Kobolds From Space

by terrycloth

Rating: mature
Tags: Profanity, Adventure, Sex, My Little Pony: The Movie, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, My Little Pony Comic, Princess Luna, Diamond Dogs, Original Character, Science Fiction
Length: 68279

All Wave and her friends want to do is colonize Equestria, rapidly build up a post-scarcity society with a population of a few billion, and use it to spread onwards through the galaxy. Luna is not amused.

For hundreds of years the kobolds have been colonizing space -- arriving in a system, rapidly building up a technological civilization, and using it to fire seed colonies at new stars that look promising.

Equestria looked very promising, until they arrived and found that people were already living there. People like Luna, with her incomprehensible magical powers (logging on to their network using magic is incomprehensible enough without *moving the moon*) and political control of an established nation or possibly two depending on how you count the Nyx. You probably shouldn't count the Nyx.

But they literally can't go home, so...

Sex tag is for lots of sex but not enough to really qualify as porn because why can't I just make up my mind you know? Gore is mostly implicit but apparently that still needs the tag?

Kobold visual design was inspired by the protogen... almost everything else was inspired by D+D though. And an old story I wrote about otters in space that involved zero ponies. And the dungeon core genre. And Furtoonia. It's not a crossover with any of those though (in particular the linked stories are not actually in the same universe and couldn't really be).

Published 2020-10-29 14:20:00 UTC
Last updated 2020-11-06 16:05:29 UTC

Moon Base

Once all the boxes were stacked safely where we could get to them and they wouldn’t fall over and crush anyone, I asked the warp crystal to restore normal inertia inside its domain, and then Breeze and Enny and I communed with it for a while thinking happy thoughts to reward it for getting us all to our new home safely. In my mindscape this meant I spent an hour polishing the dragon’s scales, while Breeze danced for its amusement and Enny fed it cupcakes. This wasn’t a proper virtual reality where we were actually linked – I only had the vaguest sense of how they were rewarding it and no idea at all what they envisioned it as.

Or I mean, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t asked them later. Breeze saw it as a feathery serpent, and Enny as a kind of robot raptor… and both of them interpreted my ‘reward through physical contact’ as me having sex with the thing. I guess I have a reputation.

“So… yeah,” I said to them afterwards, doing a post-thankfully-not-literal-mortem. “When the raft started spinning I was really worried everyone was going to be crushed, and I guess it picked up on that. It’s always been extra-helpful – that’s why we picked it, remember?”

“Extra-helpful for *you*,” Enny noted. The crystal still liked them, but under their guidance would get moods where it slipped into malicious compliance. That’s why I’d been the pilot.

“I still think you shouldn’t anthropomorphize it,” said Prism, who was sitting in despite having absolutely zero talent for warp-crystal manipulation, because they thought they were in charge.

“And that’s why we’re the ones who talk to it,” Breeze said. “That sort of attitude would just make it angry.”

“I don’t even think we can make it angry,” I said. “It’s a good boy. The goodest boy.”

“So how soon can your ‘good boy’ get the defensive protocols up and running?” Prism asked.

“The what?” I asked.

“We covered those before you joined us,” Breeze said. I’d originally intended to be part of the assembly team, working with machines and construction, but then it turned out I could talk to warp crystals which was super rare, so I’d been transferred. “They’re only supposed to be used if we land on a populated world, and we were headed way out past the frontier, so it was never a priority.”

“Well, it’s a priority now,” Prism said. “I don’t know about any ‘pony princess’ but someone threw a moon at us.”

“Throwing a moon is the crazy part,” I said. “Why would you be skeptical about the part that makes sense?”

“You should be skeptical about everything,” Prism retorted. “I’m skeptical that you didn’t just fuck up completely and make up a convenient story about a mobile moon to cover for yourself. But just in case you’re telling the truth, we should be prepared for visitors.”

“Prepared to kill them?” Breeze asked, their faceplate’s mouth-line curving into a frown.

“We can do catch-and-release,” Enny said.

“As long as they don’t get their grubby little paws –”

“Hooves,” I interjected.

Prism continued, hardly missing a beat, “—hooves on our warp crystal, I don’t care if you hold a tea party for them. But right now we’ve got everything in one big room on the surface and that isn’t safe.”

Breeze still looked uncertain. Enny put a hand on their shoulder and smiled. “We can go through the tutorial with Wave, since she never did it back at the academy.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of curious now,” I said. “When can we start?”

The answer was ‘soon’, but there was some administrivia to deal with first – finding kobolds to assign to my command, and linking all our faceplates together so that I could command them. Then Plus had to dig a syringe out of storage and stick me in the neck with it, because defense mode required a closer connection to the warp crystal and that apparently involved the sort of drugs that can only be administered with giant syringes. The upshot was that Prism was getting really impatient by the time we were ready to start, pacing from one end of the space raft to the other and looking out the windows at the desolate landscape to keep watch for the army of moon ponies that surely was on its way.

Finally, we were ready. I sat in Enny’s lap – too dizzy from the drugs to stand – and let them steady me while I buried the warp crystal, freed from its elastic bonds, in my chest-fluff to keep it close to my heart.

“Step one,” Breeze said, reading out of the tutorial, “Link up with the warp crystal. I need you to go into your mindscape, and get as close as possible to the crystal’s representation. Sit on its throne with it – that’s how you envision it, right?”

It was, but the dragon was huge and the throne was huge and I was not really tall enough to even reach the dragon’s lap. I imagined myself taking a running start, and giving my best high jump… and then the dragon’s teeth snapped shut around my middle, plucking me out of the air. “Um…” I said, then squeaked as it shifted its grip to take my head in its jaws instead, then tilted its head back to swallow. Gravity dragged me into its throat, and then it was warm and wet and tight and dark for what seemed like an eternity until I finally felt the urge to open my eyes… and I was the dragon, with a squirmy little lump in my belly, making me feel delightfully full.

“Are you okay?” Enny asked. Apparently my squirming hadn’t been entirely restricted to the mindscape.

“I think it worked,” I said, my own voice echoing strangely in my ears.

“Step two,” Breeze said, unconcerned. “Engage defense mode.”

“How?” I asked.

“It should be instinctual,” they replied. “The warp crystal is trained in the procedure.”

“Can you tell me what’s supposed to happen?” I asked. “It sends us underground somehow, I know that much…”

“We turn the rock below us to cake, then increase our density so that we sink,” Enny explained.

“Alright,” I said, imagining doing that, since as far as I could tell I was the warp crystal at the moment. The part of me that was aware of the outside world noticed the windows going dark, so apparently it had worked.

“Oh wait, we skipped a step,” Breeze said. “That was step three. Step two is to engage the HUD.”

My faceplate blanked out without warning, then lit up with an abstract control interface, complete with a button labelled ‘enter defense mode’. I flicked my attention to activate it, and red error messages spilled rapidly into the log… but the last message was a bright green ‘defense mode activated’, so all’s well that ends well I guess.

After that it was simple. The interface had a 2-meter grid, and I could mark squares for removal, which would turn those cubes of rock into cake. My underlings, guided by their own faceplates, would then go and dig out the cake, leaving a 2-meter wide corridor and then a room large enough to set up the general-purpose fabricator. The waste cake was shoved in a matter compressor for use as raw materials later… that wasn’t actually indicated on my HUD anywhere but I’d been trained in the assembly team side of this sort of operation so I knew how it worked.

When we say ‘cake’, keep in mind that we don’t mean frosting-covered sweet bread. Warp crystals can do a lot of things, but for elemental transmutation we use a different device. What ‘turning it to cake’ does is weaken many of the crystal and/or ionic bonds, leaving a dense, caked mass of very fine dust that can easily be disassembled by hand… or by putting too much pressure on it, or by sucking it into a hose connected to the matter compressor if one wants to be efficient and not get dust everywhere.

No, the strange, inexplicable part is that it only works on ‘rock’ or ‘dirt’ and not on plants or people or even sufficiently rich veins of ore. Fortunately, this moon was not made of cheese, so we were able to dig normally.

“You’re doing great!” Breeze said. “The rest of the tutorial covers some advanced concepts. First, it doesn’t use a lot of energy to mark squares for removal, but the warp crystal does have limited energy.”

“Right, the mana bar,” I said, having noticed it earlier.

“It’s not mana, it’s warp energy.”

“It’s blue, and it goes down when I cast spells,” I said.

“Whatever.” Their eyespots shifted to horizontal slits, while their mouth went all jagged. “How much do you have left?”

“It’s full,” I said.

Breeze’s eye-slits tilted inwards. “That’s impossible. Just entering defense mode should have taken you down to half.”

“Sure, but it regenerates,” I said. “It filled back up while I was marking the big room.”

“Alright… try selecting ‘expand domain’?” Breeze suggested.

The map suddenly got a little smaller, as the warp crystal increased its range of influence. This cost about half the bar, but it immediately started filling back up. I did it again, and noticed that it was filling faster. “It looks like we’re drawing more mana –”

“Warp energy,” Breeze hissed.

“Um, we’re regenerating faster the larger I make it.” I hit it a third time when the bar got back up to half. “Hee, this is like a clicker game. Is there any way to make the bar bigger?”

“I think you’ve got the gist of it,” Breeze said, their expression still rattled. “Come on, let’s bring her out.”

I turned my focus back to the mindscape, and the now-resting lump in my belly. “Out, huh.”

“Just get down off the throne,” Enny said.

“I’m kind of trapped,” I sort of explained. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t normal to imagine the dragon *eating* me so I was a bit leery of explaining in full.

“Then get untrapped,” Breeze said. “Come on.”

“Alright, alright, just let me think,” I said. How did you get out of a dragon’s belly? Did dragons vomit?

I didn’t want to vomit. I also didn’t want to come back to myself in a pile of shit, even if it was imaginary. That left… an egg? I’d always imagined the warp crystal as a male dragon, but males with vaginas weren’t particularly strange among kobolds. I imagined the lump inside me hardening into a solid ovoid, then travelling through my body towards my birth canal… I shifted on the throne to expose my crotch, and stroked downwards along my belly-scales to urge the egg along…

I’ve heard that giving birth is painful for many creatures, but kobolds have an easy time with it, and my only real point of reference was the eggs I’d laid personally. So it was an overwhelming, but sensual and pleasant experience to lay my egg, and I moaned with release as it plopped to the floor…

…and the mindscape shattered as I was back in my own body, wracked by orgasm and spraying semen all over a very surprised-looking Breeze’s faceplate as they leaned forwards to snatch the warp crystal out of my faltering grasp. “Fuck,” I said. “Sorry?” I wiped some of the cum off their faceplate with my hand, but it mostly just smeared so I used my much fluffier tail. I’d gotten enough on myself that I was going to need a bath anyway.

“It’s fine,” they said. “It’s not unusual to make a mess the first time, although it’s usually the merging that’s the exciting part.”

It was going to take a while for the digging team to clear out all the cake, and even longer for the assembly team to set up the general-purpose fabricator, so we had a bunch of time with nothing to do. Of course Plus had to ruin it by pinging everyone who wasn’t busy to meet with her in the virtual Garden. It took a couple of minutes for everyone to trickle in, which meant she could have just as well had us meet in a corner of the raft in real life, but whatever.

“I’ve completed the analysis of the local biosphere,” she said. She’d taken the form of a bipedal lizard with giant breasts for some reason, that reason almost certainly being that she liked having giant breasts, despite none of us having breasts of any size in real life. Many of the people present found it hard to look away – they jiggled whenever she talked or moved, and it was kind of mesmerizing even though I wasn’t really into them. I had to tear my gaze away from the wobbling scaly flesh as she spun in place, so that I could look at the presentation she was showing us.

She pointed at a pie chart. “Atmosphere is terrifyingly good. A bit thin, but the oxygen level is higher to compensate. Humans could breathe it.” The display shifted, and she pointed at a bar chart. “The surface dust can be converted into food and water without any transmutation. I haven’t analyzed the cake we’re digging out but at a glance it looks like the same stuff.” She turned back towards us, as the display was replaced by giant letters spelling out ‘CONCLUSION’.

“There’s effectively no limit to the carrying capacity of this world, so we should start breeding as soon as possible,” she finished.

“How soon is that?” someone asked.

“Now,” said about half the crowd, before she could answer, some of them also giggling.

Plus nodded. “I want everyone pregnant by the end of the day. Ship day. I wasn’t able to get a straight answer from the pilot about how long the local days are.”

“The moon swerved out of its orbit to catch us,” I said, being the pilot in question. “The day’s probably however long the pony princess wants it to be.”

Enny groaned. “Not this again.” At least they didn’t say it loud enough for many of us to hear it over the general chatter.

The message received, I woke myself up. Enny woke up a few seconds later.

“So,” I said to them, smiling sweetly under my faceplate and not entirely sure what it was showing them, “want to work on this assignment together?”

They tilted their head. “I figured you’d be pairing up with Spots.”

“He won’t touch me in real life. I’m kind of dumpy.” I picked at my boring dusty-brown fur listlessly. I mean, he wasn’t wrong.

“Let’s grab Breeze and we can make a threesome,” Enny suggested. “You already squirted all over us, might as well squirt inside.”

We hadn’t wandered far, so it was a bit of a surprise to find Breeze doing something with the warp crystal – had they not been at the meeting? They were out of it, so probably merged, and like they’d said it had made them rather dramatically aroused. I reached up for their cock, then looked over at Enny and flicked an ear. Their faceplate shifted into an evil grin, so I cracked mine open and slipped Breeze’s cock into my mouth, closing my hand around the base of their shaft, while Enny bent down under their tail and and started fingering their vulva.

They twitched, immediately, and I hadn’t had time to do much sucking before they shivered from ears to tail and then carefully set the warp crystal down on the floor. “What brought this on?”

“Breeding time,” Enny helpfully explained, with a little ‘schlick’ as one of their claws thrust abruptly inside.

Breeze put their hands on my shoulders and pushed me away, off of their penis. “Turn around then,” they said. “I can’t breed with your mouth.”

I got down on my hands and knees, facing away from them, lifting my tail and spreading my legs a bit to show myself off. They wasted no time sliding inside me, claws reaching around to take firm hold of my chest plate for better leverage for their thrust. It wasn’t the same as virtual sex – a bit more pain, a bit less pleasure – but Breeze knew me well enough not to waste time on foreplay, at least.

I’d kind of expected Enny to take Breeze in turn, since they’d already been behind them and playing with their labia, but instead they came around in front and cracked open their faceplate, licking their tongue all over the slick surface of mine. “She already shot off once,” Enny explained, as they got their hands underneath me and started lifting me up, tilting the two of us back until I was sitting impaled in Breeze’s lap. “We’d better not waste her second orgasm. The sperm count drops each time, after all.”

I’m pretty sure that was a myth for kobolds, but I wasn’t about to complain. I dug my claws into the fuzzier parts of their back as they climbed up on top of me, and buried myself in fluffy warmth, the filling in a delicious kobold sandwich. We writhed and moaned, flexed and thrust and of course I lost – was it ever in doubt? I was always on a hair trigger even when I wasn’t being double-teamed.

Once I’d finished pumping Enny full, they pried themselves off me and helped Breeze lower me to the ground, on my back… without pulling out, although they did stop thrusting for a bit while we were shifting positions. Then Enny took Breeze from behind while they finished up, and I got to play the part of a well-stuffed pillow, clinging to Breeze from below as Enny went to town to complete the set.

“I need to apologize to Spots,” I said afterwards, still the bottom of a kobold-pile while we cuddled a bit in the afterglow. “That wouldn’t have worked in co-op mode.”

Biometrics said all three of us had managed to induce ovulation, but that didn’t stop Enny and me from taking another turn with each other, just to make sure. Breeze bowed out, though, sticking a completely-ordinary-sized syringe into their arm and re-merging with the warp crystal to do… whatever they were doing with the warp crystal. Like before, it left them obviously aroused.

“You should fill them up while they’re distracted,” I said, petting Enny’s ears while they slowly thrust into me. We weren’t going for anything that intense this time, just some nice lazy screwing.

“I’m pretty sure that would distract them from whatever they’re doing,” Enny said, giving a sudden, deep trust and then exploding inside me again. “They seemed to think it was important.”

I didn’t respond for a few seconds, savoring the spreading warmth, and the way Enny twitched in pleasure as the last few spurts squeezed their way out of their cock.

“You had the full training too, didn’t you?” I asked, once we were effectively back to slightly sticky cuddling. “Any ideas?”

“I haven’t given it any thought,” they said. “We’ve been busy.”

I glanced up at the warp crystal, its purple glow seeping from between Breeze’s claws. “I could go commune with it normally. Might get a sense of what they’re up to.”

“Why? You don’t think they’re up to something evil, do you?” Her expression was amused instead of worried. I’m pretty sure mine was… anxious.

I gave it a little thought. Did I actually think Breeze was going to betray us? I couldn’t even think of how they’d do that. But still… “I think I’m just impatient to try working with it again,” I said. “And if I knew what they were doing, I’d know how long they were going to take.”

“Ah,” Enny said, petting my ears. “It’s a clicker, you said.”

I cringed. “Oh shit.” I mean, I’d been joking, but…

They extricated themselves from my grasp, and I sat up and fussed with my fur a bit, uselessly since I was pretty filthy by this point. “I only clicked three times,” I pointed out.

“And you’ve been fretting over it ever since,” Enny retorted. “Go talk to Null, or at least get out of sight of the thing until you can detox.”

So I went looking for a bath. We didn’t have the facilities for a real shower set up yet, or the water to spare – although both of those would come quickly, once the fabricator was set up – but the matter compressor was full of dust, so I joined the cloud of kobolds taking a dust-bath, and spent a happy but not otherwise memorable half hour or so getting somewhat cleaner. It did manage to distract me from the warp crystal, and I don’t think I was actually reward-locked just by clicking three times anyway.

We take reward-locking seriously, mostly because of the virtual world. It would be trivially easy to program a simple routine that made you have orgasms constantly. You wouldn’t get bored. You wouldn’t get tired. No actual chemistry is happening, so you wouldn’t run out of dopamine or whatever and have the intensity of the orgasms gradually decrease. You might be able to turn the program off, assuming you had the presence of mind to include an off switch, but it’s a bad bet and someone would probably have to rescue you… and half the time even a short stint reward-locked like that would render you useless for any purpose and… the options from there are all bad.

Clickers aren’t as bad. Being reward-locked by a clicker doesn’t usually take up *all* your time and you’ll probably get sick of it after a week or two… but that’s a week or two where you’ll be operating at drastically reduced efficiency and annoying everyone around you with your obsession. You can joke about clickers, and try recovering on your own before you get help – ancient society was riddled with them and still mostly functioned. But at the core, it’s the same mechanism, so they’re heavily discouraged.

I’m a bit of a not-all-that-special case because of my all-but-documented sex addiction. I’m not addicted! I can go without sex for long periods of time! What I can’t do is easily say no without a good reason, unfortunately, so I don’t generally go long periods of time and no one believes me. And no, ‘proving that I can’ is not a good enough reason to turn down someone I like who looks like they might be in the mood.

‘I just got out of the bath and I’m already quite sated’ is, though, so as I looked around at the pairs and triples still working on Plus’s assignment, I was able to wave off the ones who invited me to join. I did track down Spots, because I was worried about him, but he’d managed to find three of his other regular girls, and one of them had taken him from behind while the other two kept him focused on being a male, so he was (a) good and (b) didn’t want to talk about it, or at least that’s what he claimed after complaining about having had to do it.

So he didn’t need my help, and as I’ve mentioned, he wasn’t very interested in me when we aren’t virtual, because I’m not actually a girl despite everyone else assuming I am. I don’t care. I don’t care what pronouns people use for me, so I don’t correct them, and I don’t like confrontation so I don’t object when others correct people if they aren’t using female pronouns for me, and somehow this fools everyone but Spots, who is probably the only person it would be convenient to fool.

“There’s a big communal dust bath over by the matter compressor if you want to clean up,” I suggested. I’d obviously just dusted myself off so it wasn’t a proposition.

“Too busy,” Spots said, sitting with his back against a box, his tail curved over his lap to hide the worst of the mess, while he typed away in midair. “The network’s acting weird.”

I didn’t offer to help because I don’t know anything about that. I could listen, though. “Want to talk about it?”

He didn’t respond, which I took as a ‘no’.

Since I wasn’t able to do my job with Breeze hogging the warp crystal, and most of the rest of us were just fucking or fucking around or hanging out, I decided to find a quiet place to sit down and log back on to the virtual world. I know, I know, I’d just spent six months trapped there, so I should have been sick of it, but right after landing there are basically no amenities in real life, and I wanted to be something other than myself anyway. I put on my sexy female otter form and preened in a mirror for a bit, then called up the directory to see if anyone else was around to talk to.

Star was on, and a couple other people I didn’t know as well, but there were also a couple of guest accounts logged in. Was the pony princess back? The directory gave their location, so I teleported to the closest teleport spot, then ran around a bit through the mazelike industrial zone until I finally caught up. They looked like a pair of generic kobolds, with the icons ‘1’ and ‘2’ on their shoulder and hip-plates – the default guest bodies, in other words.

“Hey there!” I called out to them, swimming through the air because, well, because I felt like it. Actually walking with tiny otter legs is not a lot of fun. “What’s with the guest accounts?”

They turned and looked at me, faceplates glowing with wide eyes and distressed, jaggy mouths. “Is this your dream?” asked Guest1.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Princess Luna asked us to investigate this dream, and we’ve been searching for the dreamer for hours,” Guest1 said.

“Minutes, anyway,” Guest2 commented.

“It’s not a dream!” was my immediate reaction, but I realized that that was stupid – if they were really sent by the pony princess, who I was absolutely certain had not been a prank thanks to the accelerating moon, then I couldn’t expect them to know what our virtual world was. “It’s not exactly a dream,” I added quickly, “but if it was I’d be one of the dreamers? We all share. Where are you connecting from? Do you want a real account? I could ask Spots to make some for you.”

“Account?” asked Guest2. “Like a bank account?”

Um… “I guess, except that instead of money it just stores your preferences. Like, do you want to be a kobold like in real life, or would you rather be an otter? Who do you consider your friends? What are your favorite games? That sort of thing.”

“Do we get interest?” Guest1 asked.

“That depends entirely on how interesting you are,” I replied, smirking. “Do you have real names? You’re labelled ‘Guest1’ and ‘Guest2’ right now.”

“Jerome,” said Guest1.

Guest2 was “Larry. What’s your name?”

My name should have been the most obvious thing about me, but if these were aliens who thought they were somehow connecting to a dream… “Um… I’m Wave. How are you connecting?”

Guest1 started to explain, “We searched for your dream with the big cauldron, then –"

“Are you sure we should tell her? They’re alien invaders,” Guest2 said, interrupting them. Or ‘him’, probably, with a name like Jerome, assuming it wasn’t a complete coincidence, and that whatever weird mechanism was letting us understand each other was translating the names as well.

“I just meant that you don’t seem to be getting all the metadata, or you wouldn’t have to ask my name,” I said, holding up my arms to look less threatening or something.

“I don’t know what that word means,” Guest1 said.

“Technobabble,” Guest2 suggested.

“What it means,” I said, “is that you’re not connected properly so you’re only getting about half the functionality. If you’re connecting to this like it was a dream, that would probably explain it? It’s not really my area. But we could probably rig up something to let you connect normally if you came here in person.”

“Is that an invitation?” Guest1 asked. “We know where you are, your landing was hard to miss.”

“Well… sure, you’re invited,” I said. “Just be careful, you might have to deal with some traps and puzzles.” I didn’t think we’d be able to arrange for any monsters. “It’s traditional.”

They stared at me.

“I’ll try to make sure they’re nonlethal!”

So I called a meeting. I never call meetings; I don’t have a job where calling meetings really makes sense. I was giddy as I confirmed that this was what I really wanted to do, and then instantly terrified after the network actually went and pinged everyone. We met in one of the meeting halls in the virtual world; the big chamber we were digging would probably have worked but virtual meetings are always easier.

Once everyone was gathered, I blurted out “Aliens!”

“Aren’t we the aliens?” Star asked.

“Yes but they can show up in our virtual world using the guest accounts,” I said. “I asked them to come over so we can give them a proper terminal.”

“For free? Shouldn’t we be charging?” Fire asked.

“Oh, I didn’t think of that,” I said. “Maybe the first few can be samples? We do want to talk to them right?” We didn’t use money internally – we were a collective – but we did sometimes have to deal with people who weren’t in a collective, so we’d all gotten the basic economic training. I knew what money *was*. Also, money was used in a lot of games although you had to be careful not to let collecting money turn into a quasi-clicker.

Prism, who looked kind of annoyed or maybe that was my exaggeration since their avatar was a cluster of butterflies, asked, “Why didn’t you call the meeting before asking them to come? We’re really not set up for visitors.”

“I know I know I promised them traps, and I’m not even sure we’ll have an exit dug out. I just wanted to make sure that people knew they seemed friendly and laid out the friendly traps. And didn’t shoot them.” We didn’t bring weapons, but we brought the general purpose fabricator, and it had no problem at all making guns.

“I’ll dig an exit first thing,” Breeze promised.

“You’ll *mark* an exit. We’ll be the ones digging,” Squirrel replied

“There’s already enough room to set up the simple fabricator elements,” Star said. “We can have snares and pits. Gravity’s pretty light here so the pits shouldn’t hurt anyone too bad. I don’t know about making rigs for aliens, though.”

“As long as they have hands, we can just give them a screen and a keyboard,” Spots suggested.

“That’s hardly a proper terminal,” Dot replied. “We need to brain-scan them so we can make it immersive.”

“I’d really rather get some of the other medical equipment squared away first,” Plus said. “But talking to the locals is important, I guess. I won’t stand in the way.”

“It sounds like we have a consensus?” I asked.

“You didn’t leave us much choice,” Prism said. “But it looks like it.”

My punishment was swift, and also not really a punishment either in the ‘intended to annoy me’ or ‘actually annoyed me’ senses. Breeze had the most experience with defense mode, so they were the one working the warp crystal, and everyone else who wasn’t involved with setting up the fabricator or other critical tasks (Plus continued to monitor everyone’s health, and Spotty continued to try to figure out how the aliens kept accessing the network, for two) got tagged as a worker drone for Breeze to order around.

Which was fine by me – yeah, I loved my actual job but assembly was the job I’d picked, and I liked it well enough. We didn’t have enough suction tubes at first, so I spent a while clawing cake to bits with my bare claws with a bunch of other kobolds, while a single worker with a suction tube cleaned up after us. Once some of the basic fabrication units were online we all got our own suction tubes and that maybe wasn’t *quite* as fun as playing in the dust, but it went a lot faster.

And there was so much to dig out! We weren’t going to let the aliens visit our space raft or the fabricator, so we had a big, fake ‘central lair’ chamber for them to sneak into if they got past all the traps, with a double height ceiling, a big glowing crystal lamp that kind of looked like a warp crystal if you’ve never seen one, and comfortable furniture that looked like it was made out of recycled crates. That was Star’s idea – in case the aliens had read our minds and knew what to look for, they might be tricked into thinking they’d found it.

Then there was a big warren of private chambers for each of us. Not very big, but it meant we could have our own space to hoard things mostly. And to sleep in, out of the way. Maybe to have sex in in private, if we felt like pretending it was shameful, which was a couple of peoples’ kink. At the far end of it was a room for the eggs, and some space for toilets and wet baths although of course those weren’t set up yet and anyone who really had to go would just do it right into the backup matter compressor. On the other side from the central lair was a room marked ‘cafeteria’ with a kitchen and pantry, and then of course a bunch of recreational tunnels that would eventually make their way to the surface, which we were going to fill with traps.

I ran into a vein of ore that didn’t get caked digging out the cafeteria, which probably meant that we’d be changing the plan around a bit because mining ore needed heavier equipment than we had built just yet. But it wasn’t like we had any food to serve there, and we could always just eat in the lair.

Once things were winding down, and most of the remaining work was being left to the people who’d actually trained for it, I got a weird ‘go to’ order that led me into one of the side passages in the recreational tunnels. I advanced carefully – this part had been completed so there weren’t any construction notes for it anymore, and it was almost certainly trapped. I froze at a glint of light reflecting off a tripwire, and carefully stepped over it, then hopped over a section of flooring that was a little *too* smooth.

The ’go to’ order vanished, then reappeared telling me to step on the trap. “Breeze!” I complained. Since I was one of her drones she might have even heard it. Otherwise she was just responding to my hesitation.

“We need to make sure they aren’t lethal,” she sent back, making the text appear briefly on my faceplate. The ‘go to’ order flashed a few more times, then beeped with urgency.

Since the next level of ‘worker drone do this thing really’ was electric shocks, and we *did* need to test the traps, I rolled my eyes and stepped on it.

Sure enough, it was a pit. I’d braced myself for a fall… for a two meter, maybe four meter fall. It was a lot deeper than that! I had time to scream in terror before hitting the bouncy net, and then more time to squeak and grunt as I bounced up and down in the pit, banging against the sides occasionally, until enough of my momentum was lost that I could grab hold until it was finally still.

A secret door opened at the bottom of the pit, under the net. Enny was there, grinning up at me. “What do you think?”

“That was fun!” I said. “How do I get out?”

“I mean, you’re not supposed to?” they said. “You should probably try though.”

I tried some obvious things first. I crawled around on the net to see if I could unhook it, but it was welded to a ring set flush against the stone walls, and all of it made out of structural plastic that I wasn’t going to be able to chew through. I mean, I tried – when we crack our faceplates it cracks them along the mouth-line which is usually pretty jaggy if we’re about to bite something, and it gives the resulting ‘teeth’ a sharp edge. But it’s mainly meant for gripping and eating and maybe fighting and kissing, and not for sawing through thick, stretchy cables.

So I started bouncing up and down, to see if I could get back to the top that way. Bounce. Bounce. BOUNCE. BOUNCE. When I got as high as I could manage before the dampening effect counteracted what I could add on each bounce, I reached up and… was still three meters short of the trapdoor, which had closed behind me anyway and probably only opened down.

“Alright, I give up. It seems pretty solid,” I said, once I’d gotten it to stop bouncing again. Enny hit a button on the wall underneath the trap, and the ring holding the net in place lost its rigidity, letting it snap tight around me. I dropped the last three meters with an “Oof!”

They picked me up, net and all, and tossed me over their shoulder, hauling me back through the service tunnels.

“I can walk, you know,” I said, inverted and thoroughly tied up.

“No you can’t, you’re trapped in a net.”

“You can let me out of the net.”

“I think it takes special tools,” they replied.

We were basically home anyway by that point. The assembly team used their special tools to get me loose, and we all gathered in the central lair to watch the aliens approach on a big screen someone had set up. We’d finished just in time!

…and all our traps were useless.

The aliens could fly. Not even with wings – they just hovered in midair in exactly the way frilled lizard creatures usually don’t. They *had* legs, but they didn’t use them.

One of them accidentally brushed a tripwire with his tail, and the snare snapped closed around it! He stopped for about two seconds, then squeezed his tail out of the snare as if he didn’t have any bones.

“Do we have time to set up some sleep darts?” Prism asked.

“Would they be safe?” Plus said. “We know nothing about their biology.”

“And they might pop,” I added. “They kind of look like balloons.”

At least the maze was still a maze – they didn’t seem to have any supernatural maze-navigating properties, and they didn’t walk through the walls or anything. So when they made it to our central lair, we all cheered and welcomed them in.

“They’re cartoons,” Star said quietly, and seeing their expressions I had to agree – lizard faces don’t bend that way. Lizard bodies don’t compress like that when hugged. Lizards also don’t float in midair so that was another thing that we’d already covered. They weren’t as cartoonish as the pony princess in the virtual world had been, at least – they *looked* like they were made out of matter. Just…

“Are you balloons?” I asked when I got close enough for them to hear me. “How do you float like that?”

“You ruined all our traps!” Fire complained.

“We’re dream spirits,” the bigger one explained. He had a birdlike beak that still looked soft and squishable and deformed with his expressions. “So kind of like balloons without the outer covering?”

“Here watch,” said the other, the ‘frilled lizard’ I’d mentioned earlier. He twisted himself around until he exploded into a cloud of mist, that swooped around the room rapidly before reconstituting itself into a lizard again. I stared, speechless, along with everyone else.

“Do you even have brains?” Dot asked. “How are supposed to scan you?”

“Are you calling me stupid?” the bigger one said, getting even bigger. Dot recoiled and cowered. He laughed and gave her a hug. “Just kidding. But we can think and dream and use magic so whatever dream magic you were going to use on us should work fine.”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Breeze said, which most of us probably agreed with but thankfully our visitors didn’t seem to notice.

Anyway, Dot put the brain-scan helmet on their heads – squishing their heads to fit inside since they were a bit bigger than kobold heads – and set it running. It didn’t immediately light up in red error lights or anything, so I guessed that it was working but what did I know.

“So this scan will let you make a charm to let us better connect to your shared dream?” one of them asked.

“The device is already built, but we need to know how to read and write to your brain for it to actually work,” Dot explained.

“Some sort of mind-control helmet?”

“Not directly,” Dot said. “It only writes sensations.” They continued to stare at her, dubious. “Sensations can be intense.”

“But we don’t do that!” I added quickly. “I mean not unless you want them, like if you’re playing a really realistic fighting game or having virtual sex or something.”

“What’s sex?” asked the smaller one.

“Wave, why don’t you demonstrate?” Fire suggested, his faceplate showing an evil smirk.

“Um… it takes two,” I said. It’d been a while, so I wasn’t *not* in the mood, but that was still a bit rude.

“So pick someone.”

“Fine, I pick you,” I snapped back at him. “Bend over.”

So we gave the aliens a little demonstration. I sat down in front of them first, and showed them my penis and my vulva and spread my labia so they could look inside, and fingered myself a bit so they could watch me getting erect. Then I bent Fire over one of the couches and gave him a good hard fuck. He curled his tail around my neck, so I cracked my faceplate and bit down on it, just hard enough to hurt a little, and his moans suggested he was enjoying it a lot. I still finished first though, because I *always* lose at sex… I made sure to play it up, moaning loudly and exaggerating the jerky thrusts my instincts were already telling me to make.

“That looks like fun,” the bigger one said. “We don’t have the right bits, though.”

“Well, in the virtual world you can,” I said, while I sat down on the couch next to Fire, giving him a hand-job to try to finish him off. “I mean, if the scan works.” The guest bodies didn’t have genitals and I didn’t know how they’d been connecting before or if they were able to feel anything.

“I don’t know, this is sounding more and more dangerous,” the small one said. “I don’t want to get sucked into your hive mind and not be able to escape.”

“It’s not a hive mind!” Prism snapped.

“It’s a shared dream world built from all your thoughts, isn’t it?”

“No?” Spots said. “It’s a shared virtual world hosted on our peer-to-peer network.” He tapped his faceplate. “On these.”

“Right, in your heads,” the alien said, frowning.

“Not…” I grimaced, then my faceplate blanked as I reached up and took it off. Most of the other kobolds looked away – we *never* took off our faceplates. We were hideous without them! And we couldn’t really make facial expressions because our faces were not cartoons or squishy bags of gas, so we always looked like we were snarling. And we could only talk in Yipyip, which was a horrible language that we never used because we never took off our faceplates. “Yip?” I yipped, in Yipyip, then yipped some more as I tried to swear and then I put my faceplate back on. “It comes off, see?”

“I can’t believe you did that,” Enny said, frowning.

I reached back down to finish finishing off Fire, but he’d managed to completely lose his erection, and scrambled away from me.

“I’ve embarrassed myself enough, so I won’t strip down, but the rest of it comes off too,” I said, tapping my chestplate. “Oh, except my left leg, that’s cybernetic. I mean, it comes off…” I grabbed it firmly, found and unlatched the mental release trigger, and twisted it off at the hip, holding it up in the air. “The bottom part’s still organic, but I broke my leg a few years ago and it was faster to just replace the thigh segment.” I ticked my foot, and it twisted and squirmed as if it was still connected, although of course I couldn’t feel anything with it popped off like that.

This time, it was the aliens that looked horrified. There *were* reasons to take off limbs – usually, to put on other, more specialized limbs, although this wasn’t the sort of mission that needed that so most of us still had our natural ones – so the other kobolds didn’t mind as much, although they were all still staring at me while I clicked it back into place. I massaged my foot until the pins and needles went away.

“So it’s a magical hive mind –” the alien started.

“It’s a *virtual world* that we visit,” Prism said. “We don’t have a hive mind!”

Let me tell you about hive minds. Back… well, I can’t really call it ‘back home’ since I’m many, many generations removed from anyone who ever set foot there, or was even close enough to see the stars in the sky with the unaided eye. But back where we came from, there were not one but *two* hive minds.

One of them was an aggressive swarm, that went from planet to planet kidnapping everyone and forcibly turning them into brainwashed, insectoid versions of themselves. Their victims retained their memory and intelligence and skills, but their will and consciousness were completely subsumed. Everyone hated them but no one could stop them, there were just too many of them.

The other was an evangelizing swarm, that went from planet to planet offering free samples of neuro-link technology and trial memberships, and cogent, convincing arguments for joining that were enthusiastically backed up by everyone who’d ever connected, even after they were cut loose. Everyone hated them but no one could stop them because they didn’t do anything to anyone who didn’t agree to it, and we weren’t *monsters*.

For a long time they were fighting each other, which didn’t really do much to keep them in check but at least it made us feel like there was hope that they’d wipe each other out? But that didn’t happen. Somehow they managed to make peace, and the aggressive swarm stopped deleting its victims’ personalities and the evangelizing swarm stopped taking no for an answer and it was probably not really the worst of both worlds but it was a lot harder to live with. So like any sane collective of engineered creatures designed for deep-space exploration, we ran away.

We’re still running. And interstellar communication being what it is, we have no idea if we’re a thousand light years away from the hive minds’ nearest minions or if they’re right on our heels. I hope it’s the first one.

And I don’t know about everyone else, but what really grates on me is that we’re not even rebelling. We’re still doing the job we were designed for, paving the galaxy with technologically advanced civilizations made up of creatures proven to be susceptible to conversion. They probably don’t even want to catch us.

At any rate, the scan finished successfully somehow, so we handed over the headsets we’d made for them, and the keyboard-and-screen consoles Spots had insisted we make, even though the connection on those is just text so you can’t really do much of anything except talk. The bigger one even put his on! About a dozen of us went virtual with him to make sure it was working from that end, and Spots talked him through registering his account name (‘Shadowfright’, although he explained his real name was Jerome) and setting a password and an icon and then I pounced on him and volunteered to let him use any of the avatars from my collection, because I have a bunch of them. It’s basically what I did in my spare time.

“Do you have any ponies? I always wondered what it was like to be a pony,” Shadowfright said. He was in the default kobold body, but it had a scary face as an icon instead of a number this time, since he wasn’t a guest.

“Um…” I frowned. I’d never really liked hooves. I had a couple of centaurs but they were weasel-centaurs and pangolin-centaurs. I brought out the pangolintaur, which was about twice as big as a kobold and had each scale a different, mismatched rainbow gradient. “Is this close enough?”

“That’s…” he paused. “Colorful. Just like the ponies! I’ll take it.”

He wasn’t eager to try out sex, since Dot had said it would ‘write intense sensations into his brain’ and he didn’t want to trust us *that* far, but he did play around with that avatar and half a dozen others, not all of them mine, and we laughed and talked and petted each other and went swimming and flying and by the time we returned to reality, the other alien had left with his headset and console, to report back.

“I’d better catch up with him, before he tells everyone I had my brain eaten,” Shadowfright said, and ran off into the labyrinth. He got caught in one of the suction-traps some of the others had set up to work better on floating, squishy aliens, and we took him prisoner and tossed the little ball he’d been sucked into around a bit to celebrate before setting him free.

All in all, it seemed like a good start to a relationship.

Sand Castle

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.

Parrot Ship

When I came to, inertia was back to normal, and we were in space.

“What,” I said, not moving as the stars slowly spun around me.

“We’re going to the planet!” Star said, excited.

“Just like you wanted,” Fire said.

“What,” I said again, sitting up and staring at the crystal, and then at the planet as it rose above the moon’s horizon. I had my faceplate calculate our orbit, and sure enough the low point was several miles underground – we were going to hit the planet.

“Breeze managed to make a new warp crystal, so we’re going to start a new lair on the surface,” Star explained.

“They thought you were more likely to be able to control an untrained crystal than Enny, so you were volunteered,” Fire added. “Normally you would have been asked, but then you might have said ‘no’.”

“I told them that there was basically no chance of that,” Star said, rolling their eyes. “But you know how they get.”

“The trip was a test, to make sure we could work together,” Fire said. “We also used it to sound you out about the idea without giving it away. If you’d been against it we could have called it off.”

“Just the three of us, though?” I asked.

I grabbed onto my ears and tried to process this. On the one hand, I’d been forcibly removed from almost everyone I knew for an indefinite period – there was no way a raft this small would have more than a mini-printer on board, and it would take a while to work up to a transmission tower that could reach the moon. Also, the planet was full of dozens of different kinds of intelligent creatures and hundreds of kinds of monsters, so we might not even survive to that point. What if I never saw Spots again?

Wait, that was supposed to be a negative, so why did I feel relief?

So, yeah, on the other hand the moon was about the most boring possible place for a kobold colony to land, with ridiculously accessible resources and no enemies at all. I’d originally signed up to explore new and dangerous worlds, and this…

…was a lot of new and dangerous for three kobolds. “Why just the three of us?” I asked.

“Well, it’s kind of dangerous,” Star said. “Once the eggs hatch and the first generation is old enough they’ll be able to risk a full size team. I’m kind of surprised they’re risking a warp crystal! Making it couldn’t have been easy.”

“Huh,” I said. “The moon was recharging the crystal’s mana at a crazy pace, so we don’t need generators to recharge it. We could probably mass produce them.” I hadn’t thought of that angle, but in retrospect it was pretty obvious. “I still don’t see why we have to be in such a rush, though.”

“Luna said we couldn’t land on the planet,” Fire said.

Star’s mouth went all jaggy. “Nobody liked that. We’re going to show her how far we can go, without her permission.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Count me in.”

“You are in,” Star said. “You’re in the shell with us.”

“She means she won’t sabotage the mission out of spite,” Fire said.

“I don’t think I would have been spiteful enough to get us all killed,” I said. “I mean, killed sooner. We’re probably all going to die.”

“I promise not to kill either of you, no matter how much you tempt me,” Fire said.

“We could make a game out of it,” I said. “One point for each of us that one of us gets killed. Five points if it’s permanent.”

“Shouldn’t we be trying not to get killed?” Star asked, faceplate showing a spinning spiral.

“Right. Points are bad.”

“No no no no no, points have to be good,” they said. “We start with ten points and lose a point each time we get one of us killed.”

Fire shook his head. “If we’re going to make a game out of it, we should use the combat tracker.”

“What’s a combat tracker?” I asked.

“We used it to make a game out of our combat training,” he said. “Here, I’ll copy it over to your rig.”

I accepted the app and let it run. It added a few menu options, reminding me of the warp crystal’s control interface, and also put Fire’s name and level over his head. Apparently he was level five. I opened my own status.

Wave – lv 1 [NO CLASS ASSIGNED]
Kobold – 6% cybernetic
STR 10 AGI 7 CON 14 INT ?? WIS ?? CHA ??
ATK 11 DEF 8 HP 24 REP 0
Weapon: [EMPTY]
Armor: [EMPTY]
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1

“RPG stats?” I asked, as Star apparently also installed the program, given that ‘Star lv 1’ appeared over their head.

“It should have physical stats based on your biometrics,” Fire said. “Mental stats will be assigned once you’ve demonstrated how smart you are.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with what we were talking about,” Star pointed out.

“REP is reputation I’m guessing?” I said. “The rest might be fun to play with if we actually have to fight stuff.”

There was a context menu when I focused on Star and Fire, so I had a look at their stats.

Star – lv 1 [NO CLASS ASSIGNED]
Kobold – 40% cybernetic
STR 20 AGI 10 CON 8 INT ?? WIS ?? CHA ??
ATK 21 DEF 11 HP 18 REP 0
Weapon: [EMPTY]
Armor: [EMPTY]
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: [EMPTY]

“You didn’t bring your impeller?” I asked, noticing that in fact their tail was empty.

“Those things are useless,” Star said. “They do what, a tenth of a G? We’re not in space anymore.”

I looked pointedly out the window.

Their faceplate showed the image of them sticking out their tongue. “You know what I mean.”

Fire – lv 5 Hunter
Kobold – 2% cybernetic
STR 8 AGI 16 CON 13 INT 8 WIS 14 CHA 7
ATK 33 DEF 31 HP 43 REP 36
Weapon: Holdout Taser
Armor: Combat Harness
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1

“Don’t put too much stock in the hit point value,” Fire warned us. “It’s really only useful if we’re play-fighting. It will try to update the current value based on any injuries you take but the value is just based on your level and con and you don’t actually get that much tougher in real life.”

“Is zero dead or unconscious?” I asked.

“Unconscious,” Fire said. “Dead is negative con. Completely dead is negative fifty.”

“Reset your rep to zero,” Star said. “If we’re using it keep score we should start on an even footing.”

“Or we could just remember to subtract 36,” Fire said.

Star put their hands on their hips. “Or you could reset it.”

Fire shook his head. “I got those points fair and square.”

“We didn’t get points for all the things we did,” I said. “Besides, no one’s going to see them but us.”

Fire wasn’t having any of it. “Only until we set up a communication tower. Then everyone will wonder how I managed to lose 36 points!”

Star wasn’t impressed “So instead we should just mentally adjust the score every time we look at it? Does anyone else even care?”

They argued for a while. I played around with the combat tracker interface a bit and found a utility to apply custom temporary modifiers, and sent Fire a mod to give himself a ‘stranded on a lost planet’ modifier that erased any previous reputation gains, but would bring them back as soon as he was ‘rediscovered’.

“I didn’t know you were a programmer,” Fire said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know the first thing about writing code but my main hobby is designing virtual avatars. This is way less complex.”

Star’s faceplate showed a rotating octahedron. “I thought your main hobby was sex?”

I shrugged. “What do you think I use the avatars for?”

It was a long trip. We did a little play-fighting with the combat tracker, and got up to level 2 – which gave us five hit points and basically nothing else since we hadn’t picked a class. It also gave us a little more idea of how to actually fight.

We didn’t have sex. I was still a bit burnt out from the Nyx, Star was never in the mood, and Fire didn’t bring it up. Also, zero-G sex is terrible. If you’ve never tried it, don’t.

We didn’t want to unpack anything, but we took inventory of what we’d been sent with. The expected mini-printer, and a battery to run it with a couple days’ charge, but also a cybernetics repair station (meaning it could print up new cybernetics but didn’t do the surgery to implant them) and a food processor. They’d also sent another matter compressor full of soup – lots and lots of soup. We weren’t going to be able to lift it in full gravity, but it had the antigrav harness attached and we did have a warp crystal.

There was also a note telling me where to look for the instructional program on how to train a warp crystal, and I decided to get started on that right away because if the momentary-inertia-reduction-on-impact wasn’t actually instinctual we might have a pretty short mission.

Luckily, it was, but I spent time with the warp crystal anyway, planning to teach it how to manipulate inertia. Communing with it the first time was strange – I tried to imagine it as a dragon, like our other crystal, but it didn’t work. Do you know how weird it feels to fail to imagine something?

I eventually managed to get the mindscape to stick with it as an egg, and I clutched it to my chestfluff and rocked it back and forth until it hatched into a tiny little dragon that sat on my shoulder. Then, like the instructions recommended, I started teaching it physics. Warped physics. There was no point teaching it to warp reality to work just like reality actually did.

After a few hours, we all felt our internal emergency power supplies whirr into action as the crystal started generating the standard warp field. I still hadn’t gotten to the point where I could teach it to *change* physics… but I was out of time; we were entering the atmosphere.

“Strap in,” Fire said. We’d found the crash harnesses earlier, and I put the crystal back in its secure location in the very middle of the raft.

Star had a control panel by the seat they’d claimed. “Opening –”

“No!” I said. “No parachutes yet!”

They trusted me enough to pause. “When, then?”

The raft started shaking, and flames licked over the transparent shell.

I tried to remember my brief training on manual parachute operation that I’d never expected to need since our original raft had automatic parachutes. “I don’t know, but I know it’s after the flame part.”

The flames didn’t last long, and after a bit we were definitely in a sky instead of in space, so Star popped the chutes. The raft jerked painfully, then continued falling, as the parachutes tore free and floated off into the sky.

“Oops?” Star said, embarrassed. “And it just gave me -1 REP. Thank you combat tracker.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “This is fine. The warp crystal should save us.”

“Would it help if you went and –” Fire started to say, but then we smacked into the water and didn’t die because the warp crystal saved us.

Instead, we bounced. The crystal panicked on the second impact as well, and we bounced again. We spent some time skipping over the surface of the ocean until we’d lost enough speed that the warp crystal let us splash into the water and eventually float to the top, bobbing in the deep ocean waves… upside down, at least until we unstrapped from the crash harnesses.

Fire stared through the floor into the depths of the ocean – and it was deep ocean, we couldn’t see the bottom. “This is not exactly what I was expecting.”

Star joined him. “And yet statistically, it was quite likely. The planet was something like eighty percent ocean.” They paused. “We probably should have planned for this.”

I headed straight for the crystal to praise it for saving us – imagining petting its scaly skin and gently brushing its wings. Good crystal. Such a good crystal. Don’t worry about what those other two were saying, you did fine.

The good news was we wouldn’t die of thirst. Star siphoned some of the seawater into the food processor, and it was able to output drinkable water without any trouble which was good because that was literally the simplest possible thing it could make and if that hadn’t worked we would have had to print a new one.

Unfortunately, the waste from that didn’t do anything useful if we fed it into the mini-printer because there weren’t a lot of things to make out of salt. There was salt, chlorine gas, and metallic sodium. Yay.

“So, which of you can swim?” I asked.

“Not it,” they both said together.

“Also, I don’t know how and I’m not buoyant,” Star added. “I figured if I needed to swim I’d install some water legs.”

I climbed on top of a box so I could get my head above the water-line, and looked out across the relatively still water for any sign of land – nope. “I’m not buoyant either but I brought some rope so you can pull me back up. We need to find something else to put in the mini-printer.”

“I wish I could print you an air can,” Star said. We had the boxes, but there was surprisingly little material involved and the quality was low. Everything else was useful equipment that we might need.

Oh well. “I’m not going to inhale water or anything, so just pull me back in if I pass out I guess.” I opened one of the panels that was above the waterline and jumped in.

So, attempt number one. It turned out I could hold my breath for a long time as long as I didn’t move… until I sank out of range of the warp field and my internal power supply turned off, then I suddenly needed air. I saw a couple of fish that quickly swam away before I could get in arm’s reach, then I yanked frantically on the rope and they took the hint and pulled me back up before I went unconscious.

I felt very heavy as I pulled myself up over the edge and back into the raft. Kobold fur holds a lot of water. At least we were near the equator, and the water was relatively warm.

“Okay I really need an air can,” I said. “We’ve got to have something we can recycle.”

Maybe I let them bully me, or maybe it really was the easiest stuff to reprint, but we ended up using my adventuring gear – the extensible rod, the grappling hook, the climbing spikes. They were all made out of sturdy material and the rod even had some springs which Star said would help a lot making a valve. They worked up a custom air cannister that used exactly the materials we had, and we waited around for a bit while the mini-printer assembled it.

Once it was ready, I attached it to my faceplate – I had it make a hole for the air valve, but left it otherwise sealed – and jumped back in the water to try again.

Attempt number two was longer, but not any more productive – the rope was only about fifty meters long, and that wasn’t long enough to even see the bottom. I drifted around at the end of the rope for a while, but didn’t see anything slow enough for me to catch. When the air can ran out, I climbed back up the rope for some rest while Star recharged it.

“We’re not in any hurry,” Fire said, as I lay puddled at the bottom of the raft, exhausted. “We’ve got plenty of soup and water. You should wait until we see something before going out again.”

On day three I caught a fish.

We still hadn’t seen anything, but I was making a daily trip into the water just for fun because sitting around in a tiny raft was pretty boring and we’d already run out of things to say to each other before we’d even left the moon. It turns out that dragging an edible lump of meat on the end of a rope is one way to catch fish in the deep ocean.

The shark – it looked just like a real shark – swam up out of nowhere all mouth and teeth, so I kicked it in the face with my cyber leg. It managed to avoid the kick, but when it retaliated it bit down on the cybernetic part which was pretty well armored, and I decided that that had been intentional.

With it relatively immobilized, I was able to grab it by the gills and dig my claws in until it stopped thrashing around. It wasn’t a very big shark.

That left me blinded by a cloud of bloody water, but Fire and Star saw the other sharks closing in and dragged me (and my catch) back inside before they could bite down on a less metallic limb.

Once I was out of danger, I started to notice just how much pain I was in – see, only the upper part of my leg was metallic and the fleshy part below it had gotten pretty sliced up by the teeth. I twisted my leg off at the joint – shark and all – and then Fire helped me pry its jaws loose so we could see the damage.

It was pretty gruesome, but nothing had actually been bitten off or anything. Fire had some antiseptic spray in one of his pouches, and Star was able to make bandages out of the crappy box material, and we sprayed and wrapped my bleeding foot and hoped that would be enough because we didn’t have any real medical supplies. Then I put my leg back on, despite the pain, because it wasn’t going to heal if it didn’t have a blood supply.

“The good news is, if your foot dies we have the cybernetics station to make a replacement,” Star said.

“Out of what?” I asked.

Star’s faceplate turned into a rotating box. “Yeah, that’s the bad news. Probably out of shark guts.”

Making things out of shark guts wasn’t completely facetious – the shark was made out of something pretty close to normal flesh, which meant it had everything we’d need to make plastic. Star thought we could probably set up a sail, so we moved the matter compressors to the bottom of the raft for ballast and deactivated the antigrav that the one had, which made us sit a little lower in the water but not actually sink.

Star went to work designing and printing a sail, thin but strong, and a mast sturdy enough that they thought it wouldn’t snap off which we could affix to the raft’s hull. It took a full day to print on the trickle of power from the baby warp crystal, and didn’t do much when they set it up, since there wasn’t a lot of wind. We’d seen gusts on previous days, though, and figured it was just a case of being patient, but maybe slightly less patient than before.

For good or ill, it also made us more visible.

We’d just gotten a little wind, and were finally making headway towards *somewhere*, when Star, who was up on the pile of boxes we’d stacked so that they could see while working the sail, spotted something on the horizon.

That something quickly turned into ‘a giant sailboat’, and all of us clumped together on the narrow perch to get a look.

I used my faceplate to zoom in and get a better look. The ship was made out of wood, with cloth sails and some metal fixtures, including what looked like guns of some sort poking out the side. The crew were a bunch of colorful feathered bipeds, complete with beaks.

“Are they friendly?” Star asked.

“They’re smiling,” I said. “I think. Their beaks aren’t quite as mobile as Shadowfright’s.”

Then one of their guns fired, and sheared off our sail with a bunch of spinning chains. It might have sheared off our heads, too, but the chains that were low enough to do that clattered off our hull instead.

“Not friendly!” I squeaked, ducking instinctively while Fire slid the hatch shut.

By the time they pulled up alongside, wrapped our raft up in chains, and hauled us onto their deck, we had plenty of other evidence that they weren’t friendly. Their laughter and jeering had a lot of malice, they had scars and various missing body parts (with very crude prosthetics, if any) which meant they did a lot of fighting, and the little flag on top of their mast was a skull.

“Open up, ye scallywags, or I’ll open yer throats!” shouted the leader – or at least, the pirate with the biggest hat – rapping their curved sword against our hull. This attempt at diplomacy came after five minutes of futile attempts to pry it open with crowbars, or bash through it with sledgehammers.

“And if we do open up, you’ll let us go?” Star asked.

The pirates laughed. “Aye!” the leader said. “Over the edge, into the briny deep, with only a slashed gut to draw the sharks.”

Fire said, quietly, “If we melt down the impellers, I bet I can make some tasers for you two. Then at least we’d all be armed.”

“We’re a little outnumbered,” I hissed back, looking around at the dozens of colorful birds brandishing weapons in our general direction, albeit somewhat lackadaisically due to the transparent walls between us.

“We just need to make it to the edge,” Fire said. “We can jump in the water and think of something else from there. Unless you have a better idea?”

I did not, but I did have a worse idea. I turned to the pirate. “Let us join your crew!”

They put their hands on their hips. “And why would I let a bunch of scurvy sea dogs join my proud parrots?” I think they said parrots. I mean, that was the name for their species, we found out later. They might have said pirates though.

“Because we’re the only ones who know how to use our stuff,” I said. “It’s just junk to you otherwise.”

“I see at least one shiny gem,” they said, looking at the warp crystal.

“It’s a *magic* shiny gem, but I’m the only one here who knows how to use it,” I said. I kicked the mini-printer. “And Star’s the only one who knows how to get full use out of the printer. They can make it make stuff out of other stuff.”

The pirate looked interested. “What kind of stuff?”

“I made the sail you broke,” Star said. “Out of a shark!” I think that just confused the pirates. *I* thought it sounded impressive.

“What about the third?” the pirate asked.

“Oh, he’s useless,” I said. “Toss him over the side.”

“I can fight!” Fire snapped, slapping me on the side of the head. Which I thought was unwarranted – hadn’t he wanted to go over the side?

“Can you,” the pirate said, looking down at him suspiciously. The parrots were a lot bigger than us – twice our height, although not as solidly built. “I’ll let you fight one of my crew, then. If you win, the three of ye can join our merry band. If you lose, you go over the side, and the other two will be our slaves.”

“Could she get more cliché?” Star whispered to me.

“You’ve got a deal,” Fire said. “Back off, I’m coming out.”

The parrots formed a circle around us, and Fire clambered out of the raft and stood on the deck, waiting.

“Bosun!” called the leader, and a gigantic parrot lumbered through the crowd to face him down, carrying a giant metal hook on a chain as a weapon. “Lay out this ‘lubber for me, will you?”

The parrot twirled his hook over his head, making a sinister whistling noise. Fire watched it cautiously, and when it slammed down – faster than I could even *see* -- he dodged to the side and punched the giant parrot in the crotch.

With his taser.

That was the end of the fight. The bosun jerked and twitched for a bit, dropped his weapon, and then – once Fire stopped tasing him – collapsed in a heap. The crowd cheered, and we were welcomed to the crew of the Filthy Feather. More or less.

The captain – Pareto, they introduced themself as – wanted a demonstration of my ‘magic gem’ because they suspected I was making that part up.

“It’s young,” I said, holding it to my chest and imagining the mindscape from last time – a mountaintop nest, with a tiny dragon perched on my shoulder. “It can do a few tricks though.” I hoped.

“Show me one,” they said.

I pointed to one of the pirates – not the captain! – and asked the warp crystal to make their matter more firmly attached to its current position and momentum. “Inertia,” I whispered to it. “This is called increasing inertia.”

The pirate staggered, gave out a pained chirp, and collapsed. I had the crystal let them go before they had time to suffer serious injury. The looked pretty angry, though.

“I’ll make it up to you later?” I said, grinning.

They pulled out a little gun, and pointed it at me.

“Do the opposite to me!” I quickly told the crystal, and when the bullet smacked into my belly, it didn’t have enough kinetic energy to penetrate my fur, let alone my skin. I pulled it out and held it up. “Good enough?” I asked the leader.

“I’ve seen unicorns who can do more than that,” they said, not particularly impressed. They did wave the pirate off, so at least he didn’t shoot me again. “Could you knock down more than one at a time?”

“Anything or everything within range,” I said. “Um… about ten meters right now I think.”

They frowned. “What is that in hooves?”

“I’m about a meter tall,” I said.

They eyed me a bit. “So thirty hooves. And you can make everything inside that range immune to bullets?”

I nodded. The warp crystal hadn’t had any trouble understanding the command, and it wouldn’t be any harder for it to get everything instead of just one thing.

“What about cannon fire?”

I frowned. Wasn’t that just another word for gun? “Are those are the big guns?” I guessed. They nodded. “It should work on those too.”

“If we put you up in the rigging, you could protect the sails and most of the deck,” they mused. “Won’t help with solid shot if they’re trying to sink us, but ponies usually try to cripple us first.” They slapped me on the shoulder. I think it was supposed to be friendly, so I smiled a little nervously. “I think we’ve got a battle station for you, at least. Go below deck and find a berth.”

I’d just gotten to the bottom of the stairs when someone grabbed me and slammed me against a wall, grinding my faceplate against the wood. “So,” they snarled in my ear. “Make it up to me, you said. How do you reckon you’re going to do that?”

Ah, it was the pirate I’d demonstrated on.

“I didn’t expect you to be that mad!” I whimpered. “I could… suck your dick?”

This worked a little better than it had on Luna, which wasn’t saying much. They turned me around and slammed my back into the wall, holding me up off the ground so that they could stare me in the eye-spots. “Do I look like a man to you?”

“I don’t know how to tell on parrots,” I squeaked.

“I have breasts!” they – I mean, I guess ‘she’ – shouted at me, before shoving them in my face.

“Okay okay,” I said. “But I mean it didn’t hurt that much, did it? I figured a little pleasure could make up for the pain.”

“Fuck the pain,” she snapped. “You humiliated me in front of everyone! But you know what? Fine. You can make up for it by licking my snatch.”

“Yay?” I said.

“On the deck, in front of everyone,” she sneered.

“Okay,” I said. Then, a little belatedly, flattened my ears to try to fake embarrassment. My expression was jaggy enough that I didn’t have to fake not being happy.

She dragged me back up the stairs – carrying me over her shoulder like a sack of dust – and plopped me down on my tail in the middle of the deck. Before I could stand up, she grabbed me by the back of the head and shoved my face into her crotch, her other hand loosening her belt and letting her pants fall around her knees.

“Lick!” she shouted, getting everyone’s attention who hadn’t already been paying attention.

I cracked my faceplate, and buried my tongue in her feathers.

I’m not going to say she was perfectly clean, but she was a lot cleaner than I had any right to expect given how filthy the rest of the ship was – although come to think of it, all the pirates had had bright, well-maintained plumage. At any rate, there was a bit of her scent but not enough to be unpleasant as I slipped my tongue through the downy feathers and along the vent I found beneath. I teased it a bit and was rewarded with a firm shove to the back of my head, prompting me to slip it inside.

Bird genitalia are a little weird, but it’s still a sensitive area that you can get a good response from by licking over the surface gently. I didn’t find anything like a clitoris, but she gave me enough prompting from her grip on my head that I could tell which parts felt especially good, and I focused there for a while. Kobolds have pretty long tongues, so I was able to explore the entirety of her little pocket, and delve a bit into each of the opening that led further inside her…

“Fuuuuck,” she said, her grip loosening briefly, before her ‘snatch’ convulsed around my tongue. “Fuck yes,” she said, dragging my head away and shoving me onto my back in front of her. My cock – always aroused by oral sex – jutted up into the air, but she ignored it, having had her fun. And I guess her humiliation, although I’ve never been able to figure out why people are embarrassed to have sex in public.

“I’ve got next,” said one of the spectators, taking a step towards us.

She shoved them back. “Fuck off, he’s mine,” she said.

And that’s how I acquired a pirate girlfriend. Or vice versa, I suppose.

It wasn’t a terrible relationship. There wasn’t any privacy on the pirate ship, and she *was* a bit embarrassed by public sex, so my main ‘boyfriend’ duty was being a big fluffy pillow for her to cuddle while she slept. Sometimes she’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and we’d have careful, quiet sex.

Sometimes she’d joke about lending me out to the rest of the crew, which I would have been fine with, which is probably why she never actually did.

And she wove me a lanyard to mount the warp crystal in, so that I could wear it like an amulet. That was nice.

So why the fuck did being her ‘bitch’ cost me -5 REP?

At any rate, while I was making peace with one specific pirate (and spending most of the rest of the time training the warp crystal because there wasn’t a lot else to do on the ship except clean), Star was doing her best to get the parrots hooked up to the virtual world. Part of this was because the virtual world was peer-to-peer and with only our three rigs running it it was pretty bare-bones, but I think most of it was because they were bored.

The ship had plenty of organic waste, and they only needed small amounts of silicon and gold to do the circuitry itself. The pirates sacrificed a giant ruby – seriously, it was the size of my palm – and a few gold bits (the coins were literally called ‘bits’) and that was enough to make three dozen of the headsets like we’d given the Nyx. We didn’t have a brain scanner, or Dot around to do the scanning, but parrot brains were pretty normal and the default settings worked.

It took three days for the leader to notice parrots zoning out and ban ‘hallucination’ on duty. I was mostly busy with the crystal, but I peeked into the virtual world they were building and the main part was a much larger pirate ship that flew through the air with giant propeller blades. I suppose you didn’t select a pirate crew for their imagination.

The headsets had a little flip-down eyepiece in case the pirates wanted a HUD (or to use the zoom function or read messages without going virtual, or whatever), and Fire decided that meant they should be running the combat tracker… which meant all of them could look at my stats.

Wave – lv 3 warp magician
Kobold – 6% cybernetic
STR 10 AGI 7 CON 14 INT 13 WIS 8 CHA 17
ATK 23 DEF 15 HP 34 REP -3
Weapon: steel dirk
Armor: padded coat
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1, Warp Crystal (lv 2 – juvenile - MP 14)
Spells Known: Power Field, Crush, Feather Shield, Brittle
Titles Earned: Shark Bait, Pirate Bitch

“Why does it keep calling me that?” I complained to my girlfriend, sitting in her lap as she rested on her hammock. “I’m not even a dog.”

Polly stroked my back, then pushed my head to her chest. We were relatively alone at the time with only a few parrots around, none of them paying attention, so I pulled her shirt to the side and started fondling her breasts and licking her nipple, since she enjoyed that.

“Probably because you come like a bitch whenever I call,” she said, groping my butt. I gasped as her fingers found my pussy and started playing around. “Come on,” she said, resting her thumb on the base of my cock as two of her fingers slid inside. “Scream for me.”

I moaned, and shuddered, and, well, had to go wash off my clothes again.

Polly had been intrigued when she first noticed I had a pussy. “Are you a guy or a girl?” she asked, poking at it. We’d just had sex, so we were whispering to each other in her hammock in the dead of night.

“Neither really,” I told her. “Kobolds are kind of both.”

“So you don’t mind if I keep calling you a boy?” Her hand slid up to stroke my flacid penis instead, all slimy with our juices.

“I don’t mind at all,” I gasped, still a bit sensitive.

Overall, the pirate crew was only a little different from a kobold crew. It was a collective, mostly, although they voted on things if they couldn’t immediately reach a consensus, which I guess made sense if you couldn’t easily split the crew (Polly said that the crews would split on the rare occasions they stopped in port). The captain, who I’d been calling the ‘leader’, was only in charge for emergencies and the rest of the time people only obeyed when the orders were obviously correct (like ‘don’t spend your lookout shift in the virtual world’). That’s why the ship was so dirty – the pirates weren’t especially filthy people, but their cleaning tools were terrible and painful to use, and it was a repetitive, thankless task that kept having to be re-done because the waves would occasionally wash over the deck and get everything dirty again.

Captain Pareto also owned the ship as personal property, and could toss people off if she really didn’t like them, but unless they tried to mutiny or something she at least let them off on land. Not that that happened while we were with her. Yes, she was a girl, as Star had figured out instantly but I needed to be told.

They were also mostly explorers. All the actual freight traffic was handled by airships – we saw a few fly by overhead – and a wave-bound pirate ship wasn’t going to be taking many prizes. Aside from very lost travelers like ourselves, the only people they expected to run into were other pirates. The tradition when we saw other pirates was to fire a few broadsides at each other from extreme range, where we were unlikely to actually hit, and with me up on the mainmast protecting the rigging and the deck there was even less risk than normal. For us. The one pirate ship we ran into lost their rear mast, and I saw ponies tumbling from the ruined rigging into the ocean, some of them missing pieces because we’d been firing those nasty chains.

No, our actual job was to sail between the thousands of tiny islands that dotted the seas and search them for treasure.

There was a lot of treasure to be found. The world had seen disaster after civilization-ending disaster, and each of them left artifacts behind in scattered ruins. The islands in particular were a popular place for survivors fleeing the disasters to run to and hide away their valuables, before inevitably dying out or degenerating into mere monsters. Or, you know, not doing that and just continuing to be civilized people, but those islands were known so they were easy to skip.

So in the dead of night, we sailed up to an island with a creepy glowing skull face the size of a mountain, lit from within by what looked like lava, and dropped anchor about a kilometer offshore. Pareto stood proudly on the aftcastle, looking at her map. “This is it, girls!” she said. “The lost treasure of the Arimaspi is ours for the taking!”

I raised my blade and cheered along with everyone else, I mean maybe a half-second late because I hadn’t been expecting it.

“We may get scorched by fiery demons, or torn to shreds in the claws and teeth of the gargantuan beasts of old, but we’ll do it with shiny treasure in our claws!”

She paused for more cheering, then continued with a serious look on her face. “A single idol from the Arimaspi was enough to lift the mongrel griffon hordes to a century of glory. If we find half of what is rumored to be buried here, we’ll put their empire to shame! Parresia will rule the waves forevermore!”

“At least she dreams big,” Star sent to Fire and me.

I sent back a shrug. “There’ve been pirate empires before. The hive mind probably thinks we’re one of them.”

“If she really wants to rule the world she should give us an island and let us build one for her,” Fire said. “Nothing we’ve seen here compares to our tech.”

“That wouldn’t be *her* empire though,” I noted. “Some people consider that the important part.” After a second, I added, “Also, remember the moon. Throwing the moon at us compares to our tech pretty favorably.”

The ship, surprisingly, had enough little boats to ferry everyone to shore in one trip, except for Star and a couple of the parrots who volunteered to stay behind and guard.

On the beach, we split up into small groups to comb the island for treasure. I teamed up with Fire and Polly and the three of us headed for the lowlands on the far side of the mountain from the giant skull.

“You really think we’ll find the treasure here?” Polly asked.

“I think Wave and I are low status enough that if we found treasure in an obvious place someone else would take it away from us,” Fire said. “I don’t know why you came.”

“She’s worried you’ll fuck me so hard I’ll forget about her,” I said.

“I’m worried you’ll get hurt,” Polly snapped. “Little guys like you need a big strong parrot to protect you.”

“Not going to argue,” I said, holding up my hands. “Fire?”

He laughed. “I’m not in this for the glory. She can steal all the kills she can handle.”

I snuck a peek at her stats…

Polly – lv 1 Pirate
Parrot – 0% cybernetic
STR 10 DEX 14 CON 8 INT 8 WIS 12 CHA 14
ATK 21 DEF 20 HP 18 REP 1
Weapon: cutlass, smoke grenades
Armor: padded coat
Rig: basic headset
Accessory: lucky charm
Titles Earned: Kobold Lover

…which were probably not a fair assessment of her combat experience, since it had only started tracking the pirates recently.

We spent some time carving our way through the underbrush with our blades. The island was pretty jungly, but not very dangerous – the plants had thorns but nothing that could get through even the cheap pirate clothing we were wearing.

“So are we actually going to look for treasure, or are you just leading us into the middle of nowhere so we can finally have some privacy for a threesome?” I asked, when we stopped for a rest. I was already in Polly’s lap, because she wanted to pet me.

“Why not both?” Fire said, crouched near the exit of the little cleared out space we’d found inside a bush, keeping watch for the monsters that were taking their sweet time finding us.

“Mmm, okay,” I said. “Who gets to be in the middle?”

Fire shrugged. “Polly’s the only one without a penis. You want her cunt or her ass?”

“It’s the same hole on parrots,” I said, with the benefit of my considerable experience. “Why don’t you take her mouth?” I opened her shirt to start fondling her, and snuck my tail into her pants, tickling her vent with its fur.

“Guys?” she said. “Are you seriously –”

I silenced her with a kiss, cracking my faceplate to snake my tongue over her beak. She tilted her head for a closer seal, and leaned into it. When I pulled back, she was still silent for a bit, distracted by my other ministrations.

“He likes having his dick sucked,” I stage-whispered to her. “So you should probably lick his pussy.”

So I was a bit surprised when Fire yanked my tail out of her pants, and rammed his cock into me from behind. I lost my grip on Polly, and fell back into his arms as he thrust his hips to shove himself deeper inside. “Oh fuck…” I moaned – he felt so good, after so long without a cock inside me.

Polly leaned down – way down – and took my shaft in her beak, gripping it with the surprisingly gentle edges and slurping at it with her tongue. It was… different, but pretty much any oral attention feels really fucking good, especially with another friend pumping away behind you. I barely had time to enjoy it before shooting off in her mouth…

And of course, neither of them were done. Fire shoved me down on my back and spread my legs to take me more conventionally, while Polly sat on my face for some somewhat distracted licking. She combed her claws up my belly until they hooked under my chestplate, and used the leverage to smother me underneath her feathery behind. I couldn’t breathe, at all, but with the warp crystal hang around my neck I didn’t really need to – my emergency power supply gave me enough energy to lie there twitching around Fire’s cock, and even to stroke Polly’s feathers and squirm my tongue around inside her. That didn’t leave me a lot of energy to think with, and I drifted along in a half-conscious daze until the two of them finally finished.

I came to to Polly poking me with a stick. “Is he okay?”

“She’s fine,” Fire said, stroking my foot.

“She?”

“We always called her a girl. I don’t think she actually cares.”

“I don’t,” I said, taking a deep breath, and slowly sitting up as I switched back to my oxygen metabolism. “I’ll be your boy, your girl, your tentacle monster if we’re in the virtual world and that’s what you’re into.”

“You don’t have to be a boy to use your penis,” Fire said.

“Whatever,” I said, taking a few more deep breaths, and fixing my clothing so that it mostly covered me again. I probably wasn’t going to get clean until we got back to the ship.

“I’d rather have a boy,” Polly said. “Besides, his lights are all blue. That’s a boy color.”

“Then as a manly kobold I will declare myself recovered,” I said, standing up. “Let’s go find some shinies.”

We eventually found some giant ants, which were a good match for us. One of them bit me and tried to drag me away, but I stabbed it in the head until it stopped moving. Dying didn’t make it let go. By the time I pried its jaws off of my shoulder-plate the other three were also dead, having failed to land a hit on either of my companions.

I poked at my shoulder display, shattered and dark. “Ow,” I said.

“Did you break something?” Fire asked.

I shook my head.

Fire sighed. “You need to stop doing that. Dodge the attacks.”

“I know, I know, ‘learn to play’,” I grumbled. “Maybe I just need to start wearing armor.”

We ran across another giant ant a few minutes later, and Fire made me fight it by myself. I grabbed the warp crystal and had the little imaginary dragon crush the life out of it with inertia.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Let it up.”

“Ugh, fine…”

I tried asking the dragon to take away the ant’s inertia if it looked like it was about to bite me, but I wasn’t sure it understood. At any rate, when I was expecting the attack my dirk was long enough to keep the thing at bay, and we danced around each other for a while until five more ants showed up, heading right for us, and we decided running away was the better part of valor.

“Or you know,” I said, as I stumbled through the brush trying to keep on Polly’s tail. “I could just crush them all with the warp crystal.”

“Don’t train the warp crystal to kill things!” Fire shouted back from in front of her.

That was kind of a good point.

The ants stopped chasing us, eventually. I tried to use the warp crystal to get them off our tail a couple times – making some trees brittle so I could kick them down behind us as a barrier (but ants are very good climbers), and lessening our inertia to let us make huge jumps (this took several tries to get right; the key was to bring the inertia back just after we left the ground so we didn’t get swamped by drag) – but I think they just gave up once we were out of their territory.

“What did you do to those trees?” Fire asked me.

I grinned. “I can’t quite turn wood into cake, but I can weaken it a lot. On the ship I was able to pull it apart with my hands like it was cotton or something.”

Fire gave a big jaggy frown. “But that only works on rock.”

“I only had wood to train it with, so with my crystal it works on wood.” I frowned a bit too. “I hope I can still teach it to do stone.”

“Does the wood get strong again when you stop weakening it?” Polly asked. I nodded. “Then I’ve got an idea.”

I weakened a smallish tree – all the trees around here were pretty small, but this one was arguably in bush territory – and she stripped off some branches and braided them together into a long pole, then took my Dirk and tied the ends of the branches around the crossguard to hold it in place. Once the wood was un-weakened, I had a workable spear. I gave it a few practice stabs into the ground, and the blade didn’t wiggle or come loose.

“You looked like you needed a longer reach,” she explained.

I grinned. “I like it! We should go back and find some ants to try it out.”

“We’re here for treasure, not ants,” Fire said.

“I know,” I said, “But I was thinking… ants like to drag everything back to their nest, right?”

Polly nodded. “Everything they think they can eat, at least.”

“But the one that jumped us went right for my shoulder plate. That’s not edible – its shiny. I think these ants were collecting shinies.”

“That seems like a leap of logic,” Fire said.

“It’s easy enough to test,” I replied.

I twisted my shoulder plate to unhook it from my chestplate, and tossed it back towards ant territory like a frisbee. The three of us crouched down to wait… and sure enough, before too long, one of the giants ants came and dragged it away.

Fire shook his head. “It probably just smelled you on it.”

“And now you’re down a shoulder plate,” Polly said. “Being asymmetrical is more pirate, I guess.”

I frowned at that notion. But no, this was temporary. “We can track it to their nest, and I bet we’ll find some of the arimaspi treasure we’re looking for right there with it.”

“I don’t want to fight through an entire ant nest,” Fire said.

“Oh, right,” I said, pouting. “That’s fine, I needed to train my warp crystal to work on dirt and rock anyway. We’ll dig our way in.”

We headed back to the ship to get some supplies before starting that, of course. The main thing we needed was a matter compressor. Mine was empty, since Star had been handing out soup to the cooks and had finished it off before starting on the new one, so we swapped the antigrav harness over to it and let it float along behind us.

“Bring it back full!” they said, eager to get some new materials to work with.

We also picked up half a dozen more parrots. A couple of other groups had come back to take a break from fruitless searching in the foothills and were eager to see if my plan would pan out. Since digging and fighting ants were both easier with more people, I was happy to have them along.

Polly was a bit pensive.

“I know, I know,” I said, patting her butt. “No more private time.”

“Actually, I was thinking about lending you out to them,” she said. “Watching Fire screw you was hot.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t follow through with that. Everyone was pretty focused on the treasure, anyway, so I don’t know how well it would have gone over.

We had a carpenter with us, who told us about shoring up our tunnel so it wouldn’t collapse – he recruited another parrot and they started chopping down trees while I taught the warp crystal to weaken dirt and rock, which turned out to be really easy compared to the wood. After that we were digging at a kobold pace, the four parrots with hoses sucking up liquified material and feeding it into the matter compressor, while Fire stood guard and I made sure the leading edge of the tunnel stayed soft and the compressor’s antigrav harness didn’t drift out of range.

We were fifty meters down – and maybe two hundred meters laterally – by the time the carpenter was ready to set up the first crossbar to shore up the first three meters of tunnel. We’d had a few collapses but not actually on anybody’s head, and it was easy enough to backtrack to soften and slurp up the fallen rubble. I will say that the first twenty meters or so was more of a trench than a tunnel by that point.

It still took hours to break through into the ants’ midden. Or what we’d expected to be the ants’ midden. What we actually found was a bit different.

“I just broke through!” Polly shouted. “Careful, everyone!”

The pirates quickly cleared away a hole in the bottom of the tunnel. I firmed up the rock, and one of the ones I didn’t know leaned down to get a look – and squawked, and vanished, as something grabbed her and dragged her through.

Fire shouted “Ambush!” and drew his sword, then leapt down after her, followed by the other pirates. There was a scuffle, some clanging of metal on metal, and then a quiet ‘zzzt’ as Fire resorted to his taser, which he’d been trying to use sparingly as more of a secret weapon. That was enough for me to join the fray, or at least to peek over the edge to see what was going on.

Hulking, doglike creatures, plated in metal armor with full-face helmets, had Fire and the parrots tied up in nets, and were dragging them away as they struggled. They had one of the giant ants hooked up to a cart, with my shoulder plate sitting in it alongside a few of this world’s gigantic gemstones.

I gripped my warp gem and focused. “Just the armor,” I imagined telling the little dragon. “Their armor is too massive to move.” Once they’d stopped moving – for the ones already in motion, this involved toppling to the ground first – I hopped down and started untangling the parrots from the nets.

There was one dog who hadn’t been wearing armor, and while he was only about my size and unarmed, he pointed at me and whistled at the ant, which unharnessed itself and charged in my direction. I stabbed at it with a spear, and maybe it was only a draft ant and not a warrior ant because it was a lot slower than the ones we’d fought on the surface. Eventually I managed to wedge my spear between its jaws and shove the blade up into its brain, and it wiggled for a while before going still.

By that time, the little dog was long gone. I finished freeing Fire and the parrots, grabbed my shoulder plate (and the gems), and we got the hell out of there.

“Diamond dogs!” spat Pareto when we reported back. “Those mangy beggars’ve probably looted this whole island by now. No wonder we didn’t find squat.”

“They seemed pretty civilized,” I said. “Does this mean we move on?”

“What, and leave my treasure in the paws of those thieves?” she snapped. “They aren’t arimaspi – they’ve got no more claim to this island’s treasure than we do. They’re competition, and I won’t let them grab the lion’s share of the loot.”

“They kind of kicked our butts,” I noted. “They’ve got some serious armor for this tech level.”

“Taser didn’t even work,” Fire added. “That armor’s insulated and grounded.”

“And they’re faster than they look,” Polly chimed in.

“Buncha canaries,” Pareto said. “They got the drop on ye, that’s all. Next time we’ll be ready. Call everyone back! We go out in force and take what’s rightfully ours!”

Fire and I went to talk to Star about options, since it seemed like fighting these guys was inevitable.

“Stretchy nets, maybe?” they suggested. “There’s plenty of raw material on the island, and nets don’t care how much armor you’re wearing. And I’ve got a pattern for net guns; it’s standard.” They turned from the mini-printer to the food processor. “Napalm’s probably out if you’re fighting underground, since you want to breathe. Poison gas?”

“Risky,” Fire said.

“Glue bombs,” Star said. “That’s kind of redundant with the nets but should probably work.”

Pareto was in too much of a hurry for us to re-arm everybody, but we made net guns and glue bombs for ourselves, and Polly, and a couple of the other pirates who’d been with us on the dig and didn’t want to face down dogs in full plate with just cutlasses and cloth armor. As it was, we were near the tail end of the column that marched out to do battle.

“So just to be clear,” I said to Fire and Star as we marched to our doom. “This was not part of my idea. I’m not taking credit for getting us all killed.”

When we got back we found our tunnel had collapsed, but we didn’t even have to dig it out – the collapse was narrow enough that I could get all of it with the warp crystal in one go, and then the loosened mud (too much water in the area for it to be dust) slid down the rest of the tunnel on its own. It barely slowed us down.

There was an ant ambush at the bottom of the tunnel where we’d run into the diamond dogs – they’d sprayed some foul-smelling chemical that attracted the ants from the hive proper, and the parrots had to fight them off before we could move on. Cutlasses and handheld guns were enough to take care of the ants, although one of the parrots got a deep gash in his thigh, down to the bone, and the pirate doctor decided to amputate, right there in the dirt. Fire broke out his antiseptic spray to at least attempt to prevent infection, although the others didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. One of the other parrots left with the new amputee to head back to the ship and fit him with a proper peg-leg.

The rest of us moved on, following a set of tracks deeper underground. Pareto was in the lead, keeping an eye out for traps, and she marked several before stumbling over a pressure plate disguised as a rock, which opened a pit three meters behind her. The mechanism was slow, and most of the parrots managed to jump to safety, but one went tumbling into the darkness, her scream cut off with a sickening squelch. I glanced down in the pit as we passed it and saw her gruesomely impaled on a bunch of spikes. Yeah, the diamond dogs had set out the good traps for us.

Their maze was short, though, and not very maze-like with the tracks leading us right to a wide open cavern in the center. Of course it opened onto a killing ground, a cleared area doubtless riddled with traps, where the enemy crouched with crossbows behind two rows of metal barriers.

“Charge!” Pareto shouted, aiming her handgun and expertly placing her bullet in the gap between one of the crouching dogs’ helmet and breastplate. The parrots without ranged weapons cheered and rushed forwards past her, while the other gunners lined up next to her and completely failed to repeat her performance. She took out another dog with her other barrel, but before she could reload the walls burst open to either side and the ambush squad descended on the rear.

…not the very rear. Fire and Star and I, and the parrots we’d armed, hadn’t wanted to charge forward into such an obvious deathtrap, so we were ready in reserve when the surprise was sprung. Nets and glue bombs rained on the ambushers, quickly tying them all down – but not quickly enough. Pareto and the others had been standing in the narrow entrance, immediately in range of the dogs’ spears, and most of them were dead in seconds.

“Come on!” Fire said, running up to the struggling, netted dogs. “They left us a back door!”

Sure enough, the ambush squads had tunnels that led around behind the barricades, and our special squad lost no time hurrying down the one on the left. We came out behind the second set of barricades, and before the crossbow dogs knew what was happening they were netted and glued. The first set of barricades was a messy melee of half a dozen pirates who’d made it past the traps, and ten lightly armored dogs without any real melee weapons. It was too mixed up for nets or glue, but Fire and a couple of the parrots with us headed over to help out with their swords (and taser).

“I think we might actually win this,” I said, looking up at Polly, just in time to see a massive crossbow bolt shunk into her forehead from above.

Her eyes crossed, and she collapsed at my feet, convulsing and pissing herself. I looked up where the bolt must have come from and saw the diamond dogs’ leader frantically reloading his weapon. I barely even had to think to touch the warp crystal and have it help me leap ten meters, kicking him in the face. He clawed at my thigh – my cybernetic thigh – and then coughed up blood with my spear wedged in his sternum. A firmer thrust shoved it right through him, into the roof, and he stopped moving.

After that, it was just mopping up. Pareto was dead, along with most of her crew, and the survivors showed no mercy to the dogs who threw down their weapons, or to the dogs trapped in nets or glue. Every last diamond dog was put to the sword, and I would have helped them if I hadn’t been sobbing over Polly’s corpse while Star explained to me that even for a kobold they would have needed a lot more equipment to bring her back than we had.

And she wasn’t a kobold, so she couldn’t just shut down and wait until we had the things we needed – she was a parrot, and dead parrots stayed dead.

To add insult to injury, we didn’t even find much treasure – as far as we could tell, not having any prisoners to ask directly, the diamond dogs who’d looted the arimaspi were long gone, and this group was just a bunch of ant-tamers combing the island for dregs who’d set up camp in a long-abandoned underground village.

So morale was very low when the fifteen survivors – most of us badly wounded – met on the deck of the Filthy Feather to decide what to do next. The consensus was to head back to Free Haven to offload the wounded and take on new crew, but Pareto and her second were both dead, and the chain of command hadn’t gone any deeper than that. Who got to keep the ship?

“We should stay here,” Star said. “Kobolds were never meant for boats. Our tech barely works on the open ocean.”

“It’s a lost island,” I said. “No one will come to visit us here. We’ll be almost as bored as we were on the moon.”

Fire shook his head. “The diamond dogs got here somehow. I bet this pack won’t be the last.”

“Besides, we could use some boredom,” Star said. “We need to build a stable colony – raise some eggs for the specialties we’re missing, build the rest of the fabricator, maybe even put a comm tower up on that scary volcano? If we’re still lonely after that, we can build boats of our own and find friends that way.”

“So you’re ditching us and taking your tech?” Phillip complained. “You’re the only good thing we found on this trip. And you said you’d make me a better peg-leg!”

Star cringed as some of the other parrots chimed in with similar complaints.

I held up my hands to pacify them. “Look, you don’t have to leave right now. Give us a few days and we can finish off Star’s outstanding orders… in a week she can have a new mini-printer for you to take with you, and train one of you to use it. Right?”

Star nodded. They’d done as much with the Nyx, so it wasn’t an impossible task.

“And what about your magic stone?” Pirra asked.

“It’s still a baby,” I said. “It’s going to be a long time before I can duplicate it.”

The vote was nine to six to let me stay on the island… and that’s with the three of us voting in my favor. But they could hardly argue that I wasn’t enough of a part of the crew to vote during a vote about whether to let me leave it.

They ended up staying for two weeks, which was honestly a big help setting up our new home – a cave we dug out ourselves in the foothills, far from the diamond dogs’ lair. Phillip – one of Star’s chosen apprentices – wanted to stay longer, but after two weeks the vote was ‘leave’, and the vote to let him stay behind with us failed almost unanimously (I voted to let him, but Star and Fire both wanted him gone).

I was also extremely pregnant by that point. Apparently, Fire had knocked me up. Two weeks had been plenty of time to set up a hatchery, though, and the laying went smoothly this time. I set the networked egg-caps -- basically headsets for eggs... eggsets? -- on each of the eggs myself, and the diagnostics verified that the accelerated learning software was online and ready for the embryos to develop brains.

When I headed out to the shore after finishing up, the Filthy Feather was already a dot on the horizon.

Princess Problems

By unspoken, unanimous consent, we didn’t get started on the next generation right away. This was normal – a collective usually laid one set of eggs, then didn’t lay any more until they were grown up and ready to lay eggs of their own. And now we knew why.

This didn’t mean we never had sex, it meant that we had sex virtually after an accelerated full night’s sleep. Usually it was just me and Fire, but Star joined us occasionally just to reassure us that they were still part of the family. We’d spend five or six hours cuddling and screwing and playing virtual games at normal speed, get another accelerated night’s rest, then wake up with the kids for their real-life phase.

We were relaxing as dragons in a virtual lava bath when a guest account logged on to our network. Since there were only three of us (the kids didn’t count yet since they were still locked to educational access), we’d taken to reskinning the main room for this sort of thing, so the Guest1 kobold appeared in the lava and immediately caught on fire.

Guests didn’t feel pain or take damage, so we just sort of laughed at them as they flailed around in panic and then realized that they weren’t actually burning up. “It’s me!” they said, once they settled down.

“Shadowfright?” I guessed. We hadn’t set up a transmission tower, so there was no way this was a legitimate connection from the moon.

“You recognized me!” he said. I hadn’t, it was just that the last time a random guest kobold had shown up it had been him and one other and I didn’t remember the other’s name. “I’ve been trying to get into your dream for a while but it keeps flinging me back out.”

“We’ve been using a lot of accelerated time,” I said. “Maybe that doesn’t work with your dream cauldron?”

“Oh that would explain it,” he said. “How are you doing? Have you linked up with Enny yet?”

“We have babies!” Star said. “But we haven’t linked up with anyone. We had a guest, but he left just after the hatching.”

“Why would we link up with Enny?” I asked. “Did Breeze throw them out of the moonbase too?”

“I guess you could say that?” the guest said, shrugging. “They weren’t sure you’d made it, so they sent down a second team with Enny, Dot, and Skull. I think they’re on the far side of the planet?”

“We really could have used the reinforcements here,” Fire said.

“They never would have been able to join up with us, even if they’d landed in the same place,” I reminded him. “Who knows how far away we were dragged by those parrots?”

“It sounds like you’ve been busy,” Shadowfright said.

“I’ve been keeping a log,” I told him. “Want me to send you a copy?”

“Um… I can’t actually receive files through the dream cauldron?” he said. “You could tell me the story though, and I could pass it on!”

So the three of us spent a while relating our exploits to him. “Parrots are good folk,” he remarked when we told him about the pirate ship. Also, “Oh, stay away from the diamond dogs!” and “Yeah, that sure sounds like a dragon.”

“Oh! That reminds me!” he said, interrupting the part of the story where Ash almost got me killed in the labyrinth. “Luna saw a dragon’s nightmare, and apparently it was full of baby kobolds. She put two and two together and came up to the moon to ask if the kobolds were still here. I told them about your mission, and I think she’s going to come visit.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s, um…”

“Fuck,” Fire said.

“She didn’t seem interested last time,” I said.

Fire snorted. “No, I mean, we’re fucked.”

“Oh you guys!” Shadowfright said. “Don’t be so gloomy. I’m sure she just wants to welcome you to Equestria!”

“The island has a giant flaming skull,” Fire said, pacing nervously. “She’s going to find us.”

“We’re not *in* the skull, though,” I pointed out. “We might have a little bit of warning.”

“Or she might be able to detect our children’s educational program with her dream powers and home in on us like a missile,” Fire replied.

“Our traps are still mostly set up for the dragon,” I said. “That might not be easy for her to get through… but we should assume that she will get through them. Friendly traps only.”

“So just repair the grabby-spears?” Star said.

Fire and I nodded.

Fire turned around and paces the other way. “For weapons, if she gets through and is hostile, we’ve got net guns, tasers, glue bombs…”

“Knives, sledgehammers,” I added.

Star pointed to the wall mount. “Fire extinguishers!”

“Claws and teeth,” Fire said.

“A bunch of baby kobolds to throw at her as a distraction,” I suggested.

“No,” said Fire and Star together.

I shrugged. “Fine, but they’re the only thing that worked against the dragon.”

“We could throw you at her!” Star said.

“I’d throw myself at her *again* if I thought it would work,” I said. “She seems to be immune to my charms. Oh! But I’ve got the warp crystal now so I could try using spells on her.”

“Spells,” Fire said, his eye spots narrowing.

I folded my arms. “That’s what the combat tracker calls them. Crush, Feather Shield, maybe Super Jump could come in handy. Brittle on her weapons if she brings any. She was naked on the moon.”

“She wasn’t naked,” Star said. “She was wearing shoes.”

“Those are probably weapons,” Fire said. “Horses kick.”

Luna arrived later that day, which was enough time to fix the trap at least. We herded the kids into the hatchery and let them go virtual again a bit ahead of schedule so they’d be out of the way. They were still too young to question it, although not too young to get distracted and wander off if we didn’t literally herd them like sheep.

She circled the island a couple of times, then swooped down right towards our cave entrance, blasting the drone – still parked on the hilltop over the cave – with some sort of blue laser from her horn when Fire connected to it and had it point its camera-eyes at her.

Star squeaked in indignation.

Luna took two steps into the labyrinth, and let out a pulse from her horn. I felt the warp crystal squirming against my chest, and put a hand on it to imagine the mindscape. The poor little dragon was desperately clutching at its perch as a blue wind tried to sweep it away… I imagined holding it close and steadying it against the wind.

There was a flash of light, and Luna appeared before us, bypassing the traps with some sort of teleportation. I’m pretty sure that was cheating by anyone’s reckoning.

“Congratulations!” Star said, her faceplate a jaggy mask of aggravation despite her cheery tone. “You got past our traps using a method worthy of a princess. Go you. Normally we’d make you a prize but you got through *so fast* we didn’t have time.”

“And you blew up the drone I was going to use to ask you what you wanted,” Fire added.

“Yes,” Star said, tone no longer cheery.

“What are you doing here, Luna?” I asked, hand still on the warp crystal, trying to comfort it as the imaginary weather continued to be gusty, cold, and overcast.

Luna looked around the lounge. It was kind of a mess, in ways we hadn’t processed after several days of trying to deal with eighteen baby kobolds. The couches and chairs and tables were all in disarray, some of them upended, and toys were scattered everywhere. I’d recycled all the dirty dishes, at least, since I thought those were gross.

She poked at a toy dragon with a hoof, and it made a ‘squeak’ sound. “So it’s true,” she said. “You’ve been breeding.”

“It’s what she does,” Fire said.

“Jealous?” I asked, smirking.

“You shouldn’t be,” Star added. “Children are a lot of work.”

“I think I could make time for a princess, though,” I said. “Princess means you’re a girl, right? Which means you’d be carrying my eggs? So we could get started right away if you wanted, no need to wait for me to lay these.” I patted my rather pregnant belly with my free hand. I was getting a little worried, to be honest – I wasn’t more pregnant than I normally got, but I was as pregnant as I normally got even though there were only two eggs.

“Must we continue this jest?” Luna asked. “I tired of it more than a thousand years ago. It was amusing when Discord offered, but by the time I’d been propositioned by Tirek and Sombra it had already begun to wear thin.”

“And none of them were ever sincere?” I frowned. That sounded awful.

Luna laughed bitterly. “Chrysalis was sincere, I’m sure, but I don’t sleep with *infestations*.” At our silent stares, she backpedaled a bit. “I wasn’t intending to include you in that, but already a second clutch? It’s been less than a year.”

“It wasn’t on purpose!” I said. “I didn’t think I’d be fertile with a dragon.”

“Ah, yes,” Luna said. “And I imagine he didn’t mention the possibility until it was too late. I’m quite familiar with their antics. Still, unexpected… bonuses aside, how long before an army of kobolds is descending on my lands?”

I looked at Fire, who looked at Star, who invited us both to a quick spreadsheet session. We spent ten accelerated minutes modelling population growth and guessing at our descendants’ emigration rate.

“Twenty years,” they said, announcing our best guess rounded to one significant digit, since the confidence was low. “Twenty of our standard years I mean? About two hundred moons.”

“It’ll be a peaceful army, though,” I said. “We’re not warriors.”

“Not on purpose,” Fire corrected, slightly.

Star tapped their chin. “And ‘descending’ is probably the wrong word since they’d be coming on boats.”

“I’m pretty sure armies can descend from any direction,” I said. “It’s a figure of speech.”

“That’s not so long, as alicorns measure time,” Luna said. “How may we forestall this calamity?”

“It’s not a calamity!” I said. “We’re peaceful! And cute and fuzzy even. Most people like that.”

“And yet we may drown beneath the flood, regardless,” Luna said. “I mean to head off this tide while the swell has yet to build to an unmanageable level.”

“Was that a threat?” Fire asked.

“The opposite,” Luna said, holding her head high. “Come with me to Equestria and let us help you control your population. With education and careful management we can find a place for you here, without needing to swarm like locusts across the land.”

“Not interested,” Star said.

“None of you need be harmed!” Luna insisted. “We would stick to voluntary measures as much as possible. If your numbers outpaced our ability to support you –”

“Stop,” I said, noticing my companions’ reaction to her suggestions. “Just stop talking.”

Luna’s tail raised, and her eyes narrowed as she looked at me, but she stopped, at least for a moment.

“I’m going to say some things that you aren’t going to want to hear,” I told her. “Are you capable of listening to them without losing your temper?”

“Of course,” she said.

I nodded. “Fuck me, you dirty whore. Lie down on the couch and suck my dick while Fire pounds you up the ass. Let me chain you to a wall and whip your back red and raw until you stop begging me for mercy and start begging for more. I’m going to stick my tongue in that slippery cunt of yours and make you come until all your self-respect sprays out all over my faceplate, leaving you nothing but a mind-broken slave begging for my touch.”

To my surprise, she stayed calm. Calmish. She didn’t hit me again, at least. “Thou best have good reason to offer such obscene mockery,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

I shrugged. “Now that we’ve both presented our ludicrously offensive proposals, can we maybe talk to each other like adults?”

“I think I’ve heard enough,” Luna said, stomping a hoof. “Know that I will stand by my word – you will not be harmed. Yet by the same token, I will not allow –”

Without even waiting for her to finish her threat, Fire and Star both shot her with their net guns. The nets never reached her – the storm in the warp crystal’s mindscape gave a quick gust, nearly blowing the little dragon out of my grip, and the nets were flung to the side. Her horn glowed, and swung towards Fire, and I imagined a glowing knot of lightning forming over his head. On some instinct, I threw the dragon at him, and imagined it intercepting the lightning, drinking it in and enhancing its power…

Luna’s drone-killing blast swerved in midair and vanished into the warp crystal, which distracted her enough for Star to start spraying her with a fire extinguisher. The spray didn’t reach her, instead outlining the invisible dome of a protective force field.

Luna turned to charge at Star as if to trample them underfoot, the dome moving with her. I tried to make her hoof-boots immovable to stop her, but the warp crystal couldn’t affect anything inside her shield… but Fire managed to get about the same effect by lobbing a glue bomb in her path and letting her charge onto the sticky patch. She stumbled as her hooves stuck fast, and her face smacked into the ground, glued in place alongside them.

Unsure what I could do, I imagined the dragon flying up into the storm, to absorb its fury at the source like it had absorbed the bolt. Luna screamed in agony as blue light started to stream from her horn towards the warp crystal, then she vanished in a flash of blue light, much like she’d arrived.

“What the fuck, Wave?” Fire asked. “Is that what you call diplomacy?”

“I was trying to think of something she’d find as grotesque as her suggestion that we become her neutered pets,” I said. “I’m not sure I managed it. Did you really have to attack her?”

Star looked embarrassed. “I thought it would work.”

“We have to run,” Fire said.

“Run where?” I asked. “Into the diamond dog caves?”

“That would work,” he said. “They’d probably guess where we went, but it’s better than staying here and not even making them search.”

“How about underwater?” Star suggested. “They wouldn’t expect that!”

It wasn’t a bad idea. We’d have to replace our rigs with aquatic gear, but we had plenty of resources, and enough of a fabricator to do at least the water-breathing faceplates relatively quickly, even including the children. All the designs were already there waiting to be printed. Aside from the needing to breathe thing, our bodies were well-designed for pressure and cold. We’d need to rub special oil in our fur, but a full aquatic rig would take care of that for us too.

“But you and Fire can’t swim,” I pointed out. None of us were buoyant, but I at least had some experience submerging myself.

“I guess we’ll have to learn,” Fire said.

Star got to work on the basic aquatic rigs, and I started assembling an amphibious crawler that we could load the kids and the half-built fabricator into so that we wouldn’t have to start all over when we found a new underwater lair. But we weren’t yet ready to move when the airship showed up on the horizon.

We moved anyway. The three of us switched faceplates, the kids (forced once more into virtual reality so they wouldn’t make any trouble) were all stuffed in the crawler, and Star ran back and forth picking the most important pieces of the fabricator to load in with them.

“We have to go now!” Fire said. “In half an hour they’ll be close enough to see every valley in the foothills, and we won’t be able to sneak out.”

It took twenty minutes to get the crawler up to the surface through the labyrinth, and fifteen minutes more to make it to the shore. We had some cover from trees, and the crawler was sort of camouflaged, so we crossed our fingers that we hadn’t been seen as we slipped beneath the waves.

Star was in the back printing out the underwater faceplates for the babies, so it was Fire and me driving – or more accurately, Fire driving while I got out into the water and pulled. The crawler had too much air – we’d had to leave behind too much of the equipment we’d wanted to take – and kept floating up off the sea floor and losing traction. I’d hook the tow rope onto something, work the winch to pull it down, and then Fire would make the crawler flail its legs until he managed to grab on to something to pull it further forwards. Ten meters later he’d bounce up into the water and we’d have to do it all again. It was exhausting!

We were maybe twenty meters down (and much farther than that laterally) when a quake shook the ground, stirring up the muck and reducing visibility to nothing. I tied off the tow rope and swam up through the floor hatch into the cockpit to wait it out.

“Your fur’s dripping wet,” Fire said, taking a towel and scrubbing me off. “You didn’t use enough of the oil.”

I hadn’t noticed when I was in the water, but being in the air – yeah, I was cold. I shivered as he fluffed me all up with the towels, then curled up into his warm embrace while he pulled out the jar of oil and started combing it into my fur.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did they bomb us or something?”

“I left them a surprise,” Fire said, running the comb across my belly. “I tried to make it look like an accident in case any of them survived. With luck, they’ll think we blew ourselves up and stop looking for us.”

“Until Shadowfright finds our dreams and tattles on us, anyway,” I said.

Fire’s faceplate went all jaggy. “I didn’t think of that.”

I giggled. “Maybe we could put up a sign in the garden, right where the guest accounts spawn? ‘We’re playing dead, don’t tell Luna’.”

After a few seconds, Fire nodded. “Worth a try.”

Yes! Finally!

Old Dogs

We had to wake up the children before too long, unfortunately. All of us (including the kids) would have preferred to let them stay virtual, but they needed to eat and excrete and that was when we discovered that we hadn’t brought a toilet. The obvious solution was to take them into the cockpit one at a time, cover their fur in oil so they wouldn’t get too cold, and then let them pee into the ocean a few meters away from the crawler. The water was still mostly opaque, which made me nervous, but Star was able to make a sonar module that would warn us of approaching sharks.

But we had eighteen kids and three of us and everyone needed to pee… and ‘potty trained’ didn’t mean as much as we might have wanted when they really needed to go but to get through everyone was going to take three hours.

“Couldn’t you just let them go into the matter compressor?” I asked Star, after the kids decided through some mutual consensus to make a game out of spraying urine everywhere.

Star’s faceplate showed a twisting collection of lines. “We didn’t bring a matter compressor.”

Worse, we couldn’t build a matter compressor with the materials we had on hand, which weren’t nearly as much as we’d had on hand before we accidentally left all our matter compressors in the old lair. We weren’t *that* bad off but compressors needed a lot of metal and we mostly had rock and organics.

“How are we going to dig a new lair without a matter compressor?” I whined. The warp crystal could make rock soft but it still had to go somewhere, as the ‘Floor is Lava’ incident had demonstrated.

Fire shook his head. “We’ll just have to find a big enough cave to move into and worry about setting up a labyrinth later.”

The good news was that once Star heard about our buoyancy problems they were able to solve it in approximately thirty seconds by letting some water in to pool at the bottom of the cargo area. “It’s called ballast, dummy,” they told me. “How did you live on a pirate ship for weeks and not learn about ballast?”

“That’s not even a word,” I insisted, but it worked and our crawler was able to crawl again. Fire let me drive while he kept an eye on the sonar.

Of course it made the cargo area even more miserable since now it not only smelled like pee but also had seawater splashing all over everyone and everything. Some of the fabricator elements were lighter than water and started floating and bumping against each other until Star printed out a bunch of stretchy nets and tied them down. The kids were mostly conscious and screaming and climbing on things and somehow two of them got into the cockpit – one kept pushing random buttons on the control panel and the other kept trying to jump out into the ocean but Fire picked them up and held them still while they wiggled and complained.

Then the sonar started beeping. “Why is it doing that?” I asked, steering with one hand while I shooed the baby kobold away from the environmental controls, which I was about 75% sure weren’t actually hooked up to anything since we’d had to rush our departure.

“I don’t know!” Fire shouted back, struggling with the baby in his arms which didn’t like the beeping any more than I did. “It just says ‘danger’ but there’s nothing on the scope!”

“Well, can you shut it off before I –” I started to say, before the whole crawler pitched forwards off the edge of a cliff, and started to slowly spin, front over rear, as we sank. Murky water flooded in through the floor hatch as the air bubbled out, and I couldn’t even see the controls or tell which way was up.

When we finally stopped moving, it was with a disturbing crunching noise that I could feel through my seat. “Is everyone okay?”

Star sent back, “No we’re not okay all the kids are terrified and we’re upside down and losing air WHAT DID YOU DO!”

The good news was that we’d landed with the cockpit upside down and only half embedded in the seafloor – we could swim out through the hatch in what was now the ceiling, and opening the other hatch to the cargo bay only flooded it a little more than it already was. We were also able to help Star patch the cracks in the hull with duck tape.

The bad news was that it was obvious that the crawler would never survive the stress from being flipped back upright, even if we found something to let the winch tug it in the right direction. What was left of our fabricator was strapped to the ceiling, now, hanging in stretchy nets that kept us from getting to it to actually use it, and cutting the nets would just send it crashing down on our heads. The water outside was still opaque from the earthquake, our sonar was buried in muck and nonfunctional, and our dear children decided that it was a good time to escape from the crawler and go play hide and seek in the wild, shark-filled ocean.

“Is it too late to tell Luna to come back and make us her pets?” I asked, sinking into the pee-water.

“I’m pretty sure that ship has exploded,” Fire said, “I’m going to go find the kids.” He vanished into the murky water.

“Go dig out the sonar and switch it to terrain mode,” Star suggested. They were fiddling with the lower corner of the net, presumably working on a way to get the fabricator down. “Maybe there’s a nice cave close enough to walk.”

“It has a terrain mode,” I said. That would have been useful to know five minutes ago, I didn’t say. Star’s ears flattened against their head, so I think they heard it anyway.

I don’t know how long it took to dig blindly into the muck until I found the sonar unit, or how long I spent trying to pull it off by tugging on it before Star reminded me that it was bolted in place. I got a wrench from Star to unbolt it, but the bolts were fused and twisted from the impact, so I went back in and got a saw. I don’t know how long it took to saw through the mount so that I could get the sonar free.

I stood there holding it for a few minutes until Star noticed and talked me through connecting its display to my faceplate and switching to terrain mode, which gave me a wireframe outline of the seafloor and the cliff superimposed over my otherwise obscured vision. I struggled through the muck at the base the cliff for a long time, and made it maybe fifty meters from the crawler, before I noticed a hole in the cliff above me, twenty meters up and ten meters back.

Kobolds aren’t buoyant, but it’s still a lot easier to climb underwater, even if one of your hands is full carrying a bulky sonar array. There was a current coming from the cave, though, and it knocked me loose and I slowly fell back down to the seafloor. I sat there half-buried in the muck for a few minutes, then stood up and trudged back to the base of the cliff and started climbing again.

This time, when I got to the cave, I forgot I was underwater and cracked my faceplate to hold the sonar in my teeth. My mouth filled with salty water, and I had to hold my breath to avoid inhaling any of it. But with two hands free I was able to pull myself up into the cave, against the current, which turned out to be pretty faint. Strong enough that the water stopped tasting as salty, at least, and wasn’t all muddy besides. I could see, a little, although the wireframe drowned it out until I turned down the brightness.

I shifted the sonar back to my hands and closed my faceplate so that I could breathe, after swallowing the water left in my mouth. The tunnel got a bit brighter as a pair of eyespots and a distressed, jaggy mouth-line appeared on my faceplate, and I wondered how long it had been blank.

“I found something,” I sent to the others. “It’s pretty small.” It was about a meter across, with a circular cross section, which was plenty large enough for a kobold to walk through with no issues, but most of the fabricator elements were meter-wide cubes or larger and wouldn’t fit. “Some sort of underground river. There’s a current, but I can walk against it.”

“This is promising!” Star sent back. “See if it comes from a cave!”

I trudged upstream for a while, against the current. The tunnel branched a few times, but I used the sawed-off edges of the sonar’s mounting bracket to scratch an arrow telling me which way I’d come from. I was using the sonar to navigate since its wireframe reached much further ahead than my vision, and was wondering at the strangely flat ceiling on a wider section up ahead until I noticed distorted torchlight from behind it and realized it was the surface of the river I was following, or maybe even a small pond given its size.

Unfortunately, with the crystal-clear water and my own glowing icons and faceplate, my approach did not go unnoticed. I probably would have been able to dodge the net if I’d been paying attention, but the ripples it made in the wireframe of the surface confused me long enough to get snagged. I was dragged up out of the water, onto a rocky shore, surrounded by diamond dogs.

The other dogs were laughing at the one who’d pulled up the net. “Ha ha, you catch a sea dog!” “We can’t eat that, throw it back!” “Look at its shinies!”

Fire had tucked the warp crystal amulet under my chestplate while he was oiling up my fur, so I was already touching it. I imagined the dragon long enough to turn the net into mush, but didn’t break out of it yet. “Hello to you, too,” I said.

I felt a little bad, because the next thing they tried to do was free me from the net but I’d already destroyed it. “Sorry,” didn’t really make up for it, but it was a ratty old net made of ropes so it couldn’t have been that valuable. They were mostly scared instead of angry, and very careful not to touch me.

“You come with us, sea dog,” one of them said. “Talk to old bitch.”

“I don’t know,” I said, not really feeling up to talking to anyone, let along anyone important. “I’m looking for a nice empty cave, and apparently I didn’t find one since this one is yours. I should go.”

The herded me away from the water, still careful not to actually touch me. “We have lots of caves! Maybe she finds one for you.”

“I’m being kidnapped by diamond dogs,” I sent back to Fire and Star. “Or maybe invited for a friendly chat. I’ll keep you posted.” Only I wouldn’t, because it immediately bounced with ‘error: no connection’. I guess I’d walked too far up the river with no repeater.

It was hard to tell how many diamond dogs were living in the caves, because they were caves connected by burrowed tunnels and I didn’t see anything that looked like a central encampment. They didn’t have traps set up as such, but a couple of times I saw diamond dogs pop out of the walls – or vanish into them – like they were digging through cake. The ambush tunnels that had killed captain Pareto – it hadn’t been some brilliant plan, they’d *improvised*.

The Old Bitch lived in what looked like a natural cave, lit by very unnatural flames on candles that looked like they were screaming in agony. Her back was to us as we came in, scarred and twisted, with the stub of a tail twitching against the velvet cushion beneath her. Her ears perked as we stepped through the door, and she grabbed a cane and levered herself up on her feet, then shuffled around to face us, squinting her one good eye, the other sealed shut by yet another scar.

“What is this you bring me?” she asked.

“We catch a sea dog in the net,” said the fisher-dog. “She’s cursed.”

“Cursed, are you?” the old diamond dog asked me, mouth open in what looked like a laugh but sounded like croaked, labored breathing.

“That would explain a lot,” I said, “but curses aren’t real.”

“Aaah, how precious, like a legend come to life,” she cackled. “This is no sea dog, foolish fisher. This is an old dog.”

“I’m a kobold,” I said.

“Kob dog, old dog,” the old bitch said, waving a paw dismissively. “What are you doing alive, ancient one?”

Well, we had had our suspicions. “If I had to guess,” I said, “I took the long way ‘round.”

“So you do, so you do,” she said, absently. “But why do you come to us now?”

“She is looking for a cave,” said one of the diamond dogs who’d escorted me in. “Probably to raise her pups.” He wilted a bit under the old bitch’s stare. “She’s pregnant.”

“Ha! How old do you think I am?” the old diamond dog snarled. “I can smell she’s pregnant. A dead pony could tell that much.”

“You don’t look a day over five hundred,” I said. “Which makes me wonder how you know anything about us.”

“Ha!” she snapped. “Bold dog, are you? I am the chaos-keeper of this tribe. I hear the stories and retell them, and so we remember even when the world goes mad.” She pointed her cane at me, the gemmed rod shaking in her grasp. “We remember your kind – how you breed like a scourge until the world is drowned beneath your tide.”

“What? No!” I said. “Why does everyone keep assuming that we’re going to breed out of control? We need to build a civilization in a hurry but we can stop laying eggs anytime we want. It’s like flipping a switch.” I threw up my hands. “We need a few million… a few hundred million kobolds, but a planet like this can hold *trillions* and we came prepared to do without it if we had to. We’re not going to take your land or drown anyone beneath anything!”

“You believe that, do you?” the old bitch said, squinting at me some more. Then she shrugged. “Ha! It isn’t our problem. If you overstep, the creatures of harmony see to your fate.”

“Harmony is here?” I said, ears flat, mouth jaggy, fur failing to bristle under all the oil but doing its best to try. I should have known. As soon as we thought of the possibility that others had gotten here first, we should have guessed that the hive mind might have come with them!

“Not underground,” she said. “We fear them as well. If you wish to hide with us for a time, we can find a little space. If you wish to become a numberless swarm, you need to go elsewhere.”

“A little space for a little while is fine,” I said. What were we going to do?! “I need to go talk to my friends.”

“Go, go,” she said, waving her cane. “Go fetch the rest of your horde.”

“We prefer ‘collective’,” I said, numb, then turned to walk back through the caves. The diamond dogs claimed not to be part of Harmony… but what about the Nyx? They didn’t seem like mindless drones but that could just mean that Harmony had gotten better at faking. Or gotten better at respecting individuality? No, no, that was what they’d want us to think to trick us into joining.

“Are you really giving them a cave?” one of the diamond dogs asked the old bitch once I was out of the room.

“There are other legends about the old dogs,” she replied, “Let me tell you the story…”

I didn’t stay to listen; I was too busy imagining doomsday scenarios, and then I got lost in the caves and had to ask for directions to the fishing hole, but apparently they had something like six fishing holes? The diamond dogs were patient – apparently they all thought I was a ‘sea dog’, whatever that meant, and they were friendly with sea dogs – and I found the right one on the second try.

My markers were not as obvious as I’d hoped, and at one point I came to an intersection that wasn’t marked at all, probably because coming from the other direction it wasn’t obviously an intersection. The wrong passage was narrower than anything I’d remembered, though, so I didn’t have to guess, and the challenge of navigating the natural labyrinth was a welcome distraction.

Before long I was back at the entrance to the cave, and was bombarded with Fire and Star’s worried messages, at the same time as my own queued message automatically got sent to them. So, there were half a dozen variants on ‘I guess the cave is deep enough to block transmission, should we start moving in? Oh wait you can’t read this,’ and then “Kidnapped!”

But before reading through them, I’d added my own urgent message, “Harmony is here and can hack into our network!!!!!”

I followed up with, “Oh and the diamond dogs offered to let us use one of their caves as long as we don’t become a numberless swarm.”

“It’s a trap,” Fire said, once we all went virtual so that we could talk in real time instead of sending messages. “They want us where they can get us all at once.” He was still wearing the incredibly muscular dragon avatar he’d been using for the lava bath.

“Harmony?” Star asked.

I shook my head. I was also a dragon, although I was just using my pink dragon avatar, which I’d adjusted slightly to match what we knew about Ash. “I assume he means the diamond dogs. Most of them seemed to think we were ‘sea dogs’ whatever that means, only the one old one knew we were kobolds. Or mistook us for ‘old dogs’ but she seemed to be describing kobolds.”

“Shouldn’t we be talking about the hive mind?” Star said. They were floating around as a geometric shape again, but still managed to be all jaggy.

“It’s not as urgent as whether or not to trust the diamond dogs,” Fire said. “Which we should not. They didn’t ask for payment, or any concessions. They’re trying to lure us in so they can wipe us out.”

“That’s… possible,” I admitted. “They seemed a lot more playful and friendly than that. Do you really think it was a ruse?”

“I do,” Fire said. “Star? You’re the deciding vote.”

“Um…” Star froze for a few seconds. “I’m not comfortable being a deciding vote. But I guess I’d have to go with Wave since she was there.”

“It’s not a vote,” I said. “We need to reach a consensus. Or split the collective, I guess, but…”

“I’m not going to abandon you two,” Fire said. “That’s why I asked for a vote. If both of you are sure, then we can walk into the obvious trap.”

“No, wait,” I said. “We should split.”

“Explaaaaaain?” Star asked.

“If we don’t all walk into the hypothetical trap, they won’t spring it right away because they want to get all of us, right?” I said. “We can imply that some of us stayed behind because they wanted to watch and see what happened before committing. That should buy us some time.”

Fire nodded, unconvinced. “But you’ll still be trapped.”

“With a little time we can give them reasons to keep us around,” I said. “Yes, I can offer sex, obviously, but also we can just make friends with them. At least for their rank and file, their first impression of us is as allies, which should help. And once we get the fabricator sorted out we can start making gems. They like shiny things.”

“And headsets for access to the virtual world,” Star added. “Everybody loves the virtual world.”

“Fine, fine,” Fire said, shaking his head. “I can go with that plan. But how about instead of leaving me out here by myself, I come in with you and we just pretend there were more of us? If you’re going to trick someone you might as well lie.”

That made sense.

“So…” Star said. “About Harmony.”

“I might be overreacting,” I said. “But the old bitch – that’s what they called her! – she said that ‘Harmony’ would take care of us if we tried to take over the world. And I was thinking about how there’s all this ‘magic’ that people use without knowing how it works, and the Nyx’s dream cauldron that can *mysteriously* log into our network, and… um. It would explain some things.”

“If they got here first, then our whole mission is pointless,” Star said. “Unless we think we can start running faster?”

“We could steal their FTL?” Fire suggested.

“If they really have perfect FTL and are just trying to avoid violating causality, they could have been everywhere in the universe the instant they invented it,” I said. “If we want to get *anywhere* first we’ll have to violate causality ourselves, assuming their tech can even do that.”

“They obviously didn’t go *everywhere*,” Star said. “They weren’t waiting for us back home.”

I blinked. I hadn’t thought of that. “Right, right, okay. So it’s not a worst-case scenario. And maybe they’ve changed? The Nyx didn’t seem like drones.”

“Oh, they never seem like drones,” Star said. “That’s how they getcha.”

We woke up the kids for the trip, because it was already going to be trouble enough hauling the pieces of fabricator. Star netted together the buoyant machines with heavier machines until we had three long bundles of almost neutral density. Mine wanted to float a little, but not enough to lift me off the seafloor. Star took the heaviest and strapped it to their back.

“You need to come with us,” we told the kids. “We found a nice dry cave.”

“Line up and sound off,” Fire ordered, and they formed a ragged line and counted to eighteen, although the one after eleven said ‘thirteen’, and sixteen needed to be prompted three times.

I took the front of the line, since I knew where we were going and had the warp crystal to soften the rock to let us squeeze the fabricator in, since the largest pieces were a bit bigger than the cave. Star and Fire were originally going to take the middle and the back but every time I looked back at them they were running off to herd one or another of the kids back into line, so that never really panned out.

It turned out that lifting the cargo twenty meters was not the hard part. The hard part was shoving it into the underwater river without having it squirt back out like a bullet from a gun. After a couple of amusingly frustrating failures, I turned all the rock around the edges into cake and swirled the package around like a giant stylus, letting the current carry the dust away. If we’d had infinite patience, we probably could have just let the current do all the work, but I didn’t so I helped it along. Once the passage was two meters across, the current was weak enough to walk upstream. Fortunately, the tunnel widened out by itself with every branching we passed, so after a hundred meters or so I was able to give it a rest and we all just walked upstream single file.

When we finally got to the lake, we had sixteen children with us.

“Oh… god damn it,” Fire said, after counting. “Don’t let any of the others wander off, I’ll go find them.”

“Don’t get lost!” I said.

Some of the kids kept trying to make a break for the shore, so we brought everyone up out of the water to meet the diamond dogs. I didn’t recognize any of them and they weren’t fishing, but they were willing to stop and chat with the ‘sea dogs’ and make appropriately adoring noises at the children until the kids stopped being terrified of the big hulking brutes.

Somehow they’d signaled the old bitch, because she showed up a few minutes later. “This everyone? I think there are more,” she said.

“No! And no, and yes?” I said. “Fire’s off finding a couple of kids who got lost but –"

“Kids?” she frowned. “You call your pups kids?”

“Yes? I mean, it’s not an official term. Is it?” I asked Star.

“I don’t think it is,” Star said. “I’ve heard ‘pups’ before too.”

“We hatch them from eggs, so I’d think ‘chicks’…”

Star shook their head. “I’ve never heard chicks.”

“We call them a lot of things,” I told the old bitch.

She nodded. “We wait here for them then. Cave is pretty far.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the no longer neutrally buoyant bundle I was supposed to carry, which was really quite heavy out of the water. “Do you have something with wheels we could borrow? Otherwise we might have to make several trips.”

“Perro! Fido!” she snapped. Two of the diamond dogs stopped playing with our… pups and stood up facing her. “Help the old dogs carry their stuff.”

I shrugged. “I guess that works too.”

Fire came back after a few minutes, *three* pups in tow, and we did another count, and got sixteen again.

“The other two go off with Rover,” Perro said. “They want to explore.”

“Alright,” I said, still a little worried about them but no longer confident that we could ever get all eighteen to stand still. I told the old bitch, “This is everyone who’s coming, then. Not everyone wanted to come live with you… the Nyx said some nasty things about you and it scared them off.”

“Who are the Nyx?” she asked.

“Moon spirits,” I told her. “We came from the moon. Most recently.”

She frowned, then shrugged, waving to us as she turned her back on us to lead us away from the water. “Cave is this way.”

“Soooo,” asked Star, as the diamond dogs led us into their labyrinth. “What’s this about Harmony?”

The old bitch explained Harmony to us, as she understood it. Understands it. Harmony was a force that connected everyone on the planet and controlled their destiny. The diamond dogs were mainly beneath its notice – literally, it didn’t normally look underground – but other races were firmly in its grip, especially the ponies (like Princess Luna) where it went so far as to brand a symbol into their fur.

I’d thought that the moon on Luna’s hips was like our icon, but it was so much worse! ‘Harmony’ or ‘Destiny’ (it wasn’t clear if they were the same thing, but they were connected) would assign a pony a symbol, and then would partially take over their mind to help them complete any related task, and give them a quick emotional boost whenever they performed it, training them to accept it as their purpose in life.

Sometimes Harmony (definitely Harmony this time) would also just grab every pony in range and force them to cooperate on something. You could tell when it was doing that because they’d all start singing in harmony and doing choreographed dances. It sounded really, really creepy, and non-ponies could get dragged into it so it wasn’t like ponies were the only drones, just the ones with the heaviest load.

Also it would sometimes outright blast troublemakers and either rewrite their personalities completely or turn them to stone, which was *not* death apparently but more like a sort of long-term stasis, because at least one person had come back from it. All of that was a secondhand rumor even to the diamond dogs, though, so I wasn’t sure how much stock to put in it.

“But most of the time they’re individuals?” I asked.

“We always feel like individuals, even when we’re dancing to its tune,” the old bitch replied.

“It’s how they getcha,” Star messaged me.

The cave they led us to was smaller than I expected – maybe ten meters on a side, although it was irregularly shaped, without any flat surfaces. The entrance was near the top, and it was impossible to tell how deep it was, because it was full of garbage – bones, offal, random broken wood and metal things, and piles and piles of diamond dog shit, the surface about a meter down from the opening.

“It needs a little cleaning,” the old bitch said. “Nothing comes free. You learn this lesson first, if you stay with us.”

Star was like a kid in a candy store. They leapt down into the filth and gathered up a huge handful of garbage, holding it up for me to take. “Load it in the hopper! This is great stuff!”

“This really looks like a job for a matter compressor,” I said, gingerly scooping up the oozing pile. Perro danced back from me when I approached. It probably smelled really, really bad – bad enough that my faceplate started filtering out the stench. “Set it down and unwrap it,” I told them. “Then you can run away.”

The old bitch looked bemused, then turned and left us to our work.

The first thing we made was not a matter compressor. It was a playpen to shove the kids into, so that they didn’t jump in the garbage and get lost, with little wheels so that we could move it into the cave once it was clear. We counted fifteen baby kobolds, and put them all into virtual reality, and then Fire ran off to find the sixteenth (we were trusting Rover to bring the seventeenth and eighteenth back with them) while I helped Star load more trash into the machines.

The second thing we built was a forge – sort of like a mini-printer for sturdier things made out of ceramic and metal. It took metal to build, but the trash had enough metal for our purposes.

The *third* thing we built, once the forge was complete, was a matter compressor. Well, we’d also printed a bunch of shovels and sacks and more stretchy nets and ropes, and a repeater to set up down the tunnel at the first intersection to give us a little more coverage, but that was all minor stuff.

With the matter compressor, cleaning out the rest of the pit was a lot more tolerable, since all the squishy, liquid stuff could get sucked in through the hose and we only had to deal with large pieces of rotting wood (that we needed to break down so they’d fit) and all the rusty metal, which we didn’t want in the matter compressor anyway – not in the same matter compressor at least.

I had the food processor start making pure water, and just left it spraying down into the hole so that we could rinse things (and ourselves) off.

Rover found us, carrying two sleeping baby kobolds, when we were about five meters deep. I helped him put them in the playpen, then activated their virtual reality.

“You live in the old garbage pit?” he asked, backing away from me since I’d rinsed off a bit, but still wasn’t what you’d call ‘clean’.

“We will, once we clean out all the garbage,” I said, with a shrug. “You can keep bringing garbage here if you want. We can recycle anything.”

Fire returned with the missing number sixteen at about seven meters, and volunteered to stay far away and start setting up more repeaters. “Don’t cut yourself on anything sharp,” he warned us. “There’s probably enough bacteria in that mess to eat you alive.”

Star didn’t have to worry, of course, since their hands and feet were already artificial, but I made myself some heavy gloves and boots, in case I needed to go down there for some reason.

When the pit was eleven meters deep and showed no sign of bottoming out – it was actually getting *wider* – we decided to take a rest. I helped haul Star out of the pit, and we made some soap and cleaned each other off. The filth had gotten under our rigs, so we needed to take everything off and wash it separately – well, not our cybernetic limbs, since the seal was watertight. We did wash under our faceplates, though, and MY GOD the stench.

“Once we get all the solid garbage loaded, we can spray everything with bleach,” Star said, after getting her faceplate back on. “It’ll probably still stink for a while unless we can find some way to clean the air, though.”

“Smelling like garbage is not going to make us popular,” I said. “If they’re really out to get us, this might be part of their plan.”

After resting for a while, we decided that living in a smelly hallway while we mined infinite garbage was not ideal, so instead of jumping back into the pit, Star spent a little of the materials we’d already collected building a floor for the pit, and we installed it ten meters down, just before the pit started to widen. Fire helped – he had the most experience with that sort of medium-scale construction, since he’d used a lot of it for the traps he’d set for Ash. It had a hatch with a gel-membrane barrier, so that we could stick the hose through to suck up more garbage, or squeeze through ourselves if we wanted to retrieve some larger pieces, without letting more of the stink out. To deal with the existing stink, we used lots of bleach to clean the walls, and installed an air processor that was really meant for aerating habitats in toxic atmospheres, but overkill against the stench felt (and smelt) pretty nice, honestly.

Then we put in a bunch more floors, because we had the vertical space and the lair was otherwise pretty small. We ended up with six stories, about a meter-and-a-half each, which was comfortable for kobolds but would make most diamond dogs need to duck, which we hoped would keep them away. The very top level was large enough for them, but that was our public lounge where they were welcome.

“Do you think we should set up some traps in the hallway?” I asked, once it was all done, if a bit unfurnished. The playpen was down on floor three, the fabricator machines on four and five, while six was for storing and cleaning the metal bits. The matter compressor was still up in the corridor because it was far, far too heavy to move.

“I’ll work on that,” Fire said. “Friendly traps for now. It’s not much of a labyrinth if you can see the goal from the start, but it’ll be better than nothing.”

I flopped onto the one couch we made, and rubbed my belly, which was getting really gigantic by this point. “It’ll be nice to have a real lair again. I hope we don’t get chased out of here too quickly.”

“Long enough for you to lay your dragon eggs, at least,” he said. “When are they due?”

I grimaced. “At least a week ago – they were already overdue when Luna came to visit. I hope I actually lay them at some point, and don’t just pop like a balloon.”

He tilted his head. “What do your biometrics say?”

I shook my head. “You know it’s never precise about egg laying. It says…” I paused to check. “Uh, it estimates negative two days. That’s, um.”

“I’ll go talk to the diamond dogs,” he said. “Maybe they have a doctor.”

“It’s probably a witch doctor,” I said, grimacing.

He rolled his eye-spots. “Maybe they have a real doctor. I’ll ask.”

They sent the old bitch. She squinted her good eye at the lounge we’d built on the top floor. “You are finished with your task already?”

“No, we’ve still got more to dig through,” I said. “We wanted to stop smelling it though, so we bricked it over. With plastic, not bricks. Plasticked it over. Do you want a tour? You’re short enough to fit.”

She shook her head. “I come to examine you. Fire says you worry about your pups.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed that she was the only one he could find.

She scowled at my expression.

But oh well. I explained, “They’re half-dragon, and the pregnancy has been weird. I should have laid the eggs by now.”

She leaned close, and sniffed at my belly. “How many eggs?”

“Two,” I said.

She poked me with her staff. “Careful!” She scowled at my outcry, and poked me a bit harder.

Finally, she nodded. “They are ready, but dragon eggs are gluttons for magic and heat. You are not a dragon, so I use magic.” Her scarred, ruined eyelid opened, and where her other eye should have been was a glowing green gem, embedded in the socket. It flared brightly, and she placed her clawed paw on my belly, and the rush of green light spread rapidly down her arm and –

I was forcibly drawn into my mindscape, the little dragon representing my warp crystal perched on my head and hissing as the rock I stood on liquified and I started to sink beneath the surface – knees, hips… it dug its claws into my scalp and tried to drag me back out.

“No! Stop!” I said, to her or to it, I wasn’t sure. Neither of them listened. I fished the warp crystal’s amulet out from beneath my chest plate, and as my head started to swim from the agony of two imaginary forces fighting over me, I tossed it onto the couch. I briefly imagined vanishing beneath the ground, and then everything was agony, spreading from my belly and crotch. Burning heat, stretching pain, tearing flesh… I screamed, arching my back and contorting all out of shape, claws digging into the plastic floor tiles…

“What’s going on? What did you do?” That was Star? “Stop it! Stop hurting her or I’ll make you stop!”

There was a last burst of pain, and then a flood of pleasure as the tail end of the egg tapered to a more reasonable size, and the slick, bloody dragon egg rolled across the floor. I wailed, sore not only in my poor, abused vagina but in my three non-mechanical limbs.

“She’s bleeding!” Star said, panicked.

“That’s one,” the old bitch said, and the green fire built up on her hand once more…

The second egg was worse, bad enough that I shrieked my throat raw and lost the ability to breathe. It didn’t take as long, at least, with the way already stretched beyond its limits by the first.

“Is it over?” I said. My throat was so hoarse that even my faceplate’s vocal synthesizer made it sound like a croak.

I felt so weak.

“Almost,” the old bitch sighed. “There is too much blood.”

“Can you stop it?” Star asked.

She shook her head. “It is too late. She bleeds out.”

I tried to move, but it was so cold, and I couldn’t feel my limbs. “This means I lose a point for killing myself, doesn’t it,” I said, as everything started to get fuzzy. “Only one though, right?” I tried to look at Star, but I couldn’t move anything. The only reason I could talk was because it was synthesized.

Star nodded. “Only one.”

It took Fire and Star working together almost a week to revive me. Neither of them had any medical training, but we had all the necessary instruction manuals on file and it wasn’t like they could kill me more by screwing up. They did make a huge mess by pumping me full of replacement blood without patching the torn artery, but that was more of a funny story to laugh about later than anything truly dangerous.

“And the good news is, we have all the medical components built now, so if someone else gets hurt maybe we can save them before they die all the way,” Star said.

“Are the eggs okay?” I asked.

Star shrugged. “They’re in a nest, with egg caps on. No sign of brain activity yet though. They’re definitely not kobolds so I don’t know if that’s something to worry about. Most natural species take longer to set up their neural net.”

I reached for my chest, which was bare – they’d given me a faceplate just after waking, but the rest of my rig was elsewhere. “And the warp crystal?”

“I have it,” Fire said. “The old bitch tried to steal it but it burned her hand.”

“She was clever,” Star said, “Waited until I was distracted. The hissing noise got my attention though.”

“Fucking witch doctors,” I groaned. I still felt pretty weak, which my extensive experience with coming back from the dead said was normal (it had happened once before, when I broke my leg – same deal, fatal blood loss).

Aside from getting at least another day of rest, Star’s non-expert opinion was that I should probably stick to virtual sex for the foreseeable future (I’d eventually heal all the way, but they had no idea how long it would take) and should definitely not get pregnant. Also, next time any of us had gigantic eggs twice the size of the ones that we were supposed to lay, we should just disembowel ourselves and get them out that way, because it was safer. I laughed at that, but they showed me the medical procedure in the reference manuals that explained how to do it safely.

There was also a reasonable chance that I’d damaged more stuff internally that wasn’t life threatening but would keep me from ever having kids again, but I’d already laid twenty six eggs so I decided that getting depressed over that was kind of stupid.

At any rate, once Star and Fire confirmed that I was alive again for real and not likely to die until I did something else stupid, they let the kids run in and cry and wail and climb all over me – apparently they really loved me or something and were terrified that I might not be coming back.

It was kind of nice, and I tried to hug them back, although I was completely overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Fire pried one of them off of my neck. “Nine, stop trying to strangle her.”

“Did you number our children?” I asked.

“Um…” Star said, “We visited them at school to see what they were calling themselves, and apparently they just had GUIDs because they’re not allowed to change their own names yet and we were supposed to give them egg names but didn’t.”

I blinked “We were?”

Star threw up their hands. “I know! I’d never heard of it either! I always thought they were randomly assigned.”

“I shortened them to a digit or two each to make them easier to remember,” Fire said.

He pointed to each of them in turn and rattled off their ‘names’. Apparently, our children were named Zero, One, Two, Three, Four, Seven, Eight, Nine, Nineteen, Sixty Two, Sixty Three, Ninety, Ay, Cee, Ceecee, Dee, Eff, and Effeff. I really hoped they didn’t keep those names when it came time to pick their icons.

They were different colors and coat patterns and I’m sure they even had different personalities, but I couldn’t keep them straight which I’m pretty sure made me a terrible parent.

“Should we give egg names to the dragon eggs now?” I asked.

Star sighed. “We can’t, not until they have enough of a brain for the system to lock onto. Their user accounts don’t exist yet.” They smiled. “Why, did you have something in mind?”

I grimaced. “I was thinking ‘Pain’ and ‘Suffering’.” Fire and Star gave me a look. “What? If they’re anything like Ash they’ll love names like that.”

Once I could walk, I walked over to talk to the old bitch. She was talking to a couple of diamond dogs about reinforcing something or other that I didn’t care about, so I interrupted them.

“You tried to steal my warp crystal,” I said.

The three of them looked down at me. “If you are dead, you don’t need it anymore,” she said. “Why are you alive?”

“Fire and Star revived me,” I said. “For future reference, don’t try to take the warp crystal away from our lair. It makes our machines go.” This was an oversimplification – it made the generators work, which charged the batteries, but we had backup generators that could burn organics.

“And your machines bring back the dead?” one of the diamond dogs asked.

“Well…” I mean, I wanted to say ‘no’ but the more complicated version might actually save someone’s life, so, “They can if they haven’t decayed. Kobolds don’t decay. Most other creatures do. Typically you’ve got about an hour at the most if you keep them cold…

“I can prevent decay,” the old bitch said. “It is within my aspect.”

“Then we could try? But we don’t have a doctor. It took both my friends a week to put me back together because neither of them is a doctor. I don’t know how often diamond dogs die but even a small throughput could completely prevent us from getting anything else done. Do you have any…” not real, don’t say ‘real’ “…conventional doctors who know how to patch wounds and things? That’s the hard part. For us. Not being doctors.”

“I hear ‘yes but no’,” the old bitch said after thinking over it.

I tried to use smaller words. “If you preserve a body right after death, and fix its wounds so that it’s healthy except for being dead, then we have a machine that can bring it back to life. If the second part is hard for you…” wait. I’d come here to be angry and now I was offering to help them?

Eh. Revenge was pointless next to making ourselves too useful to get rid of. “We have headsets that train our children really fast. They might work on diamond dogs. If you send us a volunteer or two we can have them try it out? And even if they don’t let the dogs learn fast they’re still a lot of fun to play with at normal speed.”

She looked suspicious. “And what do you get in return?”

I counted off on my fingers. “You don’t take our stuff without asking. You protect us from things that want to hurt us. You help us dig our lair bigger if we need more space because wow you guys are great at digging. Um… we might need some more gold or copper for circuitry if we have to build a *lot* of headsets. We can stretch one bit to about a dozen of them.”

She stared. “Is that all.”

I pondered. “You let us set up traps in the hallway? I mean we’re going to do that anyway. Oh! And you don’t try to weasel out of your end of the deal by cleverly failing to mention something important like ‘the cave we have for you is full of garbage’ because that was totally an insult, even if we’re equipped to make the most of it. We’re easygoing but we’re not *that* naïve.”

“You ask for a lot,” she said.

“Half of it is just ‘don’t fuck us’,” I said. “I mean, without asking first.”

She wouldn’t actually commit to a deal, but she did send Rover and Perro to test the headsets, since they were already friendly with us and if we were going to betray and murder them we’d be killing our own potential allies. She didn’t say that. Fire said that. I think she probably just asked for volunteers and they volunteered because they were already friendly with us.

It worked a lot better for them than it had for the parrots – at ten times speed they felt sluggish and drugged and a little stupid, but slowing it down to eight times speed worked pretty well.

“Does this work on our pups?” Perro asked. “They grow up too fast to learn everything we want to teach them, so only the chaos keepers learn everything and the other races that grow up more slowly think we’re stupid.”

“It’s *meant* for pups,” Star said. “Send us all your puppies!”

They had a lot of puppies, but Perro and Rover were able to dig out floor three so there was enough room for them, and the dogs already had nursemaids who could take care of them while they were awake. They dug the floor three extension two levels high so it also included floor two, since the nursemaids wanted to be able to stand up, but that was fine because floor two was mainly just going to be for eggs and we only had two eggs incubating for the foreseeable future.

They didn’t ask the old bitch for permission – maybe she wasn’t actually in charge? Perro and Rover confirmed that they did whatever she asked, though, because she was the chaos-keeper and knew everything.

“If we weren’t outnumbered by diamond dogs in our own home now, I’d feel safe having all their puppies as hostages,” Fire said.

“We could always put nets in the ceiling to tie up all the caretakes by remote control,” I suggested, half-joking.

“Oh, I already did that,” Fire said. “But the aim on those isn’t very reliable.”

Eventually, we got around to sucking up more garbage – with the hose, through the gel membrane; we had enough metal already harvested to last for a while and even Star wasn’t that eager to jump back into the filth now that we had a clean place to rest and enough resources to last for a while, and only a vague duty to someone that we didn’t really like motivating us to continue.

I was nervously checking the fireproof kobold eggs for signs of brain activity for the second time that day, and Fire was working on an easy training labyrinth to run the puppies and our own kids (and any visiting diamond dogs) through, when Star, who was siphoning up garbage looking for copper or gold because we really were running low, suddenly broadcast ‘TRASH MONSTER!’ to everyone in range, which included both of us, the diamond dog caretakers, Rover, and sixty children of various species. The followup picture showing their faceplate half-submerged in slime with a tentacle smearing more filth over the other half made the urgency of the cry crystal clear.

It was less clear what we were supposed to *do* about it.

“That’s an Otyugh!” Rover shouted, verbally, which worked fine because everyone in broadcast range was also in earshot. “What’s an Otyugh?” I shouted back, looking around for something to use as a weapon as I ran down the stairs. I hadn’t thought to grab my old parrot weapon during the mad evacuation, and I didn’t think the net guns and glue bombs we usually used would help much against a monster that lived in trash. I didn’t see anything likely until I got all the way down to six, where I grabbed a long sharp rusty pole and hoped I wouldn’t cut up my hands worse than whatever I tried to stab with it.

Rover was already there, pulling Star up through the gel membrane. One of the tentacles was wrapped around them, but it let go and slithered back into the trash when I poked it with the ‘spear’. The hose was still stretched taut through the membrane, vibrating and jerking around as something tugged on its far end, hidden in the garbage pile.

“It thought the hose was attacking it!” Star said. “It only grabbed me by accident, I think.”

The kids standing around were mostly complaining and making icky faces from the stench of the slime covering Star from head to tail. I prodded Star with my stick until they got the hint and ran over to the cleansing spray we’d only intended to use on salvaged bits of metal. It was safe for kobolds though.

“It’s still hooked!” Rover said, grabbing onto the hose. “Help me pull it up!”

Some of the older puppies ran up behind him and helped pull on the hose, dragging it slowly back up through the hatch. A tentacle lashed out and curled around the hose, just missing Rover’s paws… I ran towards it and stabbed it with the pole, but that just made it angrier.

A message appeared on everyone’s display -- “KILL SUCKY SNAKE KILL KILL SNAKE KILL”.

“Turn it off!” Star suggested.

“We can’t let an Otyugh loose in the tunnels!” Rover insisted, continuing his tug of war. “They don’t just eat garbage!”

There was a horrible ‘bang!’, and the hose, stretched past its limits, snapped. Rover and the children went flying, while the severed hose flailed around threatening to suck up puppies and kobolds alike into its all-consuming void! I parried it with my spear and pinned it against the wall, searching through the menus for the remote hose control because the nozzle with the manual controls we usually used was gone and it really did need to be turned off right now.

Before I could manage what should have been a trivial task, the Otyugh, a shit-dripping armor-encrusted tentacled horror with a giant toothy maw for a face erupted through the hatch, roaring incoherently, flailing aimlessly, and apparently transmitting “EAT YOU SNAKE PEOPLE” at us.

I panicked and asked the warp crystal to Crush it, hoping to at least hold it in place with the increased inertia – but that made the flailing tentacles into unstoppable sledgehammers of destruction, smashing huge holes in the plastic floor and threatening to send the whole level collapsing into the shit-heap. After that one swing they were done, though – the Otyugh wasn’t strong enough to move them against the crushing force… but the “EAT YOU EAT YOU EAT YOU” let us know that it wasn’t out of the fight yet, and I really didn’t want to hold it with the warp crystal until it died because teaching warp crystals to kill is not a good idea.

Also, it was slowly managing to turn itself in my direction, which meant that it *was* strong enough to move against all the inertia my baby warp crystal could heap on it, and it knew exactly where it was coming from, somehow. The toothy maw approached with what would have been comical slowness if I hadn’t been locked in place by the need to keep the hose pinned and the Crush going.

Then Fire ran in, finally, carrying an awkwardly bulky cylinder which he pointed at the monster – it was part of a trap! A spear shot out towards the otyugh, the serrated grabbing claw of a ‘friendly’ spear springing out to clamp onto it around its midsection. “Well that was useless,” I started to think to myself, before Fire triggered the trap again, and the ‘friendly’ claw clamped shut with a sickening squelch, crushing the otyugh’s armor plate and messily snipping it in half.

Both halves sat there, twitching, until I remembered to release the Crush, letting the back half slide back into the garbage pile, while the front half sagged, limp.

I imagined petting the little dragon in my mindscape, to reward the warp crystal for saving my life, but it had something in its teeth. I didn’t get a good look at it before it furtively swallowed. “What was that?” I imagined asking it, but it was just a baby dragon and I couldn’t imagine it answering, even if it had wanted to.

I looked up to notice Star and Fire arguing. “You were going to use that on our kids?!”

“It was just a prototype I was playing with!” Fire shouted back. “I wasn’t going to leave that mode turned on!”

I finally navigated the menus to shut off the broken hose, then crept forwards to look down into the pit. The otyugh half was gone. “Guys, everybody, we need to get out of here,” I said. “I don’t think that was the only garbage monster.”

Whatever else was down there, it didn’t come after us before we got everyone up to the next level and closed the emergency hatch.

The good news was that nobody died.

Rover and the puppies who’d been playing tug of war were all hurt pretty badly by diamond dog standards – broken bones, bruises, several had a concussion. Without a doctor we weren’t going to be fixing them with cybernetics, but there were some first-aid instructions intended for use by non-doctors that let us get them wrapped up and bandaged so they weren’t in any danger and would eventually heal on their own.

Star was actually in worse shape – they’d been scratched across their back by the toothy protrusions on the otyugh’s tentacle, and between the otyugh slobber and the septic garbage the scratches had gotten thoroughly infected even with the relatively quick attempt to wash them out. We gave them a bunch of antibiotics (there was a recommended mix that were safe to use together) but they still got sick, which could mean that the bacteria here were immune but more likely meant that some of the infection was from parasites or viruses and those were harder to treat blindly.

The bad news was that we had garbage monsters, and if they were intelligent enough to send us text messages they might be intelligent enough to figure out doors. This news was bad enough that the diamond dogs’ leader showed up at our lair, flanked by Perro and a bunch of heavily armed and armored guards. We could tell they were the leader because even the injured diamond dogs knelt before them and bared their throats, and also they were wearing a crown.

“What is this!” they growled. “Who are you!”

“We’re kobolds,” Fire replied in a calm, even tone. “The old bitch said we could live here if we cleaned up the old garbage pit.”

I crept up behind him – I’d been down on the next level checking on the fireproof kobold eggs again – and tried to keep my mouth shut.

“But you fail!” the leader growled. “And now our puppies are injured, and you need us to finish the job you fail at!”

“I wouldn’t say we need your help,” Fire replied. “We would have tried a few more things before even thinking about giving up… but if you’re offering to help kill the monsters I’m not going to stop you.”

“But now we are doing your job,” the leader replied. “What will you pay us instead?”

“Gems?” I suggested.

“We have gems,” they snorted.

I nodded slowly, and added, “We’re teaching your children. They’ll learn four times as fast as they could without our help, so your next generation –"

“You already do that,” they said. “And now our puppies are wailing in pain.”

“Well, I don’t know, what do you want?” I asked. “You must want something since you’re going out of your way to reject everything we offer. Do you want me to get down and suck your dick? Zero out of two royal assholes took me up on that one, but I guess it’s worth a shot.”

“You can’t count Luna twice,” Fire sent me. I sent back an image of a face sticking out its tongue.

“Ha,” they said, taking it in stride. “You have no mouth.”

I cracked my faceplate open, and stuck out my tongue, slowly licking it over the jaggy fang-like protrusions the faceplate liked to leave. Then snapped it shut, and folded my arms, smirking.

They snorted, and shrugged. “I accept. Perro, you take her to my chambers. You make her ready. I come to claim her after I exterminate these pests.”

Perro motioned to me, and I hesitantly walked over to join them, as the hulking diamond dog warriors streamed past in the other direction. I stopped as I reached them, and turned back to the leader. “Just to be clear, by ‘pests’ you mean –”

“I mean the garbage monsters, yes,” they growled. “You are not as annoying as you think.”

“I can’t believe that worked,” Fire sent.

“Our Alpha has powerful appetites,” Perro replied, apparently included. “I hope you can handle him.”

“He can’t be worse than the dragon,” I sent back to both of them, as Perro led me down the hall. “Wait!” I said out loud, and stopped. “Wait here,” I told Perro, and ran back to the lair to print up an extra-large headset, which only took a minute or so, then ran back to join them. They were back with Fire in the lounge, talking about something in low tones. “Virtual sex is a lot safer. I’ll see if I can get him to try it,” I told them.

They looked at each other, and Perro shrugged.

“Good luck,” Fire said, and I headed off to my date.

Harem Girl

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.

Clear Conscience

With the relays set up, the days passed pretty easily for a while. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice I was away from the lair – every time I wanted to print something and realized it would be a huge production that should probably wait for a while, I was reminded. The girls and I went to the city a lot – they had casual friends among the diamond dogs, sort of like we had Perro and Rover, and favorite hangout spots, and the Alpha made sure to discreetly let us know when we had to be back on display, although it was an unspoken rule that a couple of us would stay behind just in case something came up or he wanted a quickie. And there was a *lot* of sex – not just the Alpha, who came by at least once most days and for the moment at least was focused on me, but the other girls who took it seriously when he told them to teach me how to be better at sex. I was already pretty *practiced*, but they had some tricks I hadn’t heard of.

…I also had a bit of a crush on Pippi. She was just so enthusiastic, it was contagious. Squee usually inserted herself into the mix whenever she noticed us making out, but I didn’t mind reassuring her that I wasn’t stealing her friend. I eventually got my own room and my own bed, but I kept sleeping with the parrots because their feathers made very nice pillows.

But when things were quiet, I could always go find Star and Fire and we could hang out for a while. Star didn’t die – they didn’t get better, either but they didn’t get worse, the sickness instead just persisting at seemingly random intensity from day to day. After a month, they’d learned enough to do some more tests and decided that it was probably a parasitic infestation, which meant they just needed to identify the parasite and then find a poison tailored to kill it, assuming it was something the medical library recognized. None of the poisons were safe, so they couldn’t just take a cocktail like with antibiotics.

“The Old Bitch offered to try curing me,” they mentioned.

“Don’t do it,” I said. “She’ll kill you. She hates us.”

“She hates you,” Star said. “I don’t think she hates me. And I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

“It’s not worth the risk,” I said, grabbing on to their little floating star avatar and squeezing it to my chest. “Please!”

They laughed. “That’s the same thing Fire said. I guess I’m outvoted.”

I glowered at them. “If I have to sacrifice my principles to keep you alive, then fine. We’re a democracy now.”

They stuck out their tongue – they manifested a tongue entirely to stick it out at me. “I’m not that desperate yet, you don’t have to hold me down with systems of government.”

But Star’s sickness aside, I was enjoying myself. I *like* meeting new people and there were a lot of new people to meet. I didn’t entirely neglect my duties, though – I spent at least an hour a day training the warp crystal (yes, this was pathetic, it should have been more like eight hours) and it only took two weeks to come up with an initial design for a heat-resistent, insulated nest/eggset combo. It had to be built in the forge, though, which meant it was on indefinite hold since Star wasn’t feeling well enough to watch the forge and make sure it didn’t burn down our lair, Fire wasn’t qualified, and I wasn’t there.

When Perro brought a spare mini-printer over, I knew I hadn’t asked for it but I figured it was just a thoughtful gesture on Star’s part. We put it in the workroom next to the gem maker, and used it as we assumed it was intended, to make generic bits of crafting supplies for Cinder to craft with, since she refused to let us use it to make new outfits directly.

In retrospect I probably should have asked about it, or at least thanked them.

Star and Fire and I were sitting in a rainbow crystal cave in the Virtual World talking about what game to play next. Since I was getting plenty of sex and Star wasn’t really interested, we’d shifted towards board games and card games. One of Star’s favorites was Hive Escape, but it really needed more than three people to be fun – there was a lot of cooperative strategy but the key was to figure out who was the secret hive mind agent and half the hive mind powers didn’t really make sense unless there were at least two agents, which meant at least five players but preferably six.

“It looks like Nightwing and Cold Snap are on,” I said, checking the directory. “I’ll pop over and ask them.”

“Or you could just send them a message,” Fire said.

“Or I could just go there and ask,” I replied, and teleported to their location. They weren’t set private, so I wasn’t too worried about walking in on something I wasn’t supposed to see. Also, Nightwing didn’t seem interested in the kind of things I expected not to be supposed to see.

“…what are we going to do then? Print up a dinghy and row across the ocean?” Cold Snap asked.

“Madam Purr managed it,” Nightwing said. “I had something else in mind, but I don’t want to risk giving it away. It’s not that I don’t trust you, or I wouldn’t even be…” she trailed off, noticing me standing there.

“Hi!” I said. “Sorry to interrupt, but I wondered if you two wanted to play Hive Escape? We need more players for it to be fun.”

“We’re kind of in the middle of something,” Cold Snap snaped.

“No we’re not,” Nightwing said. “Nothing important, anyway.”

“It’s a really fun game,” I said. “I mean, most people I know that tried it like it. It’s cooperative but some people are traitors…”

Cold Snap leapt at me, pinning me to the ground with her dragon claws. “How much did you hear?”

“Uh… I wasn’t really paying attention,” I said, letting her hold me down. “I was just waiting for a pause so I could ask about the game.”

She glowered at me. “Get out of here.”

I looked over at Nightwing, who was still a harpy, and had one feathery wing-arm covering her face. “How about you? Interested?”

“Maybe some other time,” she said. “It does sound like fun, but I don’t think I’m in the mood for being social.”

“Fiiine,” I said, “Sorry to bother you then.” I teleported back to Star and Fire. “No luck,” I said. “and Cold Snap was acting really weird.”

“You interrupted their date,” Fire said. “Just send a message next time – they probably don’t even know about the privacy settings.”

“Well, if we can’t play Hive Escape…” I trailed off, as my faceplate alerted me to someone approaching in the real world. I’d set an alarm because the other girls weren’t very good with kobold etiquette and would just talk to my unconscious body if I let them. “Just a sec, visitor.”

I woke up to see Cold Snap standing in the doorway of the room where I slept with the parrots, holding a giant spear in her mouth.

“Careful!” I said, moving to the side so it wouldn’t be pointed at me. “That looks sharp.”

She stood there frozen, eyes tracking me.

I smiled at her. “Is that a present for Nightwing? I don’t think she’s allowed to have weapons.”

She backed out of the room, the curtain falling back into place, obscuring her. I held on to my connection to the warp crystal, though, just in case she changed her mind and rushed back in to kill me after all. I played back the log of what I’d overheard and payed attention this time.

Oh. They were planning to escape. In a dinghy.

I was a bit torn. On the one hand, if they managed to get away it could be really bad for me, personally, and the collective in general. Luna would find out I was still alive and maybe come back to round us all up and put us in cages.

On the other hand, it would be pretty hypocritical to help hold them here against their will. I hadn’t agreed to be their jailor and if I had been asked, I would have said ‘no’. And when I put it that way, the right course of action was obvious.

I went back to the Virtual World and explained what was going on to Star and Fire. “…so we might want to start making plans to evacuate, if Luna decides to raid this place.”

“I’ve been planning to evacuate since we moved in,” Fire said. “Thanks for the heads up, though.”

“I’ll try to talk them out of it,” I said. “I don’t think Cold Snap really wants to leave, but she still thinks of herself as an Equestrian, you know? It’s one of those ‘how could I live with myself if I didn’t try’ things.” I winced. “Also the plan seems really stupid. They’re going to get lost and die of thirst or else get murdered by pirates.”

“If we do run, I’ll have to stay behind,” Star said. “Luna probably isn’t going to kill me, and trying to travel in my condition probably will.”

I hadn’t thought of that. “I guess I’ll try to talk them out of it *really hard*.”

I mean, I had an 18 charisma. How hard could it be?

It wasn’t hard to track them down. I knew where they lived, and they were both in Nightwing’s room, shoving things into saddle bags. They froze as I walked in. Well, Cold Snap froze. Nightwing froze for about two seconds, then started packing again.

“Hi, guys,” I said. “What’s the rush?”

“As if you don’t know,” Cold Snap said.

“If you think I’m going to tell the diamond dogs that you’re escaping, it’s too late to start running,” I said. “Even if I haven’t done it yet I could do it in less than a second, and they’d block all the exits and catch you. Unless you think you can fight your way out?”

“We’re not just staying here to die,” Nightwing said.

“Why would you die?” I asked. “I mean, you haven’t even done anything yet except plan to escape, and everyone already knows you want to escape. All they’d do is watch you for a while and… probably take away the mini-printer which would be kind of annoying.”

Nightwing finished packing, and shifted her saddlebags onto her back. “Okay, you have a point. Still, waiting isn’t going to make it better.”

“It depends how long you wait,” I said. “No one can stay vigilant forever. Also, and I’m going to be up front about this, your plan is stupid. You can’t print a seagoing vessel on a mini-printer.”

“That isn’t our plan,” Nightwing said.

“Oh?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Also it would be really bad for us if you left right now,” I added, “The kids are too young to move easily and Star is sick and might die.”

Cold Snap looked confused. “What?”

“If you leave, we have to leave too,” I said. “We can’t wait here for Luna to find us. She was *really mad* the last time we saw her and that was before…” I trailed off. “Um…”

“Before you blew up our ship and killed all my friends,” Nightwing said.

“Eep.”

“You kobolds have no concept of operational security,” she said. “I figured it out by looking at Fire’s personal logs and watching the recording of him setting the trap.”

“Er, it’s not that we have no security,” I said, cringing, “it’s that we didn’t bring a computer security guy with us. Or a doctor. Or… lots of other specialties.”

Nightwing rolled her eyes. “So you decided it was a good idea to hand out headsets to everyone who didn’t even ask, that let them steal all your technology?”

“It’s not my technology,” I said. “It’s all freely available, public domain stuff. I mean, except for the avatars I guess since I made those. The public library avatars are kind of meh.”

“There’s a plan for a bomb to destroy a city,” she said, gritting her teeth.

“Yeah, there’s, like, six different ways to do that,” I said. “I don’t even know why we have those patterns, but they’re ancient tech. Haven’t been secret for hundreds of years.”

“What do you mean Star is sick and might die!” Cold Snap shouted, interrupting us.

I was confused for a few seconds. Why would she even care? “Oh!” I said. “Not your friend Bright Star. My friend Star, the kobold. They got hurt fighting the garbage monsters and still haven’t recovered. And… okay, I was exaggerating. They wouldn’t die because we wouldn’t take them with us. We’d have to leave them behind while we escaped, and I’d probably never see them again.” I paused. “So I guess it’s not that much different than you and Bright Star, since it doesn’t look like you were planning on taking her.”

Cold Snap shrank into a little ball.

I turned back to look at Nightwing. She looked back at me. I frowned. “I kind of want to have you join our collective. You really went all out learning our technology. I don’t even know how to look at other peoples’ logs. I didn’t know you *could*.”

Nightwing narrowed her eyes. “And I want you to suffer for destroying the Dominance. You also insulted Princess Luna on multiple occasions, engaged in acts of piracy on the open seas, and helped murder a group of Diamond Dogs after invading their home. Each of those would be punishable by death in many nations.”

“One more reason to hate the concept of nations, I guess,” I said, folding my arms. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of. My conscience is clear.”

“Is it?” said a voice from behind me. Cinder’s voice. Apparently we hadn’t been talking quietly enough to keep everyone else from coming to listen in. “I think I’d like to hear the explanation for that.”

“Pirates? You worked with pirates?” Pippi said, looking horrified.

“We were captured by pirates!” I said quickly, trying to think of how to word this without lying because Nightwing had probably watched all my logs too and would call me out on it. “I convinced them to let us join their crew instead of killing us. We ‘engaged in acts of piracy’ by fighting what we assumed were other pirate ships, because according to Pareto, no one else was stupid enough to try to sail surface ships anymore. I know that’s not true now, but… I don’t think it was your ship. This happened years later.

“And fighting the Diamond Dogs was self-defense. They attacked us first, when we were just exploring the surface. I think all of you are familiar with that.”

“They fought to capture you,” Nightwing said. “You slaughtered them to the last puppy.”

“What puppies?” I asked. “I killed one of them. One. After he shot down my girlfriend right next to me, while she was armed with a stupid net gun and glue bombs. They were the ones fighting to kill.” Come to think of it, though, he had been a little short for a diamond dog. Had I really killed a puppy?

“And the Dominance?” Bright Star asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Luna wanted to capture us so we could be her neutered pets, so we ran away and set a bunch of traps to blow up the lair and anything in it we couldn’t take with us. I don’t know how that would destroy an airship.”

“Gold plated, gem-encrusted darts in the dart traps,” Nightwing said. “With hidden bombs inside, triggered to go off once they were on the ship.”

I laughed. “Oh, wow! Yeah, that sounds like a fair trap. You can’t blame us for people setting off our traps! They knew they weren’t invited.”

Nightwing glared at me and made it very clear that she could blame us for that. But Bright Star looked a little less betrayed.

“Which leaves… insulting Luna?” Cinder said.

“Yeah, have you ever met her?” I replied, grimacing. The parrots and Madam Purr laughed a little, and Cinder gave a small smile. The ponies still looked angry, but I was pretty sure insulting Luna wasn’t actually a capital crime, or she would have just killed me herself.

Cinder grabbed me by the tail, and dragged me back away from Cold Snap and Nightwing, standing between us and herding them to the back of the room. “Alright. It sounds like Nightwing has a reasonable grudge,” she said. “There’s a difference between setting a trap to keep people out of your lair and setting a trap to blow up their friends.”

I frowned. “All of them were there to kidnap us, though. It’s not like they were innocent.”

“We were there to *rescue you*,” Nightwing said.

“Then maybe the hail of darts should have convinced you that we didn’t want any!” I replied, a bit angrily. I think I was really angry at Fire, though – it *was* kind of cheaty to trick them into blowing up their own airship.

“We rescue people who don’t want rescuing a lot,” she said. “People are stupid and paranoid.”

“If you were dragons, I’d just let you fight,” Cinder said.

“Yes, let us fight,” Nightwing said, baring some very non-pony-like fangs. They were… actually kind of adorable. I imagined them sinking into my flesh… nope, still adorable.

Cinder shooed her back against the wall. “But you’re not dragons and you’d end up killing each other, and how would we explain that to the Alpha?”

“If they were Abyssinians, they would prepare a series of riddles, and whoever could not answer the other’s would be cast into the abyss,” said Madam Purr.

“Really?” Pippi asked. “You have riddle contests to the death?”

Madam Purr was silent, then said softly, “No, not really. We’d take them before a judge and jury, like most civilized places.”

“What do Diamond Dogs do?” I asked.

“Pretty much the same as dragons,” Cinder said. “Only they usually end up killing each other.”

“What about kobolds?” asked Nightwing. “Please enlighten us with your superior method of settling disputes.”

“We do everything by consensus,” I said. “For something where one kobold thinks another did something wrong, we get a kobold that both sides trust to mediate. Sometimes, they agree, and suggest a punishment, and if the kobold being punished respects them enough they’ll allow themselves to be punished.”

“Not a lot of capital punishment, then,” Squee said.

I shook my head. “We’re more civilized than that. The closest we get is a trap gauntlet.”

Nightwing looked interested, so I explained. “One kobold sets a bunch of traps – good ones, lethal ones. The kobold we trust verifies that they’re fair. Then the punishment is to run through the labyrinth. A lot of kobolds will agree to that – we really like traps.”

“So is that a solution you’d accept?” Cinder asked. “A trap gauntlet?”

I waggled a hand in the air. “It’s kind of a weak punishment for genocide,” I said.

“You killed a lot of ponies on the Dominance, but it wasn’t *genocide*,” Bright Star said.

“Huh?” I looked confused. “No no no, Nightwing was the one trying to commit genocide. She wants to help Luna round us all up, put us in cages, and forcibly sterilize us, or do you think when I said ‘neutered pets’ that I was being figurative?”

“You must have misunderstood,” Bright Star said, as many of the others looked suitably horrified. “Luna may be a bit out of touch with modern times, but she’d never do… that.”

“Let me find the log,” I said. It took about thirty seconds, it was a ways back.

Luna’s recorded voice rang from my faceplate: “Come with me to Equestria and let us help you control your population. With education and careful management we can find a place for you here, without needing to swarm like locusts across the land. None of you need be harmed! We would stick to voluntary measures as much as possible. If your numbers outpaced our ability to support you –”

“Huh,” I said. “I guess I interrupted her before she spelled it out, but I think it’s pretty obvious where she was going with that.”

“Yeah, that was… pretty bad,” the unicorn agreed. “I don’t think Celestia would have let her go through with it.”

“Who?” I asked.

“She’s the one who’s actually in charge,” Bright Star said. “Luna is a newer princess, sort of like Cadance and Twilight.”

“Luna is nothing like them!” Nightwing protested. “She’s Celestia’s equal. They’ve always ruled together!”

“Except for the thousand years that Luna spent imprisoned on the moon,” Bright Star said, deadpan.

“Oh right, the ‘army of evil’ thing,” I said. “I forgot about that.”

“So, the trap gauntlet,” Cinder prompted.

“She already did it,” I said. “I mean, if we’re going with collective punishment, and apparently Fire decided that we are,” I grumbled that bit, “then the Dominance collectively went through the traps.”

Cinder nodded. “Which means it’s your turn.”

“I don’t know,” I said. It seemed wrong, but it was hard to put a finger on why. Was I just scared?

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Nightwing said, grinning.

“But would it solve anything?” I asked. “If I went through your traps, you’d consider that payment for all our supposed crimes?” Ah, right, that was why. I was never afraid of *her*. “You wouldn’t let the Princess put us on trial?”

Her grin vanished.

“I don’t think you have the authority for that, do you,” I said, narrowing my eye-spots.

“The Alpha has the authority we require,” Madam Purr purred. “We must report this matter to him, along with all of the kobolds’ secret crimes.”

“No!” Nightwing said.

“You can’t!” I said at the same time.

“Don’t worry, you’ll feel much better once all of this is out in the open!” Pippi said, with a reassuring smile. I was not reassured.

So we found ourselves in front of a thousand diamond dogs, the Alpha presiding, while Nightwing and I presented our cases before him. Nightwing and I stood on platforms around the edge of the arena, the diamond dogs witnessing the trial from the stands behind us, while the Alpha and several other important Diamond Dogs held court from a box raised above us, just below the cavern’s roof.

Fire and Star were on my platform with me, for support in case things went sideways, and because they were involved in the charges. Star looked miserable, but they were well enough to stay conscious and lucid, at least. And also to send me messages telling me not to panic, although they could have done that from anywhere.

“It’s still not too late to run for it,” Fire said, while we listened to Nightwing putting everything that we’d done in the worst possible light. “Give the word and I’ll set off my diversion.”

“But then we’d have to run again and leave everything behind again and start over *again*,” I whined. “And it’ll just keep happening, over and over.”

“Then we’ll start over, over and over,” Star sent back. “It’s what we do.”

Nightwing finished her story, and was just starting in on some philosophical diatribe about why I sucked when the Alpha cut her off with a wave of his paw. He turned his gaze on me, and fixed me in place with his stare.

“You wrong me,” the Alpha growled, menace in his voice and in his gaze. I flattened my ears… and his expression softened. “But that wrong I forgive. Soldiers fight soldiers, and the leader is dead and her pack shattered. That is vengeance enough for me. Not every soldier needs to die.”

For a second, I was almost relieved.

“I cannot forgive!” cried the Old Bitch, standing next to him. “I demand vengeance for the death of my pup! He was no soldier!”

“He fought like a soldier,” I said. “His death was already vengeance. Do we really want to just… bounce revenge back and forth like that?”

The Alpha nodded. “The cycle of vengeance burns until it dies. You can forgive the one who wrongs you, but you do not. The chance for forgiveness lies with the Old Bitch now.”

“I melt the flesh from her bones!” the Old Bitch snarled.

“You try,” the Alpha said, shaking his head.

“I claim vengeance as well!” Nightwing said.

“You are not of our pack,” the Alpha said.

She motioned at me. “Neither are they!”

The Alpha glowered at her. “They live with us, perform the work we ask, share their wealth and knowledge freely. You could do this but you refuse, again and again you refuse. You are Equestrian and serve only the Princesses.”

Also, we weren’t the ones asking for revenge, but details.

Nightwing stepped back, then recovered her composure and stared back at the Alpha with determination. “Give me my vengeance and I will forswear the Princesses, and serve only you.” She looked like she was going to be sick, as she added, “In all ways.”

The Alpha drummed his claws against the edge of his throne. “Very well. If Wave survives the Old Bitch, you take your turn.”

“Not Wave,” Nightwing said. “I claim vengeance against Fire.”

“Bring it on,” Fire replied, mouth flat and jaggy.

The Diamond Dogs had an armory, with all kinds of period-appropriate weapons. I took a crossbow, a cutlass, and a spear, along with some light armor. I also had the warp crystal tucked under my chestplate – this wasn’t the sort of fight where I was willing to hold back.

The Old Bitch smirked as she watched me arm myself. “Weapons do not save you,” she said. “My aspect is growth and rot.”

“Sounds tasty,” I said, cracking my faceplate and licking my tongue over the edge. I wasn’t actually sure that I’d be able to get the warp crystal to eat her magic like it had eaten Luna’s, or it if would do anything useful if I tried, but I wasn’t about to taunt her by telling her the techniques I was actually planning to use.

“So are we doing this?” Fire asked, loading himself down with weapons of his own.

I nodded. “Even if we both lose, we’ll have Star and Perro and Rover to look after the kids. And if a single opponent is enough to make us drop everything and run, we really are going to be running forever.”

I sent, because I wasn’t going to say it aloud, “And I’m pretty sure your diversion is going to kill a lot of innocent people. I’m still not happy about the Dominance.”

“If they follow a leader who’s going to order our deaths, they’re not innocent,” Fire sent back. “But fine, we can play this straight. Try not to die.”

The Old Bitch and I were up first, so we headed out onto the sands, stained with the blood of countless duels before ours. The fight wasn’t technically to the death, but I was sure she was going to try to kill me, and sparing her wouldn’t win me any mercy. So yeah. To the death.

She struck first, opening her crystal eye and sending a wave of sickly green light towards me. In the mindscape, I imagined a ripple running across the ground, leaving the parched dirt cracked and broken behind it. I imagined the dragon leaping to the ground before me, and breathing fire that melted the ground into glass, deflecting the attack to the sides. In the real world, it looked like an invisible bubble warding off her energy.

I tried to shoot her with the crossbow, but the bolts rotted to dust before they got halfway. Reinforcing their inertia didn’t help much. So for my third shot, I launched myself, using the super-jump trick. The protected aura moved with me, but as my spear touched the Old Bitch’s robe it crumbled to dust. The sudden lack of impact made me stumble and I rolled to a stop at her feet.

“DIE!” she screamed, thrusting her hand in my direction, and redoubling her effort to disintegrate me with her magic.

“You first!” I shouted back, and punched her as hard as I could, guiding the warp crystal through one of the maneuvers I’d been practicing: loading down my fist with all the inertia the warp crystal could manage as soon as it was in motion, reducing hers as it hit, and then after she was launched into the air, I shifted her inertia the other way to make her hit the wall hard.

The wall cracked a bit. The Old Bitch cracked a lot. Most of her fell to the ground in a heap, while the rest stuck to the wall, leaving a dog-shaped splotch with blood splattering out to the sides.

I barely noticed, because my hand was on fire. I screamed in agony as the fingers turned black and crumbled to dust, the rot spreading slowly towards my wrist. I tried to get the dragon to stop it somehow, but the pain was too much and I couldn’t hold on to the mindscape.

The Diamond Dogs cheered as the blackness crept up my lower arm.

I lay down in the sand, and drew my cutlass. The first hack dug into my flesh, but fell far short of removing the limb. I had to do it again, and again – it probably would have gone faster if I could have hit the same spot twice… if I could have held on to the mindscape enough to activate a simple inertial shift on the cutlass in motion it would have been trivial! But I couldn’t manage either, and the rot had reached my elbow by the time I gave up, my arm mangled but still firmly attached.

There was one more thing I could try. My cybernetic leg was usually set to match my other leg’s strength, so that I could walk. I removed that limitation. Curling it up across my body, I dug my footclaws into the mangled ruin of my upper arm, and grabbed hold of the bone underneath… and then kicked at full, augmented force.

I blacked out for a few seconds, and when I could see again, my arm was gone, ripped out of its socket and lying a few feet away. But to my horror, the rot was spreading up my leg, now.

Well, that was fine. My leg was easy to remove.

It was easy to remove with two arms, when I wasn’t working through a haze of pain and on the verge of passing out from blood loss.

I managed it, though, and crawled away from the rotting limbs, hoping that the curse wouldn’t be able to crawl its way along the bloodstains.

Then I passed out and bled to death.

Do kobolds normally dream when they’re dead? I hadn’t the previous time, but maybe this time they kept me alive but unconscious longer to deal with my wounds.

At any rate, I dreamed. They were not good dreams. Crawling decay disintegrating everything was a recurring theme – parts of me, other people nearby, the mines, the city… the world, eventually? I was crawling on my remaining hand and knee through a writhing mass of black decay when Luna appeared in a flash of light and banished everything, replacing it with a gentle snowfall.

Her eyes fixed on me and she glared at me silently for a while.

“Am I dead?” I asked, because the snow looked a little like clouds and that made me think of heaven. I am not a lucid dreamer.

“Clearly not,” she replied. “Where are you?”

My faceplate had rotted away, but in my dream I forgot my face was unexpressive, and I smiled a big, toothy grin at her. “I think I’m in heaven.”

She gave a pained sigh, and vanished in a flash of light. I dreamed of resting, limbless (somehow it seemed logical for my other arm and leg to vanish so that I could be a snake or something) in a field of snow, for a really long time, and then I woke up, which is the only reason I can remember this.

I don’t know if it was really Luna. We didn’t hear anything from her right away.

I hope by now you aren’t surprised to hear that I woke up alive. I was a little surprised to have two arms – cybernetic limbs were the easiest kind of cybernetics to install, but it still wasn’t trivial when you were starting from a new amputee. It was stranger (and a little jarring) to see all four limbs brown and furry, but apparently Pippi had told them about how hard it was to accessorize with obvious cybernetics, so they’d disguised them.

They being both Star *and* Fire. I hadn’t been able to see Fire’s fight, but he’d won his duel as well. Nightwing was dead.

“She was good,” he said, “I was better.” He paused a bit, then added. “And luckier. A lot luckier. I almost thought she was throwing the fight on purpose, but if she was she was a really good actor.”

I had no choice but to take his word for it. I never did figure out how Nightwing looked at other peoples’ logs.

We did manage to piece together her plan, though, by looking through what she was packing once I was well enough to go back to the menagerie. She’d designed a transmission tower small enough to carry but powerful enough to send a burst message to the moon, once. She’d been planning to call for help. I don’t think it would have worked since we’d already asked the Nyx to stay quiet about us, but if she’d only said that she herself needed rescuing, maybe? The Nyx were pretty stupid sometimes.

Or maybe the Equestrians had radio, and she was planning to signal them? If you fly high enough the horizon is pretty far away.

I also got a slightly better description of the battle itself from Pippi, but she wasn’t a fighter and didn’t really know what she was describing. The coup de grace where Fire chopped off Nightwing’s head was pretty definitive, though.

She also described how the Old Bitch’s apprentice, who inherited her magic eye, had been given the opportunity to pursue vengeance against me on behalf of the Old Bitch herself, and had declined. No one else had stepped forward either – she’d been respected, and feared, but few had really liked her.

“I let the apprentice try her healing magic on me,” Star mentioned, during our virtual hangout time. “It didn’t cure things instantly, but I’ve been feeling better. She comes by to use her magic to weaken the parasites once a day.”

“And you trust her?” I asked.

“She didn’t kill you when she had the chance,” Star said. “I don’t think you could have fought her off unconscious. Besides, it’s Perro. I trust Perro.”

“Wait,” I said. “Perro’s a girl?”

Cold Snap didn’t try to escape again, but she was afraid of me for a while. Eventually I got tired of her flinching every time I glanced her way.

“You do realize that I never had anything against you, right?” I asked. “And if you thought I was going to get revenge on you, why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?”

She looked confused.

“I was lying unconscious in the arena and the Alpha asked if anyone else wanted to kill me,” I said. “I don’t think I could have fought back.”

“I don’t think I could have killed you in front of all those people,” she replied, looking embarrassed.

Bright Star hugged her in the weird way that ponies had to, slinging a forehoof over her neck and nuzzling. “I don’t think you could have killed her at all,” she said softly. “You’re not that kind of pony.”

I didn’t bring up the way she’d snuck into my room with a spear while I was in the virtual world. Maybe Bright Star was right, and she wouldn’t have gone through with it.

Cold Star hugged her friend, and sighed. “You *are* that kind of pony, Wave,” she said. “You’ve killed, more than once, and I don’t care whether it was justified or not, I can’t feel comfortable knowing you could do the same thing to me.”

I pouted. “I’ve literally never killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me right at that instant.”

“It’s an emotional thing,” Bright Star said. “She can’t just stop feeling her emotions because it’s unfair. I sort of feel the same way, although it’s kind of a turn on since I know you aren’t going to actually do it.”

Bright Star had been a little on edge ever since the arena. It made her a lot worse at sex, somehow, but I still hardly ever won when we played together.

“Ponies,” Cinder said, rolling her eyes. “Hey, Wave, do you want to fertilize my eggs?”

I grinned at her. “You know I’m always up for that.”

She flicked me on the faceplate. “I’m being serious. The migration’s coming up, so I’m fertile for the next month or so.”

“Oh,” I said. “You sure you don’t want to go off and find a real dragon?”

“Dragons are jerks,” she said. “I don’t want to raise a clutch of jerks. You put on a good show in the arena – ripping your own arm off like that? Our kids wouldn’t be dweebs, and you’re only about 50% of a jerk, so they might even be tolerable to be around.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I think.”

“The Alpha gets the first shot,” she continued, “but I don’t know if dragons are fertile with diamond dogs. I know we are with kobolds.”

“I get it,” I said. “I’m a barely tolerable backup plan.”

She grinned. “Smart, too.”

“My services are at your disposal,” I told her. “I was kind of disappointed Ash’s clutch only had two eggs.”

If that sounds awfully casual, well, we’d already grown a lot closer. She’d started joining me and Star and Fire for game night, and I’d taught her how to use the avatar builder and how to design new patterns for the mini-printer, although she still preferred to make things by hand.

About a week later, as the four of us watched the space station we’d been trying to save disintegrate as the fires and structural damage spiraled out of control, she sent me a private message. “Tonight.”

“When?” I sent back, only to be immediately dragged out of the virtual world by a loud growl two inches from my faceplate. Cinder was there in my bed, pinning me down.

I cracked my faceplate and kissed her, our long tongues entwining and wrestling for dominance… and used the distraction to disable the governors on my cybernetics, so that I could roll her off of me and onto the floor, pinning her down in turn.

…she let me do it, don’t get me wrong. Dragons are stronger than cybernetics. But she seemed to appreciate the gesture, pretending to struggle (and I’m sure that was pretending, since she didn’t even break free from my flesh-and-blood arm) as I bit down on her neck and roughly thrust inside her.

Dragons are surprisingly soft on the inside… a little too hot, though. I compensated by doing quick thrusts, holding myself at her entrance to cool down between… until I couldn’t hold back anymore, and shoved inside her and held it there while I came, screaming in pleasure and pain.

At least my poor penis got to rest for a while while I finished her off with my tongue.

The next night, she insisted on being on top.

The night after, the parrots joined in and we had a very messy foursome.

By the end of the month, I was pretty sure someone was pregnant with something. Cinder certainly was – and while I hoped that her eggs were mine, well… as I’ve said before I had *plenty* of biological children and didn’t need to stress over it. I was sure dragon puppies would be adorable too.

After that…

I guess you could say we lived happily ever after, at least for a while. The Alpha never let us put up a big transmission tower to reconnect with the moon, but we had each other, and the other girls from the menagerie, and an increasing number of friendly diamond dogs of all ages and professions, and we were safe enough and happy enough and we could finally stop worrying about when the next hammer would fall.

Things kept happening, don’t get me wrong. But for the most part they didn’t happen to me, so I’m not really sure that the rest is my story to tell.

Who wants to go next?

Author's Note

And that's pretty much all I have written so far. As I'm sure you've noticed because some of you commented on it, there's plenty of loose ends, but this seemed like a good stopping point.

Next up is a time skip and then another narrator. I'll post more when I have another 'book' done, probably as a sequel. I already started writing it but it's not going very fast, so it'll be a while.

Space Raft

It could hardly be called a space ship. It had an FTL drive, of sorts, in the form of a warp crystal that warped reality so that the speed of light just wasn’t a thing, among other effects, but it was suspended in the middle of the only room by four semi-elastic cords attached to rings set in the walls. That didn’t mean it provided any form of propulsion – the whole mess had been flung towards its destination with what the people on board, who could hardly be called a crew, devoutly hoped was sufficient precision to hit the broad-side of a planet. We had personal impellers, and could get out and push if the trajectory needed to be adjusted, but we didn’t have a navigator who could tell us whether that was the case so the point was kind of moot.

One of the other effects of the warp crystal was to mess with inertia. In transit, the outer hull had its inertia set very very high, making it difficult for anything to affect the trajectory. Shortly before impact, it was important to change the setting to make it very very low instead, or else the planet we were aimed at was going to have a very very bad day. An unfortunate side effect was that we’d probably shed the last dregs of our momentum in the upper atmosphere and have to rely on parachutes to drift the rest of the way to the ground. The very very low setting didn’t include the crew, technically – that was a different function where the warp crystal would momentarily negate the inertia of everything around it to prevent its own destruction when we ran into something. Which was important! Everything else could be replaced, but warp crystals were impossible devices and so could only be created inside the warped reality of another warp crystal. The urban legend was that the very first warp crystal had been the result of a botched demon summoning, but everyone knew that magic wasn’t real.

Aside from the crystal, the space… not a spaceship, but it was some sort of spacecraft. A spaceraft? In any event, aside from the crystal, it was mostly full of boxes and shaggy lizard people. Kobolds. Our six-month mission: to helplessly plunge into the depths of space and impact on a planet that, ideally, would already be habitable. If it wasn’t, the general-purpose fabrication unit packed securely in most of the boxes would be able to build the tools to build the factories to build the devices that might eventually terraform it – or, more practically, build some sort of sealed habitat for us to live in. The space raft didn’t have any form of life support, but the… biological cargo was capable of existing in a sort of low-power mode almost indefinitely, saving the precious atmospheric oxygen (we had a few extra cans) for when we needed a quick burst of energy. In the meantime we subsisted off a trickle of energy supplied by an internal perpetual motion machine, made possible by abusing the side effects of the warp crystal’s insane physics.

We were *much* better designed than the raft.

We were also, to a kobold, dead to what passed for reality in the vicinity of a warp crystal, letting the electronics clamped to our bodies immerse us in a virtual world instead, where moving and talking didn’t use up mission-critical resources and we could frolic and play to our heart’s content… as long as someone kept an eye on the timer. Specifically me. It was my job to keep an eye on the timer.

The main problem with Spots was that he was so conventional. He was in a lobby trying to decide what to do next, so of course he looked like himself, spots and all. He was even wearing his rig, which meant that I had to talk to a virtual simulation of the pixel array he used for a face – currently, a pair of eye-spots and a curvy smile for a mouth. His ears perked up as I materialized, then they flattened and his mouth became a horizontal zig-zag because I wasn’t in one of the shapes he liked.

I slithered towards him and coiled my sleek, scaly avatar around his, letting the bulge of my sheath press against his belly… then I switched to my fuzzy green otter before he could get around to actually complaining. He wasn’t really that fun to tease, so I had to do it sparingly.

A fuzzy green *female* otter. This was very important to him.

His arms wrapped around me, claws running through my fur, sliding down my back and leaving me all shivery by the time they slipped under my tail to cup my rear. “Rawr,” he said, his face briefly replaced by a picture of a gaping toothy maw before returning to its pleasant smile.

“Rar,” I said back, sliding my whiskers along the smooth plastic of his rig until I could clamp my teeth around his ear, gnawing on it lightly.

He only ever wanted one thing, but that was fine. I only went to visit him when I wanted it too. It probably helped that I usually wanted it. For scheduling purposes, I mean.

“Mmm, such a sexy otter,” he purred, squeezing and stroking my behind. “You had me worried for a second there.”

“Can we do this one co-op?” I asked.

He grumbled, and lifted a hand up to caress the back of my head. “That takes all the fun out of it. I’ll never understand why you like that mode.”

I liked that mode because it guaranteed a simultaneous orgasm, and I wasn’t enough of a jerk to leave after I’d had my fun, but after finding satisfaction I was usually satisfied, and finishing off my partner was kind of a chore. “Maybe I’m feeling super lazy and want you to do all the work for once,” I grumbled right back.

“If you want to lie there and take it, then lie there and take it,” he said, his eye-dots shifting into mischievous slants. “And we’ll see how many orgasms I can give you before you get me off.” The blank white of the lobby swirled into the not-quite-as-blank white of his favorite snowscape, and suddenly I was falling onto my back into the soft snow – not cold enough to hurt, but cold enough to make me really appreciate his warmth as it pressed down on top of me.

I moaned, and clutched my tiny otter arms and legs to his sides as he slid into me, and knew that the answer was going to be ‘a lot’.

Damn it.

We lay in the snow for a bit afterwards, letting it cool us down. I clung to his side like a fuzzy leech, watching the dregs of semen drip from his cock and vanish just before messing up his fur, because that wasn’t one of his kinks. My own juices were failing to smear against his hip-plate.

“You know, in three more days we’ll finally get to wake up,” I said, stroking a paw through his chest-fluff where it erupted from behind his chest-plate, making a game out of rearranging his spots. “It’s going to be really weird being back in my own body.”

“You’re cuter as an otter,” Spots said, the arm underneath me curling to stroke my side.

“Yeah yeah, I know,” I said. “I don’t like my body that much either.”

He rolled over and pushed me away. “Stop that,” he said. “You’re still cute.”

“But not fuckable,” I replied. He’d never made a pass at me in the real world. I’m not actually sure that I wanted him to, but it was still kind of embarrassing.

His eyes curled into upwards swirls, then spun around before turning back into dots. “Too much penis.”

“We all have penises,” I said, deadpan. “It’s part of the standard package. Just like you,” I curled my tail over between his legs, and prodded underneath his flaccid penis at the unbroken expanse of fluff. “Have a vagina. I don’t get it – you keep everything else about your avatar true to life but you leave off that?”

“We all have our ideal selves,” he said. “You want to be a cartoon otter –”

“Cartoon?!” I said, sitting up indignantly. I’d put a lot of work into my otter shape!

He booped me in the nose, making my face scrunch up involuntarily. “Real otters’ faces are not that expressive.”

So I bit his finger. It was an otter necessity.

“Wave. Wave!” came an overly excited direct message from Star. “You’ve got to come to the Garden. There’s an alien!”

“There’s no such thing as aliens,” I sent back, but teleported to the Garden anyway. It was a public hub, so no one would take any particular note if I showed up, or if I left after a few awkward minutes without saying anything other than rote greetings. I was in my current default shape, an androgynous pink dragon.

When I arrived, everyone was gathered around an avatar I’d never seen before, a small blue cartoon horse with feathery wings and a single horn. And by ‘cartoon’ I mean the head wasn’t even shaped like a real horse’s, and the skin was completely untextured. Whoever it was, they were also obscuring their icon – the horse had an icon of a moon on each hip, despite lacking a rig, but it wasn’t Moon’s moon and the system identified them as ‘Guest 1’.

“I am not an alien,” the horse said, in a haughty feminine voice. “I am a Princess of the Ponies, and you and yours do hurtle towards my planet with undue haste. Slow your approach at once!”

This elicited a wave of tittering laughter from the others gathered around. The pony princess stomped a hoof.

“Don’t worry, princess, we’re not going to hit very hard,” I said. It was always more fun to play along with this sort of thing.

“You are not going to land at all without our permission,” the princess replied. “You are to slow your approach to a speed that does not suggest that you mean to eviscerate our planet like a shot from a distant cannon!”

“Sorry, no can do!” Star said, giggling. They were using their icon as an avatar – they hovered in midair, a star-shaped crystal which rotated wildly every few seconds only to stop in a random orientation. “You see, we were shot out of a cannon…”

Everyone laughed, except for the princess. Even I chuckled a bit.

“Cease your lies!” princess shouted back. “If you can slow to land you can slow a trifle sooner to prove your peaceful intentions.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “We don’t have an engine. It’s the most expensive part of a spaceship, so we left it at home.”

“We could turn off the FTL?” Star suggested.

“Time dilation would smack us in the face and we’d arrive even faster,” I said.

“It’d be slower to her, though.”

I shook my head. “We’d have to switch modes at the same time, and that means two years for some random bit of space dust to throw us off course.” I also didn’t know how to switch off the FTL since that wasn’t part of the standard procedure I’d trained for. I would have had to find the Warp Crystal documentation and figure it out, and I had other things I’d rather do. And by things I meant people of course.

The Princess pushed past the others to speak to me alone. “If thou dost this for us, we give our solemn oath that we shall guide your ship safely to Equestria.”

I frowned a bit. I mean, obviously we couldn’t trust an alien at their word, even if they were a real alien and not someone’s stupid prank. But it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know how hard time dilation would hit us. Maybe we were already travelling at the same subjective speed? If that was how it worked, then two days with the Warp Crystal turned off meant two days that all of us would be awake and breathing, and while we could probably manage that with canned air and water from our stores, it would put us in a bad place if we didn’t land on a habitable planet. Habitable by kobolds, not by ponies.

If it had been real, it might have been a good idea anyway since anything that could project itself into our virtual space from several light years out was probably not something that we should laugh at and ignore. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.” I summoned a giant cartoon lever labeled ‘FTL’ and pulled it to the ‘off’ position.

“Wave no! Stop!” Star screamed, hurtling themself at me. Their crystal spun, agitated. “What have you done?! You’ve killed us all!”

“What?” I said. “It was your idea!”

They spun more rapidly. “I didn’t mean it!”

The princess just frowned. “Why dost thou jest? Nothing about your ship has changed.”

“Look, Moon or whoever you are, I’m willing to play along with this game of yours but I’m not going to actually wake up and wreck the ship as a joke,” I said. “Do you even know what would happen if I shut off the FTL for real? Because I don’t.”

The princess looked confused. “You are lucid, and share a dream space, but you think me a figment?”

“No, I think you’re one of us pulling a prank,” I said. “Does the virtual space even have guest access?”

“It does,” Spotty said. In a direct message, since he wasn’t there in the Garden.

“What?” I sent back. “Are you spying on me?”

“Only when you’re in public!” he replied. As if that made it better. “But yes, we do have guest access. If an alien somehow managed to get a signal to one of our receivers, and interpret our network protocol, they could log on as a guest.”

“So… have they?” I asked. “You can check, right?”

Spotty just replied, “There’s no such thing as aliens. But let me see if… huh. There’s a guest login but no corresponding activity on the network.”

“So it’s a prank.”

“Of course it’s a prank,” he said. “Aliens? Really?”

I guess I’d zoned out a bit chatting with Spotty, because the next thing I knew a blue hoof booped my avatar. Reflexively, I bit it. The princess shook me up and down like a ragdoll, since I was set to allow that sort of thing, and eventually flung me into a bush.

“Know this – we are no prank, and no figment, and you shall make no landfall without our permission!” Then she left, with a flashy teleport effect that looked like her tearing a hole in space with her horn, large enough for her to walk through, head held high.

“Well, that was fun,” I said to the bemused crowd. “Anyone want me to go figure out how to turn off the FTL?”

“Don’t even joke about that,” Star said.

The next day I woke up in my own body, sore and stiff from six months in low power mode. Our space raft looked about the same as we’d left it – dark except for the grape purple glow of the warp crystal, and the varicolored glimmer of the icons and faceplates of the rest of the gaggle of idiots who’d signed up for this trip with me. My own were a deep blue, my icon a wave of course, but the rest ran the gamut from Star’s orangey-yellow to Prism’s rainbow. Still, there was more shadow than light, and at least I didn’t have to look at myself.

A countdown in the corner of my field of view gave an estimated time to impact – less than five minutes. “Which way’s forwards?” I muttered quietly, and my faceplate gave me an arrow towards one of the walls. I floated over to it and placed a paw against it – cold. I gingerly unlatched the shutter and cracked it open, making sure no burning rays of sunlight were lurking just beyond to fry my cameras.

I shouldn’t have worried. We were still well outside the target solar system. I couldn’t even make out the planets until I had my faceplate highlight them, complete with a dotted line indicating our trajectory. It looked so small… and I could see it moving towards us. Slowly, but perceptibly. I’d thought the recommendation to switch modes ten seconds out was cutting it close, but wow we were going fast – we’d still have to cover half the inner system unprotected, with any random bit of space junk potentially meaning the end of our mission.

I asked my faceplate to highlight the space junk, or at least the pieces large enough to see, and that was a mistake. There was so much of it. So much that it completely obscured my vision. There wasn’t an asteroid belt – it was more like an asteroid cloud, and the planet we were headed towards was in the densest part.

Eager to figure out how fucked we were, I dipped into a small simulation to model the junk surrounding the planet. It looked like the planet had cleared out a safe area around itself, at least… and there were only a few pieces that looked like they might actually hit us on the way in. All of them were potentially dangerous at ten seconds, but if I could switch us over at *one* second…

“You know what would be really nice? Being able to automate this shit,” I grumbled. But no – warp crystals refused to listen to anything other than direct requests from a living creature, and lucky me I was one of the ones that our warp crystal liked.

The countdown started pulsing subtly, reminding me that there were only two minutes left. It took thirty seconds to return to the crystal, because I was an idiot and forgot I had my personal impellers strapped to my tail, and did the whole trip the hard way. Still, plenty of time. I placed my hands against the warp stone, and leaned forwards to clack my faceplate against it as well. “Oh great and generous crystal, your pledged servant begs for an audience,” I said, envisioning the gaudy throne room I usually used to commune with the thing. There was a slight tingle in my neck, and the purple-scaled dragon in my imagination turned his burning eyes towards me. “I pray that you change the inertial mode from crunch to splat, but the timing is tight so you’ll need to do it quickly when I give the word.” I kept a close eye on the countdown, and added a diagram of our path to the other upper corner, with the dangerous asteroids highlighted in red. “Will you do that for me?”

The dragon nodded.

“Then at my signal, great one,” I said, and watched the countdown slowly tick down. Fifteen seconds. Ten, and my ears twitched, but I stayed silent. Five – and the first interloper shattered against our hull. Four, and the next one missed. Three, and oh god oh fuck where did the planet get a MOON and why was it accelerating towards us?! “SHIT!”

I felt the queasy sensation of the inertial mode shifting, and then something sent the whole space raft spinning, and I curled around the warp crystal and tried not to think about my friends being crushed by the unsecured crates. Dizzy and disoriented, I could have sworn I saw the moon jerk impossibly fast to catch us before we could go flying off into the void – but that was impossible. Moons didn’t do that. It must have just been luck that we still ended up hitting it at an angle, slowing only a little in its thin atmosphere before digging a long trench in the surface dust.

“What the fuck, Wave?” shouted Prism, from underneath a pile of boxes. They shrugged them off like they were made of Styrofoam, because apparently in my panic I’d somehow set the warp crystal to reduce inertia inside the raft as well. That couldn’t be healthy, but it was probably healthier than being crushed by boxes.

“Are we dead?” asked Star, from behind me, their face a spinning version of their icon which usually meant they were worried.

“Probably,” I said, trying to give a reassuring smile but pretty sure my faceplate wasn’t going to display anything that much different from how I was feeling. “I think the pony princess threw a moon at us.”

Deadbeat Dragon

Let me digress a bit about accelerated learning. In a purely virtual scenario, with a low fidelity environment and sensorium, we can experience time approximately ten times faster, which we mostly use to teach our kids. By the time our eggs hatch, they’ve learned two languages (Yipyip and Common) and the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with object permanence and not to bite and even how to control their bowels because despite virtual reality being a very bad fit for that sort of thing, nobody wants to deal with that shit in real life.

For the next two years, it’s half accelerated virtual reality to learn socialization and all kinds of academic subjects, and half actual reality to get comfortable with their growing bodies. So, two years after hatching, they’re physically adult and mentally… mostly adult. Adult enough to make choices, like finalizing their icon and picking a specialty to train in.

In an ordinary, established collective, that would be the end of systematic acceleration (although we still use it for things like avatar design, computer programming, and complicated strategy games) but in a new colony like ours where we need a bunch of missing specialties filled out yesterday, the plan was to do another year of half and half and have them ready to work full-time by the age of three.

Three standard years. Somewhere between four and ten local years. Thirty moons. Twenty one standard years subjectively, because that’s how long it takes to get a kobold fully trained.

Star and Fire and I grew up in an established collective, so chronologically, at this point in the story, we were not quite eight years old, but subjectively I was somewhere around twenty three or twenty four because I do a lot of avatar design.

And yeah, it would be really nice to be able to just snap your fingers and go into accelerated time in a crisis, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way – you need to be fully virtual and give a series of three commands, in order, with about fifteen seconds between each one or else you get error messages and it doesn’t work. If you have a few minutes to think you can turn it into half an hour to think, though.

Oh, and this isn’t purely a property of virtual reality – kobold brains are designed to work with it. Aliens *can* use accelerated time but the results vary. It worked perfectly for the Nyx, but the parrots’ thoughts got really sluggish and it was more of a mind-altering drug than a useful tool.

At any rate, it was going to be a long time before our eggs turned into useful members of the collective.

A few months passed uneventfully. Star and Fire added their own eggs to the hatchery (I impregnated Star, and Star fertilized Fire, for what variety we could eke out of three people). I continued to train the warp crystal on the more esoteric prerequisites for a proper ‘dungeon mode’. Star started building up our fabricator, one piece at a time. Fire wandered all over the island, stealthily placing hidden cameras so that we could detect visitors before they were at our doorstep.

The three of us made a day trip out to the old diamond dog lair, since the giant ants made it dangerous, even if the dogs weren’t back. We did get attacked by ants a few times, but Fire and I could handle them, and doing a super-jump to interrupt our scent trail kept us from getting swarmed.

The tunnel had collapsed again, and we had to do some actual digging because we hadn’t brought the matter compressor. Eventually we came to the start of the diamond dog’s maze, and remembered the traps that we hadn’t set off, thanks to Pareto’s perceptiveness. So we took it really slowly and carefully, roped together so that we’d have a chance of pulling someone out of a pit before they landed on the spikes.

Conveniently, all the traps had been set off, probably by giant ants given the green bloodstains on the floor and walls. The bodies were gone, though… and when we reached the ancient diamond dog settlement the ant trainers had been using as a base, those bodies were gone too. The ants had been thorough.

Since we’d already stripped it of everything valuable the first time, we set up some cameras and left.

“What’s eating you?” Star asked, on the way back. I guess my faceplate was displaying my emotions, exactly like it was designed to.

“Why did he shoot Polly?” I asked. “He knew I was the dangerous one.”

“Are you complaining that you’re still alive?” Fire asked.

“It wasn’t even a barbed bolt,” I said. “I would have been mostly myself again, eventually.”

Star shook their head. “We’re *still* not built up enough to do brain surgery, and even when we are it won’t be a good idea until we’ve trained up a doctor. We’re lucky it turned out the way it did.”

I sighed. “That whole battle was stupid.”

“They usually are,” Fire agreed.

Four months in, we had our first visitor. A parrot-sized dragon flapped their way down from the sky and landed on the volcano. After carefully looking around for any monsters, they jumped in the lava and stretched out like it was a hot spring.

“We’ve got company,” was Fire’s summary, before he shared the video with us.

“We should invite them over,” I said. “We don’t get many visitors, and it’d be a shame to let them move on without even noticing we’re here.”

“Please tell me you don’t want to have sex with him,” Star said.

My mouth went *very* jaggy. “That wasn’t what I was thinking about, but now that you mention it, I kind of do.”

“I can’t really blame you,” Star said, grinning. “Look at those adorable horns!”

“I’ll send a drone to talk to him,” Fire said. “I don’t want to get anywhere near that lava with a potential hostile present.”

I perked up “We have drones?”

“We have one drone,” Star said. “Please don’t break it.”

The drone was a sort of mechanical dragonfly with rotors in the wings. Star carefully inspected it from camera-eyes to stabilizer-tail before releasing it into Fire’s control. “Whatever you do don’t bump the wings into anything!” they said, fidgeting as he held up his hand to guide it into the air.

“Can you disable the traps, please?” Fire said, sounding a bit zoned out as he piloted the drone towards our labyrinth.

I went over and pulled the big lever to the ‘off’ position. It was traditional to practice trap evasion by sneaking in and out past your own traps, but with no doctor it was reckless to risk the lethal traps and it was a huge pain for somebody else to go free you from the nonlethal ones if you screwed up, so we installed a massive security hole. It also had a setting for ‘friendly traps only’, in case we wanted to have friends over and didn’t want to try to reset the entire maze for them with just the three of us.

I pulled it back to ‘on’ as soon as the drone was outside. It was nerve-wracking to have our lair exposed like that.

We had repeaters all over the island, to keep connected to the cameras, so there was no trouble flying it over to the skull volcano. Star and I connected to the feed from the drone so we could watch its progress, and both of us yelped as the dragon spotted it and breathed a gout of fire right at it.

Fire dodged easily, though, and activated its speaker. “Stop that! We’re not here to fight you.”

“What the heck are you?” the dragon asked, standing up in the lava and spreading their wings warily. “Some sort of bug?”

“It’s just a way for us to talk to you without getting too close,” Fire said. “If you’re willing to be friendly, you can come visit us in person.”

“Why would I want to do that?” the dragon asked.

“Because you’re the most interesting thing that’s landed on the island since we came here,” I said, and was a little surprised when the speaker projected my voice as well. “We wouldn’t want you to move on without, um, admiring you in person?”

“Ha, I can see that,” the dragon said. “But why would *I* want to do that? What’s in it for me?”

“Fuzzy cuddles?” Star suggested. “Good conversation?”

The dragon snorted. “Got any gems?”

“We could have gems,” Star said. “What kind would you want?”

The dragon shrugged. “I like Labradorite.”

Star winced. “I… don’t even know what that is.”

“So you’re not diamond dogs, then. How about rubies? Quartz?”

“Easy peasy,” Star said. “I’ll make a big bag of each.”

The dragon stretched, and flapped their impossibly small wings to start hovering in midair. “You’d better. I know this is trap, but if there’s no rubies waiting for me after I spring it, I’ll eat you instead.”

“Of course there’s traps!” I said. “Do you want the friendly traps or the fun traps?”

The dragon grinned. “Do your worst.”

Fire started leading the dragon back to our lair with the drone. Star ran for the fabricator to whip up some rubies, presumably.

“Hide the warp crystal,” Fire said, after muting the speaker. “He wants gems, and I don’t want him tempted to steal it.”

I grabbed my amulet and frowned. Without the crystal on me, I wouldn’t be much use in a fight… but avoiding the fight in the first place was always better. “I’ll hide it in the hatchery,” I said. “We shouldn’t have any reason to go in there while he’s around.”

“Hide it,” Fire said, for emphasis. “Don’t just throw it in a corner and rely on no one going in the room.”

“I will, I will!” I said.

And I did. I softened a bit of wall and shoved the warp crystal inside it, so it was completely surrounded by cake. I couldn’t uncake the wall without touching it but I thought it blended in pretty well. I made sure to mark its location in my trap overlay so that I could find it later.

Fire parked the drone outside our labyrinth, since we had plenty of cameras inside to watch people trying to run the traps. The dragon went inside, and proceeded to *destroy* our traps.

They didn’t detect them or dodge them. They managed to spring every single one. It was just…

Dragon steps on a pressure plate. Spears spring out of the wall to impale them. Dragon is already jumping back before the trap finishes triggering, and breathes fire over all the spears, incinerating them. Yes, even the metal.

Dragon steps on a pit trap. Pit opens under dragon. Dragon hovers in midair over the pit, and laughs, then tears the doors of the pit trap off and uses them as shields to block the next three spear traps. And by ‘block’ I mean ‘bash hard enough to snap the hafts clean off’.

Dragon triggers a motion sensor and proceeds to claw one of the vacuum traps to pieces and breathe fire on the other one before either one can attach to them, not that they would have done anything since the dragon wasn’t a Nyx.

Dragon steps onto the slippery slope and quickly tosses down the pit door they hadn’t managed to break yet and uses it to *surf* past the razor traps, and somehow makes it jump over the spikes at the bottom by shifting their weight.

The dragon was laughing as they surfed the rest of the way into our central lounge, posing and flexing as Fire and l stared wide-eye-spotted at them. “You’re right, that was kind of fun,” they said, stomping over to the largest couch and planting themself on it. “Now make with the rubies!”

“Coming! Coming!” Star shouted from another room, rushing in with a large plate covered in small red gems.

The dragon took a handful and popped them into their mouth, crunching noisily. “A little bland. And small.”

“I’m cooking some larger ones, but they’re not ready yet,” Star assured them. “The formula for those was pure ruby – I can try doping them with some common contaminants?”

“Does that mean ‘adding spices’?” the dragon asked.

“Basically?” Star said, their faceplate a spinning spiral. “Be right back!”

“That was amazing!” I said, staring up at the dragon. “We really need to step up our trap game if we’re going to have more dragons stopping by.” I’m pretty sure my eye-spots were literally stars.

The dragon looked down at me. “What’s with the creepy masks?”

My mouth went all jaggy. “Trust me, we’re creepier with them off.”

The dragon glommed their clawed hand onto my faceplate, and lifted me up in the air by it, obviously trying to strip it off. I wiggled my legs a bit in panic, then reached up and detached it properly, dropping heavily onto my butt, my snarly ugly face exposed for everyone to see.

“Huh,” the dragon said, staring at my fang-filled lips, scruffy brown fur, and jet black eyes. “Metal.”

“Yip yip?” I yipped.

“She’s asking incredulously if you like it,” Fire translated.

“Take the rest of it off,” the dragon said, dropping my faceplate and leaning back on the couch with his arms spread to either side. “I want to see what you really look like.”

It was an odd request, but honestly the faceplate was the only truly embarrassing part to remove. I reached back and undid the clasp holding my chestplate on, and slowly wiggled out of it, setting it down next to me along with my shoulder-plates. Then I sat back facing the dragon, and lifted my right leg into the air to work the hip-plate down my leg and set it to the side. The dragon looked expectantly at me, but that was it… except for the impeller, right. I rolled onto my belly, sat up on my hands and knees, then twisted my tail up over my back so that I could reach the bands of the personal impeller and stripped it off, too.

“Her other hip-plate doesn’t come off,” Fire explained, since I couldn’t. “She lost her leg a while back.”

“Very metal,” the dragon said, then reached down and grabbed me around the waist, lifting me into their lap.

Fuzzy cuddles ensued. Fire joined in, although the dragon didn’t make him strip, and we clung to either side of their chest pressing our fluff up against the scaly warmth, licking and biting and stroking while the dragon sat back and basked in our attention.

I may have stroked in some rather lewd areas, but the dragon didn’t seem to mind me coaxing their cock out into the air, to stroke further.

“Yip?” I asked.

“She’s asking if you’re a guy,” Fire translated.

The dragon snorted, a puff of smoke washing out over Fire’s faceplate and my still-bare face, making me squint and try not to sneeze. “What do you think?” they asked glancing down at their penis.

“He says yes, he is,” Fire translated. “Seriously, Wave, how are you so bad at this?”

The dragon – Ash – stayed with us for a while. Yes, we had a lot of sex, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘me specifically and him’. He was like Spots, and only interested in girls, but unlike Spots he was willing to overlook my penis. He’d even play with it sometimes.

“I thought you only liked girls?” I asked, when he pushed me down on the floor and started stroking my cock.

“You’re a girl, right?” he said.

I nodded, because I was perfectly willing to be a girl for him.

He licked my shaft, with his ridiculously long and snaky tongue. “I always wondered what it was like to suck a dick, and when am I going to find another dick-girl?”

Usually we did the ordinary ‘boy and girl’ stuff, though – he’d come up behind me, yank on my tail to pull me off my feet, then shove himself inside me while pressing my chest and face into the ground. Other times he’d have me do a ‘strip tease’ – apparently the poses I tended to take when removing my rig were kind of sexy or something? – and then have me suck his dick with my faceplate off. It was probably a good thing that I was so bad at sex because he didn’t even *try* to win.

After a few days, the novelty had completely worn off. Star and Fire went back to their normal lives, with only the occasional conversation with the dragon in the lounge when he was feeling chatty. Since it had been my idea to invite the dragon over – and since I couldn’t do my actual job with the warp crystal hidden away – I was now a full-time Ash wrangler. If I hadn’t been able to sneak a few days of virtual, accelerated privacy every time he took one of his ten-hour naps, I might have been really miserable. But I was able to do that, and a full day of Ash wrangling was a lot more tolerable with a three day vacation afterwards.

“How long is he planning to stay?” Star asked me, while training me on the finer points of gem production, so that they could shed themselves of the last bit of dragon-related duties.

“He normally only stops on the island for one night, to use the lava baths,” I said. “So, anywhere between negative four more days and forever.”

Star gave a jaggy scowl. “Well, if he ever gets to be too much for you, let me know and I’ll get rid of him.”

I tilted my head. “How?”

“I’ll think of something!”

Fire didn’t wait for me to ask to try to get rid of Ash.

“Finally finished,” he said, loudly, in the dragon’s presence – Ash had me bent naked over a couch and was fucking me slowly, laughing at the way I squealed every time he slapped my butt.

Ash dug his claws into my sides, just hard enough to draw blood, then jerked and shot off inside me when I squirmed in pain. I slid out of his grip and curled up on the couch, waiting for the pain from the scratches and his too-hot semen to subside. If this sounds like I wasn’t getting any pleasure from it… there’s a certain amount of pleasure in pleasing someone else through painful effort, you know?

“Finished with what?” Ash asked.

“Fixing all the traps you broke,” Fire said. “Our labyrinth is officially back in business.”

“Is it,” Ash asked, interested. “It was kind of fun. I could go for another run.”

“You probably shouldn’t,” Fire said. “It’s harder to do in reverse, and I improved all the traps. You could get hurt.”

“Ha!” the dragon snorted. He grabbed me by the tail and tossed me over his shoulder. “Come on, Wave. Let’s go have some fun!”

I squirmed out of his grip and turned around to ride on his back. “Yip yipyip?” I yipped because I didn’t have my faceplate on.

Fire suddenly looked terrified – but scrambled and tossed my faceplate to me. I fastened it in place so that I could at least talk to him. “I suppose it would be cheating if I turned on my trap overlay,” I said, as Ash marched into the bottom of the labyrinth.

“Turn on your trap overlay!” Fire sent me.

“But then I can’t help him spot the traps!” I sent back.

“Yeah, no cheating,” Ash said, cracking his knuckles. “Let’s see what he’s cooked up.”

It started out relatively tame. Some tripwire traps that filled the hall with spears for six meters in both directions – impossible to dodge, even for the dragon, but the ones that hit him snapped off against his scales. He held up his wings to protect me, and even the fragile-looking membranes were impervious.

“Ha. You’ll have to do better than that,” the dragon boasted, shoving his way through the rest of the spears, which hadn’t retracted. My faceplate bleeped a warning about poisonous gas seeping from the broken hafts, but Ash didn’t even notice.

“Why did you set it off?” I asked. “I told you to jump.”

“I don’t take orders from you,” he said.

“I wasn’t trying to mess with you, I just didn’t have time to tell you why!”

“Yeah yeah…”

The next notable trap was a pit – I spotted the faint outline, and strangely a matching outline in the ceiling. “Wait,” I told Ash, and he paused long enough for me to describe what I saw. Then flew past it, not setting off a trap for the first time in his life.

But the third trap… the third trap was nasty. Fire sent me a message as we came to a large octagonal room, but I minimized it so I wouldn’t be tempted to cheat.

As soon as we stepped inside, a loud ‘ticking’ noise started, and portcullises slammed shut behind and in front of us. There were six more doorways on the other faces, but portcullises started sliding down to cover those as well. “Run!” I said, dropping off the dragon’s back and heading for what I guessed would be the second to last gate, in case he didn’t follow.

He did follow, kind of. Lazily, unhurriedly, slow enough for the portcullis to slam shut between us. “And now you’re trapped,” he said, folding his arms.

I was pressed up against the bars, because the ‘escape’ tunnel I’d picked had a greased, sloping floor, and that was never a good sign. Sure enough, a massive stone rolling pin dropped out of the ceiling about a meter past the gate, and rolled down the hall, to crush anyone who’d tried to take shelter.

“Or else I got past stage one, and just dodged stage two,” I said. “How many exits are there from where you’re standing?”

“Plenty,” Ash replied, grabbing hold of the bars. “Come on, let me get you out.”

I took a step back, careful not to slide down the slippery slope, as he yanked on the bars to try to pull the portcullis off, and it probably saved my life. The floor and ceiling in the octagonal room slammed together, pinning Ash between them, and there was a buzz of electricity as they became the terminals of a massive circuit hooked up to what I found out later was our entire energy reserve. Lightning crackled over and through the dragon’s body, and a stray side-bolt snapped from the bars to my faceplate, knocking me unconscious.

I came to at the bottom of the slope, nestled into the gap near the floor between two stone rolling pins. I wasn’t hurt, aside from some electrical burns, but I wasn’t about to roll a multi-ton crusher back up a greased slope either. I opened Fire’s message, which was just ‘run, now!!!!!!!!!!!’. I sent back a message to let him know I was alive.

Fire and Ash had to work together to winch the stupid roller back up into the trap room to get me out. Ash was a bit disgruntled – even that insanely over-the-top trap hadn’t actually injured him, but he hadn’t been able to get past the room despite setting it off three more times, and Fire declared him a loser.

Later, I sat on his lap, spread out around his cock but going at my own pace for once, since he was too down in the dumps to fuck me with his usual enthusiasm. “I think you were right, jumping into the side corridor was a mistake,” I said. He hadn’t even bothered to make me strip.

Ash grunted, thrusting up a little into me, just a twitch really but enough to send a shiver up my spine. “I don’t think it mattered, that trap was rigged.”

“It didn’t go off until you pulled on the bars, right?” I asked, rubbing my hands across his sleek chest-scales.

“Yeah, but it went off again every time.”

“I think you just needed to wait it out,” I said, sinking all the way onto him and clenching around him in a sort of mini-orgasm – the sort of warning that I never got because I usually just came. “The ticking was…” I lifted myself up, and dropped down rapidly. “A hiiii --- aaarghhhh! Yes!” I shivered and squirmed around him for a few seconds, pressing my belly against him so that when my cock spurted it mostly got into my own fur. “A hint.” I said, resting my faceplate against him, silly orgasm face and all.

“What, like just stand there and do nothing?” He asked.

“Yeah,” I said, basking in his warmth. “For five minutes, probably. That’s a traditional time.”

Ash dug his claws into my back, but in the afterglow that just made me squirm some more, still impaled on his rock-hard shaft. “That’s fucking bullshit,” he said. “I knew it was rigged.”

He took a nice long nap after that, and I spent a couple of days planning some trap ideas in the low-fi accelerated virtual world – friendly traps, since Fire seemed to have the lethal side covered. One issue was that there was a distinct lack of strong, fireproof materials – almost everything was made out of plastic or ceramic and the first tended to burn and the second to be brittle and easily snapped in half by, oh I don’t know, an angry dragon.

After far too long setting up various configurations and then testing them in a dragon avatar, I woke myself up to go talk to Star about it. I was a bit surprised to wake up on Ash’s chest – he’d dragged me with him to fuck him to sleep, but subjectively days had passed since then for me. He’d gone soft, but I still had a little shiver as slid him the rest of the way out, and I carefully set his arms on his chest as I slowly squirmed out of his embrace. I was a little sore, but mostly in a good way – sleeping dragons were surprisingly comfy.

After a quick dust-bath, I knocked on the secret door to the fabricator. Star welcomed me inside, looking worried.

“Are you okay?” they asked. “I can’t believe Fire almost got you killed like that.”

“I’m pretty sure I failed the trap on my own,” I said, smiling sheepishly and scratching the back of my head. Then I noticed how quiet the fabricator was – most of the machines were dark, with only the one machine Star was working on in operation.

They noticed my confusion. “We’re in low-power mode, ever since Fire rerouted our entire energy reserve through his stupid trap.”

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t think energy was a problem anymore.”

“It wasn’t,” Star said, curtly, “until someone rerouted our entire energy reserve through his stupid trap. Talk about overkill!”

I smirked. “Not exactly overkill. It didn’t even end up being ‘kill’.” I imitated Ash’s voice. “It’ll take more than a little lightning to stop a dragon!”

“It wasn’t a little lightning, it was our *entire energy reserve*!” Star snapped, their faceplate a swirling star made out of swirling sticks, more agitated than I’d seen them in a while.

“Compared to an atmospheric lightning bolt, though?” I asked. “That’s probably what he evolved to survive.”

Star looked thoughtful. “I’m not actually sure how they compare. But anyway, you’re not here to complain about the dragon. Are you?” Their faceplate showed a question mark, which waggled back and forth expectantly.

“Kind of?” I said. “I was wondering how I could deal with dragon fire. All our fireproof stuff is so brittle.”

“A fire extinguisher maybe?” Star suggested. “I’ll print one up for you.” They pushed a few buttons, and one of the other machines lit up, starting a job.

The fire extinguisher turned out to be pretty big – half a meter long, and several kilograms. Awkward to carry around, but not the largest thing I’d ever built into a trap. I stashed it in the common room so I wouldn’t forget it.

Ash woke me up from my next trap design session by poking me in the chest. That was more or less how he always did it, and it was effective enough. My faceplate lit back up as I returned to consciousness in the real world.

“What were you dreaming about this time?” he asked. I’d once mentioned that Princess Luna and her dream spirits were able to access the virtual world through their dream magic, and he’d locked on to that explanation and refused to listen to anything else we’d said about it – he certainly hadn’t been at all interested in visiting himself.

(“But you could put on a female avatar and see what it’s like from the other side!” “That sounds super-gay.”)

“Some new traps for the labyrinth,” I said. “I want something that can beat you without cheating.”

“Ha, good luck with that,” he said, chuckling. “Why do you call it a labyrinth, anyway? It’s more of an obstacle course than a maze.”

“It’s supposed to be a maze, but we’re not set up to do a lot of digging right now,” I said, neglecting to mention why.

“You’ve got me,” Ash said, flexing his arms. “Maybe that could be my job in your little collective. Although I was thinking ‘chief gem taster’…”

“Your what?” I asked.

“My job,” He said. “’Everyone chips in’, right? Star makes things, Fire sets traps, you… what *do* you do?”

At the moment my job was ‘dragon wrangler’. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to tell him that.

He laughed, and slapped me on the butt with his tail. “Don’t worry, I know. You don’t have to say it.”

“I mean –” I said. “Are you planning to stay? Permanently?”

“Why would I leave?” he said. “I’ve got comfy cushions, all the gems I can eat, and a lava bath a quick flight away. What more could a dragon ask for?”

“Adventure? Exploration?” I suggested. “The freedom to wander the world, seeing the sights and meeting new people?”

“Heh, kid’s stuff,” he said, flopping onto a couch. “I think it’s time I settled down, had some kids…”

“Other dragons! Dragonesses!” I said, waving my hands in the air.

“Fuck ‘em,” he said. “I’ve got a mate.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be laying any of your eggs,” I said, a chill running down my spine. “We’re not even the same species.”

He laughed. “Like a dragon would let a little thing like that stop them.”

I checked my biometrics, just to make sure.

Oh.

Fuck.

(“HOW AM I PREGNANT!?!” I sent to Fire and Star.)

“Oh, fuck,” I said, turning to flop to the ground, leaning back against Ash’s couch. “I’m carrying your eggs.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what you get when you fuck like bunnies for a week,” he said, reaching down to pet my ears. “Wonder what they’ll turn out to be. Fuzzy dragons? Fireproof kobolds?”

(“I didn’t do it!” Star sent back.

“Neither did I,” Fire added.

“FIREPROOF KOBOLDS!?!!” I sent back to both of them.)

“Fireproof kobolds?” I said out loud. “Actually that sounds pretty cool.” I patted my belly, imagining the eggs growing inside. Biometrics said there were only two of them, which was weird, but not as weird as them existing at all.

(“You think the dragon did it?” Fire asked. “Genetics don’t work that way. We’re not even fertile with humans.”

“It was definitely the dragon,” I sent back. “Unless one of you fucked me in my sleep.”)

“So yeah,” Ash said. “I’m staying.” He stood up over me, draping his tail in my lap as he set his hands on his hips. “First thing I need is to dig a lair.”

He walked over to one wall of the lounge and stared at the rock. After a few seconds, he lashed out with his claw and scraped it down the surface. There was a terrible screeching noise, and sparks flew, but the stone wasn’t even scratched – I’d reinforced it with the warp crystal, one of the standard parts of the defense mode that I was still working towards, and nothing should have been able to break through.

But Ash was barely slowed. He took a step back and let loose a massive plume of fire, and just kept going and going until the wall started to glow, then dug his claws into the semi-molten rock and scooped it out like mud. The reinforced layer was only a few centimeters thick, and the rock behind it had melted long before it started to weaken, so as soon as he pierced the layer a flow of lava started spreading across the floor, setting a couple of chairs and a table on fire as it passed. I danced back, then danced back further when I realized that even getting close to the lava was dangerous.

Ash didn’t notice – lava was nothing to him after all. He breathed more fire to soften more of the wall, digging out a nice big hole while the pool of liquid lava he was standing in got deeper and wider. I kept backing up until I was standing on the big couch in the middle of the room with the lava getting closer and closer… and spotted the fire extinguisher sitting against one of the armrests. I grabbed it and sprayed it at the lava.

Massive clouds of chilly vapor filled the air, and when they cleared that section of lava was dark and solid, the flow splitting to either side instead. I walked along the edge, spraying more of the cold mist to solidify the entire perimeter, then doing it again when the lava began to well up and overflow. Eventually there was a meter-deep pool filling about a third of the room, and beyond it Ash had a cozy little cave dug out in the wall. Well, not little little – it was five meters across and deeper than that.

“Wave? Ash? What’s going on out there?” Star asked, running in from the hallway, and staring at the crusty orange pool.

“The floor is lava,” I said, standing on a couch to see over the retaining wall. “Oh, and Ash is staying with us, apparently.”

Their faceplate flickered and went blank. “What.”

“Yeah, he wants to settle down and raise his kids,” I explained. “Decided to dig himself a lair to show how useful he can be.”

“Ha, no way,” Ash said. “You can raise the kids, I’ll just make them. All three of you can get pregnant, right? Dragon eggs for everyone.” He grinned.

Star, faceplate still blank, backed into the hallway and then into the fabricator, and let the door slide shut behind them.

I spent some time spraying extinguisher to help the lava cool off faster. It ended up leaving a nice smooth floor in the otherwise rough cave Ash had dug out for himself, and he was willing to break the massive flow that had destroyed half the lounge into small pieces I could feed into the matter compressor we’d been using for rock dust – more raw materials to turn into gems.

“It’s a good workout,” he said, shattering more of the lava rock with a barefoot kick.

“Very impressive!” I said. I wasn’t accelerated, or even fully virtual, because this dragon very much needed wrangling, but I was spending most of my attention on my new labyrinth design.

“Come on, you give it a try,” he said, standing aside.

I stared at him, then at the solid rock that crumbled like chalk under his blows, but would tear my poor feet to shreds if I tried to replicate it. “Be right back!” I said.

A minute later I was back with a sledgehammer so heavy I could barely lift, it, and with a loud “HI-YA!” I slammed it into the rock, shattering off a few chips.

“Yeah, that’s it!” he said. “Build those muscles!”

So that was it. It was a workout. We worked out for hours and hours, and then took a break in his new cave to break in his new cave, and then spent a few more hours breaking rocks before he got sick of it and told me to do the rest while he took a nap.

I took a peek at my stats:

Wave – lv 5 warp magician
Kobold – 6% cybernetic
STR 10 AGI 7 CON 15 INT 13 WIS 8 CHA 17
ATK 35 DEF 12 HP 45 REP 0
Weapon: sledgehammer
Armor: none
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1
Titles Earned: Shark Bait, Pirate Bitch, Mother of Dragons

Bah. Hours of work and zero muscles built. Not that I expected much, it always took forever to improve yourself in real life.

Then I narrowed my eyes at those titles -- there was no way that last one was automatically assigned.

I sighed and changed my class to ‘dragon wrangler’, since with the way things were going I wasn’t about to be using the warp crystal anytime soon.

A few days later, Fire was done setting up my traps. My entire setup was nonlethal in case Ash dragged me in with him again. That didn’t mean they were *fair* in any normal sense – I’m not sure I would have been able to make it through – but they played to Ash’s strengths in ways that I hoped would be satisfying, even if he lost.

“Even if he loses, this isn’t going to get rid of him,” he grumbled. “And we’re running out of time. The eggs are going to hatch any day now.”

I tilted my head at him. “And? Do you really think he’d hurt the kids?”

“I’m more worried about them taking after him,” he said, then poked me in the belly – I was just starting to show. “Especially those two.”

I sighed. “Look, in the long term we can move the lair around so that his cave isn’t right off the main room. I’ll probably have to resign as warp technician, but the crystal’s trained enough to power the generators and that’s all we *really* need, at least in the next few years until we have a replacement for me. I can focus on keeping the dragon under control and… breeding fireproof kobolds and we can keep each others’ company in the virtual world which he still doesn’t give a crap about.” This was not my ideal future, but, “It’ll be fine.”

Fire gave me a blank look. Not literally blank like Star, but a carefully flat mouth with only a single set of jaggy fangs. “One last touch,” he said, and hung a sign up on the wall by the entrance.

WARNING: FIRE SUPPRESSION DEVICES IN PLACE. AVOID OPEN FLAMES.

“I thought you said not to put up signs?” I asked him, pouting. “But it’s okay when you do it?”

Fire’s mouth curled up a little at the corners. “I know when to do it.”

Ash jumped at the chance to run another ‘obstacle course’. “Maybe this time you’ll actually hurt me,” he scoffed. “Right, let’s do this.”

He paused by the entrance to read the sign, then snorted out a puff of smoke.

The first trap was meant as a warm up – one of the spear traps with a wide enough area so as to be undodgeable, but with gripping teeth on the end of the spears to hold him in place instead of points to futilely try to injure him. Six of them latched onto his body and limbs, and when he flexed to snap the hafts, the inner hafts were stretchy and flexible and wouldn’t break. They were also cut-resistant but I had no illusions about them resisting Ash’s claws…

He didn’t try to cut them, though. He opened his mouth and breathed out a huge gout of flames to try to burn them away. That wasn’t going to work! The fire suppression turned on instantly, heat sensors triggering the array of extinguishers set in the ceiling and floor. Less than a second after the fire emerged from the dragon’s mouth, he was bathed in chill mist that put an end to *that*.

When the mist cleared, Ash stood there motionless, covered in a layer of ice. We stared at him for a bit, but he remained still. The rubbery ‘spears’, frozen brittle, cracked and shattered, and with a ‘tink’ the frozen dragon fell to the floor, stiff as a statue. I ran into the labyrinth and dragged him back to the lounge, since he was only a few meters in.

Fire picked up an extinguisher from its sconce on the wall – we’d put them up all over the place since the 'floor is lava’ incident – and started spraying Ash some more.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Do you want him to wake up?” Fire asked right back. “Serious question. If you really want to keep him around, we can deal with him. You don’t need to exile yourself to the Shame Cave with him, we can… let him join our collective, like he wants.” His mouth was *so* jaggy saying that last bit.

I pulled another extinguisher off the wall and sprayed it on Ash’s legs and tail. “I don’t think we can keep doing this forever.”

Fire laughed. “Not forever, Star’s working on something.”

A few minutes later they came out of the fabricator dragging an honest-to-goodness cryopod, of the sort that kobolds have never needed… but we didn’t design the fabricator and the item libraries have a lot of stuff we don’t generally use. We loaded Ash inside, and watched as it filled up with some sort of cryo-gel and various indicators lit up in various colors that we weren’t sure meant if he was dead or not.

“How long should we keep him frozen?” Star asked, poking at the control panel. “Forever isn’t an option.”

“A thousand years?” I suggested. That was a number that had come up in a few of the Nyx’s stories.

The cryopod had some sort of null-friction thing on the bottom to make it easy to move around, but it still took all three of us to push it up the ramp to Ash’s cave.

“We should put up a sign,” I said, once he was set in place in the middle of his lair, surrounded by the gems he hadn’t gotten around to eating yet. “’Sleeping Dragon, Do Not Wake.’”

“No sign,” Fire insisted.

I threw up my hands and walked away. So unfair!

Two days later, the eggs started to hatch. All three of us gathered in the nursery, excited to watch the miracle of life – we’d missed the hatching up on the moon, and before that we’d been part of a large enough collective that we didn’t have to deal with kids at all, so the last hatching we’d been to was our own and none of us remembered it well.

There was a crack from one of the eggs, and the eggshell fell away to reveal the cutest little… sort of cat-looking thing, actually. So fuzzy! Such big ears! Even their face was cute somehow!

And then they started to cry. Across the room, another egg hatched, and the kobold inside immediately started to cry. Soon they were all hatching, eighteen eggs turning into eighteen little kobolds, all wailing at the top of their lungs! Wailing and flailing their little limbs and yipping in a high pitched version of yipyip, “Where am I?” “Menu menu menu menu” “Ahhhh what’s going on”

The three of us rushed around, comforting them the best we could, cuddling them to warm them up and stroking their ears and faces to give them some good sensations to associate with the real world. Up until that point, their life had been spent in accelerated virtual learning, an existence of sight and sound but no touch or taste or smell or pain or, we finally realized, *hunger*.

Fire and I sat next to each other, swarmed by nine little kobolds each, while Star ran off to make some baby food. We started putting their baby faceplates on so that they could access their menus, and they probably tried to go virtual right away but the virtual reality cycle was locked to 12 hours on, 12 hours off, starting with the off cycle since they’d just spent six months ‘on’. Babies didn’t get to decide that sort of thing. Then we had to teach them how to crack their faceplates to eat, and they all started giggling at how silly it looked and throwing food at each other and Star ran off to get another batch of food because most of this one was going on the floor apparently.

The next few days were a stress test for how well we’d managed to childproof our lair, which it turned out was ‘basically not at all’. We had kids wandering into the fabricator and trying to climb into the feed hoppers for the machines, kids trying to put their eggsets back on to get back to the virtual world off-schedule, kids getting lost under furniture playing hide and seek, and it’s a good thing we hadn’t cleaned up the labyrinth because the frozen grabby-spears were a harmless barrier to curious exploration. I turned the traps off anyway; there was nothing on the island to threaten us except for the ants, and all sorts of cameras to give us warning that I assumed Fire was keeping an eye on because the kids were taking up all my time and then some.

We’d finally gotten all the kids – all eighteen, I counted – to sit still in a circle and listen as Star told the story of the Very Grumpy Dragon, when a loud thumping sound came from Ash’s tomb. Thump. Thump. THUMP. CRASH!

“Oh no!” Star cried, “The grumpy dragon is awake, kids, go hide!”

The kids piled up behind us, hiding in our shadows and peeking around the edges to see what was going on.

Ash stumbled out of his cave, yawning and stretching. “Ember’s tits, that was cold,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Did you guys put me in a coffin?”

“We thought you were dead,” Fire said, frozen in… tactical concern.

I had a bit of tactical concern of my own, since I was wearing the warp crystal as an amulet again. I grabbed it and covered it with my hand so that it wouldn’t be a big shiny ‘eat me’ beacon.

“Ha! It’ll take more than a little cold to keep a dragon down,” he said, grinning at us blearily. “Not a whole lot more, though. I think that put my fire out.” He looked up at the ceiling, and breathed out a cloud of smoke, coughing and choking. On his second try he got fire.

The baby kobolds snuck out from behind us, staring in fascination.

“There it goes,” Ash said. “All better.” He looked down at us, and saw the three dozen tiny eye-spots fixated on him, and froze in place.

“He doesn’t look that grumpy,” one of the babies said.

“More fire! More fire!”

“Do the smoke!”

“Is that our daddy?”

“Daddy daddy daddy!” all of them started to chant.

Ash turned a paler gray, then leapt into the air, swooped over our heads, and dove into the labyrinth. There was some cursing and shattering as he pushed his way through the spears… we ran after the babies who were running after him and hauled them back away from the labyrinth, which had a meter-high barrier now to make it at least a little hard for them to get into.

“That was… a thing,” Star said.

“He didn’t stop when he left the cave,” Fire said, watching the cameras. “He’s… wow. I think he’s leaving.”

“I guess he really didn’t want to take care of the kids,” I said, stunned but not especially disappointed.

Fire’s mouth went all jaggy. “Of course he didn’t. Fucking deadbeat.”