake. Magically speaking."

This seems like a time for hugging its Esme very thoroughly, with both arms and tentacles.

There's something very comforting and hot about being wrapped up in tentacles. Though it does make it harder to eat breakfast.

"...we should put that on the agenda, but... not just yet? I think I'd rather focus on making my wishes first, and leave digging into my memories for after we've got that settled."

"Sensible."

Two new tentacles split off, so Sable doesn't have to remove any limbs from this hug, one catching the suddenly-appearing notebook, the other flipping it open and writing "reconstruct ritual magic" down in the "long term projects" section. Then the two new tentacles add to the hug, which continues a little bit longer, before Esme is finally released to resume breakfast.

She catches a retreating tentacle and gives it a quick kiss before returning her attention to her plate.

That surprises and blushifies a certain demon.

But yes, breakfast can resume. It's even tasty.

It's so tasty!

All right. She sets down her glass of milk and gets up and stretches. "Shall we resume the tour?"

"We shall!"

She stands, waves a hand at the island, and the mess all vanishes, leaving the dishes sparklingly clean. Then those vanish into cabinets with faint clinks.

She pulls Esme close and wraps an arm around her, and leads the way back out of the suite. When they reach the stairs, she asks, "Do you want to tour all the remaining floors quickly, or head straight for the office and workshop floor where I can show you the map and all the fancy data?"

"Hmm... tour first, fancy data afterward."

"We do have eternity. Might as well take the scenic route."

It leads the way upstairs, to a lovely rooftop terrace. Flowers bloom in an assortment of planters, and cozy chairs and tables dot the area. The view is spectacular.

"Ooh, this looks like a really fun place to sit down with a cup of tea and a book."

"It really is. Speaking of which, I bet you're going to love the library. That's a few floors down, though."

"Ooh, library. I look forward to seeing it."

It kisses the top of Esme's head with a sappy smile on its face and leads the way down again.

The next floor below the suites is an enormous art studio, with shelves full of paints and clay and other supplies, and large windows to see out to the surrounding landscape if one wishes. "I only ever really dabble here, but I'm still glad I have it."

"I am immediately tempted to get into art."

"That sounds lovely. Perhaps after the tour, wish planning, and next round of sexy horrors."

It squeezes her tightly and runs a hand along her side. "Lovely girl."

She grins and hugs back. "I don't know, probably by the time the opportunity arises I'll have plenty else on my plate."

She nods. "Well, the studio's not going anywhere, so whenever you feel like it."

The next floor has a small landing with four doors. "This is the workshops and office, we're gonna come back to this at the end."

Then the next below that is the two-story-tall library. The whole floor is open, with a cozy lounge area surrounding the stairs, full of comfy-looking leather armchairs and little side tables and a few squashy beanbag chairs and a couple couches. At the edge of the lounge area is a little lectern with a book and a pen on it. Shelves fill the walls, packed full of books.

"And here's the library, containing a tiny fraction of the books I've got in the overflow stacks. That's the index book on the lectern. It controls the whole thing, shuffling books in and out from the stacks, searching for topics, looking up authors, et cetera."

"That's so charming..." She is experiencing the urge to give the index book a pat and tell it it is doing a good job. But that seems premature when she hasn't actually seen it do its job yet.

"I'm so glad you like it! The index book was probably one of the two trickiest enchantments I've made. The other is the big display in the office. Would you like to try it out?"

"Oh, I'd better not, I'm going to be way too tempted to dive into a beanbag chair with an old favourite."

"Reasonable." Cheek kiss. "There'll be plenty of time to show it off in detail later."

She leads the way down again, to another circular landing, with two double-doors opposite each other.

"Ballroom and conservatory. I have never yet hosted a party here, but I figured one day I might, so I prepared."

She opens the doors simultaneously with tentacles.

The ballroom is very open, with polished hardwood floors and glittering amethyst chandeliers and some seating and tables around the edges. The conservatory is full of trees and shrubs and flowers, purple leaves and blue petals and black trunks, with little paths winding through it all.

"You know, I do like the vibes, but there's a part of me that was expecting to see green leaves and is disappointed. Maybe I should get a little potted plant for my windowsill."

"We can absolutely have some green plants if you want. It doesn't have to be all purple in here. And I definitely support little window plants."

"One of those succulents with the round little leaves, I think. Jade plant, maybe?"

"I love it. Probably not right now because I'm a little distracted for good conjuring, and we're in the middle of a tour, but definitely."

Sable can say no to Esme. Really. It promises.

It's just very glad there's so little it needs to say no to her about.

"Of course, of course. Houseplant shenanigans after the tour is complete. Please, continue."

Down they go another floor, reaching the entry hall. This is another double-height floor, with enormous pillars and arches and sweeping stairs and double-height stone doors. "Big fancy entry room, doubles as a defensive chokepoint if anyone ever figures out how to attack here. Shouldn't be possible, but I would feel like such a moron if it was and I didn't have all the fancy magitech turrets hidden in the pillars, and the extra layers of walls I could deploy."

"...the first objection that occurs to me is, if entering your world without your permission should be impossible, then if someone is already entering your world without your permission what's to stop them from doing it directly into your bedroom?"

"If someone actually manages to scry inside the tower, you're absolutely right. It'll be easier for people to just aim blind at the world itself, though, in which case they'll wind up somewhere out there and need to come in through the entryway. Also, if I manage to turn the outer reaches of this world into a broadly accessible afterlife, it'll be populated and people might try to make trouble."

She frowns. "You're right, though. I should probably put proper defensive magics up, just to make the tower even harder than the rest of the world to target. I've yet to find any magic on this Earth other than my own, though, and I haven't granted powers to anyone yet apart from some transformations. So there shouldn't even be anyone to try. But assumptions can be dangerous. So yeah, I should do something about that."

She pulls Esme close and kisses her forehead. "Smart point. Thank you. Good, clever girl."

"I try!" Happy snug.

Some more cozy snug for a moment.

And then down they go.

"Last stop before we go back up to the office: the new dungeon."

The basement dungeon is a massive room, with barrel horses, ribbed silicone-topped sawhorses, swings, St. Andrew's crosses, cages, and cabinets full of toys and ropes. Every surface is padded, and there are hardpoints everywhere. In addition to the usual dungeon features, though, are two unique items. On one side of the room is a large four-part table, split down the middle by a pair of deep grooves, with wheels on the bottom to allow them to be rolled apart from each other, and latches to hold them together. Above it is an enormous circular saw on an articulated arm. Across the room from it is the other rarity, an iron maiden.

"Well this all looks fun." She is trying not to indulge in fantasies because when your powerful demonic captor is reading your mind at all times and you're both trying not to get distracted from tasks it is rude to fill your mind with detailed and appealing suggestions for distractions you could try.

"I'm really looking forward to putting you through all of this. Before we go back upstairs, though, lemme show you one neat feature of the iron maiden."

It sashays across the room to the enormous torture device, pushes it closed, and then flips three latches. Then it puts its hands on the seam and swings apart, as though to open it.

What happens instead is that the iron maiden's outer shell opens up, revealing an inner cage the spikes are mounted to, still locked in place deep enough to pierce through the occupant.

"Display mode," it teases with a grin.

"Oooh, clever. Okay, please take me back upstairs before I get too tempted."

How about if it scoops her into its arms and tentacles, giggling madly, and carries her upstairs in a princess carry while peppering her face with kisses?

Then she shall have an armful of happy cozy wigglesome Esme!

A very pleased demon then carries its Esme up to the office floor.

It opens doors with tentacles. One door reveals an electronics workbench, with soldering irons and circuit boards and other supplies. Another reveals an enchanting workshop with crystals and assorted reagents. A third is full of servers, blinking as data flows in and out.

The last, though, leads to a large office. Much of the outer wall is dominated by an enormous parchment display. The center is occupied by a world map, with symbols of various polities, corporations, and other organizations on the map in various colors. A few warning icons are drawn attached to a few cities around the world. A list on the side notes each warning icon attached to a short status description. A list on the opposite side provides a short status description for each organization.

"This thing integrates all the intel sources I have, everything from new bills being proposed in legislative bodies to contract discussions on corporate servers. Generally I try to keep important things moving toward more support and kindness and human rights and such, and this is how I find out when they're going off-track."

"...I know this is silly of me but the first thing I think of when I look at that big map is that I want it to be a globe. I know it's easier to see everything at once this way, but... a globe is how the world is shaped!"

Okay she can't help but giggle. "You're adorable. You're absolutely adorable, and I had — still have, honestly — the same thought. I'm just torn between that and the convenience of seeing everything at once. I suppose one argument for your point is that it's not usually going to be a matter of the seconds lost by waiting for a globe to turn making a difference, and if it is I probably need a different type of warning."

"You can also put the globe in the middle of the space so you can walk around it - and maybe give it a way to raise and lower, or turn on multiple axes, so you can study it from more angles? And the big map could show multiple different views of it, even! I think this is an idea with a lot of potential."

"And I was thinking about trying to add an enchantment that tracks the locations of important players as they move about the world, and that would be so much easier if I was taking it apart to reshape it anyway..."

"Oh fine, I'm sold. Next couple days, probably."

It kisses her fondly. "Good girl for making me reconsider and actually try a very good idea."

She kisses back. "I like organizing things!" she says, affectionately bumping her nose against Sable's.

"I like this fact about you. My adorable, precious Esme."

Down she sits in a comfy office chair at one of the desks, Esme still in her lap.

"So. I should probably explain all my various capabilities, and the various things I can currently grant, or work up to granting, and how wishes work, and what exactly I'm doing to the world."

She nestles cozily.

"Please do! Can I take notes?"

"You absolutely may. What sort of notebook would you like, and what writing supplies?"

"Hmm, can I just step over to my desk for a moment to grab a notebook and pen?"

"Absolutely."

It opens its arms and lets her down from its lap, then opens a portal directly there. "You can even take the quick way if you wish."

"Thanks!"

She kisses Sable on the cheek, steps through the portal, and grabs a pen with a little cat face on the cap (complete with little molded plastic ears) and a spiral-bound notebook with a soft blue-green gradient on the cover.

"You are absurdly cute, and every moment I get to witness this brightens my life immeasurably," she replies on seeing her selections, and gestures around at the abundance of desk space, standing up from her chair.

(She's probably going to pace a bit.)

She sits down, deploys her writing supplies, and listens attentively.

"Okay, capability overview or history and accomplishments first?"

"How about, history of your accomplishments including your capabilities and how you came to understand them over time?"

"Okay!" It claps excitedly and starts pacing. "So, when I first appeared, I knew nothing about humanity. I was a strange, writhing mass of ink emerging from the Mississippi river that had never even heard of spoken language, full of inexplicable sourceless knowledge about various things. I figured out pretty quick that humans were tool users, but had no idea how they were communicating for the first little while of observation. I scared the first person to see me, and stuck to hiding after that. A bit of telepathy revealed the existence of spoken language, and then a series of longer, deeper scans let me copy English from a few different people, along with some explanation for the wildly varying range of physical presentations people had and what those meant. So I took a look at the range of easily accessible shapes I could occupy, noticed that the easy and comfy ones were all feminine, and decided okay, clearly I fit humanity's 'girl' category. I practiced shifting clothes a few times to make sure I could manage well enough, and then started trying to occasionally interact and learn more."

It grins at her. "Honestly I think I did a pretty good job for being a couple weeks old by the end of that."

"Most people who are a couple weeks old do not have the ability to speak English or dress themselves!"

"Yeah! I was cheating massively with telepathy every chance I got, but to borrow a human saying I like a lot, cheating is technique."

She turns and keeps going. "So a couple months of intermittent conversations go by before I run into my first mugging. One human was pointing a gun at another human and demanding possessions. I didn't like it, just judging by the fear and stress on both of them, but I didn't know enough to know where to intervene, so I just read their minds deeply and waited. That led to figuring out crime and harm, and I decided a mugger was a tolerable test subject for a few of my less-dangerous capabilities. By that point I'd identified most of my basic abilities — pretty broad mind control and telepathy, biomancy, portals, reshaping landscapes, acquiring biological capabilities by eating things — in isolation and with a little animal testing, but I needed to figure out memory and society a bit better, and see how the safer things worked on humans. So I captured the mugger with a portal, used another portal to put the victim's stolen property back at their house, and started testing."

"Poking at the mugger's memories quickly led to figuring out economic conditions and desperation, and that kind of pissed me off. So I resolved to start trying to meddle. I read a bunch of books, figured out how human education worked, copied stuff from a bunch of sociology and economics students, and came to the conclusion that the root of the problem was scarcity, and I'd need to move slowly and make sure humanity had 'normal' explanations for everything I did. I started with just the one city, and tried to encourage homes to be built, and businesses not to pollute, and everyone to discriminate less."

She keeps pacing, tapping into a hand with a tentacle as she explains. "This is when I first had a chance to really use my dream magic. Whenever a business leader or a politician was trying to push for a policy that would harm people, I gave them a dream of the experience on the bottom of that change, to shake them up and discourage them. It took a little practice, but I got pretty good at little nudges."

It turns and grins at her, cheeks faintly purple. "And this is when I first got exposed to sex. When I didn't have much practice yet, I had to visit people in the night to make sure I gave the right person the dream I'd crafted, and so I wound up accidentally observing humans fucking a few times. That was a bit of a revelation, because it turns out I have a whole mess of sex-relevant powers that I didn't even notice until I'd worked out that sex was a thing. Didn't play with 'em at that point. That was later, I figured out that humans go to bars to find opportunities for sex and quickly worked out that I've got bodily fluids that glow in the dark, aphrodisiac fluids, a toggleable lust aura, an intuitive ability to read people's kinks and desires, an awful lot of bodily elasticity and the ability to share that with people, control of sensitivity, ability to induce endless pleasure without orgasm or orgasms on demand, and passive sexual healing. I had a lot of sex. It didn't really solve the lingering loneliness I still had, because I couldn't get emotionally close to people, but it was a lot of fun."

"That is a very fun list of sex powers, I have to say," she says when she finishes copying them down.

"It really is, isn't it?" She teases.

"To get into why I couldn't get close to people, and why I'm still stealthy, the other major power I have is a certain kind of minor precognition. I can figure out the likely outcome of an action if I care about the question a lot. And every time I considered being open about what I am, my outcome-sense sounded metaphorical alarms. So I do everything very sneakily. There's the possibility of using accelerated time to do things, but that's very expensive to keep going for any length of time. So I stick to operating in secret, and have a lot of sex."

"A couple years into this is about when I discover trans people," it continues. "This is something I'm very proud of, to this day."

It twirls and gestures grandly. "So picture it. I'm picking up a girl at a bar, and we're walking off somewhere private, and she nervously says she's trans, and asks if that's okay. I've never heard of this before at this point, so I just copy everything she knows about it. And that kind of blows my mind a bit."

"People wanting different bodies, different pronouns, different social roles! It's fascinating! It's great! Humans actually creating their own roles rather than sticking with what they're given! As a shapeshifter, and a being that learned everything about society by stealing knowledge from normal people, I love the idea."

"Now, I still wanted to get laid, and I didn't want to leave the poor girl hanging, so I nodded and smiled and and pulled her into a soft kiss. We proceeded to have a great night. And the next morning I started trying to figure out whether anything I had was sharable. Revealing myself was still getting a big warning from my powers, so I couldn't use my biomancy to transition people, since that takes time. One of my lunar powers, though, gives me different default 'set points' for my shapeshifting based on the phase of the moon, and I figured I might be able to work out how to grant that."

It claps its hands. "That took a lot of practice. For the first long while, I was stuck on trying to grant it at all, and then I was stumped on how to give just a single shape rather than a whole cycle of them. But eventually I worked it out, and appeared to that same trans girl in a dream. I offered her a contract, let her pick one of those shapes, and for the other wishes updated some documentation and tweaked some memories for her, so people wouldn't make trouble for her about it."

"Aww, that's really sweet of you! ...does this mean you've been going around offering to turn people into girls, but you can only turn them into a specific list of girls?"

"At first, yeah! I'm still disappointed I can't offer my help to trans boys, or enbies, but the risk of taking the time with my biomancy isn't safe. I did figure out how to tweak subtler details within the broad 'type' of a given set-point after the first three or four, though, things like little face shape details, or variation in hair or eye color, minor adjustments to the overall build, so that helped. Managed to avoid a huge wave of carbon copies of the same five girls running around everywhere."

"None of these girls have died yet, but I've got a village way out on an outlying island they'll land in when they do."

"Of course, I couldn't do all this and learn all this without taking some time to question gender for myself, could I? So I spent some time thinking. I tried carefully shifting to a masculine body. Hated it. So I was pretty solidly on the femme side of things. But I kept thinking. And I realized I vibed a bit better with 'girlthing' than simply 'girl', and after a lot of thought started mixing it/its in with she/her for my pronouns."

"And that felt pretty great! So here I am, inky demonic girlthing, trying to meddle, saving occasional trans girls from lifetimes of dysphoria, using wish contracts to stretch my powers, and trying to figure out a way to safely reveal myself a tiny bit more and not break anything."

"'Girlthing' is an extremely adorable word," she says, writing it down and then drawing a little heart next to it.

It giggles happily. "Glad you like it. I don't mind 'girl' or 'woman' or other femme nouns or titles, just feel 'girlthing' is more accurate if we're trying to get specific.

"So, any questions?"

"Hmm... how closely can you track the effects of your interventions? I guess I'm not used to operating with the power of minor prophecy - in your position I'd want to know everything about how my dream visions turned out, so I could carefully experiment to nudge things in better directions, maybe try things more subtle than just averting major catastrophes, and notice if any of those aversions of major catastrophes had side effects I wasn't expecting. On the other hand I'd also be wary of overspecializing in mind control just because it happens to be the biggest available hammer. If you do want to build toward going public eventually - and if you're constructing an afterlife, going public eventually is kind of inevitable - there's something to be said for structuring your major interventions to be things people will be glad to hear about. Sending people dream visions warning them away from doing bad things is definitely better than some possible interventions on that front, but, I don't know, I feel like it'd be pretty easy for someone who didn't start out trusting you to get the wrong idea, you know?"

"Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I don't have a lot of angles for surveillance of outcomes and problems other than data taps I've put into the computer networks of major corporations and governments, parsing the news, mind reading, or observation through discreet portals. The minor prophecy is unfortunately pretty vague a lot of the time. It doesn't really give me a detailed look I can use to track which plan gives me a better outcome on which variables. And portal observation and mind reading mostly don't scale very well."

"I notice that I am once again tempted to solve a problem by duplicating myself. I bet five of me working together could do so much data analysis."

Sable giggles. "Cute. You probably could. Direct analysis isn't so much the bottleneck, though, unless we scale you up to a few million. We can do some pretty impressive pattern recognition with enchantment, and parsing and processing of those recognized patterns is easy with computers, but really the hard part is figuring out additional viable data sources, or additional patterns to watch for. I've got checks for things like bribery, hired espionage, assassination, a variety of dangerous policies that could be proposed, lots of measures of public well-being, but more data would absolutely let us navigate better."

"I'll definitely give that some thought!" she says, writing it down.

"Thoughtful, helpful girl," it replies, stepping close and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. 

"So that's a pretty sprawling summary of my capabilities, and now we get to the question of wishes. Wishes give me a bit more finesse and power to accomplish the request, so there's definitely value to be extracted there by picking things that are currently not possible but could be with practice. Not as much value to be had in terms of things I can already do reliably, because you can have any of that just by asking, as long as it doesn't harm a bunch of people or something."

It creates a little illusory chart, broken into five categories, each with a symbol at the top of the column.

"So my powers fit into five loose thematic groups. First, being inky goop." It puts a tipped-over inkbottle at the top of the first column. "This mostly covers some very low-level shapeshifting, and my ink being a healing substance to consume."

The next column gets a stylized inky outline of a shield. "Next we've got magic tattoos. These I've mostly figured out, though many of the capabilities would be nice to share if I could. One grants a shield, one grants healing, one grants recovery of things like stamina, one aids mental clarity, one gives levitation, and there are three really fancy ones I haven't figured out how to share yet that are kind of dangerous. Wings and curses, a magic sword and reflexes, or a bunch of little mind control tricks."

Then they get to a crescent moon icon. "Lunar powers are the easiest to work out how to share. This is where the transformation set-points come from, and I could also grant some things like luck, social grace, transformation magic, illusion magic, or mind magic. Probably going to avoid sharing that last one."

The next icon is a curling tentacle. "On the tentacular horror side of things are a lot of powerful options that are middle of the road in difficulty: harder than lunar stuff and tattoos, easier than everything else. This set is where I get the eldritch madness aura, though there are other things a person could end up with on all elements of it, and it's where my ease of learning things or manipulating biology or altering landscapes fit. This is also the theme that the portals fit under."

Lastly, a silhouette of a girl with horns. "Finally, and harder than everything except the goop nature itself, is the demonic side of things. This includes a lot of resistances, all the sex magic, the wish contracts, conjuration, enchanting, the dream manipulation, and the accelerated time. Technically it's also where my realm fits, but I don't think I'll be able to grant that one."

She nods to Esme. "Your idea of wishing for empowerments in three of the themes is a good one. Probably the best value there is the lunar things, the tentacle things, and the demon things. All three of those have angles on maintaining an appearance of humanity when out in public, through different methods."

"I consider maintaining a human appearance strictly optional, though it does open up some possibilities that would otherwise be closed to me. I'd be happy to wish for lunar, tentacular, and demonic empowerment if you think those are the best areas to focus on developing right now, and the best capabilities to focus on giving me."

"It's mostly that the empowerments are the biggest power stretch, the tattoos are pretty thoroughly handled, and I don't think you'd get a lot of upgrade out of being goop unless the goop life really calls to you. Absolutely open to other ideas, though. I think it might be possible to frame the lunar stuff so you'd keep your current appearance, even."

"The goop life does not especially call to me, no. Keeping my current appearance is also strictly optional, unless you're fond of it, in which case of course it's mandatory." Also it would be really hot if Sable had final say on what all of her forms should look like.

She giggles. "I am mostly fond of it both being quite pretty and containing you, and consider the latter strictly more important than any other fact about it. Especially given that all of the empowerments have some degree of pull toward attractive results, as long as you're even minimally thoughtful about selections."

And then it processes Esme's thought about deciding what her forms look like and blushes.

"Oh. Um. That is a thought."

Blush.

"Ooh," she says, grinning. "A fun thought?"

It grins blushily. "A fun thought that comes with some attendant worry of picking something you might not like, so you'd have to be involved in the process just to soothe my nerves a bit, but yes."

"Well, yes. I won't deny there's some appeal to having things like that imposed on me unilaterally, but obviously you should be able to make an informed decision about what I should look like, and my preferences and comfort are definitely information."

"Oh good. Glad we agree on that. So, given that the biggest value to point your wishes at is power growth, can you see anything better than aiming for the eventual empowerments?"

"Well, hmm. Are there any areas you've noticed your power growing in besides empowering others, that you might want to accelerate?"

She hums. "Speed of biomancy, size of this world, ease of maintaining temporal acceleration for longer. The world should be fine, though, it grows with other methods too, and there isn't really a shortage of space."

"In that case it sounds like the three empowerments are probably our best bet, at least if we want me to make my wishes pretty urgently, and I for one," thinking fondly of that kitchen and also the dungeon downstairs, "would definitely like to have my soul safely in your possession as soon as reasonably possible."

"Agreed. We have some dangerous kinks, you and I, and on top of that there's the risk of unexpected harm if you ever visit Earth, and really I'm just going to feel a lot safer if you were guaranteed to come to me on death. That would be much better."

It snaps its fingers, and a paper contract appears, breaking down three wishes for the specified three empowerments in unambiguous language, specifying clearly that these wishes are not immediately grantable and will instead be worked toward over time, being granted as soon as feasible, and finally listing the cost for the arrangement as the recipient's soul.

Esme beams delightedly and then sets to reading through the contract, paying close attention to all of those details.

Everything is thoroughly agreeable and cooperative, with no tricky wording or hidden gotchas. The empowerments are specified to be granted through a collaborative decision, involving the recipient's preferences and wishes everywhere feasible. It's all about as friendly as a contract for one's soul could possibly be.

Well, yes, naturally that's how Sable would do things. She just wants to make sure for both their sakes that there aren't any accidental issues with the wording that could lead to trouble down the line. Once she has perused the document twice and made some notes in her notebook about it, she's satisfied.

Sensible of her, really. There are two spots to sign, and a special pen to use that writes in her blood.

There may be a hint of a dreamy sigh as she picks up the pen.

The pen seems to sting her fingertip just a bit as she gets it settled into her grip. As she starts to write, it becomes a sharp biting draw, piercing into her finger and drawing out the blood — and with it just the tiniest hint of the flavor of her soul, indelibly marking the signature as hers no matter what changes she may ever experience in the future. The tug of writing with it is deep and subtle, but utterly unmistakable.

She ever so carefully puts her name down on the page in her best handwriting, twice, despite how unfairly hot this experience is.

And once it's signed, Sable sighs sappily at her, duplicates the contract, and vanishes one copy off to the stacks. The other she hands back to Esme.

"Well that's a huge relief," she says with a smile as she feels Esme's soul bind itself to her permanently. "Now there's no possible way to lose you. You're completely and irrevocably mine, through death and beyond. Nothing can stop me from putting you back in a body if that's ever needed."

She takes a look at Esme's soul, now that it's properly hers.

On the surface level and most of the levels below that, it's an ordinary human soul, the same kind Sable is familiar with from other soul contracts.

Only in the very deepest part, the innermost layer, does there start to be a hint of strangeness. On inspection, it seems that what Esme has is two souls, both complete in themselves, but one accreted around the other like a pearl around a grain of sand. The inner soul is a relic of her previous life, and it belongs to Sable just as much as the outer one does, bound by the same contract.

It seems conceivable, from a close examination, that the two souls could be separated to allow for both of her to exist simultaneously. It would be a bit delicate because of the depth of integration, but it may even be theoretically possible—though Sable may not currently have any idea how—to allow the souls to each sustain a separate body while remaining deeply enough conjoined that both bodies would share their thoughts in a permanent bond, two minds joined as one.

Always feels special, taking ownership of a soul. Tender, poignant. 

That nesting soul situation is a surprise, though.