Chương 162: Chapter 157 – Keepsake

"We're a hell of a long way from certainty, but the first studies of relationships between long-lived samurai and their colleagues—several decades younger—indicated that the unaging quasi-immortality has a profound effect on their subjective perception of each other. They appear to disregard the age gap entirely, even on the level of the subconscious. This phenomenon was observed almost exclusively among those who have halted their aging."

– Recorded snippet of a discussion at the School of Social Sciences Nuremberg, 2055 ⁂ I was dozing once more, relaxed like never before, smiling contentedly to myself and sprawled like honey on top of Leah. Or like liquidized cat, maybe? She was massaging me between my wing arms again, but… much more lovingly. And with a more serene purpose.

Tynea had revealed that, ingenious as the construction of my organic flight apparatus was, part of that brilliance lay in the compromises its designers—and later Tynea, when adapting it to my physiology—had chosen to accept. One of them was the many reflexes needed for coordinated flight that were hardwired into nerve bundles to unburden my flight brain, and that many of these were triggered by airflow stimuli across the skin.

I had a lot of new sensory nerves all along the wing arms, would have far more across the wing membranes—and also possessed a small, but critical, number across my lower back. Right where my wing arms' limb girdle—the armature of joints, musculature, and fascia anchoring a limb's root—connected to my lower spine. For me, that meant involuntary kicking reflexes. For Leah, that meant she got to play with my body in a more… innocent manner. So long as she was gentle.

And not being a redheaded gremlin two handspans taller than myself. She wasn't right now. Instead of tormenting me with my new kicking reflex, she dragged two fingers down the middle between my lower… proto-wings. It had the effect of causing them to slowly stretch south, as far as they could, until they shivered. It was magnificently relaxing, like a massage combined with stretching exercises, except I didn't have to bother myself into doing it. It made me yawn every other minute.

The quiet, lazy atmosphere preserved my vibing peace as my mind turned towards the earlier events. In hindsight, with a clearer head and undriven by the go-go juice, I realized I'd probably put too much on Leah. It hadn't been fair of me to make her figure out how to integrate that side of my existence with… us. Our relationship. My social side. She'd managed. Somehow she'd found a way to do it, and clearly didn't mind—not even now in the aftermath.

But it was the kind of thing I should've taken to a real therapist. I wondered if the reason she didn't mind was because it satisfied that fear in her, that panic that she'd miss something vitally threatening in her love's life again. If that was the case, then I'd have to be a lot more careful about that. Those kinda things could cause a whole lotta stress in a person not prepared for it. But I also didn't want me being careful to make her feel like I lacked trust towards her. More therapy topic?

Either way, she'd taken damage from the event. Maybe not emotional damage—considering how utterly happy and sated she seemed—but certainly physical damage. Her other arm hung lifelessly from her stump, awkward in the way it sagged down the side of the créche. It was wrong, like something was dead that should've been animated. I was working to ignore how that made me feel, because Leah very clearly didn't give a fuck.

Which surprised me, considering it meant she'd lost yet another limb, one more way in which she wasn't agent, one more strike against that particular trauma, but… Maybe she was starting to clarify what losing agency meant to her, exactly, and when it wasn't dangerous? I hoped so. It'd be way quick, what with not even a handful of days having passed, but… the thought secretly made me tear up with relief. And… we had been through a lot of events in a very short time. Plenty to stimulate that kind of personal growth.

⁂ While her physical hand continued massaging and caressing Tinea's back, Leah was finalizing her planned gift with virtual hands, courtesy of a minor software upgrade to her Polylaterality implant that let her use digital limbs to control the user interface of her cybereye. She'd need two hands to, heh, hand the present over.

Disengaging the damaged prosthetic without first cutting some physical connections required an override, but a remote scan using the Sim Cell's instrumentation had assured her that none of the damage would lead to haywire currents; the threat of which was what the overrides were meant to mitigate. She'd barely released the vacuum seals when Tinea's hand flashed out to catch the thing, startling her like a lightning strike. Her sudden twitch bounced Tinea's head on her chest, who glanced up with an apologetic look.

"Sorry," the girl said, "it seems I got used to my enhancements a little faster than you've had the chance to." Leah chuckled in reply and patted her girlfriend's head. Those enhanced capabilities were and would remain beneficial whether she was used to them or not. Then she took the broken prosthetic with her good arm and threw it out the airlock where one of her drones would ferry it to her foundry for reclamation, and replaced it with another copy of the prosthetic for a measly sixteen points.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. She could've gotten it for even less, but decided to keep the squirtgun function—she'd have even less use for the soap in her other arm without the water. Two-handed once more, she finally confirmed the purchase and caught the beautiful disk of a box Ypsi sent. Made of warm, burnished copper with rounded edges, it matched the size of her palm, and its tempered privacy glass was still set to opaque.

The whole thing had cost them a good three hundred points. Hellalutely worth it, Leah thought.

"Hey, squeaky bean," she grinned. Her fingers, already back massaging Tinea's muscles, poked the squeaky bean once. Meanwhile, she kept the box hidden in her other hand and down her side. No way she hadn't noticed it pop in, not with how sensitive those antennae were, but Leah decided to have some fun anyway. She was fairly certain, at least, that the box's contents were safe from Tinea's spying.

And indeed, when Tinea looked up with an eyebrow crooked at the tease, Leah did see a glint of curiosity in the amused stare. She also squeaked satisfyingly when Leah poked her in the side with the hidden hand.

"Sit up for a moment, if you would."

"Hmm?"

"Got a gift for you." Tinea blushed prettily and ducked her head.

"Sorry, I…still haven't given you anything, have I?" Because it was so fun, Leah made her squeak once more. There was a realm of social cognition and understanding still unfolding in her girlfriend, and it was incredibly engaging to watch her discover its span. Hella adorable too, and addictive, because she so freely shared her emotions with every glance and every motion.

"You gave me freedom, my lovely squeaky bean. That's plenty. Seriously," Leah replied softly. She'd pitched her tone for maximum sincerity, and it smashed into Tinea's uncertain embarrassment with all the force of a wrecking ball. The brunette whined quietly, a different kind of squeak that also exuded superhuman levels of cute, and burrowed her nose in Leah's cleavage. When she finally sat up after a few more seconds, dainty hands supporting her on Leah's tummy, her eyes were swimming with tenderness.

Leah promptly dragged her down again for another kiss, which led to girly giggles and yet more twinges of Leah's sapphic heart. But, relationship reaffirmed and general gooeyness exceeding safe thresholds, Leah was determined to avoid further sidetracking. She let Tinea sit up again—and, brand new resolution immediately ignored, stole a moment to appreciate the vision the girl presented. Her wing arms sat in relaxed arches behind her, skeleton heralds of what the full wings would eventually look like.

They had yet more segments to grow, too. Her battle skirt's panels and their banked energy streamers draped across the pod's lip behind her, a quiescent rainbow of technological marvels. Of course the Battlepoet would have a wedding gown's train, made of supertech weapons manufacture trailing auroral colors.

"Leah?" Tinea asked, and Leah shook herself out of her thoughts. She finally presented the box to her quietly thrilled girlfriend.

"Touch the glass, love." Smiling and holding her breath, the brunette did. The opaqueness rippled and collapsed slowly, in a wave of diamantine delicateness. It revealed the choker waiting within, piece by piece from the outside in. The choker's band was made from fine mechanical links cushioned on a strip of black velvet. The links showed the same stepped bismuth geometries Tinea's other pieces had, with active rainbow LEDs set in random clusters across them.

Tinea drew a finger across the glass and cooed when the LEDs responded by glowing brighter. Leah chuckled.

"The links are all capacitors, of the hyperdense storage variant."

"Hmm?" Tinea asked, looking up for but a second.

"There wasn't any place left to put a proper reactor that wouldn't have gone to more capacitors, so…we spread energy harvesters all across the band instead. I decided they should glow."

"They're beautiful." Leah was pleased to see her girlfriend so taken by her gift. She supposed it hadn't been a thing for her to receive any before they'd met.

"They absorb electrical or magnetic energy. Light, too. Kinetic in an emergency, but they'd need to generate a field to harvest that first, and even then it works mostly against conductive materials only." Tinea, having herself a clue how difficult such esoteric technology was to make practical, glanced up again.

"That's still a lot of options. What needs that?" Leah pointed her at the box again, at the heartpiece about to be revealed.

"Ah…" Tinea paused as she recognized the shape encased within the amber crystal. The box's lock clicked discreetly as the glass finished its transformation, and the pane lifted a few degrees. Enough for Tinea to catch its edge and open it all the way. She gently lifted the choker free, and Leah took the box back as she watched Tinea study the piece with a soft smile.

She'd reconstructed the most epic moment of Tinea's old hunting rifle from the clips she'd saved, and preserved its freshly exploded form in amber-colored crystal. The once-owner had, of course, identified it instantly.

"The crystal's special. It makes up around eighty percent of the material costs, and presumably, ninety-nine of the production costs."

"What is it?" Tinea asked. The crystal flashed with tiny streamers of energy inside, little lightning trees that looked like a neuronal network visible only when energized.

"A crystalline computer and emitter all in one. It can channel the entirety of those capacitors, which, by the way, do store enough energy to fire a modern tank-sized railgun—" Tinea chortled.

"Fucking samurai tech!"

"—Hell, yes. Anyway, the crystal can harness all that and more for single retaliatory strikes." The blooded samurai's eyes grew wide and her mouth hung open.

"Yes," Leah continued, grinning.

"The thing comes with a safety. In fact it'll want your confirmation every time it fires."

"Oh, uh. Um. Recoil?" Tinea laid a hand on her throat and went green as she imagined that much force having an equal and opposite reaction.

"None, except for the shockwave right next to your face when it fires that lightning bolt. Which it'll just recover for the next shot of course. It's samurai bullshit magic. You're safe. You're probably the only one safe when it goes off."

"... Huh." Tinea sat there, on Leah's lap, and gently caressed the choker. Leah tapped a finger against her forehead.

"But its most important function is to empower your forcefield there." Tinea's eyebrows rose.

"The choker can put down a threat, but if it detects that your defensive shielding is being overtaxed, it'll take the strain instead."

"Oh, is that why it has harvesters instead of its own powerplant?"

"Yep. It's supposed to seize control of the shield and dump all its stored energy into it for strength—then reabsorb the chaotic, dangerous flux into its capacitors, even if the heartpiece breaks in the process. That way, your main shield can stay intact and take the next hit."

"Ah, it's sacrificial?" the brunette asked as she continued to inspect the heartpiece, now with a touch more melancholy. It did have a kind of bittersweet irony to it, that the thing meant to memorialize her surrendered rifle was itself made to break one day. But, that was okay. New memories would be made, other moments worth preserving in amber.

"Yeah…"

"It's beautiful, Leah," Tinea finally said as she handed her partner the choker and moved her hair out of the way to present her throat. Leah happily obliged. After she'd pressed a lingering kiss underneath Tinea's chin. ⁂