Definitely more on the oscillation side; there's variance in how much and how fast she 'wakes up' when prompted but it's not trending upwards consistently over time much if at all.

Aire finds herself feeling disappointed. If she could wake Tanthe back up that would give her all sorts of options. But no, there goes her last hope of maybe being able to repeat, if not this exact process, something involving increasing arousal and desire for more and culminating in Tanthe falling apart. 

Well, she'll have to do without, tragic as that may be.

She'll take her time working Tanthe up to her next orgasm. She hasn't done things nice and slow yet in this womb, and she might as well give it a try. Who knows how Tanthe's mind will react in this state. Aire only gets the one option to check, and if she does end up deciding to dedicate a century or so to learning how to replicate what's going on with Tanthe's mind, she suspects she'll be glad to have the data.

And she doesn't want to move things one step closer to being over, just yet. That too.

(It's possible that Aire could learn how to wake Tanthe back up from this point, but it would, at minimum, involve a lot of tinkering with different possible inputs to see what combinations produce the best results, from a pretty messy thorny starting place without a ton in the way of clear feedback about which circumstances cause which outcomes.)

Tanthe definitely seems to be in favour of this new direction, insofar as Tanthe can be said to have preferences at this point in her life. With plenty of time to process the gradual build of pleasure, she's better able to appreciate it in what remains of her conscious mind, better able to enjoy it in her emotions as well as her senses.

With as little experience as Aire has with altered mind states, a consequence of the small amount of experience she has with everything, Tanthe's state looks perhaps more recoverable to her than it actually is. Oh, not to proper wakefulness as she'd desired so shortly ago, she's given up on that, but to a simple desire for more. She can't get a Tanthe who's giving in despite her knowledge she shouldn't, but perhaps she can get a Tanthe who wants more? 

Unfortunately, she doesn't think she has any way to manage that without going to the extreme of not stimulating Tanthe physically much at all. Which would very possibly, Aire thinks, result in a Tanthe whose emotional state shifted to one composed primarily of sadness and frustrated want. And evil as Aire may be, she is not evil in the way where she enjoys inflicting suffering on her targets. No, she wants to drown them in so much pleasure and joy they're broken by it, so much that the person she's breaking willfully participates in their own destruction despite all the reasons they have not to. Emotional pain itself is an undesired side-effect she works to mitigate. The frustrated want is very much something she wishes to inflict on Tanthe; the sadness a regrettable byproduct.

When she weighs up the possibility of a Tanthe aware enough to want more against feeling more of Tanthe's sadness, she decides that her last opportunity to get Tanthe to participate in her own fall, even just with a desire for more, is worth it. After Tanthe's next orgasm, Aire can cuddle her with both her bodies rather than drive her up towards more pleasure. And if that doesn't seem to work, well, it was worth a try.

Before that, she can work Tanthe up slowly until her next orgasm hits, using her secondary body to bleed off excess lust as she build's Tanthe's arousal slowly up towards her peak. Every time she starts to get impatient, to want to push back up into Tanthe as hard as she can over and over and thrust her way through into her last womb, her secondary body lets its desires overflow and spurts into Tanthe's ass.

Tanthe happily floats on her sea of sensation as the tide continues to rise. All her straightforward visible primary emotions are positive; her sadness is visible only in secondhand echoes.

It takes a while, but she does come like this, and she likes the way she comes like this, the way her pleasure spills over gently like an overflowing cup and she can ride that current instead of being helplessly sucked under the surface and drowned. It's a powerful experience, being at the heart of a volcanic eruption of ecstasy many times more powerful than most people will ever experience in their lives and being able to feel it with some degree of conscious awareness. Even if Aire doesn't work to perpetuate it, it'll take her a while to come down off it afterward.

And at that point, well... it's up to Aire how exactly she wants to play this.

Aire will gently snuggle up against Tanthe from the front and behind with her two bodies. Her tentacles will vary the pressure they're exerting slightly over time, and Aire's cocks and tentacles will keep satisfyingly stretching her out, but she won't do more than that. Tanthe is very thoroughly snuggled, right now, and nothing much else.

But her warmth, her affection, and her lust for Tanthe dance around beyond her shields, brushing up against Tanthe's mind.

The goal, here, is to snuggle Tanthe mentally and physically at the same time. And hopefully that mental stimulation will wake Tanthe up enough that she can start to feel desire, again, instead of just pleasure, satisfaction and perhaps the ghost of a preference. If the result is that Tanthe's sadness bubbles up again to the point that she broadcasts it to Aire, well, she only gets to do this once. She will wring every last ounce of satisfaction out of it she can.

At first she just... rests, enjoying this new variant in her sensory landscape. In fact she dozes off for a couple of minutes somewhere in there.

When she wakes up from that brief nap, she's a little more alert than she's been in a while, and manages to hold an entire conscious thought in her head long enough to observe that there are two of Aire now and that's novel and interesting. (Her sadness also comes closer to the surface here.)

Slowly, from there, in the absence of a constant haze of intense distraction, she builds back up. She remembers everything that's been happening while she was too out of it to react, and, sleepily and hazily but consciously and knowingly, reacts to it: an appreciation for Aire's affection now tinged with reluctance since she recognizes that Aire is more enemy than friend, a lively academic interest in the implications of her own experience that is tinged with deep sorrow that she'll never get to study it herself, a quiet bafflement circling endlessly around the question of why this is even happening...

Around that point, she starts regaining enough conscious control of her faculties that she can make an attempt to pull her thoughts back in and keep them private, and instinctively does so. But then, a split second afterward, she extends a clumsy telepathic probe towards Aire with a question-shaped message, entirely nonverbal and messily packaged with a whole heap of both relevant and irrelevant context: Aire wants to see her thoughts, yes? (why?? is this happening???) (telepathic contact is so fun soft good cozy...) (she's still despite everything glad she can't pierce Aire's shields and mess around in her head) (sad sad sad) (wistful impossible desire for the friendship they never really even began to have) (being filled like this still feels so good...)

What.

She was expecting, perhaps, for Tanthe to blearily think that fucking again sounded nice. At the outside. Not for her to basically come back up. This is absurd.

She lets her incredulous awe out from behind her shields. And then, why not, Tanthe can have the rest of what's going on explained to her.

The thing happening to Tanthe's mind as she's transformed, that incredibly strong pleasure, and that change and alteration by pleasure, is one half of the most beautiful, valuable thing in the universe. Especially because Tanthe's mind was so beautiful before it began to change. The other half is when people decide to give in to pleasure, when they throw themselves into wanting it wholeheartedly. But the thing that's most beautiful, most valuable, is when those two things combine, when people make that choice to be thrown to the pleasure themselves, coerced by its pull or even tricked but not forced, knowing of the danger that all that pleasure brings, and their mind falls apart under the consequences of that choice.

Aire does actually like Tanthe. She wasn't faking those emotions, that sense of being impressed, when they were talking earlier.

Aire's thoughts about about Tanthe feature keeping her warm and safe and cozy quite a lot, in addition to the obvious ones fantasizing about giving her more pleasure. Tanthe feeling good things is good, above and beyond even the normal way that inflicting pleasure on people is good. Aire isn't quite sure why.

Aire wants to give Tanthe every pleasurable thing in the world, just to watch the joy ripple through her mind.

This is the best day of Aire's life, and she halfway expects it to stay that way, no matter how long she lives.

Wistfully, in a part of her mind she's not paying much attention to, she's going over a beautiful world she knows she'll never get to have. One where Aire is the greatest fleshcrafter to ever live, and can make it so Tanthe comes back up fully. One where Aire is the friend that Tanthe wishes she was, out of self-interest if nothing else. One where they have fun driving Tanthe up from baseline to seven unlocked wombs every night for the rest of eternity. After all, like Tanthe said, it's very important to understand what you want, even if you don't have much chance of getting it.

She keeps all of those thoughts floating outside her shields. Tanthe can pick her way through them slowly, one bit at a time. Even if she has, miraculously, managed to pull slightly out of her tailspin into mindless pleasure, she's still more than a little out of it.

A few seconds after Aire responds, Tanthe's shields unfurl, though by that point the train of thought that led her to open herself up again has mostly dissipated and only echoes remain. (Something about... not seeing any good reasons not to?)

It takes her a while to pick through it all, and she frequently loses the thread and has to start over, or misses part of a thought and has to go back and look again, or misses part of a thought and doesn't go back and look again. And she can't, actually, hold the whole picture in her head at once, so a lot of her reactions are repetitive, 'discovering' the same thing twice without fully noticing; and a lot of her reactions are shallow, seeing one thing without connecting it to the rest of the picture. And in at least one case, she can't hold her whole reaction in her head at once, so it bubbles up in a mess of fragmentary concepts that never resolve together into a coherent whole. But, in broad summary, her reactions look like this:

Confusion/happiness/uncertainty/affection/confusion, at Aire genuinely liking her. (Shy delight and empathic-recognition-of-shared-drive, at Aire wanting to make her happy on more than just the inflicting-pleasure level. Strongly mixed feelings about Aire wanting to fill Tanthe's mind with pleasure just to watch it go.) (A bizarre mix of happy comfort and sharp bitter anger, at the idea of Aire wanting to keep her safe as though any outcome of this situation from here could possibly count.)

A sort of confused wry wistful unhappy gladness, that she could give Aire the best day of her life.

Interest-because-people-are-interesting/delight-in-prettiness-of-minds, at Aire's explanation of what the Best Things In The World are; it seems like there's more to this reaction, emotions spinning through her thoughts that don't link up properly because her conscious mind isn't big enough to fully process them anymore, but it's hard to say exactly what's going on there except that she's probably on some level belatedly recognizing the loophole that let Aire dodge her truesight with incomplete reassurances.

A huge hot heaping mess of a response, to Aire's daydream of an impossible future friendship. No single emotion gets enough unalloyed airtime to be definitively recognizable as this feeling linked to that aspect of the situation. The pain/grief/betrayal/sadness/hurt cluster is definitely in there somewhere, and something that might be despair warring with wistful distant hope (and winning), and - arousal? (though that might also be background noise) - and ??frustration??, though the undertones of that one are all over the place and some of them don't make any sense in context, fond-exasperation and deep-aggravated-annoyance and just-give-me-the-puzzle-already-I-can-FIX-IT and and and... and below those, a hundred other less nameable emotional ingredients seething in an overflowing overboiling cauldron all together. She comes back to this one repeatedly and her thoughts about it never get any clearer.

After she's wrung out just about as much reaction as she can to all of this, she keeps going anyway. She's been through the whole thing for several iterations with no new content generated before she manages to reflect on her own memory and realize she's stuck in a loop. Realizing it isn't enough to get her unstuck, though, because her instinct in this situation is to keep stubbornly trying to fit it all in her head at once even though, right now, she genuinely can't.

Well, if Tanthe's going to get stuck in a loop Aire can gently guide her out of it. Most of her complicated thoughts vanish back behind her shield.

Before they do, a few responses to Tanthe's thoughts bubble up. A sense of confusion at the idea that there's some more important sense of safety than being unthreatened, at the idea that Aire keeping her physically safe forever wouldn't count. An incredulous feeling of maybe-you-could at Tanthe's feeling that she can somehow fix things. Tanthe's incredible. She doesn't think she's ever looked at someone's mind and felt like she was looking up before. 

But then they're gone, and Tanthe is left with warm affection and burning lust. Much easier to process.

(There's an explanation for the thing about safety but it's slightly too complicated to fit properly in Tanthe's thoughts. Maybe if she had a few iterations to work on it she could get farther than the are-you-kidding-me incredulity and the flickers of memory of herself nearly crying as she explained what she feared most in the world.)

(Similarly, she has some sort of reaction to Aire being impressed with her mind, and at least some of it is pleased/flattered, and it's going to be hard to ferret out the rest unless Aire decides to continue the conversation.)

So. Affection and lust.

As it happens, Tanthe is also feeling affection and lust, though rather more conflictedly.

There's a half-formed thought circling around her head. The logic of it isn't fully visible, because it isn't fully expressed, isn't fully considered; it's a descendant of the why-not logic that led to her opening her thoughts again, and Tanthe is in no state to retread multi-step logical paths when she already has their cached results available.

The conclusion at the end of the tangle, however, is: well, why shouldn't she give Aire what she wants?

And what Aire wants... is for Tanthe to take pleasure in her own destruction, and choose it knowingly. Right?

If Tanthe hadn't had that thought about giving Aire what she wants, she probably would have kept the conversation going. But as it is, that distracts her enough that her further thoughts will just have to stay private.

She thinks she understands the safety thing, now. At least partially. Two or more closely related concepts are attached to the same word, unified by shared reference to do-not-want. She understands the second one well enough to see why it would get the same name, it's like a generalization of the more basic version of the concept, making reference to things beyond physical safety because things beyond physical safety matter to people, but are cared about in similar ways on an emotional and intellectual level. And it's clear why the more generalized version takes primacy; there are plenty of things Aire values in that manner above her physical safety, and providing her with the latter in exchange for taking the former from her would not be doing her a service.

Well, this is the kind of confusion that happens when you lose all your memories and then spend a few decades trapped in a cave with only a pit worm for company. Concepts drift away from the words used by other people and you don't really have a way to realize that before it comes up. 

She can't give Tanthe the more important kind of safety, and she chose not too at the start of this interaction. Oh, she'd give it to her after this was over if she could, because of that odd sense that Tanthe's happiness is important in and of itself, but she's already demonstrated that she'll choose her own satisfaction over Tanthe's more-important-safety if they're in direct conflict.

She'll still work very hard to keep her the less important kind of safe.

And then she's too distracted by the hottest thing she's ever heard to keep musing on the nature of safety.

Aire's cocks twitch.

And a thought drifts outside her shields.

Yes. That's what she wants more than anything in the world.

Tanthe can do that.

It takes her a minute, and a few false starts, to remember how moving her body on purpose works. But eventually she sorts herself out, and embraces the Aire in front of her. There are tears running down her face but she's not really paying attention to them.

Words are far, far beyond her at this point, so she sends concepts and mental pictures instead. Thoughts, drenched in desire, of Aire fucking her slowly and teasing her final gate. She's too distracted by sadness and despair to really want to go all the way right now, but that? That she can want. And the rest will follow, if Aire gets her worked up enough.

The sadness and despair is unfortunate, but she can't get a participatory Tanthe without them. Something in her feels like there must have been some way to thread that needle, but no, Tanthe does not want to give up her mind, and is too resilient, too thoroughly herself, for that to be bypassed. The ability to do anything purposefully at all necessarily implies an ability to feel what she is right now.

Aire leans in and gently kisses Tanthe's neck, again and again. And she can slowly thrust up into her, just deep enough to tease the entrance to her last womb. Nice and slow, soft and gentle. At the same time, slow gentle motions by her tentacles across Tanthe's body can start back up again, little caresses and nothing more.

Aire isn't paying enough attention to her own mind to notice, but underneath all that lust, she's feeling the same thing as the Black Eye cultists were when they described something as sacred. 

That emotion tumbles through her shields along with the rest of her warm feelings for Tanthe, mixing in with her affection and desire.

Her clumsy embrace turns to gentle clinging, and she squirms a little, then a little more. Pleasure ripples across her sensory landscape, and she throws herself into it. Her already-minimal coherence starts to fade, but she keeps the structure of her plan firmly fixed in her mind. It is not that complicated of a plan. All she has to do is—enjoy sensation, feel these feelings, immerse herself in them—embrace desire, feel that teasing pressure and know what it means and let herself want it—give in to the nightmare, let want become need become the final irrevocable choice.

So far, step one is going well. And step two is not far off. She remembers what it's been like, every time Aire opened another gate, how it wasn't just more pleasure but different pleasure, a whole new way to experience her senses, every time. At first she's more curious than anything, but her curiosity, boundless as it's always been, is being rapidly overtaken by lust.

Clinging is so good. Aire finds herself a little surprised by just how good. She can feel Tanthe's desire over telepathy, but apparently even with that physically demonstrating that desire still adds something extra.

She'll keep her thrusts nice and slow as she builds Tanthe's lust. At the terminus of each thrust she presses gently against her last gate, but she's quite careful to stay gentle, even as her arousal builds and she finds herself wanting to push against that entrance harder. She doesn't want to risk jarring Tanthe out of the mindstate where she can make choices.

She is being given a gift. She is being given a gift, on purpose, even though that purpose might just be "why not". Tanthe feels affection for her, complicated though it may be. And for some strange reason even now Tanthe is still glad she can't hurt Aire through her shields. Somehow, those facts combine to add something new, something pleasant, along some strange new axis of goodness that she's never even noticed before.

Every slow gentle thrust tips her farther and farther toward wanting.

She hesitates, still, for a while. Long enough that the edges of the tiny space in her mind where thinking still works are starting to fray pretty badly; long enough that she's started whimpering into Aire's shoulder at some point, she's not really sure when.

And then, trembling with fear and desire, she imagines Aire opening her final gate, imagines being wiped away by pleasure. She holds the image in her mind deliberately and purposefully. There's no way she can ask in words; this will have to do.

That's enough.

Her secondary body lets itself ejaculate in Tanthe's ass as soon as she's finished parsing what Tanthe means. She presses herself against Tanthe from behind and shudders with the pleasure of it.

It helps her bleed off enough lust to make sure she can push through Tanthe's next womb slowly enough for Aire to savor the sensation and watch Tanthe's mind as she does it.

Aire thrusts her cock as deep into Tanthe as she can, until her cockhead is pressing harder against Tanthe's last entrance than it ever has before. And then she casts her spell again, and her cock starts to grow. First, the pressure against her last gate increases. And then its clear Aire's cock is going to push though it.

To Aire, it feels like Tanthe is squeezing down on her deliciously.

Eventually, the pressure is enough, and Aire's cock pushes through that last entrance with that lovely popping sensation she's grown to crave. It's so good, so right, her orgasm is upon her and her cock is already spurting as it finishes pushing through. Aire is overcome with a monomaniacal desire to be as deep inside Tanthe as she can be, only half of that from the raw animalistic pleasure Tanthe herself is radiating, and she locks her hips in place as she pumps Tanthe full of cum.

Even after her cock is through, it keeps pushing. The need to avoid penetrating Tanthe's next entrance is absent and so her cock can grow enough to push back against Tanthe as her womb contracts around it.  And Aire cums, and cums, and cums some more, her orgasm mixing with and buoyed by Tanthe's as she radiates it against Aire's only mostly-impermeable shields.

Her mind expands, thrown open wider than ever before, and fills with a near-incomprehensible torrent of pleasure. It's not obvious at first what the major difference is, between this gate and the last.

(Aire's cock, pressing up against the far wall of Tanthe's seventh and final womb, can feel her heart beating on the other side. But that's just a side note.)

The difference, which comes clearer and clearer over time, is this:

Her cascades of interconnected pleasure tend to get larger as they go on, and not smaller.

As long as she's feeling something, anything, at all, physical, mental, emotional, psychic, any kind of experience whatsoever, it spreads its echoes into the vast interconnected network of every single thing it's possible to feel, and every single thing it's possible to feel has become a kind of pleasure, all wrapped up and tangled together so that one tiny sensation sparks a dozen more that each spark a dozen more that each spark a dozen more, and so on, and so forth.

It may not be possible to make this first and final orgasm stop. She might just keep feeling its echoes forever in a constant seething storm of perfect ecstasy radiating through a thousand thousand variations in the space of a single breath and then turning around and finding a thousand thousand more.

And yet it's not at all meaningless to keep stimulating her, because stimulating her changes that experiential landscape, paints fresh patterns across the map of her senses. It's a constant riot of noise but it's not pure noise, not indistinct undifferentiable meaningless loudness; it's hundreds of voices all singing at once, and every touch changes a tune. And Tanthe's mind is just big enough to hold them all, to process all that pleasure in all its deep intricate ever-changing beauty, though it leaves her without so much as a single thought to spare for anything else.

Aire would be sad about Tanthe's permanent inability to feel anything but the pleasure, and she likely will be later. It puts the last nail in the coffin of their ability to ever do anything like this again. But for now, the pure, transcendent lust and satisfaction Tanthe's state inspires in her overshadows everything else. She lets it overwhelm her, drive her actions and fill her mind. It's probably the case that she could have maintained control through that, but why should she try?

The beating of Tanthe's heart feels good, light but pleasant enough that if not for her overwhelming lust she could keep her cock here, pressed into Tanthe's seventh womb, for hours, and just bask in Tanthe's pleasure.

But she wants more.

Her tentacles raise Tanthe up enough that Aire can thrust in and out of her and use Tanthe's seventh gate to get herself off. It's a long time before she stops thrusting in and out of Tanthe's last womb, using that pleasure to form the focal point in Tanthe's symphony and satisfying her almost uncontrollable desire to thrust into Tanthe again and again to watch the effects ripple out across Tanthe's mind. Eventually, even through that addictive sensation, she wants something different. 

She wants that pop sensation, but more. 

Her tentacles lift Tanthe up high enough that Aire's cockhead is the only bit of her cock left inside, and then they pull her back down, and Aire's cock pushes through all of Tanthe's wombs in a row. Pop pop pop pop pop pop pop, go all of Tanthe's gates one after the other. The pleasure, the way that pushing through those gates is now thoroughly associated with breaking Tanthe's mind, the effects she can see rippling through Tanthe, all of these things combine to leave Aire a willing slave to her own lusts. She repeats that slower, less intense motion for a while, wringing another few orgasms out of herself, before she decides to change things again.

She wants it faster.

She flips them over so Tanthe can rest on on top of Aire's secondary body. Then she grabs hold of her hips and she thrusts into her, over and over, hard enough to make Tanthe's entire body jiggle. Pushing through those entrances over and over again, feeling Tanthe wrap around her and experience perfect, unending pleasure, is better than anything she's ever experienced.

She wants to cum in Tanthe's cunt, she wants to cum on her, she wants to cum down her throat and up her ass, and probably a large part of how fixated her mind is on physical pleasure and orgasm is a result of Tanthe's own experiences flowing through Aire's partially-dropped shields, but the rest is Aire's own overflowing lust.

She radiates all her own desires and feelings just to watch them impact Tanthe and ripple through her.

The ripples are intricately beautiful, never the same twice. Tanthe feels everything Aire does to her, and enjoys it, and it all echoes endlessly through her eternal orgasm. She hears every thought Aire shows to her, and it's all pleasure because everything is pleasure. There's nothing left in her but pleasure. Nothing at all.

She isn't crying anymore.

Tanthe not crying, when she notices it, provokes a complicated response in Aire. It's good that she isn't sad anymore. It's bad that she can't feel sad anymore, that there isn't enough space left around the pleasure for her to feel sad. And not just in the way where it means this night can't ever happen again.

So, if that isn't the only reason, why else is it bad?

For the same reason it would be bad if Christa ended up spending the rest of her life using Aire to not have to think. The actual underlying thing is complicated enough she can't think about it in the background while furiously fucking Tanthe as many ways as she can think of, but she can tell that it comes down to the same thing, that the same underlying concept is lighting up.

She spends hours fucking Tanthe as many ways as she can think up. There's the obvious of just putting her magically grown cock in places Tanthe hasn't experienced it yet, but that's gone through relatively quickly, even with a number of basic positional variations thrown in. Then she tries cocooning  Tanthe securely in squeezing, massaging tentacles and moving her like a toy, and from there to suspending Tanthe by tentacles like they're ropes. And, of course, there's the straightforward way of moving on from there of combining all those prior things in different ways.

The novelty of each new way for Aire to fuck Tanthe and make her mind ripple in new beautiful ways keeps Aire intensely, monomaniacally focused on this moment, on finding more and more ways to pleasure Tanthe.

After she's worked her way through most of the obvious purely-pleasurable things to do, she experiments with something new, genuinely different in kind rather than just variations on pleasurable stimulation. 

Inflicting moderate, light pain, small bites here and there. Tiny little nips on the lobe of her ear and slightly harder chomps delivered by her secondary body to Tanthe's shoulders.

Does Tanthe like it? She hopes she likes it, she wants to give Tanthe as many nice things as she can.

It's new and different, a novel sensation that sparks novel patterns; and while there is not a lot of Tanthe to go around, there is enough of her left to react positively to novelty and variety. (She's been having the same novelty-positive response many times over the course of Aire's explorations, but this is a particularly strong one because pain is an especially intense and distinctive sensation that's especially different from other things Aire has done.)

Good! Additional nice things to give Tanthe!

She experiments with this. Different parts of Tanthe's body should feel pain in different ways, and she can catalogue how exactly they all make Tanthe light up. For now she sticks to lightly nipping all across Tanthe's body, just to get a general feel for things. Is there a place where she likes to be nipped most? 

Most places seem to be about equally good, but she's especially in favour of light pain on her breasts and nipples; the sensation-cascades seem to get particularly sparkly there, for some reason.