Chapter 25Jasmine Tea3 March 2022It feels like her entire body hurts.

  Not because Eira has hurt her, not directly at least. She's continued to be oddly nice, even understanding in some ways, but that doesn't mean she hasn’t been strict. Amy barely made her do anything at all during the times when they were together, seemingly more interested in making her look like a maid whilst doing distinctly non-maidlike things. Kelynen was happy to make her do light work, picking up some boxes, cleaning a table, and helping tidy up a room. It was almost pleasant.

  In contrast, Eira made her scrub the kitchen floor today. It's not like her sponsor watched her whilst she went about that work: she seemed very busy with trying to get some particurly disgusting, sticky goop off the windows, AGA and the entire kitchen aisle. It looked a bit like a warzone. It probably was. They'd reshuffled the so-called dinner duos — the system they'd invented to make sure there were always two people responsible for making sure something is cooked that day, or that there’s someone around to teach the new maids — and it just so happened that Amy and Jenny ended up together. It isn’t even that they fight, per se. They just get easily distracted despite the fickle reputation that the AGA had garnered over the years.

  Ace remembers enough from GCSE Chemistry and various rants by Rose that she knows it’s wise to be careful when adding energy to a system, especially when it’s in a potentially enclosed space such as a pan.

  She still has burn marks to remind her of this very concept!

  Apparently it doesn't always end up like this. Just usually. And it's not much worse than when Kelynen bakes, anyways— at least according to Eira, though that results in less goop and more ‘flour, everywhere’. Ace then asked her why they are the ones cleaning up and not the girls who'd actually caused the mess in the first pce, and all Ace got to hear was a vague 'Elle really wanted to see them this morning.'

  Ominous.

  At some point Eira told her she had the rest of the day off, slightly scolding her for the fact that she hadn't told her that her back hurts as badly as it does.

  Ace has no clue how Eira can tell, or really how she can tell anything as well as she does, but she supposes that her mum also always knew everything and that the programme encourages the development of some motherly skills.

  It can't be as devious as the mirror her mum had angled just right to be able to see what goes on in the kitchen, though. Something tells her Eira’s methods are much more sinister than that.

  With little else left to do, Ace walks down the seemingly endless hallways of the manor to the opposite side of the building, from where she'd take the stairs up to her bedroom, before coming across something very unexpected.

  There's a kitten.

  What is a kitten doing here?

  Is there supposed to be a kitten here?

  Whose kitten is it?

  Is it lost?

  Should she do something?

  The kitten has beautiful, fluffy white fur with light grey lines patterned throughout, and a little pink bow around its head. It looks well-groomed— it can't be some random stray that made its way into the building. Which answers at least one of the questions— it might be allowed to be here.

  It's staring at her with its big grey eyes, more curious than it is scared.

  Ace cautiously approaches it — the kitten also taking a few steps towards her — and gently picks it up. It doesn't seem to mind being picked up by humans. In fact, it climbs onto her shoulder when it gets the chance to.

  Huh. At least it’s not scared of people.

  She stands there for a while, softly running a finger through the kitten’s fur, still unsure what she should be doing next. There’s no maid protocol for lost pets, or none she’s aware of.

  "Jasmine~" Amy calls out through the hallway in a very cute voice, like she's looking for a child.

  Presumably this kitten is called Jasmine, then.

  "She's... here?" Ace responds. "I think this is her.”

  "Oh my god, Alice! She likes you!" Amy walks up to her and the kitten, softly stroking its hair when she arrives, then taking Jasmine safely into her own arms. Ace wishes Amy would pet her like that too. But she doesn’t have fur, and would thus be much less enjoyable to touch.

  "Does she?" She asks.

  "Of course she does. She got all up on your shoulder! She looked so content, like, oh my god— she was just totally in her zone. And yes, I can notice when she doesn’t like someone: she doesn’t like Elle even one bit.”

  "Is she... Elle's?" Ace asks, really needing some crification here. She assumed pets just wouldn't be allowed at the manor, yet here one was. All snuggled up in Amy's arms.

  "She's mine, doofus." Amy boops her on the nose. "I just got her and, oh my god,” She looks at her like she just remembered something. “You should see Jenny's new puppy too! She's so cute. Come on, follow me!”

  Ace follows Amy, knowing full well that she's going to be dragged along if she doesn't just willingly follow her friend towards whatever room would be big enough to house both Jenny and an actual, real-life puppy.

  It's a bad sign that she can hear the blonde before she's even entered the room. "Amy! C'mhere!"

  "I'm coming." Amy responds as she opens the door.

  "Not you, dumbass. I meant Amy." Jenny says. Ace isn't quite inside the room yet, but she can imagine the sarcastic eye-roll that comment was paired with all too well.

  Once she does enter, she sees a scene she hadn't quite imagined yet. Jenny is lying stomach-down on the floor, rolling a little red ball across the room in Ms Lambert's vague direction. A Samoyed puppy is running after it, intently watched by a very distracted Faith. Gwen's in her arms, looking quite comfortable, her eyes closed yet seemingly not asleep. Aoife's sitting on the couch, watching the whole scene in mild amusement.

  "I’m gone for five minutes and you decided to name it Amy." The real, definitely not a dog, Amy responds.

  "Yeah." Jenny grins devilishly. "It just felt fitting. You're a big old dumbass, and so is she. Nothing going on in that big dumb head of yours— I mean hers.”

  "Not a very kind thing to say about your own puppy, Jenny." Amy responds, putting Jasmine on the couch with Faith, Gwen and Aoife— the kitten immediately snuggles up on the tter's p.

  "You called Jasmine a right little bastard earlier." Jenny points out, having moved on from pying with the ball to giving Amy — the puppy — some belly rubs.

  "She was. She was drinking from my tea, Jenny. She could have hurt her little kitty tongue.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “Some thieves get lucky. You, of all people, should know.”

  "She drank your jasmine tea. Which means you named your kitten after the first thing she stole, and so did I. Little Amy here stole you from me. It completely shattered my heart.”

  "What?" Amy eyes her suspiciously.

  "Yeah. You were all cuddled up in my arms this morning and then Elle arrived and—"

  Amy quickly interjects. "I'm sure that's the logic behind it. It’s definitely not because you want to be able to say things like, 'Amy pissed on the floor again' and then bme me and make me clean it up. No, don't give me that all-innocent look. I've known you for thirteen years now, Jenny. That's exactly what you had in mind."

  "She won't piss on the floor." Ms Lambert interjects. "I made sure she's very well-trained. She'll only pee when she's being walked."

  "You made sure Amy is well-trained?" Jenny asks very smugly. Amy being aware of a pn does not leave her quite able to stop it from being carried out, it seems.

  "God. I hate you. I hate you with every fibre of my being, Jenesis ‘Middle Name’ Singer." Amy says, giving her friend the best gre she can manage to bring up. "I am going to have my revenge for this, you know. It’s gonna be the worst thing you’ve ever experienced, I reckon.”

  Ms Lambert giggles, more content than Ace has ever seen her before. She doesn't seem very infatuated with the pets, unlike everyone else in the room. Is she just happy to see the girls be as excited about something as they are?

  Or is there some deeper meaning to this?

  Eira said something about wanting to make sure Ace would see the community that has been built at the manor over the past few years— is this part of that? But they couldn't just have drummed up these pets so quickly as is, especially not a puppy and a kitten who don't seem to react negatively to each other's presence. They'd have to grow up together for that to be true, and she can roughly guess from the sizes of the animals that they are a month or two old already.

  Maybe it really just is that innocent. Amy and Jenny wanted pets, and they got them, and now they're pying with them in the presence of the people they care most about in the world.

  Jenny interrupts her thinking by handing her the red ball. "Don't just stare off into the distance like that, silly. Go py with Amy!"

  "Um." Ace looks at Amy, then the Samoyed, then at Jenny, then at the ball, now in her hands. "Sure? I can do that."

  ***

  Surprisingly, Aoife's actually feeling pretty rexed right now.

  Usually it's a bad sign when Jenny randomly takes her hand and drags her to the other side of the building, refusing to eborate on her pns. It's usually one of two things: either Jenny is going to make her do something the sponsors would frown upon, or she's going to make her do something that she would frown upon— like voice training, practising make-up or walking in heels. Once, she'd even tried to make her dance, and Aoife just stared at Jenny like it would stop her from trying anything along those lines.

  Being in Jenny's general vicinity is perhaps the best antidote to being surprised that's ever been invented. The girl just does things without thinking about them. Aoife isn't sure whether she should be jealous of that or not. Nor is she sure whether she should appreciate it— she might be getting out of her room more now, but she's also racking up more cumutive hours of social interactions in a week than she might have in a whole year before she ended up at the manor.

  She finds herself a lot more tired than she did before.

  Sitting on a couch in a random room, surrounded by her roommates and their friends, is just what she needed right now.

  All she has to do is sit around and watch Alice sit on the floor with a puppy sleeping in her p, exhausted from spending the past two hours or so pying with just about half a dozen people. Sometimes, Aoife will stroke Jasmine, who has moved slightly to take up the couch between Gwen and her instead of her p. Faith had gotten up at some point, insisting that she needed to cook dinner; Ms Lambert had to withdraw for a phone call, or something along those lines.

  Her inclusion in the whole event was the most confusing. Why was she just sitting there, watching some trans girls py with some baby pets?

  Aoife doesn't understand the aristocrat she's supposed to serve, at all.

  At first she had assumed she was some kind of chaser, like the kind she'd dealt with online in the past — a man found some kind of pronouns in her bio and sent her a creepy, overly forward message — but the more time she spends around Elle, the more complicated it seems. She's a chaser, yes, but the kind with whom you can share a room for a few hours without it being too creepy. The kind who will fund a programme that's supposed to train maids and mostly just gives them time to dilly dally. The kind who will get her technical subordinates a male puppy and a male kitty, have them spayed, then personally deliver them to the manor to watch as they put little pink bows onto the pets and start treating them like girls.

  Apparently it’s ‘not the first puppy she’s had spayed and forcibly feminised’. Though that was according to Jenny, who remains a very unreliable source at best.

  Ms Lambert is a very weird woman. Then again, everyone at the manor is weird; even Faith's weird in how seemingly normal she is at times, despite everything going on around her and Viv—

  She doesn't know a lot about Viv, but she's dating Rose, so she has to be at least a little weird. She’s also dating Kelynen, though, who is quirky and likeable enough that it almost cancels out Rose being the way she is.

  Being abnormal seems to be the norm at the manor, and it’s something she’s really not quite built to handle. Spending an entire lifetime being corrected for being different, for being fundamentally wrong in her parents' eyes, and then finding herself surrounded by people who are proud to stand out even more than she ever had is infuriating. Because she should be able to fit in so easily, but she just can’t.

  She's been corrected so much that she doesn't know how to talk to people anymore. A lifetime of conditioning makes her consider every word before she says it, more willing to be silent than risk yet another faux pas. It got to the point that she avoided people altogether unless it was absolutely necessary, and now everyone around her pretends like such a thing never even existed in the first pce.

  Like just talking to people is something one can do without feeling the weight of a thousand conversations past— an inappropriate joke; a voice that’s slightly too loud, or too soft; a comment that catches people’s attention in a way that she really didn’t want it to; someone obviously disapproving of a question she’d asked; her mum telling her that she should either pretend to be normal or keep her mouth shut, ‘for her own sake’.

  Everyone except Alice, that is.

  The girl is struggling even more with these concepts than Aoife is. She’s just as incredibly aware of her behaviour, but it seems less informed by trauma per se than just an incredible discomfort at failing to be… something. The obvious answer is ‘a girl’, as if Alice doesn’t know how a girl is supposed to act, feeling more comfortable in an absence of behaviour than accidentally acting unfeminine.

  She hopes Alice figures out how to be a girl. Maybe, if the girl figures it out, she can share this forbidden knowledge with her— Aoife is just as lost at sea when it comes to that.

  It really would be good for Alice if she opened up a little more. It’s almost painful to watch how uncertain she is. She looked genuinely surprised at the idea that she is allowed to py with the dog. There’s something going on in that head of hers that makes her fascinating, in the same way that a particurly nasty engineering failure is. She wants to understand what went wrong where, and how it can be fixed.

  Aoife should probably talk to her more— but it'd be difficult.

  More importantly, it’d be awkward. Neither of them really know how to hold a conversation. Talking to people is hard in general; talking to someone who also doesn’t know how to talk to people? Nightmare.

  An actual, recurring nightmare of hers.

  Aoife will have to think about it. Maybe she'll have to ask someone for help.

  No, she'll definitely have to ask someone, probably a sponsor, for help. But it should be worth it in the end.

  ***

  Eira's here, which is pretty nice, because Amy's missed her presence quite a bit — kneeling on the floor is quite different without her around — but it's also a DEFCON 5 — or was it 1? nevermind! — crisis.

  Eira is here, in this room, figuring out that Amy and Jenny have not just been spending the whole day doing anything but their work but also that they've gotten pets without even trying to get her approval.

  At least they’ve managed to find something that temporarily distracts the force of nature that is Eira Willis: Head Sponsor & Part-Time Executioner (of punishments).

  The puppy gets up from Alice's p and approaches Eira, sitting down in front of her whilst wagging her tail on the floor. Adorable.

  "Oh?" The head sponsor pretends to be surprised, picking the Samoyed up and letting her rest in her arms, petting it. "What's your name, little one?"

  Jenny sits up and grins, all too happy to provide the information that Eira is looking for. "Her name's—"

  "I wasn't asking you, Jenny. I'll get to you ter." Eira says, quick but snappy, then turns back to the puppy. "You're a fluffy one, aren't you? You've been shedding hairs all over the pce, huh? Oh yes, you have~"

  Amy bites her lip.

  The human, that is, the Samoyed didn't bite Eira— in fact, she seems quite fond of the woman already. The human is quite fond of Eira too, but, fuck, this isn’t making things any less confusing.

  "We'll clean it up, ma'am." Amy whispers.

  "Oh, you'll definitely see to it that you do." Eira says. "You're going to be cleaning a lot more than this room, young dy. Both of you. And no, I don’t want to hear arguments that it wasn’t you two, because in three years it’s always been you two trying the most brazen rule breaks. And no, Jenny, it won’t have been Rose, because Rose always asks for permission. Now, with that done, whose puppy is this?"

  "Amy's." Jenny says.

  "Okay, so this one's Jenny's..." Eira concludes, because of course she does, she's as used to everyone's shit as Amy is at this point. "So I presume the kitty is Amy's responsibility."

  "Yes, she is, ma'am." She admits.

  "I hope you've taken the necessary preparations for her, then? Do you have a litter box, cat food, a few toys, a pce for her to sleep?"

  "Feeding bowl?" Gwen, hitherto tactically abstaining from the conversation, saw an opportunity to be a real funny girl from the safety of the entire opposite side of the room. Smart to keep her distance, because Amy was definitely going to hit her with, like, a newspaper for this.

  All Amy can do for now is wait for which one of the smartasses in this room will make the obvious comment. Jenny, probably. It’s always Jenny.

  "That won't be a problem, we'll just reuse one of Jenny's." Eira says.

  "Hey! I'm using those." Jenny pouts. "I gotta have a bowl for my crisps when I’m pying S.T.A.L.K.E.R. And those are just the right size for one of those little packets you insist we get over the big bags.”

  "I'm sure you'll find another bowl for that purpose, Ms. Singer."

  Gwen and Aoife giggle in the background.

  Meanwhile, Amy's just happy she's not the one stuck in the crossfire for once.

  "Amy? I asked you a question?" Eira continues.

  "Ms Lambert got us the necessary items, ma'am."

  "Of course Elle was involved in this nonsense." Eira sighs. "But at least the kitty is being taken care of. Now, Jenny. Who, if anyone, is going to be walking little Amy here?"

  Wait, how does Eira know the dog's name?

  No, that makes a lot of sense: Eira knows bloody everything around here.

  "Amy volunteered earlier." Jenny grins, being the littlest shit possible.

  "And Jenny said she'd do the litterbox. It seemed like a fair deal." Amy quickly adds. Two can py at that game.

  "I see." Eira nods, somehow content with the answer. "That clears up almost all my concerns for now; at least, when this room is dealt with, and the hallway, and, oh, I heard someone left a bit of a mess cooking dinner today. I trust you two will attend to all that?”

  “Of course, ma’am.” Amy sighs in relief. They were always going to be allowed to keep their pets — Eira is cruel at times, but she's not a monster — and the punishment of some extra chores is actually milder than she'd expected.

  Than she'd hoped, as well.

  Maybe that's the real punishment here: not getting a fun one.

  "Alice, Gwen, Aoife— follow me. It's dinner time. Kelynen made some lovely salmon risotto today and I think you’ll quite like it.”

  "Amy and Jenny won't join us?" Gwen asks.

  "I think you'll find they'll be quite busy.” Eira smiles cruelly. “I’m sure they could reheat some ter, though— they’re very responsible adults, after all.”