And yet, when she checks, she will discover a startling absence of Tanthe!

Oh no.

Did someone grab her? Hopefully a Seducer is just taking Tanthe on a pleasant adventure to additional shielded tentacle pits with different options or something like that. Aire herself had planned on something like that for the future. 

How can she find her? She needs to keep Tanthe safe. Tanthe is one of the four genuinely important things in the entire universe.

Maybe she's still close by?

She turns to exit to begin her search.

What's that just outside?

It's a startling presence of Tanthe!

On her feet, shields firmly in place, naked and surrounded by a halo of floating knives. Her three flying eyeballs hover above her head like a triangular crown, out of the way of the knives, looking in all directions.

She looks unspeakably furious; and, in keeping with that image, she doesn't speak. Her mind brushes against Aire's shields, almost a caress, a touch too delicate to be carrying an assault. As for what exactly it contains, Aire will just have to receive it to find out.

Tanthe! Tanthe is angry, and this is bad, but Tanthe is okay, and this is good! Also, Tanthe is together enough to be feeling angry, and this is even better!

"You're okay!"

She's a bit worried about the knives, but she does have a secondary body if Tanthe decides to kill this one. She keeps her attention on her shields, bolsters them enough that Tanthe shouldn't be able to scramble her mind even if she suddenly tries. That would be the only thing that could damage her permanently here, she thinks.

She'll receive that message.

Rather than waste time or effort picking and choosing what to send, she just pours her entire current mental state straight across the channel, with a grace and crystalline clarity that's very at odds with the clumsy thought-spilling she was doing last time they spoke.

The bulk of it comes down to three things:

1. An all-encompassing cold fury, enough to freeze the the Blue from edge to edge, born of pain and violation - not just of her body but of her trust, the way Aire first manipulated her into feeling safe and then betrayed that fraudulent faith to her own ends. The way Aire listened to her explain what she feared most in the world, and then did it to her. That's not an okay thing to do, at all, ever.

2. A calm certainty that, point 1 notwithstanding, she doesn't want Aire hurt. Aire being hurt would not solve any of her problems nor advance any of her goals. She has never, not from the point of her earliest memories, been a vengeful person; it comes of being in everyone's head all the time, she thinks, the ability to not just know but constantly and fully experience that everyone, all the time, no matter what they did, had reasons for doing it that make sense from their own perspective and are born of their own needs and desires, and that everyone, all the time, no matter what they did, is a person who experiences the world in the same kind of way as Tanthe, has preferences and goals in the same kind of way, feels pain in their body and mind in the same kind of way. Hurting people hurts them and she doesn't like doing it.

Which brings us to 3. She wants Aire's side of the story. For both personal and practical reasons.

3a. On the personal level, she wants the closure of understanding how this happened; she remembers their time together well enough to reconstruct some of it, but she's missing a lot of the pieces, and she wants the whole story. (And she remembers a wistful glimpse of a hypothetical friendship that she caught in Aire's thoughts, when they were together, and—let's not overstate the case: it is just barely within the realm of theoretical possibility that, with enough honesty, with enough understanding, with enough sincere remorse, they might get to the point where being friends again could be on the table. It's certainly not happening any other way.)

3b. On the practical level, point 2 notwithstanding, if Aire cannot be convinced to stop going around doing the Red Queen's work for her, it is morally necessary to stop her by force. Really, showing up to the place where everyone is congregating to fight the world-devouring threat, and inflicting personality-death on the volunteers? What was she thinking??? Could she not, at bare minimum, go around destroying people for her own amusement absolutely literally anywhere the fuck else?!

And, since Aire has thoroughly forfeited the benefit of the doubt that allows Tanthe to take people at their word when she is looking right at them with her seer's eyes, it's full telepathy or bust. If Aire would like to have this conversation, she should have it the same way Tanthe is: completely and totally open, holding absolutely nothing back. Or, if she prefers, she can leave the area of the Deep-Heart-Glisten-Palace and never return. Or (telekinetic-proprioceptive awareness of a dozen orbiting blades) she could start a fight, but Tanthe would really rather not go there.

(Because Tanthe is sending everything, it's also possible to discern that she's... kind of horny. Hornier than she ever let herself get, before all this. She's not lost in that deeply interconnected network of sensations anymore, her senses are mostly back to their pre-Aire state, but her baseline arousal is much higher. And... it might be more than just baseline arousal? But the main focus of her thoughts is nowhere near this topic, so if Aire wants more detail she'll have to ask.)

Aire will not ask.

She trusts Tanthe. She's seen enough of the inside of her mind to really doubt that she'll go back on anything that she agrees to.

So. She sends Tanthe a telepathic query. Does Tanthe promise to let Aire reset to this state here, her shields back up, before attempting to engage in any sort of combat with her, if she's unsatisfied with what she sees in Tanthe's mind when she lets her shields down? Oh, and, just to clarify, either way she isn't holding Christa hostage, or anything. If Tanthe decides to kill her she'll let her extract Christa and move her out of the crossfire first, if she was worried about that.

(She's holding her emotions together until Tanthe says yes, or she decides to let this body die. She can react where Tanthe can see it, rather than in her head alone.)

Yes, Aire can let Christa go and put her shields up before they fight, if it comes to that. Tanthe is still very much hoping it won't.

Then Aire will let down her shields, and with them the iron-tight control she's keeping over herself.

Emotionally, what she's feeling right now is complicated. Tanthe is okay, and mentally whole again, which is one of the best pieces of news she's ever received. Also, Tanthe is entirely reasonably furious with her, and Aire has never actually experienced someone she cares about being angry with her before, and it turns out to be terrible. And also, she couldn't even escape it by fleeing or even, if it was in her power, rewinding time to before Tanthe recovered. Her mental model of an intact Tanthe would now include well-enough-modeled fury for her to feel it. Which means the only possible escape from something that that turns out to be unexpectedly painful is to find a way to be such that an intact Tanthe just actually isn't angry with her.

She sort of doesn't like this whole caring about people business. First she had to worry about Christa realizing she what type of person Aire was and becoming incredibly sad about it, and now she has to worry about Tanthe being angry with her for being evil. On the other hand, even if she didn't care about them, they'd still be two of the only valuable things in the universe, right? And she wouldn't even know. That would be even worse. Or, would they still be valuable? They'd be valuable to this version of Aire that exists now, she decides, and the other versions of Aire can look out for themselves.

There's an unpleasant sick to her stomach feeling burbling through Aire as she thinks back to Tanthe broadcasting that she still doesn't want Aire hurt. Tanthe will probably recognize it as guilt, but Aire doesn't. She's never felt it before.

Aire thinks about Tanthe's desire for sincere remorse. How can she tell whether she's feeling that? She thinks she understands what it would feel like, from Tanthe's thoughts, but she doesn't think she feels that. Not properly. Tanthe lost a Tanthe, but Aire gained the experience of flooding a Tanthe with pleasure in the process. There are exactly four highly valuable things in the universe (The process of altering a mind through pleasure, Aire, Christa, and Tanthe) and she doesn't know what to do when they conflict, that's never happened before.

Maybe Tanthe could try smushing her own feelings about what Aire should be feeling into her head really strongly, and maybe they'll stick? She wishes she was the version of herself that would feel what Tanthe wants her to entirely on on her own, that version of Aire would get to say she felt sincere remorse, and mean it, and maybe Tanthe would stop being angry with her, and it would stop hurting. That would be nice.

It's only been a few weeks since she left her cave, and she doesn't have any memories from before she entered it, just long, dreary decades on her own. She wishes she still remembered before she was put in there. She'd already have run into situations like this, and so she wouldn't be thrown into emotional turmoil as soon as she was in a position where two things she cared about were in substantial conflict. She doesn't actually know whether there actually was anything, before the cave, but she has the vague feeling that surely there must have been, she has procedural knowledge for all sorts of things even if she doesn't have the memory of learning it.

But. That's all about Aire's emotions, not what Tanthe wanted to hear. She'll grab control of herself a bit, rather than just letting her thoughts go every which way, and explain properly. Okay?

Despite everything, Tanthe does still care about Aire, in specific and not just as a generic person whose feelings exist and matter. She feels sympathetic to Aire's misery and turmoil; she wants to figure things out between them, wants to chase that distant hope of reconciliation. But she holds back from getting too deep into that tangle just yet, because she wants to hear Aire's explanation first. There'll be time afterward to talk it out.

And Aire will move on to explaining.

So, like Tanthe probably heard, Aire cares substantially about four things. The first thing she ever remembers caring about, in her cave, alone in a world of grey rock and a single pit worm, was the prospect of inflicting so much pleasure on a person that it changed them. That they were left dumber, or hornier, or with changed priorities, or something similar, with the entire idea made much better if the person involved willingly participated. The second thing was herself. She can't actually remember which of the first two came first. She might have started with both of them already, before she lost her memories.

After who knows how long, Christa stumbled into her cave and freed her. Aire misunderstood how things worked, and thought her own increased sensitivity and many, many alterations, meant that if Christa experienced too much pleasure while wearing her, it would damage her mind. She happened to be wrong, but when Christa lost herself to lust and both she and Aire thought she was risking damaging herself, Aire didn't stop her even thought she could have, and even deliberately seduced her into it. When she learned later that she was wrong, that it temporarily disabled her, she was so happy. She could do her favorite thing in the world with the same person multiple times!

Oddly, Aire's mind seems to be directly running over the things she expects to make Tanthe angry at her, that's odd. Anyway, back to thinking in order, this turns out to be a bit difficult.

Aire and Christa spent under a week in Arcadia, and it ended with Christa being roped into serving as the Lord-Commander of the Dragoons' eyes and ears out here. There was kind of a lot of stuff that happened, but for contextualizing why Aire is doing what she's doing that's the bit that matters. Also, over the course of that week, Christa went from just a useful tool to the third of the valuable things in the universe. Aire doesn't feel empathy, but reading people's minds through sufficiently focused telepathy seems like maybe it substitutes. There's got to be more, Aire was never at risk of caring about anyone else, but Christa and Tanthe sure do seem to have that in common. But, well, that's why Aire is here, rather than somewhere else. Christa would have been out here alone and sad without Aire, and Aire's secondary body (Aire has two bodies, if Tanthe kills this one it won't really matter, now that she thinks about it she actually feels like she shouldn't have asked Tanthe to promise to let her shields back up without explaining that letting her shields down was the only thing that made her really vulnerable in advance, she wishes she'd done that in a different order) can stay safe and sound in Arcadia while Aire looks after Christa here.

And, as far as inflicting personality death on the people here goes, she was, and would still be if Tanthe hadn't turned out surprisingly durable, intending to inflict very moderate damage through intense magical pleasure, offered freely to people she'd seduced. Her plan was to lay out the whole tradeoff, get a little dumber and hornier in exchange for a lot of pleasure, after addling them with her pheromones and aphrodisiacs. She'd already given the offer to a few lovers without most of the seduction steps and they'd just said yes. One of them was of the philosophical opinion that their brain was for feeling horny, and Aire probably wouldn't damage anything that mattered, and certainly even if she did it would be worth it. So Aire can satisfy that particular drive of hers with people who are okay with it. Or even just through the lesser version she can do with Christa, if she has to. She thinks that it would be worth it, if she got a Tanthe who wasn't angry with her out of the deal, although she's not actually sure. She's never gone deliberately without satisfying her fetish before, and for all she knows it would eat away at her ability to care about anything else. She's sure it would do some of that, but the question is how much.

Also, Aire is just getting back now from completely failing to damage a lover, or even seduce them into being willing to do evil deeds for her. She left them enjoying themselves in the bar's basement in a way where they're unlikely to decide to stop themselves, due to alcohol being to them both stupefying and a very powerful aphrodisiac. Aire was going to grab her in the morning, entirely out of self-preservation and a desire to do the whole seduction process again, rather than due to anything like ethics. If Tanthe decides to kill Aire she'd probably prefer to know about that, so she can grab her. She'd probably be grabbed on her own, if she was valuable to the war effort, but she expects Tanthe doesn't really care about that. The bar is friendly and will just leave her alone if she asks, she doesn't need to worry about that.

What Aire did to Tanthe was Aire seeing the opportunity to do something she couldn't otherwise do, and jumping at it, lest her only opportunity to have the thing she wanted most in the world slip through her fingers. Aire's own abilities so far seem to only extend to "hornier and dumber", and even that's plausibly temporary, she doesn't actually know that it lasts any longer than a few days. Around halfway through the process, Tanthe shifted from a person who was valuable only for that, to the fourth valuable thing in the universe.

Even before Tanthe had explained the entire situation with her wombs, Aire was planning to seduce her and then offer her more intense pleasure in exchange for slight damage, and then let her make the choice. Once Tanthe explained further, Aire's plans changed to doing what she did, albeit with much more participation from Tanthe than ended up actually happening, before the very end. And then Tanthe kept pulling her mind together in ways Aire sort-of-recognized, but she kept doing it in ways Aire herself couldn't, despite Aire's stronger will stacking the deck in her favor. It was absurdly impressive, and the first time Aire had ever felt like she was looking up as she read someone's mind. And also Tanthe was incredibly cute, and Aire was feeling all of her emotions as Tanthe radiated them. And probably that and some other stuff Aire doesn't understand is how she ended up important thing number four. If Tanthe wants Aire can go over her memory and radiate what she was feeling and thinking over the entire experience? That would probably take a while, but, well, if Tanthe wants her to that's the most important thing she could be doing with her time, so it's not like she's reluctant. 

Doing what she did to Tanthe was the most beautiful, most sexually satisfying experience she's ever had. She'd have been willing to trade another few decades in her cave for it. That's why she doesn't know whether she can properly feel remorse. She thinks, from what she can get out of Tanthe's mind, that feeling sincere remorse should involve not being willing to do the thing again. And while she wouldn't do that to Tanthe again, on account of the fact that it would make Tanthe sad, if presented with a person who wasn't innately valuable the way that Tanthe is, she would be willing to do it again. Although maybe the fact that Tanthe would predictably be angry with her for doing so is enough to make that not true? On reflection, she thinks it is. But that's not remorse, not really, that's still just Aire prioritizing her own selfish desires. She doesn't feel ethical concerns herself, but she's seen them in other minds, seen them in Tanthe's mind, and she knows enough to know that not wanting Tanthe to feel negative emotions about her really isn't the same thing.

Tanthe listens to all this and mostly doesn't comment, except to fit the pieces into her model of the situation, cross-reference against her own memories and inferences and build it all together into a coherent picture. Her anger is ebbing; maintaining anger isn't a natural state for her, it runs against the grain of her mind, and if what Aire did to her had been anything less than the worst conceivable thing she's not sure she could've stayed mad this long. It's important, though, because anger is the emotion you use when you need to stand up for yourself, and Tanthe really needs to stand up for herself here.

She might ask Aire for that recap later, but not yet; the overview is enough to be going on with.

And as for her reactions, now that she's seen the whole picture...

...she wants to find her way to the world where they can be friends, she really does. The shape of Aire's feelings here is pretty close to the sincere remorse she was asking for; see there and there? (She reflects Aire's own unrecognized guilt back at her, along with Tanthe's broad understanding of the places she's seen that emotion before and the ways she's seen it work. People handle their thoughts and feelings very differently but there are still some common themes.) It's true that Aire doesn't seem able to make the leap to valuing people in general, but you don't have to value people in general to avoid destroying their lives, there are lots of possible good reasons to avoid destroying people's lives. And she is, at least, satisfied that Aire definitely doesn't want to destroy Tanthe's life in particular. That's... a reasonable place to start.

Tanthe thinks she could maybe be friends with an Aire who, even if she didn't care about most people, still agreed to treat them well. She doesn't see much wrong with doing this sort of thing to people who are fine with it; it's the deception and manipulation and betrayal of trust that she objects to. (And, separately, the mind-bogglingly terrible strategic implications of inflicting extreme seemingly-irrevocable damage on volunteers against the Red Queen. Though it makes sense that Aire succumbed to the unexpected temptation that Tanthe represented, she still feels like it was a remarkably bad idea even on purely selfish grounds, just because what if Tanthe's remarkable psychic talents turned out to matter in the fight? Aire is as doomed as anybody else if the Red Queen rolls over the continent in a wave of indiscriminately destructive mind control.)

And at this point it perhaps becomes relevant that—

She shares her memories of waking up. There she was, embraced by tentacles, as insensate or perhaps more accurately omnisensate as ever, temporarily empty of assorted penetrations while she dumped her latest clutch of assorted eggs out into the pit. And, as she caught her breath in the aftermath, before the tentacles returned, a sudden clarity swept up out of the depths of her mind where it had been building for days. She saw everything that had happened to her, understood it more fully than she ever managed while distracted by too much pleasure, and was immediately angrier than she's ever been before in her life. The anger isn't the part she's focusing on, though; the relevant thing is that the way her recovery worked, the structure of it in her thoughts, looks innate and intrinsic and foundational to her practiced psychic eye. It wasn't possible to see it before it actually happened, but in theory—and it is a theory she wants to study in considerable depth before putting any weight on it in practice—in theory, she could do it again, and not only could but would, will do it again, inevitably, every time something like this ever happens to her. Every time she gets wiped out, she'll come back stronger than before.

And if that's the case...

...then the thing that has been her worst nightmare for years, that when it happened was the worst thing that could possibly have happened, the opening of the gates that fills her mind with pleasure until it overflows and stops being capable of anything else... actually starts to look kind of hot? Except that the main difference between awful-hellish-nightmare-scenario and actually-kind-of-hot rests directly on safety and trust, two areas where their relationship is currently severely troubled.

If Aire can do that kind of thing to people who are fine with it, she's very comfortable making the promise to treat people well. It loses her the joy of seducing people into making a choice they know they shouldn't make, but she can cope without that, she thinks. And then there's the obvious option of just working at a brothel somewhere and making seeing her free if you can resist for a while first. 

Aire agrees that doing what she did to Tanthe was stupid even on selfish grounds. Although Aire does feel like Tanthe is perhaps still underestimating the strength of Aire's desires, here, and the rarity of people like Tanthe? She'd read rather a lot of minds, and never encountered one shaped like Tanthe's, so incredibly beautiful and thus so satisfying to flood with so much pleasure Tanthe can't cope with it. And when the rarity of that is combined with the rarity of people who can have what Tanthe had happen to her happen to them, you get a very rare opportunity indeed. She would absolutely have accepted, say, a one on in one hundred chance of death, to do what she did. If she thought that she'd never meet anyone like Tanthe again, that that was her one chance, she probably would have taken a one in two chance of death, even. But, yes, there's no reason to imagine that Tanthe is the only person in the world who is like that, so it was a rather obvious mistake, and one that reflects a flaw in her judgement that she really should work on.

When Tanthe thinks thoughts that vaguely suggest that there might be a possibility for Aire and Tanthe to do something like that again, she instantly, and apparently automatically, starts trying to generate solutions. There's the obvious option where Aire just actually is trustworthy for long enough that Tanthe starts to trust her, but what if that doesn't work? Perhaps there's a way for her to ensure her trustworthiness in a way that would be obvious to Tanthe, if reading her mind didn't do it? Aire doesn’t think a slave collar would work, but maybe there are stronger versions she wouldn't be able to resist? Or maybe Tanthe could do something to Aire with her telepathy? Probably risky, who knows whether it would work. Mind magic maybe? Aire can do that, maybe there'd be something she could do that would force her to not do anything Tanthe didn't agree to ahead of time? No, that probably doesn't work, mind magic is a very blunt instrument. 

And then of course there's the question of whether doing so would actually be safe, and Aire is in complete agreement about not wanting to risk it if they don't know. It would be terrible if they had a lovely time, expecting everything to turn out okay, and then it turned out Tanthe recovering like this was a one time thing. Aire has no way to help there, however, and any help would of course only be useful if they'd managed to get over the "justified trust" hurdle.

Well, Aire can just decide to be trustworthy, and even if it takes a really long time, that should work. And even if it never does, Tanthe being happy somewhere on the opposite side of the world, or enjoying herself with someone else, is still good, even if Aire can't see it happening. The thought does make her a bit sad, though.

...if they are going to be friends, Tanthe would really rather they get there by means other than mind control. Aire does seem to be enthusiastically consenting to the hypothetical mind control, so, could be worse, but still, it seems like a last-resort kind of solution to her.

For the immediate future, if Aire is willing which she certainly seems to be, the thing Tanthe needs in order to feel reasonably safe around her is for her to let Tanthe read her mind like this all the time. It won't fix the whole problem by itself, but it's definitely already helping.

Another thing that she speculates might help is... how awkward would it be for her to meet Christa? Christa and Aire are important to each other, and Aire and Tanthe are... complicatedly also important to each other... and she's never been in this kind of position before, of trying to be close to someone who's close to someone she's never properly met, and she thinks she'd feel like she had a more secure foundation in this relationship if they all knew each other. Things seem like they're somewhat complicated between Christa and Aire too, though, even if not the same amount or in the same way, so she's not sure if this is a realistic possibility.

Then again, if Aire promises to treat people well in a way that involves not substantially deceiving them, well... that has implications for Aire's plan to keep Christa in the dark forever about who she is as a person. But maybe, if Tanthe meets her, she can help Aire figure out how to tell Christa the truth in a way that doesn't make her very sad, or at least only makes her sad temporarily and leaves them still friends afterward?

Tanthe can read Aire's mind, then. Aire actually sort of enjoys it? It's nice, to be known by someone she cares about, and have that person feel less unsafe as a result. Rather the opposite of what she would have predicted the result would be.

Aire thinks treating people well shouldn't completely include not substantially deceiving them? There are people in Arcadia who would kill Aire for being a skinsuit. Not for any of the very good reasons they'd have to maybe want Aire dead, just for the skinsuit bit. And Aire doesn't think she should have to treat people so well that she neglects to deceive them about completely ethically neutral traits that cause them to attempt to murder her. She'll do it if that's the price for interacting with Tanthe on good terms, though. Mostly by just not going back to Arcadia outside of her cult, admittedly. But still.

Oh, also Aire has a cult that worships her as a divine being. It was a very eventful six days in Arcadia.

Tanthe can meet Christa, if she wants. Aire doesn't think it would be very awkward, as long as Tanthe isn't, like, radiating distrust of Aire through telepathy or body language too strongly. Beyond the dishonesty at the heart of their relationship, things aren't substantially complicated between Aire and Christa, although admittedly that is one heck of a complication on its own.

Aire thinks Christa would really like Tanthe, actually. Part of what Christa's so sad about is her recent realization that far fewer people than she thought are good in the same way that Tanthe is. 

But. The bit about keeping Christa in the dark seems straightforwardly true. But Christa's already so sad. One of the things that she's clinging to, emotionally, is that Aire is on her side, which is true. But, more importantly, she's clinging to the idea that even alone out here, she has Aire, and Aire isn't like the people who hurt her by exiling her here. And. Aire really doesn't want to hurt her by revealing that that's not true, that she's worse. And, well, she thinks telling Christa in a way that doesn't make her sadness and disillusionment even worse would probably be very hard, and maybe impossible. On the other hand, Tanthe is herself, so perhaps that means a lot less than it would in other circumstances. 

However, Aire wouldn't be too surprised if even without any effort to phrase things well at all, Christa still ended up friends with Aire afterwards, as long as Aire agreed not to hurt people. She and Tanthe have that in common. Rather a lot of things in common, actually. They're both ethical telepaths who Aire has done her favorite thing with, who she wouldn't be surprised to learn were still willing to be friends with Aire after she did something to betray them as long as she agreed to be good. Seems to be rather a bit too much in common for her to imagine it's a coincidence, perhaps those things are part of what's required for Aire to find a person innately valuable.

Deceiving people because they'll murder you if you don't is fairly reasonable. Deceiving people in an intimate relationship like the one Aire has with Christa seems much less defensible than that, and shades into the manipulation/betrayal thing that Tanthe was so upset about; she feels like, if you are trying to be very close friends with someone, you should avoid keeping things from them that you'd expect them to be upset that they hadn't been told. Tanthe is on board with trying to break the news in a minimally saddening way, though! Even if that means waiting until Christa knows Tanthe better and can rely on her as well as Aire, and is generally in a better place in her life so she'll have an easier time handling shocking news. Just not waiting, like, several years. Several years would be kind of too long.

...she likes the thought of the three of them eventually being good friends? It's a nice thought. She's glad that Aire is willing to work with her to make friendship possible. It would've been really sad if she'd had to exile Aire from the Deep-Heart-Glisten-Palace, and still pretty sad if they'd been able to peacefully coexist but not fully reconcile. It was heartbreaking, when she finally managed to realize that the friendship she'd thought she had with Aire was nothing more than a lie; it's good that maybe they can be real friends now.

And wow, that is a lot to have in common with someone. She's really looking forward to meeting Christa!

Although, in the meantime... what exactly did Aire do with Tanthe's clothes? It would be nice to have them back; she had some sentimentally valuable stuff in her pockets, and is still a little uncomfortable walking around naked all the time.

So, the thing about deception makes sense to Aire on a "hypothetical fully informed Christa would be sad if you kept this from her" level, but it remains the case that everything about deception being bad for personal relationships remains very non-native to Aire's mental architecture. Mostly on account of the idea of caring about the other party in a relationship being new and also somewhat non-native, but still. Aire is flagging this fact on account of trying very hard to operationalize being actually trustworthy, and so she's deliberately not steering away from thoughts like that.

Aire actually kept Tanthe's clothes safe at a fallback location in the Green, mostly for sentimental reasons. Which is something Tanthe will probably find moderately disconcerting. In Aire's defense she thought Tanthe's mind was gone forever, and so she gave Tanthe's stuff a point of pride in the, um, cave, to do something similar to what the people in Arcadia did with gravestones.

Anyway, the fallback location in the Green is a moderately sized cave with a very well-hidden and very small entrance, and so is not accessible for things that aren't able to squish very small or send one half of a [Warp] through. It's where she was planning to operate out of with Tanthe, Christa, and probably a few other people if her cult and the Deep Heart Glisten Palace both fell. She has a decent amount of stuff stashed there, including around a third of the eggs Tanthe laid. Aire can bring Tanthe there if she wants via portal, instead of just heading off herself to retrieve things? That way she couldn't manage an escape even if she tried. There is the hypothetical risk that Aire could have an ambush set up there, but she doesn't think she has the mental self-control not to think about that now that she's thinking about the possibility of ambushes. Wait, that's not true, she probably could for a few seconds. Maybe they can wait for said few seconds to pass, and then they can portal off? Aire can get them there and back without needing a recharge from making Christa orgasm, so she doesn't need to wake her from her current doze, and she can keep recovering.

Tanthe is getting tired of holding up this halo of floating knives. With a thought, she sweeps them together into a fairly tidy stack and lays them down gently on the flesh-floor at her feet. Her flying eyes spread out from their crown configuration into a more natural stance, drifting this way and that and turning slowly to survey the area.

She really appreciates Aire making an effort to be actually trustworthy! She can try to explain in more depth why she thinks deception is bad for personal relationships but she should probably not get into that in too much depth right this second.

...Aire making a sort of grave for Tanthe in her fallback location is... honestly really sweet of her? Maybe a little disconcerting but like, the disconcerting part of thinking about someone keeping a sort of gravestone for you is not the part where you were mourned, it's the part where you died.

Overall Tanthe thinks she is just not that worried about Aire escaping. She would be pretty unhappy about it if Aire decided to leave and never return, but she did openly give Aire the option of exile from the Deep-Heart-Glisten-Palace as an alternative to trying to work things out between them. Working things out between them is definitely her preferred option here! But she's not going to try to drag Aire into it by force if that's not what Aire wants. Aire can just go get Tanthe's clothes from the cave, and if while she's in the cave she decides not to come back, well, that's sad but sometimes sad things do happen.

Aire departs, and Aire returns. All told, it takes less than a minute. She has the entire route from here to there mapped out in advance, in case she needs a quick escape, so [Skim]ing there is so fast as to be indistinguishable from instantaneous. And grabbing Aire's clothing is as simple as ducking into the cave, opening the small nondescript Tanthe Chest that's tucked away on its own in a side chamber, and removing Tanthe's folded clothing from underneath a set of metallic and gemstone eggs, containing one of each type lined up in order. The Tanthe Chest is in a side chamber so she wouldn't have to see it too often and be sad. She has a different, larger chest with more of Tanthe's eggs that she isn't planning on keeping forever in a different part of the cave.

She keeps the portal open as she does, allowing Tanthe to keep track of her thoughts and verify that there's nobody else thinking thoughts in the cave. Never once does she think about the possibility of escape. 

And then here she is, giving Tanthe's clothing back to her!

Tanthe breathes a quiet sigh of relief and puts all her clothes back on. She checks her pockets for her stuff: maps, fancy spectacles for seeing unusual things, fancy collapsible telescope, sunstone lantern, and most importantly, her necklace. One of her great-grandma's emerald eggs, in a silver shell on a steel chain, lightly enchanted with youth-preserving magic. She wasn't wearing it earlier because she was uncomfortable with the reminder it entailed, but that ship has thoroughly sailed by now, so she takes it out of her pocket and puts it on.

She did actually prepare in advance for the possibility that she'd end up making herself a halo of floating knives, and there's a bunch of pouches stashed in various pockets that she can take out and attach to her belt and then put her knives away in. She's much more comfortable after she does that; she doesn't really like explicitly maintaining the option to hurt people as an immediate possibility.

With all her stuff settled back into place, she bounces slightly and smiles at Aire for the first time since... well, since the last time she smiled at Aire.

"Thanks," she says, and now that she is clothed and not prepared to do violence, she kind of wants to hug Aire. She immediately second-guesses this impulse; she feels awkward about it and she's not sure what Aire thinks of the idea or how she feels about it, though presumably she's about to find out.

The extra movement Tanthe has to do to get her clothing back on really tests Aire's ability to keep her mind off of her attraction to her, but through the power of looking in another direction she manages it. That's not to say the start of a fantasy don't manage to slip through her mind, but she does manage to divert it from anything too explicit beyond a few background flashes, and cut it off before it gets any further than a barely-formed image of an unclothed Tanthe smiling happily down at Aire as she presses in close. 

Aire is sorry about that. She's only so good at self control, and Tanthe is attractive enough on both a physical and mental level that trying to keep her thoughts off of things like that is difficult. The clothes make it easier, though, and she relaxes some of the now unneeded control she was wrangling her libido with.

Aire reacts very positively to the idea of hugs! Hugs with Tanthe are of incredibly high value. Aire hurt Tanthe, but the other way around hasn't happened at all. Aire's feelings about Tanthe are purely, uncomplicatedly positive, and now that Tanthe isn't radiating anger she isn't even feeling any negative consequences of having those feelings. On the other hand, given the entire situation and those mental images that just rushed through Aire's mind, plausibly Tanthe's feelings have moved on from awkward to unpleasant or possibly unsafe, so Aire isn't actually expecting this situation to result in hugs, just feeling pleasant about the hug impulse in Tanthe.

Overall she appreciates Aire stifling her fantasies for the moment, but also she's not really mad about Aire having fantasies to stifle? It's kind of flattering how into her Aire is.

She dithers a bit on the subject of hugs. Aire's not wrong that the connection with Aire's fantasies increases her hesitancy, but... it's not like Aire is going to actually do anything ill-advised if Tanthe hugs her, right? Probably? Perhaps Tanthe should ask Aire about this and wait to hear her response, yes, good idea.

Aire promises not to do anything ill-advised if Tanthe hugs her, by her best guess of what Tanthe herself would consider ill-advised. She will stay still, lift her arms and wrap them around Tanthe's shoulders, and then let go when Tanthe does. If Tanthe somehow loses control of herself and feels an insatiable desire to continue hugging, Aire will end the hug herself after, say, ten seconds, not that Aire thinks something like that happening is actually likely. Tanthe is Tanthe, after all.

Oh, there's also the pheromone problem. Aire releases pheromones that mess with people's heads somewhat, but they're outside, Aire's wearing clothes, there's a bit of a breeze, and Tanthe's currently upwind, so it should be fine. At any rate, the pit Tanthe was in would have still had some of her pheromones floating around in the air when she woke up, Aire was only gone for a few hours, so Tanthe should already know how she reacts to minor exposure. But if Tanthe doesn't want to risk it Aire understands.

At the explanation of the pheromones, Tanthe nods slowly, inspecting her memories and finding the places where their influence looks likely. That should be reasonably easy to compensate for. And it's probably a good idea to try low-stakes experiments now and then.

All in all, despite some lingering awkwardness and nerves, she thinks a hug is probably a good idea. She steps towards Aire with her arms held out.

Aire will open up her own arms and the, when Tanthe is close enough, wrap them around her. Otherwise she stays still, as she promised.

There's a scent that Tanthe will recognize, around Aire, and if she presses her face against Aire's shoulder or something like that it will be stronger. She could probably manage to give herself a pheromone high if she spent a while nuzzling into Aire, but as long as she doesn't do that, the wind will solve the problem.

It smells nice, and she observes that she instinctively wants to chase it, but that would be a manifestly terrible idea so she doesn't. She just gives Aire a gentle squeeze and holds on for a few seconds and then lets go.

It was a good idea, she thinks; everyone carries at least a little of their mind in their body, and now she has reminded her body that Aire is a friend, and it's happier and more comfortable.

Aire is of the opinion that hugs are very good, and also that Tanthe is very good.

At the moment all four of the things she cares about are taken care of. All of the people she cares about are alive and well. Tanthe is trying to make herself think of Aire as a friend. Something in Aire unclenches.

She will have to let Christa know what kind of person she is in the future, but spending too much emotional energy dreading that wouldn't be productive. And for now, in this moment, everything is good.

And then the hug is over, and Aire goes back to thinking about preparing for that future again. Probably Tanthe could meet Christa in a couple of hours, if she wanted. It might be a bit longer or shorter, but that's around how long it will take her to properly wake up.

Awwwww. Yeah, hugs were a good idea.

Tanthe would like to meet Christa in a couple of hours! What should they do until then? Maybe Aire could explain her relationship and history with Christa in more detail, if she thinks Christa would be okay with that?

She's quite sure Christa would be okay with that. She hasn't really noticed Christa having substantial privacy intuitions, just a general desire that people not know things that might make them hostile to her, and Aire doesn't think there's literally anything about Christa that might cause Tanthe to feel hostile towards her. However, she does have really strong instincts about other people's privacy; she's incredibly bad at controlling her telepathy, she's just sort of always receiving information, so she developed a principle wherein she was very careful not to even accidentally spread any information she picked up from someone else's mind. So, given Aire's new "treat people well" thing, it would probably be best to elide over anything that touches on anything that would be private for other people. Which is actually somewhere north of half of their history, actually, as Aire said, rather a lot happened. And, Aire doesn't think she can manage that with her shields fully down. So, maybe really broad strokes, for now?

Under the circumstances, really broad strokes seems reasonable, then!

Then on to broad strokes! Or, well, broad except for the definitely-not-private bits.

Well, their interactions started with Christa freeing Aire from her prison, and Aire taking advantage of this to, unbeknownst to her temporarily, melt Christa's brain with massive amounts of pleasure. This isn't private, so Aire mostly just lets the thoughts of what happened float through her mind, with a bit of forcible distance from her own arousal and the physical sensations involved. It took Christa around a full day to recover, and during that time Aire impersonated her and snuck into Arcadia. At this point Aire had approximately no information and didn't realize precisely how stupid that was. 

Also, some of this is going to be not-private by virtue of everyone in Arcadia already knows it, like the dragonfucking incident, but not the- nope, not thinking about that, thinking about that, chickens, think about chickens, they have so many feathers and Christa's family used to own some-

Anyway, infiltrating the city and realizing Christa was actually fully present. She only actually realized during seducing- nope, private- after realizing Christa was fully present, Aire did a similar technical-truth thing with Christa to get her to think the entire brainmelty encounter had been basically accidental. She also gave control of their body back over to Christa, and mostly restricted herself into nudging Christa into doing what she wanted.  Due to Aire's pheromones, getting her to do what she wanted was pretty easy.

The efforts to preserve people's privacy are appreciated and also very cute. Chickens do have numerous feathers. Correct chicken facts.

Christa is coming across as naive—not that Tanthe is one to talk, she somewhat self-consciously observes—but also a total sweetheart. And pretty cute. Aire clearly has a type.

Aire is also realizing the thing where she has a type. And Tanthe is absolutely correct about the naivete, Christa was really rather gullible. Although, in her defense Aire is good enough at wielding her shields that she let Christa see that she was telling the truth about a bunch of stuff without letting her see that it was misleading. And she spent all of her time interacting with Aire under the effects of a lot of pheromones, and also Aire's various seals and tattoos which all impair stuff like that at least a little, although some of them are under Aire's control and can even be used to counteract the others. But Aire shouldn't think about that stuff for too long, it's distracting, so back she goes to explaining.

The main non-private thing that happened next was Christa going on a date with a Dragoon that she ended by fucking his dragon. Which is when everything very suddenly went very wrong.

Actually, some of the rest is private for "possibly some powerful people will want to kill you for knowing it, but probably not" reasons, rather than privacy reasons, but the people involved are all very far away. How does Tanthe feel about that, should Aire deliberately elide over some things?

Tanthe is kind of unsure about that! Is this related the cult Aire thought about earlier? It's sort of hard to guess how best to proceed without already knowing who the powerful people are and why they might want to kill people for knowing their secrets most of the way across the continent. Maybe safest for Aire to elide over that sort of thing for now, and she can always get into it later if it seems relevant?

Not rally about the cult, but about some people who don't get along with the cult, and perhaps an additional very dangerous person who is something of a wildcard. She doesn't know why they might want to kill Tanthe except a general sense that at least one of the people involved seems almost absurdly paranoid.

Anyway, as requested, Aire shall elide.

So, the cult grabbed Aire and Christa from there for mostly good reasons, with the end result was that people thought the Dragoon, a boy named Alard, had had his dragon Yui rape and then eat Christa. Christa was mostly unconscious during this time, overdosed on pleasure and dead to the world. While Christa was unconscious, Aire engaged in a complex scheme involving framing someone for framing someone for framing Alard, to hopefully prevent dangerous people from looking too closely at Christa in the aftermath of her disappearance, since Alard was very obviously not the kind of boy to do something like that to anyone who knew him. Christa woke up just before she could properly put her plan into action, and Aire explained the situation and reassured her that she had a scheme to fix most of their problems, although not the details, which Christa still doesn't know.

The most relevant piece of information from here is that Aire's scheme didn't clear Alard, and Christa was displeased with this. So she escaped from the cult and turned herself in to the Inquisitors to clear Alard's name.

Such a sweetheart. A sweetheart with perhaps a looser grasp of tactics and strategy than would be optimal, but a sweetheart nonetheless.

Indeed. She's very lucky they didn't get a telepath in to rip the knowledge of the cult and Aire from her mind, or just torture the information out of her. But, they didn't do either of those things, so all the city knows is that a group rescued Christa from what they thought was rape-by-dragon, that group read to Christa's telepathy as well-intentioned, and apparently Christa had sex with some of the people in it. Far worse than if they didn't know they existed at all, but not the worst possible disaster.

Ah, additional information that probably matters to Tanthe, the cult reads as confused but genuinely under Aire's thumb to her, with only one possible exception, who is only an exception due to being very devoted to Aire's safety and a tendency to favor quick action over consulting with Aire first. She's never known the exception to kill except in defense of another's life, but Aire's known her for very short period of time and is also sure that's mostly due to caution rather than ethics. The exception is also of vital importance for protecting the lives of all of the members of the cult, making things rather delicate.

But, back to Christa. Her interrogator had truesight, and noticed Christa was sort of dancing around some things. In response, he dug up an old law that would allow him to exile Christa from the city for the crime of deviant-promiscuity for fucking a dragon, and threatened Christa with exile unless she cooperated and gave him more information about her rescuers, the cult, in which case he would "forget" to file the paperwork. Rather predictably given who Christa is as a person, that didn't work. Also, the Lord-Commander of the Dragoons, Alard's father, happened to be in need of an informant out here who would be able to cope with the sex-filled nature of the Pink, and who could also be relied upon to be loyal. And so, he offered Christa a deal; she serves as his eyes and ears out here and checks in with him regularly, and he gets the charges dropped. She agreed. Aire broke into her cell to rescue her a bit later, and ended up deciding to follow her out here. She also came to a rather important realization in that cell, part of why she's so sad, about the rarity of genuinely good people, but as much as Christa doesn't have very strong privacy instincts Aire's mental model of Christa starts to object if Aire goes into more detail than that without her express permission.

Tanthe really appreciates Aire protecting Christa's privacy!

Their time together really has been very eventful, hasn't it. Well, hopefully things will be a bit calmer now.

Hopefully. But, given the thing where they're in the base of the resistance against a threat to the entire world that the gods themselves seem concerned about, she isn't very hopeful.

That is a fair point.

Still, at least maybe the three of them can look out for each other? That would be nice. And they can try to avoid having any of them end up kidnapped or imprisoned again in the near future. And then if they join the resistance and go off and do dangerous things they will at least be doing the dangerous things on purpose for a really good reason, which seems better than tripping and falling into them by accident.

Looking out for each other seems like a good idea, yes. Aire can spot problems coming from certain directions by virtue of being approximately innately evil, Christa by virtue of having experience living in a large city, and Tanthe by virtue of her innate people-reading skills, in addition to just being very impressive.

Aire agrees that doing dangerous things on purpose is better than by accident. If it's by accident, you never know exactly what it is you're getting into. Much more dangerous.

Although, all that said, if they do join the resistance, and Tanthe and Christa are predictably going to want to, she thinks, they'd probably end up split up. While Tanthe seems like, what with the regeneration and Metal Magic, she would be very capable in direct combat, Aire and Christa wouldn't be as useful- wait, no that's not true. Christa would plausibly be rather useful as a telepathic relay, if Tanthe's busy fighting. Even if she doesn't have too much range, not having to yell during combat would be an advantage. And even though Aire is used to thinking of herself as not particularly capable in a fight due to a lack of offensive options, Protect Magic would mesh well with Christa's support role. She wouldn't be fighting alone, after all, so her lack of offensive options wouldn't matter as much.

Although, given Aire's position as a highly renewable supply of Portal Magic she might end up primarily used for that. They might end up all together filling a similar role to one of the ways the Dragoons were used back in Arcadia: a mobile strike force with a lot of offensive power that's very difficult to put down. They'd need a few extra people to fill in the additional firepower, and all of that does depend on the doctrine the resistance ends up using while fighting its war. Imitating successful militaries from around the world makes sense, but who knows, perhaps the Pink already has its own system of war developed that doesn't resemble what's used in the Untainted and the Wastes.

Much as Tanthe expects to hate being a front-line combatant, she acknowledges that it's probably where she fits best. But it would be really nice to get to work with Aire and Christa. Maybe they can keep an eye out for more people who seem like they would complement their group well both personally and tactically?

That seems like a wise way to do things! Probably one of the better ways to do that would be to actually sign up properly with the resistance. Tanthe was indisposed for the announcement of what precisely is going on, but the Tentacle Princesses in charge here have already divided things into a number of primary goals they're seeking to accomplish and an approximate order of importance.

Actually, Aire was there for that, why doesn't she just bounce her memory of the announcement to Tanthe?

Sure!

And she bounces it! Her memory is very good, it's nearly like Tanthe was there herself. Including the bit where there she was participating in an orgy, actually. Although Aire is focusing her recall on what was said, rather than physical sensations, some of the remembered physical sensation still comes through. When Aire realizes this she sends a vague sense of apology and manages to steer her focus enough that only what she saw and heard the Princesses saying enters her mind, although it's clear that that involves quite a bit of focus on her part.

Aire herself didn't volunteer to help with anything, and Christa was out of it enough that she didn't manage to parse the actual words enough to want to volunteer. 

In retrospect this was an obvious failure mode of asking to hear about an announcement being made at a gathering of Tentacled. She appreciates Aire adjusting her focus to omit the parts that give her trouble.

It sounds like Aire is thinking of their group as best suited to a direct combat role, either in the push to the Spire or more likely in raids to free the Red Queen's subjects, does that sound right? That's, well, terrifying, but so was coming here at all and that has managed to turn out all right so far. Tanthe would also like to check in with the psychic barrier people, both to find out if she can help with that and to see if anyone has suggestions for how to avoid grabbing people by the brain when she gets intimate with them. Particularly if she intends to get intimate with Aire again, she would like to be able to be in telepathic contact at the same time and not have that turn into a disaster.

Aire was mostly thinking that direct combat was what it sounded like Tanthe would be best at, and then realizing that Aire and Christa could support that rather well. And as far as their role in the war effort goes, mostly she was thinking that they would be really good as a rapid response team to Red Queen attacks on either the Palace or the infrastructure of the Barrier. They could get around very quickly with Portal Magic, and Aire has the type of memory that would, in fact, allow her to memorize a hundred different [Skim] routes out to positions that might need defending. Tanthe's probable vulnerability to magic or aphrodisiac based attempts to incapacitate her via arousal and then carry her off to use her as a power source for the Red Queen makes Aire sort of leery of participating in raids, or even the attack on the Spire. That said, she predicts that the Spire attack is probably important enough that Tanthe will want to participate despite the risk.

Actually. If Tanthe wore Aire, well, one of Aire's seals in an Arousal Seal, which she could use to dull Tanthe's libido to the point that she would be pretty safe from incapacitation-by-arousal. Not that Aire is suggesting they try something like that soon, Tanthe doesn't have enough information or a strong enough foundation of trust with Aire for that, the idea just happened to come to mind, and, well, Tanthe's getting all of Aire's thoughts, right now.

Tanthe's first reaction to the thought of the Arousal Seal is academic interest and curiosity. This is the closest she's ever been to someone who could actually tell her how such a thing works. And then Aire goes on to remind her that they shouldn't actually try it anytime soon, and she agrees immediately; but she's still pretty curious about the mechanics. On second thought, though, Aire might not be familiar with the details of her own construction and function? It's okay if she's not; it makes sense given her circumstances and Tanthe will try not to be disappointed.

Aire in general has an understanding of how her various features work from the perspective of operating them, but none from the perspective of creating them. So, no, as much as she'd like to, she can't help Tanthe too much.

In general, her many, many functions tend seem to all work together on the theme of, essentially, inflicting Tanthe's post-several-opened-wombs state on her wearers. It just also happens to be the case that Aire can negate part of that with the use of her Arousal Seal, but even that feels to Aire like it was probably added to be used for its ability to increase arousal and heighten libido, and it just happens to be a tool that can be used for the opposite purpose as well. Aire should probably be thankful that her Arousal Seal can be used that way at all, from the rest of her suite of features she has the sense that if her creator could have removed that ability, they would have. 

Well, if Tanthe is very curious they could try exploring -no! It would be dangerous, she has very vague memories of her creator or modifier, she doesn't actually recall which, suggesting they were a very capable and also very unethical fleshcrafter. But, actually, proper trust probably includes finishing that thought, instead of cutting it off. They could look around where Aire was imprisoned. She recalls that there was a hidden entrance to some sort of facility or something like that behind where she was imprisoned, possibly making Aire the world's oddest and most extravagant guard dog. They hadn't interacted with Aire in literal decades, and also hadn't used the entrance Aire was imprisoned in front of, so who knows what's going on back there. Aire's strongly suggests against investigating a very dangerous and very unethical fleshcrafter, even if they might have useful information. 

...Yes, investigating there seems like a very bad idea. Tanthe is still really curious, but even if they do someday go and have a look, it should be after the Red Queen crisis at minimum, when they'll have more experience and a better understanding of their powers and maybe even a few more allies to bring along. Definitely not anytime soon.

Maybe, with all these Tentacled around, they'll end up meeting fleshcrafters who can explain how Living Clothes like Aire are made, enough to get a start on understanding the theory behind Aire in particular even without her specific creator's notes?

That would be interesting! Learning is one of the things Aire enjoys, although it doesn't rise to the level of one of the four highly valuable things. And while most of Aire's effects on her wearers come from her mutations and composite tattoo, all of the effects of which get applied to anyone wearing her, the individual factor that would be most relevant to Tanthe would probably be the Arousal Seal. Which is a bit more esoteric, and rather more particular to Living Clothing.

It really would solve quite a few of Tanthe's problems if they could find a way to allow a human to place a seal like that on themselves, one under their own control, wouldn't it? Or just find a fleshcrafter willing to make sub-sapient, very easily controlled Living Clothing with that feature that Tanthe could then wear, although that sounds both difficult and probably very expensive. And who knows what the Pink uses in place of money for things like that.

Those are some interesting theoretical possibilities to explore, yes! Although Tanthe is a little nervous about them, especially the idea of a subsapient Living Clothing; she's not sure she'd be comfortable wearing Living Clothes that could not understand the explanation of why it's really important not to do certain things to her. And having to feed orgasms to a subsapient entity also sounds awkward, and what if her controlling the clothes meant that she couldn't feed them properly because of the same effect that doesn't let her orgasm by herself? Then she'd be left with a poor creature made entirely for her convenience that she couldn't even sustain the life of, and that would be very sad.

You see, this is why it is much more convenient not to have ethics, Tanthe should try it sometime.

No, Aire doesn't actually mean that, Tanthe would stop being Tanthe if she didn't have ethics and that would be terrible. And also the rest of those concerns are entirely valid even in Aire's internal mental language which doesn't reference ethics at all. Or, well, mostly; she can't say she has the particular feeling that feeding orgasms to a subsapient entity would be awkward, she spent multiple decades surviving on that and never found the experience anything but occasionally boring. But Aire comes fully equipped with the ability to understand the rest of Tanthe's concerns.

She will indeed not be trying not having ethics. She would be so bad at it even if she did; the experiment would be over as soon as she read a few people's minds and remembered how she feels about them. They're all different and interesting and full of thoughts and feelings and they change and grow and learn and interact with the world and form social connections and relationships through which they can support and strengthen each other! How could she not find them so precious and important?

Anyway, yes, she admits that finding it weird to feed orgasms to a subsapient parasite is something of a personal quirk. It's probably substantially because she's still pretty hesitant on the subject of orgasms in general, and a little bit because she's pretty hesitant on the subject of interacting closely with subsapient minds in general—it always makes her feel a little off-balance to be trying to communicate with something that can technically be communicated with but only just—and she's not entirely sure about the rest.

Huh. She thinks she's just realized something. So, the difference between the way that Tanthe feels about people and the way that most people feel about people is sort of like the difference between Aire lack of anything like empathy for most people when compared to the sort of get an approximation of it she gets if she's in enough telepathic contact with someone. Only, instead of only having just having the thing Aire has, Tanthe has that and empathy, and so things compound. She knew that in words before now, but this is the first time she's felt like she can extrapolate out from where she is to where Tanthe is, to understand what it might feel like to generate that inside herself, instead of just seeing Tanthe doing it.

It would be so exhausting to feel about everyone a bit like how she feels about Tanthe and Christa. But actually, Tanthe doesn't seem exhausted by it, so perhaps she's wrong. And it's not quite the same, Aire's care for Tanthe and Christa is a noticeably different thing from the way that Tanthe care's about people in general. But she definitely recognizes that feeling of intense fascination. 

And on the subject of finding Tanthe fascinating, she hadn't actually been paying quite enough attention to notice that her hesitance around subsapient minds was a personal quirk of Tanthe's, and not something shared among many people with strong senses of ethics! It makes sense as following from a combination of that and her telepathy, and probably a bunch of other miscellaneous Tanthe traits she hasn't had the opportunity yet to observe.

Actually, that thought of Tanthe's about being hesitant on the subject of orgasms reminds her of something. Has Tanthe realized yet that all of those large bursts of pleasure she was getting while they were together were orgasms? Even the ones in, say, her throat, rather than in more traditional areas?

Well it's hard to say whether she realized it, her whole capacity for conscious thought was kind of dodgy for a while there, but it certainly isn't a surprise to hear at this point. It's very odd, though, she's never heard of anyone being able to orgasm that way. Then again, it's clear that her family's notes on her ancestors were not fully comprehensive; she glances down at the palm of her left hand, where she can see clear as day a slightly charred-looking black blotch, whose origin and nature are a complete mystery to her because she only noticed it after she escaped the pit.

(The black blotch is not visible to an external observer, but Tanthe does not know this.)

Oh. That's concerning. 

Aire can't actually see that with her eyes, she just knows its there from seeing it through Tanthe's. 

Does it feel like anything? Expand or contract or change? 

Aire manages to hold herself back from thinking a bunch more questions. Tanthe hasn't had long to investigate it, she probably doesn't know the answers to most of them yet.

It feels sort of background-unpleasant in a way not dissimilar to being slightly achey or slightly chilly or both, but mostly doesn't impinge on her consciousness unless she focuses on it specifically like she's doing now. It doesn't seem to have expanded or contracted or otherwise changed in the time she's had it. She poked it a few times and it was like so—

She pokes it, demonstratively. It feels slightly stiff, and slightly sore, in a way that feels consonant with the slightly-achey-slightly-chilly background discomfort.

The fact that Aire can't see it through her own eyes, only through Tanthe's, is weird but does handily explain how it could be a part of her curse that didn't get recorded in the notes. On the other hand, maybe it's some kind of weird interaction between her curse and something else. It definitely seems curse-related, what with appearing right after her curse was triggered.

The time it appeared certainly is suggestive.

As far as weird interactins go, it could come from the other part of her line, and be triggered by something telepathy-related, like radiating experiences that are above a certain intensity, maybe? That does feel less parsimonious, though, hypothesizing a curse that's lain dormant on one side of her family for generations. But she does feel like it points to the approximate class of other things that could be involved; Tanthe does have two different sources of oddness, and she feels one of the most likely reasons for her to have something pop up when nobody on either side of her family has had it do so is an interaction between those two sources.

Actually, does Tanthe know how common people with seven wombs are in the Coiner line? She recalls Tanthe mentioning a relatively recent person with five, but perhaps Coiners with seven wombs all share that mark, and that state is simply rare enough that it never got recorded.

She remembers that the number of Coiners who lay copper by default (and therefore have five or more wombs) was quoted to her as about one or two in a hundred; the number of Coiners recorded in the secret books who were known to have seven wombs is four, out of, well, she's not sure exactly, but maybe she can come up with estimated population numbers if she thinks about it...

Tanthe is now thoroughly distracted chasing down her own memories of offhand remarks, family trees, and all other conceivable sources of genealogical data. After a few minutes, she thinks she has an estimate: it seems, from what she can gather, that a little more than four out of five Coiner women are the normal kind with only one womb who lay only gold, and a little more than four out of five of those who remain lay silver, and although her data is too scarce to provide a confirmation, it seems reasonable to conclude that probably a little more than four out of five of those who lay copper have five wombs and the rest have seven. The math also checks out with respect to the number of Coiners who lay copper being about two in a hundred.

Anyway, back on topic, yes, her best theory right now is that only the seven-layer Coiners get the mark, and as there have only been four of them recorded so far - with Tanthe as the fifth - it's very easy to imagine that none of the earlier ones managed to tell anyone about a mark on their hand after they triggered their curse.

Tanthe is very Tanthe, and as she goes down mental rabbit holes, Aire finds herself suffused with warm affection for her. And also rather impressed, that analysis was quick, and probably more important for the "feeling impressed" bit, quicker than Aire could have done it. There's something pleasant about watching Tanthe's mind at work, seeing it all happen in enough detail that Aire feels Tanthe's thoughts have carried Aire along with them, and let her experience what it would be like to be cleverer.

Aire thinks Tanthe's best theory is a good theory! Without telepathy, it would be very easy not to notice the mark in how it effects the behavior of a seven-wombed Coiner with all their gates opened, given Aire's experience with Tanthe they probably weren't very inclined to talk. And even with telepathy, Aire didn't notice it in Tanthe.

In fairness, it's entirely possible that Tanthe did not once catch a glimpse of the palm of her own hand in the entire time she and Aire were together after triggering her curse, or, if she did, that she didn't consciously process what it looked like. They were kind of busy at the time.

Do not think about what exactly you were busy doing, Aire, control yourself or Tanthe might decide it's not safe for her to be around you and that would be terrible.

Aire casts about for something she can ask about that will get her mind off of how absurdly delicious Tanthe is, and manages to recall Tanthe's earlier offer to explain more about the precise nature of the badness of deception in relationships. It sure sounded like she had a more fleshed-out understanding there than "if they knew you were deceiving them, they would be sad, and that would be bad, so you should not do that" and Aire is interested in hearing what exactly that is. No, actually, she knows it might look like she's just looking for a way to distract herself and that would be nice but also she just genuinely is very interested.

Oh! Yes, very reasonable.

Okay so, one reason why deception is bad in intimate relationships is the obvious surface-level reason of "if they knew you were deceiving them, they would be sad", and that can be a sufficient reason if you care intrinsically about that, but it's just a starting point. There's plenty more to be said on the subject.

Deception creates distance, for one thing. One of the purposes of an intimate relationship is intimacy, closeness, sharing yourself with another person and being shared with in return. It can feel awkward or uncomfortable to try to be close to someone while keeping a secret from them that they would be sad to learn you had kept. It can be unpleasant to try to be close to someone who bases part of their opinion of you on false beliefs, when they tell you what they think of you and you know they only think that because you lied to them. When you're with them, you have to spend thought and energy on tracking your secret and making sure you don't accidentally reveal it; you can't be fully and casually open with them, can't speak carelessly in front of them. People often pick up on that kind of distance and, even if they don't have any idea why, notice that their friend or partner is acting oddly towards them.

Deception also makes relationships fragile. If you're keeping a secret from someone, you have to continually put work in to maintain that secret, and it might take only a few slips of the tongue before your deception is irrevocably demolished; also, other people who know your secret might reveal it, either accidentally because they didn't know it was a secret, accidentally because they weren't as careful as you, or even on purpose, whether because they want to damage your relationship with that person or because they want that person to know the truth or for some other reason. In fact, even someone who doesn't know your secret can inadvertently reveal it by revealing evidence for it that they themselves did not realize had those implications! Things often don't go well from there, however it came to that point. By contrast, if you're keeping something from someone and then you decide to tell them yourself because you want to stop lying to them, especially if you're doing it out of consideration for them or for your relationship, they'll probably feel more favourably towards you than if they found out by accident. They'll tend to be less upset and more open to reconciliation.

And deception damages trust. The more you lie to people who think they can trust you, the less it is the case, in practical terms, that you are trustworthy. That's obviously bad in an ethical sense, but it's also bad in a practical one? Trust is a tool for coordination; it lets people cooperate with one another toward shared goals without spending effort and time and energy searching for potential betrayal. When you give the false appearance of being trustworthy, you're contributing to a state of affairs where that tool is less useful, where people benefit less from using it, especially around you in particular, because you will abuse it to betray them. It's some of the same problem as Tanthe was complaining about with destroying people at the heart of the resistance against the Red Queen specifically, though much less immediate, more diffuse and abstract: there's an important project happening, one that can benefit you as well as the people working directly on it, and you're sabotaging it for your own short-term gain. (For the personal benefits of being able to rely on genuine trust, Aire need look no further than the reasons she herself has been trying to be actually-trustworthy toward Tanthe. Which Tanthe really appreciates! It's good to know that that's a thing Aire can do, and good to know that she's putting in the effort to do it!) Under this framework, manipulating people into trusting you so that you can use that trust for purposes they would disagree with is generally bad, but it's especially bad to do in the context of an intimate relationship, where people normally have the most reason to trust each other and are relying on that trust the most.

She could probably come up with more reasons if she tried, but those are the big ones, in her opinion.

Hearing all of this is doing very odd things to Aire's mind. She knew, not all of this, but large parts of it at some point, didn't she? Not even before her memories were removed, but early on during her time in the cave. Well, she already noticed her sense of what was meant by the word "safe" had drifted and become far more specific over decades alone, it makes sense she'd have lost more, during that time. Oh, she didn't really care about a lot of that, she thinks. And other parts don't feel familiar at all. The memories coming back up are fuzzy, but they're clear enough she thinks she can be sure of that much. And she does feel that even in the areas she did grasp she had a different mental focus, and things were more about, hmm, avoiding certain negative consequences of deception, rather than reasons one shouldn't utilize deception in the first place. And of course there is that substantial portion of what Tanthe is saying that does seem entirely new, like its filling in gaps in what her old understanding would have been.

Looking back, there's an odd sort of gradient where her more recent memories are the type of crystal clear that means they'll last forever, and the earliest have that odd fuzz over them. Two competing effects, maybe one imposed by her maker and another innate to her? She doesn't really know.

What else did she lose, during her time alone?

Anyway, moving on from moping-adjacent thoughts, she agrees that what Tanthe is saying makes quite a bit of sense, but she does feel that it's perhaps focused on people with a sense of ethics or at least people interacting with others that have similar values. That doesn't mean it isn't true, just that it seems likely that an Aire not motivated by actually caring about Christa and Tanthe would absorb all of that information, adapt precisely how she did deceived people and perhaps do so more sparingly, but decline to stop using it as a first-line tool.

This version of Aire finds herself feeling a new and unfamiliar yearning when Tanthe describes the purposes of an intimate relationship. Intimacy, closeness, sharing yourself with another person and being shared with in return? She couldn't really get that, not properly, while the version of Aire in the minds of those she wanted to be close to was so far from the real thing, could she?

Yes, exactly! Most people have a social need that looks something like that definition of intimacy, even though different people (and different kinds of people) can relate very differently to that need. If the thing you are trying to have is an intimate relationship like a close friendship or romance, then deceiving the person you're trying to build that relationship with is counterproductive to that aim. (A version of Aire who didn't care about anyone might not want that kind of intimate relationship... but Tanthe thinks that's a little sad? She has a feeling that this Aire is able to be happier, has more sources of good things in her life, than a hypothetical version who had never met anyone she felt moved to care about.)

Aire thinks Tanthe is right that a version of Aire who didn't care about anyone wouldn't feel any sort of desire for that sort of relationship. She finds the idea desirable now, but only specifically with the individuals she cares about.

Aire thinks she agrees with Tanthe about this version of Aire having a higher ceiling of happiness, and in general thinks she's better off for caring. Or, well, she agrees that this version of Aire is better off for caring about who she cares about, she is still of the opinion that caring about people is a double-edged sword. If someone implacably opposed to everything else Aire cared about or someone who was imminently going to die ended up on her short list of things that actually matter, the version of Aire who had to deal with that would be worse off than the Aire who didn't meet anyone worth caring about. But, all in all, Aire is pleased that she has an entire new source of good things in her life. It's just that she's rather aware of the new vulnerabilities that come along with caring, due to the newness of it all.

Hmmmmm. Tanthe thinks that she personally is still better off for being able to care about people, even though sometimes people die or are opposed to your goals. But maybe that's partly because her immediate reaction to the concept of someone implacably opposed to everything she stands for is 'that doesn't sound real'? Short of, like, Literally The Red Queen, she feels pretty good about her ability to find common ground with people! (And even then—she's not going to actually try talking sense into the Red Queen, because that is an insane doomed plan that could not possibly work, but if she were somehow trapped in a room with the Red Queen and inexplicably not mind-controlled yet, she'd give it a shot! Just to see what happened! This is perhaps the same underlying tendency that is leading her to try befriending Aire.)

Aire thinks Tanthe is probably at least partially right about herself, although she thinks she's run into enough people where "try to find common ground" wouldn't work that she thinks that some of that attitude is coming from Peachport's idyllic nature. Arcadia was different enough that she thinks Tanthe would find a bit less success with that attitude there than she did at home. As an example, the individual who interrogated Christa would, Aire thinks, be rather difficult for Tanthe to get along with if Tanthe was, say, declining to inform him of Aire's location so he could send the Inquisitors to kill her.  She can't imagine Tanthe persuading him without leaning on deception during the early stages; she thinks if Tanthe didn't, he would hear "skinsuit" and then everything after would just be taken as more proof that Tanthe was an evil slut to be threatened or punished into submission.

On the other hand, Tanthe is Tanthe. And she did happen to be right about Aire, when Aire herself wouldn't have predicted that to be be the case if you'd asked her when she was back in her cave. Perhaps she should decline to put weight down on her skepticism until the first time Tanthe is actually wrong. And perhaps she's simply thinking on too short a timespan; when Aire imagines Tanthe interacting with him for months, or even weeks, she finds herself much less reluctant to imagine her successfully persuading him that Aire should not be murdered simply for what she is.

Yes, finding common ground with people can take time. And deceiving someone because they'll murder your friends if you don't is a completely reasonable thing to do!

As for Peachport's idyllic nature... Maybe people from Peachport are just special somehow. But maybe most people, if they try, if they have help, if they're embedded in a community where it makes sense to shape your life that way, can find common ground with each other without any kind of special idyllic nature?

Aire thinks that probably the people of Peachport aren't special, and the source of Peachport's idyllic nature is that it's the kind of community that Tanthe is imagining, with people like Tanthe providing the help, and a culture that encourages people to try, and that's plausibly enough. And she does get the sense that something like that would be self-sustaining. If it's just actually true that most people you interact with will be the kind of person who will reach back to find common ground with you if you try to find it with them, and everyone else around you resolves their conflicts that way, and someone who's willing to help lives two doors down the street, it would be pretty easy to just go along with that.

Yes, that sounds about right. Maybe, after the Red Queen situation is handled, Tanthe should try traveling more widely and see if she can find somewhere else to set up that kind of self-sustaining improvement. She's not sure how well it will work, though; she suspects part of the reason she has such an easy time of it in Peachport specifically is that she grew up there.

Yeah, that's a bit of a problem. It does seem like the Pink is mostly the kind of place where people tend to feel like they have common ground with each other, Red Queen notwithstanding, which is perhaps suggestive of some things. It might have something to do with the lack of the risk of starvation or homelessness? At any rate Aire's seen substantially less enduring conflict between Lovers than she did between people in general back in Arcadia. Although with some more thinking it occurs to Aire that that might have a lot to do with just how selected-to-be-a-certain-way the kind of people who decide to travel to the Pink are. But that's also suggestive of what it might look like to find a place where she can do that kind of thing.

Oh, yes, that's an interesting angle to consider. Maybe people are friendlier when they're happier? Or when they're better off and there's more to go around so they don't have such a strong need to guard what they have and press each other for more? They should investigate and find out! ...later. When they're not in the middle of a crisis.

Tanthe is so cute how is Aire supposed to cope with this?

Yes, they should probably not go on a fact-finding mission during the war for the fate of the world. But yes, later, absolutely. It's not particularly what she would spend her time doing if left to her own devices, if she'd never met Tanthe, but seeing the curiosity reflected in Tanthe's mind lends the question a glow of interestingness it wouldn't have to her on its own. And spending her time with Tanthe is what she'd spend her time doing if left to her own devices now that Aire has met her.

(They're beginning to run up on the possibility of an on awake and alert Christa, Tanthe should be able to feel a bleary recognition of an extra person being present in Christa's mind, if she's paying attention.)

Perhaps it is time for Tanthe to start saying things out loud in words then, so as not to leave Christa out of the conversation. She will be careful not to touch on secret subjects.

"I just think it's a really interesting question, why people relate to each other the way they do and how they might relate to each other if things were different!" she enthuses. "But yes. Later. Not now. Though I might still spend time speculating about social dynamics as I get to know the people here."

Christa is telepathic too! Although she does pay attention to her more conventional senses first, when she's coming out of a daze. Aire will follow Tanthe's lead here, it seems like the right thing to do.

"Oh, speculate as much as you want! Far be it from me to pretend I don't find it incredibly endearing."

(Christa is now vaguely noticing that words are being spoken, although she hasn't moved on to parsing them just yet.)

Tanthe has never had to deceive another telepath before and doesn't want to try it for the first time in a three-way link. She's going to stay shielded to Christa until it's time to tell Christa certain things.

"I'm really interested to find out more about how Tentacled society works! Though of course I will have some trouble fully participating even if we do work out a solution to my embarrassing personal problems." Even if she recovers fully and reliably every time, it'll still be inconvenient trying to interact with Tentacled while at risk of having a new addiction crisis and week-long pleasure bender every time she has sex.

Okay, no, that's just flat out correct and Aire is somewhat annoyed with herself for not noticing that concern. The pattern of Tanthe being impressively clever continues.

Also, Aire continues to expend heroic amounts of effort to not think about the details of the week-long pleasure bender. It sort of looks like that effort has fallen far enough into the background that she's not really noticing it. 

"That would be a bit difficult, wouldn't it? Well, I suppose you can learn more through the avenue of having me participate fully and asking me questions." And also maybe it will turn out that Tanthe's subsequent pleasure benders are shorter, she did mention coming back stronger every time, perhaps that includes recovery speed. Although hopefully not so much that eventually she stops going on pleasure benders at all, that would be terrible.

"Oh, would you? I'd really appreciate it!"

(She decides not to speculate in depth about possible futures for now—that can wait until they aren't talking in front of an increasingly awake Christa—but she does hope that everything works out in a way that's compatible with both their preferences in the long term.)

"Of course! Hmm, if I manage my shields well enough, we might even be able to feed you sanitized telepathic input so you can understand it on a nearly the same level as if you were participating yourself." Of course that assumes Tanthe trusts Aire enough to let her bring her shields partially up, and while Aire is confident that will happen eventually, she's much less confident it will happen soon. So probably if that happens it won't happen for a while.

"That sounds fascinating, though very tricky."

If Aire is going to be interacting closely (i.e. sexually) with Tentacled then she's going to be some combination of 'not interacting with Tanthe at all' and 'not sending Tanthe all of her thoughts', and it might as well be more toward the latter, since this does in fact sound fascinating.

"I'm a little concerned about what happens if you share more than you intended, though I suppose you can always deliberately err on the side of sharing a little less than you think you can probably get away with..."

"I'll be careful, and make sure always to err on the side of caution."

Also, Aire needs rather a lot of orgasms a day to be fully fed. She can do that quickly, but there's still going to be some need for mental distance within the next day or so.

Huh. Sounds? Voices? What are they talking about? Sharing things? What are they sharing?

"Oh, hello Christa. Are you awake enough to want control of our body back just yet?"

That sounds like work. 

But okay, sure. There's a new person here? Who is the new person, help!

The new person is named Tanthe. They're nice. And while Christa was unconscious Aire made friends, and she'd like to meet Christa.

If she needs a bit more time, she can have it. There isn't any rush.

No! New person! And Christa felt that affection when Aire said Tanthe was "nice"! Aire has a crush! Cute!

But anyway, it's not like she was sleeping really, just not properly aware. Now that she's basically all there she can shake herself out of the last of it pretty quickly.

And then Aire will give over control of their shared body to Christa.

(And she'll use her Arousal Seal to keep Christa's from getting turned on, Aire's tattoos, seals, and mutations all conspire to mean that she really needs the help. That said, after she's given it, there's no hint that Christa would normally be a cauldron of lust at all. This is also why Aire isn't suggesting she and Christa separate, Christa would be liable to get distractingly aroused by Aire pretty quickly.)

She asks Aire to unroll herself a bit so she can talk with her actual face. Aire does, and the end result is a Christa who looks like she's wearing a ruffled pink collar.

"Um, hello? My name's Christa, I'm Aire's host. It's nice to meet you?"

"And I'm Tanthe. Tanthe Coiner, from Peachport. It's nice to meet you too! Aire told me lots of nice things about you in the course of explaining who she is and where she came from."

"Oh!"

Ooh, new person is friendly! Yay! Probably she should have expected this from someone Aire managed to become friends with so quickly, but still!

"Nice things is good! Thank you Aire."

"But, um, what all did she tell you about?"

How much does she know about the entire disaster that resulted in her and Aire ending up out here?

Christa's mind is completely unshielded, entirely open to Tanthe's perusal if she so desires. So is Christa's face, actually, so even without that Tanthe probably knows what she's concerned about. Not that Christa is aware of that.

"A lot. She was very careful of your friends' privacy, but I heard about the boy and his dragon. It was very brave of you to try to clear his name; I'm sorry it turned out to be such a troubling process. I hope next time one of your friends is in trouble it'll be more feasible to ask other friends for help."

She smiles happily when Tanthe calls her brave, and nods when she mentions asking other friends for help.

"Yeah. That would be nice."

Of course, she couldn't get Aire's help that time since Aire would have been too worried to let her go. She managed to put together the pattern where Aire makes her distractingly horny to stop her from doing something she thinks is dangerous pretty quickly, after all. And if she did that over Christa helping with whatever her mysterious plan was, she absolutely would have done it over Christa trying to turn herself in to the Inquisitors.

It's sort of nice not to have to tell the entire story herself, actually.

"This is the first time I've ever left my hometown so all the," she waves her hand vaguely, "strangers and strangeness, can be a bit overwhelming. I'm hoping I'll feel more settled once I've made some friends here and I'd like it very much if you were one of them. From everything Aire's said, you're a good friend to have."

"Friends! I'd like that! And I'll try to help with the overwhelming if I can, especially if all I need to do is make a new friend! But, also, questions! You know so much more about me than I do about you, after all. Why'd you decide to leave home? And what's Peachport like? I don't think I've heard of it."

She's also just now noticing that Tanthe is very pretty, but due to Aire's finagling with the Arousal Seal this just takes the form of her noticing that Tanthe is especially pleasant to look at the same way that the best sunsets are.

"Peachport is a nice little town on the southern coast, right where the Fringe meets the Green. My family runs an inn there. I left home because we heard a rumour about the Red Queen and when I cast the stars about it they said DOOM—they did not literally say DOOM, that was just what it felt like—and I'm a really powerful psychic so I thought I might be able to help."

Oh no, is she reading all of Christa's embarrassing thoughts? Wait, she hasn't actually had any of those. False alarm!

"I'm glad they didn't literally say DOOM, that seems like it would somehow be even worse. And wow, it's really impressive that you came here just because it was important and you thought you might be able to help! It's admirable."

So cool! She's a real-life hero! The type of person Christa might read a book about.

"Oh, also, I'm, well, not fully psychic, just telepathic, but still! I'm not the best at controlling whether or not I read people, but you don't need to worry, you've got really strong shields. Aire probably already told you that, but it's important to be sure!"

"Aire did tell me, but I still appreciate you saying something! You're right that it's one of those things it's important to be sure about. Speaking of which, I am reading you but I can stop if you want—" hmm except she's still reading Aire which kind of entails some reading of Christa by proxy, but to mention that she needs an excuse to still be reading Aire and to prioritize that over Christa's privacy which would otherwise be quite important—actually wait, Aire, is it okay to tell Christa I'm reading you? (She thinks she can come up with an excuse fast enough to finish the sentence, if she gets an answer immediately. But it just occurred to her that Aire probably never drops her shields for Christa and so it would be weird that she's done it for Tanthe, so she'd better check before mentioning it.)

It's okay if she can come up with an excuse. Fortunately, that isn't going to come up because Christa is really predictably going to-

-shake her head as soon as she's finished processing what Tanthe's saying. Reading her is fine!

"Okay! I'd let you read me too but, um, I spend a lot of time thinking about my embarrassing sex-related personal problems when I'm in the Pink, and I don't quite know you that well yet, sorry." Not not true, but it will probably take longer to figure out how to reveal Aire's secret in a minimally painful fashion than it will for Tanthe to feel otherwise comfortable opening up.

"Oh, that's okay! I, um, don't really have anything that private, I think, so I don't mind, but that doesn't mean you have to not mind!"

"That's fair," she agrees, "I probably would've said exactly the same thing if our situations were reversed."

She nods. "So, you said you're a powerful psychic? What all can you do?" She's visibly holding herself back from bouncing excitedly as she asks.

(A small bit of her in the back of her mind is deciding to get over the whole "be embarrassed by thinking of embarrassing things" process that's inevitably going to happen by just digging up her most embarrassing memory at the start. This process has not yet completed by the time she's done talking, it's currently brushing past that time she lost a fight against a goose when she was twelve.)

Losing a fight against a goose is honestly adorable but she's not sure it would be helpful to say so. Aire, any advice?

"I can read minds really well, though it's hard to be sure exactly how well when I've known so few telepaths, and I'm a telekinetic too but I have even less of an idea how I measure up there, I just have reason to think I'm probably really good from the stories in my mom's family."

Aire agrees, it's so adorable it's ridiculous, this is why Aire finds her so pleasing to- no, she shouldn't think about that in detail, she needs to continue to control herself.

Anyway, it'd probably be helpful? Christa's pretty standard in that she likes being liked, and Aire thinks she'd like being thought of as adorable.

"Cool! I'm not that strong myself, noticeably a bit below average, and my control is atrocious."

Hmm, goose-fight is not the most embarrassing memory, even if failing to defend her friend from the horrible goose after solemnly pledging to defeat any hostile waterfowl in the river is pretty embarrassing. She ran away! Slower than her friend, but still!

"Are there a lot of telepaths where you're from? In Peachport there's just my mom's family. I could try teaching you all the meditations I learned from my aunt, though, if you want. Also, your goose-related adventures are adorable."

Oh good! If she's adorable she doesn't have to be embarrassed!

She's not quite sure why her brain has decided this is true, but it certainly has. And the bit of her brain digging up embarrassing memories seems to have been stopped working without the fear of embarrassment to fuel it.

"They aren't too common. I've run into a few, but not a lot. But even though they're not that common, Arcadia is really big, so there's still lots of them in the city, even if I didn't meet that many of them personally. And I'd really like to be taught! I've mostly just tried brute-forcing it, which hasn't worked so far, and spent the rest of my time on my alchemy studies."

"I'd really like to try teaching you, then! I'm not sure how much of it will help, but it sure helped me a lot, it took me years to figure out how to stop reading everyone but I did eventually manage it with Auntie Meri's help."

"Thank you so much! I really appreciate it! I, um, haven't even come close to not managing it, and hearing that it took you years gives me hope that it's probably not just that you're really powerful or something. I can't imagine what it would be like to have family that understood! It came out of nowhere in me. Or, well, my father had his suspicions, but it's not like we ever had a telepath come through town at some point, he was just being nasty."

"Oh, dear. I'm sorry to hear that. Maybe someday I'll get to introduce you to my family! I'm sure they'd love to meet you. Both of you, even. They'll be so happy I made friends out here."

Friends! Friends already! It's nice. Probably that's mostly Tanthe being nice, though. But even so, she can keep being friendly until they're friends for real!

There's a little bit of disquiet in the back of her mind about not just knowing, but if she gets better at controlling her telepathy she'll have to get used to that anyway, so she'll just have to cope.

"That's nice to hear. Does it change anything, having a bunch of people like you in your family? Wait, I guess you wouldn't know, it's not like you've ever experienced being in a different family that isn't full of telepaths."

"I did really appreciate Auntie Meri, growing up. It was nice to have - somewhere to go for answers. My mother isn't nearly as strong; she mostly let Meri teach me, since Meri could demonstrate things better. But it was still nice that she understood that part of me; Papa didn't so much, and I noticed that. Not that Papa's bad or anything!" she hastily clarifies. "I love him very much! But he's a Coiner, not a Fairbridge. Better at things involving innkeeping than things involving mysterious powers."

"Huh. You know, I think that might be a difference between the Dragon Empire and Peachport! It's rare and odd there, but I don't think people would tend to think of it as mysterious powers. Like, I had a lot of people who didn't like me because they were worried about me reading their thoughts and spreading their secrets around. It's often not liked, but people think of it as weird and bad the same way they thought about girls who liked other girls, not as something mysterious."

She's glad Tanthe has a good dad. She only had a good mom.

"...people think girls who like other girls are weird and bad?" she says, blinking. "Really? That one doesn't come up much in Peachport. Anyway, yes, my mother's family's powers are thought of as mysterious. Telepathy and telekinesis and truesight. And people say we have an unnatural talent for astrology but I don't know how true that is; I think we might just have a family tradition for astrology that ends with us being better at it than most people."

Peachport sounds so nice! Also yes they do, it's very sad.

Wait, Tanthe's a telepath, why is she talking? Well, it helps Tanthe know exactly which of her thoughts she wants her to respond to, and it's easier than deliberately mentally marking them, she supposes. Also, it's sort of nice?

"Aw, I wish I had a whole big family tradition to fall back on in anything. Or, well, anything besides being moderately wealthy manorial farmers, which really isn't the same as astrology or generations of psychic abilities. It does keep the family fed, I suppose. But it involves rather a lot more slaughtering livestock than I'd like to have happen close enough for me to telepathically overhear."

"My father's family also has inherited powers but 'lays little eggs made of precious metals' is much less mysterious than telepathy. And it's hard to feel very glamorous about it when you're trying to pick them out of the mess in the bathtub. I am sorry about the livestock, though, that sounds awful."

"It was, um, not fun, yeah. They were good at it though, so they didn't really notice what was going on, at least. It was too fast. Anyway, moving on from that to talk about less sad things, you lay eggs made of precious metals? I don't think that comes across as mysterious to me, but it certainly feels more worth remarking on than telepathy! I've never heard of anything like that! Oh, you hear about some people who lay eggs, that happens occasionally, but not metal ones."

"All the women in my father's line do! It's part of how Peachport got to be so prosperous, never lacking for things to trade. We used to run the town but now we only run the inn."

Christa's brain has classified Tanthe as an Interesting Person of Great Import, and so something in the back of her brain is now sure that there was some sort of grand intrigue that resulted in the Coiners losing control of the town. The rest of her brain is saying that so far Peachport hasn't sounded like that kind of place. And then that second part goes a bit quiet. Is she sure anywhere isn't that kind of place?

"Oh, I was wondering how someplace between the Fringe and the Green got to the point of being a proper port! People don't come to trade for nothing after all."

"We trade with the people of the Fringe and the Green too, but I think it's Coiner gold that got the sailors from Vynait interested, and then of course once you're a town with a lot of trade people come to trade more things. I might have the history wrong, though, I've never heard exactly how the town was founded, just that it was Coiners who got it going somehow or other. Um, and I don't think it was any grand intrigue exactly, I think the inn and the town both got bigger so the same handful of people couldn't run both anymore and my ancestors decided to stick with the inn because it made them more money. Though I could be wrong about that too."

"Ah, I'm glad there wasn't any intrigue involved, even if it would make you even more like one of the main characters in the novels I used to read growing up."

"So far as I know I have never been the main character of a novel! What kind of books do you like to read?"

"I haven't really had the opportunity to read for pleasure as much ever since I joined the Collegiate, I have to spend most of my free time studying instead. But I really loved adventure novels growing up! All brave heroines going off to save the kingdom from the horrible monster. Who usually grew up somewhere sort of out of the way. And had mysterious powers but grew up mostly normal. And they were usually very nice and very pretty. And they often made new friends in new strange places. And mysterious secrets in their backgrounds, or something like a stolen legacy, were also common features!"

"Mostly I think it's just that a certain kind of historical figure is really interesting, and then people started writing books about people like those characters. And we're sort of in a pretty historic time, what with the Red Queen. So it makes sense that we'd have the kinds of people who show up in histories show up now, right? The times make the people, at least a little, I think."

"That makes sense. Well. I hope we meet plenty of other interesting people here! Especially since—I was talking with Aire, and it sounds like the two of you would make good support for me in a small combat team, if we're all going to help out. Only if you're comfortable with it, of course! But if so, then if we meet more people who complement us well both personally and tactically, that would be really helpful."

Huh, Christa doesn't feel like she'd be that useful, especially with another telepath around.

Wait. No. Her and Aire. Aire has pretty decent Protect and Portal Magic, right? And she's clever enough to track a bunch of details at once. And probably Christa's telepathy would still be sort of helpful, especially if Tanthe's doing something too important and distracting to be using it much. Christa wouldn't be.

"I'm comfortable with it! I hadn't really realized I might be able to help much! But, if I can, I want to!"

Aire places a thought outside her Christa-facing shields for Christa to pick up.

She actually met someone else last night who might fit with that. She might already be doing something else, but it might make sense to check. She had very powerful living clothes and highly enhanced strength. She might be good to have along as long she meshes with people personally, and Aire spent an hour or two talking to her and she thinks she should. She's probably still enjoying herself in the bar's basement Tentacle Pit, and probably will be until morning, so they can head off to nab her and make her an offer if people want.

Since Aire doesn't have any Tanthe-facing shields, Tanthe can see that Lilian would probably have a really hard time with the "don't be horny around Tanthe" thing, but also in Aire's opinion Tanthe wouldn't actually have to listen to her thoughts, she seems probably trustworthy.

"Huh!" says Tanthe aloud. "Sure, we can ask."

And, responding privately to Aire's more private thoughts: yes, that seems fine, Tanthe mostly does not want to be reading everyone constantly anyway. Most people will accurately display whether they are trustworthy over the course of a quick chat under truesight.

"Yeah!"

Hopefully this new person is nice!

The feeling she now knows is guilt floods through her.

Well, she can't change the past. Dwelling on it won't help.

All she can do is be trustworthy, and not hurt Tanthe again.

Tanthe sends the sentiment of a hug. Yes, Aire did behave terribly towards her, but they're working on it and it seems to be going well so far. They can build a true relationship that's stronger than the false one.

Anyway! She smiles warmly at Christa. "We can do that sometime soon, then. Meanwhile... this place is a little lacking in pastimes that suit me. Have you tried the mediocre beer at the adorable tentacle bar yet?"

Underneath the guilt, she feels warm. It's nice.

Tanthe is good.

Um. She has tried the bar's beer, yes. But, uh, during a little break that she took while she was in the Pit underneath the bar. Enjoying herself. Well, she'll just not blast Tanthe with memories of what it felt like for all of those tentacles to be paying attention to her. 

Um. How? She's never had to control her thoughts before. Talk, Christa! Making words should distract you!

"I have! It was okay, I thought! Not great, but better than most of the beer I'd had in Arcadia, actually."

"It wasn't as good as what I'm used to but it was definitely unique. If I have the time maybe I'll bring some of what my Papa serves at the inn, in case the tentacle bar would find examples instructive." She blushes a little, but seems otherwise okay.

"Oh! That's a good idea! And Aire has portal magic, so that'll probably take less time than you might expect. She'd still have to figure out a route to Peachport to [Skim] her [Warp] down, but she should be able to manage something like that."

A sense of affirmation floats out past her shields for Christa to see. Yes, she could do something like that, if Tanthe wanted her to.

And to Tanthe, she understands that the complicated nature of their relationship might mean that she'd rather Aire not have a route like that memorized.

As it happens there is also another obstacle to this plan, and it's one that she can freely say out loud to Christa.

"I'm... a little nervous about going home while the Red Queen is still a pressing threat," she admits. "I might do it, but I'd want to work up the nerve first to make sure I wouldn't just stay home. Being out here is really scary and I miss my family and friends a lot and, you know, once you're there you can always think of one more thing you just have to get done before you can go back... I don't want to put myself in that position without being really sure first that I won't get caught up like that."

"Oh! Yeah, that makes sense. I think if I could go home I might just never come back. But, you know, have to stay out here working for the Lord-Commander and all that."

"Hopefully they'll let you go home when things have settled down some."

"Hopefully! And worst case scenario, I vanish out to somewhere the Lord-Commander can't find me and my friends visit me by portal instead of the other way around. It'll be okay, I think."

It's starts off as something she's saying for Tanthe's benefit, but by the end she's realized it's actually true. 

So what if most people aren't as good as she thought they were? Some of them are. She's making friends with one right now!

"Yeah. It'll be okay," she agrees. "You'll always be welcome in Peachport, if I have anything to say about it."

Tanthe is great. 

"Thank you so much!"

Tanthe is great, isn't she?

Also, it turns out watching two people you care about be lovely together is wonderful. 

One more reason to be glad she met Tanthe. She wouldn't be able to get this if she still only cared about Christa.

Friends being friends is such a good feeling, Tanthe emphatically agrees. She hopes to be able to provide this feeling for Aire a lot!

"I like you," she says to Christa, "and I think it's really unfair how your home country treated you, and I want you to get better treatment than that from somewhere, and I'm somewhere."

This is exactly what one of the heroes from one of her stories would say! Or, well, not all of them. But the ones in her favorite stories, the ones she came back to over and over.

Actually, on reflection there were really just a couple like that, weren't there? She just read them a lot.

Christa sort of feels like she wants to be Tanthe when she grows up. This feeling is somewhat complicated by the fact that, as far as the Dragon Empire is concerned, Christa has already grown up, and at any rate Tanthe certainly isn't much older than Christa, if at all. But still, Christa finds herself feeling like that anyway. 

"So, um, you said you're a telekinetic? What all can you do there?"

She is asking this both because telekinesis is cool, and also because she should probably know if they're going to be fighting together.

But mostly because it's cool.

"Um, well," she says awkwardly, "at home I mostly use it as an extra pair of hands, but I've practiced one trick that I think would be useful in combat..." and her pockets open up and a procession of blades, a dozen all told, swirls up out of them to form an arcing halo around/behind her body.

"I have Metal magic so I can replace them with just a little work," she explains, "and I'm getting better and better at directing them. But... I haven't actually... hurt anyone with them yet, and I really don't want to."

That's so cool!

But. Also, she understands the bit about not wanting to hurt people. It's going to be hard, if they have to do that. And they probably will have to, won't they?

Well, Christa won't, she'll be wearing Aire and just serving as an undistracted telepath, probably.

But still. Even if it isn't by her own hands, she's going to have to hurt people, isn't she?

"Hurting people feels really hard and scary," Tanthe says softly. "But I do think there are times when it's the right thing to do, and that this is one of them. I'm just... not sure how to get to the point where I can do it."

She was certainly ready to try, back when she first confronted Aire, but she's still overwhelmingly relieved that she didn't have to.

"Yeah. It's. Well, it's never good if people hurt. Even if they're bad people. But sometimes it has to happen anyway."

Her books taught her that much. And maybe they were wrong about a lot, maybe they were wrong about people like Aire, but they weren't wrong about people like the Red Queen.

"So, we'll have to learn, right?"

Maybe they can try punching each other or something. It's bound to be easier to hurt people trying to hurt you than to hurt your friends, so if they can do one they should be able to do the other, right?

(But. Um. Maybe not now.)

"Yeah. Somehow, at some point. I... guess I'm hoping I can still put it off a while longer. Maybe until we have a good idea about how to learn safely."

They could try pinching each other very hard! That's definitely safe! And not something she'd be too afraid to do right now, even!

Christa is very excited to have come up with an idea! She hopes it's a good idea!

But, um, if it's not Tanthe should feel free to say so! She probably would anyway, but it's important not to push! 

Oh no, is she pushing? If so she's sorry for pushing! It's sort of harder to not do when it's all in her thoughts. Wait, this is all in her thoughts, she didn't say any of it out loud yet to mark it for proper consideration. Salvation!

...Tanthe giggles softly.

"I don't mind you having ideas!" she says. "I think... whatever ideas we have, I want to think about them carefully and discuss them before trying them? Not because I specifically think there's something bad about trying to pinch each other, but because... 'learning how to hurt people without flinching too much' seems to me like a pretty delicate thing, and I want to be careful around it, and understand what I'm doing and why I expect it to work, and pay attention to whether it works the way I expected or not, so that I don't accidentally... teach myself the wrong things? Does that make sense?"

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense! I wasn't even thinking about that. I think probably it'd be okay anyway? But really, better to know than to go off "probably" with something so important."

"Yes, exactly. But I think it might be a good idea! I just want to be sure we think about it first."

Aire is moderately confused about what exactly Tanthe is getting at, until she thinks to compare it to her own four importantly valuable things. She doesn’t just care, she cares about caring.

Aire feels a little ridiculous for not immediately understanding. And then disconcerted. That was a pretty obvious thought. Why hadn’t she thought it already? She feels like there’s a reason.

She must have lost it when she lost her memories. And perhaps her lack of empathy is impairing her.

That sounds correct to Christa. Hmm. How do they think about it, how would they be able to tell whether it was doing the right thing? The obvious way might be trying to find someone like who's already gone through this, but that sounds perhaps hard.

Tanthe is interested in Aire's train of thought, but trying to mostly keep her attention on Christa so there aren't any obvious gaps in the conversation. She's a decent multitasker, though. 'Care about caring' seems to her like a good way to put it, but she thinks it's not the only thing making her hesitant here; she also just has a general reluctance to mess around with the way she thinks without understanding what she's doing, because the way she thinks is important to her in general, and deliberately trying to change something as integral to herself as her reluctance to hurt people sounds like the sort of thing that could have weird unanticipated side effects if approached thoughtlessly.

"Hmm... no, actually, I think asking other people for advice sounds like a great idea. Hopefully someone will know someone who had a similar problem and can advise us from experience, but even if not, I like the thought of getting multiple perspectives. Does either of you know someone we could ask?"

In the back of her mind, a feeling that probably having a well-considered reluctance to harm people and growing capable of doing so in a thoughtful manner is pretty rare. Back in Arcadia she didn't really read a lot of people who thought about things like that. 

Hmm. Christa has spent most of her time here in something of a haze. Has Aire met anyone that seemed like they had experience with something like this?

Not really.

But as far as alternate perspectives go, Lilian, the girl she mentioned as maybe a good fit for the team they're putting together, seemed to be in a similar position, and attempting to solve her version of the problem by trying to grow the ability to temporarily suppress her reluctance, or something like that. Aire isn't sure how far along to managing it she was, and she also gets the sense that Tanthe might want something different than that. They could head off and grab her if Tanthe wants? Perhaps she's done more thinking about the issue than Aire realized, when they interacted. And at the very least she'd be another perspective.

But, all that said, Lilian was kind of out of it when Aire left her under the bar's care, and in the middle of a very mutation-altered alcohol high. She burns through the stuff absurdly quickly, but there'd be a waiting period.

(And privately, to Tanthe, yes, Aire did deliberately put her in a position where, if not for information Lilian didn't have, she might end up trapped in a haze of pleasure forever. The plan was always to grab her in the morning though, and just privately luxuriate in her theoretical capacity to seduce Lilian into actual terrible outcomes.)

Tanthe privately expresses a sort of fond wry sense of 'yes, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing you'd do'. She's glad that Lilian is safe, though.

"Sure, we could try talking to Lilian if she's available."

They should probably head to the bar then, and Aire can chat with the bar through a Christa-relay and ask it to ease Lilian down from her fun. She should burn through the alcohol and be amenable to meeting Aire and her friends after not too long.

Tanthe thinks this is a fine plan! She also isn't sure where the bar is from here. Perhaps Christa and Aire should lead the way.

Aire does, walking beside Tanthe this time, instead of seductively in front of her. As she makes the choice to do so, the memory of leading Tanthe away bubbles up through her. The attraction she was feeling at the time, the sense of anticipation. 

She banishes the thought, and just walks.

It'll only be ten or so minutes. They're not far.

Christa does not know the way herself, on account of spending much of her time highly distracted. So instead Aire is controlling their shared body. Being carried along like this is fun!

(Christa is so cute.)

And they arrive at the bar.

It's the work of perhaps a minute to finish her conversation with the bar, but who knows how long it will take Lilian to be interruptible. 

Christa grabs control of their body for a moment to ask the bar for a beer. She wants to try it while she's not so distracted.

Tanthe will have one too, why not.

Aire guides them to a different booth than the one where she talked to Tanthe, the first time. She doesn't want too many of her memories coming up and distracting her. This one's on the opposite side of the room.

They're lucky in that the upper area isn't currently in use by any Lovers who are using the tentacle-bar for the tentacle half of the description, which wasn't a guarantee. But, well, if worst came to worst, they could have just waited outside.

And Christa takes a sip of her beer.

"It's pretty good! Well, compared to what I've tried before, anyway. And you said what your family's inn had back in Peachport was a lot better? Wow."

"My Papa is very particular about his beer. Well, about his inn's beer. He says what he drinks doesn't matter to anyone but him, but what he serves matters to his customers."

Wow, her dad even has humble wisdom!

Be quiet, silly part of Christa. Tanthe isn't actually the hero of one of your childhood adventure novels.

"That makes sense! Hmm, do you know if travelers to Peachport praise the beer there? I'm sort of curious whether Arcadian beer is surprisingly bad of your dad's the secret wielder of lost Beer Magic."

She giggles. "As far as I know, he's not magic, just picky. People do mostly praise his beer, though I think some travelers are even pickier than he is."

She pouts.

"Aww, Beer Magic would've been cool."

"If I discover any ancient hidden magics I'll be sure to let you know. Probably. I don't know, discovering ancient hidden magics might be the sort of thing where I'd have to swear an oath of secrecy about it."

Hmm. This is true. Unfortunate.

"Well, I'll just have to tag along if you ever go on a quest to discover ancient magic, I suppose. We shall succeed through the power of friendship!"

In the basement, Lilian's ceased being fed alcohol. It'll take her a bit to finish burning through it, but not an outrageously long time. And while she does, she'll work the rest of its effects out of her system.

It remains a good thing that Tanthe doesn't find it necessary to listen to everyone in her range.

"The power of friendship is such a good way to succeed at things."

"You know, in most of my adventure novels, the supposed power of friendship really ended up just being the power of friendship-powered supermagic. Absent that I'm not quite sure how to make it work."

"But it's such a good power!" she says. "Understanding people and figuring out how to cooperate with them so you're both better off than you would have been alone! Why would you need extra magic on top of that?"

Aire is quietly thinking that, given her interactions with Tanthe so far, it looks like this is somehow at least partially true, which is ridiculous. Tanthe did almost lose herself because of that general outlook. But also, Tanthe successfully managed that entire "cooperate with them so you're both better off than you would have been alone" thing with someone like Aire.

"Ask all of my childhood adventure novels, not me! But also, sometimes it is hard to negotiate with rockslides. And then you want the ability to apply supermagic to the problem."

Christa wishes that they had some friendship-based supermagic to deal with the Red Queen right about now, actually. She also seems difficult to cooperate with.

(Tanthe is quietly delighted by the knowledge that her approach totally did work.)

"I admit that usually when I hear people say 'what are friends for' the answer is not 'halting rockslides', but in a sense having friends helps halt rockslides too, because if you have a rockslide in need of halting you can ask your friends to help and some of them might be really good at Earth magic!"

If the power of friendship is a large part of what manages to finally put a stop to the Red Queen -

Wait. This alliance is sort of that, isn't it? All these people coming together like this?

No, Aire, don't be ridiculous, this is just people joining together in common cause in their own individual self-interest, because together they can-

Drat.

"The Earth Magic was within the friends we made along the way! Well, I suppose it's still the power of friendship doing it, albeit at one step removed."

"Exactly!!"

"Okay, you've won me over, the power of friendship is surprisingly workable even without friendship-powered supermagic, and can perhaps be used to counter rockslides in some circumstances."

This is good! She's very good at being friendly! Much better at it than punching people!

She gives Christa a little hug when she thinks that.

She's rather glad she was wrong about how all of this worked, back in her cave.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww. Friends being friends! <3

It takes Lilian a while to burn through the alcohol in her system, and even then she’s left with all the lust that it left behind. It takes her a while to even realize what’s happening, as the alcohol wears off and she emerges from her fog of alcohol-induced-stupidity and into a fog of lust.

Maybe it’s morning, and the bar is helpfully “waking her up” so she can go about her day?

Well, surely, she can take a little time to have a last little bit of fun for the road. She had coffee in the morning back home; tentacle sex is perhaps a slightly different way of waking herself up, but she rather doubts anyone in the Pink will find it odd.

The bar gives her a bit of time, lets her work her way through her lust with its tentacles, before interrupting to try to explain. It’s spent enough time out in the wastes to understand the way that non-tentacled can be distracted by lust, or disabled by pleasure.

But, after not too long, Lilian has worked out quite a bit of her lust with the obliging tentacles of the bar and approached something resembling satisfaction. And so it lets her know that her friend is waiting for her upstairs.

Friend? Oh, it must be Aire.

She disentangles herself from the bar's tentacles and turns to head upstairs.

She feels a little silly now about the vague sense of ominousness she got off of Aire, while she was leading her down to the basement. Really, someone leads her off to a friendly bar's pleasure pit and she decides this is something to be worried about? When she comes back to life if she dies, she has friends to come grab her if she gets distracted for too long, and Aire hasn't actually done anything suspicious?

And then she emerges into the main area of the bar and looks around, trying to spot Aire. There's a girl over there who has Aire's build, but she has a different face and hair color, so - wait. That's also Aire's clothes. And Aire's boobs. Lilian would recognize those anywhere.

What in the world is going on here? Creative use of illusion magic to have a new face every day?

And now probably-Aire is looking at her.

Lilian heads over to say hello.

And then she notices the person in the booth opposite Aire, who had, until her closer approach, been blocked from view by the backing of the booth, on account of being a rather small woman.

She's really quite pretty.

Lilian shakes herself out of her distraction, and says, "Um, Aire, is that you? I didn't recognize you with the different face."

"Oh! Hello, you must be Lilian! I'm Aire's host, Christa. I wasn't actually conscious when you were talking with Aire, so hello, it's nice to meet you!"

What. Is Aire a... what are they called again? Skinsuit, her implanted knowledge informs her. They're called skinsuits.

Wait. She and Aire did rather a lot more than talk, yesterday night. Is Christa okay with that?

She opens her mouth to ask-

And Christa answers her question before she can get it out.

"Oh, it's fine, don't worry about it. Oh! I'm a telepath! That's how I heard that. And Aire says good morning, sleepyhead, and that it's nice to see you again. And this here is Tanthe, another friend of Aire's."

This is a rather large flurry of information for her to process, just after coming out of an alcohol-and-pleasure-induced fugue. So, she simply falls back on her social niceties, and says, "Oh, hello Tanthe! I'm Lilian, it's nice to meet you."

"Hi! Nice to meet you too! I like your hair."

"Oh, thank you it's new."

Wait, that's such an odd thing to say - no, people get haircuts all the time, they won't realize she means literally new - wait, Christa can read her mind, she's totally going the see the thing where Lilian's from another world - 

Well, that's not ideal.

"I am also a telepath," Tanthe volunteers. "Sorry. I'm not actually reading you directly though, I'm reading Christa and I forgot that this would have effects."

This is somehow even less ideal.

At any rate, Lilian has a pretty solid and fleshed out set of memories of growing up in another world and dying there before waking up here in the fringe. She looks pretty much the same as she did before her transmigration, with the exception of her hair color and some airbrushing - wait, they won't know what that term means. Some slight alterations to her features, making her a bit more symmetrical and removing some little imperfections in her skin, stuff like that. It's entirely plausible that her memories were just altered by a hostile outside force. That said, she can't see what the point of doing something like that would be, while a god grabbing hold of her and empowering her so she can help in the war against the Red Queen makes quite a bit of sense.

She doesn't bother to turn all of that into words; expressing it all in thought is easier.

"...so my instinct here is to ask if I can see your memories so I can check whether they look fake to me, but I imagine that's not a comfortable request to entertain, and I don't want to make you uncomfortable? I'm just curious! Faking a whole person's worth of memories sounds really hard, you'd have to imagine a whole life in a whole world. And apparently invent the concept of 'airbrushing'! I think I don't expect your memories to be fake but I admit I would be kind of fascinated if they were. And also really concerned for you."

Lilian would also be concerned for Lilian if her memories were fake! She's actually deliberately looked through her memories for signs of stuff like that herself, and she thinks she's got a rather large amount of information that really doesn't fit in this world, and would be too important to use for something as comparatively frivolous as faking a history for someone. 

(A mental image of a city destroyed in a flash of light)

And she's checked whether it still stands up to thought, if the pieces fit together, and it seems like it does. All that said, she wouldn't turn down a second opinion, from someone she knew and trusted. Which doesn't apply to Tanthe, yet. 

That aside, mostly she just expects Tanthe looking at her memories to be sad and incredibly awkward? Even absent other concerns, she wouldn't be comfortable doing it now, with someone she just met, but the idea of doing that with a friend doesn't make her that uncomfortable. But, well, she died young of a terminal disease, and reading through that would probably be pretty upsetting. And, well, since she got to this new world she's been, um, kind of absurdly horny, that's one of the changes, so if Tanthe saw any newer memories it might be pretty awkward.

Christa's sitting back and letting Tanthe deal with the probably-not-crazy person and potential-friend, but that mental image sure was concerning. 

"No, yeah, that makes sense! I also would not be keen on showing all my memories to someone I just met, for reasons of privacy and awkwardness. I think it mostly sounds like your memories are real, though, and I'm happy to assume that for now."

On closer reflection Christa is less concerned about that mental image. Sure, that definitely was a large flash of light, but also, what happened to the Consumed is much worse. So what, apparently Lilian's world also has some stuff like that. Probably most worlds do. It's nothing to panic over, just because it's new. There's no reason to think Lilian somehow brought that with her. 

Lilian nods, and says, "Well, no reason to assume that too strongly, I'm not going to be offended or anything if you have some pretty substantial doubts, and even I don't know enough to be completely sure. But, anyway, I think there's probably a reason you're all here? If you all just want to make friends I'm entirely down for that, to be clear, just, well, this feels like there's something else involved."

Lilian would be going for food right about now normally, but she's rather consumed rather a lot of the bar's fluids recently, and is thus full.

"I do certainly also want to make friends, but I'm also looking ahead to our participation in the war effort and thinking about who would make a good complement to the three of us," she gestures to herself and Christa-and-Aire, "and your name came up when I asked Aire who she's met who might suit."

She nods.

"That makes sense. I've got a friend who my abilities synergize with really well in close-quarters or sightline-range stuff, but I think they'll end up spending a lot of their time as heavy artillery - wait, I should disambiguate that. As doing very long distance highly-damaging-to-a-wide-area destruction, basically. And adding me to that wouldn't always be necessary, or even too much help. Something can't be double destroyed, and I can't really aim at over-the-horizon stuff, or stuff occluded by lightning storms. What role were you all thinking the group might fill?"