Dear Diary,

Not much to add today.

After four fights during CT, one of which I ended by dumping as much Mana as I could into a Stabilize, I fell asleep with Marie washing my back. I woke up Monday morning relaxed and ready to go bum around with my Patron.

He, of course, had other ideas. Because of course he did.

He knocked on my door and got an eyeful when I answered it sans clothes, expecting Marie or maybe Saffron. "Well. That certainly won't do. Close your eyes."

I watched his gaze as it tracked back up to my eyes, "One question first?"

"As always, I am your willing repository of knowledge."

"Are you happy with me or upset with me about yesterday?"

He laughed, making me wonder if anyone but me could hear his very masculine voice echoing down the hall. "Oh, Tabitha. I am so very, very pleased with you. Not only did you win, you remembered to call on me to observe your victory."

"Huh. That matters?"

"Why, of course it does! Any victory or achievement of yours gives me a portion of the Glory, per our agreement, but the ones I observe are even better."

I cocked my head, thinking about it, while maintaining eye contact so he didn't take to checking out my merchandise again. Which was a little weird, what with him not only being a capital 'G' God, but my own personal one at that. "You get more Glory if you're watching?"

"Not precisely. But if I'm watching, I get to see the events firsthand, which is so much better when it comes to rubbing other Gods' noses in your victories."

"Which gives you personal Glory for besting them."

He blinked at me, then let loose another peal of laughter. "Oh, Tabitha Diaz, you are a gem beyond compare, and today we shall see to providing you with a setting worthy of you. Now, as I said, close your eyes."

I shrugged and closed my eyes. I half expected him to cop a feel after catching him taking in the view, but he simply took my hand and pulled me across the threshold into the hallway.

The moment he did sweat popped out of my pores, as the temperature and humidity skyrocketed. My room is comfortable to sleep naked in without blankets. The hallway had to be ninety degrees at least, and water dripped around me. "Can I look now?"

"If you wish."

When I did, he stood there looking almost like what I'd expect Loki to look like; blond and blue eyed, like you'd expect from a Norseman, wearing a well tailored hunter green suit cut to be just slightly reminiscent of a jester's garb, wearing a stylized, minimalist steel helm, almost a crown, with equally stylized, equally minimalist golden horns protruding from high on his temples. He spoke quietly with two women, one a young Asian woman in a beautiful flowing cherry blossom colored gown, the other a wizened old crone who stood almost as if sheltering behind her. To the side, almost where I'd expect an interpreter or bodyguard, stood the hairiest motherfucker I'd ever seen. Like, I know some dudes have to shave their necks, but this guy just didn't even bother, the hair on his head blending with his short chin-strap beard, which merged seamlessly with the chest hair showing over the almost ceremonial armor he wore. While the women spoke with Loki, the hairy guy just stared at me, head tilted like he couldn't quite figure me out. To his credit, he only really looked me up and down once, and just smiled after doing so, the kind of thing you'd expect to see from a guy checking out a girl right before saying 'nice' to his bros.

"Of course. The view is nice. But I have no bros here."

Loki shook his head and turned back to the women. "As my message said, I have need of her," here he nodded to the old woman, "services for the creation of garments to clad my Champion. Time is of the essence, and I will have her in nothing but the finest of garments." Here he paused and looked between the young woman in the cherry blossom gown and the hairy armored dude. "I shall meet any reasonable price you name for the services of your most Glorious craftswoman." With those words he gave a slight bow to the old woman, who up until then had a resigned look on her face.

Cherry Blossom Girl looked at my Patron and said, "I do not hear the words 'Glory' and 'Crafter' often said together. She will not be harmed."

Loki raised one hand to his chest, the image of someone shocked by another's words. "Highness, I know the reputation of my father's house is warlike, but I am at worst a prankster, at best an admirer of all things beautiful, and she is a creator of beauty; I should rather harm myself than bring any harm to her."

"Then... let it be so?" she directed the question in her statement toward the hairy guy, who tilted his head, stepped up to Loki and looked him in the eye. It surprised me how much shorter than my Patron the hairy guy was. Like a full head shorter, maybe more, since Loki slouched just a touch and the hairy guy was clearly standing as tall as he could without going on tiptoe.

He smiled, pointed a finger right at Loki's nose, and said, "No tricks, unless you want to match wits?"

Loki just laughed the easy laugh of sublime confidence, although even I wasn't sure if I meant 'a confident guy' or 'a con man' when I said that. "I should dearly love to match wits with you at some point, my esteemed colleague, but this is neither the time nor the place. I am, as I noted, on a schedule, and it simply would not do to disrupt such a magnificent artist's creative space."

The hairy guy shrugged. "I'll stay to watch, if you don't mind?"

"I do not mind at all." He turned to Cherry Blossom Gown Girl. "We have an agreement, then?"

"Yes. I must go now, my husband awaits."

Loki made a full, courtly bow to her, and I got so wrapped up in watching the flourishes I completely missed her leaving. One second she was there, the next, gone. Hairy guy just up and perched on a counter, and the little old woman came over, shuffled me onto a slightly raised circular dais in the middle of the room, and started taking measurements.

While she measured and cut, measured and pinned, measured and sewed, then measured again, Loki asked her for a few ribbons of fabric and plaited them through my hair. By the time he finished, he'd folded all of my hair into an up do that had to be half as big as my head, with little sausage curls dangling down here and there. Just as he finished, the little old woman came over with what looked at first to be a single long swatch of crimson silk. Without a word, she handed me a tiny uneven hourglass shaped bit of silk with a few cords coming from the corners. It took a second, since the last time I hit a Victoria's Secret had been like six months before I wound up here, but after that second I snatched the silk panties from her and put them on.

She moved to start dressing me, but I grabbed Loki by the arm and said, "I need six more of these."

"That's not what I agreed upon with her."

"Six more or that," I nodded to the dress, "won't be going on me."

He blinked at me, his mouth a flat line. "You would extort your God by threatening him with your nakedness?"

I barely paused for thought before I retorted, "yeah, that's about the size of it."

Hairy dude chose that moment to chime in, "if you don't want her any more, can I buy her?"

Loki rolled his eyes, trying to hide the twinkle in them as his customary grin returned. "I am honored by and seriously considering your offer, but not today, I don't think." He pulled the old woman aside and murmured in her ear for a few moments, and I saw something change hands before he turned back to me.

"The craftswoman has graciously agreed to our request, and I shall have them delivered to your armoire before such time as you have need of them again."

I raised one eyebrow. "By tomorrow morning."

He laughed out loud, the kind of sound you'd expect from a thirteen year old boy who'd been told he had unlimited access to the junk food, video games, and supermodel of his choice. "You are indeed such a treat. By tomorrow morning, then."

Finally, going commando would be a conscious choice rather than a practical necessity to avoid permanent crotch chafing. A conscious choice I made again the moment nobody could see, but having that choice felt so much better than not.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The old lady stepped up and wrapped the dress around me. The dress... Oh, lord, the dress. What had looked like one long swath of crimson silk wrapped around my neck and crossed my front, leaving my arms, back, sides, and midriff bare, then swept around my waist to cascade to floor length on one side while the other left my thigh completely bare. I know I joked about my uniform blouse being a walking wardrobe malfunction if I tied it loose, but this thing paired with my here-and-now, duBois PT honed body became a mobile incitement to riot.

I loved it.

I balked when she approached me with some silk slippers though. I mean, I took them, let her slip them onto my feet, but this dress didn't beg for heels, it demanded them in terms that would make the most diehard Karen weep with envy.

My beloved Patron had no idea what the hell I meant by 'stiletto heels', but he admitted to being intrigued by the name, stilettos being a hobby of his.

"Cover your eyes again."

This time I didn't give him shit, I just closed my eyes and covered them with my hands. Okay, I limited my shit-giving to saying, "You know, you could have had her make me a blindfold."

Hairy guy lost his shit at that, in a hooting, hollering, laughter kind of way that cut off the moment I took a step.

The heat went from the oppressive, humid heat of an equatorial forest to the baking dry heat of a forge. I almost didn't want to open my eyes, because I half feared they'd dry out in an instant. Loki stepped away from my side and I heard a brief but heated exchange muffled by the constant roar of a furnace. Someone stepped up to me and said, "So what is it she wants, then?"

"Stiletto heeled thigh boots."

"A name tells me nothing, girl. Your Patron told me the name of what you want, but even he has no idea what they are."

My eyes snapped open at the word 'girl', and I stared into the eyes of a sociopath. I don't know how I knew, but every damned 'stay alive' alarm I have went off the moment I met his gaze, and most of them told me that if I flinched, not even Loki would be able to save me.

Good instincts.

I ignored him and locked gazes with the asshole in front of me. "You know what boots are, right?"

He frowned, "Yes. Of course."

"You're familiar with thighs?"

Asshole looked at Loki, "This one? You're paying me for a commission for this one?"

I reached out, grabbed him by the chin, and pulled his gaze back around to me. "I'm talking to you here. Thighs." I slapped mine, twisting as I did to show him my bare skin, then slashing my hand across about a third of the way before the knee. "Boots that come to here. Got it so far?"

"You da..." He got no further before I just fuckin' squeezed his chin with every ounce of pissed off I had, and his eyes crossed as he squealed.

"You fuckin' disrespected me first, asshole. Ask my Patron, if somebody's nice to me, I'm a fuckin' joy to be around. But if somebody disrespects me, I will take it out of their ass eventually. Got it?"

I let up just a little, and he worked his jaw a moment before replying. "We have that in common. I apologize for any disrespect I have shown. Do go on."

I let go of his jaw and said, "Likewise. Sorry about the jaw. Okay, you know how boots have heels?" Before he could answer I lifted myself onto the balls of my feet, raising my heels as high as they would go. "Okay, make the heel as skinny as you can, I think they use steel bars to reinforce them, but wrapped in leather to match the boot."

That got his attention. He stared at my foot, my calf, and my thigh, and for once I got the impression he didn't see one iota of sex, just an intricate machine of muscle and bone. One that he might want to take apart at some point, but for now he just said, "You... you want me to craft boots that force you to stand like that?"

I shrugged. "If you're any fuckin' good at it, they'll support my weight as well as any other boots do. But yeah, spending the day in them is pretty fuckin' torturous."

He mouthed the words 'any fucking good', a smile chasing its way across his face. "Anything else?"

"They need to match this dress and look at least as good as it does."

He waved one hand in a throwing away gesture, as if stating both of those requirements were nothing. "And how long do I have?"

I looked to Loki, and he rolled his eyes, "We're late already. I'd prefer fashionably late, but so long as the party is still in full swing when we arrive it's soon enough."

"Party?"

"The Lion Party."

The sociopath got a strangled look on his face, then spun to face me. "Dress. Off. Pose."

I wasn't about to back down now. As quickly as I could carefully do, I slipped out of the dress and wrapped it about itself, holding it up on top of my head while I lifted myself onto the balls of my feet.

"Move only when and how I tell you."

He proceeded to measure my thighs, my calves, my feet, and my stride, having me walk back and forth, then around in circles. After about ten minutes had gone by, and I was blessing duBois' weird posing Endurance training while cursing this sociopathic asshole, Loki opened his mouth to speak. Before he got in a word, the guy lifted one finger in the air in an imperious gesture, and Loki did nothing but fume.

"Will you be wearing stockings?"

"Normally I'd say yeah, but I think we're too crunched for time to get me a pair, so I'm just gonna have to chafe."

The sick sadistic bastard actually shuddered a bit when I said that.

"What type of stockings will you normally wear with it?"

"Back home I'd say nylon, but here I'm gonna guess at silk or nothing."

He just nodded, turned, and left me standing there with my dress in hand, my feet and calves aching. For the next little while, more than an hour but not by much, he moved around the workshop, heating metal, cutting leather, carving wood, applying dyes and paints, and assembling things. Even staring, I never could quite follow his fingers as he worked. This guy might be an asshole, but he knew his way around a workshop. For the final ten minutes, I listened without moving to hammering and stitching coming from behind my back. Then he stepped into view, his eyes as dead as ever, and handed me what had to be eight pounds of crimson leather and steel.

"I imagine your Patron wishes you to arrive dressed."

"You okay if I move now?"

For the first time since he'd started working, I saw something approaching a human emotion on his face, a tiny smirk. "She not only remembers instructions, she follows them to the letter. Excellent. I will require her as a model in the future."

Before I could do more than open my mouth to retort, Loki knelt next to me, one boot in his hands, and he cut me off saying, "Should the craftsman prove worthy of his wage, he shall have it."

I guess I did kinda go full on bitch mode about having them, and something told me this was not the guy to pull a con on in his own fuckin' workshop.

Loki helped me get the boots on, and I needed every bit of his assistance, but once they were on... I got a glimpse of painted-on-tight leather covering me from thigh to toe, and looked over at my cobbler. "Hey, you got a mirror?"

Loki winced, and the sociopath grinned as he whipped the cover off of a full length standing mirror. I had no clue why; the mirror had some really goth skeletal motifs going on in tarnished silver, but the mirror itself worked fine. I put my dress back on, and I gotta say I got a little, ah, anxious standing there staring at the chick in the mirror. I looked down at Loki, who still knelt with his back to the mirror, and said, "you ready to go?"

He looked up at me, met my gaze, and I saw honest surprise there for a split second before it disappeared as he stood and took my hand. He nodded to the cobbler without looking and said, "I shall be in touch regarding your payment, never fear."

Then he stepped past me, pulling me around as he did, and between one step and the next we stood at the edge of a precipice, as if we'd just stepped out of the air above the sheer drop. Decorative columns holding up a complete lack of ceiling stood around the perimeter of the plateau before us, and I saw the tops of clouds beyond its far edges. Small knots of people lingered around tables set with fruit, hors d’oeuvres, and wine bottles. Music filled the air, strings, woodwinds, and a tambourine playing something way too sedate and stately for a fuckin' tambourine. More groups of people stood on the dance floor, gossiping rather than dancing, by the looks of it. Overall I guessed the place to be about twice the size of a school gymnasium, with a few hundred people overall between the snackers and the gossipers.

After that quick scan of the room, I turned to Loki to ask him why we'd come here. He spun around me, one hand sliding behind my back and the other lifting my hand to shoulder height. As I saw an older guy, like Hugh Jackman as a grandpa, stepping forward like he intended to talk to us, Loki's voice whispered into my brain.

Follow my lead.

Absolute legend that he is, he meant that absolutely fuckin' literally. I'm not half bad when it comes to showing my stuff to some club music, but I'd never really tried ballroom dancing before. He didn't do anything crazy, at least to start, but we literally danced right past grandpa and onto the floor. I kept my eyes glued to my dance partner's, and between his eyes and his hands he kept me cued to what he wanted me to do next.

Around the edges of my vision I caught glimpses of people as we spun through the room, and carefully catalogued any of them who stood out. Grampa dude couldn't decide whether he wanted to kill us, fuck me, or both. A chick who looked just a smidge older than him fumed behind him, although I'm pretty sure she was set on 'kill' rather than 'fuck' or 'marry'. I guess she'd done the latter to grandpa, and he'd made a habit of doing the horizontal mambo with everyone but her as often as possible since. A dude in a fuckin' Bronze Age suit of armor, who bore a striking family resemblance to grandpa, looked like he wanted to end us both right then and there, but his kid brother stopped him with a hand on his elbow and the world's most eloquent 'really?' look.

Another group, centered on a pair who looked way too similar to be anything but brother and sister, and way too cozy to be that anywhere but Kentucky, tracked our progress like some kind of anti-aircraft turrets. When I got a better look at the chick, I swear she looked just like the crazy woman who had followed me around the day I met Loki. Close by them, but separated by the hangers-on orbiting the sibling-spouses and herself, a woman with a Porcelain Black domino hairdo and a cowled dress that obscured her left side completely while leaving nothing to the imagination on her right nodded to us as we spun past. Loki chose that moment to dip me, and I arched backward a little further than I really wanted, but he didn't pull me upright until I stared straight between domino's ankles. When we spun away she lifted her drinking horn to us with a laugh.

I got a little dizzy after that, to be honest, but I had a fucking blast as we danced through the crowd, pissing off more than half of them by ignoring their reactions, amusing the others by playing to them, and even inviting a few to join us on the dance floor alone, in pairs, or even in one case as a trio who apparently never got Shakira's memo.

Like I said, ballroom isn't my thing, but after duBois pushing me to my limits for over a month, I had the stamina and flexibility to go where Loki led me. I was born with the attitude to tell the assorted crowd to fuck off without ever saying a word.

As the sun neared the horizon, I noticed that Grampa and Bronze Age Roid Rage had teamed up with a surfer dude in furs to herd us toward the Western edge of the plateau. Dizzy as fuck, arroganter than that, and completely unwilling to back down from something as pedestrian as fuckin' gravity, I followed Loki's lead and danced straight over the edge of the plateau.

My feet never hit air. Between one step and the next I spun into my room, collapsing onto my bed, laughing my ass off at the final look on Team Grandpa's faces.

With a final fuck you, this time to biochemistry in the form of adrenaline, I fell asleep moments after my head hit the pillow.

Woke up late for Remedial Mana and did not fucking care one tiny little bit.