"So, Penelope," Vita tells me, speaking up as soon as I finish weaving a bubble of silence around us. "I think the two month mark is a good time to betray him. What do you think? I want to fuck up his plans but I figure he probably gave himself a buffer."

I glance down at my short little companion, at her smooth, unblemished skin. At the toned muscles growing underneath it. Her frame, her face, pointed away from me of course, all of it part of my own design except the two piercing blue eyes that gaze insistently in every direction but my own. I hear the whispering knowledge in the back of my mind that I would need a very special disease indeed to destroy her, ignore it like I do all the others, and focus instead on the excitement I feel at a good plot.

I can't help but grin. Of course she's planning to betray him. I should have never doubted her.

"Earlier is of course better," I opine. "It frankly depends on the amount of time you need to be ready for such a betrayal."

She says nothing, thoughts whirring behind those beautiful, inhuman eyes.

"Okay, I’ll try to figure that out. I have a good idea of how much his soul can take now. By the way, do you want this guy Sky gave us? I don't really want to be anywhere near him, so you can experiment on him as much as you like."

A shudder of anticipation, alongside many other feelings fills my body with a foreign warmth. How can she just say that? How can she just give me a human as a gift, not only knowing about but being perfectly content with the sort of horrors I long to enact upon his flesh?

I am Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius, and I must regretfully admit that I have rather inconveniently fallen in love. I'm even tempted to remove the failsafe I implanted that lets me quickly kill her, but I know that would just be madness.

Love. What a strange emotion. At least, assuming what I feel is love, it is. This is different, very different, to anything I have ever experienced before. Her presence is a comfort and an ease the likes of which I cannot remember ever feeling. Why did it have to be Vita, of all people? I suppose she appeals to the broken, clawing parts of me, makes my instincts feel content and understood. I feel like a child, clinging to the first imbecile that offered me a smidgen of affection. Look at her. A self-destructive, ignorant fool that personifies the very kind of monster that I've been taught I must never be. Powerful and confident, utterly irreverent of the very society that I must one day rule. Even as my slave she is no follower, no servant. Some sick part of me wants to see her as Queen.

I almost make myself chuckle. Vita. Queen. Watcher's eyes, that would be such a disaster. Yet what an amusing and beautiful disaster it would be. Not that it is possible, of course. The lines of royal succession are so complicated and interwoven within the political structure of Skyhope that it would take an event of near apocalyptic scale to disrupt the churning bureaucracy that defines my life. I can no more break them than I could beat a Templar in a fistfight.

"Having a living human subject would undoubtedly be invaluable for our research," I agree, allowing my prior train of thought to unravel. Such flights of fancy are a waste of a woman's time.

"Theodora probably won't like it if we hand her a living human to work on," Vita points out in an uncharacteristically accurate assessment of a possible social issue. I suppose she is prone to being much more caring and observant when it comes to her own servants.

…If I already love her, would it make any significant difference were I her servant myself?

I clamp down on the idea immediately, allowing myself to feel a surge of frustration for even letting it complete. Obviously, there would be differences. I wouldn't be fucking alive, for one. Stupid, foolish, pathetic! Am I really so desperate for even a minuscule dripping of increased attention that I would consider abandoning all reason?

"That's a valid point,” I respond, “but unfortunately I don't have anywhere else to store a human that I intend to perform live experiments on. I'm not sure if you were aware, but that is in fact illegal."

Vita blinks in surprise, one of the few facial expressions she still uses with regularity. The poor girl slips deeper into her talent every day, and I am not sure I like what it is doing to her.

"You seriously don't have anywhere else you perform illegal experiments?" she asks me. I have to laugh at that, selecting and executing the appropriate chuckle for a private conversation between friends. Not that my audience will ever appreciate the work and effort necessary to train that to the point where it is automatic.

"I don't! You’re too much of an indulgence, Vita."

To anyone else, I would have been quite pleased with myself regarding the double meaning there, but Vita cheats. Not being able to dance words around her is her one great flaw, and it robs me of no end of entertainment. What a cruel irony that such a powerful empath has such a profound lack of empathy. She could be such a perfectly ruthless noble, if only her talent was not animancy.

"Okay, well, I don't have anything else to do with him so the offer is open. We can just boil his skin off in an alleyway if you want. I kind of want to see that too."

How am I supposed to not fall in love with this girl if she keeps saying things like that!? I feel my heart rate elevate just thinking about it. Watching that forbidden temptation, unleashing my most ruinous diseases that I plan alone in the dark hours I'm unable to sleep and the thoughts are too much to resist. A catalog of a hundred cruel and inhuman deaths waits inside my mind, each begging to be unleashed just so I can see them blossom into rapturous perfection, reducing the infinite, glorious complexity of life into a maddened playground, with her standing beside me and not judging, but joining—

Vita shrinks a bit herself, eyes unfocusing and pace slowing, ever so slightly. Her face remains as expressionless as ever, but I have made a point of paying attention to this odd little person's habits and I know she is suddenly, profoundly uncomfortable. She's disassociating with her body, putting up the same walls of unawareness that she uses as an automatic reaction to pain. I clamp down on my fantasy. Again. Damn me and my pathetic lack of control, where did it all go?

I hate making her uncomfortable like this. I make myself uncomfortable with this, but that is an acceptable and expected part of living. It should be enough that my emotions torture me, but to have them torture my one and only friend? Beyond inexcusable. I've never felt this about anyone before, I don't know how to deal with it! Until now, I didn't think I could be attracted to anyone. I thought it was just another part of me that was broken. Yet here I am, seventeen years old and experiencing a childish crush for the first time ever. I laughed at others, honestly I did. The unimaginable self-destruction my so-called peers would get up to in the name of love or even just sex baffled me to the core. Nothing but the expected stupidity of fools, I thought. Yet I am slowly starting to see where their utter abandonment of sense comes from.

Now I need to figure out how the fuck to stop it.

As far as I can see, there are two primary paths for reconciliation. The first being to change myself, deny my emotions, use self control to avoid mishaps, and allow myself to return our relationship to how it was before whatever insane thing in my head activated and decided to make me stupid. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be working, so perhaps it is time to move on to the second option.

Changing Vita.

Not biologically, of course. If I knew how to create or destroy love I would simply do it to myself. But with the right approach, it should be possible to warm her up to the idea of… warming me up. So to speak. As far as I can tell, what activated my feelings was intense comfort and understanding more so than any particular interest in her physical body. I was not attracted to Vita before; I've seen her naked enough times to be fully confident with that. Yet it creeped up on me somewhere, and it took nearly our entire trip home from New Talsi after the fool girl publicly announced my feelings to admit that she’s right. I feel like I can be myself with her, regardless of what persona I wish to adopt, and that is somehow attractive? No one else is like that, certainly, but that is not how I was ever taught to believe attraction works. Perhaps it’s one of those things people allow their biases to misinterpret for them. So under that assumption, I can posit that her lack of reciprocation is simply because such comfort is not mutual?

"Vita, you know I would love to do that, but I think using him as a test subject is going to be ideal,” I tell her, continuing the conversation with appropriate timing. Conversations are slow. Part of me wishes to know cognimancy simply so that I can inject information into people's brains instead of going through the exasperating oversimplification of concepts required by converting thought to language. “Would you like to drop him off at our lab first, or should we head straight to see your family? The house I got them is fairly nearby."

Vita shrugs, still in her unfocused state. Why is her comfort not the same as my own? She likes me, she trusts me. She has demonstrated each. There are parts of her I understand that I know no one else does, for they are the very parts no one but her understands about me. Is this not enough?

"Either is fine," Vita answers.

I suppose there are many parts of who I am which she does not and will never understand, but they are the parts that are… differently me. I am Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius, for I was forged into Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius. She is a careful and exquisite sculpture, the result of intense effort and tutelage. She is the wall between the world and my true self, a dear and essential aspect of who I am, but due to her inherent nature as an artificial front she is not a part of me that I ever want to be understood. She is a mask, an enigma, the natural result of a person born and raised to rule, and I use her as my sword and shield. So what front that Vita puts on have I failed to crack? What truth to her person is she not comfortable placing in my hands?

"Try again," I tell her, snapping my fingers in front of her face. "Does your family want to see you dragging in a body bag containing the man that got your sister killed?"

She thinks about that for a moment, focusing once more. I wonder if I'm going to need to end up killing Johan. The man seems to genuinely care about me, so ideally I could trust him to remain an ally even after I call off the marriage, but the risk of him interfering is significant. My backup plan is an interesting enough man, but the very thought of marrying him is revolting. Not because I find him personally distasteful, but because resorting to such a thing will only happen if I fail to make myself First Lady Vesuvius on my own merits. I cannot stomach such weakness, yet I cannot justify removing my safety net either. Perhaps I should just push Johan to eliminate as much power from the Church as possible and see if they assassinate him in retaliation. That would be the ideal outcome.

"Right, you're right," Vita says casually. "I should definitely see if Lyn or the kids want to beat him up at all."

Not at all what I was expecting, but that puts a smile on my face. Predictable people are droll. Still, I have wasted enough time pontificating about pursuing my own slave as a love interest, especially considering the all-pervasiveness of the thought lately. I force my mind to busy itself with more practical spell designs, theorizing and categorizing, chipping slowly away at problems I would normally be writing down if not for the risk of my notes being discovered.

Soon we arrive at the home I picked out for her, the result of a painstaking number of hours analyzing and weighing the many aspects I knew she would most value in a place to live with the practicalities of location, cost, and social status. I do not mention nor anticipate recognition for this work, knowing better than to expect more than a mumbled thank you from the tactless girl, but I derive my satisfaction from seeing the visible approval in her posture, eyes actually taking in the location with excitement and awe. It's a proper stone house, single-story, but spacious enough to avoid the cramped conditions inherent to her life before now. The front of the building is visible enough to deter crime, and the back of the building has easily defensible windows, connecting to an alleyway with long enough sightlines to prevent any unwanted guests from hanging about unseen. The indoor bathroom is properly and professionally connected to Skyhope's sewer system to prevent both unwanted smells in the house and unwanted vulnerability for anyone needing to relieve themselves in the night. Two hidden, lockable stone coverings hide hatches into a safe house and sewer access, respectively, giving her family a place to hide the questionably legal goods they will no doubt acquire and a method of entering and exiting the abode unseen. It is perfect, it is thanks to me, and her whole family knows it.

"Vita!" Lyn the fucking Metal Thief cheers happily, ushering us both inside. "I felt that horrifying threat of death claw at my heart and I just knew that you were finally home!"

Lyn the Metal Thief. One of the most wanted people in Skyhope, living in a home I purchased for the purpose of hiding and protecting her. I truly am crazy. Still, Vita lights up with joy as the two of them grab each other into an embrace, and it all feels worth it. I quickly close the door behind myself, watching as eleven children suddenly rush into the room and swarm us all. Lyn laughs alongside them, brushing locks of red hair out from in front of her face and behind the bandanna she perpetually wears. Even indoors, surrounded only by people she loves, the woman wears light armor and has at least a half-dozen knives strapped around her body. Like mother like daughter, I suppose. How the fuck did we let our city fall so far as to make this normal for them?

Three of the children approach me. Basra, Jari, and Sonja, I believe. Each of them hold likely-stolen gifts: two bundles of flowers and a small pastry. Pointless and wasteful, considering I have nowhere to put flowers and no need to eat an inexpertly constructed dessert, but Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius accepts them with dignity, as one must do when receiving thanks. The interaction gives me time to look over the state of their health, allowing myself to be satisfied by the progress I have made. Each one of the children possesses different modifications, experimental improvements to their bodies which hypothetically should not impact them negatively but still needed testing on someone. Jari in particular possesses the enhanced bone structure I have been considering applying to Vita, and eventually myself, so I am very pleased to see he seems hearty and healthy. I am growing a few smaller, redundant hearts in Basra, which will be the first step towards enabling her to survive a significant chest wound. One of the other children, Jarod, possesses the other step, a rapid sealant that should greatly improve his ability to stem blood loss if his body goes into shock. I have of course tested all of these improvements on animals in my spare time, and inferior versions of these current designs are present within my own body, but having more willing subjects to experiment on has allowed me to significantly speed up my learning process.

Well, for a certain definition of willing, I suppose. I'm sure they wouldn't mind. It's going to make them harder to kill, ideally, and that has been a contentious point in this household lately.

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"Glad to see you're home safe, Vita," Rowan says, emerging from a side room behind the tide of children. "How did the mission go?"

Vita winces, actually visibly winces. Poor thing.

"We were sent out with three senior hunters, all of whom died. So I sort of had to… do my thing, and then the whole team knew, and then…"

"And then Norah also tragically died to the monster," I intone for her.

I watch as Lyn and Rowan both let shock and sadness bloom on their faces, each more than capable of interpreting my implication. The children react with mixtures of indifference and mild disappointment, already quite hardened against the shock of death. Norah hadn't even been one of their own, just a nice woman who played with them. This is the sort of stock Vita hails from. A dull fury warms my chest, reminding me that every virtue a noble is called to strive for has never manifested in actions, not outside the walls of the center city. The country I love is well and truly rotten.

So like with all things, my job is to heal it, as no one else seems competent enough for the task.

I kneel down, motioning one of the kids over so I can start my casting. Vita makes me feel comfortable and safe, but the rest of her family are just people to me, more chaff important only by their relationship to her and my obligations to them. I have no desire and a very limited patience for engaging in pleasantries, so I am quick to immerse myself in work.

First, the diagnostic spells. A beautiful and intricate mix of biomancy, metamancy, and very technically a small dab of cognimancy—though it is the kind everyone is quick to make arguments over why it is not technically cognimancy to stream information into one's own mind, in the same way that is not really an inherent form of natural animancy to manipulate one's own soul. And true enough, that small portion of the spell which interprets biological data into a form the caster can understand has been of little help towards my actual forays into researching cognimancy, but the hypocrisy amuses me nonetheless. I run my hand over the child's body, analyzing bone and muscle and comparing the two with my mental records of the subject's prior examination, marking growth and change. I note each red flag which pops up in my mind, a weakness here, a minor injury there. I track unnatural alterations I applied, which on this child take the form of what will eventually be an extra-human level of flexibility. I follow the diagnostic spell with more direct physical examination, bending their fingers back and watching the joints twist the other way, lying with easy reassurances about how some people are just like this and it's perfectly normal, and surely you can make all the other kids jealous with the cool tricks only you will be able to do. They seem immediately mischievous on the matter, which will hopefully prove enjoyable enough to prevent any problems from coming back my way.

Is human experimentation really wrong if my experiments are happy about it? I say no! Besides, the sort of work I'm doing on these children would beggar a lesser merchant, let alone the family of my slave. I’m entitled to this other form of recompense, surely. Even odds on whether Vita would be approving or furious about these alterations, however, so I’ll keep them a secret. Promising to tell her things is a bit difficult when there is so much I don’t want her to know.

The rest is fairly routine. Spell upon spell upon spell to encourage the body to heal itself not in the way it thinks it should heal, but in the way I know it must. Many claim that the Mistwatcher designed our bodies, and if that is true I can only laugh at how pathetic a god it must be. Those that tout our forms as if they are indescribably perfect temples could not possibly be more ignorant as to how fundamentally moronic the human being is. An incalculable number of diseases and disorders are merely the result of our bodies being incredibly stupid, following some insane programming that does not apply to the situation that requires fixing. There is no wisdom in our creation, only a chaotic mess which cares little if we die or suffer. The intellect is exceedingly superior to nature, and in a quarter of an hour I have removed more pain from the body of this child then years of natural healing could have even started to dent.

Then I do it ten more times. I am intensely aware that it used to be eleven, memories of a sobbing Vita holding a child’s corpse in her arms fresh and fiery in my mind. Angelien was only going to be able to regenerate new teeth in the event that hers were damaged, at least, so she’s far from the worst of them that we could have lost.

Then I finally get to work on Vita herself. It's so very odd how it feels now. She used to just be another patient, another thing to correct. Now I find myself second guessing each alteration, crafting a list in my mind of what I wish to do to her so long that her treatments might start taking hours. Yet today, that is not even my only set of tasks. Today I get to view one of her eyes and observe a rare and beautiful example of natural biomancy. Natural biomancy! As if Vita did not have enough talents! She sits down in front of me and I have to pull her face closer to mine to get a proper look at her evolving visual structure. ...Although, I am not immune to appreciating other advantages of this position.

"I am going to use a light bit of kineticism to grab your eye and move it, if that's all right," I tell her, adding the last bit mostly because it's polite. I'm already casting the spell.

"Sure," Vita acquiesces immediately, shrugging with indifference. Goodness gracious do people tend to panic when I grab their eyeballs and start pulling them around, but Vita couldn't care less.

…Why the fuck is that a turn on? No, don't think about that, it's time to focus.

One hand gripped firmly around her chin and the other directing my spell, I ensure that my mana sight is on and set it to see both natural mana and Vita's unique variation before snatching her eye and holding it still. Vita does not so much as flinch, her body going just slack enough to allow me to move it however I need without being too floppy to stay in position. Even when I turn her head to the side and start pulling on the eye enough to stretch it slightly out of the socket, she doesn't react. Which is good, because it gives me the time I need to see minute fractions of her mana passing through little invisible channels in her body, entering the eye and being formed as if by a talent into glorious, beautifully complex biomancy. As I suspected, her iris is becoming substantially larger, blending in with her rapidly-darkening sclera in a manner that evokes an image of the blue consuming the white, infecting and overcoming it. Not that this is at all literally occurring, as the vast majority of her eye structure is staying the same, merely changing in color, size, and minute differences in shape. I can see the form her mana takes as it coaxes the eyes to gently conform to whatever bit of her soul insists they must look a new way, and I resolve to decode the structure in my spare time.

"You mind if I take this eye?" I ask. "I can regenerate it in a week or so."

"Go for it," Vita grunts, and I quickly sever her optic nerve and pop it out, weaving a spell to halt her blood flow only to see her not start to bleed.

"…I see you've improved that technique," I murmur.

"Yeah, gotta pinch off the major blood squirty bits rather than just try to hold the blood in," she explains. "It was obvious once you pointed it out."

I am immediately stuck between a bit of indignation at hearing her call arteries and veins "blood squirty bits" and a bit of a rush at knowing Vita can locate and precisely interact with them after two tries, just because I pointed it out. I still cast the spell, of course, healing her up as I quickly seal her eyeball into a small glass container. If I'm honest, I'm not actually sure why I wanted to take it. It was just a whim. No more mana flows within it, it's merely a former part of Vita. A physical representation of the edge she and I both teeter on, half human and half something else. I place it firmly back in a pocket underneath my armor, trying to ignore the twinge in my head that shouts about how I should not be seen in public with such an unclean, unadorned outfit.

The rest of my work on her is routine and uninteresting, if a bit time-consuming. First comes the practical improvements to her health: bone enhancement, antibody production, forcibly flushing and replacing parts of her that grew wrong as a result of the wretched environment they developed in. A smattering of mismade cells, benign and fully expected, are selectively annihilated nonetheless. I will not let even a single trillionth of my friend stay faulty. Next come the alterations and improvements: shaping her muscles so they grow denser before they grow larger, ensuring a soft and shapely layer of thin fat maintains the illusion of someone thin, petite, and vulnerable. Fat developing around her belly is moved, banished from forming and placed instead in her thighs and breasts. She is, to my annoyance, developing very little fat in general, despite her absurd appetite. Can I encourage her to eat more? Is that even possible? This morning she ate three bowls of stew larger than her head and it's nearly all fully digested already. Well, I'm sure I will find a way. She will no doubt be furious when she eventually figures out I'm responsible for her breast size—I wonder if she even made the connection between that and my claim that I was making her conventionally attractive—but I spend the next five minutes ensuring she won't get any period cramps this month and consider that even.

I recognize the intense satisfaction I get from being able to customize the appearance of the person I am attracted to as a bit perverse, but every noble has her vices. And speaking of appearance customization…

"All right, I'm done," I announce. "Miss Lyn, if it is not too much trouble, I would like to change your face."

Vita silently gets up and starts to stretch, winking her empty eye socket and wrinkling her nose. Lyn and Rowan both turn to stare at me, once again quickly picking up on my implications but not seeming terribly enthused about the matter.

"Your current one is plastered in quite a few guard houses," I remind her. "And if you are caught, you are no longer the only one that will get in trouble."

"Yeah, it's just… a weird thing to ask someone out of the blue, you know?" Lyn hedges.

"I like your face as is," Rowan agrees.

I huff in annoyance, suppressing an undignified roll of my eyes as I wait for them to stop letting stupid noises fall out of their mouth.

"You love her, Rowan," I say, avoiding my desire to gag as I supply an appropriate platitude to the situation, "so you are going to love her face no matter what it is."

That traps him out of the conversation. It is not as though he can argue that point, even if it happens to be untrue. I focus my attention on Lyn, as she actually matters and is still on the fence. At least I can take heart in the fact that he is a smart enough man to not suggest using an illusion to mask her. Anyone with an illusory face would be detected immediately by a half-decent magic-wielding guard, since it would require a persistent enchantment. Altering the face, however, only requires a spell to initiate change, and the time to allow that change to settle permanently, after which her face will be no more magical than it is currently.

She hedges and whines a little, but after a few more quick twists of rhetoric I have her on my side, pushing magic into her head. I will have to return every day for a week or two to finish the work, but I should be doing that anyway for the children and it will result in one less problem when I'm done.

In the end, it turns out that Vita's family wanted nothing to do with the man in the bag who got her sister killed. So, once I am done with my work, the two of us depart for our laboratory with the living baggage in tow. I'm genuinely impressed at how casually Vita can walk around with a human being in a sack and make it seem natural. We make it downstairs, Vita's disturbing undead slime child hopping onto her shoulders. Even carrying a man twice her weight she doesn't seem impacted, although she quickly dumps our new experiment out on the floor as if she was tossing sewage over the outer walls.

Theodora and Margarette, both emerging at the time, jump in surprise to see the bound and bruised man lying unconscious on the floor.

"Who's that, Mom?" Vitamin asks.

"This is the fucker that let your aunt Angelien die," Vita explains as if reading off a damn accounting report. "A mob boss gave him to me as a gift."

If Theodora was capable of paling any further, I have no doubt she would. The woman is not only a remarkable genius, but a fantastic case study on animancy and its effects on the mind in general. She is for whatever reason remarkably capable of maintaining autonomy in the face of forces constantly eroding her individual impulses. A lot of what we do here is against her personal morals, but much like so many people with metamancy talents of her ilk, the temptation to learn and experiment has little trouble finding purchase on any excuse. Vita’s mental alterations provide that excuse quite easily, most of the time. This might be a little over her limit, however.

"Not to worry, I will handle the live subject personally," I reassure her. "No one is going to be asking you to work on him."

It's not enough; obviously, Theodora would prefer us to not have the man at all. But it helps, and she nods a brief thank you in my direction. If anyone is liable to ruin this operation, it is Theodora. All she has to do is step outside and start yelling for attention, and everything we have done is gone. I have therefore made it a priority to try and befriend her—obviously not something I consider a strength, but I have been making slow progress. If Vita passes Theodora's personal moral event horizon, I will hopefully be enough to dissuade her from taking drastic action. This is assuming, of course, that Theodora is physically capable of acting directly against Vita at all, but one does not plan for the best case scenario and nothing else.

"W-well, um," Theodora starts, "we believe—"

"We figured out the soul sight spell!" Margarette blurts. "Vita! Can we see your soul?"

She turns to face them, eye focusing. Vita smiles, warm and genuine and very nearly human.

"Of course! I would love you to."

Oh. Is that what I'm missing? I focus very, very carefully on Margarette's hands as she casts our first step into true learned animancy, an utterly and completely illegal branch of magic that is without a doubt our best bet for achieving true immortality. Immortality! The ultimate goal of medicine, an undoubtable, inarguable feat of worth, the future First Lady Vesuvius's gift to the throne, and a power that I want more than anything.

Right now, however, I just want to see what she sees. Margarette finishes her cast and her eyes go wide, letting a shaky breath into her dead flesh as she gazes upon a small girl with such rapturous reverence that I am certain she's moments away from falling on her knees. Theodora very pointedly does not cast, though I know she must be capable of the spell. She fears it. She fears what she will see. I take her aside, serving the dual purpose of allowing her an excuse to avoid looking and getting her to ensure I am casting the spell correctly. She guides my hands, and even with my skill it takes nearly ten minutes before we are comfortable with having me try to cast the spell for real. Neither of us have any idea what kind of chaos magic we might risk from a failed animancy spell, and neither of us wants to know.

Then I cast it. A brilliant sapphire blue, as deep as eternity, stares back at me as my breath catches, my mind racing desperately to identify the metaphors I require to comprehend the sight before me. Five yet ten yet twenty shimmering translucent tentacles extrude from an eye-like core, of which I see now that Vita's physical eyes are becoming but a pathetic, fractional imitation. Each spiritual limb twists and moves in purposeful patterns, scratching her skin, pushing stray hairs from her eyes, wrapping around her arms and legs, grasping through the floor and walls, pulling out tiny souls of the insects and vermin hiding within. I cannot count them; there are as many as there need to be, never giving the impression that they appear or disappear yet somehow gone when no longer in use.

Not even that is the whole of her, however. Veins of energy pulse through her body, twisting through where I know bone and muscle and organ and heart reside, an intricate web of mastery over her physical form, waiting to be unlocked and perfected. Oh, if I had known! If I had known she could be this! This changes so many of my plans, so many of my enhancements were far from the perfection I thought they could be to her! She is so much more than I could have possibly dreamed of! I want that. I want that power. I want to wrap my heart with that energy and feel it beat the way she does. What glorious gift is this? What is she?

What more can she become?

Dozens of motes of light in all colors softly glimmer within her, a gorgeous artistic beauty in their own right if not for how thoroughly she overshadows them. She notices my staring, and for the first time ever I see her react with that pleasant sort of embarrassment one gets when complimented about something both private and dear to the heart. This is not an emotion she can duck away from her body to avoid, because I finally see the truth of her.

The eye remaining in her head looks at nothing, but her true eye, not the imitative grasping of her flesh, stares my way. She doesn’t need to ask anything. No shy yet preening ‘do you like it?’ coming from a boring fool girl trying on clothes her mother won’t approve of. This is Vita, and she feels my overwhelming awe. In that moment, I can truly believe she is a goddess.

Then I snap out of that stupid idea.

“This will… certainly help with the experimentation,” I say, clearing my throat. “A first great step. Excellent work, Theodora, Margarette.”

I manage to tear my gaze away from her long enough to nod their way, forcing my thoughts out of their grinding halt and back into something resembling a professional demeanor. I have important work to do here and I can’t let myself be distracted, no matter my feelings. With a quick request to Vitamin, I obtain her assistance lifting and transporting our live subject into a side room, away from the others. I have two major problems I need to solve: one, how to utilize our new human subject in a non-wasteful way, which is to say ‘how to take advantage of him in a manner that could not be substituted by an animal.’

And two, how the fuck I’m going to convince the most oblivious person in Skyhope to go on a date. This is no longer a flight of fancy, after all. Not after that.

I must have her.