It Takes Time <To Be Properly Taken Apart> - Chapter 13
Chapter 13
Chapter Length: 5,500~ wordsKnow Your Place
"Raqi," Punica said. "Before we continue further, I need to inform you of something." "Yes?" The xeno cocked her head. "At some point, I am going to need you to tell me the location of the Landamar Mobile Fleet." She kept her voice neutral; neither overtly forceful, nor soft. "While I am happy to continue accommodating your wishes in regard to not wanting to be domesticated for the time being at least, the subject of your home society's independence is a separate matter. Now that I am aware of its existence, I will need to report it to my fellow affini; and at some point after I do so, preparations will begin being made for its domestication." She paused for a moment before speaking her next sentence. "As part of this, your assistance will be required. Whether that is consensual and by your own will or forced is entirely up to you: but it is not optional." She expected Raqi to hesitate. In this situation, who wouldn't? Being asked to hand over her entire people to the Compact was a request that would make any sophont flinch; regardless of their view on the Compact- Raqi stuck her bottom lip out slightly, expression otherwise remaining neutral, and gave a small shrug. "Yeah, sure." This response took Punica aback, and she was silent for several seconds. "I was not expecting you to comply that easily." She couldn't keep the surprise out of her voice. "Have you, then, reached a decision about the Compact?" The landamaeri shook her head. "Not about whether it's right for me, personally, no. But for Landamaeri society over all? Honestly, I probably would've said yes before I even met you." She shifted her head very slightly. "The Mobile Fleet is a shithole. On a societal level, it shouldn't exist. If from now on you answered every question I had about the affini or the Compact in the worst possible way, I would still sell them out in a heartbeat." She shrugged, gaze turning distant. "It's what they deserve, anyway. Whether it ends up being for better or for worse; either way, one half of me still gets what they want." It made more sense now that she knew Raqi was neurodivergent that the girl would have complicated feelings on her home civilisation; particularly when that civilisation very obviously did not treat that portion of their population well. Punica's core sunk slightly in her chest. With every anecdote she heard about their society, the affini was starting to wonder more and more if this 'Landamar Mobile Fleet' was in fact yet another Terran Accord. "I do have one condition, though." The use of the word 'condition' caused an immediate shift in the mood in the room. Punica's gaze seemed to harden ever so slightly, and some of the vines around her base which had been swaying lightly now seemed to move more slowly. Raqi raised one hand palm-forward towards Punica. "Before you point out how I don't have any room to negotiate or anything similar: I can drop you out of this ship substantially faster than you can get a vine over to me from here. I already have the command prepped. Even if you do get me, unless you can inject me with something that will knock me out instantaneously, you will be outside of the ship before it finishes working." She lowered her hand. "Besides, what I'm asking shouldn't be very objectionable to you, anyway." The tension in Punica's form eased. Her vines started moving slightly faster. "Go on." "When the time comes to domesticate Landamar, I want you to get me a meeting with whoever - or whatever body - is in charge of planning it. And I want you to help me convince them to let me be involved in planning the strategy of specific parts of it. Specifically: the steps involved in the domestication of other yuyayni like me." The strings at the hem of her poncho swayed softly in the artificial wind within the garden. "There are things about us that the affini won't be able to understand; not even if you take your time to study Landamaeri society beforehand. Without someone with personal experience to guide the process, you will make a catastrophe of it." She turned one hand towards herself. "I know my people. I know how we think, and how we feel. We hate change, and we're afraid of virtually everything. If a conquering force comes in and upends the entirety of civilisation - even if it's for the better - and it isn't handled properly, you will be sentencing an entire class of people to a lifetime of therapy- or whatever your equivalent is. The yuyayni are less than three percent of the population; the ch'ikan make up the other ninety-seven percent. It's not as if I'll be taking control of the entire operation away from you; it's a tiny fraction of the overall population, comparatively." Her hand dug into her chest. "I have to be there to oversee it. I have to make sure it's done right. There isn't anyone else I can entrust that duty to." After she finished speaking, silence hung in the room. This time, it was Punica's gaze that grew distant. Her head turned towards the wall, and her humanoid form mimicked a sigh. Raqi frowned. "What's wrong?" "Raqi... You are not understanding the circumstance that you are presently in." She turned back towards her. As she continued speaking, she kept her tone low and non-aggressive. "I understand that, to you, this seems a perfectly reasonable - and in fact, sensible request. The underlying logic of what you are asking seems sound; but it is built upon faulty premises." The response her statement drew was immediate. Raqi's eyes narrowed almost to slits, and the small motions she made while in conversation ceased entirely, her breathing hitching for an instant before slowing to a crawl. Punica flinched. She hadn't even said anything yet, and the girl was already reacting this way? She had hoped to do this without upsetting Raqi, but evidently, that wasn't going to be possible. Blight. I had thought she understood her position here, but it seems I misjudged the situation. She hesitated for a moment. It looked like trying to be gentle wasn't going to work here: if that was the case, she figured she might as well get it over and done with as quickly as possible. Recomposing herself, she dropped the inoffensive mask she had been projecting onto her humanoid form and instead drew herself up to her full height. "Raqi. I understand that you likely believe you possess a significant degree of familiarity with the needs and circumstances of your people. I do not doubt the veracity of this; from the perspective of you and those you are used to." It was here that her tone hardened. "But that perspective is highly limited, and informed by the circumstances of your life up until now. What passes for 'expertly knowledgeable' among denizens of the Mobile Fleet is, I suspect, likely what we among the Compact would consider hobbyist levels of expertise. Presuming that your species shares a similar lifespan to that of other humanoid sophonts we have encountered in this galaxy, with an upper age limit of around 100-160, this would mean that the eldest among your race live for half of an affini bloom." She gestured towards herself. "I am a first bloom, Raqi. I have not yet lived for long enough to rebloom, and while I am not considered a child by our standards, I am still exceptionally young. On the other hand: There are affini who have lived for over a hundred blooms. That could place their age anywhere between ten thousand, to thirty thousand years old." She let the sentence hang for a moment. Once enough time had passed, she turned her hands upwards in a mimicry of a gesture she had seen Raqi make; hoping it would at least somewhat soften the blow of what she was saying. "You must understand, Raqi: When contrasted in such a way, even the most knowledgeable member of your species is like a newborn in comparison to one of us. It is in no way a personal failing, on your or any other's account: it is simply a difference of capacity; the same difference that separates the xenosophonts of the universe from we affini at large." "That's absurd," Raqi spat. "Do you really think that just because the individuals of your species live longer other species that they automatically know better than them?" She shook her head vehemently. "That's idiotic. The mere accumulation of knowledge is not sufficient in itself to convey expertise." "Raqi, there are those within the Compact who have dedicated multiple blooms to studying the topic of minority integration in xenosophont species. Anywhere from a thousand, to three to four thousand years; perhaps more in some cases." She tried to keep her tone level, but it was becoming more difficult now. "Do you think that does not convey expertise in the relevant fields?" "How could it?!" Raqi suddenly exploded. "By your own admission, you're different on a fundamental level from other, non-immortal races!" She gestured challengingly at her. "What, exactly, are all those thousands of years of studying going to involve? Reading research papers about the experiences of xeno minorities? Maybe domesticating some personally and asking them how they felt prior to that?" Once again, she shook her head. "That's not going to give you an insight into how our lives actually work! So long as you're observing us externally, rather than actually experiencing things as we do, you can only ever have an outsider's perspective on our lives! By your very nature as the force at the top of the universe, it's not possible for you to experience being oppressed; and that makes you incapable of properly understanding it!" "That is simply not true." Raqi's criticism of the Compact was starting to get to her, and Punica now allowed a hint of open anger to enter into her voice. "Lived experience is valuable, yes; but it is also, as you so very rightly pointed out, a potential source of bias. You possess only your own perspective on this matter; which, useful as it may be on account of direct familarity, does in turn colour your experience. Does your civilisation have access to detailed neurological information on the behavioural patterns of your species? Are you able to track, down to the chemical releases of stress and combat hormones, the way which aggression manifests in them as a species, and what circumstances lead to the development of phenomena such as discrimination in the first place?" "We- No, we can't do all that, but we have theories for things like the latter!" Her hands balled into fists. "I and people like me have spent our entire lives trying to figure out just what it is that makes everyone who isn't like us act so shittily towards us! Do you not think we wanted to know why we had to spend every waking hour of our existences being hurt and tormented by other people?! We tried to work it out, and we've done a good fucking job of it!" She bared her teeth towards Punica. "We do not need a race of immortal space plants to show up out of nowhere and act as if the sum total of all of our effort amounts to nothing!" At this, the anger that Punica felt seemed to melt away. In its place, pity began to well up within her core, and the features of her humanoid form drooped. "Raqi... The reason that the Compact domesticates civilisations is precisely so that no one will ever have to go through what you or others like you have gone through again. You have done your best, and I am sure it has made a difference..." She made a wide gesture at the interior of the ship. "But the fact that you had to flee from your own people, and come here in search of support, is evidence in itself that your best was not enough to save you." Raqi's jaw fell open. Her eyes widened; first in horror, then in pure, unbridled fury. "You fucking WEED!" Flexing a muscle in her mind, she created a mental overlay upon the landscape in front of her. She envisioned herself cutting away the ground beneath Punica, the floor being torn away as a cage of glass erupted all around her; sucking the plant into the void while avoiding depressurizing the ship. It would take less than a second from the visualisation completing to Punica being flung out of the ship, and nothing she could inject her with would work fast enough to- In reality, Raqi went blind before she had even finished creating the overlay. It was only roughly two hundred miliseconds later that her brain registered the loss of all visual input. At roughly the same time, she received a signal from the nerves on her face telling her that something was pressing against them. It took her mind another hundred miliseconds to process and begin reacting to this fact. Even at its fastest and most automatic, the landamaeri mind could only react to something unanticipated in about a tenth of a second, and this was how long it took for Raqi's brain to begin flooding her body with adrenaline. From her perception, it manifested as a sudden lurch in her chest, a feeling of incredible tightness in her head- And at the same time, she received a message from a different set of nerves reporting a sharp, stabbing pain somewhere in the right side of her neck. Somewhere in all the confusion, the loss of her sight had unbalanced her, and she had lost her footing and begun falling backwards. She was not aware of this, though, and it would take her a further half a second before the sensation of weightlessness reached her mind; by which time there would be reports from all over her body of physical contact at other locations. Around half a second later, Raqi received an absolute deluge of sensory information. It was so much that her brain had to stop and try to unpack it before it could respond to any of it. This process took one full second. By the time it had completed, her brain had ceased panicking, stopped releasing adrenaline, and concluded that she was no longer in any danger. Three seconds later, Raqi's heart rate had returned to normal, her cortisol levels had begun dropping, and she abruptly ceased being concerned about the loss of her vision and began treating it instead with a sort of innocent curiosity. By that point, the remainder of the sensory input she had been receiving had finished resolving, and she could now tell that she was tightly bound nearly from head to toe. This also didn't bother her at all; she actually found it quite comforting. It might have been unpleasant under other circumstances, but as things were the vines - she assumed they were vines, anyway - were only touching her through her clothes, and so the sensory was largely manageable. Shortly thereafter, her centre of gravity shifted, and she experienced the distinctly unpleasant sensation of not knowing which direction was up. It lasted for only an instant, however, and then she felt her feet pressing against the ground at the same time as her vision abruptly returned. She found that she was standing in front of Punica. She looked casually up at the other woman, her gaze finding its way almost immediately to the other woman's eyes. They were glowing a light yellow, tinged with a green that seemed to merge in and out of them at the edges. The display was mesmerising. Raqi figured she could probably sit there and stare at it for hours, and she had no particular reason not to. "Forgive me, little one." Punica's voice was filled with sympathetic kindness. "I had no wish to drug you, but you left me no choice. I could not stand by and allow you to harm yourself by jettisoning me from this ship, so I opted instead to take action to pacify you, and prevent you from hurting yourself." "Oh." Raqi realised at that moment that she had been fully unbound, and could now think and act again as normal. She took the opportunity to nod. "That's fair enough then." Her tone was one of casual appreciation. "Thanks for that." "You are quite welcome, petal." A vine reached forward and began brushing through her hair, and for the first time, she made no attempt to suppress the small noises of delight that it solicited from her. "Hhahmmn," Raqi sighed musically. "That feels really nice." "Does it? I am very glad to hear that." Punica seemed to audibly relax in response to Raqi's remark, and that in turn made the landamaeri herself relax. It felt easy and natural to match tone with Punica; probably in large part because she had such an unbelievably pretty voice. Raqi was a sucker for pretty voices even normally, but the affini's was on another level entirely. She wished that its owner would spend several hours, or maybe even a day monologuing at her with it; however long it took for her to completely lose track of everything that wasn't the sound. "The drug that I injected you with," Punica continued, allowing Raqi to stare blissfully up at her as she let the words flow uninterrupted into her ears, "would be best described as a rudimentary class-E. In case you are not familiar, class-E is a catch-all term that we use to refer to the class of xenodrugs endowed with powerful anxiolytic and sedative effects. They are generally proscribed to sophonts with anxiety disorders, or whom require longterm calming, but they can also be applied topically in order to prevent or halt panic attacks; as well as to calm agitated sophonts, as you just witnessed." Raqi was viscerally disappointed when Punica finally stopped speaking. She had simultaneously been paying rapt attention to her voice, hanging off of her every word, and also paying no attention whatsoever and had barely processed anything that she said. "That sounds cool, I think," she boilerplated, hoping it would prompt Punica to get back to monologuing. When it did not immediately have the desired effect, she added: "Actually yeah: I hate being anxious, so that sounds great. Thanks for that." A second vine began to ruffle her hair, and she let out another dreamy sigh; an expression of near-mindless bliss forming upon her face. "Good girl. You are welcome." The shiver that Punica's words sent through Raqi's body could be heard as clearly as it could be seen. The girl moaned, pressing her head harder into the vines as her fingers flexed in and outwards for a moment. The shiver continued on down through her chest and into her sternum, causing her to shake bodily for a few moments, and eliciting another happy trill as it finally dissipated. Punica seemed happy with her. She liked that a lot. She really wanted to make her happy. "You wanted this, didn't you, little one?" The plant asked. "Yup." She nodded eagerly. "I really wanted you to play with me. I was just too afraid to ask, because I thought that if you did, you'd make it permanent afterwards." "I see." She nodded. Raqi's eyes widened slightly - in excitement, not fear - as Punica reached down and took hold of her head. The affini began to gently run her thumbs over each of her cheeks, in a slow, rhythmic motion that sent even more shivers down her spine. Everywhere the plant's fingers touched, it felt like her skin was set alight with a gentle, needy thrumming. She wanted to lean into it more, but she couldn't move her head one way without moving one cheek further away from the finger, so she just stayed still and tried her best to relax into it. "Is that still something you are concerned about?" Raqi almost started to shake her head, then stopped immediately. "Nope." Her reward was a gentle scratch on the back of her neck. She immediately craned her head upwards, her brain almost seeming to short-circuit for a second as sparks of bliss permeated her entire awareness. She let out another moan. "HhhI love having my head scratched." "Good girl. You are being so wonderfully honest." Another moan. "Tthank yyou." She was losing the ability to speak clearly. That made her even happier. "Although you are not concerned..." The plant's tone turned pensive for a moment. "Do you believe that you would be happy under my care?" Raqi let out a 'hmm'; or as close as she could get to one in her present circumstances. "I dunno, rreally. Itttt dependss a lot on what you would ddo to me, I tttthink?" The touch on her cheeks temporarily made her forget what she was going to say next. "If you drugged me lotsss, I wouldn't be able to be unhappy; so then I'd be really happy. I thinkk you probablyy have loooads of ways of making me really happy if you wanted to." The nails running through the back of her feathers felt like they were massaging her brain directly. She could feel herself becoming more floaty and less aware with every passing moment. She had absolutely no idea how she hadn't collapsed into trance yet, but it was really kind of fun so she figured she would let it last for as long as it ended up doing. "Presume that I did not make any use of them. Instead, let us suppose that I simply took you as my pet by force, but did not alter you in such a way as to force you to enjoy it; and you were left in a state conscious enough to be aware of it, but not to resist. How would you feel about it then?" Another 'hmm'; this one even more slurred than the last. "Iii think in thatt case... Ii'd probably be pretty ssad and unhappy. I wwould feel like I'd ffailed and let everyone thhat I cared about dddownn, aand that coming here was for nnnothing. Ii think I'd probably end up thhinking that all of those things people ssaid about me being uuseless and an idiot were true; because I kind of already thought that coming here mmade me stupid, aand I was banking onn nnot getting dommesticated by you tto disprove itt. Sso if I end up losing to you, it bbasically means I was stupid and an idiot and I overestimated myself wway wayyyyy too much." By the time she had finished talking, she was disappointed to find that the strokes on her cheeks had slowed substantially. The nails were also no longer caressing her brain, and as a result she wasn't feeling nearly as floaty as she wanted to. She was also sad to see that Punica didn't seem nearly so happy any more; that was a shame because seeing the plant happy made her brain release happy chemicals and she wanted more of those, and now that it wasn't doing that she couldn't feel as good any more. "Do you think that if I tried to convince you that that was not the case, without drugging you to be more suggestible, you would listen to me?" "Nope," she replied immediately. "Not a chance." There was a long silence. The fingers kept rubbing over her cheeks, but the rhythm was desynchronised now, and Punica had gone back to staring into space. It wasn't nearly as satisfying this way. She figured something must be bothering the plant, because she didn't seem as into the whole thing any more in general; which was really a shame. "If I apply a counteragent for the chemical that you are currently affected by, and you regained the ability to feel anxious, how would you react?" Raqi pursed her lips. "I don't know. I might freak out really badly and hit you with a pillar or try and cut you in half? But more likely I just kind of wouldn't care if it seemed like you still weren't planning on domesticating me, because I'm honestly kind of a slut and I'd probably just think this was really hot." The look on Punica's face was hard to parse. It was like she was partially smiling, but also seemed like she was shocked- or in disbelief? It made Raqi feel like she'd probably said something funny, so she started giggling too. "You are truly a fascinating little creature." "Oh, thanks!" She chirped. "I like you too! I think you're really hot as well." A hand reached down and ruffled her feathers. She let out a joyous 'Yaayyyyy~.' Mid-way through the exclamation, she felt another sharp pain - this time in the arm, and suddenly- Raqi blinked several times. The sensation of having a hand in her hair was still doing quite a bit to pacify her, and so she did not quite immediately have the thought to throw fifteen pillars at Punica. By the time she had done so, the sensation of the hand had made her feel so thoroughly subby that she was relatively willing to forgive the fact that she had just been drugged into giving away like a third of her secrets. "Uhm," she stated. "I feel kind of like I should be freaking out really badly right now, but uhm... You seemed to have un-drugged me, and I feel like I still have my free will; so if you don't mind can I just assume you aren't going to do anything bad to me and I just go along with this? I kind of- don't really feel like I have the energy to be super paranoid and flighty right now." The hand ruffling her hair intensified. She couldn't stop herself from letting out a satisfied 'mmmm', and her cheeks started to burn in embarrassment. "My dear, you do realise that the only one invested in you maintaining a state of anxiety around me is you, yes? For my purposes, it would quite suit me if you were to start feeling more comfortable around me." She pursed her lips. "Uhm. Yeah, that's a good point I guess. To be honest, I don't really feel like I have much to lose at this point. You kinda could've done the thing to me like three times now, and you still haven't, so uh..." Another hand appeared and began scratching her under the chin. "That's a good girl. See? You're learning." The noise that came out of Raqi in that moment was probably the most embarrassing sound she had ever made. Deciding that enough was enough, she extricated herself from the mercifully soft grip a moment later, and stepped backwards. "Okay enough: any more and you're going to melt me to the point where I can't even talk." She was still blushing fiercely. "I'll just admit defeat for the time being. W-what do you want to do now?" "Well." Punica rose back up to her full height, having been bending down slightly for convenience when petting Raqi; not that the other woman had noticed it from where she was standing. "I believe we were discussing your medication, before we became rather severely sidetracked." She smirked for a moment at her. "I would like to resume our discussion there, if you are amenable. As a part of that: I was also thinking that I would rather like to perform a more detailed inspection of your body." Raqi's eyes shot open. "Huh?" Punica chuckled; a remarkably ominous sound that sent a pleasurable shiver down Raqi's spine. "Only for medical reasons, I assure you. The feather sample that I took from you the other day was useful, but that alone is not sufficient for me to synthesize complex drugs that are compatible with your system. At present, the most I have working is still just the faux-class E that I used on you a moment ago." She reproduced the medicine bottle that had Raqi's hormone medicine in it; which was now somehow full again. "It would also allow me to make a substantially more effective version of this medication, one closer in its effects to that of a traditional class-G." An intrusive thought popped into Raqi's head. "Would you be able to make it edible?" Punica gave her a look. "I could. I'm not going to though." Raqi tutted. "Damn." She shrugged. "Anyway, sure. Given you can already drug me to the point that I can't meaningfully resist you, giving you the ability to make even worse drugs to use on me probably isn't going to make that much of a difference." The affini's mouth widened into a thorny grin. "It would certainly make a difference in how much fun we were able to have with each other." To her surprise, Raqi found out that her cheeks were able to get even redder. "Inos damn it. C- Can I ask you to tone the flirting down slightly? I may have given up, but like, I am not psychologically prepared for this. I- In case it's not obvious already, I don't really cope super well with this kind of thing. I might end up freezing up again, or hitting you with a pillar if we're not careful." Punica seemed to consider this for a moment. "That is understandable. I will try to keep the flirting to a minimum for the time being, then." It seemed that 'a minimum' still included some flirting, as a vine wrapped itself gently around Raqi's right arm a moment later. "Still. It would be useful if you had a better method to communicate when it was becoming too much; ideally one that did not involve any manifesting with the Chimera module." "Mhm." Raqi nodded in agreement. "There's always the jump lights system? In the Mobile Fleet, we adapted the system used for when our jump drives are ready to be used for consent. 'Green' means something like 'good, keep going', 'yellow' means 'pause and discuss, then potentially resume', and 'red' means 'stop immediately, no questions asked.'" She started to frown. "Though... Half of the problem is that I kind of end up freezing up a lot of the time, so I might not be able to communicate verbally when that's happening." "Then, in that case-" The vine that had been wrapped around Raqi's arm made its way further up, until the tip of it was pressed lightly against the palm of her hand. "In future, I will make sure that any time I am touching- or teasing you- that I place a vine in your hand. The moment you become uncomfortable, you are to squeeze on it. 'Light' means 'slow down, pause and discuss', 'hard' means 'stop now.'" A smirk formed on her face. "And you may also rub it to indicate that you are enjoying what I am doing. Does that work?" Raqi's expression went vacant. There was no fucking way this was actually happening. There was no way she was currently negotiating a consent framework with a sapient space plant that had just forced her to sell out her entire civilisation, then drugged and bullied her when she'd said she wanted to be involved in deciding how they got placed into what was functionally slavery but without the abuse. "Yep, I think that works," she said, still staring into space. I'm so fucked, she thought. She was, but part of her really didn't mind the thought.
TerraTranslate :: Raqi Marr :: Punica Granatum :: The Affini Compact :: Landamar Mobile Fleet :: Hormone Replacement Therapy :: The Chimera Module :: Affini :: Intersidera :: Posters :: Magnesium :: Wonderland :: The Hundredth Time: Part I :: Communication :: aftermath :: Physical Confrontation :: Garments ::