.
Having received a surprising question that I found myself unable to answer, I paid attention instead to my cousin’s hands as they tended to my hair. Combing hair is a rhythmic activity, and can be a very therapeutic one. It’s a gentle dance, one hand lifting the tresses, the other steadily pulling the comb through them. With the hands occupied, the mind has plenty of space for either chatter or thought. Unfortunately for me, Dilorè was patiently combing and waiting for my reply.
Let’s review something, since it is probably counterintuitive. Even though the rooms of the training hall all belong to the same simulation network, they hold a lot of distinct differences, both between different rooms and between the rooms and the small world outside. It matters.
My small world, Sky Ocean, is a reproduction of my original world in the lowest order Immortal Realm. As an annex to one of the highest order universes in the Mortal Realm, it has a spiritual density as similar as one can get while in a physical state to that of the Fundamental Realm, without going there.
In contrast, the simulations within the training hall and elsewhere in my small world are Illusory Realities constructed in the Spiritual Realm. In effect, they are very orderly dreams, although their physics are more complex than that. Usually, they resemble different scenarios set on Huade or other environments in Huade’s stellar system. By running their clocks far faster than Sky Ocean, they dilute the spiritual energy back down to Huade’s density. The wireframe ‘background’ of the training hall does the same.
Kanon’s home Illusory Reality does the opposite, running the clock slower than the small world so that she receives a higher dose of spiritual energy than in Sky Ocean, keeping her alive somewhat in the same fashion that an oxygen mask keeps a person with compromised lungs alive. She can leave it and go to other places for short periods, but must go back eventually.
Beyond that is this ‘garden pavilion’, Kanon’s ultimate life boat. By rigging it to run at the training hall’s background speed, but concentrating all the available spiritual energy within its grand space into this one small building at the center, the energy reaches densities equal to the Fundamental Realm, or higher. She can come here to recharge at high speed, probably in order to recover after having stretched herself by going out into the lower density scenarios.
So, right now, here in the garden pavilion, in this environment as rich in spiritual energy as my very first place of birth, I could put an amazing degree of focus onto my thoughts as Dilorè’s hands continued combing my hair. I currently possessed my full awareness as a Celestial Maiden. The HR Manager would stand no chance to read my mind… assuming I weren’t saddled with the spiritual development of an immortal infant, that is.
Even so, I reached this state from my level of awareness as a juvenile Elder on Huade immediately upon crossing into the pavilion. Any petty resentment I had borne toward Kanon for usurping my position as trainer should have washed away in that instant.
So Dilorè’s question had caught me off-guard. Even though she said I sounded unhappy, I had entirely forgotten it since arrival. Not only had I accidentally walked in on my cousin in the midst of sex, I had gone through a strong change of environment and an adjustment to my mental state. I was, frankly, a different version of myself in this place.
Speaking of immortal powers, I could sense enough of what was going on in my cousin’s head as she combed to know the general direction of her thoughts. I couldn’t tell any details, but she had shifted through a variety of thoughts, between concern for my mental state, pleasant memories of her recent lover, and enjoyment of our current interaction. Currently, she was definitely thinking about the tempting proximity of my body, confirming my belief that her regular teasing included some real desire for me.
I did my best to ignore it, but ignoring it left me right back on the topic I had been dodging just now, so I made myself consider the question. Why had Dilorè just said that I looked and sounded unhappy while I described all the events with Kanon, Ryuu and Chiara?
Dilorè stopped combing, then wrapped her arms around me, hugging me from behind.
“Is it a difficult question?” she wondered.
I twisted my lip, then admitted, “The logical answer is that, underneath my prideful Elder exterior, I’m still just a petty fifteen-year-old, feeling left out after Kanon took charge of Mr. Kowa.”
She let out a light laugh. “Do you think so?”
“It doesn’t feel like the right answer,” I admitted.
My cousin continued holding me, and for once when we were this close, her hands didn’t try to go anywhere inappropriate. Her head leaned against mine, then she noted, “You are a really hard girl to read, Your Highness. It makes it difficult for me to give you advice, even though my heart is telling me that I should be doing so, here.”
My brow wrinkled a little. “What do you mean, I’m hard to read?”
“I mean, because we’re far enough apart to be mother and daughter, I feel like I should be the one giving you advice and helping guide you in life. But that just describes your body, right? You’re also my distant ancestor, and a creature straight out of legend, and a being descended down from Heaven, and apparently several other things I can barely understand. When I look at it that way, that ‘petty fifteen year old’ is a little hard to believe in.”
I nodded and then realized I had an even stronger reason to disbelieve it. Even though the original Tiana had dominated my personality for a while, and even though she still made up a big part of my self-image, she had been anything but a moody teenager. She wasn’t one to sulk and retreat if she disliked an outcome. And the discontent I was currently feeling really didn’t seem to be emanating from her personality, anyway.
Dilorè gave me a peck on the cheek and let me go, saying, “Let’s head to the roof. The light is amazing up there!”
“Sunbathing? Although, there’s not actually a sun…”
There isn’t, either here or in Sky Ocean. My cousin shook her head while she stood up. “It doesn’t matter to me! The light here is as good as the best sunlight!”
My cousin’s penchant for sunbathing comes from the same place as mine for taking baths. Her mana makeup is skewed toward Light. Although, because she is lucky that it is Light rather than Water, she gets most of what she needs to replenish her mana during normal daytime activities, she still needs a certain amount of extra exposure to make up the difference.
But she also moonbathes, getting naked outdoors on clear nights to enjoy the gentle mana of the cool moonlight on her skin, so it’s more about pleasure than about need, for her.
She had made her mind up already, and began stripping me before I could object. At this point, I had gotten used to this, so I didn’t fight it. Although, I did think about telling her that she didn’t actually need to sunbathe in this place. Our bodily mana doesn’t deteriorate inside Illusory Reality. But she had probably noticed that fact for herself, already. She just wanted to sunbathe.
Once my disrobing was complete, she grabbed my hand and headed for the outer ledge. We stepped out together into the infinite sky, as blue and distant below us as above, and flew up to the observation deck on the roof.
But once we arrived, my cousin perched on the balustrade surrounding the deck, folding her legs and sitting there with her hands on the rail. It was such a gorgeous nude photo, I wished I had a camera.
I landed on the deck and dismissed my wings, wondering why she was not lying down.
“Do you want a blanket or something?” I asked, a little puzzled. Like most fairies, Dilorè usually just plops down on the stone or grass or sand or whatever surface is handy.
She shook her head with a smile. “I’m fine. I was just thinking about this place. You could remodel it, right?”
I hesitated. If it was a technical question, the answer was certainly ‘yes’. The complex things about a simulation that required many hands on deck to accomplish were the physics and the gameplay. NPCs required the most work. Making or changing a simple building was not much more complicated than creating that comb I had made.
But there was another problem. “This place is Kanon’s, so I wouldn’t feel right just changing it.”
She gave me an odd look. “Kanon is a part of you, right? Doesn’t this place actually belong to you?”
I shook my head. “She began that way, but I want her to stay her own being. I’m telling her to think of us as twins and cultivate until she can ascend as her own immortal.”
Dilorè grew a puzzled frown as she thought about it. Then she noted, “Logically speaking, she’s more like your daughter.”
I wanted to retort, Logically speaking, she’s like the other half of a divided amoeba, but I didn’t know if Dilorè knew about those. I shrugged and replied, “The mother in her heart is my mother, so she’s her daughter, not mine.”
The puzzled wrinkle in her brow again returned and receded. “Oh. That’s right. You don’t mean Aunt Deharè. Of course, you have your own mother.”
I shook my head. “You’re right that I meant someone else, but Deharè is also my mother. The original Tiana’s memories have become mine, no less than the mothers I’ve had in all my other lives. They are all my mothers.”
Those words came from me with firm resolve, because they were the truth. I had never woken up to my past lives as a baby, so each and every woman who had raised me equally received my childhood selves’ normal love for their mother figure, including the love I had inherited from the first Tiana for my mother here on Huade.
My cousin appeared to be doing her best to absorb that idea, so I added, “If you ever wake up to your past lives, you’ll understand.”
She hmphed uncomfortably. “If I have any.”
“It’s likely that you do. A few fairies will be in their first lives, but fairy embryos are ideal vessels for souls that have already progressed most of the way to immortality, so the odds are, you are reincarnated too.”
I let her absorb that news for a bit, then continued the original topic. “In this case, I did mean the immortal who gave birth to Senhion. I don’t have a spoken name for her, because we only adopt names in order to interact with mortals, so I can only call her ‘my mother’. She is also ‘my mother’ to Kanon, so she’s my sister. I want to convince her to stay that way. Which means I can’t lay claim to her things.”
Dilorè nodded. “True. But do you think she would object if we put a pool here? This place is huge, so there could be plenty of space left over.”
I considered it. “Kanon likes to meditate on that dais in the center, though. And if we put the pool to one side, it would ruin the symmetry of the place.”
My cousin pouted and insisted, “But that’s easy to fix. Leave the dais as an island. Put the pool around it. And if Kanon doesn’t want to keep it, you can put things back the way they were, right?”
She seemed to really want that pool. With a sigh, I concentrated on the image, mentally constructing a donut-shaped pool that had a wide underwater seat ringing the dais and a circular channel wide and deep enough to swim surrounding it. Rather than make the roof thicker to make room for it vertically, I raised the pool above the rest of the deck, and raised the dais as well. But that left only a narrow path between the pool and the balustrade, so instead, I had the pool fill the entire deck and the balustrade became the pool’s outer wall. The individual ‘fence posts’, the balusters, remained. I simply made the outer perimeter impermeable to water so that the balustrade held it in.
It materialized, and I was now chest-deep in water. Dilorè laughed when she found her lower legs submerged. She slipped off the railing into the water, letting her wings disappear, and swam across to the ledge seat. I did likewise, except I slipped into mermaid mode. We sat together in the warm light, our backs against the dais, me gently waving my flukes in the clear water.. Looking out at the wide sky and the field of scattered clouds, I decided that this pool had been an excellent idea.
“So, you’ve had an awful long time to think, now,” Dilorè commented. “Do you have your answer yet?”
“I do,” I replied firmly. “I realized it while we were talking about Kanon. I wasn’t jealous, or feeling left out, at all.”
“Then?”
“It was Mr. Kowa’s training itself,” I stated. “I was thinking like Senhion, and Kanon doesn’t have any other way to think. We’re training him the way Senhion would train a Servant, but all the other sides of me were trying to tell me that Servant training is completely wrong for Mr. Kowa.”
