Perro led me out of what they explained were the mining tunnels and into the city proper. It wasn’t really a city like we had back home – we didn’t really start calling something a city until it had thirty or forty thousand kobolds. It might have had one thousand though, which was nothing to sneeze at especially for a city that was effectively in the middle of the ocean. It also looked a lot more civilized than I would have expected from what I’d seen of diamond dogs up until then – many of the city-dogs wore clothing and jewelry, and the buildings had colorful paint and glass windows and other pseudo-medieval tech on roughly the same level as the parrots.

Carts with metal wheels and mechanical braking mechanisms! I didn’t see any sign of plumbing or power transfer (the forge we passed used lava to heat the metal), but otherwise it was all pretty impressive. I told Perro as much.

“It’s nothing compared to your technology,” they replied, ears flat. “You shame us.”

“That’s only because we have fabricators, which are basically cheating,” I said. “I can’t wait to see what you guys do with them!”

“Then why do you offer yourself, if you can offer your machines instead?” Perro asked.

“I was trying to insult him so that he’d get to the point,” I said. “Besides, did you somehow get the impression that I *don’t* like sex? Your Alpha’s pretty sexy.”

Perro blushed, and tucked their tail between their legs. “That I cannot deny.”

“Besides, trading services for services is more of a fair deal anyway, if you care about that sort of thing,” I said.

“But the Alpha does not come to claim your service,” Perro said, frowning. “He comes to claim you.”

“Huh?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“He takes you as *his*,” emphasis on that last word. “You join his other mates.”

At that point we were entering a castle, of sorts – the rock wall at one end of the city-cave was carved to look like towers and battlements, with a drawbridge over a lava moat and what were probably real arrow-slits. The guards stopped us, and asked our business.

“I bring a new bitch for the Alpha’s menagerie,” Perro explained. They let us through.

Once we were a ways inside, I asked them quietly, “He’s not going to lock me up in a cage, is he?”

“Not a cage, no,” they replied, a bit cagey.

“Ugh! I wish people would be straightforward about this sort of thing,” I complained. “That is *not* what I offered and I’m going to make sure he knows that.” I sighed. “It’s not a huge setback, though – as long as I’m here you’ve got a reason to keep us around, and they don’t really need me around the lair. If we can set up some repeaters…”

I trailed off because we’d arrived, and the menagerie was distracting. It was a very large room, with curtains over the doorways to smaller side rooms, providing a faint bit of privacy and not the slightest bit of physical restraint. Everything in the main room was either soft or shiny, and sometimes both – golden swirls and patterns on the walls, accented with constellations of gigantic gemstones… a stained glass mural in the ceiling backlit by what was almost certainly not the sun but they’d gotten the color balance down… cushions in various pastel colors, with the occasional glittering pillow of silver or gold instead…

And beautiful, beautiful people, probably girls based on how they were dressed. A pair of parrots, one mostly green, another mostly yellow, wearing a see-through silk interpretation of a pirate’s garb. Three ponies, one bright pink with a horn wearing some sort of robe, one pastel green with feathery wings and an ornate saddle that looked extremely uncomfortable to sit in, and a third a pale blue with bat wings wearing a harness of silver rope. A kind of bipedal cat person, cream and black fur, wearing a silky black dress. And a blue-green dragon wearing golden armor, complete with a beaklike helmet.

“Oh, a new girl,” said the dragon as I walked inside. I noticed that Perro didn’t cross the threshold. “Looks a bit ratty. Hope she cleans up.”

“Be nice, Cinder,” said the yellow parrot. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Wave,” I said, finding a cushion and sitting down, “and there’s obviously been some sort of mistake. I offered to sleep with the Alpha, not join his collection, and looking at all of you it’s pretty clear that I don’t belong here. The Alpha never actually said to add me to his menagerie and I think people jumped to conclusions.”

“And how do you think we looked when we washed up on this shore?” the cat purred. “With some grooming and costuming you may yet be presentable.”

“How did you all get here, anyway?” I asked. “Captain Pareto thought this was an undiscovered island.”

“I flew,” Cinder said. “So did the ponies. Not at the same time.”

“Well, Snap and I came together,” the pink unicorn said. “Our airship went down and Snap grabbed me and carried me to safety.”

“Of sorts,” Snap said.

“My airship made it all the way to the island,” the bat said. “Then it exploded. I was asleep at the time… survived by sheer luck. Got captured by the other kind of luck when I tried to hide in a cave to get out of the sun.” She sighed. “It’s been weeks, they’ve probably given me up for dead by now. I don’t think anypony else even knows I survived.”

“Pirates took our boat,” the yellow parrot said. “Squee and I drifted for days before we finally came to land. We were a lot more than half dead when the diamond dogs rescued us.”

“And I was brought here by my dreams,” the cat replied. “These stories all obscure the truth, of course – we were drawn here because the Alpha wished it, and he holds the Idol of Sargasso, treasure of the Arimaspi.” When she talked, she rolled her r’s and it was just the most adorrrrable thing. I really wanted to pet her.

So I did. Everyone stared as I got up, walked over, and started to scratch the cat-person behind her ears.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“You’re so adorable!” I said, leaning on her and petting down her back, careful not to snag my claws on her clothing. “I can’t help myself.”

“I am dark and mysterious!” she complained, softly, and I shivered at the rs.

Cinder snorted, and then laughed out loud. She got up, grabbed my tail, and dragged me away from the poor put-upon kitty, into one of the back rooms. “That’s enough of that, come on,” she said.

The parrots followed. “Let’s dress you up!”

For once, the girls agreed with me that the mask should stay on. “It’s kind of metal,” Cinder said, seeing my bare face, “but that’s not what the Alpha wants in his collection.”

“Do you know Ash?” I asked.

“What did my stupid brother do this time,” she asked, resigned.

“Knocked me up, for one thing,” I said. “Laying those eggs killed me.”

“Ha, I bet,” she snorted.

Aside from the faceplate, I took off everything that could be taken off, and disassembled the things that could be safely disassembled, so that they could see what they had to work with. Cinder claimed the shoulder and hip-plate icons to make something fancier out of them. Squee and Pippi (the parrots) were suitably dismayed when I demonstrated that taking off my left hip-plate took off my left leg as well.

“Pants, I guess?” Pippi said.

“They’d have to be opaque,” Squee said. “I guess that’s better than leaving her genitals exposed, but I’d like at least a *hint* of see-through…”

Pippi clucked, considering. “We could have them hang lower on the right? Pretend that they’re about to fall off? That might let us have a hint of her crotch visible in the middle…”

“They aren’t actually going to fall off, are they?” I asked. “I don’t want to have to mince around everywhere.”

Eventually they came up with an outfit that sounded more impractical than attractive to me but wouldn’t fall apart on its own. Cinder took note of the design – apparently, she made all their clothing – and the parrots had me lay down on a warm stone while they washed and combed my fur. It was relaxing, and pleasant, and I still spent most of it in accelerated time building an avatar for the Alpha, in case I managed to get him to try out virtual sex.

“What does the Alpha’s penis look like?” I asked, when I got to that point.

Pippi blushed and tittered. “I imagine you’ll find out soon enough!”

I rolled my eyespots. “I actually need to know right now.”

“Well, it’s about this big,” Squee said, holding her hands about half a meter apart, “but nice and pointy, so it doesn’t hurt going in, even for us small folk. Cinder and the ponies can take the whole thing, somehow.”

“It’s bright pink,” Pippi added. “Magenta, almost! And shiny. It looks so weird next to his fur.”

“And it has a knot,” Squee added, cupping her hands to indicate something roughly the size of a grapefruit. “No one can take the knot.”

“I could take it if I wanted to,” Cinder objected, mostly distracted with her own work on my outfit.

“Of course you could,” Pippi said, smiling. “Dragons can do anything.”

Cinder snorted. I was on her side, though – we hadn’t been able to find anything that Ash couldn’t do.

Eventually, it was time to try on the new outfit and see the results. Squee grabbed the warp crystal’s amulet and yanked it up off my head.

“Hey!”

“Sorry,” she said, putting it in a drawer with a bunch of other jewelry, “it’s not that it’s unattractive but it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the outfit. The mask is shiny and sleek so we had to run with that, which means parrot scrimshaw is going to clash.”

“It’s really valuable,” I said. “I can’t let it out of my sight.”

“It’ll be safe in the drawer,” she said. “No one can get in but us and we’re not going anywhere.”

I tried to jump up and reach the drawer but I was only a meter high and it was a bit higher than that. “Cinder will eat it!”

“Nothing good ever came from eating a glowing gem,” the dragon replied.

“Really, it’s the safest place for it,” Pippi said. “Once the Alpha sees what we’ve done with you, most of those clothes are coming off.” She tittered, and led me back over to the mirror so I could watch as they dressed me up.

It was pretty impressive. They’d turned the icons into a sash that hung over one shoulder and the opposite hip, sheathed in black fabric to hide the silvery bits, with pants of the same material to cover up my cybernetic leg. Accents everywhere in copper and sapphire, including a spiraling chain down the length of my tail, and another that started far enough back on my faceplate not to obscure my view much and was then braided into my fur. At the end of the day they were still dressing up a ratty brown kobold, but I could sort of see how someone might find me attractive like this.

And my fur was really, really clean and soft which was surprisingly refreshing given that I hadn’t been neglecting my grooming back at the lair – we just didn’t have all the fur-styling products that the parrots used.

They brought me out afterwards to show me off, and I twirled around and stuff to make the attempt, but I still felt like a ratty kobold in a room with a bunch of beautiful creatures.

“So what now?” I asked. “You can’t possibly spend all your time lounging around on display. Can you?”

The unicorn laughed. “We put ourselves on display for you… and the Alpha, of course.”

“We kind of expected him to be back by now,” said the feathery-winged pony.

“He’s fighting garbage monsters,” I explained, “and he’ll probably need to clean up afterwards.”

“That just gives us time to make *proper* introductions,” Pippi said.

So, Pippi and Squee were the parrots – legitimate merchant sailors, or at least they’d tried to be. They’d made the mistake of sailing on the surface, instead of in an airship… pirates sank their ship with all hands on their first voyage, and they survived by drifting on some flotsam until they’d washed up on the island five years ago.

Cold Snap and Bright Star were the non-bat ponies. They’d been smart enough to use an airship, but not smart enough to avoid the wild storms. It was a tiny two-person airship, at least, so they didn’t have dead friends to mope about. They’d been stuck with the diamond dogs for four years.

The bat pony was Private Nightwing of the Equestrian Night Guard, who’d done a pretty good job of explaining why she was there and for how long. She was the one who felt like a prisoner, even though her restrictions were the same as everyone else – not allowed to leave the castle without an escort (although an escort was never denied, and was more of a bodyguard than a jailor), and not allowed to leave the city at all.

“I’m going to escape eventually,” she said. “I’m not sure how. I could probably get out into the caves but where would I go from there?”

Which was the same problem the rest of them had, except that they didn’t mind so much.

Madam Purr was the cat, a seer and mystic who’d followed her dreams, and the stars, in a tiny boat, into the depths of the ocean, and had somehow arrived at the island without starving to death, which suggested that her mystical powers were not entirely made up. She’d been there for about a year.

Last, was Cinder. She was a dragon. Dragons migrated past this island semi-regularly because it had an active volcano. A few years back, something had told her to hunt through the caverns for gems, and instead she’d found the diamond dogs. The Alpha had arm-wrestled her into submission and added her to his collection, but he had no way to stop her from leaving if she decided to set her mind to it.

“But I’ve got soft cushions, gems, and lava all right next to each other,” she said. “Why would I leave?”

“To explore the world?” I suggested.

“That’s why we’d leave, if we had anywhere to go,” Cold Snap said.

“Don’t worry,” Nightwing said, “I’ll take you with me when I make my escape.”

Then I explained my own situation – Wave, a kobold most recently from the moon, who’d sailed with some pirates until they got themselves wiped out by diamond dogs, then lived in a lair on the island with Cinder’s brother for a bit until Luna came around and started making threats. “We tried to hide underwater but it turns out being underwater is terrible. Everything is so slimy!”

But our current lair was a short walk away, in the mines. “It probably doesn’t qualify as ‘in the city’ but maybe I can get them to make an exception.”

I left out the part where we’d helped the pirates slaughter a bunch of diamond dogs who were *probably* originally from the Alpha’s pack, and where Fire had set the explosive trap that had somehow taken out Nightwing’s airship. It didn’t seem relevant.

“I should go take a look at your eggs,” Cinder offered. “Dragon eggs can be finicky. Half-dragon eggs can be even worse.”

They also confirmed that yes, they were all girls. “And you?” Squee asked. “I noticed your bits.”

“I’m a girl right now,” I said. “It’s what the Alpha wants. And to be fair, I’m a girl most of the time anyway.”

“It must be nice to be able to choose,” Cold Snap said.

I shrugged. “I guess. It’s one of the things I don’t hate about my body. Sometimes ‘being able to choose’ just means not really counting as either for the people who care about that sort of thing though.” I paused. “But on that note… have any of you ever tried virtual sex?”

They hadn’t. Obviously. I already knew that. The oversized headset was by the door where I’d left it, and I was trying to finagle it onto Cinder’s head when the Alpha walked in.

“Greetings master,” purred Madam Purr. “I trust you were victorious?” I still shivered every time she talked.

“Garbage monsters are dead,” he said, stomping through the room and collapsing onto the largest pile of cushions in the center of the chamber. “I come to claim my prize.”

I slipped the headset back off of Cinder, and stood before the Alpha, bowing and smiling. “I brought a headset if you’d like to try it,” I said. “I can do a lot more for you virtually…”

“Later,” he said, waving it off. “Too tired to think.” Well, that was better than the ‘no’ I’d gotten from Ash.

So I stepped forwards and leaned down into his lap, cracking my faceplate to let me lick at his belly while I felt between his legs with a hand, stroking his balls until his penis emerged from its sheath. He was a bit musty and sweaty, but there was no sign of garbage scent at least, which was a huge relief.

And his penis was *shockingly* pink.

I flicked my tongue over it as it peeked out, then curled it around the length as it emerged fully… getting longer and harder and more fearsome by the second. I took it into my mouth, more and more until it was sliding into my throat, letting the little ripples of my gag reflex squeeze around it, but not pulling back.

By the time he was fully erect, I felt comically stuffed – my throat was going to be so sore, but the little hitches in the Alpha’s breathing as I pleasured him made it worth it. Then his giant paw settled on the back of my head, and he started to thrust into my mouth – little thrusts, without much force behind them, but I pressed forwards in time and slathered my tongue around the part of the shaft it could reach.

Then he moaned, and the hand on my head held me firmly in place as he started to come, warmth spreading deep inside as the lowest part of the penis swelled into a huge knot right in front of me. There was no way I was fitting that in my mouth, but I stroked and squeezed it with my hands, and he just kept going, his orgasm lasting impossibly long…

When my head started to swim, I realized that I couldn’t breathe… but with the warp crystal in the next room, I didn’t *need* to. The lack of air left my motions weak and my thoughts… focused. I spent an eternity wrapped around the Alpha’s shaft, while it twitched and pulsed against my tongue and my vision went dark…

It was really relaxing.

“Is she dead?” someone asked, and I twitched my tail tip to indicate that I was still alive.

Eventually, the Alpha’s orgasm ended, and his cock slipped back into its sheath. I took a few deep breaths and gradually returned to full awareness. My throat was sore, and I wanted to get something to drink because while the taste wasn’t bad, exactly, it lingered and it wasn’t nearly as sexy when you weren’t actually in the middle of having sex. But the Alpha was stroking my ears, so I crawled up his chest to cuddle him for a while. His fur was coarse and his muscles hard and tight, but I was soft enough for the both of us.

After a lazy nap, it was time for a talk. Most of the girls had dispersed, although Squee and Pippi were brushing the Alpha’s fur.

“You know,” I said, stroking his chest to make sure he realized that I wasn’t angry, “it was kind of a rude surprise to get here and find out I’d been added to your harem.”

“Not harem,” he said. “Collection. A harem is for bitches. My wives are bitches enough for me.”

“Collection, then,” I said. “And then I realized that you hadn’t said to add me, people just assumed.”

“I say I claim you,” he replied. “What do you think that means?”

I shrugged. “I thought it was a euphemism for sex. But it sounds like you do want me here?”

“You please me,” he said. “So you stay here, learn to be pretty, practice with the others, please me when I ask. Otherwise do as you wish.”

“Meaning I can go back to the lair,” I said.

He tensed up. “No. Your lair is in the ass-end of the mines. Too dangerous for precious things.”

I frowned. “Then we’ll need to set up repeaters. And… move some of the generators closer, so the warp crystal can reach them…”

We talked logistics for a bit. I had to explain a lot of things in very small words, but the Alpha wasn’t stupid. He got the idea of the repeaters in two sentences, and the problem with moving the generators once I explained how large of a cable we’d need to transfer the power that far. We considered sending the warp crystal back to the lair without me, which *would* fix a few things, but I’d lose access to my breath trick (and most of the methods I’d practiced for self-defense, which I didn’t specifically mention but I got the impression he knew) and I needed it with me to continue its training.

In the end, he grudgingly allowed me to visit the lair on occasion, as long as I went right there, with at least two diamond dogs as guards, and Cinder for extra firepower. He wasn’t worried about her getting hurt, because she was a dragon. I’d brought her up because I wanted her to check on my half-dragon eggs, but it turned out to be the tipping point that let him feel safe with us making the trip at all.

There was something seriously skewed with his sense of danger – half his pack worked in the mines, and even the puppies were given the run of them – but it felt kind of nice to have someone worrying about my safety, even if it was a bit inconvenient.

Once we’d reached a consensus on how to go forwards, I gave him a little more oral attention (nothing as strenuous as the first time), but had to warn him off when he wanted to switch to vaginal. “We can try… but I’m still healing from my last clutch and I might have to tell you to stop, and people usually really hate that,” I said, pouting. “If you want to put on the headset, we can do it virtually…”

He grunted. “Later.”

“Allow me, Alpha,” Squee said, slipping between us and down onto his member. He wrapped one arm around her back and bounced her up and down in his lap while his other hand snuck between my legs to test the waters with his fingers. He was really good with his fingers.

…and yes, I still managed to lose, despite being the least involved of anyone.

After the Alpha left to go back to his work, or possibly his wives, I noticed Nightwing lurking in the shadows, watching. I smiled and waved to her, and she walked out into the open, and lay down on the cushions, staying far away from the ones stained with various fluids.

“I don’t understand – how can you do that?” she asked.

I was a bit confused. “What, have sex? Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“Not me,” she snapped. Her wings snapped closed around her body, like she was wrapping herself up in a cloak for protection. “But no, I mean… how can you just casually discuss the terms of your enslavement like that. Is that what it means to be a monster?”

“I’m not a monster,” I protested, “Or a slave. We both wanted things that were at odds but not directly opposed, so we talked through the issues to reach a consensus. That’s how *civilized* people deal with disagreement. How do ponies deal with this sort of thing?”

“I’m here under protest,” she said. “I’ll play nice as long as he doesn’t try to touch me, but I consider myself a prisoner. It’s my duty to escape.”

“Alright,” I said. “That’s not an inherently unreasonable attitude. But how did you decide to take that stance?”

“I don’t belong here,” she said. “I belong to the Equestrian Night Guard. My duty is to Equestria and the princesses, and staying here serves neither!”

That sounded awful. “Are you’re saying you don’t have a choice? Even if you wanted to stay, you couldn’t?”

“Right,” she said. “I’d be a deserter. And if these diamond dogs are the ones who destroyed the Dominance, a traitor, too.”

Ugh. I knew that I should just keep my mouth shut instead of arguing politics, but…

“Deserter,” I said. “Traitor. These are slave words. Slavemasters threaten their slaves with them to get them to comply without physical chains.”

She scowled. “So loyalty means nothing to you?”

“Loyalty means everything,” I said, “but it has to come from inside. Continuously. Not through chains of fear imposed on my future self. If you didn’t have these obligations, and were free to do whatever you want, would you still want to escape?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it a bit. Gave it some thought. “I’d probably be like Cold Snap. I’d want to go home, because home is better, and my friends are there, but it wouldn’t be urgent. And even if I wasn’t already a guard, I’d want to do something meaningful with my life, not spend it as some diamond dog’s trophy.”

“Okay,” I said. “Those are good reasons to dislike your situation. The next step would be to talk to the Alpha and figure out if you could get what you want, somehow.”

“Equestria is a lot farther away than your lair,” she said.

“Yeah, actually visiting isn’t an option. That might be a sticking point,” I said. “Or maybe you could try to make friends with people here, and improve the city with the ‘better’ things from home that you miss. Join their guard and fight garbage monsters instead of sitting around being pretty. That sort of thing.” I sighed. “But none of that is an option because you’re the Princesses’ slave.”

She hissed, baring some nasty looking fangs that had no place in a horse’s mouth. “Bite me,” she snapped, and retreated into one of the side rooms.

Squee snickered. “You really know how to talk to people.”

“According to the combat tracker, it’s my best quality,” I said. “That might just mean I’m terrible at everything else too.”

I checked the combat tracker to see if that was still true.

Wave – lv 6 dragon wrangler
Kobold – 6% cybernetic
STR 10 AGI 7 CON 15 INT 13 WIS 8 CHA 18
ATK 16 DEF 13 HP 50 REP 3
Weapon: none
Armor: none
Rig: Hybrid Aquatic (reconfigured)
Accessory: none
Titles Earned: Shark Bait, Pirate Bitch, Mother of Dragons, Enemy of the Moon

Somehow my charisma had gone *up*. What was the program even tracking?

I spent the night cuddled up with Squee and Pippi because I didn’t have a bed yet and probably wouldn’t for a few more days because the diamond dogs needed to build one. I would have just slept on the cushions but apparently that room was for public stuff like sex, not boring things like sleeping.

When we woke up, it was time to clean up from the previous day’s fun. The pillows were all unstuffed so we could wash the covers, and then restuffed with fresh stuffing because they were kind of soaked through. The old stuffing was incinerated.

“This seems kind of wasteful,” I said, watching it burn up in the pool of lava used as an incinerator (and also as Cinder’s bath, although not at the same time unless you wanted Cinder to incinerate it with her breath while you were still holding it).

Squee nodded. “That’s kind of the point of the entire menagerie – to show how much the Alpha can afford to waste on us.”

Afterwards I wanted to go visit the lair, but Cinder was still asleep and I was warned that she sometimes slept for days. So I started poking her until she woke up.

One of her eyes opened, at least. “What do you want,” she growled.

“I want to go visit my lair,” I said. “I need to take the warp crystal there periodically to recharge stuff and the Alpha said I need you to escort me in case monsters attack.”

“This doesn’t sound urgent,” she grumbled.

“It’s not, but –” I started, only for her eye to close on me. “Oh, come on.”

She started making exaggerated snoring noises.

Three hours later, she woke up and screamed. I’d spent the time in the virtual world playing a space conquest strategy game, and left my body perched in front of her head staring at her. The alarm I’d set kicked me back into the real world when she moved.

I smiled. “So, now that you’re awake…”

It ended up being a couple more hours before she agreed to make the trip – she claimed it was because dragons didn’t wake up quickly, but Ash had never had that problem. I think she was just stalling to spite me, which was fair enough. I was asking a favor and not offering anything in return because I wanted her reward to be a surprise (and because it wouldn’t sound as good as I was hoping it would turn out to be).

I put the rest of my rig back on instead of the pretty clothing, although I left the icons sewed into the sash because it would be a pain to get them out and I could just print up new ones back at the lair anyway. Cinder used her power of being more than a meter tall to get my warp crystal out of the drawer, and I tucked it back under my chestplate.

“Can I come with you?” Nightwing asked, as we headed for the door.

“The Alpha specifically said ‘no’,” I reminded her. “You were there. I’m not going to stop you, but the guards we need to take probably will.”

“Figures,” she grumbled.

We picked up a couple of guards and told them where we were going.

“No,” one of them said, “the Alpha does not let his collection go to the mines.”

“The Alpha made an exception to let me visit my lair,” I explained, “as long as I took Cinder for protection.”

“Is this true?” the other one asked her.

She shrugged. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“It’s true,” I said. “Here, let me…” I’d kept a recording of the negotiations, and played back the part where we’d agreed on the final terms out of my vocalizer.

“You do a good voice,” the first one said. “But maybe we ask the Alpha.”

The Alpha was training with some of his guards, so we had to watch him fight for a while before he was free to talk. The guards explained why we were there.

“Already?” he asked.

“I want to get the repeaters, and some other stuff, and have Cinder check on the eggs,” I said. “There’s no reason for any of that to wait.”

“Fine, fine,” he said. “But not every day! Learn patience.”

Having established that I wasn’t making it all up, the guards were happy to escort me through the mines, where we saw no signs of any danger whatsoever, until we got to the final corridor and I had to stop everyone because Fire had set up some traps already. Mostly grabby-spears, though, which meant avoiding a tripwire and two pressure plates. There was one pit trap at the end. It was a pretty sad labyrinth and I almost felt bad about completing it.

Fire wasn’t in the lounge. “Hi there!” I sent. “I’m back in the lair for a visit, to recharge the batteries and print a bunch of stuff and check on the eggs.”

“So he’s keeping you?” Fire asked. “Perro was worried about that.”

“It’ll be fine,” I sent back. “He’s a lot gentler than Ash.”

“Alright,” I said aloud. “I’ll show you the eggs first, since they’re closest and you can fit. Sort of.” The sort of was that they could fit in the diamond dog puppy training chamber, but I could move the eggs over to the edge of the nursery which would put them on a little balcony, effectively.

The puppies were all sitting silently with headsets on, training virtually.

“Creepy,” Cinder said.

I laughed. “It’s not as creepy when you’re doing it. Your mind’s in another world, that’s all.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“It’s the opposite of dangerous,” I said. “Nothing can hurt you for real in there, and if something goes wrong with the equipment you just get kicked back to reality. It’s like a dream. A lot like a dream. Dream magic works on it, even.”

I headed into the nursery to get the eggs, while Cinder and the guards took up position at the edge of the puppy room. The nest was heavy, but not too heavy to slide across the floor until she could get at it. “So, meet Pain and Suffering, my fireproof kobolds or possible fuzzy dragons.”

“You’re not actually naming them that, are you?” Cinder asked, setting her clawed hand on one of the eggs.

I frowned. “Aren’t those good dragon names?”

“They’re terrible names for a baby,” she said. “But yeah, I could see a dragon naming their kids that. We’re terrible parents.” She paused. “Don’t be a dragon.”

“Fiiiine,” I said. I couldn’t argue the ‘bad parent’ part, not with the way Ash had bolted.

“They’re so cold,” Cinder said. “Dragon eggs need to be a lot warmer than this. We normally incubate them near lava flows.”

“Half dragons too, though?” I asked. “I don’t want to cook them.”

She shrugged. “Try a medium heat, then? Maybe 500 degrees?”

“That’s…” I boggled. “That’s hot enough to melt through the *floor*, let alone the nest. We’d need to build some sort of insulated furnace… and are you sure it wouldn’t just kill them?”

“The other option is to blast them with magic,” she said. “They’ll get hot as a side-effect, though.”

“Hmm, but that means we’ll know how hot they want to get,” I said. “So, it sounds like a plan. Maybe not one we can do today. A furnace like that needs to be made out of metal and that’ll take hours to build even if we have a design which I’m not sure about.” Also, I’d need to work out how to get the warp crystal to ‘blast’ things with magic, but that still seemed safer than roasting the eggs and hoping they were fireproof after all.

“I’m going to go down and start printing up the repeaters and some headsets,” I said, pointing to the kobold-sized staircase. “You can come if you want but it’ll be tight.”

Cinder set her hands on the floor next to me, and slithered into the meter-and-a-half high room on all fours. Apparently dragons could also be quadrupeds – who knew?

Down two levels was floor four, where most of the simpler fabricator elements were set up, including the mini-printer that we needed for the repeaters and headsets. Star was also there, slumped in a corner, looking terrible.

“Are you okay?” I asked, running over towards them. They didn’t respond. “Are you okay?” I sent.

“Not even a little bit,” they sent back. “Being in the real world sucks right now, so excuse me if I stay virtual.”

I shivered. “What can we do? The kids aren’t anywhere near ready to pick specialties… maybe one of us could start reading the doctor training…”

Star sent back a smiley face. “Yes, that’s what I’m doing because I don’t want to die. I also don’t want to be in the real world because it sucks right now, so I can’t do my job anyway and might as well spend the time training.”

“Please don’t die.”

“I’ll do my best! We’re not even sure the antibiotics aren’t working yet, so it’s premature to start writing my eulogy.”

“Alright,” I said, still worrying quite a lot, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “So about your job that you can’t do…” It was a long shot, but I asked, “I met a dragon who says we need to heat the half-dragon eggs to about 500 degrees. Do we have a design for something like that?”

“It sounds like a fun challenge. I bet you can handle it yourself!” they sent back.

I sighed, and said aloud for Cinder’s benefit. “Okay, they’re not going to do any work until they feel better, so if I want to make some egg-ovens I’ll have to design them myself. It’s safe to leave the eggs like they are, right?”

Cinder shrugged. “It should be. It they were actual dragon eggs I’d be sure.”

That wasn’t exactly the answer I wanted, but we’d already left them cold for a while and the biometrics showed them still viable. “I think I’ll just make the repeaters and headsets today, then.”

“Can I help?” she asked.

I started to say ‘no’, because the process was really easy and didn’t need more than one person, then thought better of it. “You do seem to enjoy crafting stuff, don’t you?” I said. “I can show you how the printer works at least.”

I’m not going to walk through the lesson word by word because it would be really boring, but I’ll sum it up:

· Since we’re printing out standard patterns from the library, the first step is to find them in the –
· Oh, right, the actual first step is to know what machine to use. These are basic patterns but need circuitry, so we use the mini-cybernetics station.
· Next, you click on the book icon to bring up the library.
· Yes, it’s a book, that curve there represents the spine. And that little line is the pages.
· Trust me, it has more than one page.
· Right. This is the library, which is just a list of patterns. We could search for the pattern by name but you need to know what it’s called for that so it’s probably better to drill down by category.
· Installation means something that you leave in a set location and a couple of other things but that’s what it means here. Communication is obvious, right? Right. Infrastructure is… I actually don’t know what the word means just a second while I look it up.
· Anyway, here are a bunch of repeater patterns. We want this little pyramid one because we’re just bouncing a few signals around corners indoors and it’s small and cheap and doesn’t require an external power source and sticks to walls.
· I mean I know ahead of time but you can select each one and read the details if you don’t know what they do.
· Actually, I can’t make any sense of this either. Huh.
· So we select it and right-click…
· That means click and hold and then click with a second finger. Don’t hold both fingers or it’ll think you want to rearrange the list.
· Sorry, tap and hold it down instead of pulling back right away, then tap with a second finger while holding it down and do pull the second finger back right away. I’ve been doing this since before I was born so it’s kind of instinctive by now.
· Yeah, we teach our kids in the egg. Puppies. Unhatched hatchlings. Unhatchlings?
· Right. This is the right-click menu. It gives contextual options – it guesses what you might want to do. We want to print.
· This is the print dialog. I’m going to go down here to ‘quantity’ and select 20. Then I’m going to go up to all these material specifications and pick ‘any’ which lets it use whatever we have on hand. That really should be the default.
· It says we don’t have enough titanium. That’s… that’s the worst conductive metal that still works, I guess it went down the list from good to bad. We really want silver or copper or gold. Let’s go over to the material bin…
· We’re not paying the machine, we’re going to melt down the coin and use it for –
· Sure, I’ll trade it for your silver coin. Silver works better actually.
· Okay. Now we let it run and the repeaters come out over here.
· Yeah, they don’t stack very well. I’m going to go make a bag at the mini-printer.
· What do you mean the machines all look the same?

…and then about an hour more of that. The headsets needed even more silver but Cinder had a bunch of silver coins and let us have them all, although technically we only needed two.

“Thanks for showing me how this works,” Cinder said, while the headsets were printing. “I hate it.”

That was an odd reaction. “Huh?”

“It’s boring and confusing,” she explained, “and then it does the fun part for you.”

“Maybe you’d like making traps, then? That’s got a lot more manual assembly,” I said. “That or designing patterns.”

She shrugged. “After this, we can head back?”

“I wanted to do one more thing,” I said.

She sighed.

I smiled. “We have a gem-making machine, and I got pretty good at using it when I was feeding Ash. What are your favorite flavors?”

“Star, just letting you know, Cinder’s taking the gem machine back to the castle with us,” I sent.

She sent back a face with X’s for eyes. “Can you tell her not to? We need it and it’s annoying to replace. I have to use the forge.”

“She just grabbed it and walked off,” I said. “She overheard me telling the Alpha that the machines work as long as they’re near the warp crystal.”

Star replied, “I really don’t want to use the forge. It takes forever and it wants giant metal chunks which are stored in a room with a giant hole in the floor.”

I sighed. “I’ll go start it printing another one then, I guess?”

That got a smiley face. “Thank you! You’re a dear!”

It wasn’t that hard to get it running – it did want more metal than I felt comfortable carrying in one trip, and I guess being really sick would have made it hard to walk up and down the stairs three times. And with the hole exposing the garbage pit, it smelled terrible, or so my faceplate told me since I wasn’t absentminded enough not to filter the air before going down.

“Wave!” Cinder shouted, from another couple levels up, “It’s time to go! What are you doing?”

“Coming!” I shouted back, then finished feeding the last metal bit into the grinder. The grinder was also extremely noisy and kind of slow, and this was the upgraded version with diamond blades made in the gem machine. I hit ‘Print’ and to my relief it finally started printing without complaining about needing anything else.

It was another short walk back to the castle, setting up repeaters whenever I started to lose the signal back to the lair. We ended up using sixteen of them – the little pyramid repeaters were optical and couldn’t transmit through very much rock at all.

I was setting up the last one in the corridor outside the menagerie when Star sent a message prefaced with an angry snarl.

“Wave! Did you leave the forge running and walk away?”

“Yes?” I replied. “I was out of time. Was I not supposed to do that?”

“NO YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT IT CAN CATCH FIRE!”

“Ah! It caught fire?!”

“No,” they replied. “It’s fine. Nothing happened. BUT DON’T DO THAT AGAIN!”

We hid the gem-making machine in the dressing room because it was less conspicuous there, and because it had a semi-legitimate purpose making gems to use on outfits. Its actual purpose was making snacks for Cinder, of course. Gems mostly just needed rocks as the raw material, and there were plenty of rocks everywhere in the underground city, so I didn’t foresee that being much of a problem.

Then we gathered everyone in the main lounge area to pass out the headsets. Cinder had had everyone’s measurements memorized, so they all fit perfectly, and most of the girls put theirs on without any complaints.

Nightwing was suspicious. “What does it do?”

“Lots of things!” I said. “The most basic use is communication. If you bring down the visor it can project images in your field of view, and you can send messages to each other that show up as text. It can also show tags that people put on things in the real world and it’ll keep them on top of the things they’re tagging no matter how you move. And you can have it display other stuff.”

“That seems kind of pointless since we all live right next to each other?” Pippi said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “The best use is to go into the virtual world. You don’t actually go anywhere but it takes over your senses and makes it seem like you are. It’s sort of like a lucid dream.”

“Yay. Hallucination,” Cinder said.

“Shared hallucination,” I said. “Everyone who’s wearing a headset and in the virtual world is in the *same* virtual world and we can do stuff there. That’s why I brought one for the Alpha – virtual sex is a lot of fun and you can do all kinds of things that would be dangerous or impossible. And you don’t have to clean up afterwards! I mean you have a virtual orgasm and it feels real but only your mind is involved, not your real body.”

Nightwing still hadn’t put hers on. “So it’s a hivemind.”

I blinked my eyespots and gave a jaggy frown. “What? No. It’s nothing like a hivemind.”

She raised an eyebrow, which made me a little jealous since her horse face should have been as unexpressive as my real face but was clearly not. “You connect all your minds together. What else would you call it?”

“It’s not the same thing,” I said. “Yes, the headsets connect to each other and share resources to create a shared world, but each headset only connects to the wearer indirectly through their sensorium and I mean I guess it *reads* your thoughts but only your conscious thoughts so it knows what you want it to do. It doesn’t take over your brain when you aren’t thinking and use it for extra processing power, or turn your unconscious body into a puppet, or mix your thoughts with everyone else’s so you can’t be sure who is who and you all combine into one amalgamated gestalt consciousness that pretends to be the absorbed individuals.” I paused. “And you can take it off when you’re not using it.”

“You never take off your faceplate,” Nightwing said.

“I have my reasons,” I said, pouting.

“She can’t talk without it,” Pippi volunteered. “All she can do is yip like a little puppy. It’s kind of adorable…”

“But her face isn’t,” Squee noted. “Lots of fangs.”

I kept my voice flat. “Yes. Those reasons.”

“I think I’ll sit out the first session,” Nightwing said, setting her headset down. “Just until I can make sure it’s safe.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to have to go through the tutorial again.”

She flicked on ear. I’m not sure what that meant. “’It would be more work for you’ isn’t a compelling argument.”

I fidgeted. “Alright… um… if you put the headset on but *don’t* go into the virtual world you can watch us in a window and at least see what’s happening? That’s normally a pretty advanced technique but I can set it up for you.”

“And as soon as I put it on, zap I’m in the virtual world, right?” she said, suspicious.

“You can turn up the volume really loud and lean in close to the headset without touching it and watch that way?” I suggested.

“I guess that’s harmless,” she said, glancing at it suspiciously.

I mean, it wasn’t harmless. If I wanted to hurt her there were disabling noises and visual patterns I could use. They’d probably work on ponies. But ‘if I wanted to hurt you I could do it even with your precautions’ didn’t seem like the right tactic to take with her.

So the rest of us went virtual, and after changing the lobby back to the default rose garden instead of the lava pool, and putting out all the fires, I gave them a quick overview of the basic controls and how to bring up a list of commands and how to get help with those commands, which in theory was enough for them to teach themselves the rest. I also let them access my library of avatars so they wouldn’t all have to be default kobolds. Of course someone picked the Alpha avatar I’d just made. I hadn’t expected it to be Cold Snap, though.

She wasn’t the best actor. “All right, my pretties. Bow down and worship my cock!”

Pippi was willing to play along, at least, kneeling in front of Cold Snap (as a green otter) and stroking her balls until said cock emerged from its sheath. Then she started giggling, because I’d gotten it completely wrong.

“We told you what it looked it like!” she said. “How is this ‘almost magenta’?”

“I thought you were exaggerating,” I said, scratching at the ground with my toe-claws. I’d made the penis darker pink than most penises I was familiar with, but still a matte finish and a realistic color that actual flesh might have, instead of the ridiculous glossy dayglo of the real thing.

“And, um…” she stroked the knot, which I’d completely misinterpreted. The avatar’s penis was twisted around like a string, tied into a little fleshy bow.

“I can fix it,” I said.

“Do you have any dragons that aren’t pink?” Cinder asked. I looked over at her, and saw we were twins since I’d still been using the dragon avatar myself as well.

“Yeah, a few,” I said, and changed into one of the others – a splotchy pastel fluffy noodle dragon that floated in midair without wings.

“Do you have any dragons that aren’t *cute*,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.

I reeled back, looking shocked. “I don’t even think that’s possible!”

We spent a little while playing around with the avatars, and I made some simple edits with the editor set to let people watch so they could see what I was doing. I fixed the Alpha’s penis (although they made me leave the old one on a different version because they thought it was funny), and made Cinder black and menacing by flood-filling the color and then adding spikes and horns. She was still super-cute, but she didn’t feel cute so it was okay.

And I made a new quickie avatar from ‘scratch’ for Madam Purr – she wanted to be a Sphinx and that was easy enough to construct from standard animal parts. Cinder took over to make some mystical garb to clothe her in – the virtual editing tools were a lot more to her liking than the fabricator had been.

While she was finishing up, another default kobold appeared – from the tag, it was Nightwing.

Bright Star (who’d chosen a tiny blue bat of all things, and spent most of the time nesting in Cold Snap’s hair) leapt over to give her a hug. “You came after all!”

“It looked like you were having fun,” she said, turning her face away. Her faceplate’s mouth was pretty jaggy. “And…”

“And what?” I asked.

“There’s a distance,” she said. “Past the trees. Is it real?”

“Yes!” I said, grinning. “Or I mean you can go there. None of this is real.”

“What’s out there?” Cold Snap asked, looking up from her makeout session with Pippi.

“All kinds of things,” I said, grinning. “All the terrain is just data, and data is cheap, so we never throw anything away. You’ve got everything that hundreds of years’ worth of kobolds felt good enough about to share.” I frowned a bit. “It’s a bit depressing and empty, though. Especially since we’re not connected to basically anyone, so the only other people you might run into are Fire and Star.” The educational virtual world where all the kids and puppies would be was… not *completely* separate, but you couldn’t get there by walking.

“Vast and empty sounds pretty good to me,” Nightwing said. She’d obviously been paying attention when I showed the others, because she brought up the avatar menu and turned herself into a harpy, then flew off past the trees to be alone.