Ash’s POV
I was completely stunned. As Sophia was leading me around what she called ‘my wing’ of the house, I kept waiting for her to say something suggesting that this was something that these were rooms that they had already had, and now were just being repurposed for my use, because the alternative is that in the couple short hours that Sophia had announced that she’d get things ready, she had straight up just BUILT me my own damn house that connected to theirs?! What the hell do I say to that?! How the fuck am I supposed to thank someone who straight up made me a damn HOUSE? And even though I want to do something in return, what the hell could I possibly do for someone who could make a separate wing in her own house in a matter of hours that she wouldn’t be able to do for herself?!
After she showed me the shed that Leo had apparently built for me months ago, a warm feeling of appreciation filled me, but it wasn’t until she showed me the bathrooms and how to work the various enchanted tools that I truly understood. The fact that Leo had these extras lying around could only mean that my coming here was something they’d been getting ready for for a while. The sheer level of thought and silent acceptance of me from the pair of them was overwhelming. I couldn’t help but feel relieved when Sophia left me alone to set up my room, and bounced eagerly back to her room.
After Leo had whispered into her ear, Sophia had become much less intimidating than I had found her at first glance. Partially due to the fact that her mere presence was no longer infecting my mind, causing a strange feeling of existential inferiority, but much more so due to the way she was acting. With how clearly heat was flooding her face and neck, and how enthusiastically she was dragging me around, almost too fast for me to fully understand the words that came out of her mouth, it wasn’t particularly difficult to understand the…nature…of the words Leo had told her.
Unknown to him, during my private conversations with Sophia, she had told me all about his….proclivities. She often spoke to me about various relationship drama, including me and Mike, Mike and Liz, Liz and Aozia, me and Leo, her and Leo, and her and the demons she was working with. It seems that a side effect of either Leo’s emotional colorblindness or maybe just his personality was that he didn’t really gossip. He’d speak for hours about enchanting, or science, or the various natural magical laws he was studying, but when it came to people, he really couldn’t care less. Sophia on the other hand, seemed very much to enjoy talking about people and relationships, and spending a lot of time with Leo kinda made her bottle all of it up, so when she finally found herself a girlfriend in me, she wasted no time in catching me up with all the juicy gossip.
Which is also why when I heard loud slapping sounds echoing throughout the subspace from my room, I wasn’t completely surprised. Embarrassed yes, but not surprised. Guess I’m gonna have to get used to this. I couldn’t really move into someone else’s house and tell them that they needed to change the way they lived to accommodate me could I? They were already being so warm and welcoming, I couldn’t-
My thoughts were interrupted by screaming and moans, bouncing through the house and echoing into the void in a cacophonous orchestra of debauchery. I laid in bed, feeling pure embarrassment flooding through me as I listened to the sound of two of my best friends having a grand old time, with Sophia occasionally actually managing to form words to beg Leo to ‘punish me more’, and ‘put me in my place’. Maybe I should ask them to keep it down from now on anyway.
After a few hours of it, they finally settled down and silence fell as we all were finally able to get to sleep. The next morning, I woke up, headed to the kitchen, and spent a couple minutes looking around, seeing where exactly they keep everything set up, and made myself some light breakfast. During this time, Leo and Sophia came out of their room. Remembering the night before, all of the embarrassment from hearing the pair of them filled me again, so I decided to target Leo and make him feel just as awkward as I did. As I goaded him, I saw his face flush a bright crimson color, and thought, Huh, so he CAN get embarrassed. How oddly wholesome.
With his short conversation with Sophia, I gathered that the noise was in fact something that Leo had thought of and didn’t intend for me to hear, causing another flood of shame and appreciation to flow through me. As he left, presumably to make something to fix the problem, I turned to Sophia and asked despite myself, “What the hell did he do to you this time!?” Her eyes became glossy and unfocused, and she practically drooled as she went waaaay too into detail about last night. I felt my own body heat up and clench in embarrassment and sympathy. “Better or worse than that lightning magic he used that one time?”
“Oh God, so much better it’s incomparable.”
Leo’s POV
Well I fucked up. I should have checked the soundproofing situation first last night, but it had completely slipped my mind. And while Ash obviously knew roughly how Sophia and I spent our nights, I had no intention of letting her find out the specifics. Now, did I think there was anything wrong with the sort of stuff Sophia and I got up to? Absolutely not, we were two consenting adults who made sure to properly discuss limits and what not to do, so what happened in our bedroom was no one’s business but ours. However, kink isn’t really for everyone, and when done incorrectly, is much easier to lead to abuse or violation of consent. So unless Ash specifically asked about it, I wanted to keep her in the dark about the details of my sex life, which at the end of the day was none of her concern anyway.
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The first thing I needed to do was figure out a way to keep sound isolated in our rooms. There were two ways of doing this, I called them hard, soft, and magic soundproofing. Sound is just pressure waves traveling through the medium of air after all, so soft soundproofing involves using a lot of thick fabrics with plenty of folds, which would cause the pressure waves to disperse into the cloth and prevent the majority of it from escaping our rooms.
Hard soundproofing involves removing the medium through which sound travels, and creating a vacuum that would turn a thin space around our room into a bubble. This would completely cut off all sound from the outside, but it would also have the danger of giving us a limited amount of breathable air. I still needed to test to see if Sophia actually needed to breathe, and if so, what gasses she could in fact breathe, but I most certainly did, and required oxygen. The safest way to do it would probably be to create a thin vacuum barrier in the hall leading from our rooms to the central area, but then the problem becomes how to form a stable vacuum and keep it up for however many hours are necessary.
Magic soundproofing was a kind of blend of the two, and involved coming up with an enchantment that could control the concept of sound directly. Kind of like a real life mute button. This is the way that I tried first, taking a piece of normal cloth and enchanting thread and sewing in a simple speaker with an x. When I ran my mana through it, it worked, but in a useless sort of way. Instead of muting all surrounding sound, all the enchantment ended up doing was making the cloth I had sewn it into incapable of making noise. I sewed the same enchantment into four patches so that I could make a sort of stealth mode for my clothes while I thought of another thing that might work.
I tried making a volume button, a rectangular box with a speaker in it, a + on top and a - on the bottom, but this enchantment ended up completely surprising me. A rectangular box with + on top and - on the bottom is an image that I was extraordinarily familiar with by this point, as that is almost identical to what I used for my batteries. And by putting a speaker in the middle of it, what I had ended up making was not a volume button, or a mana battery, but an enchantment that could actually store and release sound. A sound battery. This opened the door for a whole new line of enchantments, many of which would actually be of great help to Sophia and my tests to get her to the moon, but none of which were useful for what I was currently trying to do.
At some point while I was testing different things out, Sophia and Ash had entered my shed, so I took a little break to tell them about the science of soundproofing, and show them the enchantments that I had tried and how they’d failed, and the new possible things I could make from those failures. After I went through it all, Sophia offered an alternative solution.
“What if I put the two wings and the central area all into their own separate subspaces that are connected by doors? That way we could all get to each area, but without opening the doors no sound should be able to pass through into the other subspace?” I stared at her. While that does sound like a far more extreme version of hard soundproofing that would probably work, it also sounded…kind of extreme.
“Just how difficult would that be?” Ash asked, no doubt thinking along the same lines as I was. Sophia just shrugged. “I have a bunch of empty subspaces just kinda sitting around uselessly, once I make them they don’t really need much upkeep, and manipulating them is super easy. The only difficult part is actually getting enough solid stuff to make houses and whatnot, but I’ve been collecting material from Hell for thousands of years, so that’s also a nonissue. I also won’t actually be making more buildings anyway, just separating the one I already made into two different subspaces, so all I really have to make are the doors. Doing all of it should only take a few minutes, half an hour at most.”
Ash and I stared at each other, once again slapped across the face by the sheer capabilities of the woman next to us. “Uhh, sure Soph, that sounds great.” I looked at all of the failed experiments in my shed, not just from this project, but from every project I’d undertaken in the two years since I arrived in this world. How many of my problems that I’d spent hours upon hours coming up with a solution to would Sophia have been able to solve with a snap of her fingers? Probably all of them. Gotta appreciate a woman who can get shit DONE.
As Sophia started working on that, Ash and I made our way into the central area, and I started teaching her the rules to all of the various games that Sophia and I played every night. With the addition of a third player, chess and checkers were no longer on the table, but mahjong and all of our card games were. Even a demonic version of Sennet that Sophia had learned from Veronica could be modified into three players, so we definitely had ways to include her. I started off with teaching her the rules to rummy, and by the time Sophia had finished, I’d already beaten Ash for a few rounds. I dealt Sophia in and the three of us played until my stomach started yelling at me, reminding me that instead of eating anything, I’d embarrassedly ran away into my shed this morning.
“I’m gonna go check out the town, see if I can’t fill up my diaries, check out local recipes, and grab something to eat from the guild. Ash, you wanna come with me, or you wanna stay home?”
“I’ll come with you, let me just grab some stuff first.”
“Sure, Soph and I should go test the doors to make sure they’re actually fully soundproof anyway.”
Ash blushed and stuttered, “I-I’m not gonna be th-that long tho-ough? You-you don’t have enough t-time t-to-” I raised my eyebrows and clarified, “We aren’t gonna go fuck Ash, I’m just gonna yell on one side and see if Sophia can hear me.”
Rather than responding, Ash just turned an even brighter red and ran off to her room. I turned to Sophia and saw her looking down, also bright red. Did she look…disappointed? Honestly, what the hell am I gonna do with this girl? I sighed and sent through the telepathic channel, I’ve got a lot of tests to run to also find out just how the doors work, so it’ll take about 10 minutes, so feel free to take your time Ash. I then grabbed Sophia, made sure she couldn’t hear me shouting behind the door to our wing, then pulled her through it with me, giving her 10 minutes to do whatever she wanted.