Well. That doesn't happen every day.

Calistria feels a godemotion that, if she was trying to express it on a mortal face, would probably take the form of a malevolent grin.

Despite Her ongoing efforts, Her agents within the city of Sothis number in the single digits. Her church is outlawed. Her clerics, ostracized. Mortals know Her as the goddess of lust, of revenge, of trickery. But she is an ancient god, and these are merely the stories mortals use to find her, not the true essence of what She values.

Today, one of those mortals is gazing right through those stories to instead stare at the real Her, and said mortal's physical incarnation happens to be right in the heart of Osirion. That has literally never happened before, and She is very excited.

The core concept at the center of Calistria's value system is not something the mortals have a word for. It is a form of moral meta-symmetry, that Calistria embodies. The meta-policy of relating to others through a mirror that reflects their own moral policies back at them. One who threatens may be threatened. One who lies may be deceived. One who kills may be killed. One who tolerates must be tolerated. One who desires may be desired. Forgive those who employ forgiveness. Hate those who employ hate. Walk neither the path of Good nor Evil, and instead judge others only by their own standards, not yours.

And above all, ascendant over the rest: Never, ever, ever, judge someone who cannot judge you in return. And if you judge someone by your own standards rather than theirs, after having, yourself, made them incapable of reciprocation? Well, that just pisses Calistria off.

Abadar's pet country is built almost entirely out of non-reciprocal judgement, starting with the sexism and infecting every layer of the society except the literal actual banks. It has bound it's people in the worst kind of 'lawful' authority, crushing all the beautiful potential reciprocity of free mortals down into one flat layer of hateful conformity. Osirion grates on Calistria's nerves like nothing else in all of Creation.

So, obviously, Calistria immediately redirects as much of her attention as she can spare to get a very good look at this exceptional squirrel. What, exactly, is this mortal's deal?

Earlier...

The sun beats down on the back of Gamila's borrowed hood as she sits beside her father on her father's mail wagon. He is indulging her. She is supposed to be at home with her mother. But her mother has been unbearable since she found out that Gamila's father had secretly taught Gamila to read. Her father had argued that it only made sense, given how their family's entire livelihood depends on delivering letters. Gamila's mother had claimed to agree, but she'd been cold to both of them for days now.

So here she is, trundling along in the hot sun instead, bored.

They're headed toward the Street of Artisans and the routing depot there, when they hit a pothole, and the wagon's axel snaps.

There is a terrible, tail-bone-bruising jolt, as the body of the wagon sags, collides with the paving stones, and screeches to a stop, throwing any unsecured little girls who may be present from their seats.

(Reflex Save: 23)

Gamila feels herself lurch free of her seat and start tumbling through the air. In a flash of adrenaline she plots a course and plants her hands down on the hitched donkey's back, fur and muscle providing purchase for small hands as she vaults, boosting herself up and forward to clear the donkey's head and the hitching entirely. She somersaults once in the air, and then sticks the landing, both feet planted firmly on the street.

Gamila blinks in surprise that she actually managed to do that without hurting herself, then turns around to see that, yep, that sure is a broken wagon. And a somewhat upset donkey. Gamila takes another step to get out of hoof range.

With a pained wheeze, the stocky, fit man in a high-quality walking-about cloak levers himself out of the position the impact had wedged him into, and climbs down from the drivers seat to confirm the same.

He checks first that his daughter is unharmed, is himself surprised by how unharmed she in fact is, lets out a sigh of relief, then goes to inspect the broken axel.

"Sure enough. We're not going anywhere like this. Perhaps the wizard at the laundry service near our depot has Mending prepared today?" He curses. "No, I can't leave our cargo unattended..."

(Diplomacy: 18)

"I could run there without you and ask him if he does."

    Her father gives her a vaguely pained look. "You're getting too old to get away with that, Gamila. You're old enough that I couldn't in good conscience have you unescorted in a man's place of work."

Gamila growls a little. "I could... disguise myself as a boy again." Gamila hates doing that.

    "You're getting too old to get away with that, too," he says with a nostalgic smile, then goes dour. "Also it's illegal for women to do that, and again, you're nearly old enough to start counting yourself as one. So no. You can't do that anymore."

"It's not illegal for me to run down to the laundry wizard and ask him a question. You just don't want mama to hear about it and call you a bad father again."

    Her father sighs. "...not wrong."

"You're a good father, papa. And like you said, you can't let the wagon out of your sight. I just want to help."

"...very well. But be quick, and be courteous."

    "Doing one of those makes it kind of hard to do the other."

"Gamila."

    "Fine."

"Good girl. Go on."

Gamila moves with the fleetness of youth, darting down the street at a pace that is definitely going to leave her dehydrated, but they've got water at the depot, it'll be fine. She wants to get away before her father changes his mind, or worse, gets judge-y looks from passers-by and changes his mind.

She's been to the depot before. She doesn't need to roll have much difficulty finding the laundry service just down the street.

In fact, she's been at the laundry service itself, before. But her father doesn't know that. He wouldn't like knowing about her designs on the place, or on the wizard who works there. Knowledge of the most basic principles of spellcasting is so tantalizingly close... she's seen the laundry wizard's spellbook with her own eyes. It was right there...

The laundry wizard is presently in.

His business is a small but well-organized space, with an area for a queue and wide shelf of large, clearly-labeled baskets.

The wizard himself is a rather average-looking man in his twenties, well groomed and shaved bald. His whole look gives off an impression of cleanliness; appropriate advertisement for his provided service.

At this moment, he is standing at one of the baskets, wiggling his fingers over it and muttering, "Prestidigitation."

Gamila freezes in the entrance and watches intently, trying to mimic his finger movements, plucking on the strands of magic that she can feel at her fingertips.

(She has magic at her fingertips. She figured out that part a while ago. Her father knew enough of the theory behind wizardy for her to, after a tantrum of an interrogation, reach for and discover her 'spell slots'. She even stumbled her way into what she suspects is a really rare special ability that she is keeping secret, because it's awesome and useful. But that ability isn't a spell, and she direly wants to know how spells spell.)

As usual, her mimicry gets her nothing, and a young couple in the process of carrying their clean laundry out give her a look like she's something dirty. She forcibly composes herself, hides her frustration, and clears her throat.

"Excuse me, sir? My father would like to request your aid. He wishes to know if you have prepared Mending."

"A moment, boy. I have customers."

More prestidigitations, one basket at a time. Shortly, he is finished, hands the baskets off, and then turns, expecting to see a small male child and frowns when he instead sees a girl on the cusp of womanhood. He frowns.

"Your father? Where is your father?"

She doesn't like that he mistook her voice for a boy's. She hates it even more because of how it would've helped. It makes her want to be even more flagrantly female.

"Our wagon broke down at the Sphinxside crossing. Snapped axel. Do you have Mending prepared? Father stayed with the wagon."

"You're alone?"

Thoughtless little-

"Out!" he snaps angrily, bulling forward toward the entryway. "Outside! Outside!"

She used to roll her eyes at this kind of thing, but these days... she's just tired.

Gamila steps back out onto the street and folds her arms.

"Okay, we're outside. Can my father hire you to fix our wagon or not?"

"Listen, little miss, you can't go around wasting the valuable time of working men like this. Run back to your father and apologize for leaving his sight before someone gets the wrong idea."

    "My father needs a wizard to Mend his wagon," the 'little miss' repeats.

"I'm sure your father has that well in hand and doesn't need a willful mannerless girl complicating matters."

    The girl's jaw clenches. "My father is Mido Saei. You know." She points down the street to the district's mail depot. "The man who runs that?"

"I don't care who wait did you say Saei, as in..."

    "Yes, that Saei. He. Wants. To. Hire. You. To. Mend. Our. Broken. Wagon. Which is currently stuck in the middle of the street just this side of the Sphinxside crossing."

Omlar scowls thunderously, but Mido Saei is someone he knows can pay well. Still, what kind of man sends his daughter off alone to play messenger? Did he have no sons?

"Very well. Take me to him."

He closes up the laundry service and follows the girl up the street.

Finally!

Gamila quickly leads the way back to where the wagon broke down.

She is silent, but she's plotting. As frustrating as this man is, he's still her only possible access to a spellbook. She contemplates her approach to broaching the subject. A man like him would deny a woman knowledge for no reason but that she asked for it rather than was told to learn it. She'll need leverage. Something against him, or something he wants. Given how violently he shoo'd her out of his place of business when he realized she was unescorted, she has an inkling on the latter.

That inkling, that thing there, that she can feel by instinct is there; not understanding that on an explicit level is possibly even more torturous than not understanding spell mechanics.

Mido has been waiting anxiously. He relaxes significantly when he sees his daughter returning.

And she brought the laundry wizard too!

After exchanging greetings and polite sympathies, Mido gets down to haggling.

Once a price is agreed upon, they jack up the wagon, and Omlar casts Mending, and the axel is as good as new.

Mido catches the glance Omlar shoots Gamila. He can guess what that's about, and he throws Omlar an extra silver piece to shut him up. With the wagon fixed, they're still behind schedule, no time to chat.

The wagon trundles off. Mido and Gamila arrive at the mail depot without further incident.

Gamila gulps down a bunch of water and then settles into a chair to watch her father and a handful of employees sort mail.

It's not completely uninteresting. The system of addressing is clever, and Gamila tries to pay attention ever since she noticed that following the process got her to accidentally memorize a lot about what was where and how to get from one point to another in the city without getting lost.

She waits for her moment, and then, when her father and the employees get into a subproject with packing packages efficiently that looks like it'll occupy them for a while, Gamila slips away.

(Stealth: 13)

Gamila lets herself out into the alley behind the depot, looks both ways to check for witnesses, then darts toward the street, pulling her hood up.

She makes her way back to the laundry service, which is now closed for the evening, and eyes the apartment above the shop. She waits for her moment, then strolls on by. When the locked door is to her immediate left and she's much less sure than she'd like that no one is looking, Gamila's power floods out of her, and she sends it flying off in opposite directions in a way that she can't quite perceive but feels natural.

There is a faint twisting of the air, and Gamila is gone.

Imagine two dots on a sheet of cloth.

Draw a line that passes through both dots. Then, take a knife and carefully cut a slit in the cloth along that line between the dots that goes just a little ways beyond each. Put one hand on either side of the slit, then push one hand up and pull the other hand down.

The cloth will bunch and scrunch, but at the limit the two dots will touch.

The fabric of Creation cracks and shears against itself, sliding two points into colocation for one and a half seconds, during which Gamila's spatial coordinates are in flux. Then the fabric of Creation heals itself, shunting Gamila ten feet to the left without passing through the intervening space.

Gamila is now inside the locked shop.

(Stealth: 21)

Gamila really hopes no one saw that.

She takes a breath and gathers her courage.

Then she slips into the back of the shop and climbs the stairs into the laundry wizard's apartment.

Omlar is busy updating his ledgers and completely fails to notice the faint creak of the stairs.

His apartment is moderately nice, with well-made furniture and lit with Light spells. It is a single room but it is a large single room. The bed in the corner is narrow but one of the kinds with an adjustable upper quarter and fitted with high-quality linens and an excess of pillows.

The stairs come up into the room facing away from the work table where Omlar is working, but he entirely fails to see the movement of an intruder in his peripheral vision.

An obvious spellbook is resting innocently on the bedside table, out of Omlar's line of sight. The room's only window is directly in front of him, currently shuttered.

Gamila doesn't have a specific plan. She can think of half a dozen possible approaches, and half a dozen more now that she's in his apartment and he still hasn't noticed her.

The spellbook is right there. She could just take it.

A part of her is very tempted, but a larger part of her rebels at the thought. Not because Stealing Is Bad, but because... this man's livelihood would actually be hurt, by that, and she has not decided to hurt him deliberately, so she should not do things to him that hurt him incidentally, if there is an alternative. And getting what she wants by benefiting someone does feel more appealing than getting what she wants by hurting someone.

Men desire women, and hasn't she just been told that she ought to start counting herself a woman? So then, she has something he'll want. Something to trade. And trade is holy, isn't it? Gamila is willing to try to play by the rules so long as the rules leave a pathway available to her. (She thinks, having already broken into a private residence.)

But she should know what she's negotiation for, before she negotiates. Her father always says that, and it seems true.

Gamila creeps over to the bedside, borrows the spellbook, then retreats down the stairs so that the sound of rustling pages does not alert Mister Narvet.

As this self-taught, fledgling Arcanist looks upon the spellbook of the laundry wizard, what she sees is at first incomprehensible.

But after only a moment, her own magic begins to react to the arcane writing on the pages. In the web of connections between her natural spell-slots and the artificial reservoir of arcane charges that this girl created by simply not knowing any better while experimenting aggressively upon said empty spell-slots, there is something like an emergent spellform. A spellform that is pulled into focus by the writing in front of her. With but a brief effort of will, her power flows through that form and she is granted Read Magic.

And suddenly she can read the incomprehensible arcane writing as easily as plain text.

This spellbook contains:

- Detect Magic
- Light
- Prestidigitation
- Mage Hand
- Mending
- Spark
-- Endure Elements
-- Gentle Breeze
-- Waterproof

What the fuck was that?! What just happened?! Why can she read this?!

Why can't she stop smiling?

Whatever. For all she knows, every wizard can do this. It's not like she'd know.

...being able to read the spells doesn't tell her how to use them. She can understand what they're supposed to do, but this still doesn't reveal how the concepts described hook into physical effect, or how she goes from knowledge to actual effect.

Alright.

She is here to convince Mister Narvet to teach her how to cast Detect Magic, Prestidigitation, and Endure Elements, in that order.

Detect Magic because she suspects she might be able to figure out the rest on her own with just that one. Being able to see the actual magic rather than just the finger-wiggles would be amazing.

Prestidigitation, because hygiene. Wizards always seem to have impractically good hygiene and smell nicer than everyone else, and she finally understands why. It's literally the same cantrip they used to do the laundry. Which makes perfect sense in retrospect. But she's been under the impression that it cleaned cloth, nothing else, not that it was basically a very tiny Wish that could do all kinds of things. She wants the ability to look and feel and smell freshly-bathed all the time, for free. That would be amazing.

Endure Elements for the obvious reason. She lives in Sothis. The hot weather might as well be a chronic illness, and this spell is the cure.

Detect Magic, Prestidigitation, Endure Elements.

Gamila closes the spellbook, takes a breath, and forges back up into the laundry wizard's private sanctum.

(Perception: 15)

Omlar still doesn't notice her. She's going to have to either announce herself or wait for him to finish what he's doing.

She's going to silently return the spellbook to it's previous resting place, and then...

Honestly, she has no idea what to do here.

At one extreme, she could strip naked and creep over to him on her hands and knees and see how close she can get to touching him before he notices her. On the other extreme, she could go back downstairs, make a loud noise, and claim he forgot to lock his door, and ask politely for a moment of his time.

The latter extreme is safer, but what if he says no. She feels like if she's already naked and within five-feet of him and has him off-balance, that's a much stronger negotiating position. But that could backfire. Loudly. On the third hand, taking too long could backfire loudly. Her father could notice she isn't where she's supposed to be at any moment.

She doesn't have time for a slow seduction. She doesn't know enough about seduction to pull off a slow seduction anyway. All she knows are the base facts, the urge between her legs that can be soothed, stoked, and then sated, and the direct connection between that urge and the craving to touch she feels when she sees someone pretty. All she knows is that foundational drive that is the common ground that (as far as she knows) all men and women share.

In the end, it doesn't matter what she says, how she approaches. Either he'll feel that urge, and this will be easy, or he won't and this will be impossible.

Does she have anything else to offer him in trade?

No. She doesn't. It's either this, or stealing the spellbook outright.

She ducks down into the stairwell and starts carefully disrobing.

With her apparel tucked inside her cloak and left on the steps, Gamila ascends one more time. A shiver of excitement runs through her. As mercenary as her motivations are, her body is eagerly hungry for what she's hoping will happen.

This time, she walks straight across the room and does nothing to conceal her presence, planting her feet audibly on the floor in plain view.

To say that Omlar was not expecting this is an understatement.

In fact, when he turns at the sound and sees her there, he's so startled that he doesn't even register her state of undress.

He screams and falls out of his chair.

There is a plush rug on the floor, but his landing is still about as undignified as it gets.

Snerk.

No, don't laugh. That will definitely make him mad.

"Good evening, Mister Narvet. I apologize for the interruption."

"What are you doing in my house?!?!?"

He recovers what dignity he can as he scrambles to disentangle himself from his fallen chair, hissing at a bruised elbow and hip.

Then he's shocked all over again. One, it's the Saei girl from earlier. Two, she's naked.

What?

Just-

What?

Her ill-fitting obviously-meant-for-growing-into clothing really left a lot to the imagination and his imagination had apparently been insufficient-

But, no, seriously, what?

What is happening, here? Is someone trying to frame him for something? Is this actually even the Saei girl? If it is...

"What the 'strom are you playing at, girl?!?! You can't be here!!!"

(Perception: 12)

She's looking, but she's not sure exactly what she's looking for. He... that was maybe a flash of desire in his eyes? She might have imagined it, she's not sure. Well either way, she'll clarify that matter shortly.

"You should probably keep your voice down."

She moves closer, into the Light, letting him get a better look and also getting in his personal space before he has a chance to stand up.

"I've come to you with a simple offer, Sir. My body, for your knowledge. Please teach me to cast a spell, and I will repay you with pleasure."

(Will Save: 6)

Omlar stares at her for several long moments as his brain slowly processes her words. He's taken-aback enough that he forgets to dismiss the words of a girl out of hand, and eventually the meaning of her proposal sinks in as an actual proposed trade.

In the end, it is a rather straightforward deal.

Omlar is aware in a background sort of way that female casters aren't that much more unusual than male casters, that the unusualness of being a caster is several orders of magnitude bigger than the unusualness of a woman doing anything unusual. But female casters aren't women; they're female-shaped people who are doing something else with their lives, something other than being a woman. This is a legally-recognized fact.

It is obviously logical that for female casters to exist, they have to start as women, but this is the first time in Omlar's life that he is directly encountering this fact. And he feels a kind of vague horror at the idea of, by his own actions, causing a female to be a caster instead of a woman.

But this budding young woman is really hot and naked and offering herself.

He'd be ruining her. But it's not like any man would ever marry a girl who'd offer to whore herself like this in the first place. But no man with sensible tastes would want a caster for a wife either. He'd be ruining her just as thoroughly if he taught her a spell. Assuming she could even learn. It wasn't like wizardry was easy.

Her father isn't Important, but he's not a nobody. He might be able to force Omlar to marry the girl if anyone finds out.

But she is really hot and naked and offering herself.

He should get to have her. A girl who'd offer herself like this, he doesn't need to deal fairly with her, does he. He should teach her a lesson; show her what happens to stupid girls like her when they go around being whores. It'll only be what she deserves. He'll even make a genuine attempt to teach her Prestidigitation, so she can fail at it and know her own folly.

Omlar rises to his feet to loom over the audacious young woman.

"Do you even understand what you're offering, Miss Saei?"

Oh. Yeah. Very much. The urge is strong in him. The heat in her own body surges at the confirmation.

She smiles up at him, and moves in to let her bare chest touch his vest.

"After all the dire warnings, I'm terribly curious about what it is that happens once I'm alone with a man. Maybe you could show me. After you teach me Detect Magic."

"Detect Magic?"

He could ask why, but he finds he doesn't care. He's already resolved on the point that a girl smart enough to learn magic would never put herself in this situation. So it doesn't matter which spell he tries to teach her.

"Fine. You have a deal, Miss Saei."

Then he grabs her waist, pulls her closer, and bends down to suck on her tits.

Gamila has a lot of tit, for her age.

His warm hands on her bare body, his mouth on her chest, his tongue on her nipple. It feels startlingly, shockingly good. Good like she's imagined, but also good in a way that creeps over her flesh and makes her heart pound and her head go wobbly in a way even her most intense self-pleasure sessions haven't. If this is how that feels, she can understand why even women who decide not to do this sometimes do it anyway.

"A-After. I said a-after."

She is being pedantic. She doesn't actually want him to stop.

"I'm good for it~" Stupid whore has no idea how long it takes to learn a spell. Figures.

Unless she physically fights him, he's going to move her back and push her down onto the narrow but plush recliner-bed, then quickly strip out of his own clothing and get on top of her.

Gamila knows which hole goes to her womb.

As long as he avoids that she's up for pretty much anything.

Omlar is not very creative and is in fact going straight for penetrative sex with no foreplay.

His hot, blunt, throbbing member is at her gates, and pushing in.

Shit!

Oh fuck that feels good.

But shit!

She was in a hurry; she never actually specified that she wanted to limit things to only whatever two girls or two boys could do together, since she knows that is safe.

This is not safe. The idea of a baby growing in her belly is repugnant, and terrifying.

Not terrifying enough to dampen her ardor, though. And a removed, abstract corner of her mind quietly marvels at how beautiful that disastrous fact about herself is. Pride in herself stands against fear like one shining hero against an undead army, in that far corner of her mind.

Much more present is the thought that, she now has nine months to become enough of a wizard to be absolutely sure she'll never give birth. However that works. She only knows rumors that it's even a thing. But she can't back out now. She has to follow through and learn how spells. That is now urgent.

And even if she wanted to back out, even if she could back out without upsetting Mister Narvet...

...it would sicken her. She'd hate herself. She doesn't even understand why (yet), but she would.

(Because by not backing out she is defying the cruel grasp of the oppressive incentive-structure that would withhold her ideals from her.

Metal.

Pointless, when aimed at nature and natural consequence, rather than at an agent of that incentive-structure. But still. Metal.)

Omlar pumps into her at a steady pace, rocking against her, thoroughly enjoying the feel of her body under him.

He's deliberately selfish, using her body, chasing his own pleasure with no concern for hers. He's trying on purpose to wake her up to the harsh reality of what she's gotten herself into.

He feels vaguely cheated when it doesn't work.

It hits different, being taken. Feeling her pleasure rise and crest and explode outside of her own control. Riding the experience rather than driving it.

She's disappointed when it ends, even though she's gotten more pleasure out of it than he has. She can feel the powerful spasming of his manhood inside her and knows that must be his own pleasure cresting and exploding. She's not sure what part of this process is the proverbial 'man plants his seed in woman's womb' but she figures it has to be some part of it, and it could easily be this part.

Her resolve only grows stronger. She wants this again. She wants more of this. She wants this without the fear. And she wants it for everyone, not just herself.

Omlar looks down at the sweaty, flushed, very satisfied-looking girl under him, and shoves her off the recliner-bed, onto the floor. (There is a comfy rug.)

He turns and flops into the vacated space, sprawling out as he catches his breath.

She's hardly expecting any better from him, so whatever.

She sits on the rug and looks up at him demurely.

No, actually, she gets up and gets on top of him. He looks too tired to go again but his body is objectively more comfortable than the floor. She swings a leg over him and straddles his pubes.

Also, draping herself over him puts her in arm's reach of his spellbook. She grabs it and props it on his shoulder, giving him an expectant smile.

Yeah, yeah. He knows.

He shifts her a bit, so they can both hold and see the pages of the book. It's cuddly. He doesn't acknowledge the cuddliness.

"Detect Magic. So the first thing you need to do..."

(Spellcraft: 20)

She only has a couple of hours before the mail depot closes and her father will expect to bring her home.

It turns out those hours are not enough time to hang her very first spell. Especially when she ends up riding her teacher's manhood and then bending over the worktable for him. As fascinating and important as learning the spell is, sex is... what it's all for. Or something.

However, when she eventually has Mister Narvet clean her up with a Prestidigitation, puts her clothes on, and sneaks back to the depot, she does leave with several pieces of absolutely critical knowledge: What a scaffold is and what it's for. Magic's five-dimensional nature. What 'topology' means and from that, what a spell's 'circle' is. What a 'balancing point' is.

Tiny drips of knowledge, but each illuminating the previously blank space of how a wizard prepares spells. They didn't get as far as actually trying to hang the complete spell in one of her spell slots, but now that she knows what a spell is in any meaningful sense, she already can kind of see in her mind how that might work.

The looming threat of pregnancy keeps her from bouncing in excitement, but she feels like she's finally moving after sitting stagnant for months.

The mail depot is currently in a tizzy.

Several voices are calling out Gamila's name.

Thankfully, this does not seem like the kind of tizzy where they've been frantically searching for a missing teenage girl for two hours. Rather, it seems more like the sort of tizzy where they've only been looking for her for a couple of minutes, having decided to close up for the night only to then notice she wasn't where she was supposed to be.

(Stealth: 9)

Shit.

She locked herself out. And there's no window, no crack, the keyhole's not the kind you can see through. She can't Dimensional Slide somewhere she can't see at all.

She can't sneak back in, and everyone's looking for her.

Okay...

(Bluff: 3)

She goes in the front door.

"I'm here, I'm here! I just, uh, went outside for a moment. No need to yell."

"We've been calling out for you for five minutes, Gamila!"

    "I, uh, I didn't hear you."

Mido shakes his head. "You had me worried something had happened to you. Don't do that."

    "Sorry."

"For Axis' sake, Gamila. You know better than to wander off like that."

    "I know. I'm sorry.

"If you know, why did you do it? You should tell me, at least, so I know where you are! Why didn't you tell me?"

    "You were busy."

"You're lying to me and I don't know why but I'm disappointed in you, Gamila. C'mon, we're going home."

...

Great. Now both of her parents are being cold to her, and they're still being cold to each other on top of that. The Saei household is under a continuous strain.

Mido does not take his daughter to work again in the following days.

(Stealth: 20)

Which is why, as soon as her parents are asleep, she sneaks out.

Gamila wears her cloak, keeps her head down, and swerves away any time she hears the sounds of armor.

She avoids the major streets, sticking to alleys and back passages, using her knowledge of the city's layout.

There are a couple of close calls, but nothing terribly unlucky happens, and Gamila finds her path mostly unimpeded.

The laundry service is closed up tight and both the shop and the apartment above are dark and quiet.

(Climb: 22)

Gamila goes for the window this time. She climbs up the alley wall until she can peak through the curtains, then Slides through the glass, appearing inside the dark apartment.

She peers through the darkness at the recliner-bed.

Omlar is fast asleep.

His spellbook is in its usual place on his bedside table.

Gamila takes the spellbook and creeps down into the closed-up shop.

She sits on the floor with the spellbook in front of her.

And she resumes where she left off, following the scaffold for Detect Magic, slowly tugging and sculpting the magic at her fingertips into the structure it needs to have. She's very, very good at visualization, but even she can't imagine in five dimensions.

She's slow. She's precise. Her hands are steady. And it's still going to take her a while to get it right.

(Spellcraft: 18)

Or not.

Gamila's eyes go wide and her face lights up in a grin as the magic folds together and she's suddenly holding a completed spell.

...what does she do, once she has the complete spell?

She can feel the tug, to cast Detect Magic all she has to do is pull, but that'd ruin all her hard work, and she knows cantrips are supposed to be reusable.

...it sure would be a lot easier to figure out what to do if she could see what she was doing.

Fuck it, she has time.

She pulls, she casts, and everything changes.

Building a second Detect Magic is trivially easy with the first one up, even when it cuts out halfway through.

Building a third Detect Magic after casting the second goes even more smoothly. This time she actually finishes and is able to look at the complete spell.

Now, how does one hang the spell for later?

Okay, she can kind of see a naïve way to stick the spell onto one of her spell slots. But that can't possibly be the right way. It wouldn't change anything about how actually casting the spell would unravel it into nothing. She knows cantrips are supposed to be reusable so this can't possibly be the correct way to use a spell slot.

(Omlar deliberately omitted the concept of 'catching' a cantrip for reuse from his explanation.)

She's only seen the one spell. Maybe looking at a different spell will give her a hint?

Gamila flips the page of the spellbook to Prestidigitation, then casts the third Detect Magic and gets to work.

Omlar Narvet is accustomed to rising early.

If he oversleeps, Endure Elements collapses on him and that is not a pleasant way to wake up.

He stretches, yawns, reaches out to slap his bedside lamp with Light, then reaches for his spellbook to do his routine re-casting of Endure Elements, as he does every morning.

His hand meets bare wood.

Omlar is suddenly very awake.

Gamila is too excited by her success to feel guilty about it when she hears Omlar's cursing from upstairs.

She grabs the spellbook, races up the steps, and glomps him.

"I did it! I did it!"

His spellbook. There it is. He feels an immense relief about that, followed by an anger-tinged lust. The girl is far too audacious, sneaking additional lessons he didn't give her. She needs to be put in her place. Her place being, on his dick.

Then his mind catches up, and that feeling is replaced by mild horror.

"No you didn't."

...

"Detect Magic."

Gamila has Endure Elements up.

"Watch. Mage Hand."

She floats his spellbook back onto his bedside table.

"Prestidigitation."

She runs her hand over her hair, turning the wavy black to a gem-like emerald green (while also changing it from 'rinsed and brushed three days ago' to 'freshly shampooed and styled').

She unhugs to do a pirouette.

Omlar smirks.

She definitely didn't catch those cantrips after she used them. She's about to learn that lesson the hard way.

"Well done," he lies.

He puts on a frown.

"How many of my spells did you prepare?"

"I've got Detect Magic, Prestidigitation, Mage Hand, Light, and Endure Elements. It took most of the night to figure out the right way to hang the spells; those are all I had time for once I did."

Omlar's smirk grows at her obvious lie. She oughtn't have the slots for more than that. The only way she could is if she's smarter than him, and he's already decided she isn't.

(A note of disquiet, that he couldn't have worked out the rest of it for himself after only the instruction he'd given her. Easily ignored. After all, the him of today is hardly taxed by the task. But there'd been something off about those cantrips, when she cast them.)

"You can thank me in a moment. I need the privy. When I come out I want you naked on my bed."

"Yes, Sir!"

She strips and lays down.

When he returns, she isn't just naked, she's touching herself in anticipation.

He slaps her hand away and replaces it with his cock.

For the next little while, he uses her ardently if uncreatively, fucking her roughly and with no care for her pleasure. It's less frustrating when he's expecting it, but still kind of disappointing that she wasn't overestimating her own value hasn't learned her lesson.

He finishes twice, before regaining enough self-control to clean himself up and kick her out. (Oh that's right, she lost her Prestidigitation. She needs him to clean her up. Well, he might. If she begs.)

"Detect Magic," he whispers.

Gamila still has no idea there's anything strange or special about how she hung her spells.

"Prestidigitation."

She waves her hand to clean up all the sweat, manseed, and tangled hair.

(Her hair is black again, but still much cleaner than it usually used to be.)

...whut.

"You bitch!"

Gamila startles.

What the fuck?

Where did that come from?

Why is Mister Narvet spitting mad out of nowhere?

He is almost beyond words as he realizes what must really be going on.

"You-! You-! Seductress! Succubus! You were a sorceress this whole time?!? You lying cunt!!!"

Has he gone insane?

"What the fuck are you talking about-"

(Attack: 16)

He strikes her across the face, hard.

"Don't play dumb with me, you slattern!"

It's a shock, but it barely hurts. Like, that was a grown man's punch and it barely rocked her.

After a stunned moment, a part of her goes cold. It's a small part. He has no combat spells and if that punch was representative of the physical threat he can bring to bear, she doesn't feel very in-danger, actually.

Still. He hit her.

(Attack: 21)

She hits back. And she doesn't need a spell to hit him with magic. Her power flows around her fist as it crashes into him, delivering half again as much force as her fist alone. (It's still not very much damage, but it's more than he did to her.)

Omlar is not expecting her to hit back.

He falls on his ass with a wheeze.

This just serves as confirmation, though. This is not a normal girl. She lied about everything. She never needed him to teach her wizardry; she was already a sorceress. There had been no trade, her offered deal was a sham.

It was nothing but an elaborate ruse to make a fool out of him.

He's going to hurt her. If he can.

Is she willing to kill this man?

No.

Well, in that case, fighting him is pointless.

Gamila darts for the window, Slides out of the apartment, and drops to the ground.

She races away and is long gone by the time Mister Narvet can make it down the stairs.

Maybe it's a good thing that her father isn't going to be taking her along when he goes to work, anymore.

Over the next two weeks, a rumor begins to spread and grow across the neighborhoods of Aru-Da.

The name 'Saei' is whispered in hushed tones. The daughter, it speaks.

The daughter, barely flowered, yet already defiled. Tainted blood and dangerous chaotic tendencies. Unfit for marriage. UNFIT FOR MARRIAGE. UNFIT FOR MARRIAGE.

Gamila has bigger concerns than some rumor that Mister Narvet probably started out of spite.

Her monthlies are late.

She was expecting it, but the creeping dread is now ever-present.

From her bedroom window, she can see the Crimson Canal cut below, and beyond it, on the other side of the waters, the High Temple of Pharasma spears into the sky.

She looks upon the spire with loathing.

She's not giving up when she's barely started. She knows what a spell is, now, and she's practiced the ones she has until they're second nature. She has a much better idea of what questions to ask. The puzzle now, is where to ask those questions. She has an idea about that. It's kind of the obvious idea, when you know how to read.

(Bluff: 12)

At breakfast, Gamila askes her father if he'd let her come along with him to work, again.

After he and her mother snipe passive aggressively at each other for a few minutes, he tells her she's welcome, as long as she stays within his sight at all times.

Gamila agrees.

Later, when her mother is out of ear shot, Gamila tells her father that she changed her mind; that she'd rather stay home after all, actually.

Then, when her father heads out, Gamila tells her mother goodbye and claims to be going with him.

Her mother thinks she's with her father, and her father thinks she's with her mother. Gamila now has an alibi for the entire day.

She hurries out of her own neighborhood and joins the throngs of traffic heading into the Rose Quarter. She's never been to the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, but she's heard about it. Everyone has. Knowledge. Wine that makes you smarter. Crazy wizards doing crazy things.

There is so much blank space in Gamila's understanding of her own magic, her own body, everything. She needs to fill that space in, and she needs to fill it in quickly.

Kesi notices, shortly after her husband leaves with her daughter, that her daughter left her cloak behind. She'll get sunsick without it. She snatches it up and power-walks out into the street, spotting her husband's wagon at the end of the row.

"Mido!" She closes the distance, then stops and look over the wagon in confusion. "Mido, where's Gamila?"

    "What do you mean? She's at home."

"You were taking her with you today."

    "She changed her mind about that, said she'd rather stay put."

"She just left with you!"

    "What do you mean she just left with me? I just left without her. Kesi, where is our daughter?"

"She was with you!"

    "No she wasn't!"

"She, she lied to us?! Why would she do that?"

    "I don't know, she's been off lately..."

"Our daughter is a conscientious girl, in spite of your influence. She wouldn't do that, unless someone's gotten to her, gotten to her and filled her head with poison and lies."

    "That's going a bit far. I think she's just feeling a bit... confined. That's normal at her age."

"Oh don't you start. You had to go and turn her against me. Now she's vulnerable and someone's turned her against us both!"

    "I never turned her against you. You managed that all on your own."

"...how dare you. I'm a good mother."

    "Listen, I need to get to work."

"Fine! Go. Our daughter's gotten into gods-know what kind of trouble, but fine. I will handle the matter. Have a good day at work, dear."

Ignorant of the shitstorm that's waiting for her at home, Gamila stares up in awe at the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye. It really is a lot bigger when you're standing in it's shadow, and clearly built by wizards.

She realizes... she has no idea what the rules are, here.

For lack of better options, she's just going to walk in and look for books and see if anyone tries to stop her.

The Temple of the All-Seeing Eye is an enormous building that appears to be made out of glittering pastel glass and crystal, radiating magic, tapering upwards into a spire that is, just by a few inches, taller than the Black Dome. That's what it looks like right now, at least. It's kind of well known that it changes, sometimes as often as every week.

The plaza around the base of the tower is filled with light, airy taverns and outdoor cafes. The wine of Nefreti Clepati is for sale on all sides, at the price-point of one gold piece per mug.

The interior of the temple is mostly hollow, with stairs ringing it, climbing up and up and up to the highest levels of the spire. On the ground level, the glossy marble floor is dominated by a huge, slowly-rotating Silent Image of... some kind of bumpy sphere, with little bits floating around in it, and a smaller sphere inside, which in turn was filled with spools of thread. A quartet of richly-dressed, well-groomed teenagers (three boys, one girl) are standing under the image, gesticulating at it as they argue with each other in low voices.

There do not appear to be any checkpoints or anyone who's job it is to keep the riffraff out.

There does seem to be a gilded plaque with information for aspiring wizard students. Among the information on the plaque is that lessons for absolute beginners hoping to get their first wizard level are three gold-pieces per week.

Her father makes between one and two gold pieces a week, total. These prices are insane.

Her family is relatively wealthy, she thought. All their neighbors are significantly poorer than them. The laundry wizard is probably poorer than the Saei household. Which is nuts if the lesson he gave her usually went for that much gold.

But this. These people, this place, makes her feel like an urchin, dressed in rags.

At least she's a clean urchin. She's not sweating at all from the walk over, thanks to Endure Elements, and she keeps Prestidigitation up constantly while she's awake. She turns her hair emerald green again to show off that she already has spells and isn't just an illiterate child who wandered into somewhere she shouldn't be. Or something. She has no idea. She feels a little like she's suddenly in a foreign country and has no idea what's normal.

Gamila peers up at the hovering illusion, then goes over and creeps up behind the quartet of attractive teenage wizards. What is that thing? "What is that thing?"

"We don't know!" says the wizard girl.

She and the three boys glance backward for a moment. The common-girl look contrasting with the gemstone hair makes all of them stare for a moment, before two of the boys dismiss her with vague distaste. The remaining boy and the girl both smile at Gamila and point at the illusion.

"It appeared last night."

"No one knows who cast it or what it's an image of."

"We think there's a prize for whoever figures it out, though."

"There's usually a prize when something mysterious happens."

"The prize is almost never an explosion," the girl adds, reassuring, but with a small hint of disappointment.

"You've never seen anything like this, have you?"

(Knowledge(Nature): 6)

Gamila stares at the strange... thing. She's not getting any sense of recognition, and she's not having any ideas.

"No. Sorry. I have no idea."

She glances around.

"Is, um, is the library open?"

"It's over th-"

The wizard girls bounces forward with a smile. "Up that way and to the left. I can show you, if you like? Is this your first visit to the Temple? Are you looking for something specific?"

(Sense Motive: 17)

Gamila peers suspiciously for a moment before realizing: no, this girl is actually just being friendly. Gamila isn't used to kindness or interest from her female peers. Not for a long time now.

"I want to look over a, encyclopedia, is that the right word? Of all the spells wizards can learn. Do you think you could show me something like that?"

"That's easy. We've got lots of those. Kind of have to."

The wizard girl holds Gamila's hand and leads her off, up to the broad doors to the left.

"I'm Dana, by the way. It's a pleasure."

The library is beautiful. Eight stories of magelight and concentric bookshelves rise up to a stained-glass skylight at the peak of the space. There are desks sized for everything from gnomish children to full-grown dragons, with a number of well-worn magic carpets heaped over the backs of chairs. There is one ladder, in the corner, covered in dust. It is not a space one can navigate if one cannot fly, either under their own power or using one of the provided enchanted carpets.

Some of the chairs are occupied. Some of the airspace is occupied. There is a lot of reading, happening here.

"Gamila," she says, giving the other girl a smile after a moment of hesitating to give her real name.

Being honest feels right, though. These may not be her people but they are better people than the ones she's used to. Or maybe that's just Dana. Time will tell.

Gamila takes a few moments to just stare, hungry and also intimidated, at this ridiculously grandiose repository of knowledge.

Dana snickers a little at the look on Gamila's face.

"I know, right? But it's not as inconvenient as it looks. Most of the books that matter to you if you're under third-circle are down at the bottom where you don't need to fly to get at them."

Dana can show Gamila where they keep the books with the spell lists.

"Thank you."

Gamila sits down with one of those books and cracks it open. She doubts that what she needs is going to be this easy to find. If it was easy, well, everybody would be different about sex things.

There are a lot of spells. This is a very thick book. This is going to take more than one day, probably.

"If I find a spell in here that I want for myself, is there someone I should talk to? Or does this library have usable spellbooks too?"

Dana spocks an eyebrow.

"There are example spellbooks you can copy most of the well-known spells from, but you can't take them with you. You don't have your own spellbook?"

Gamila really doesn't want to answer that question.

"Hey, can I ask you a really scandalous question?"

Dana's attention is diverted immediately.

"Absolutely."

"Say a woman lays with a man, but she doesn't want a child, so she Prestidigitates away the man's seed as soon as he finishes. What goes wrong?"

This is something Gamila has been wondering in the back of her mind since she saw the white goop dripping out of herself and realized what it had to be. It can't possibly actually be that easy, or life as a woman would be very different, but it's such an obvious idea; she's desperately curious about what does happen.

Dana's mouth falls open. She thinks it over for several long moments.

"That... is a fucking good question!" The pun is on purpose. "Could that work? I've never heard anything about what happens if you try that."

Dana laughs.

"The others are going to be so scandalized when they hear about my new research project, because how the 'strom has no one tried that? Someone must have! And it must have failed, but you'd think it'd be really common cautionary tale... I really want to know why that isn't a really common cautionary tale, now..."

Dana remembers Gamila is still there long enough to wave goodbye as she grabs one of the flying carpets and zooms up into the stacks. "See you around, Gamila!"

She gets shushed from like six different directions at once.

Okay, yeah, first impression correct. Gamila likes this girl.

She settles in and starts reading.

To start with she isn't really trying to accomplish anything except to fill in all the blank space in her head labeled 'Spells That Exist'.

Without her bearings in that space, she can't even begin to plan.

Gamila spends the whole day reading.

She knows she's not going to remember half of this, and that she's going to have to re-read this information many times, so she keeps going until dusk.

She does, at the start, when she's reading about spells that aren't too advanced for her, pause to go find those example spellbooks Dana mentioned and build the spells for herself.

By the time she moves on to reading about spells above her own circle, she now has ready: Dancing Lights, Detect Magic, Prestidigitation, and Ray of Frost. Endure Elements, and Expeditious Retreat.

She has to lose Mage Hand, no room. And Dancing Lights seems way more useful and flexible than Light even if it needs to be re-cast every minute. Ray of Frost. She's armed, now. And also she wonders if she can use it to make ice. Ice is incredibly in-demand.

She knows what a spell circle is, now. But when she goes to hang her second first-circle spell alongside Endure Elements, she discovers that that's all she has room for. Which is strange. She can feel that she has four 'slots', not two, but hanging the first-circle spells takes up a different kind of space, and there's only room for two. She is confused about why they're called 'slots' when the spells don't actually go into them and they're more like 'charges' anyway.

She chooses Expeditious Retreat to fill her one open preparation-space because despite the name it sounds useful for a lot of things besides just retreating. It makes her twice as fast for a whole minute.

The sun begins to set.

Women out after dark can be assumed to be up to no good.

It isn't far, back to Aru-Da, but it's far enough for the horizon to move a ways up the diameter of the sun during the trip.

Thanks to her new first-circle spell, she can race from the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye to her family's house on the edge of the Crimson Canal in just over two minutes.

She pauses at the end of the block to catch her breath, then looks around for somewhere to hide until her father comes home on the wagon.

The wagon is right there.

Mido, apparently, is already home.

...shit.

Gamila's deception is completely foiled, then.

She clenches her fist, and lets out through clenched teeth a quiet, frustrated scream.

Alright.

Fine.

Subterfuge has failed.

Can she come up with a lie? She doesn't want to come up with a lie.

Fine then.

Gamila readies herself for a fight, and stomps up the street to enter her house.

Gamila's parents are waiting.

Mido is smart enough to realize that the nature of the attempted deception implied a specific time at which Gamila must have planned to return home.

So the sight that greets her when she steps inside is both of her parents, seated at opposite ends of their table, both facing her and deeply unamused.

Gamila's heart is thundering. She arranges her face in a glare.

"I'm home."

"We can see that."

If anything, Mido looks more frazzled than angry.

"Where were you, Gamila??? Do you have any idea how worried we were?!"

Something nasty flares up in her gut at that, a wordless fury at a sense of undefinable unfairness, but she can't put it into words so she swallows it.

Deep breath.

"I was at the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye. I went there because- "

"You went there?! Gamila, I do not want you around those, those wizards. It isn't safe! How could you possibly think it was a good idea to give those awful rumors more wood to burn? I know you've heard what the neighbors are saying about you. I had to set Mrs. Kekep and Mrs. Sutar straight just this afternoon! Do you want your father's business partners to think he raised a whore?"

There's that feeling again, that feeling like something is deeply wrong with, not this argument, but the grounds on which they're arguing.

Do you want them to think your father raised a whore?

Gamila knows the answer she's supposed to give.

Do you want them to think you're a whore?

Gamila knows the response that is baked into the question, because it isn't a question, it isn't a question at all, because it isn't a query for information. It's a threat.

Do you want them to think you're a whore?

Every girl who hears the question is supposed to reflexively flinch away in fear, retreat, back down, flee from the prospect of being thought a whore.

Do you want to be a whore?

Do as we say, or we'll call you a whore.

Something breaks free, crystalizes, and settles in Gamila's mind. She already is a whore. The traditional threat has no power over her anymore. Even with the... complications... she is proud of what she did, and she'll be prouder when she can do it with impunity. That's been her goal this whole time. Not to undo a mistake, but to remove the obstacles so she can do it as much as she likes.

"Dancing Lights," Gamila casts, filling the dimming room with the soft glow of magelight.

    !!!

With her parents (or at least her mother) struck silent, Gamila speaks, this vision of her desired future coming to her in the very moment, as the words form.

"I'm not ashamed of the truth. I went to the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye to read about magic. I want to learn spells, become a successful wizard, and then, when I've earned power and respect and enough money to be head of my own household, yes mama, I want to go work in a brothel."

Kesi flounders. The sheer audacity of her daughter. The sheer, terrifying blasphemy.

"Don't ever say that! Don't even joke about that! Pray no one heard the words that just came out of your face! And as for this..." she gestures at the floating magelights. "Where- How- When did-"

She rounds on her husband.

"This never would have happened if you hadn't taught her to read!"

Mido is staring at the Dancing Lights and replies without looking.

"Our daughter wouldn't have discovered a talent for magic and with it the potential to lift herself higher up in this world than we ever could've dreamed, you mean?"

    "Mido!!!" Kesi shrieks in betrayal.

Mido finally looks at her. "I gave up my dreams of being a wizard when I married you and we did the budget for the first time. I'm not going to crush Gamila's."

    "Our daughter is not a man to be enriched by such things! What kind of life can she have if her power scares off all the best suitors?"

"You were a firebrand when I met you, and I certainly liked you better than the meeker women. When did you become such a hypocrite?"

    "Don't put this on me! You've been filling Gamila's head with nonsense since she was a baby!"

"Our daughter learned spellcraft behind our backs," Mido says, somewhat proud. "I think she's rather good at filling her own head with whatever strikes her fancy."

"Don't say that like it isn't concerning. You know perfectly well that we can't afford wizard tutoring for Gamila any more than we can afford it for you."

She turns to face her daughter.

"You understand, don't you? However you feel about it now, this is not going to lead to a good future for you. I don't want you going to the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye any more. They're a bad influence, especially on women. I don't see why you can't have a few spells as long as you don't flaunt them, but no more talk of being a professional wizard. I know it sounds glamorous now but you don't understand what it means to be the head of your own household. It, it, you'd be skipping over all the important parts of your life."

Aaaaaaauuuuuugghhhh. Her mother just flatly discarding the concept is somehow even more annoying than screaming at her about it.

"The important part of my life is the part where I'm a whore."

Wow that feels good to say. She finds she means the words even more firmly than she thought she did, as the words come out.

"Did you not hear me the first time? Was the magic too distracting? I wasn't being vulgar and I wasn't being sarcastic. I was answering the question: YES I WANT TO BE A WHORE!!!" Gamila bellows, loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

Kesi does not comprehend this.

Kesi used Blame. Her wisdom fell.

"WHAT IN THE DEEPEST PITS OF THE ABYSS HAVE YOU BEEN TEACHING OUR DAUGHTER, MIDO?"

Mido just stares at Gamila in horror.

"My daughter... oh no, oh no, oh no... what have you done?"

Gamila forces herself to ignore her mother's outburst, and meets her father's eyes.

"I bribed a wizard with sex to get him to teach me enough to get started on spellcraft. I don't know if I'm pregnant yet, but I probably am. I don't plan to stay that way."

Mido eyes just about fall out of his head.

He pushes his chair back and starts pacing around the room, repeating, "Oh no," over and over.

Kesi has never been this angry.

"WHO?!" she bites out. "Who thinks he can ruin my daughter?!"

"Are you even listening?!?"

Gamila slams her fist down on the table.

"He doesn't matter! I got what I needed from him! I can learn new spells from library books now and find one to stop being pregnant! Problem solved!"

"Do you hear yourself?! We are not going to let you kill your baby!"

She grabs her daughter by the hair and shakes her.

"Tell me who the father is!"

"No," Gamila snarls at her mother, and gods does that feel good to say, too.

She rounds on her father, ignoring the pain of pulled hair to do so. "Papa!!! Stop acting like the sky is falling! I'm going to be fine!"

"You are not going to be fine!!!"

Her mother shakes her by the hair again.

"You've ruined your entire life!"

Something in Gamila's chest collapses into a singularity and another thought crystalizes.

'Ruined'.

It's true that a thing has been ruined, that thing being the life of a wife of man without strife, that thing being motherhood and the perpetuation of that same expectation. Unruined, it goes on and on and on without end, generation after generation.

A thing has been ruined, but that thing is contemptable.

"GOOD!" Gamila snarls. "Burn it to rubble and salt the fucking dirt! I've never been more sure about anything! Good! Fucking! Riddance!!!"

Kesi staggers backward, her grip falling slack.

There are tears in her eyes.

"You don't mean that. You can't mean that. You- You- You're confused. You've been- Someone did this to you. You don't understand..."

"Gamila..."

Mido looks heartbroken.

"You'll never make Axis. You know that, right?"

Gamila refuses to feel guilty, here. She refuses.

"None of us know that. This is what I want my life to be. And if I have the spells to make it safe, to make it so I never have children and can't be overpowered by common men, there's no reason I can't live that way. What would stop me?"

"The good sense to care about your future? Any feeling of moral horror at spitting in the face of civilization? Some scrap of familial piety?"

Mido is overcome by an icy calm, as tends to happen when he's hurting. His daughter gets that from him.

"Do you even care? About how we would feel if we lost you to the Abyss? Do you care about this family at all?"

Words of reassurance stick in Gamila's throat.

The truth, she understands in a burst of revelation, is the actually kind of awful, rather than the perfectly-fine-except-for-how-people-freak-out kind of awful, but Gamila can't see anything that softens the blow.

"Not enough to let you get in my way."

"That's not fair, Gamila. You know perfectly well that it is my duty as the head of this household to protect you, to protect your value, to protect you... even from yourself. Maybe especially from yourself."

Mido huffs in frustration.

"This isn't you, Gamila! Where is all of this even coming from?! What happened to you?! When did you start lying to us?!"

"You're a good father, papa. But even you..."

Gamila briefly lets her eyes close.

"You don't trust me. You never have. Of course I started lying as soon as I had anything to hide. I saw a path to power, I took it, and I succeeded. You would never have trusted me enough to let me try."

"That's not a matter of trust! It's a matter of you wanting something that's going to hurt you!"

Mido glowers.

"Succeeding makes it worse! Can't you see that succeeding makes it worse?! You've forsaken... everything! And you want to... you want to... can't you see there's no coming back from that? You'll be... worthless, Gamila. To this family, yes, but that's not what scares me! You'll be worthless to yourself. If you kill that baby, if you go on using magic to kill your babies, you'll be no better than a savage, rutting in your own filth! How could I help you do that? Even life as a slave would be better!"

There's that feeling again, like the grounds on which they're arguing have moved under her feet; everything askew and strange.

"How, would life, as a slave, be better than having the power to decide for myself what I'm worth?"

"You don't decide that! Don't you understand? You spread your legs for the first man to wave a spellbook at you! Your only hope is to bear that man's legitimate child! Getting rid of the baby won't solve anything! It'll just destroy your last and only chance to be anything but a savage. Come to your senses, Gamila! I know you're smarter than this!"

"That's right. We can't let you escape the consequences of your actions. This is serious. You are going to tell us who defiled you and we're going to sue for marriage."

Escape the consequences of your actions.

The words wring in Gamila's ears, the scathing tone echoing through her mind.

Escape the consequences-

The entire point of what she's done is to have the power to be free of those very consequences.

Escape-

Being free is only an escape if someone wants to keep you not-free.

It finally, at last, clicks. The first and final betrayal. Her parents-

No, not just her parents. Her mother is fickle, and her father is both kind and open-minded. This is bigger than them. This is... everyone.

Her parents are afraid of letting her free herself.

They, the bigger they, want the baby growing in her to be as chains, shackling her to the life of a wife. Having the power to free herself from those chains is a transgression.

The ground on which she's been arguing, shatters. Her mind reels. Horror courses through her. Because it's so obvious now that she's had the thought. It aligns a lifetime of wordless confusions into perfect, stark, absolutely calamitous clarity.

She looks to her father, the child in her searching with a last desperate hope.

"We'll find out who it was," Mido agrees with his wife in a defeated tone. "We'll sue for marriage."

He gives Gamila a sad look.

"The sooner we know, the better our negotiating position. Please think about that."

The silence hangs in the air, until Gamila figures its been long enough that the conversation is at least temporarily over.

She goes to her room and closes the drapes. She takes off her outerwear. She lays down on her bed and stares up at the ceiling. Horror flares into an inferno of rage and purpose as the logic locks together in her mind in a wordless instant, crystalized, and she clamps down on her voice with all her willpower, to be sure she won't make any sound, then with the rest of her body, she screams.

She now knows the terrible truth of that wrongness that has so often sat heavily in her gut. She has always been told that shunning promiscuity is virtuous because that protects everyone from starving babies and damned mothers. The great Lawful lynchpin of civilization: that all the rules are for something, that all the rules are there to keep you safe.

But if that's really civilization's truth, having the power to keep yourself safe some other way ought to be celebrated.

It isn't celebrated.

The revelation blazes in her mind with the fury of a dying moon: They're glad. They're glad that nature itself inflicts a cruel punishment on any woman who breaks the rules. The accidents, the unwanted babies, aren't a problem to be solved; they're a threat, wielded like a slavemaster's whip to keep their sons and daughters obedient.

The means and the goal are in each other's place.

Unwanted pregnancy itself is being wielded against her, against all women, as a threat to force them to follow the very rules that are only supposed to exist in the first place to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

Gamila's rage eclipses itself again.

No, it's worse than that.

The threat and punishment, the whip and the chain.

It's a temptation, to see things that way, to wallow in her rage and hate, and fantasize about brutally stabbing a faceless stand-in for the wielder of the metaphorical whip.

But that's just surface appearances.

Gamila can't stop herself seeing deeper no matter how temped she is to stay on that surface level.

Because as satisfying as it is in a childish way to make the comparison, women aren't slaves.

No, it's worse than that. It's just that the worse thing doesn't have a worse word associated with it.

Ordinary men wouldn't want a women cringing in terrified obedience, constantly reminding them of how terrible they are.

No, they want to perpetuate this abomination and be thanked for doing so. They, above all else, want the women to play along with the narrative. That's what this is really about. That's why alternative means of being safe are so reviled. The narrative requires that there be no way out, no safe alternative to living the way a proper Osirian woman is supposed to.

That is the true face of Gamila's enemy. The actual obstacle between her and sexual freedom.

It's daunting.

But she is still too angry for that to damage her resolve.

She wants to rip it all down and make everyone free.

What would that even look like?

What is the great lie and the narrative built upon? What would have to be true of the world, what would have to become the new normal, for all of those foundations to be gone? Birth control, for one. Wizards being able to protect themselves isn't enough. It would need to be universal. So universal that if anyone, anywhere, tries to threaten a women with pregnancy, she can laugh in his face with the support of her entire community. Disease, too. You hear about it much less often, but 'pox-ridden whore' is a stereotype. Only really powerful clerics can cure diseases. For a world without a foundation for the chastity narrative, that would also need to be so universal that anyone who talks about catching a disease sounds like a delusional crackpot. Beauty and cleanliness, that's less important but it is another area where the narrative can find footing, she's sure; meaning Prestidigitation would also need to be as universal as fingers, and more besides.

All of that, just to make it possible to demolish the great lie and the narrative. How does one even begin to act upon an ambition that large? Gamila can't fathom it.

But she does know that, at this scale, she cannot hold back. Whatever she must do, she cannot balk. If she is to be fodder, a prop, in the narrative of A Woman's Proper Place, well, then it is only fitting for her to treat the perpetuators of that narrative as fodder in turn, as nameless obstacles, in the narrative of Gamila's Story. That feels right. That feels righteous. A truer rightness than any law.

That is the only principle she has, to guide her actions, since all law is now her enemy, and she is utterly alone in her conviction.

Gamila is not alone.

It slides into Gamila's stream of consciousness like it belongs there. The feeling of being seen. The feeling of being understood and agreed with. The feeling of power. The power to defy.

With that feeling comes a simple mental image, crisp and clear: A circle with three swords sticking out of it.

FIND US.

I will.

Her sense of her own magic expands.

There is a lot there that wasn't there a moment ago.

Orthogonal to her arcane charges, orthogonal to her wizard 'slots', two new pools of power, orthogonal to each other. Four separate dimensions of spell-space. And there's more, there's a tap, inside her, through which she can feel the energy wanting to flow, and there's more than that: something else, something nestled nearby...

Gamila shakes her head. She doesn't recognize the symbol, but she knows what to look for now. There is a god that's on her side.

...that would make Gamila a cleric, wouldn't it. And that tap she can feel, that's how she Channels Positive Energy. And there's those new empty spell slots, just sitting there. She'll presumably get spells tomorrow morning, but in the mean time... she already knows how to make an empty spell slot useful, doesn't she.

The drapes almost rip from their mounting as Gamila exits her room and stalks through the house's common area.

Her parents are still there, and her sudden emergence interrupts whatever they were saying. They stare at her in silence as she stomps into the pantry and takes up a bread-knife.

Then, meeting their eyes, Gamila flips the knife over and stabs herself in the stomach.

"GAMILA!!!!"

    "STOP WHAT NO-!"

"GAMILAAAA!!!"

(Attack: 6)

She doesn't brace herself for the pain. She needs to feel it, so she can know if she hit her target or not.

She can tell immediately that she missed.

(Attack: 12)

Mido dives for her, grasping at the knife, trying to pull it out of her hands.

(Heal: 25)

Gamila dodges his hands, just barely, and tries again, more carefully this time. She can remember the feeling of Omlar's shaft in her depths, she can remember where that felt like it was. She moves the point of the knife to that spot, and plunges it in.

A choked cry tears itself out of her, because she can feel, she can feel that she hit her target that time. She can feel the blood flooding into her womanhood.

But that's it. It's over.

Gamila rips at one of her new divine spell slots, consuming it and erupting with healing energies. Then she does it again. Then she opens the tap and the knife in her hand suddenly blazes with holy light, flooding the entire room in positive energy. The flash shines out the windows and casts stark shadows into the corners of the Saei house.

There's blood on her underwear and blood on the floor, but her belly is unblemished.

She glares at her parents. "Your move."

Two months later...

Tucked away in an alley on the upper end of Baza's Pool, there is a seemingly nondescript house.

However, etched into the stonework of a pillar there is a symbol: a circle, with three lines radiating out of it. Beyond that pillar is a plain wooden door.

A teenage girl with a seemingly-innocuous bread-knife sheathed at her hip for some reason, peers out from under the hood of her cloak.

This is it. The symbol from her vision.

Gamila heads into the alley, glances around once, then goes to the door and knocks.

After several moments, the shutters on the second-floor window above the door pop open.

A young woman's face, only a few years older than Gamila, peers out with hard eyes and a lock of golden hair among short-cropped raven tresses framing a face that would be beautiful if it wasn't currently bearing the imprinted impressions of having slept on something much less comfortable than a pillow.

"Yeah? Who're you? Lose the hood. Do I know you?"

"We've never met."

Gamila lowers her hood and looks up at the woman as she puts one hand on the handle of her knife.

"I'm looking for someone who knows why I can Channel Positive Energy through this knife, and only this knife."

"...ah. Shit. Hold on."

The shutters fall closed, and after about a minute, the door in front of Gamila unlocks and opens.

"Get in here. Who did you stab?"

"Before I answer that..."

Gamila traces the circle with three radial lines in the air.

"Tell me Who."

"Seriously? You've never heard of Calistria?"

(Knowledge(Religion): 19)

"Of course I've heard of Calistria! This... is Her holy symbol?"

Gamlia huffs a laugh.

"So you're a Calistrian? I'm a Calistrian? Is... anything, they say about Her, actually true?"

"Some of it. Look, we can do you for the whole spiel, but I'm not a cleric and I'm not a priest. For that you want-"

She stops, goes to the narrow staircase at the end of the hall, and calls up, "Hey, Sadiqa! We've got a convert for ya!"

A face pokes out from over the balcony next to the staircase, upside-down.

"Someone new has come to the embrace of our dark Lady of sexy vengeance?! You be welcome and I will be right down!"

She vanishes again.

"I've really got to know, though. Who did you stab? 'cause if you've got the Eyes 'bout to bust down my door..."

"I stabbed myself. I was pregnant, I didn't want to be, and now I'm not. I haven't murdered anyone. Yet."

"Good. That's a relief. And you are definitely our kind of idiot if you've pulled shit like that. Welcome to the Beachhead, I guess."

She leads the newcomer past the staircase and into a sitting room, then faces her.

"I need to see you Channel. I don't think you're lying but I have to make sure."

"Sure."

Gamila pulls the knife out. It glows, and the room is filled with healing power.

A nod.

She reaches under her airy blouse and pulls out a pendant. A disc, with three little swords poking out of it.

"Sorry to make you waste two whole channels, but: One more time, with this."

"Don't worry about it. I get eight a day."

Gamila puts the knife down on an end table and takes the pendant.

This is absolutely the symbol she saw in her vision, yup.

The pendant glows, and a second flood of positive energy fills the room.

"Eight, eh?"

Penelope smiles, and relaxes noticeably.

"You can keep that. I don't use it, I just keep it as a spare for emergencies. I'll get another one later."

She goes over and sprawls onto one of the cheap-but-comfortable-looking chairs.

"Call me Penny, by the way."

"Gamila."

The other one comes clambering down the staircase, then, and rushes over to plop herself onto Penny's lap. Unlike Penny, who is dressed in a fairly plain set of harem pants and a blouse, the smaller young woman is wearing a large black scarf with gold filigree... and nothing else.

She accepts a kiss from an amused Penny, then turns an intense stare on Gamila.

"The faith of Calistria is nothing less than the total rejection of unfairness-caused-by-rules! I, the third-circle cleric Sadiqa Runihotep, shall teach you our ways!"

She takes a breath.

"What do you want to know?"

Cute.

"Well, everything. But we can start with why I could channel through that knife? I tried other knives and none of them worked."

Sadiqa nods sagely. "You did not ask why I'm naked. You have passed the first test."

    Penny rolls her eyes. "The tests are not part of the faith."

"It is important to find out quickly if an ally is also a friend!"

She sticks up a finger up in the air.

"The reason you could channel through that knife is because you did something so profoundly Calistrian with that knife that it was imbued with that symbolic meaning directly. It would probably not have kept working forever, so I'm glad Penny gave you one of my spares."

"What does Calistria care about? I've heard that She's the goddess of 'unchecked fornication' and of 'female violence', but... I'm an extremely sexual person, it turns out, but when She chose me I wasn't actually thinking about sex. I was thinking about... um, I think I was thinking about how men want women to play along with the story that the lawful way is for our own good, and how that meant it wouldn't be wrong, it'd be righteous, even, if I... treated those men like story-props in the same way? This sounded better in my head."

"I like those head sounds! That is a very Calistrian head-sound."

She shifts position on Penny's lap, going from a side-saddle to a straddle, spreading her legs wide.

"You see, Calistria's domains are lust, revenge, and trickery. But there are a lot of gods that have at least one of those. Our dark lady of sexy vengeance is all about that turnabout! That thing you were thinking proves that you already have a perfect understanding of Calistrian revenge! Which is much better than boring old normal revenge!"

"As for Calistrian lust, it's kind of the same thing. They say Calistria likes it when people are free to act on their desires toward other people in the same ways that those other people would act on their own desires. And what is more that than sex? What is more not that than a lawful system that completely breaks that symmetry by being super sexist while also considering pleasure and desire only as an afterthought, if that?"

She gives Sadiqa's nude body a quick stroking, her eyes briefly smoldering as she pets her lover's bare skin.

"I think I understand."

Gamila wets her lips a little as she lets her gaze linger between her fellow cleric's spread thighs, then follows Penny's roaming hands. Watching Penny and Sadiqa interact is putting a warm feeling in her chest and an ache in her loins. They're cute together, and just casually horny for each other in a relaxed way that Gamila doesn't think she's ever seen anyone be around her before.

And there's an ease here, where Gamila's curiosity isn't hitting a stone wall. This is the highest density of satisfying answers she's gotten in a single conversation since she shook a foundational comprehension of magic out of her father.

"How many Calistrians are there in Sothis?"

Sadiqa preens.

"You did not turn your nose up at my beautiful bald baby-hole!"

Her vulva and mons are, in fact, shaved bare.

"You have passed the second and third tests by embracing a feeling of attraction and by raising rather than revoking the esteem you feel toward my nubile body when I present it to you for your enjoyment! You are definitely a new friend."

"I hate when you call it that," Penny says with an amused headshake. "I'm the one who has to stick my arm up there when you take a turn at the-"

Penny shakes her head in amusement and then gives Gamila a serious look.

"There are two hives of Calistrians operating in the city right now. The Beachhead and the Dark Nest. We're the Beachhead. We mostly operate in the Crimson Island. We try not to fuck with the Eyes openly, but we're freedom fighters, it can get harrowing when we have an urgent mission. We do what we can to help people the law screws over. Freeing slaves. Assassinating the occasional rich asshole. That kind of thing. The Dark Nest operates in the Rose Quarter, and what they do is keep the brothels honest, provide resources for prostitutes, and cater to the rare kinks that you really have to be a spellcaster to get into safely. The Dark Nest funds our operations."

She pauses.

"We have... twenty people? Total? About half of us are clerics, mostly the women, though we do have one boy-cleric. And me. Sadiqa is third-circle and also the third-strongest cleric we have. I'm the strongest combatant we've got. Long story."

"I'm curious about the story but I'm more curious about; go back to what you said about sticking your arm up- "

Gamila leans forward.

"How do we do birth control? What spells work? How do you use them?"

"Ah. Right, so. At first circle, your best bet is Chill Touch combined with a True Strike. You have to stick your whole are arm up inside and touch the womb directly, or have aim so good it breaks all the rules. I'm pretty good at it, so it's my go-to, but it's really dangerous if you're gonna mess up, 'cause Chill Touch can fuck you up if you miss and hit yourself instead. Even if you don't mess up, you still might need healing after you do it, if your body doesn't handle a miscarriage well."

More petting for Sadiqa.

"The big one is for second-circle arcane casters. Alter Self. Safest way is to turn into a man right after the sex is over. That pretty much always works, has no risks, and no downsides, and the spell has lots of other fun uses in bed too, so if you're a second-circle wizard you're golden. Trouble is you can only cast Alter Self on yourself, so it doesn't help your friends, and the gods don't give it out to clerics for some fucking reason."

Of course...

Gamila recalls what she's read about both those spells, in her days at the Temple.

"I knew Alter Self was the one to go for. I did consider Chill Touch; it didn't seem better than just using the knife again... But you're right, that even Alter Self doesn't solve the larger problems."

Time for turnabout.

"I want to invent a cantrip. Or get the right spell researchers on the project of inventing a cantrip, that specifically targets and destroys a man's seed. Something to put birth control into the same magical category as laundry. Then I want to... spread it, far and wide. Make it as common as I possibly can. And I think I can do that. Because I think I've stumbled onto the key to doing that in a really big way; a way no one is going to expect."

"When you aim a Chill Touch with a True Strike, you are almost certain to leave the unwilling mother unharmed!"

Sadiqa leans forward.

"You are an excellent person for being willing to share your awesome secret with us. I really appreciate the faith and future friendship! What's the secret?"

"Do you have Detect Magic? If you do, cast it."

"I do!"

"Detect Magic."

"Dancing Lights. Dancing Lights. Dancing Lights. Dancing Lights. Dancing Lights. Dancing Lights. Dancing Lights. Dancing Lights."

Sadiqa tilts her head.

"So you're a sorcerer...?"

"I'm not a Sorcerer."

Gamila does feel ever so slightly bad that Mister Narvet's sudden insanity was caused by an actual misunderstanding, but honestly she has better things to do than think about Mister Narvet.

"I'm mostly self-taught in arcane magic. I thought I was learning wizardry. But it turns out that my naïve experimentation led me into something... rarer. According to Dana's research, Dana's my Nethysian friend, I'm something called an 'Arcanist', not a Wizard."

Pause.

"Anyway, I figured this out when I lost my first round of orisons. I didn't realize you had to catch them, see. My arcane spells were prepared out of a spellbook just like a Wizard but I cast them like a Sorcerer's innate spells, at the cost of not being able to hang as many prepared spells as a Wizard can. But it means that I only have to prepare a spell once, and then I have that spell forever unless I deliberately discard it."

Gamila is still impressed with herself for having this clever idea.

"Learning how to prepare spells reliably can take weeks or months of tutoring and practice because learning to manipulate the magic is really difficult to do from a cold start. But what if we found a way to prepare a single cantrip on someone else's behalf? And then what if we did that my way, the Arcanist way, not the Wizard way? Then that person would have that cantrip forever. They could cast it as many times as they wanted without ever losing it, despite not knowing the first thing about magic nor how to use a spellbook nor how to catch a cantrip nor any of it. If that worked we could permanently give a chosen cantrip to anyone. Or. To everyone."

"Wait, can you do that?! Can we do that?"

"Not yet," Gamila admits. "And I doubt it'll be easy. But it's... a way out. And I think it can be done."

And that was before she found her fellow Calistrians.

"Does the Beachhead already have anything like that in the works? Does the Dark Nest?"

Sadiqa contorts herself to share a look with Penny without de-lap-ing.

"Do you think- ?"

    "Should we- ?"

"Azizi would- "

    "It sounds insane, but- "

"We should."

The two young women nod at each other.

Penny stands up, effortlessly hefting Sadiqa in one arm in an almost comical manner. With the other, she reaches down to throw aside a rug.

Under the rug is a large trapdoor. She grabs the handle and flings it open.

"Come on," she says to Gamila. "All the good stuff's downstairs."

Is that a secret lair? That looks like a secret lair.

"You said twenty Calistrians, right? Divided between the two 'hives'? Which group is bigger?"

"Most of us are in both."

She sage-nods, dangling from her girlfriend's grip, still mostly posed like she's sitting on a lap, though sideways now.

    "Twenty active Calistrians," Penny adds. "Not everyone is driven by purpose or devout enough to seek us out, and we don't go looking."

"Mmhm. Mmhm. It's probably just us, though. If there is anyone else, they're being very quiet. And our dark lady of sexy vengeance doesn't usually favor people who keep their heads down."

"Just out of curiosity, is 'dark lady of sexy vengeance' actually a canon title..."

"Our dark lady of sexy vengeance does not care about the canonicity of her titles! Proper respect is shown by sentiment and by action, not by being picky about words! This too, is Chaos!"

Through the trap-door, down twenty feet of carved stone stairs, the secret passage opens up into a cavernous basement.

It's big. Big enough that they better hope none of the neighbors ever have reason to dig beneath their homes.

A huge cloth map of Sothis covers one wall from floor to ceiling, covered in pins and clippings of newsprint. The far wall is filled with workbenches and an elaborate assembly of beakers, flasks, vials, and tubes. Directly over the secret entrance, a very large wasp nest hangs, silent, waiting. Beside it: a rack and a few shelves containing various nondescript Osirian garb. In the opposite corner, three massive four-poster beds have been bolted together for form a bed big enough for a dozen people. In the remaining space, tucked into a small alcove, is what looks like a small shrine, surrounded by seating.

There are four people present, at the moment.

A girl seated by the shrine and kicking her legs idly as she reads a book.

A very large young man, rippling with muscles, studying the map with a frown.

A sultry beauty sharpening a blade over by the furthest workbench.

And a man, lean, fit, messy-haired, hunched over the alchemy apparatus.

All four of them are clad in little more than a few black leather belts and bits of gold silk; the man doing alchemy is wearing several bandoleers of potions around his hips, and nothing else.

Penny carries Sadiqa down the stairs and tosses her unceremoniously across the spacious basement to land on muscle-guy's head.

"Hey, Azizi!" she calls out to the alchemy guy. "You might want to hurry that up."

"Trouble?" He doesn't look up.

    "The good kind."

"Ah. What a day to be alive."

It only takes him a few minutes to come to a place in his work where it'll stay put while he's elsewhere.

(Perception: 28)

He cleans his hands and then takes a long look at the newcomer. It's about 85% curious study, 10% lustful leering, and 5% suspicion.

"Who do we have here? That was you channeling earlier?"

"That's right. I'm Gamila. Second-circle Cleric. First-circle Arcanist. Looking for allies. You?"

Azizi raises an eyebrow at 'Arcanist' but he's apparently heard the term at all because he doesn't ask for clarification.

"My skills in Alchemy are comparable to fourth-circle. Just call me Azizi. If you're interested, I can show you a great many uses for magical effects in the pursuit of pleasure."

He is still only 10% actually flirting with her. Well, maybe 15%. She's hot.

"Gamila, tell him your idea."

But she wants to talk about using magic in the pursuit of pleasure.

Priorities.

Gamila explains again about:

A) Inventing a new cantrip that targets and destroys men's seed.

B) Inventing, discovering, or munchkin-ing together a way to guide/force/puppet even an entirely ignorant INT 8 commoner to prepare and hang that cantrip in the Arcanist fashion, granting them the spell in perpetuity.

C) Scaling B to the point that Osirion society collapses under it's own hypocrisy.

"Though if Osirion manages not to fall up it's own ass in response to the existence of universal birth control, that's good too."

Azizi starts smiling about halfway through Gamila's explanation, and when she finishes, he starts cackling.

The other three in the room are staring at Gamila now as well. Even if it's outlandish and probably impossible, there's no one in this basement who wouldn't dearly love to see Gamila's idea play out.

"Can you do that?" The girl with the book gasps.

Penny shrugs. "That's what I said."

"You have vision, I'll give you that," Azizi says. "I've made some progress myself on the problem of undesired fertility, but nothing that improves upon a True-Struck Chill Touch. Penny's technique is still our state-of-the-art, and she never lets me forget it."

"Not the only thing I'll never let you forget," Penny says with a roll of her eyes, but also a warmth that belies the words.

Azizi grunts, then his eyes sharpen upon Gamila. "Where are you on the problem of inventing the cantrip?"

"The targeting. I have a stripped-down version of Prestidigitation that only does the cleaning effect. It was easy once I read about Fastidiousness and compared the two spells and saw they had some of the same bits. Once I knew what to look for I found that bit in a lot of spells that selectively erase some material substances."

Being friends with Dana has done wonders for her vocabulary. And also The Library.

"But it has the same effect that using Prestidigitation inside yourself does. Which, according to my research, does actually stop a baby... but then you get horribly sick a few days later with 'a very embarrassing and painful symptom' that ordinary healing doesn't fix, and uh, the accounts Dana found weren't any more specific than that. But I'm sure it's a targeting issue. So I've got a bunch of unknowns I need to test, and no ideas for testing them that aren't doomed or Evil."

"An embarrassing and painful symptom?" Penny repeats. "Doesn't that sound like what happened to Mesi?"

"You know, it does," the girl who is no longer reading a book says. "Hi. I'm Adara. And yeppers, there was this party, Mesi tried to drink ale with her cunny. And a few days later, she- it was nasty, and she wasn't able to use her genitals for much of anything for... has she recovered yet?"

"She has!" Sadiqa calls out from her perch on the big guy's shoulder. "Azizi brewed her a potion of Remove Disease. Nothing else worked, but that did."

"She still hasn't repaid me for that," Azizi mutters.

The beauty with the large sword laughs. "Mesi's an idiot for trying that in the first place. Everybody knows there's lots of stuff that will make you sick if you stick it up your down-holes."

Azizi hums. "And yet Prestidigitation can produce the same unfortunate result. And alchohol can be used for cleaning. Interesting..."

Gamila nods.

"Whatever it is that causes... that... we think it's because something in the female sex's vital essence is injured by overly zealous cleaning. Soap is also on the list of things everyone knows makes you sick if you stick it in. It really seems likely to me that it is injury rather than poisoning, that causes the... symptom."

It is really nice to be able to analyze this mystery in a conversation without half the people around gasping and staring in horror at the subject matter. None of the Calistrians seem fazed at all.

"But even if we have a working theory of what causes the injury, we still have no idea what is being injured or how to avoid it. So. Targeting issue."

"For what it's worth, I don't believe what you're trying has been tried before, and I would be quite gleeful if you succeeded."

He runs a hand through his hair.

"I don't have the solution to your problem, unfortunately, but if I do encounter a piece of your puzzle, know that I intend to bring that piece to you, if I can. Assuming, of course, that you're willing to do the same for us?"

"You all are the only people in the city with goals and... values... anything like mine. Calistria told me to find you. If the Beachhead or the Dark Nest needs me, I'm here for it."

Azizi gives her a knowing smile, then turns to the big muscle-guy with the cute little naked cleric on his head. "Rashid? Any fires in need of some kindling?"

The big guy frowns at Gamila, then beckons, pointing at one of the pinned news clippings. "Come take a look at this, new girl."

Curious, Gamila goes over to the map wall to get a closer look.

There are two clippings posted up next to each other, dated less than a week ago:

The first article is an editorial about the buyout of a nearby slave-brothel on the Crimson Island by up and coming business tycoon Gagarus Nye. It describes a brief history and origin of an idealized Sothis-born man's clever economic acumen, then goes on to praise him for bringing such a squalid enterprise up to code and into compliance with all regulations for both slave-handling and the sex trade. The article then veers off into irrelevant lamentations about the sex trade's existence and legality.

The second article is a fluff piece about a pair of sisters, unnamed in the text, who got caught defrauding a temple of Abadar, details also not in the text, and then received generous leniency and mercy in the courts. The courts which of course are so enlightened and progressive that they're prefer to reform a pair of misguided young women if possible rather than punish them as if they were men, and as such, ruled that while the sentence of enslavement would be carried out, both women would be remanded to the custody of their father, upstanding local businessman Gagarus Nye, rather than sold at auction.

The same man mentioned in both.

The fact that these stories are pinned to a giant map in a Calistrian secret lair is kind of a big clue already. Gamila's not sure how much she'd have guessed without that.

But...

"Is this what it sounds like?"

"We don't know. No one has gotten around to investigating it, yet."

He folds his arms, towering over the new girl.

"It could be an entirely innocent coincidence... but if you spend any time around Calistrians, you'll quickly learn to be suspicions any time the Lawful types start talking about 'cleaning up' the sorts of business they consider seedy. I expect that whatever laxity and 'squalor' that this Nye figure has eliminated from his newly acquired business was wholly or in part to the slaves' benefit, and that those girls lives are now significantly harsher. Which would paint the enslavement of his own daughters in a much darker shade."

He gazes at her.

"I meant to look into this myself. However, if you wish to prove yourself, perhaps you ought to put in the work to discover the details of this situation? If, of course, you feel compelled to do so."

The thing is, she does feel compelled.

It is, objectively, a distraction from her greater work.

But... her mind is already going to dark places, such dark places. Perhaps this man's daughters truly were criminals and he saved them the only way he could, but Gamila realizes that she will be genuinely surprised if that is the case. Her guts are roiling with the possibility that Gagarus Nye orchestrated the whole thing to punish his daughters for trying to defy the sexist narrative of Osirion.

According to Rashid, Nye has already shown himself to be the sort of man who values rules remaining unbroken over the prevention of suffering, overtly and proudly. If Rashid is right. But she's new at this and he isn't, so he probably is.

Gamila peers closer, at the exact street and building where the map pin is located. Part of being Chaotic is caring a lot about why people do the things they do, rather than merely about what they do. A law-abiding man is not innocent if he abides that law out of ego and malice.

"I'll take this one, yeah. I'll go."

Later...

Gagarus Nye's new property is a narrow, three-story sandstone box two streets downriver from the Triangle Gate crossing. It is bedecked in awnings of golden cloth and frequent tall, narrow, barred windows. It bears the name, represented on a small painted sign: The Ugly Wife's Lament.

A bouncer guards the front entrance. Inside, the ground floor features a lounge with a bar at one end, though this bar does not serve refreshments; indeed, there are several decorative naked girls in listlessly occupying cages behind the bar. A second bouncer guards the stairs that lead up to the second floor.

On the second floor are the rooms for customers to use the girls they rent. The rooms are clean, and contain numerous large pillows, but are otherwise bare, ugly, cramped, and the pillows are of low quality. About half of the rooms have a naked girl inside.

On the third floor is the site-manager's office. It is spartan, but the furniture it does contain appears brand new. A large desk and chair dominates the space. The site-manage is seated at the desk, various papers spread out in front of him, though he is not paying attention to any of them. Instead he is turned away from the desk and watching the street below from one of the windows.

This is probably the sort of place her parents see in their nightmares when they think about Gamila's future. The thought is fleeting. She can't really muster any feeling about it. She would take even this over... perpetuating the Osirian narrative to the next generation.

(Stealth: 22)(Perception: 29)

Gamila is hiding on the roof of a four-story apartment block that shares a back alley with the slave-brothel. She's looking in through the narrow windows, trying to get a feel for the place's inner workings.

The site-manager looks anxious, or maybe anticipatory. He's waiting for something he expects to happen soon. Given where he's looking, perhaps the arrival of someone or something important.

Through second-floor windows, three occupied rooms are visible. In one, a slave-girl has her face buried in a pillow while a rather ungroomed man takes her hard from behind. In another, a girl is huddled in the corner, not moving.

In the third, the girl inside lets herself out, revealing that the girls are not locked in their rooms. A moment later, she emerges onto a rickety balcony overlooking the alley. From that balcony, she descends a narrow wooden staircase into a large cage made of wooden planks: this appears to be a sort of makeshift bathing area for the slaves. The third girl goes and sits on a rough-hewn bench off to one side of the large washtubs, taking a moment to herself to cry.

(Climb: 24)

"Grasp." Gamila uses the orison to descend the four stories into the alley smoothly and silently.

She arrives outside the bathing cage and creeps up to the crying naked woman, peeking between the planks.

"Charm Person."

(Will Save: 13)

The crying naked woman does not notice Gamila or that she has just been Charmed.

Gamila approaches the wooden cage openly.

"Hey. Are you alright? What's wrong?"

"What's wrong? Everything's wrong!"

The woman looks up, peering between the planks to see who she's talking to, and it's not someone she knows but it's someone she can trust. It's someone she can show weakness to.

"I did everything a girl's supposed to do!" she sobs quietly. "I followed all the rules. And it didn't matter. I still ended up... here."

"What's your name?"

Sniffle. "Nera. Nera Falei."

She wipes her eyes and blinks at the hooded figure outside the cage. Sees a girl's face in shadow, pretty.

"Who're you?"

"I'm a friend."

This isn't one of her persons-of-interest, then. That suggests a next move, to Gamila, but she needs more information first.

"I heard that this place got a new owner recently. How has that been?"

"Awful."

Nera's fists clench.

"Master Lotep was kind. He'd give us breaks, if we needed to heal, or sometimes even if we just needed to cry. He'd let us get away with socializing. If we did well, sometimes we'd get treats... Ever since Master Nye took over, we, we, there's no mercy. He's terrible. Strict. We behave or we starve, no exceptions, no rewards; I'll probably get beaten if the manager catches me out here not washing; Master Lotep never begrudged us taking a moment out here to breathe."

She shudders.

"I just couldn't..."

"Couldn't what?" Gamila asks gently.

Nera simply shakes her head.

"I feel guilty, you know? I'm glad when it's not me. I just sit there, listening to it happen to the girl in the next room, glad that it's happening to her and not to me, and I just... I needed to breathe."

"Are the men who usually come here the nasty ones? Did that also get worse, when Nye took over?"

Nera gives Gamila a look like she's an idiot.

"Of course the men who come here are nasty men. They're men who lay with whores. A good man would never indulge himself at a place like this."

Gamila keeps the scowl off her face.

Not her fault. Not her fault.

"Hm. Has anyone new been brought in recently? A pair of sisters, recently convicted of fraud, maybe?"

It takes a moment for Nera to parse the question.

"...do you know the twins? I dunno about fraud but they showed up when Master Nye took over. I haven't talked with them yet. The new rules... and also those two have been... extra busy."

A shiver runs down Gamila's spine. That's... not proof. Not proof, but she already believes it. It's a hell of a coincidence otherwise.

"Nera. If you could escape this place, would you have anywhere to go?"

Nera worries at the question in her mind for a moment.

"...I don't know. But I'd take my chances."

Alright then.

"Eroding Ray."

A stream of colorless mist flows out from Gamila's hand, striking the corner of the wooden cage. Where the mist touches, the wood evaporates, until a hole large enough for a person to walk through appears.

"Prestidigitation."

(Disguise: 17)

Gamila peers at Nera, then waves a hand over her head and body, adjusting her own hair and coloration to match Nera's.

A Disguise Self would be much better. Gamila is slightly shorter and has a fuller figured, more obviously healthy body than Nera, and is younger in the face. But Disguise Self only lasts twenty minutes and she doesn't have it hung anyway. She can keep a Prestidigitated disguise up for as long as she needs.

Gamila starts undressing.

"Take my clothes and get out of here. I'll take your place and give you a decent head-start."

Nera stares in wide-eyed, disbelieving wonder and fear as the cage is breached, then desperate hope as the stranger gives Nera her clothes.

The spell that is Charming her mind shivers under the strain of all the suspicions and questions and concerns she would have about this if she wasn't Charmed, but the allure of freedom has seized her and she is just going to go along with this, actually.

She steps through the hole in the cage. She takes the clothes and puts them on, and the cloth feels strange on her skin after so long without. She takes the simple leather band from her own neck, a cheap, symbolic slave collar that has only one purpose: to mark her and serve as a reminder and to entice the men who see it. She hands that over in trade.

Then she puts up the hood of the cloak and bolts, forgetting even to thank her savior.

Not bothering to watch Nera go, Gamila slips through the hole in the cage, and puts the slave collar on her otherwise naked self.

"Make Whole."

The hole in the cage reforms into intact wooden planks.

Gamila heads for the rickety staircase. She ascends, enters the second floor, and hurries to Nera's room.

There are eight rooms on the floor in total, arranged strangely in the available floorspace. Upon entering from the washing cage, one must pass by the proper stairwell that descends into the lounge below and the office above. A zig-zagging hallway divides the first four rooms from the other four, the rooms stuffed into the available space haphazardly and no two of them exactly the same size.

                |             |
                |             |
                |____         |
________________|_   |||||____|
|        |___||||    |        |   /\
|        |       |       1    |   ||
|   6    |   5   |   |        |  ALLEY
|        |           |________|
|______  |_______|   |        |
|                    |   2    |
|   7    |    _______   ______|
|________|   |       |        |
|        |       4   |   3    |  STREET
|   8        |       |        |   ||
|________|___|_______|________|   \/

Nera's room is labeled as room five.

Room one is occupied by a girl curled up in the corner. Room six is occupied by a customer and the girl he is fucking. Sounds of sex can also be heard from rooms two and four. Rooms three and eight are empty, presumably belonging to the girls in display-cages downstairs.

From inside room five, there is little to dampen the grunts, moans, whimpers and slapping flesh echoing out of room six.

Gamila waves a quick Prestidigitation over the pillows in room five before arranging them to make a seat facing the doorway. She seats herself with her back to the wall, listening to the sounds on the other side of it and feeling a flutter of butterflies in her stomach.

Her heart is racing, her bare body flush with a strange feeling between anxious anticipation, excitement, and preoccupation. The urge to touch herself wars with the worry that the woman on the other side of that wall is... suffering, and praying for someone to save her. It doesn't sound like she's struggling, but it wouldn't, would it. It doesn't sound like she's actively participating either, but it wouldn't, would it. A slave girl is expected to meekly accept whatever is done to her, whether it be intensely enjoyable or worse than death.

Surely most men would prefer a woman with some lust in her? The majority come to a place like this because it costs less money, not because they prefer a meek and passive slave to a skilled and eager lover. Right...?

In any case, Gamila can't blow her cover until she has all the facts. She isn't sure what she's going to do, when she makes her move, but she fully expects whatever it is to draw attention from the Eyes.

The man in room six finishes, and shortly after that, leaves.

A few minutes later, the woman comes out, shuffling in front of Gamila's doorway on her way to the bathing cage. She doesn't notice or look at Gamila.

A few minutes after that, another scruffy, unwashed man arrives in the hallway, and enters room one. The slave inside whimpers but says nothing as he starts in on her. While he's busy in there, another man finishes and comes up the hallway, rotating out as new customers arrive. The girl in room six passes the girl from room four coming the other direction in the hallway.

And then a man arrives at Gamila's door and leers at her as he enters the room.

The fluttering in her belly hasn't gone away, and neither has the hot, eager ache between her legs.

She looks up at the man that's going to fuck her and... stops herself there. Nothing else about him matters. She could evaluate him, think over how attractive or not-attractive he is or think about how much she would or wouldn't want to spend her time on his lusts for other reasons... but she doesn't have to. Her evaluation of those things is irrelevant in the current situation.

And there's something gloriously liberating, something Chaotic, about that.

Something that almost outweighs the man himself being repulsive. As the man approaches, her belly flutters and her loins throb, and it doesn't matter that it's the situation rather than the man in the situation that's fueling her arousal, because she's aroused either way.

And it's beautiful. Her sexuality is expansive enough that there is room within it even for scum like him.

The man, seeing that he has been assigned a particularly beautiful slave, disrobes eagerly.

He grabs the slave and drags her pillow seat away from the wall, tipping her onto her back. He gropes her ass with rough hands, slapping her pubes with his erection as he pushes her legs apart. Then he aims himself and thrusts in.

A shuddering gasp tears itself from the man. Wet. Hot. So slick. His shaft slides in with a lack of resistance he's never felt before, and yet her walls embrace him as tightly as any tearful virgin. It's strange. Wrong. But so much better. He lifts her hips and starts pounding into her.

She waves a hand over his crotch, cleaning him off as he penetrates her, just in case. Prestidigitation last an hour. It's still up. She doesn't need to recast it to do that.

And then she just closes her eyes and enjoys.

The man collapses onto her as he drives himself into her, licking at her flesh with his mouth and mauling with his hands, breathing her in and-

He spills himself into her, grunting in her ear.

After another moment, his flushed face darkens in anger and humiliation.

He's been cheated. That was over way too fast and it's all the slave's fault for feeling and smelling so good weird. He raises a hand to strike her.

Gamila lets him. It does approximately nothing to her. She offers up a small pained gasp, without any real feeling.

In fact, it is alarmingly difficult to stop herself from... trying to help. It has nothing to do with the man, but rather... the pattern of the mistake he is making. She can envision it, growing like an invasive weed through the man's mind. He is angry and he takes that anger out on her, despite that she and him agree, are united in the feeling that that didn't last long enough, and it isn't that he thinks she's judging him, he thinks she's a slave. Rather, he can't see her as an ally in the first place. He can't see even the possibility that sex could be collaborative.

She pities him.

But she has bigger concerns. She maintains her cover.

Her lackluster reaction gets him to hit her a few more times before he gathers up his clothes, gets dressed and leaves.

And that's how it goes, during business hours. A nigh-constant rotation of men with the girls only given enough time to clean themselves off and return to their rooms before another comes. A new man every hour, for each of them, on average. A new man every twenty minutes, when it is really busy, though today isn't a busy day.

None of the men stand out. One after another they all mostly just seem to be boring assholes looking for some easy relief.

And then business hours end, late into the night. The bouncers come up and each take a turn with... one of a pair of identical twins, the girl in room six plus one of the girls from the display-cages downstairs, who look just like each other. They drag the other twin into room six with her sister and fuck them side by side.

And then the bouncers leave, locking up the building behind them, leaving the girls alone for the night.

The truly tragic thing is that, you really don't need... all this... to offer easy relief to men like that. But then, the sort of woman who'd do this willingly would be loathed by Osirian culture. The sort of man who's naturally inclined to be courteous to his disposable pleasures is exactly the sort of man Osirion teaches to avoid those pleasures, and the women who offer them, entirely. What's left? Women who've been taught to hate to be willing and men who've been taught to hate themselves.

It's so needlessly horrible. Everyone could get everything they're getting from that horribleness without the horribleness. It would be easy. It's not like Osirion doesn't already know how, either! Same-sex relationships are mostly fine! Gamila actually has very few complaints about how Osirion does those! If the entirety of Osirion's 'let's make Axis on Golarion' culture isn't a huge lie, the only barrier to having heterosexual relationships work like homosexual ones would be birth control! But Gamila knows damn well that's not what's going to happen if and when she solves the puzzle.

One step at a time.

Taking a breath to let her mental rant go, Gamila peeks out into the hall, then silently slips around the corner to peek into room six.

A pair of identical naked young women are sobbing softly on each other's shoulder.

"...can't ...another day of this."

"Menk'll find us. We just have to stay strong."

"We don't even know if he's alive. Father might have had him killed."

"Father follows the rules. He wouldn't."

"We never should have-"

"If it worked we'd be free."

"It was never going to work."

"Then maybe father's right."

"Don't say that."

"No, no, I can't- He wins, okay? He wins."

"Godsdamnit..."

"Please. He's coming tomorrow. If not then, who knows when we'll get another chance."

"...alright. Alright."

Huh. So the fraud thing was real.

That doesn't actually change any of Gamila's feelings about this, though. If anything it's confirmation. It sounds like Nye is doing the sexual equivalent of punishing a child who snuck a treat by forcing them to eat more treats until they puke. That...

Gamila trembles in rage, and isn't even sure why, until her thoughts catch up: Because that whole mode of punishment is deliberately about taking a good thing you don't want someone to have, and ruining it for them. On purpose. As the goal of the punishment. That... is the worst form of destruction that exists. The destruction of desire. Destroying a person's sexual desires is worse than murdering them, worse than torturing them; Gamila feels that in her bones.

Well. In the morning, she'll apparently get her chance to... get revenge. To put it in Calistrian terms.

Gamila sneaks back to room five and arranges the pillows into something she can sleep on.

And then, when she wakes, she prays for her next round of divine spells.

Barbed Chains, Shadow Trap, Blessed Fist, Sow Thought.

Bull's Strength, Flickering Lights, Charm Person.

...

Gagarus wipes his brow as he strides up the narrow street and steps into the shadowed interior of his newest business venture.

It had been a mild ordeal to look up all the relevant legal codes and realize just how slovenly the prior owner had been. It irks him that he's had to eat the cost of that disparity, but it had been a rushed transaction and he hadn't had time to do the proper research beforehand. But when opportunity knocks, sometimes you have to leap without looking. If only his daughters hadn't then gone and made things even worse-

As he steps inside, he nods to the first of his new bouncers. "Has there been any trouble?"

"No sir," the wiry man replies.

"Is Kavar in?" Gagarus asks.

"Yes sir. Arrived not a few minutes ago, he did."

"Excellent, I will see myself up."

Gagarus puts action to words and crosses the lounge to the staircase in the rear. His eyes slide over the currently-empty cages, not liking to look upon them. He climbs the stairs and arrives at the third floor.

Site-Manager Kavar stands. "Gagarus, sir! Welcome."

"Good morning, Kavar. How has business been?"

The discussion of the bookkeeping carries on for a short while.

Gagarus insists that Kavar use identifying numbers only, no names, to refer to the slaves. And Gagarus doesn't know which numbers are assigned to-

"Father!" a sudden cry comes, from the stairwell.

Gagarus grimaces as a pair of identical naked young women rush into the office, followed shortly by the bouncer.

"I'm terribly sorry sirs!" the bouncer says, moving toward the twins. "I didn't hear them moving around until they were already up the stairs. I'll remove them immediately."

Gagarus scowls, nods, and averts his eyes. He is irked that his daughters are inflicting themselves on him in their current state.

"Father, wait! Please!"

The bouncer, a more dexterity-focused fighter than his colleague, struggles a little to drag the pair of young women out of the room.

"Please father! You were right! You were right! We're sorry! We're so sorry! Please! We've learned our lesson! We understand! Please forgive us, father! Don't leave us here!"

Those foolish girls. They clearly do not understand. It would be cruel to leave them with that false hope, so he supposes he has a duty to explain. He gestures at the bouncer. "Hold, please."

The bouncer stops.

Gagarus forces himself to look at his daughters, his ever so troublesome twins. He sighs. "Girls, you must understand what you have cost me. The marriages I had arranged for you were necessary for a set of key acquisitions I had bargained for. When you sullied yourselves with that... foreigner, you set me back years. This is not a punishment, girls. This is merely what is necessary to recoup some fraction of my losses. This is the only value you still have to your household, so I think you'd best get used to it."

He sees the devastated looks on their faces, and turns away with a huff, angry. How dare they try to make him feel guilty for doing the financially sensible thing? He waves at the bouncer to proceed.

The office is suddenly plunged into twilight.

For the first instant, one's brain might fool them into thinking that it was merely that a cloud had passed in front of the sun, but that impression can only last for a round at best. The darkness... flickers, rising and falling, the room dimming and brightening in a jagged jitter of illumination that is both unpredictable and disorienting.

The twins pull free of the bouncer but can only sink to the ground to steady themselves and each other. The bouncer, suddenly very worried, goes for his weapons: a pair of short, nimble swords. He turns and shouts down the stairs. "Butet! On me!"

"What in all the world's Chaos is happening?!" Gagarus demands.

The other bouncer, a large burly man with a club mace, vaults up to the doorway and stumbles, eye's wide at the flickering darkness that fills the office.

The first bouncer backs toward the stairs. "I don't know sir, but we should vacate to a more defensi-"

"WHAT IS THAT?!" Site-Manager Kavar shrieks.

"Wha-"

A figure rises out of the flickering shadow, standing silhouetted against the window, standing tall upon the large desk to loom over all of them. It is black on black, the color of bubbling tar under moonlight, too dark to see anything but the outline, but the outline is of a beautiful naked woman.

(Attack: 20)

The light around her, it, suddenly fragments, shearing like a broken mirror, wiping away the apparition from their sight. A second later, there is a cry of pain as the skinny bouncer flies forward, the apparition's fist buried in his spine.

"Kill it!" Gagarus yelps. "Kill it!"

The big guy roars and swings at the apparition with his club.

(Attack: 12)

It whiffs through the air, striking nothing, like trying to strike shadow itself.

The wiry guy twists around stiffly, seizing at the pain in his back before managing to bring his paired swords to bear.

(Attack: 10)(Attack: 16)

The first slash isn't close, but on the second, he's sure he's about to land a blow on the apparition. Only, at the last second the lightless form moves unnaturally, supernaturally, the strike that should have hit instead passes harmlessly between her limbs.

Meanwhile, the site-manager crawls under the desk. Gagarus makes a break for the stairs, fleeing.

Gamila didn't know she could do that, whatever that last dodge was.

The air breaks again, and the dark apparition vanishes out from between the two bouncers. It reappears fifteen feet away with a clear line of sight on Gagarus and hisses, "Shadow Trap."

(Will Save: 9)

Gagarus reaches the doorway, only to be yanked back by some invisible force. He's stuck, and can't escape!

The burly guy closes the distance to the apparition and comes down on her with an overhand smash.

(Attack: 3)

He takes his eyes off her as he roars, not even aiming, just swinging as hard as he can at the spot he remembers her being in when he leaped. His club smashes into the sandstone wall, and the dark apparition isn't there anymore.

(Attack: 18)(Attack: 1)

The wiry guy comes in with two more desperate slashes. Again, the first one, he's sure it should have hit, but at the last instant the shadow moves like it isn't quite real, and the slash hits nothing. He overbalances and his second slash doesn't even go in the right direction.

(Attack: 16)

Another dark fist crashes into the wiry guy with far, far more force than it should. Something in his guts ruptures, and agony spreads through his innards.

The wiry guy goes down and doesn't get up again.

(Will Save: 9)

Gagarus struggles against the Shadow Trap, now terrified, but can't break free.

(Attack: 21)

The remaining bouncer hurls himself at the dark apparition, swinging his club in with all his might. It hits. There is a satisfying thud of impacted flesh as the dark apparition let's out a wheezed grunt of pain and is tossed off its feet.

"Barbed Chains," the dark apparition snarls.

A pair of spiky golden chains erupt from nowhere and shoot toward the burly bouncer.

(Attack: 18)(Attack: 25)

Both chains stab into the burly bouncer's chest and rip through his body, tearing his flesh apart as they go and spraying viscera all over the sandstone.

The burly bouncer lets out a choked gurgle, before collapsing to the floor in a pool of blood.

The twins scream.

Gagarus throws himself against the pull of Shadow Trap like a cornered animal.

(Will Save: 5)

It is futile, he's bound in forces beyond his comprehension. Helpless. He backs up as far as he can staring at the dark apparition in wide-eyed terror. "What are you?! What do you want?!"

The dark apparition bends over slowly and picks up the wiry bouncer's swords.

Swords in hand, it stalks toward Gagarus.

"Chaos," it whispers.

(Attack: 19)(Attack: 16)

Then it plunges both swords into his chest.

Gagarus takes 15 total points of damage and dies immediately.

He slides off the swords and his corpse tumbles down the stairs, loudly flopping and rolling until it reaches the second-floor landing with a splat.

The twins are huddling in a corner, holding each other. Site-Manager Kavar is still under the desk.

Killing the site-manager is actually a tough call. He's complicit, but a lot of people are complicit in a lot of things. She doesn't know him to be at the root of any travesties.

Gamila walks around the desk to get sight on him, and murmurs, "Sow Thought."

(Will Save: 5)

And Kavar has a brilliant idea to save his own life.

"W-w-wait wait wait! I c- I can show you where Gagarus keeps the proceeds! I can give you all the money please don't kill me!"

    "Not. Good. Enough," the dark apparition whispers in a loud hiss.

"I swear I'll never speak of this??!??!?" Kavar tries.

    The dark apparition shakes its head and brandishes a sword.

Kavar makes a hysterical noise. "W-w-wait wait!!! I can... give the slaves...? The money...? I'll give them the money and 'forget' to report them missing!"

Kavar's eyes are screwed shut in fear. When he doesn't feel steel pierce his flesh, he slowly cracks open one eye to take a peek.

Ordinary daylight has returned to the office.

The dark apparition is gone. Only the corpses on the floor remain as evidence of her presence.

A few streets over, Gamila unPrestidigitates herself and then uses her last Charm Person to beg a cloak off of a kindly old woman who looked likely, making up a very vague story about a laundry mishap that an unCharmed old lady probably would never have believed.

She hopes the last thought she Sow'd on the site-manage holds: that if the girls send him out to acquire them clothing, he should actually do that rather than running to the Eyes. But she's not leaving that to chance. She hides on the nearby rooftops and watches.

It's going to be kind of hard for the site-manager to do either of those things.

When Gamila returns, the Nye twins and a couple of the other slaves are in the process of beating Kavar to death.

You know, Gamila really should have seen that coming.

Later...

This is far from the first time the Beachhead has had a bunch of illegally-freed slaves on their hands. They have contacts for this. Resources to relocate the freed women to other cities under new names. In disguise as ordinary Sothis citizens, this helpful cult of Calistria can help slaves disappear without a trace.

Many of them stay in Sothis in their new identities, betting on going unrecognized. A few others, including the Nye twins, have more recognizable faces and need to be smuggled onto trade caravans to other cities. Even divided, the money they were all forced to earn, now in their hands, is enough to pave their way.

Even later...

Back down in the Beachhead's lair, Sadiqa's face fills Gamila's entire visual field as she grabs the other girl's shoulders.

"I'm blown away by how fast you work! What's up with that? You didn't hesitate at all. That was very awesome! You made more work for us but that is okay because freeing slaves is awesome even if it goes really badly! That is the wisdom of our dark lady of sexy vengeance! And this didn't go badly! These worry-warts thought you were being reckless, but I said, No! Gamila has the passion of our goddess within her! She knows what she's doing!"

She kneels on Gamila's shoulders to point dramatically at the ceiling for emphasis. It may be relevant that she threw off her 'ordinary citizen' disguise the moment she arrived and is once more naked but for the Calistrian scarf around her shoulders.

"And now, we celebrate!" she declares.

Celebration sounds good. Gamila is really horny, actually, and Sadiqa's cute little shaved quim is reminding her of that.

And she's surrounded by fellow Calistrians. A little shiver of anticipation races down into her loins.

"I'm taking that as an invitation," Gamila warns.

Gamila hasn't really had time to put on anything under the cloak she got from that old lady, so when she reaches back and tugs it out from under Sadiqa's knees, it leaves Gamila bare as it falls to the floor. The spunky little cleric's crotch plops right down onto Gamila's face.

"Sadiqa," Rashid scolds. "We debrief, then we revel. How many times do I have to tell you?"

    "Awww, but Rashid! Gamila's l-lusts ha~ave been toyed w-with by the darkness in men's h-hearts!" Sadiqa moans and grinds her cunny on Gamila's mouth. "Her pent-up dark ur~urges must be slaked so that brightness a-and joy can once again fill h-her! A-After dozens of r-really disappointing scoundrels h-have slaked their desires with a lustful y-young woman, s-she can't just let that fester. She nee~eeds to break the boundaries imposed on~n her by the r-role she played and release all that heat she built up inside before she coo~ooks herself! Oo~ohh..."

"Be that as it may, the safety of the Beachhead comes first! With every moment, memory fades and detail is lost. Every detail that might potentially affect our security and our future operations must be carefully- and you can't hear me because you're having an orgasm."

Gamila has learned several things about orally pleasuring another girl in the last handful of rounds and inferred a lot more. Fun.

She wiggles her face free of juicy aroused girl essence, and peaks over Sadiqa's thigh. "I was listening. You do have a point."

She looks up at Sadiqa. "That's a really nice thought, and an important thought, but I'm fine, I promise. I haven't been twisted up inside by any of the sex I had yesterday."

Penny gives herself a little shake and removes her hand from inside her harem-pants.

Chuckling fondly, she snatches Sadiqa off of Gamila's shoulders and carries her over to the bed corner.

"C'mere you. And hey, the rest of y'all have barely introduced yourselves yet. After taking down a slave-brothel single-handedly, Gamila's definitely earned our friendship."

One of the new faces that Gamila only met today, a muscular woman who is currently wearing several bandoleers of throwing daggers on black leather belts, and nothing else, grunts from where her naked backside is stood in front of the workbenches opposite Azizi's alchemy apparatus.

"There are two things you need to know. One, I was impressed by your infiltration skills. None of the freed girls had any idea about who or what killed their owner until we made them suspicious by helping. Two, I'm called Farida Asfar, and I'm a mid-tier Sanctified Rogue."

The handsome, svelte young man that is sitting next to Adara flashes his spectacles.

"You may call me Qamar. You can rest assured that the false identities I forged for your rescues will not be challenged." 

"I know you haven't forgotten my name already. So I'm not going to repeat it. I'm chosen by Calistria like you and like Sadiqa over there but unlike you two I'm only first-circle. But that's fine, 'cause I'm also a second-circle Bard."

"And I am a mid-tier Brawler with 'Enlarge Person' as an at-will spell-like ability. Come sit with me, and relate the events of your infiltration while they are fresh in your mind."

Rashid is seated on a cushioned bench in front of the map wall, straddling it with his chin in one hand.

"Right."

Gamila waves her always-active Prestidigitation over the bench, then straddles it facing Rashid. She is horny enough that she's not even pretending not to slowly grind her bare sex against the leather upholstery, but that doesn't mean she isn't taking the debrief seriously.

She starts at the beginning, and goes through the whole thing. Every detail she can remember.

Later, again...

"...in conclusion, your plan wasn't flawless but your execution of that plan very nearly was, and none of the risks you took could have even in theory compromised the Beachhead. Well done."

He is still straddling the bench, but he's now holding Gamila in his hands. She is seated on his right palm, legs dangling on either side of his wrist as his fingers cup her ass. She is leaning toward him as he holds her slightly above himself, and he is supporting her chest with his left hand, his fingers spread to cover both of her breasts and brace her shoulders. Her right nipple is pinched in the crease where his pinkie and ring finger meet. Her left nipple is pinched in the crease where his index finger and middle finger meet. With his right hand, he has one finger inside her, slowly stroking.

It's impressive, honestly, how sharp Gamila's mind is. He had meant to serve her needs, briefly, to help her focus, but when he started touching her, her focus never wavered. She reacted in a gratifying way to his touch, showing her appreciation in all the usual ways, except for how she didn't even pause in her recounting.

He side-eyes Sadiqa, who is currently making loud slurping and sucking noises with her head between Penny's thighs on one of the beds in the corner. If only all their clerics were as diligent, he thinks with fond exasperation.

"That's all. I'll bring you to climax now," he offers Gamila.

His finger is huge, as big as the manhoods of some of the men who used her yesterday. Her insides flutter and clench on the beefy digit, her arousal dripping from his wrist and lubricated the surface of his palm and fingers on which she sits. On which she sensuously curls her hips, riding his finger.

"Thanks for helping me relive the fun parts a bit more vividly," she says, curling her hips, fucking herself on his finger and nuzzling her chest into his boob-squeezing grip.

    "It does not surprise me to hear that the men you encountered in such a place left you unsatisfied," Rashid says, slowly extending and retracting his finger to fuck her with it.

"It wasn't their fault," Gamlia moans breathily. "I had more climaxes than they did."

    Rashid raises an eyebrow. "I see."

"It just wasn't enough," Gamila explains. "The pleasure always comes easily, for me, yet I always want more. I've always wanted more, I think. I'd be, I'd revel in it if everyone, man or woman, who ever felt a spark of lust for me, took me, without restraint, without hesitation. And even then it might not be enough. I don't know. I just know I want to accept into me all the lust, all the desire, all the sexual hunger that exists, rejecting none of it and defying any force that disapproves or tries to punish it!"

She spasms in his grip, slow, powerful convulsions rippling through her cunt and out along her limbs, cascading and crashing against the warm giant's grasp enfolding and penetrating her.

And then it passes, and for a moment the satisfaction flows through her... flows beyond her... And she looks around at the rest of the secret lair and its occupants, hungry, excited... and that momentary satisfaction drains out of her as a shiver of new desire kindles in her quivering quim.

Well, she can't give a speech like that in a room full of Calistrians and not expect it to start an orgy.

Azizi is the first to take advantage. He's already naked but not at that moment having sex with anyone, so he downs a custom Potion of Channel Vigor. He groans a little as his manhood swells into a towering pillar of rock-hard meat, inhumanly huge, flush and riven with pulsating veins.

Then he grabs a second vial and takes it over to where Gamila is trembling with aftershocks on Rashid's fingers, meeting her heated gaze with a leer of his own.

"Gather 'round, girls and bottom-boys! For tonight's entertainment... I have here an Infused Aromatic Extract of Bouncy Body for everyone to share."

While he holds the vial up with one hand, he grabs Gamila's ass with his other and slaps his Vigorous erection against her spine. Rashid just happens to be holding her at the perfect height.

"Hey, for once your crazy idea sounds kinda fun-whoa Sadiqa!"

Penny scrambles to help her lover up after the other girl flops to the floor with what has to be a sore shoulder. Sadiqa dove off the bed, forgetting momentarily that trying to drag Penny anywhere only works when Penny is aware of the attempt to allow it...

    Sadiqa pops back up without a care. "Azizi! You've been teasing us with this for weeks! Is it finally ready?!"

Penny allows herself to be dragged off the bedding as her lover resumes her zoom across the room, the pair of them joining the congregation around Rashid and Gamila. Penny wraps her arms around Sadiqa again and presses her bare body into Sadiqa's back, resting her chin on Sadiqa's head.

Adara gets up off of Qamar's lap and traipses over, carrying her dondo.

"You know, just then, you kind of reminded me of someone," Adara says to Gamila with a smile.

She hops up onto Rashid's shoulder and starts tapping out a beat. She's gotten pretty good at making the drum sound... suggestive. Like music you fuck to.

"There are two things you need to know. One, we hear your words, we recognize and glory in the truth within them. Two, I'm going to sit on your face, later."

This is so great.

This place, these people, are a bastion of freedom and joy.

She dismounts from Rashid's hands so he's free to disrobe himself and join in, then spins around and wraps her hands around Azizi's massive, dangerously-erect, potion-enhanced shaft. She shudders in anticipation as Azizi brandishes his vial.

This is exactly the kind of thing she imagined when he originally offered to show her uses of magic in the pursuit of pleasure. It's so cool.

Azizi opens the vial, releasing a burst of magical steam.

Everyone who breathes it finds their body magically elastic and pliable.

Azizi's potion-enhanced erection. Rashid's manhood, which is (sometimes) even larger. Vine, fist, and finger.

The thing about Calistrians is that when you tell them you want to be freeuse, they believe you.

Adara and Sadiqa team up to put Rashid in bondage, wrapping him in leather restraints and putting a ring on his manhood that turns him into a living over-sized dildo while everyone else uses him as a muscular cushion, stepping on his over-sized body. He's apparently into that.

    Gamila impales herself on Rashid's giant erection as soon as the girls finish binding him. She enjoys being taken, yes, but she has had an itch from so much pretending to be meek and passive during her infiltration; so she slams her hips down on and rides the fuck out of this passive phallus and forces Rashid to release in her.

Penny and Sadiqa take turns shoving their tongues in Gamila's mouth. Azizi fucks her in the ass several times, then does something with acupuncture needles that make her breasts more sensitive than her cunt. The girls suck on her nipples and make her climax again and again while she forces Qamar's shaft into her throat.

Then Gamila's head is between Farida's muscular thighs, and Qamar's vine is wriggling around in her ass while Adara is fisting-fucking her. And from there it only gets more debauched.

Gamila is in a lustful frenzy... except at the same time it's like she's never been more lucid in her entire life.

Orgasm after orgasm, so much pleasure, so much rapturous relief, satisfaction of her burning desires like nothing she's ever had before... but she's also learning, observing, testing, experimenting. The domain of sex is expanding in her mind, built and grown from details big and small.

Her mind and soul are as hungry for this as her body is.

Maybe more.

Six months later...

It is a sweltering day in the Malhitu Bazaar, with the sun beating down harshly from high above. Any stone not painted white is hot enough to the touch to burn skin. The sky is a perfect featureless dome of infinite blue.

Wide awnings and other sources of shade have been added or doubled-up on or extended, every market stall in competition not merely to sell their wares but to provide enough respite from the heat that anyone stops to look at their wares in the first place.

A figure in an expensive, finely-made cloak strides through the sweating crowds, before abruptly pivoting into the alley beside a restaurant. The cloak is a gleaming white, trimmed and embroidered in golden thread. The inner lining of the cloak is black silk, casting deeper shadows on the face of the figure under the hood. The cloak is clasped, revealing nothing of the body underneath, but for the flash of leather boot.

The figure heads around back and toward the aproned man standing in the shade of the awning over the open air kitchen where the restaurant's food is prepared.

"Ah good, you're here. We've got the trough filled and ready," says the manager.

Indeed, there is a large, rectangular wooden tub fill to the brim with fresh water, taking up most of the deeper parts of the shaded area. The cook, currently stirring a large pot, pauses and looks on with both impatience and relief.

The manager pulls out a handful of silver and hands it over to the figure in the white cloak.

"Ray of Frost. Ray of Frost."

Gamila sweeps the beams of icy magic along the length of the trough, expending its power evenly across the body of water with ease. The contents of the wooden tub crackle loudly as the water inside freezes into solid ice.

The manager smiles broadly. Most icemakers will spill half the water in the process of freezing it. This one's the best he's ever hired, even with the shit he gets from his sister for having anything to do with a wizard-girl.

A pair of waiting busboys hurry out to the frozen tub. They carefully detach and remove the walls of the tub, peeling them off the ice block, before picking up saws and beginning to cut the ice into more manageable chucks. One of them rubs a small chipped-off piece over his forehead, groaning in relief.

"Pleasure doing business. Same time next week?"

Unfortunately for him, she shakes her head.

"This will be the last time, actually. You'll need to find a new icemaker after today."

    "What? But..."

"I got a new job. Well, not a new job. But I can't keep pretending this is worth my time anymore. Don't worry. It's not just you. I've got two other restaurants and a lemonade cart to give the bad news, today. Good luck, sir."

She gives him a nod and sweeps away in her fancy cloak, leaving him behind before he can try to argue with her. She heads to her next destination.

Is she going to take her accustomed route between these establishments and cut through this blind alley like usual? Because if she is, today there's going to be someone blocking her way.

Big guy, plain but quality clothes, turban and veil. Clean. Very clean, and scentless. This is someone with regular access to Prestidigitation at the least.

His eyes land on the figure in the white cloak. "Where do you think you're going?"

(Sense Motive: 23)(Perception: 19)

Gamila takes him in at a glance, noticing the details. A caster, probably. And he's likely not alone.

She doesn't know what this is about, but she can see the impending violence in his eyes. He isn't here to talk. Her response is the same regardless.

"Through you, if you don't move."