There was light, and voices. Sabrina couldn’t quite make heads-or-tails out of any of it. Then, all at once, reality came back into focus. She was on the floor, with Jade, Alice, and Sloan looking down at her. Sloan had her hammer ready and was scanning the bathroom for threats. Jade and Alice were looking down concerned, and expectant, as though they were waiting on the answer to a question.

  “What?” Sabrina asked. Her tone was less ‘why are you looking at me,’ and more ‘can you repeat that?’

  “Are you okay?” Jade asked.

  Sabrina wasn’t sure how to answer that. She settled on, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “What happened?” Alice asked the instant after Sabrina lied.

  Sabrina was even less sure how to broach that topic. She couldn’t exactly say existential crisis, panic attack, dissociation, body terror, identity crisis, or that she suspected she was a literal imposter. “I fell,” she said, keeping it short and sweet. That only seemed to make the people she cared about more worried.

  “We know you fell,” Jade said. “Why?”

  “It’s… a long story.” The faces looking down at her didn’t appear satisfied with her dodging the question, so she gave a partial answer. “I had a panic attack,” she admitted. “Could you guys back up a bit, you’re making me sorta custrophobic.”

  Sabrina was able to brush off too many further questions by emphasizing that she really wasn’t in the right space to talk about it yet. She stressed that she really just needed to rest up for now. Of course, going to bed didn’t mean solitude anymore, because Jade followed her to their shared bed.

  “You’re probably not ready for that talk, then, huh?” Jade guessed.

  “No,” Sabrina answered, a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry.” Her embarrassment turned to guilt and fear. She fucked everything up. It was her idea to have this big discussion and then went and freaked herself out and ruined everything. God, what kind of girlfriend was she? Jade should just leave her already so she could have someone who wasn’t so broken.

  Jade was giving Sabrina that worried look again. Sabrina wanted to hide from Jade’s eyes. Why did she have to be perceived?

  “Bean. Sabrina. I think I’m… feeling some kind of echo of your emotions. I’m not hearing your thoughts, but I’m getting a sense of what you’re thinking,” Jade expined.

  Sabrina’s gaze fell to Jade’s hips, where she was still wearing the Living Dildo. Fucking telepathy! Sabrina reflexively reached for the Living Dildo, not wanting her private feelings to be observed and judged. Jade backed away, keeping it just out of reach.

  “Bean, babe! Please, just listen for a minute. I’ve felt that before, what’s happening to you. As you’ve pointed out, I’ve got ADHD. That perk I have keeps it under control, but it’s there. I was curious, so I did some research online about ADHD, and, ya know, the challenges of dating someone with it.”

  “You’re saying… I’ve got ADHD?”

  “No,” Jade said. Then she qualified, “I mean, I don’t think you do. You fell in love with someone with ADHD, which isn’t the most neurotypical thing to do, but… no. Part of ADHD is this thing called rejection-sensitive dysphoria or RSD. Basically, whenever you experience even the smallest perceived rejection, you just freak out. It’s a supercharged beam of negative emotions, which self loathing and anger and crippling sadness. I don’t know if you’ve got ADHD, but what I just felt from you was definitely RSD. You just anticipated a rejection from me because you’re understandably not in the mood to define our retionship, and went on a self-loathing spiral immediately. Am I right?”

  The st thing Sabrina wanted right now was to be perceived and here she was being perceived. Worse yet, it was by the person she cares about and fears losing the most. Sabrina answered with a sheepish, “Mhmm.”

  Jade took Sabrina into the warmth of her arms. “Oh, sweet Bean. I’ve got you. I love all of you with all of me. I promise that there’s no anxious little yer inside of you that would ever change how I feel about you.”

  Somehow it hurt Sabrina to be told this, and to be loved like this. It touched a nerve that she didn’t know was so exposed. Sabrina’s face scrunched up, ready to cry, but she refused to let the tears out. “I love you too, Jade, so much. Thank you. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you.”

  “You never needed to do anything, dummy. Just being makes you worthy of love. I love you because I want to love you, and because I like loving you. Love isn’t some reward for living the right way.”

  Sabrina was awash with emotions, but she couldn’t help but point out, “You’ve been talking so weird today. You’re all mature, and stuff.”

  Jade grinned, and let out a giggle. “Bitch, you went and got you a girl who can do both. I can bust out the grown-up talk when I need to.”

  “Oh good, it’s still you. I was starting to miss my inappropriately casual girlfriend, and all the filthy things she says,” Sabrina swooned.

  “Oh, you wanna hear me say filthy things?”

  Sabrina looked up at Jade’s smirking face and cracked a smirk of her own. “I don’t know… what did you have in mind?”

  Jade considered a moment, and declined. “I’m out of words today. You’ll just have to settle for dirty actions, if that’s okay with you.”

  It was. Jade had managed to turn Sabrina’s mood around yet again, and got her engine revved up and rearing to go. Before beginning, Jade remembered something, and pulled two levitating balls from her inventory.

  “Before I forget— I picked up a present for you in the dungeon,” Jade announced.

  Sabrina looked at the floating spheres. “Are those like that speaker that Alice has?”

  “The very same,” Jade confirmed. “One for each of us. We can even use a shared queue, so we can both py songs and they’ll take turns.”

  Sabrina thought this was neat and thanked her girlfriend with a kiss. It was meant to be a peck to thank her, but she found herself lingering. Sabrina tried her best to drag this kiss out into infinity.

  >Jade is pying: The Bodies, the Zombies! — Mal Blum

  >Sabrina queued: Creep — Radiohead

  Jade insisted that Sabrina lie back and rex. She treated Sabrina like the princess she deserved to see herself as. Slowly, and delicately, she pampered Sabrina with pleasure and drawn-out climactic bliss. She alternated, between using her mouth and her fingers as her instruments of service.

  Finally, Jade shared in Sabrina’s pleasure. She lied atop her girlfriend, hugging her closely as they each locked their legs around the other’s waist. They let their hips imitate the synchronous motions of a ship at sea. In this act, their slippery and swollen clits collided and danced, feeling a closeness like nothing else.

  Sabrina could feel the Living Dildo’s loneliness from where it y, discarded in the folds of the duvet. It would just have to live with it for tonight. Tonight, there were the two lovers, and nothing else.

  The next morning, throughout breakfast and the two-block walk to the gym, Sabrina couldn’t keep the smile off of her face for more than a second at a time. Within moments of entering, that smile died. Blown-up rge on the wall, was her own image.

  Someone had rigged up a projector to py videos from their phone. Huddled together, the few dozen members of the Diving league who were present, watched the video. On its own, seeing herself talking on the night of her big speech wasn’t surprising. She’d seen phones in the air, recording her. What mortified her was the pausing for commentary from an alt-right YouTuber.

  “This is what it’s come to, dies and gentlemen,” the nasally man said. The assumption that his audience contained women was almost ughable. Except, today it did: the league.

  He continued, “The devil has fired the first shot. I’ve been warning you all for years! Armageddon is among us! Need more proof?” He resumed the clip, and Sabrina’s heart sank as she saw herself transform into her succubus form as a demonstration of magic. That really didn’t look good for her in this context.

  The man continued his rant. Sabrina noticed as Sloan looked around the room, and to the entrance, with a calcuting look.

  “What is it?” Sabrina asked.

  “Someone is gonna try to ‘pizza-gate’ us, for sure,” Sloan answered.

  Sabrina couldn’t dispute this likelihood. It was only a matter of time before the location of this gym, or their apartment, got doxxed. Short-term, most people would likely assume the video was guerril marketing for some movie. Others, though, have been waiting their whole lives to gun-down the devil and his co-conspirators.

  “Fuck,” Sabrina said, agreeing with Sloan’s assessment.

  They needed to fortify the gym’s defenses, first and foremost. Beyond that, they needed to get every single member of the league jellied-up. If they spread them evenly, ensuring everyone got something without waiting until they could give everyone a css, they could do it today. After that, they needed to take control of the narrative.

  They had an avenue for tackling the first problem already, as it turned out. One of the quests that Alice’s party of recruits completed st night rewarded a base totem. Establishing the gym as a base and imbuing it with magic could go a long way. Alice herself, along with anyone else who picked her subcss, could bolster that magic.

  The girls got started right away. Those with levels, and thus, access to the inventory, passed out jellies to those present who hadn’t popped any yet. As the day went on and more of the league arrived, everyone would get some at the door.

  Alice rallied the four other Runesmiths to begin work on making the gym a magical sanctuary. Sloan put together an impromptu self defense course, switching to ‘drill instructor’ mode with unsettling ease. That left Sabrina and Jade.

  Sabrina wasn’t well-versed in public-retions. Fortunately, she had quite the media-savvy girlfriend. Side-by-side, the couple looked down the barrel of Jade’s selfie cam and made their first public address as representatives of the Diving League.

  It wasn’t exactly the public debut Sabrina would have wanted, if she had the time to pn things out. Jade started things off, greeting, “Hey losers! Jade here. This is my incredible, sexy, smart, powerful queen of a girlfriend, Sabrina the Bean Medina. Those of you who follow me, probably know me from these,” as Jade said this, she pulled out her boobs and left them out for the remainder.

  “I’ve had a lot of questions about them. There are people who know me and know I didn’t have these awesome huge tits like, two weeks ago. Even those who started following me after I started posting them know that I didn’t used to have this.” She turned around, showing her rge and gravity-defying butt.

  “If you like that, you won’t believe Sabrina’s,” Jade added, before tugging as Jade’s hips and making her turn around. “At long st, I’m gonna give you pervs a straight answer. These aren’t impnts, I didn’t get a BBL, none of that shit. It’s straight-up magic. Magic is real. It doesn’t come from witchcraft or manifestation or any of that shit. It comes from dungeons. There’s a viral video of Sabrina floating around. Ya know, the one where she transforms into a sexy and powerful succubus? That one. She expins this all better than I do, so she can take it from here.”

  Sabrina looked to Jade dumbfounded, with her mouth agape, and then at the camera. “Right… um… can we cut some of that?”

  Jade looked at Sabrina, confused, and whispered, “What? No. This is live on Insta. Something about that perk that makes sure I don’t fsh anyone who wouldn’t want to see it also makes me, like, immune to censorship.”

  Sabrina took a deep and tortured breath and pressed on. “Okay… to start things off, I’m not the devil.”