When Hyacinth comes home to her new apartment for the first time after a long day at university, it's to the sight of moving bots just finishing dropping off the last of her stuff and moving furniture into place. The full-immersion VR pod her parents gave her is safely hooked up in the pod room, her bed is in her bedroom, she has chairs and a desk and some bookshelves. Clothes are mostly still in boxes, waiting to be hung up in the closet. Holovid and a cozy chair occupy the living room. She doesn't have any food in the small kitchen yet.
She lets go of Sin's hand to wrap around her waist and squeezes her close, giggling. "You're adorable. Just unbelievably cute at all times."
Sable blushes faintly at the cheek kiss, grins wide, and tightens her grip as Sin bounces up to twirl her around in a circle, laughing delightedly.
Hyacinth lets out a soft "eeeee!" and giggles even more.
Then she flumphs back down to the ground and leads Sable on a little faster in the direction of the inn.
Hyacinth leads the way inside. Cocoa's nowhere to be seen in the front room, so she just tosses a small wave at Jorem and moves on.
Sable waves as well, and smiles eagerly as they head upstairs to their room. When they've got the door closed behind them, she tugs Sin down onto the bed with her, giggling warmly and squeezing her close.
"Well," she starts. "She's an SAI named May, though I get the feeling that's not supposed to be spread around. She can observe most things that happen in the game — and has seen a lot of sex as a result, though I get the impression that she doesn't mean to watch people so much as just catches it incidentally while keeping track of how people are doing. She explicitly said she prefers when people have kinky deaths they enjoy over traumatic deaths in war, too."
"That's, um. Good. Good to hear."
Hyacinth ducks her head and snuggles into Sable a little more.
"It sounds like we should head for the city then..."
"Yeah, they really are..."
Hyacinth snuggles back against Sable and smiles.
"So I'm thinking we stay overnight and head off in the morning?"
"I think so, yeah," Sable agrees with a smile. "The one question I have is whether you and Hailey want to try things tonight, or focus on being careful on the hike tomorrow and the next day until we get to Cordova."
"Let's focus on being careful. Cordova is only two days away, and we have warding stakes. I don't want to have to explain blood."
Sable nods. "Makes sense. I figure we could consider rentals in Cordova if there are month-to-month options, and otherwise head closer to the capital with bigger cities still."
"Ideally," Hibiscus says, "We get some specialized sheets, or lock a cleaning charm of some kind. A cleaning charm's probably worth the point just in general."
"Hmm. There should definitely be a way to build it. At a guess it would be... a node for a material-filtered effect, one for vanishing the target, and maybe a filterable radial burst node? Or something like that? Would be in your trees, for sure. I don't have the radial options at all."
"I am fairly sure I do not want to make an effect that vanishes all the blood in a burst. That seems like it would be inimical to the continuation of life."
Sable laughs and shakes her head. "No indeed. Good point. Probably environmental conditions like whether it's exposed outside the body need a separate node, yeah."
"I think a touch targeting node might solve the problem. Cleaning sheets by running my hand over the bloodstains wouldn't be too bad, and might save me a lot of annoying filtering."
She hums thoughtfully, then nods. "Yeah, I think that would work. Probably see how many other assorted varieties of contaminants you can cram into the material filter while you're at it, but that should do."
"In the long term, that material filtering node could be pretty generally useful. Selecting your target is just a good ability."
Hibiscus rolls over and kisses Sable softly.
"Hmmmmm." She tilts her head.
She kind of wants her, and she kind of doesn't. It's been three days in a row, Hya probably wants to take a break... But she's never had a chance to come out to play before... But she's completely short of tools here...
"I wonder if I want to mess around with you."
A wry smile stretches across Sable's face as she returns the kiss. "You certainly could. We had been talking about playing around with the hypnotic effects of your meditation assist ritual, too."
Sable quickly unequips her armor, boots, and sword, leaving her in just her trousers and blouse. "Sure," she replies with a playful grin. "How do we start this?