I grin smugly at the slack-jawed vrothizo sitting on my operating table, rapidly flexing my internal spellcasting muscles to sterilize her severed finger before it finishes dropping into my stomach. While I certainly admit to some personal satisfaction at eliciting this response from young Lark, there is some practical purpose to my sudden carnivorous display: in my experience, nothing helps a lesson stick inside one's mind more than a little bit of drama. The same is true even for a girl with perfect memories, I suspect. Remembering a lesson is not the same as keeping it in the forefront of one's thoughts. Still, in the short term, I am already regretting this.

I am First Lady Penelope Vesuvius the Inhuman, and I must regretfully admit that uncooked vrothizo flesh is the single most disgusting thing I have ever eaten. Including my penchant for autocannibalism, which at least has the excuse of being inherently efficient and guaranteed sterile. Watcher's eyes, though, it has nothing on this inconceivably repulsive flavor. I feel like I have just consumed a rotting sulfur-and-fish sausage marinated in diarrhea. I'm going to need to wash the inside of my mouth for weeks, and I'm seriously considering using cognimancy to remove the damn memory. Unfortunately, that will leave evidence on my soul that I can ill afford.

Anyway, I make a mental note to add the wretched flavor of vrothizo flesh to my physical notes, because science is equal parts rigor and suffering and I see no point in omitting valuable data from the records, no matter how arbitrary it may seem.

"That's all I need from you, by the way," I tell Lark, who manages to pick her jaw of glorious teeth up off the floor. "For today, I mean. I have a Council meeting later and I would like to get these samples situated before then."

"Um," the vrothizo stutters, "does that mean you, uh, are going to eat them, ma'am?"

I allow myself a chuckle.

"No," I tell her honestly. "You taste horrid."

I enjoy watching her expression twist between relief at the idea that I won't continue, horror at the implication that I would have eaten them had she not tasted so unpalatable, and most entertainingly, a confused sort of offense at the idea that she does. I must say, out of all of Vita's strays, this one is by far my favorite. She is both fantastically useful and endlessly fun to tease.

Not to mention… well, as I watch her swing her legs off my operating table and stand up to retrieve her armor, I find myself enraptured by the unparalleled poetry that is her body. The tight tapestry of muscles underneath her skin, the beautiful interwoven web of additions to her human frame, each adapted and modified from the base creature with such unparalleled genius I cannot help but feel a churning, invigorating inadequacy. She stretches and smooths her talons against the floor, controlled enough to not damage the wood as her almost impossibly powerful legs carry her across the room. Her quills thrum a brief, discordant tune as she leans down, sucking energy out of the world with nothing but a thoughtless movement. One of her four arms scratches her back as the other three efficiently coordinate the reassembly of her plate armor, the motion practiced and perfected yet coming from a girl with barely any experience at the act. In both mind and body, Lark is gifted beyond measure, and I must force myself to suppress a shudder of pleasure at the thought of unlocking that power for myself.

"Lark," I call to her as she leaves. "I mean it. You don't need the mask."

She pauses, her armor once again obstinately hiding her beauty. She nods politely in my direction.

"Thank you, ma'am," she says without enthusiasm, and departs the room.

A bittersweet exit, but not an unexpected one. If only she could get over her incessant self-destructive whinging, she would be perfect. As is, she's far too vulnerable to emotional manipulation and far too devoted to my enemies. I can't believe I had to resort to spouting religious drivel to drill my point through her skull. I look forward to helping her develop the confidence to make her own moral judgments before opening the closet door in which the Church has carelessly stuffed every last crime they've committed and letting it all collapse on her head.

Then she'll be free, and that will be as good as being mine.

I push away the last of that whimsical anticipation—I have things to do, and enjoying victory is an activity only worthwhile after actually achieving victory. In many ways this was my pleasure for the day; now I must immerse myself in work. I take the samples to preservation, letting myself thoughtlessly cast the necessary spells on them as I puzzle through the oddities of Lark's biology. Obviously, a significant amount of natural biomancy occurs within her body when she regenerates and presumably also when she develops new traits, but I can't bloody find where the spell gets formed. I know she uses normal mana—a constant stream of it flows into her soul, passing through her quills and teeth in order to power their enchantments—but rather than being formed into spells within said soul the mana just vanishes. Perhaps this is related to her spatial-magic-powered digestive system, but I've yet to divine how. Frustrating, yet engaging. My favorite kind of problem.

Unfortunately, I have countless other problems that I need to solve as well. I can't believe that there was once a point in my life in which I looked forward to the roles and responsibilities of a First Lady. To be clear, I certainly appreciate the power and the prestige, but if I could get out of all these damn government meetings and focus more on my work I would be quite grateful. Alas, Valka would likely collapse into a sniveling heap without my assistance, and I do happen to live here and thereby possess significant incentive to prevent that.

I store Lark's severed digits with the rest of my collected vrothizo parts and exit my laboratory complex, taking in the sights and sounds of my beloved city. Templar Jelisaveta's absolutely magnificent sensorium is almost too powerful to make use of, but I'm quite glad I successfully identified how it functions. Implementing it into my own body has been a slow process, and one that I am purposely performing with imperfection, as I fear simply co-opting every improvement simultaneously would be dangerously overwhelming. Instead, I've been improving each of my senses little by little, and while this process is nowhere near complete, even the early stages highlight the beauty of the world in ways I would have never previously been capable of experiencing.

I amuse myself by meeting the awed stares of the populace, my hands clasped primly behind my back as I walk down busy streets on my way to the capitol building. I possess neither escorts nor guards, confident in both the lack of interest my city has in harming me and my capacity to destroy anyone that tries regardless. The structure we nobles meet the King in has regained some of its ostentatious pointlessness since that moment two years prior where I kneeled before Templars barely disguising their attempt to cleanly and legally murder me under the pretense of war. The previously-wooden building has now been replaced with "proper" stone construction, grand and artistic in ways I'll never understand the human obsession with. Insultingly, there are multiple small tentacle motifs throughout the outside of the building, as if this place was a goddamn chapel rather than a government structure. They aren't even being subtle about it, and somehow that's the part that rankles me the most.

"Well hello there, Vesuvius," Galdra drawls in that aggravatingly lackadaisical tone of hers.

The wretched woman is a High Templar first and foremost, which often makes people forget the fact that she is also a True Lady and therefore, as if by some cosmic joke, fully capable of influencing government policy. She falls into step beside me as I enter the capitol building, insisting on annoying me with her proximity.

"Hello there, First and True Lady High Templar Galdra Karthala the Annihilator," I schmooze back at her, watching her lips crinkle upward with amusement at my use of her entire list of titles.

If Galdra has a single redeeming quality, it is the fact that she is easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, I gain relatively little from manipulating her, because she is a woman trained to do very little other than kill and follow orders and I'm not the one giving her those orders. Nonetheless, I have seen the difference between how Galdra treats people she finds amusing compared to people she finds detestable, and I am firmly incentivized to remain in the former category.

"Are you as excited to spend three hours discussing sewage maintenance budgets as I am?" she asks, removing her helmet in an uncharacteristic display of basic social graces. I suspect her only motivation for doing so is that she was feeling stuffy.

"Indeed, I will be precisely as riveted to the discussion as you," I answer, admitting quite honestly that I intend to tune out the entire meeting. "I'm surprised that you've yet to flee outside the walls of the city, Lady Karthala. Days like this make me wish I was still a hunter."

It's imperative that I attend these meetings so that I don't miss anything important—this is, after all, where all of the highest level government decisions get passed down from—but surprising no one, it turns out that the majority of governance is quite boring and entirely irrelevant to my objectives. My position in these discussions boils down to joining the side that wins me the most political sway, which is usually decided long before any arguments are brought to the table. My presence is almost entirely performative and paying attention would be useless drudgework, which is why I prefer to spend the time further transforming myself into a crime against nature.

Nature, after all, is terrible, and therefore every crime against it is a victory for all of us.

"I wish I could be out burning things," Galdra grumbles. "Unfortunately, I'm being kept home in case I need to burn our little baby blackbird. Honestly, Vesuvius, if you could fudge whatever papers you need to in order to make the brass think she's safe..."

"I will 'fudge' nothing," I respond testily, because this incorrigible baboon of a woman seems to have forgotten that we are in public, "but you will be happy to know that Lark is genuinely stable, mentally speaking."

"And I suppose you'd know, eh Lady Inhuman?" Galdra guffaws insipidly, with all the self-satisfied humor of someone who brought a painted rope to a snake exhibition.

I laugh along with her dig at my sanity as if it were an old inside joke while the two of us file into the legislative hall. I'm used to it. If I had a pebble for every time I heard an offhanded comment implying that I have metaphorically lost my marbles I could fill the hole in the city by stacking them all the way up from the mists. Most people, after all, are far too stupid to comprehend any perspective other than their own. They don't want brilliant golden eyes, they don't want fangs, they don't want to be anything other than the unassuming little creatures they already are and so they run the idea that I wish for more through their minds and end up unable to draw any conclusion other than insanity. Some days, it is difficult to continue believing in the value of leading them to greater things. Yet continue I do, and their insipid whispers always seem to quiet when I yield results.

The legislative hall is as drab and boring as the name implies, and the smattering of still-living true nobles within are not much more interesting. While a few other remarkable individuals have been inducted into our ranks since the perception event slew most of the upper class, the majority of the nobility are survivors of that disaster and the majority of the survivors—surprise, surprise—are either closely allied to the church or straight-up members of it. Oh certainly, the Templars were all out of the city defending us from vrothizo, and Lord Taftan was all the way in one of the port cities visiting his grandson, and so on down the line does everyone have the perfect excuse to have not been around. Lady Etna is just about the only noble from before the perception event that I actually respect, and she only managed to survive because she moved to New Talsi to install a teleportation system for salt.

Soon enough, the King enters with much ceremony, along with his escort of Templars. Having two years of experience reading speeches written by other people has, I must begrudgingly admit, improved his skill in doing so. The child is now a rank expert at having other people shove words down his throat while sticking their nose up his ass, and I can only assume that he is quite pleased with himself because of it. I pay a modicum of attention to what he's saying out of respect to the infinitesimal chance that any of it matters, but I turn the majority of my attention within. Being stuck sitting in a chair for hours on end is an ideal time to make modifications to my body, after all.

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It would be quite rude to start wiggling my fingers under the table, of course, but I solved this problem over a year ago. Instead of moving my hands I flex the many tongue-like prehensile spellcasting muscles I designed and grew in place of my rather useless reproductive system. (I kept everything necessary for the fun parts of sex, but the rest was just wasting space. I figure if I ever go batshit insane enough to want to grow a child in my belly I can always just put the womb back.) Precise, complex movement is required to perform somatic spellcasting, but there's certainly no reason the movement has to come from fingers. These custom-made internal organs offer countless benefits, from obvious things like immunity to having my hands bound to more complicated advantages such as the capacity to cast more than two spells at once, to fool skilled casters about what spell I'm actually casting, and to rapidly increase the speed of casting any spell complicated enough to benefit from using my fingers and new organs in tandem.

I am the only person in the world that knows I am capable of performing these feats, and I intend to keep it that way for as long as possible. This is why I repurposed the metal of my necklace into a ward against mana sight and anchored it inside my body. Anyone looking at me with metamancy will see that I am channeling, but they will be unable to see any of the spell configurations I craft within my own body. They will therefore assume I am simply channeling as a training exercise, because much like Galdra I have taken to doing precisely that during the entirety of my waking hours. All mishaps I've suffered due to this dangerous practice have, so far, been recoverable, and the improvement has been measurable. I therefore have no intentions to stop.

As much as I have made my dedication to superior physical form obvious on the outside, any biomancer checking my internal organs will see far, far more. I have multiple redundant hearts, livers, and kidneys to prevent any wounds from killing me too quickly to heal. I have drastically increased skeletal density and muscular capacity, completely restructured joint designs that enable free range of movement for nearly any part of my body, a nigh-inviolable immune system, a near-instantaneous capacity to clot wounds, and the ability to slowly regenerate any body part without needing to cast a spell to accomplish it, up to and including my brain. Today I am continuing my month-long development of an organ to convert magical energy into chemical energy. This will, regrettably, not remove my need to eat, but it will function almost identically to Bently's talent and largely remove my need to eat for energy—magic can reinvigorate me, just not replace the physical matter that my body is composed of. All of the theory and testing is complete; I merely need to finish the actual process of growing the organ, which requires careful supervision.

The next three hours of my life are therefore not wasted, but I am still thankful when the meeting comes to an end. (The budget that was ultimately decided on is laughably insufficient, but I have a monopoly on mold-proofing wood so I can just quietly bump it up to sane levels using my personal wealth. Obviously, I give no indication that I have any intention or ability to throw money around like this, and publicly pretend that I rely on government funding for my work.) I swiftly exit before I can be trapped by a chatty High Templar, returning to my laboratory as soon as I'm able. I'm gaining the reputation of somewhat of a recluse recently, as I rarely leave my work except for government meetings and the pro bono biomancy work I still perform once a tenday. It's a reputation that suits me just fine, however, and I happily live up to it as I descend into the bowels of my workshop.

I am, to put it bluntly, the best biomancer in Valka by several orders of magnitude. Everyone knows this. As such, nearly every biomancy-related problem in the country at some point passes over my desk, and all of the actually important ones are seen to by me personally. I have over two dozen biomancers under my direct employ within this facility, as well as a handful of professional servants and a collection of skilled slave laborers. All of them restrict themselves to the ground and upper floor, because it is the basement levels in which I perform disease work. It is restricted by virtue of sheer practicality: anyone entering the lower levels without my direct oversight will quite unavoidably find themselves a test subject, and therefore locked in with the serial killers, rapists, and other unforgivables already sentenced to serve their punishment by my capable hands. The boon of human experimentation greatly accelerates my capacity to innovate and improve, and using death row convicts means I get all the fun without any of that pesky moral degeneracy. I can, after all, read the souls of my victims to double-check that the courts have done their due diligence. Justice is so much easier with cognimancy involved!

Personally, I think the best part of having a top-secret biological weapons development lab is that I can quite legally install the kind of protective enchantments that would be considered excessively paranoid within the King's own bedchambers after two weeks of daily assassination attempts. No matter what I cast in here, no matter what I do in here, not a whiff of it will reach the outside world—with the obvious exception of regular government and Church investigation and oversight. Which is why, of course, I merely walked down here to disguise the mana signature of teleporting into my actual secret lab.

There's no teleportation enchantment on my property—I'm not stupid enough to leave something like that where anyone could get it. Instead I have to cast the entire spatial spell by hand (and internal organ), which is not an easy task. Spatial magic is absurdly complicated, requiring such large and intricate magic configurations that the average mage would kill themselves by attempting even the most basic spell. I am no average mage, and I have access to the reverse-engineered version of Capita's self-translocation. While she can pop around like the maniac she is, I don't have the luxury of merely funneling mana through pre-constructed soul pathways. It takes me over six minutes of continuous casting to complete the massive spell configuration, and another three to triple-check it for errors that could potentially end my life.

I let the spell complete, and appear at home.

Not the building I purchased for use as a home, but my actual home, an underground complex accessible only by teleportation or swimming through about a mile of underground lake. Rustic and rugged, decorated only by pale, vine-like chemosynthetic organisms, my multi-leveled sanctuary is exactly how I like it and exactly how I left it. Carved from natural cave formations, each room is a unique and pleasing beauty, far superior to any man-made artistic construction. But the real reasons I consider this a superior home are more personal in nature.

"Welcome home, Lady Vesuvius," a familiar voice greets me warmly.

Walking into the room to greet me is a young woman with pale skin, thin frame, raven-black hair and eyes like solid blue sapphires split with black from top to bottom. Crafted to look exactly like Vita as I made her two years ago, my personal maid smiles at me in a way I know the real Vita never would have. A bubbling pit of revulsion pools up inside of me at the sight of her, but I push it down. A pet project I made out of a mixture of grief and boredom, the sheer wrongness of her is both a reminder and a promise to retrieve the genuine article. By the raw scale and breadth of the biomancy and cognimancy I have subjected this person to, I doubt any living person would guess that this was once the man responsible for the lapse in security which ended in the death of Vita's sister.

She is wearing an outfit that only very technically qualifies as underwear, because the degree to which I currently have her set to be enamored with me is a bit too high.

"Hello, Nugas," I greet her back, allowing her to walk behind me as I quickly step past her. "Anything of note happen while I was away?"

"Margarette has been adapting poorly to her new form and cracked her soul falling down the stairs," Nugas reports. "She suspects she will need your assistance repairing it."

"Is she in any immediate danger?" I ask, frowning.

"None. Just minor damage."

"Anything else, then?"

"Yes. Sky is here to see you. He has been waiting for a few hours."

"Oh?" I hum. "Just Sky?"

"Yes ma'am. Capita was not with him. He arrived the long way, and flew in sopping wet."

About fucking time. Watcher's eyes, Templars are so incompetent when I actually need them. I briskly alter course to the guest lounge, immediately spotting Sky who has, indeed, seemed to have brought enough water with him to damage all of the furniture despite being fully capable of drying himself telekinetically, the absolute fuck. I must admit, the young man is some of my finest work, completely different from his previous self except in soul. Tall and broad-shouldered, his custom-designed skeletal structure and angular face portray the roguish attractiveness best suited to a man with the kind of non-musculature that forms on a person for whom the concept of exercise is fundamentally obsolete. He lifts off the couch the moment I enter the room, dashing towards me like a ravenous honeybee quite certain that flowers are five feet tall and possess four limbs.

"Where the fuck have you been!?" he demands, a full-bodied panic filling his every word.

"Sky, you layabout, did you know that it is actually quite normal for a person to not spend one hundred percent of their time in their house?" I taunt him anyway, ignoring his distress.

"They got Capita," he hisses.

I know this already, as that's the only reason he would ever arrive without her. I raise my eyebrows in surprise anyway.

"Who did?" I ask, already knowing the answer. "Where is she?" I press, knowing he'd already be there if he knew the answer. Conversations would be much easier if everyone would just politely agree to skip to the parts that matter, but culture demands the exchange of pointless drivel, and I am too well-trained to not supply it.

"The fucking Templars. They must have ambushed her while she was separate. When half of her didn't come back we went out looking for her, but I fucked up and let her out of my sight and now… I don't know where they took her! You have to find her, Vesuvius."

"I will," I promise honestly.

I didn't go through all the effort of helping the Templars plan a way to capture her just so I could leave her to rot. It took me over a year—over a fucking year to confirm that the Inquisitors run a top secret prison in the forest without raising any red flags, and Lyn finally finished tracking the scent I forced then-soon-to-be-Inquisitor Jelisaveta's body to start producing (which she could track because I gave her Inquisitor Jelisaveta's sense of smell). Then the only damn problem became getting enough firepower to actually break into the place and make it back out. Netta, Mateo, and Lyn were obvious picks, but I needed someone with the raw brute force necessary to clear a way in and out. I needed Sky, and there was not a singular chance that I was going to get him.

Sky, Capita, and I actually have built quite the friendly relationship in the years after the perception event. Sure, he murdered my entire family, and while I miss no opportunity to goad him about that fact if I'm being honest it's a point in his favor. Audacity is attractive, and so are the people I use biomancy to make very attractive. Long story short, on a few occasions I've had the opportunity to test the equipment I gave him, with Capita's blessing (and on one memorable night, her assistance). I don't love the man—far from it, even, because he is an annoying, selfish piece of shit—but our relationship is friendly even if we are not friends.

Despite this, I knew he would reject any plan to rescue Vita. Sky nurses a burning grudge for having actually lost a fight for the first time in his life, and while Capita would be sympathetic, she would ultimately choose Sky's safety over Vita's freedom. The process of freeing Vita would certainly be dangerous, but even more so she herself is the danger. I rather doubt the years have made my Vita any more positively inclined to Sky than he to her, and she is in every way the rock to his scissors. Sky has the kind of absurd power that could let him go toe to toe with a High Templar and possibly even win depending on which one he faces, but Sky is at his weakest when tossing projectiles from a distance. At point-blank range, he can rip a person apart from the inside faster than a blink, yet his inability to get close to Vita without dying fundamentally unnerves a man that is used to being invincible.

But there's one thing that can invariably move him to act. I don't want to understand whatever part of Capita's insane mind makes her love Sky, but for all his many, many, many, many faults he truly does love her in return. And as an animancer, well...

There's only one place they could have sent her.

"You'd fucking better," Sky growls. "Get your bloodhound on her yesterday, Vesuvius or I swear I'll—"

"Save your yammering, Sky, I told you I will," I snap at him. "On one condition. When you go to break her out, if Vita is there…"

"Fine, yes," he concedes immediately.

Hah. Too easy.

"Wonderful. I will send Lyn out first thing tomorrow."

"You will send her out now," Sky demands.

I tilt my head ever so slightly, passing my tongue absentmindedly over the inside of my lips as I decide how to deal with that.

"Sky," I say evenly. "Because I understand what you are going through right now, I won't shove you in a bathtub and make you fill it with your own pus for trying to give orders in my own fucking house. But let me be very clear: you will not dictate to me the proper method of retrieving a loved one from the Templars. You are an insipid, petulant brat that knows nothing about the subject and you will do exactly as I say if you want to have any hope of returning with her alive."

"Oh yeah, because you're so damn good at getting people back from the Templars," he sneers.

I do not give him the satisfaction of flinching at that. Some plans just take longer than others, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. I doubt Vita has had a pleasant two years, but… she's strong. She'll be fine, and she'll understand the importance of optimizing success chances.

"You're the one crawling to me," I counter. "Feel free to be thankful that you get to reap the benefits of my preparation. I will send Lyn tomorrow, because I am under observation and rushing off to give her orders mere hours after Capita goes missing will make it a lot harder to get her back than just waiting a little while. I visit Vita's family every morning. That is when I will tell her, and we will move to retrieve Capita when Lyn finds where they took her."

Again, I already know where they have to be taking her, but I need a few days to prepare for the assault anyway and Sky doesn't need to know the details for that. He lets out an irritated huff and floats away, which is about as close as he gets to conceding an argument.

Finally. Finally, the fucking pieces are in play. I'm coming for you, Vita.

It won't be long now.