Agatha couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was just too much. The Valasela Estate was even more decorated and furnished than the Skyscraper Academy, a literal castle and the most prestigious academy in the whole kingdom. How her humble and gentle girlfriend hadn’t become a spoiled brat after being nurtured in all this wealth was something the seamstress-in-training couldn’t understand.
The maid, Miss Diorite, had led her to Christie’s room and just told her to leave the suitcases there as she needed to head to the kitchens. Not wanting to mess anything up, Agatha just waited in a cushioned rocking chair in the corner of the room next to a window. A lovely space. As she rocked back and forth, she could easily imagine Christie reading here. That made her smile.
The wait was killing her, so after a handful of minutes she stood up and inspected the room. By usable surface area, it was already bigger than Agatha’s house back at Malachite. And that was without even taking into consideration the adjacent bathroom that was as equipped as the shared stalled bathrooms that they had outside the dormitories in the academy. A porcelain bathtub only for her.
“This wealth is going to make me puke,” Agatha caressed her temples with one hand as the other slid across the bathtub. There was a silver full-body mirror next to it, and another one was located back in the room. “Silver’s not that expensive, not as much as tin at least, but mirrors still are. I think I could buy a fully furnished home in Malachite with just one…”
It was an insidious whisper, but she was able to keep it at bay. Perhaps if this had been the home of a friend – or rather, acquaintance – from the academy she might have indulged, but this was her glorious and gorgeous girlfriend she was talking about. If she were to be cynical about it – which she wasn’t – she could get all that wealth if they revealed their relationship. She perfectly understood why Christie was hesitant to do so, but the truth was that Agatha was hesitating even more. If the redhead wanted to keep this a secret forevermore and marry a random man and keep her as a hidden mistress, that was fine with her. If she still had Christie’s love.
That was the only thing that mattered.
Agatha’s eyes darted around, not wanting to dwell on those dark thoughts, and finally settled on the bed. It was already as massive as Agatha’s bedroom at Malachite on its own, and the dais and all the extra miscellaneous bits, like the embroidery canopy, made it even bigger.
Gingerly, the petite girl climbed the steps of the dais and threw herself on the puffy quilt.
She melted.
It was literally like swimming in clouds. She had foolishly thought that the academy’s beds were soft, but this was on a whole other level.
Then an intrusive thought.
Agatha slithered like the worm she was compared to the girl she dared to call her princess up to the head of the bed. She dug her head into the cushions and then took a deep sniff.
“Ah~” The dirty, dirty-blond girl moaned. “It smells like her…” Her eyes were glossy as she left her sanity dwindling.
It had been months since the girl had slept on this bed, and yet her presence was tangible. Rather than being embraced by wealth, Agatha felt herself embraced by Christie as the bed accepted her. The quick, hidden caresses during the road trip were fine and all, but she yearned for something longer and more personal.
Then she heard the door open.
Never ever before in her life had Agatha jumped so high. Her already fast reaction time worked overtime as she did a pirouette midair and sat on the border of the bed.
“What are you doing?” Christie giggled as she barged into the room. It’s her room, you moron.
“Uh… trying the fluffiness?” Agatha responded as she didn’t separate her eyes from her smiling and lovable girlfriend.
“Yes, I can see that,” she giggled again. “Your hair is all messed up.”
The petite girl led her hands to her hair, and it was indeed tangled like a yarn ball. She blushed, and that only made the tall girl’s smile even more pronounced.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your mother has already gone,” Christie sat next to her on the bed.
“Oh, thank the earth!” The seamstress-in-training collapsed on the bed.
“How come?” The obscenely wealthy girl looked at her in confusion. Though there are other obscene things about her. Not that I’m complaining. “Were you not on good terms with your mother?”
“Of course I am,” Agatha slightly raised her head from the bed to look at Christie. “It is just that… I think she is rather angry that I have not sent her any letters. That Third Stratum reveal really shocked her. That reminds me,” she shot upwards and straightened her composure, “how is it that your father knew about my current Stratum? Did you tell him in a letter?”
“No, not at all,” the redhead professed as much bewilderment as her as she swayed her head. “I wonder how he knows, though…” As soon as Agatha was about to pass an arm through that waist of Christie’s that became more pronounced each passing day, she stood up and stretched her arms with a groan. “I would like to rest, but we need to take a bath before dinner. We have had luck with the rivers, but it is better if we get a good scrub. I fear we are not in the best of conditions, at least in the smell department.”
Agatha unconsciously took a sniff after Christie said that. Then another one, but consciously this time. No issues at all here… she thought as her glossy eyes lingered on her pleasant and piquant girlfriend.
“What are you waiting for?” Christie giggled as she turned her face to look at her. “Unless you want to bathe with me?” That giggle transformed into something far more malignant, something that threatened to shackle her.
And it would have succeeded, if it weren't for Agatha’s reddening cheeks. “N-no, I think I will go on my own.”
She awkwardly stood up, waddling away from Christie. A part yearned for the redhead, yes, but another part of her was too scared. Too intimidated.
“Oh, that reminds me of something!” Christie quickly stepped down the dais and rushed for a closet. One of the many closets in her room. “Where is it…? Where is it…?” She mumbled to herself as she rummaged through the closet. “Ah! Here it is!”
“What is it?” The villager slowly made her way down the dais.
“Something that you can wear after the bath. Your clothes are not exactly clean, and you do not have closets full of clean ones at your disposal like yours truly.” The rich girl showed a nightrobe a few sizes smaller than the ones she usually wore.
“Mine truly… It has a ring to it~” Agatha hummed as she hugged Christie from behind.
“Too soon for a ring, though,” Christie giggled and gave her a peck on the nose. “Now get going. I am afraid that Miss Diorite likes supper earlier than you are used to.”
“Okay, but… where should I bathe?” The dirty-blond girl inquired as she took the white nightrobe from her maddening and charming girlfriend’s hands. Ah, clearly one of hers when she was younger. That’s what I amount to, a child’s body…
“Look out for the kitchens, Miss Diorite will be there, and she can guide you to a room for you to sleep, unpack, and bathe,” the redhead explained, completely oblivious to the thoughts in her lover’s head.
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“And where is this kitchen at?”
“Bottom floor. There is no more need for directions, you will know when you are at it, just follow the sounds~” Before Agatha could ask her what she was talking about, the tall girl made her way into the adjacent lavatory, a click announcing the end of the conversation.
“Okay, follow the sounds. I can do that.” Agatha whispered to herself as she left the room. “Whatever that means.”
But as she made her way downstairs to the bottom floor of the mansion, she quickly understood what Christie had meant. Soft and muted sounds met her ears. She couldn’t quite put her name on them but…
“Is someone… playing an instrument?” She followed the sound, which guided her into one of the extremes of the mansion. Hesitantly, Agatha pulled open the door where she heard the sounds coming from.
The moment she did so, she felt in a whole other world.
The sounds were no longer muted, but they still softly caressed her ears, and she was able to distinguish the music. The rhythm. But that was strange, for there was no instrument nor player. She found herself in a massive kitchen with many lit fires and a single woman to look over them, too busy to be playing an instrument.
“Uh… Miss Diorite?” Agatha called out for the maid’s attention from the doorway.
“What?” The old woman snapped her head toward her. “Oh! Miss Christina’s friend! What brings you here?”
“Christie, uhm, Christina said that you could guide me to my room. And bath.”
“You can call her Christie, dear,” Miss Diorite chuckled. “The only one that might protest is Hasel, and if he does so to the lady’s best friend, I will personally slap him in the back of the head.”
“That is… reassuring.” It was, also, weird to hear.
The head maid cleaned her hands on her apron before walking to the petite girl holding the nightrobe. “Yes, I can guide you. Follow me.”
“Wait, one question,” Agatha raised her hand and pointed it around the room in circles. “Where is the music coming from?”
“Oh, I guess you have never seen anything like this if you are Esmeralda’s daughter. These are soundstones,” Miss Diorite walked to the wall of the kitchen and patted colorful pillars of agate that went from the ground to the ceiling. There were five of them. “Veins of agate that have had sounds recorded inside them and then can play them out with the Sound command. Expensive stuff. The vein. The recording. The installation…”
“Yes, I can tell…” The wealth’s embrace became tighter, like a constrictor snake she had heard Shayla talk about. “So… is it only the Sound command at play?”
“Yes, agate veins cannot do more than a command at a given time. As I have said, the sound needs to be manually recorded on the stone by a professional. And that is without taking into account hiring the orchestra to play the song for the lapiloquist alone.”
“Wait, a lapiloquist? Is this not lithorica?” Agatha frowned.
“It shows you are still in your first year,” the woman smiled at her. “Let us get walking. I will explain it to you on the way to your room.” The seamstress-in-training let herself be guided out of the kitchen by the maid. “As I was saying, this is lapiloquia. You might not get it as you have not been taught it just yet, but any kind of agate manipulation that is not done to the agates you can naturally produce is lapiloquia. Whether they are natural or from other people.”
“Wait, you can manipulate other people’s agates?” Her frown intensified.
“Ask those questions to your teachers back at the academy. I am retired. Isn’t your teacher that troublemaker René?” Agatha nodded instinctively. “Then pester him.”
“Troublemaker? You know him?”
“We go back a long way. Everyone in this mansion does, but you have had enough gossip for today,” Miss Diorite stopped and slapped a door. “This is a guest room, but it is as big as Miss Christina’s room, and it also has an adjacent bathroom. The sheets are already there, so you do not need to worry about anything.”
“T-thank you,” Agatha slowly bowed to the maid.
“Anything for her friend,” the brunette and mature woman smiled and made her way back to the kitchen.
Now alone, the dirty-blond girl made her way into the room. The bed wasn’t placed atop a dais and didn’t have a canopy with flowery embroideries, but it still was more than she had had her whole life. Without a hint of shame, Agatha undressed and made it inside the bathroom. There was no full-body mirror inside, only one for the face atop a faucet, but it still was as luxurious as the ones in the academy. It even had agate veins for cold and hot water.
“Oh, earth~” The petite girl moaned as she submerged into hot water. “I didn’t know how much I needed this…”
Heeding Christie’s warning, Agatha didn’t let herself marinate in the waters as she needed to be ready for supper. Though mostly because she felt a soft and treacherous sleep beckon her, and she knew that if she took the bath slowly, she would come out a day later and more wrinkled than a dried grape.
She got out of the tub with a grunt, which was followed by another one as the floor wasn’t heated like the ones they had at the academy. Agatha tiptoed around until she found a mat to rest her feet on. She dried herself with a towel before the head-high mirror and noticed her wet hair.
“Ugh, it’s really wet. How can it have grown so much in these last few weeks?” Normally, Agatha cut her hair by herself as she didn’t like to have it too long. Long hair didn’t work well with her impromptu acrobatics. “Hmm… maybe I can do something to dry it.”
While she wasn’t sure a Blow command existed – which it might, her mind wasn’t fresh, and the command textbook had too many of them to have all of them on her mind at all times – Agatha still was a resourceful girl with three whole command slots to her name. First, she made her sapphire levitate with Control. Second, she gave it the Spin command. Third, she noticed she messed up the order of the commands and rearranged them by having Spin first and Control later. There was usually resistance to switching commands, but because both were active, shuffling them around was way easier, yet not quite trivial. And last but not least, she occupied the last slot of her agate with Heat.
“Spin Control Heat,” she chuckled. “This must be the first time anyone has made this specific command series.”
She had a single planned usage for it: to dry her hair. As always, her lone agate worked at maximum potency, therefore creating a maelstrom of wind with the fast centripetal velocity brought by the Spin command. Though she only managed to generate a respectable gust after shaping her sapphire to add some paddles instead of being a perfect sphere. The Control Heat series allowed her to wield the blaze of her agate without burning herself, as at maximum potency, it could instantly boil water. Though her fears proved unfounded as air was a worse thermal conductor than water and the agate produced only a somewhat hot breeze.
More than enough to dry her hair.
“Well, I would’ve needed the Control command either way to keep it floating,” she mused as she also dried her hair with a towel at the same time. “Depths, this Spin command is so savage that I fear for any surface in contact with it…” A violent idea formed in her mind. “Saw tooth… Could I’ve…? No. The behemoth’s carapace was way too thick. Maybe I could’ve gotten through it, but it would’ve taken too much time. Time that I didn’t have.”
Agatha wouldn’t dare to say that fateful encounter had scarred her for life, but she still found herself wondering if she could have done things differently.
“Eh…” She grunted and left the towel on a nearby basket. “I shouldn’t worry about this. Best to not be late for supper.”
The seamstress-in-training went back to the adjacent bedroom and looked at the nightrobe she had on the bed. Only a nightrobe.
“Depths,” she cursed under her breath and started rummaging through the closets and drawers of the room.
Her luck was a mixed bag. The closest and the drawers were completely empty, but she also found a pair of comfortable slippers, so she didn’t need to put on her smelly and dirty boots.
Agatha took a deep breath, put on the nightrobe and the slippers, and made a mad dash for Christie’s room.
“Christie, are you in there?” She frantically knocked on the door, as unlike a certain redhead, she didn’t have the hobby of looking at naked people.
“Yes, you can come in,” her voyeuristic and salacious girlfriend said over the door.
Expecting some kind of foul play, Agatha opened the door slowly. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, Christie hadn’t decided to tease her in any shape or form.
“Is there something wrong?” The redhead said as she combed her long mane as she sat in front of a drawer with three different mirrors and lots of cosmetics on the counter.
“You… could say that, yes,” the dirty-blond girl felt her cheeks starting to heat up. “The room I was assigned had no clothes.”
“And?” Christie inquired, the subtle queues apparently not having been enough for her.
“And I only had a nightrobe.”
This time, the distracted and sophisticated girlfriend reacted as she looked at Agatha with a mixture of dread and… interest?
“Are you telling me that you are…” The words of the rich girl who was wearing the same attire as her died out before she could finish the sentence.
Agatha simply blushed, and that was more than enough confirmation for Christie as she shot up from her seat, leaving her comb on top of the drawer.
“Oh! I am so sorry!” The redhead rushed for her, which only made the dirty-blond girl blush more and more the closer she got. “Oops. Right,” she noticed her mistake. “Well, now that you are here, I should also get you actual clothes and footwear for supper. You can wait in the bathroom if you prefer more privacy.”
“T-thank you.” The fact that her fiery-maned and soft-mannered girlfriend was so conscious made the situation ever more embarrassing for Agatha.
The petite girl sat on a carpeted stool in the adjacent bathroom as she waited with her legs crossed. She lethargically rubbed her sapphire with her two hands as she felt the soft fabric of the ever-so-slightly translucent nightrobe rub against her naked body. She was embraced by wealth as the high-quality fabric – a mixture of silk and cotton depending on the part of the dress – met her skin. She was covered, and yet she had never felt more conscious of her body than today as she restlessly waited for her recent and esteemed girlfriend to come to her with clothes.
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