The days passed without any real problems. I wasn’t bored – there was plenty of work to do, and plenty of games to play when I didn’t feel like working, and Breeze walked me through the rest of the defense mode functions, things like ordering fixtures from the fabricator which didn’t involve the warp crystal at all but used the same interface. We got all the rest of the rooms dug out, and doors and electricity and plumbing installed, and a wet bath for people who preferred that to a dust bath, and food! We’d packed nutrition paste, so we weren’t starving, but nutrition paste is about the worst-tasting thing you can eat without dying and somehow it took four days before we got around to making actual food because everyone assumed someone else was already working on it and nobody actually was.

I was busy enough that I didn’t go to the virtual world much, so Spots ignored me like he always did when I was myself. Enny spent a lot of time hanging out with me, I think they were a bit sentimental since I’d fertilized their eggs and although mine were probably from Breeze there was a chance. We got together with Fire and set up a little sub-maze to test the lethal traps, that no visitors would be able to get to without finding an out-of-the-way dead end and going through the door labelled ‘warning don’t go this way, lethal traps inside’. No, I didn’t test the lethal traps by jumping into them – I was carrying eggs! Thanks to some of the cellular changes to support low-power mode and cybernetics, Kobolds can be resuscitated from pretty much any state (although if you need to have your brain replaced you won’t really be the same person) but eggs are a lot more vulnerable. We used life-sized plush dolls. And balloons full of explosive gas for the anti-squishy-floating-creature laser and flamethrower traps.

Then Skull decided to ignore the warnings and walk right into the hallway full of lethal traps, and got themself skewered by spears. Plus managed to save *most* of their eggs. They asked the three of us come to the clinic they’d set up and help do the repairs.

Plus was furious, and dragged Enny and me (Fire didn't show) to her clinic to yell at us while she worked on saving Skull. “What were you thinking, setting up a spear trap like that? Someone could have been hurt!”

“I was hurt,” Skull noted. They’d never actually lost consciousness… apparently we needed to tune the lethality of that trap a bit because they totally survived.

“What were you thinking going into a hallway labelled ‘warning lethal traps’?” Enny scolded them in turn.

Skull grinned. “I thought there’d be something cool inside.”

“I mean, there kind of is,” I admitted. “All the really fun traps are lethal.”

In the end, well, no harm done. Except for the two eggs that Plus couldn’t save. “I can give Skull another clutch if we’re going to be short,” I offered.

“How is that a punishment?” Plus asked. “For either of you?”

I wasn’t aware that we’d agreed to be punished, but whatever. We’ll probably have way too many eggs as it is without saving every single one.

Anyway, since it looked like people were going to ignore the sign, we made a bunch of rubies and diamonds and put them in a treasure chest at the end of the experimental section, so they wouldn’t be disappointed. Fire reappeared from whatever hiding place he’d used to evade Plus’ wrath, and yelled at us for that, so we added another sign reading ‘Absolutely no Treasure’.

After two weeks, everyone was looking pretty fat from the eggs growing inside us, and the hatchery wasn’t ready-ready but it was there and ready enough that the eggs wouldn’t die. I was spending most of my time in the hatchery because a couple of people had already laid their eggs, unexpectedly, in the lounge, and I didn’t want to make that much of a mess all over the furniture.

I was in the virtual world talking with Shadowfright and Deathgaze (not the other alien we’d talked to, but a third one who’d come by to get scanned after hearing about it, I think his real name was Sue?) who were fascinated by the idea of laying eggs and having more people around afterwards, since apparently they were all ancient spirits who’d been around since the dawn of time but still seemed kind of ditzy and inexperienced? I don’t really know how that works but I’m not an ancient spirit I guess. I was in a kobold avatar (yuck!) and showing them what laying eggs looked like, when I suddenly got kicked from the net! Because I’d started laying my real eggs and wasn’t in position and someone had noticed and told Plus and Spotty.

I think I mentioned before that laying eggs felt really good? It wasn’t the sort of thing that it was possible to want to stop, although I reached down with a claw and held the second egg in place inside my vagina, picked up the soft, translucent egg I’d already laid gently in my other hand, and waddled over to the creche I’d been assigned to, which was right nearby.

I shuddered in near-orgasmic pleasure and reflexively convulsed around the second egg, and let it squirt out into my hand. I carefully set the first egg in place as I locked my feet into the harness, hands shaking as another wave of ecstasy started to build inside. I fumbled the one in my right hand, and had to nudge it a few times to get it to sit in its depression… then leaned back and let the harness grab hold of my arms, and relaxed into the sensations, trusting the automation to catch the rest of the eggs and set them into their proper places. I screamed into my blacked-out faceplate, but none of the sound was relayed to the vocalizer, and anyone watching would have just seen me twitching and squirming in the grip of the machine, while egg after egg emerged slowly from my oozing slit… imagining the scene only made it feel better, of course.

Once all six were out, the clear plastic dome slid into place to protect them, and I got blasted with a quick dust bath to freshen up, then released from the harness, to drop shakily to the floor. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been in place for the first couple of eggs, so I still had a slime trail to clean up, which is what I’d been trying to avoid!

Now, our collective – the part of the collective that split off and got shot out of a cannon into the moon – wasn’t very big, so everyone knew everyone else at least a little bit after six months of virtual socialization.

I didn’t know many people very well, though. I know it hasn’t come up in this narrative so far, but the person I probably knew best was Star.

We hadn’t hatched from the same clutch, or even the same nursery, but we ran into each other at the job fair and I couldn’t help just listening to them talk. We talked for hours, until the deadline for picking a specialty was almost up and I picked Assembly just so I could talk to them more. We helped each other in class on all the group projects and I helped them with a few assignments that you weren’t supposed to help each other on. They taught me how to make virtual avatars, which is something anyone in Assembly should be really good at because it’s so similar to making custom devices for real using a fabricator.

And they were the one that convinced me to try out sex, and I think I’ve made it obvious where that ended up. I was really shy about it when I was young – our education was extremely sex-positive, but it just seemed so gross! And I was terrified that I’d be terrible at it. So Star, who was and still is about the least sexually active kobold I’ve ever met, took me into a private, virtual world and set the sexual simulation to co-op mode, and we proceeded to stumble through our first few attempts with simultaneous orgasms guaranteed.

And I liked it. A lot. A lot more than Star, who’d do it with me but I could tell wasn’t interested. So I started finding other people to play with, and not all of them were into co-op mode, and it turned out that I was just as terrible at sex as I’d thought I’d be, but it didn’t matter because, well, people like to win, and I do make sure they still get their orgasm in the end, which just seems like basic decency but apparently isn’t something you can count on NOT THAT I’D KNOW because I always lose.

For my part, I helped arrange the ‘accident’ where Star lost both arms, both legs, and their tail, so thoroughly that there was no choice but to replace them all with cybernetics. Star wants to be a robot, and that’s about as close as they can reasonably get without just hurting themselves for no benefit. Cybernetic limbs are stronger and tougher than organic ones, so they could have gotten them replaced without an excuse if they’d been willing to wait until they were mature, but kids are stupid and we thought it was worth the risk.

That wasn’t the incident where I broke my own leg; that was just a stupid accident.

Anyway, it turned out that I have a rare(ish) talent for warp-crystal manipulation, so we don’t work together anymore. And they still weren’t interested in sex, although they had no trouble finding someone to swap sperm with when Plus said ‘everyone go get pregnant’ – it bored them, that’s all. But we did still talk every day, and sometimes played games together if we managed to both be in the mood for games at the same time which was not really that common unfortunately.

So when Star walked up to me and said, “Hey Wave, want to go visit the Nyx?” I didn’t suspect a thing.

Okay, I scrolled back up and checked and this is the first time I used the word ‘Nyx’, so I guess I should mention that that’s what the aliens called themselves. I actually learned this during our first meeting when they thought the virtual world was a dream, and they mentioned it again during the big party when they came to visit, but that’s what I get for not including fake transcriptions of everything that everyone ever said in my presence.

Here's a fake transcript of something not said in my presence.

Breeze: “I need someone to go on a suicide mission, and it has to be someone who can talk to warp crystals. Not it.”

Enny: “Not it.”

Breeze: “I guess it’s Wave then. But if she knows what we’re planning she’ll never agree.”

Enny: “How about we get her away from the lair for a while on some pretext while we set a trap?”

Breeze: “I like that. Fire is going to go visit the Nyx, that would probably take long enough especially if Wave tries to have sex with all of them.”

Enny: “But she hates Fire.”

Breeze: “She’d do it for Star, though. Can you quietly plant the suggestion in their mind?”

Enny: “Sure! Hey, Star, want to betray Wave to her doom?”

Star: “Would I!”

Star insists that Enny was a lot more subtle than that, but I’m pretty sure they would have gone along with it ‘for my own good’ if they’d known. At any rate, at least one of us didn’t suspect a thing (me). I think Fire got brought in on the plan partway through because he did suspect a thing, but I'm not sure. Maybe he was in on it from the beginning.

As I said, I didn’t suspect a thing – I thought it would be fun to get out of the lair and see the moon’s surface firsthand. Not to mention the Nyx’s palace – they’d talked a lot about their dream cauldron and I wanted to see if I could use it, although there was no reason to suspect that that would be allowed or even possible.

“And just think of all the people you can have sex with!” Star said, still trying to recruit me even though I’d agreed right off.

I rolled my eye-spots. “I don’t think they’re going to have sex with me in reality if they won’t do it in the virtual world. But it’s fine, I can just do virtual sex if I get the craving.”

“And we already laid down repeaters so we’ll be connected to everyone the whole time,” Star added.

“I’ll come,” I said. “It sounds like fun.”

“Besides, we won’t be all alone, Fire is coming too.”

I groaned. “Does he have to?”

Star frowned. “I thought you two were friends now? Didn’t you build that extra challenge dungeon together?”

“We were friends,” I said. “Briefly.”

But even then it was a little reassuring to have him along. Sure, he was a pain socially, but he was one of the few kobolds actually trained to fight. Not that we had any reason to think we were going to have to fight anything, but just because a bunch of immortal floating gasbag spirits hadn’t ever run into trouble crossing the terrain between our lair and theirs didn’t mean we wouldn’t.

At any rate, Star and I made our way through the maze, avoiding most of the traps and rescuing each other from the rest, and found Fire waiting for us just outside. He was wearing this weird harness with a million little pouches all over it, most of them bulging and thus presumably occupied. He had a small duffel bag which he slung over his shoulder, and a frown for the two of us. “I was starting to wonder if you two were actually coming.”

“I know,” I said. “You kept pestering me and I kept saying ‘yes we’re coming’.”

“You kept saying it,” he said, mouth-line going all jaggy. “How could it possibly take you that long to get ready?”

“We kept going down dead ends,” I said.

“And there was that pit you almost fell in,” Star added. I hadn’t, because they’d grabbed my tail, otherwise we might have been a lot later since someone would have had to come let me out.

Fire looked incredulous. “You set off a trap?”

I cringed. “We avoided most of them! They’re getting better at hiding them.”

Fire grabbed his ears and snarled. “Why didn’t you turn on your overlay?”

“…because it’s cheating?” Star said, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. I didn’t mention that I’d forgotten we could do that; I didn’t go through the labyrinth much! I hoped Star hadn’t left theirs off because they were following my lead.

“It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s just that the Nyx are expecting us and we can’t be late,” Fire said.

I was unimpressed. “The Nyx are immortal spirits and barely have a concept of time. I thought this was an informal visit anyway?”

“Um… not entirely?” Star said.

“Their leader is going to be there,” Fire explained. “Someone with the power to make them stop being laid back and friendly.”

“Oh,” I said. My fur prickled, my tail shot straight out, and I’m pretty sure my faceplate was showing something comically terrified. “And you’re sending me?!”

Star giggled, and gave me a hug. “Waaave, you’re the friendliest kobold we have! You made friends with them twice already! Of course we’re bringing you.”

“Oh,” I said, still a bit uncomfortable but considerably mollified by the hug. “I see.” I flattened my ears a bit. It’s not that I *objected* to being brought along to seduce a foreign leader, exactly – I didn’t generally turn down sex with anyone, so it made sense for them to assume I’d be okay with sleeping with someone I didn’t even know because it was important. I just… didn’t want it to become my *job*. But I didn’t say any of that out loud, because I hate arguing and besides, we were already committed.

Yes, I count having to turn around and walk back through the labyrinth to find someone else committed. Wouldn’t you?

Hiking on the moon was almost wonderful! The atmosphere was completely unclouded, and it was still another three days before sunrise, so we could see all the stars – and there were a ridiculous number of them. It wasn’t that we were in the middle of a dense cluster, or farther in towards the center of the galaxy than I was used to – we’d only been shot about a hundred light years, which is pocket lint on a galactic scale. It was that the dense cloud of asteroids swarming about the planet we’d failed to land on were all around us, and from the surface they looked a lot like extremely bright stars, in all different colors, artistically placed. It wasn’t just the majesty of nature, it was a work of art.

The terrain was a bit bland, on the other hand. There were areas of deep dust that came up to our waists, and shallower dust that we could basically walk on top of, and little hills, and the occasional rock. It was all gray, and after a bit of walking we were all gray too, except for our icons and faceplates which repelled the dust as they were designed to. We didn’t have to worry about getting lost, at least – the team that had set up the communication relays had left paw prints and there wasn’t enough wind to erase them. They were the only prints we saw – the few native animals were floating creatures much like the Nyx, that sometimes touched down or burrowed into the dust to hide, but didn’t ever walk. We saw a few from a distance, and they were So. Cute.

And Fire mostly kept quiet, so I was able to chat with Star freely, with only the occasional interjection from my mortal enemy… or at least the kobold who’d annoyed me by skipping out on Plus’ lecture and who always seemed to find fault with everything I did and kept volunteering me as some kind of combination whore and street performer.

It was just… my backpack was a lot heavier than I’d expected. And of course Fire eventually noticed.

“What are you carrying in there?”

“Not a lot?” I said, shifting it again. “Just some rope, an extendable ten-foot pole, a grappling hook, an impeller booster, and a bunch of soup.”

“Soup?” Fire asked. “How much soup.”

I shrugged. “Not sure, I asked for enough for three of us for two weeks? To be safe. In case they can’t feed us.”

“Why soup?” Star asked. “That’s not the lightest food.”

I grinned. “I put it in a matter compressor! Which means I could only bring one thing and it had to be homogenous, so I figured soup would be food and water both. It just feels a lot heavier than I expected.”

“Of course it does!” Star said. “It compresses the matter, it doesn’t store it in a pocket dimension or something.”

“It doesn’t?” I frowned. “But I’ve moved around matter compressors with hundreds of tons of dust in them and they weren’t any heavier than empty ones.”

“That’s –” Star rolled their eyes. “Wave, we loaded the dust compressor into an antigrav rig. Which only works in a warp field.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess that explains it.”

“How heavy is it?” Fire asked.

I shrugged, which was a mistake because I had to adjust my backpack again. Now that I knew why it was heavy it was somehow *even heavier*. “I can manage,” I said. “Gravity’s really light, so…”

“So you’re probably carrying a few hundred kilos,” Fire said. “Give it to me, we’ll take turns.”

He wasn’t wearing a backpack, but his pouch-filled harness had a magnetic cargo clip that the matter compressor clicked onto without any trouble, once we wiped off all the dust. He staggered a bit, then got his balance. “Fucking hell, Wave…”

We walked on for a while, and despite his complaints Fire didn’t seem to have any more trouble with the weight than I had.

“So what did you bring?” I asked Star. Their backpack looked as full as mine had, although not nearly as heavy.

“Oh, you know,” they said. “Odds and ends, and a mini-printer in case we forgot anything. Like soup bowls! I’ll print up some soup bowls when we stop for a rest, so that we can actually eat that soup.”

We stopped to rest at the first relay tower, and discovered (or in Star’s case, remembered) that the mini-printer relied on the warp field for power. But Star managed to leech enough energy from the relay tower’s battery to print up a small generator, and some fuel bricks processed from the dust, and *then* we got our soup bowls. Which turned out to be necessary since my original plan of lifting the compressor and holding its output to my mouth would have been really awkward with its full weight.

The soup was… edible. Not as good as it was before compression, since the texture was completely homogenized, but it was spicy and salty and a little sweet. Definitely better than the food paste Fire had in his pouches.

After a short rest to let our stomachs settle, during which I may or may not have logged on to the virtual world and pestered Spots for a quickie (I know I was thinking about it while we all dozed, digesting, but I don’t remember if I actually did it – I’ve had virtual sex with Spots sooo many times that each individual time isn’t particularly memorable at this point), it was Star’s turn to carry the soup compressor… and they had no trouble whatsoever because their legs were robotic and designed to carry several tons in full gravity. So Star carried it the rest of the way, while I carried the printer and generator and some spare fuel, which would have been heavy if we weren’t on a moon.

It took us a couple days of walking to get to the last relay tower, which was in sight of the Nyx’s castle – and it was a castle, complete with crenellations and towers and it looked exactly like the model of it they’d built as a sandcastle on the beach in the virtual world. I mean, it wasn’t any more detailed – it was like they’d wanted a castle, but only had a vague idea of what one looked like, and built it by sticking a bunch of dust together in roughly the right shape.

Shadowfright – sorry, Jerome, since we weren’t in the virtual world – was waiting for us when we arrived. “Welcome!” he said, grinning with his impossibly expressive face. He had a *beak*! It should not have bent that way. “I’ll let Luna know you’re almost here. She’s been so anxious to meet you! You in particular, Wave. I’m glad you decided to come after all.”

“Me?” I squeaked. My eyes were little spirals as the gears turned inside my head. “Wait, pony princess Luna? She’s your leader?”

Jerome nodded. “Of course! We live on her moon after all. If she wanted us to turn into terrifying smoke monsters and devour the souls of her enemies, we’d do it in a heartbeat.” He paused. “I mean, as an example.”

“Are we her enemies?” Fire asked.

“I hope not,” Jerome said, motioning for us to follow him towards the distant castle. “I was a smoke monster for a thousand years, and I like being a Nyx a lot better.”

At least Luna hadn’t been waiting long. In fact, she hadn’t been waiting at all – when we arrived at the castle they took us to the main hall, where their dream cauldron was set up, and tuned it to Luna’s dream. The cauldron was like… a pool of smoke, which was also a window into a dreamscape – in this case, an island in a lake in an underground jungle of luminescent mushrooms. They let us watch as the cartoon pony stood up, stretched her wings, then placed her horn against the surface of the smoke and gouged a slit in the fabric of reality, letting her leap out of the picture and into the castle.

She wasn’t a cartoon in person, at least – after the Nyx, I’d started to wonder. She had fine hair covering her body, and her eyes were large and placed like a predator’s, while her muzzle was smaller and more expressive than a real horse’s, but she looked like a real creature of *some* sort. Her mane and tail were made out of mist or something, and looked like they were full of stars, but they were still solid and real, and so was she.

“Ah, our visitors,” Luna said, turning to face us. “When the Nyx told us you’d survived the crash, I was pleasantly surprised.” Assuming her expressions were anything like ours, she did not looked pleased at all.

“We’re tougher than we look!” Star said, a big fangy grin on their faceplate… and a single rotating asterisk instead of eyes, which meant they were as nervous as I was.

“You must be, to survive a collision not only with the moon, but with two of my stars… one of which was completely obliterated.” She turned to look at me in particular. “I understand you were the pilot.”

“And I assume you were the one piloting the moon?” I replied. “You startled the fuck out of me. We could have all been killed!”

“And if you’d continued as you were and hit the planet, millions would have died,” she replied.

“So you threw the Nyx under the… meteor,” I said. “That’s cold.” I’d been thinking about that for a while – about how the Princess had been willing to sacrifice everyone on the moon to protect herself. Finding out that these were her people she would have been letting die just made it worse.

She focused her cold stare on me, and I felt my heart begin to freeze. “Fortunately, no one was hurt.”

“No one would even have been in danger if you’d left well enough alone,” I replied. “I just needed to get through the debris field…”

“My stars are not debris!” Luna snapped. “Besides, did I not warn you you would not set hoof on the planet? Better that foolish creatures like you remain here on the moon, where you can harm no pony but yourselves.”

“We’re not going to harm anyone!” Star said. “That’s not what we do! We’re peaceful explorers!”

“Then what’s with all the traps?” Shadow— er, I mean, Jerome asked.

“We’re peaceful explorers who like setting traps!” Star corrected in exactly the same tone of voice.

“From all I’ve seen, you’re unrepentant invaders,” Luna said, with a scowl. “You threaten my ponies and rearrange my stars and offer not even the hint of an apology.” She turned to glare at me again.

I bit back the extremely sarcastic apology that I was very tempted to make.

Apparently, polite silence wasn’t enough for Luna. “Well?” she prompted again. “Have you not anything to say for yourself?”

“Wave…” Fire hissed. “We didn’t bring you here to piss off the Nyx’s leader.”

Oh, right. I smoothed down my fur, and closed my eyes, focusing on my breathing until I was calm. I stood up before the pony princess, looked her in the eyes, and took a deep breath. “Princess Luna, your most glorious majesty, sovereign of the Nyx and the Moon alike…”

Her eyes narrowed. Yeah, I was laying it on a bit thick.

I reached up to cup her cheek, cracked my faceplate, and kissed her on the lips, licking them delicately with my tongue. While she was frozen in surprise, I asked, “Wanna fuck?”

I woke up a few hours later, as Star was fitting me with a replacement faceplate they’d printed up. I had some scratches and bruises, but nothing that wouldn’t heal after a few stitches – which was good, because it would have taken a while to go from Star’s mini-printer to the kind of fabricator that can install new cybernetics.

Fortunately, the entire visit had been pointless theater – Luna left the Nyx with the same instructions she’d had for them before even meeting us, which was to keep an eye on us but treat us as friends.

Except for me. She’d told them to put me in their dungeon. But she hadn’t said for how long, and the cages weren’t locked, and they didn’t stop Star from taking me back out to give me a new faceplate.

“Wow,” I said, after Star explained all that. “That went a lot better than I expected.”

They gave me a look, like I was supposed to feel guilty.

“What? I’m not trained for first contact,” I protested.

Star’s faceplate shifted to a rotating dodecahedron. “This wasn’t first contact. It was second contact. Second contact is supposed to be easy.”

“I was easy!” I protested. “She was the one playing hard to get.”

“You were being confrontational and sarcastic,” Star said, not letting me off the hook. “What got into you?”

“Everything about her just rubs me the wrong way,” I said. “She makes my fur stand on end. I want to just… nnng.”

“Oh, I see,” Star said, changing their faceplate to read ‘1 + 1 = 5’. “You’re in love!”

“That is not what I am in,” I said. “I am in hate. It was hate at first sight.”

“Really,” Star said, their faceplate changing to a question mark. “So if she’d said ‘yes’, you would have turned her down?”

“If she’d said yes, I would have fucked her until repeated orgasms made us able to tolerate each other’s presence,” I said. “Maybe that should be part of the first-contact protocols?”

“I haven’t actually read them,” Star said. “For all I know, it is.”

I looked it up later… it’s not. I added it as a suggestion but Dot erased it immediately.

Once I was decent, Fire came in to berate me. “What was that,” he asked, eyes slanted and slitted and mouth as jaggy as I’ve ever seen.

“I was just doing what you told me!” I said, throwing up my arms. “I mean, I knew it wasn’t going to work and things had all gone wrong but I was annoyed that you’d thought I was somehow the right person to talk to the pony I’d pissed off and thought…” I sighed. “I thought maybe I could punish you by doing what you’d told me to do even though it was going to make things worse. It was a bad idea but I was angry at everyone.”

Fire’s expression softened, and he groaned. “Malicious compliance.”

“What?”

“It’s called malicious compliance,” he said. “It’s a drawback of hierarchies, which is why we *don’t have them*. I’m not your boss, Wave. If you thought I was asking you to do something you didn’t want to do you should have said no.”

“Usually when someone tells me to do something I don’t want to it turns out well,” I moped. “My whole life has been rubbing in my face just how terrible I am at making decisions.”

“I don’t care,” Fire said. “If you’re bad at decisions you need to make them anyway and live with the consequences. I refuse to take responsibility for your actions!”

“Or your own actions,” I grumbled. “Thanks for helping explain the traps to Plus.”

“I told you two not to put up the sign,” he said. “I specifically told you it wouldn’t work.”

“Well, we couldn’t just have people wandering in *not* knowing there were traps!”

“Then lock the door or something!”

“What good would that do? Anyone could just go print up a key.” Also, I hadn’t thought of that – we were a collective, why would we need lockable doors?

“First of all, that would take time, and you could intercept them and explain exactly what was behind the door and why they shouldn’t do that,” Fire said. “Second, most kobolds don’t even know what a lock looks like in real life and would just assume the door was a fake.”

“Fine, next time I’ll lock the door,” I grumbled.

“Good.”

“And put up a sign,” I added.

“No,” Fire said. “No sign.”

“But it explained exactly what was behind the door!” I said. “I still don’t know what Skull was thinking.”

“Just trust me on this,” Fire said, ears flat. “’Keep out’ signs are like kobold catnip.”

Fortunately, the castle was completely devoid of ‘keep out’ signs. There was the dungeon, but none of the cages were occupied or even locked, and the dream cauldron was always in use by somebody. All the other chambers were just places for the Nyx to go when they didn’t want to hang around with everyone else – not a whole lot different from the private storage space we were given in our own lair.

This made exploring a bit boring, but I did manage to find Shadowfright alone in his room, headset on and linking him to our virtual world. He noticed me at the doorway (none of their private chambers had doors) and logged off.

“Wave!” he said, leaping towards me and giving me an extremely squishy hug. “You’re okay! When Luna hit you like that and broke your face I was worried you’d never wake up.”

“And that would have been bad?” I asked.

“Of course! You’re my friend,” he said. “And I was so proud of you for standing up to her like that. None of us can do that… did I tell you about when she turned evil and made us go around as nightmare-making smoke creatures for a thousand years?”

“I think you mentioned it, obliquely,” I said. “But she’s not evil now?”

“Well, she’s not making us go around as smoke creatures,” he said with a shrug. “She says she’s good now. But that didn’t stop her from kicking your face in.” He sighed. “I told her that you asked everyone to have sex but she was still really mad.”

I whimpered. I didn’t know why but I was just overwhelmed with the sudden urge to fall over and scream.

“Are you okay?” Shadowfright asked. “Your eyes are gone and your mouth is all jaggy.”

I leapt on him and squeezed – and he squooshed because he was squooshy. And I was sobbing and burying my traitorous faceplate in his squooshiness and he wrapped his squooshy arms around me and gave me a big squooshy hug and I babbled about how he was my only friend and everyone else hated me and I’d ruined everything and he shouldn’t like me and it was completely pathetic.

And he was supportive and held onto me while I whined and shook and then curled up around me, stroking my fur with his hands and with gentle ripples of his soft, semi-gaseous body… and eventually I calmed down but noticed that he’d given me a massive hard-on because he hadn’t been very careful about which parts of me he was stroking.

“Feel better now?” he asked, since I’d stopped crying.

I moaned and wriggled in his grasp, floating up off the ground surrounded by his body as it squooshed around me. “You should probably stop stroking my cock unless you want me to feel a *lot* better.” I said, shivering as another wave of pleasure ran through me.

Jerome looked down, and noticed how hard I was. “Do you want me to stop?” he asked.

“Oh god no,” I moaned, arching into his caress, running my hands across his skin and deforming him all out of shape as I writhed in his grasp. “Can you go a little faster?”

He could. I screamed in ecstasy and sprayed both of us with cum… and he didn’t stop stroking so I was left twitching and moaning for a bit longer until I finally told him to stop.

“Um…” he said. “Did we just have sex?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. I’d normally return the favor but I don’t think I can give you an orgasm if you don’t have sex organs.”

He set me down, and put on his headset. I smiled, and joined him in the virtual world to show him the ropes on a more even footing.

Once they saw that Shadowfright hadn’t been instantly brainwashed by virtual sex, some of the other Nyx wanted to give it a try, and most of them wanted me to show them how for their first time. So I spent the week gradually sleeping my way through the castle, and seeing the virtual world fill up with more and more Nyx exploring the carnal pleasures that they couldn’t get in reality.

Star helped with some of that, but they remained mostly uninterested and left me to it most of the time. I heard rumors that they were fighting with Fire about something, which I thought was typical of Fire, but the Nyx who told me the rumors were eager to go so I didn’t follow up.

All that sex didn’t take up all my time, of course – I spent a few hours crafting a Nyx version of my otter avatar, all floaty and squishy, and cuddled Shadowfright-as-a-kobold with it. I couldn’t figure out how to get the sex program to register me as a participant in a body with no erogenous zones, though; it kept adding some in logical places. The body was deformable enough that I could keep those out of his reach, at least, and we were able to replicate our first time from the other side, which I found strangely satisfying – maybe it was just that I got to win for once.

Wait, no, I guess that’s still sex related. So maybe sex did take up all my time.

I did do a lot of ‘just hanging out’, though, with Star and the Nyx, listening to them telling stories about the dreams they’d seen or sent to the people on the planet below. Apparently ponies were a plurality of the population, but they were collectively outnumbered by griffons and abyssinians and dragons and minotaurs and cows and dozens of other intelligent species. Which meant one thing to Star and Fire and me, of course. “These are really all humans.”

The jumbled mishmash of slightly anthropomorphic animals and creatures from mythology, all with weird powers, was so much like the transhuman society that our own species had originally come from, before the hive minds ruined it all. Clearly they’d developed superior FTL since we left, and leapfrogged us. The good news was that they didn’t seem to be infected by either of the hive minds, and also that they’d fallen into a pseudo-machine-age culture, which would leave us still at an advantage technologically as long as you didn’t count their insanely overpowered ‘magic’ that they no longer understood.

“But didn’t Shadowfright say they were already here at least a thousand years ago?” I asked. “A thousand years ago humanity was still figuring out steam power.”

“We’ve been travelling for hundreds of years at an average of five times the speed of light, if you include the generational gaps,” Star noted. “We’re far enough away that they could have gotten here a thousand years ago without violating causality! Even assuming they cared about that. And that their years are the same length as ours.”

Asking the Nyx, it turned out they were actually about 40% as long as the years we were used to, on average. On average because the ponies tended to change the seasons on a whim, so some years were extremely short – to the point where many ponies used ‘moons’ instead since Luna was more reliable about maintaining its orbit than the weather ponies were about how long they felt like winter should last.

“So you’re not really aliens?” Shadowfright asked. “You’re just long-lost ponies?”

“We’re from the same star, at least,” Star said. “So we’re destined to be friends!”

“That’s going to be hard, when you’re stuck on the moon with us,” he replied. “Ponies don’t come here very often, and managing their dreams just isn’t the same.”

“It won’t take long to get a shuttle built, once we focus on that,” I said. “The planet’s really close, and the moon’s gravity is really light.” I grinned. “We could probably launch someone there in a catapult if we didn’t mind them splatting when they hit the ground.”

“Maybe with a parachute?” Star suggested.

“No, a parachute wouldn’t cut it. Too much orbital momentum to kill,” I said. “We could send a Nyx! Splatting doesn’t hurt them.”

“We’re not allowed to go down to the planet,” Shadowfright said. “And neither are you.”

“Kobolds in general don’t care very much about where we’re allowed to go,” Fire said.

The Nyx – all of them – looked shocked. Shadowfright stammered, “But Princess Luna herself forbid you!”

I shrugged. “That’s just a bonus.”

Eventually, it was time to leave. The Nyx actually hadn’t had any food, and we were running out of soup, and out of tolerance for eating nothing but soup. Star left the mini-printer with them, and had apparently taught a couple of them how to use it, which meant if they didn’t get bored they’d have their own fabricator eventually, and would at least have their own food processor for the next set of guests.

I didn’t leave them the matter compressor. They didn’t really need it, and it still had enough soup to get us home. It was also a lot lighter now of course.

It was daylight for the trip back, which mostly just meant that the landscape was blindingly bright instead of faintly phosphorescent. Not a problem for our faceplates of course. It seemed to be a bad time for the wildlife, though, since there was even less of it to be seen than on the trip out.

There also wasn’t a lot of talking. I don’t know about the others, but I was exhausted from a week of intense social activity. When we stopped to rest, Star and Fire logged on to the virtual world, but I just sort of stared into the black sky, even though with the sun up the stars were a lot less impressive.

“Aren’t you going to log on?” Star sent in a message.

“If I log on, I’m going to have half a dozen Nyx wanting to have sex with me,” I sent back.

“You can tell them no,” they reminded me.

I rolled my eyes, although no one was awake to see it. “No, I can’t.”

“You can’t stay offline forever,” they said. “You’ll get bored.”

They weren’t wrong, but I did have a few games I could play just with my faceplate without going virtual. So I found ways to pass the time.

Before long, we were back at the entrance to lair.

“Turn on your trap overlay,” Fire reminded us.

“Why? What’s the rush?” I asked.

“Just do it,” he said.

Which was a direct order that I should have disobeyed on principle, but I didn’t. I turned on the overlay, and a ghostly outline of the traps we’d set appeared on my faceplate. The entry hallway just had a few tripwires, which we had to hop over, but the antechamber had been filled with pit traps, just absolutely covered in them, to the point that the only safe way through was to jump to an island of safety, slightly offset from the corridor.

I turned off the overlay to look at it raw – this didn’t really seem fair, even if it was only aimed at other kobolds and not at our guests, since they could just float over pits. Was there some sort of clue?

There was, although it was deliberately misleading: the safe island was distinctly smooth and faintly outlined, and if I hadn’t seen the overlay I would have thought it was the trap. That was *kind* of fair, since a trap that obvious was obviously a misdirection, so guessing that it was the only safe place to step was a leap of logic but not an impossible one.

I turned the overlay back on, made the jump easily, and the floor opened up under me.

“What?” I squeaked as the pit turned into a chute, sliding me rapidly into the depths.

“Banzai!” yelled Star above me, jumping into the pit. Fire followed soon after.

“What’s going on?” I shouted, trying to slow myself and managing to get kicked in the face by Star and causing a three kobold pileup that continued to slide down the chute to an unknown fate.

“It’s a surprise!” Star said. “You like surprises, don’t you?”

“I think you’ll like this one,” Fire added.

The chute ended abruptly, dumping us into a transparent container. Someone had set up a bunch of cushions to catch us, which was thoughtful since even with the moon’s low gravity we’d been going pretty fast. Still, it was disorienting, which is why I didn’t notice the facet we’d come through sliding shut behind us. I noticed that the container was were sitting in the middle of a giant, stretchy net, which was wobbling up and down considerably thanks to our landing, and then spotted the warp crystal suspended in the middle of the little spheroid, like this was a very tiny space raft. Why was it – no wait, that wasn’t our crystal, the color was all wrong…

“Arming catapult,” came Enny’s voice from nowhere in particular. “Inertia set to maximum.”

Kobolds were not meant to have their inertia increased – it felt like every cell of my body was being squeezed by an icy grip, and I barely had time to see the net rising around us as our suddenly increased effective mass turned a down-wobble into a prolonged stretch, before I blacked out completely.