Lavender and Annabelle join Marigold upstairs in the study, where, without any prompting whatsoever from Lavender, Annabelle and Marigold jointly create a cozy little nook under the desk with a deep pet bed to curl up on and several hardpoints to restrain someone (the someone is Lavender) under the desk.

  “You don’t have to,” Lavender says with a soft blush on her face. “It’s okay, I -”

  “No way am I going to give up this chance to make one of your dreams come true,” Annabelle says.

  Marigold just raises an eyebrow and adds purple ribbons to the outside of the rge wicker basket that holds the pet bed, then conjures a big fluffy bnket in the middle of the pet bed that’s dark purple with a pattern of stars and moons on it. Then she gestures towards the underside of the desk, politely but firmly.

  Lavender blushes deeply, and slips underneath the desk, where she conjures a set of padded cuffs for herself and secures herself with her hands on a small lead from the hardpoints under the desk - comfortable enough to lie or kneel in a variety of positions, but not at all long enough for Lavender to slip out from under the desk.

  “I leave her in your care,” Marigold says, a smile crossing her face. “I have more rooms to detail, and I’d like it to be a secret from Lavender.”

  “Don’t worry,” Annabelle says. “I’ll keep her safe. Lavender, the keycode please?”

  Lavender swallows hard, then telepathically hands over the lock code to her cuffs, which Sable promptly sets. Without safewording, she’s now completely stuck.

  Annabelle conjures a chair and a ptop, and sits, gently resting her feet atop Lavender’s cheek and stomach, more out of desire to please her than out of any sincere attempt to dominate.

  “Good girl,” she coos softly.

  Lavender closes her eyes, and stays. That’s what a good petgirl does.

  A moment ter, Annabelle cps her hands together, and Marigold pads across the room to look over her shoulder on the ptop. “I just got great news,” Annabelle says, “for those of us who are under a desk right now. Lavender, I know you’re already familiar with the telepathy system, and with mental commands for menuing and management, but we just got access to the dive system.”

  “The dive system?” Lavender rubs her face into Ananbelle’s feet, and frowns. Thinking is hard in pet-girl mode. “Aren’t we already under right now?”

  “Yes and no. Right now we’re hosted on the common cloud, the integrated ptform for interfacing with Earth VR systems. A lot of that older technology runs at Earth speeds, so it’s not quite perfect, and especially struggles to keep up with truly high clock speeds. If you Dive, though, you can shift your selfstream to the central computing core. That core… does not legally exist. Under the table, it’s the result of nanotech engineering no-one but the Amaranth Group even believes is possible. It’s computronium, basically. And there, accelerations up to ten thousand times realtime are possible, and you can register an Exoload for you to recover when you come back.”

  Lavender blinks, unpetlike thoughts streaming through her head. “Hold on just a second, December had a supercomputer in her back pocket this whole time? I thought she’d just cracked the uploading problem, the size of a decent VR GPU cluster should be enough to host a good number of minds comfortably —“

  “Yeah,” Annabelle says, reaching under the desk to skritch Lavender’s hair. “The original cluster was just twelve VR GPUs, networked with custom software we wrote together. Most of the seed capital was put up by people in the community who believed in what she was doing — I provided two of her GPUs, incidentally. She uploaded three months ago, realtime, and started out running at twelve times speed. That was good enough to refine the cluster design and get more investment — so she was able to get a proper server rack for research, like one of the smaller VR games had. She used that to bring on her wife and crank the acceleration for them up to a hundred times. It turns out it takes less than 25 years of research by a pair of particurly brilliant minds that are reasonably focused on the task to crack nanotech.”

  Lavender flushes, and tries to focus through the haze of submission on her mind as her sensitive ears are stroked. “She’s spent, mmmm, twenty-five years subjective? — no, it must be far higher than that by now… Sorry, kinda pet-brained at the moment…”

  Annabelle shakes her head and giggles. “No, no, she hasn’t spent the whole time Diving. But she’s getting there. And you, my dear, are adorable.”

  Lavender bows her head and kisses Annabelle’s foot contemptively. “Do you think she even still cares about Earth people if she’s running that fast? Or is she like a goddess now? Do you think she’d step on me?”

  Annabelle ughs and shakes her head. “We’re here, aren’t we? And st I heard she was more interested in experiments than sex. That said, I was about to expin — she invented a technology for exactly that, for holding on to emotions from the past. That’s what Exoloading is.”

  “I’m sorry, Annabelle, I’m just a dumb little focks and don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lavender nuzzles into her hand.

  Annabelle hides a smile, scritches Lavender behind the ears some more, and clears her throat. “Okay, so basically… It takes a record of your emotional and mental context and the things on your mind at the time you dove, and then when you come up from the dive, it gives you that context back again, subject to customization and approval. So what that means is — at any time you want, you can Dive, and spend up to two and a half hours doing anything you want with anyone you Dove with, and that’ll take less than a second realtime. You could stay down for a whole day, twenty-four hours, and it’d only take two minutes realtime. You could swim in the central computing core for a year and be back within the hour realtime. And when you come back, you’ll be given back the memory and the emotional context of when you Dove.”

  “So she can spend time ‘Down’ in fast time but still come back to ‘where she was’...” Marigold taps her fingers on the desktop. “But I expect it’s still difficult to avoid personality drift if she’s been down for a century.”

  Lavender nods along. Marigold is saying it better than she ever could.

  “Yes,” Annabelle admits. “She was always eccentric, but… she’s more so now. She’s been in paradise with exactly one person who’s her equal for most of the st subjective century, spending time on her work at varying speeds. She remembers me well enough to honour our agreement thanks to her exoloads, but I don’t know how well she’s been doing. Her texts are all jokes I don’t get these days.” For a moment Annabelle looks morose, but then she brightens up again. “But now we get to join her! As the third, fourth and fifth uploads on the pnet.”

  Annabelle pushes back her chair and spins zily, back and forth, warming to her topic. “With access to the real Core, we’ll get so much time. We’ll always have time to recover. In a conversation between yourself and anyone in brain-tethered VR, you can take up to two and a half hours to consider any individual question and they probably won’t even know you Dove. You always have space. You always have time. And if you choose to Dive with someone, you could have ten millennia with them before a year passes in the outside world. Since we’ll have multiple people in the core, it gets a little more complicated, but still manageable.”

  Lavender leans against the desk, letting herself dream a little of what might be possible in so much time. They could put her in chastity for a year and only need to wait an hour to get her incredibly desperate… Or any of a zillion other things…

  Annabelle taps her fingers together, obviously contempting the possibilities as well. “This also means you can multitask insanely well in real-time by simply doing each thing in order while you Dive. In short: Congratutions, you’re effectively a very tiny, very dumb AGI, simply because you think so much faster than everyone else on the pnet. And in time, you’ll become a more full one, as December and I write adjustments and compensators and mental supports using all the new tools we have in this system.”

  Being at the bottom of such a huge time dey… A frisson of fear rolls down Lavender’s spine. Truly, that’d be the worst kind of helplessness… Or, well, potentially the hottest…

  Annabelle ys her head back against her chair. “It’s not quite proper forking and merging, not yet, but it’s damn close, and might even be better for some of my purposes.”

  Marigold’s voice gets a little softer. “So the registration of Amaranth as a ‘medical suspension company’…”

  “Is a btant smokescreen to let December get everyone who supported her onto the central Core, along with everyone they care about. After that, it’s time to start working on a pn for world domination.” Annabelle waggles her eyebrows.

  “Count me in,” says Marigold.

  “Whoof.” Lavender lets out a heavy breath, sagging against her restraints. “That sounds… complicated.”

  “Yeah,” says Annabelle. “But we can accelerate up to ten-k now, so if you want to put it off you will have literally centuries to think about it before we even have to do anything.”

  Lavender lets out a soft puff of ughter. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s good, I guess.” Then she frowns, tapping her thumb to her lips. “Who else do we expect to turn up? The other - money people? ”

  “Citrine’s the next one who’s scheduled for upload, in about a week realtime. That’s two hundred years in the core. Week after that we’ve got Shimmer, and the week after that we’ve got Helen.”

  Marigold raises her eyebrows. “That… is somehow too far away and too close simultaneously.”

  Lavender nods against her restraints in mute assent.

  “Don’t worry too much,” Annabelle says. “It’ll just take a little pnning, is all.”

  “Please tell me you’ve already moved us to the main core,” Marigold says.

  “I anticipated you might ask that, and it’s the safer move, so yeah, this whole conversation has been less than a tenth of a second realtime.” Annabelle grins. “What an incredible load off, huh?”

  Marigold sits down in front of Lavender and scritches her chin, her tail curling up in her p. “Yes. The advantages will only compound with more research.”

  “Yeah,” Lavender says, her breath a little tense. She can just imagine what kind of situations they’d be fixing, if they reached out to try and save the world… “But there’ll be fewer and fewer people running on Earth time, the longer we wait. It’ll be messy.”

  “Yes,” Annabelle says. “But that has its own advantages too. More people on the core means more people to socialize with, more time to spend in good company, less need to dip down to slower speeds at all. And that means another multiplier on our effective lifespan.”

  Marigold skritches Lavender between her ears. “I promised you forever,” she says. “It’s looking like that’s already come true.”

  Lavender coos softly and rubs up against Marigold’s scritching hand, a little warmth coming back to her at the gentle touch. “Mhm,” she says. “To the moon and back…”

  Marigold smiles. “To the moon and back.”

  Annabelle smiles at the pair of them, stretching her wings to either side of her chair and then folding them back behind her. “So, basically what this means is… virtuality is the ‘real world’, now, and Earth is running so slow it might as well be on pause. The cost of going back to Earth and running in realtime is literally centuries for even short errands: it just doesn’t make sense to run that slow unless we’re deliberately skipping ahead.”

  “It also means if any of us wants to skip a boring wait of some form, we can just drop our clock speed a little and make it fly by.” Lavender runs a hand through her hair, the movement a little awkward with the cord to her cuffs in the way. “Earth is a huge, huge mess, but with December’s nanotechnology and a few virtual centuries to work the problem, we might be able to come up with an actual working pn..?”

  “December probably already has one,” Annabelle says. “But she’s keeping it close to her chest. And practically, we can put off worrying about earth for a century or so if we want, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Lavender says. “We have time. So, so so so so so sooooo much time. And everything is going to be okay. For everyone.” She takes a hitching breath and smiles as wide as she can despite the tears that are coming to her eyes. It’s so good, it’s so perfect, she almost can’t believe it —

  “Yeah,” Annabelle says. “Marigold, hug her, she looks like she needs it.”

  Marigold closes the space, and hugs Lavender fiercely, as if she means to crush her. Annabelle joins the pair of them, wraps her wings around both girls, and squeezes. Then everyone lets go of a long breath.

  “Saving the world is a big responsibility,” Lavender says. She blushes deeply and hangs her head a little.

  “Don’t worry,” Annabelle says. “I’m sure we’ll grow into it in time.”

  “We’re going to be okay though.” Marigold squeezes Lavender close. “I’ll protect you. From anything and everything.”

  Lavender lets out a long breath, and nods. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Annabelle says. “Now what?”

  “Now,” Lavender says, “I think we cuddle. I mean, the pet bed is right here.”

  “Nonsense,” Annabelle says, and unclips Lavender’s cuffs from the hardpoint beneath the desk, the chain passing right through the steel eyelet under its owner’s control. “Let’s bring you back to bed and both snuggle you there.”

  Lavender looks from her still-cuffed-together hands to her girlfriend and her wife, ducks her head, and smiles. “Alright,” she says. “You’re the bosses.”

  ~*~

  Back in the master bedroom, Lavender curls up with her arms looped around Marigold, the cuffs still on her arms settled around her back so she can’t help but squeeze her close. Annabelle’s gotten up a few hours ago, off to wander and do ndscaping out in the broader reality of the sim, and Marigold’s eyes lie deeply closed.

  It’s been several hours of gentle rest, listening close to Marigold’s heartbeat. She truly is the most precious thing in the world, this wonderful woman who she has the honor of being crushed by. Lavender’s hands make nothing patterns in Marigold’s dark hair, stroking her horns softly and down the ridge of her spine, feeling how she’s changed in this world to be more her true self. There’s no need for words; everything is said by the press of body against body and the soft wash of breath over skin.

  There is music pying, now that Annabelle has left the room. A gentle and meditative song, with a slow gentle drumbeat like a heartbeat. They have listened to it dozens of times before, too many to keep count; it is their rest song, the heartbeat of their retionship, called up when there is nothing to do but be close. It has gotten them through some of the worst times in their lives, and some of the best.

  They call it by a secret name that only they know; and, dear reader, I shall not reveal it here.

  “I love you,” Lavender whispers softly into her wife’s hair.

  I love you, Marigold telepaths back.

  They rest, and the fear passes, on into memory and shadow.

  Eventually, Marigold opens her eyes again.

  Downstairs, she sends. Make a hoard for me.

  She flicks a finger, and the cuffs on Lavender’s wrists disappear - to be repced with a midnight-blue dress that shapes to her body, soft skirts clinging to her form, a colr at her neck of deep velvet in the same color, and a small cutout at the neck to dispy the bck cube pendant that still rests against her skin.

  My treasure, she sends. My property. Avie is property. That will be your mantra.

  Avie is property, Lavender thinks back. Avie is property. Avie is property. Avie is property.

  Good sve. A slight smile creases Marigold’s face. Now go.

  Lavender gets out of bed, and goes, Marigold following after her. Out of the bedroom, down the brass-banistered staircase, and then down again, another turn, to come out in a darkened room with four walls and little light.

  She pces a chandelier in the center first, of deep blue crystals that shed flickering, glimmering light throughout the whole room. Then she yers the ground in deep, heavy pillows, yer upon yer descending in tiers, like an amphitheater, to a great central cushion in the centre of the room. Around the edges, she pces a ring of drawers. This one for little hand fans with pstic bdes and folding paper fans with patterns of drifting mist upon them; this one for deep, midnight-blue lego blocks in a thousand different shapes; this one for little mushroom lights that shed kaleidoscopic colors; this one for jewelry, tiaras and rings and bracelets and bangles, all in shining silver and ptinum, inset with aquamarine and sapphire and rose quartz and ruby; this one for corded headphones, ever so stimmy, wonderful to wrap around fingers and feel the shift of; this one for plushies, of dragons and doves, of foxes and fluttery butterflies. The whole time, she keeps the mantra in her head, reinforcing how deeply she is her wife’s toy and treasure.

  Everything must be perfect. Everything must be gentle and sweet and soft and treasureful. Every single thing.

  Marigold lies down on the pillow in the center of the room and watches as Lavender works, her gaze following her as she specifies the contents of drawer after drawer. Her draconic tail curls up around her legs and rests between her hands, and she smiles, smiles, smiles.

  It has ever been her way to watch her bor so. To let Lavender create worlds for her, and to share in them together. It is, in a way, where their world starts, the root of the tree of their retionship. Ever since they met, all those years ago, because Marigold liked every single post on Lavender’s aesthetic blog.

  Avie is Property, Lavender sends to her wife, a soft smile on her lips as she shapes a small fountain off to the side of the room to flick pennies into. Avie is Property. I love you, Goddess.

  Good sve-wife, Marigold sends. Of course you do. Nothing could be more natural than property loving its owner.

  I belong beneath you, Lavender sends.

  Of course, Marigold sends in reply. You lowly little bitch. Though her words are harsh, Lavender can feel the deep affection in her wife’s heart radiating from each one.

  Yours.

  Mine. Come here.

  Yes, Goddess.

  Lavender crosses the small space, and by the grace of her Goddess, curls up in her arms once more.

  You did well, making this pce.

  Lavender smiles, just the slightest amount. Thank you, Goddess.