Chapter Text
I wake, not as my usual ‘will-she-won’t-she’ dance with consciousness but like a switch flipped from off to on. My eyes open to the gentle forest greens of Mistress’s bedroom, not the soft blues of my room. I’m surrounded in a softness that’s woven around and across my body, heavenly but for the tightness in my crotch and much too soft to be my pet bed.
Something is wrong.
“Good morning, my little troublemaker. I’m sure you’re wondering what you’re doing here, bound in my vines~”
Uh oh.
I register what that tightness must be.
“And I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve locked your little girl cock up for the first time since your early training~”
A vine slithers and tightens around my bits.
I’m wondering both those things, but I’m starting to put together an answer. I nod.
“Good girls answer their Mistresses verbally, little Chloe.”
“Yes Mistress, I am, I’m wondering both those things.” The answer is autonomic.
“Then let me answer your question with a question. Could you please tell me what you see?”
A screen floats into my field of view, suspended in the same vines I am. It shows crystal clear footage of Mistress’s living room at night. A beam of light streaks briefly across the room. Moments later, a little, me-shaped floret creeps along the same path before grabbing a tablet and clambering up onto the couch. I bite my lip and shudder.
“I see security footage taken by the hab unit, Mistress.” After a second, I feel through the movement of her vines what must be the glee of a cat that’s just plucked a small bird from the air.
“Oh is that all?” Her disappointment is but one sour note in a song of predatory glee. “I see one Chloe Anne Moschata, my very own first floret, violating her bed time to stay up and browse floret memes~”
“I’m sorry Mistress. It won’t happen again.” Mistress has been increasingly lenient with me since my collaring, and I’ve been testing the limits of that leniency. Dread trickles down my spine as I realize I’ve found those limits, and tripped and fallen quite far on their other side.
“Indeed, it will not. However, your insubordination is not your fault, but mine. I’ve let my floret get away with minor infractions here and there because I lacked time, or because I considered them beneath my concern, or because I simply felt generous. And now look at her. Jeopardizing her sleep hygiene because I’ve trained her not to respect my rules.”
Her vines constrict around my body even more. I know Mistress is playing things up for drama, but I still can’t help but dread the conclusion she’s leading me to.
“Well, that ends today. My precious, budding pet requires discipline, and infractions require punishment.”
I gulp. I haven’t been properly punished in at least a month, and even when she was training me my punishments amounted to swats, or days locked if I was extra naughty. “H-how are you going to punish me, Mistress?”
“I’m going to take you trick-and-treating~”
“U-um, don’t you mean ‘trick-or-treating,’ Mistress?”
Mistress turns me over in her vines. I squirm under her radiant, amethyst eyes. Her Cheshire cat smile is the only answer she gives.
The outfit Mistress picked out for our date is more chaste than I expected. My dark, flowing mini dress paired with a white graphic tee looks almost independent. At least, as long as you ignore the pumpkin decal on my shirt and the broad flowers-and-leaves-on-vines motif along the hem of the dress that match Mistress’s aesthetic. She even let me wear underwear. That would be normal on any other day, but it’s ominously lenient in the context of a punishment.
The Class-A she injected into my bits is more problematic.
It’s mild compared to most of the A’s she likes to dose me with, but it means I feel every inch of every scrape of wood and steel against my bits as they shift inside the cage. Walking is difficult, unsurprisingly. Even more so thanks to the short hem of my dress, which barely hides my predicament from onlookers on the street.
I pull my dress down to hide my shame. “Mistress, where are we going?” I ask.
She looks down at me, the excited purple of her eyes no less brilliant than before. “You’ll find out in a little while, petal. Little Chloes should keep their minds in the present, thinking about their punishment. Wouldn’t you agree? And you should stop stretching out your dress too.”
She takes my hand with the arm she’s holding my leash from. That leaves me one hand to hide my shame with, but I think better of it and find a pocket to put it in.
I don’t want to know what happens if I break a rule while She’s already punishing me.
The click-clack of her woody heels draws my attention back up. They’re out of sight, but the narrow points they come to are obvious just from the sound they make on pavement. Her skirt of broad, layered leaves sways to and fro. They sway mostly in rhythm with her step, but the subtler motions, the jostling, the fidgeting, those are tuned to the finer notes in her biorhythm. I keep my eyes moving to avoid falling into trance.
Mistress’s hair, winding curls of thin green vines like stems off of fruit, also bounce in time with her step, the metronome to which her rhythm ticks. But the chaotic motions of curl bouncing against curl are too complex to fall fully under her rhythm’s sway.
I hear a muffled *BA-DWING* from Mistress’s chest. She opens up to remove the offending tablet.
“Oh, it seems your little friend Olivine wants to chat. Would you like to see?”
“Oh, yeah!” I chirp.
Mistress rustles. “Is that any way to ask your Mistress for something, pet?”
It bodes poorly that she’s so strict with rules today.
“May I please see my tablet, Mistress?”
“That’s a good girl,” she answers. One vine lowers the tablet into my waiting hand while another ruffles my hair.
It takes me a hot minute to open up the message one-handed.
<LiddleGreenRock> hi chloe!! i asked ur fini if i could do a reading for u since ur comin by and theres no one here and she said yes, so i did a three card reading and GIRL what have you been UP to???
<LiddleGreenRock> <PHOTO>
<LiddleGreenRock> anyway see u soon!
In between the two messages is a very aesthetic picture of a row of three tarot cards surrounded by crystals and flowers. I recognize the first one from a previous demonstration. It shows a spectrum jelly with a bag looking up at the stars, with a spaceport in the background and a little shuttle cutting through the sky. It’s the fool, only it’s upside-down, so it represents a reckless sophont who didn’t look before they leaped. Honestly? Accurate.
I don’t know the other two. The middle shows a recognizably T.C.N. ship getting absolutely wrecked by a vine from the heavens, which feels about right, and the rightmost card shows a vine holding a cup that’s so full it’s spilling. I have no idea how to interpret that last one, but in puzzling it out, the other part of her message finally registers.
“W-w-wait, are we going to the Red Oak!? I-I can’t, what if she sees me like- like-”
“Like what, petal? Caged? Needy? I’m quite sure you’ll survive your little friend seeing you like this~”
Mistress’s biorhythm thrums with satisfaction.
“Besides, this is a punishment, if you’ll recall.”
I look down. “...yes Mistress. I’m sorry for speaking out of turn.” I squirm, and a warmth in my tummy matches the warmth in my cheeks.
“Good girl.”
We walk the rest of the way there in loud silence. Mistress feels every fidget and start through our held hands, and I feel every peak and valley in Her biorhythm as she drinks in my humiliation like a fine wine. I pray that none of the many different sophonts we pass by can see under my dress for long enough to spot my “extra packaging.” Forbidden from pulling the dress down, hopes and prayers are all I have.
Finally, we come upon a quaint building in one of the Coccinea’s Indie zones. It’s built from simple wood, painted black and etched with different symbols, with a sign over the door that reads “Red Oak Apothecary & Boutique.” Its walls rise up into an arched and shingled roof, out of which grows a scarlet oak tree, the ship’s namesake. I always forget to ask if the tree is real. I notice that the floral garlands have been replaced with fake cobwebbing and little spiders.
A bell heralds the open door, and the air that rushes by is floral scented. One of Mistress’s vines ushers me inside with a gentle pat on the rear.
“Hi Miss Moschata! Hey Chloe~”
Olivine stands by the counter. She’s a few inches shorter than me, wearing an oversize pentagram tee tucked into a short skirt with cute, ghostly-looking monsters printed all over it. The loose clothes belie how utterly tiny she is, the kind “big personality, small package” that’s paradoxically a little intimidating. Or maybe it’s just intimidating to me. She grins up at me, her green and black makeup matching her soft, green pendant and her hazel eyes full of knowing. “So what have you been up to~?”
“Up to no good, I’m afraid.” Mistress answers for me. Her facade of detached disappointment has gotten very convincing. “But hopefully some stiff correction should set things straight.”
“Oh~?” Olivine prods.
I squeak and try to pull down my dress on reflex.
“Ah ah dear, remember what I said about stretching out your clothes.” Mistress says. “Why don’t you lift your dress and show little Olive your punishment~”
After several weeks of conditioning, I’m helpless to resist the command. My hands grip my dress at the hem and my arms hike it up as high as they can, with about as much input from my prefrontal cortex as my lungs expanding, or my eyes blinking, or my cheeks filling with warm blood. I look down and away with what precious agency I have.
“Oh that looks tight! And your dress is so short! I sure hope no innocent sophonts got a peek at that on your way over~” Olivine says, teasingly.
“Only every affini we walked past on the street~”
Olivine is caught off guard for a moment, eyes wide.
“Oh, did you think we affini saw with our eyes, little Olive?”
She looks down at the floor with a blush.
“Chloe, why don’t you go take a look around?” Mistress asks.
“Yes Mistress.” My dress falls back into a (mostly) decent position, and I look for literally anything else to distract me from the butterflies in my stomach.
“By the way, little Olive, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this place so empty. We haven’t interrupted your opening, have we?”
“Oh, no Miss, it’s usually pretty dead for the…”
I half pay attention to their conversation. The first thing that catches my eye is the grid of dispensers lining nearly the entire wall of the shop, leaving just the windows and a couple gaps. All of them are filled with herbs and other xenoflora, most from across Rinan-Terran space, some from even further afield. From what Olivine has told me, herbal magic is a common feature of a lot of preindustrial societies across sophont species, and it’s common for those societies to rediscover and reconstruct those traditions as they grow. She’s especially interested in the pre–Unification folk traditions that developed as humanity first spread across the stars, before the Terran Accord could suffocate them like asphalt over a field of flowers.
Several of the dispensers hold what looks like different kinds of dried up seaweed. There’s a lot of independent spectrum jellies on the Coccinea out to see the stars, so it makes sense they'd get represented.
“And how is little Quill holding up after their implantation?”
“Oh they’re doing great, better than I’ve…”
I could probably remember better what a lot of these herbs are for, except that my cage keeps brushing skin and breaking my train of thought, and those mulching butterflies in my stomach will not settle down. I also feel a little warm and hazy, and I dread finding out why.
“...even the most independent sophonts end up happier in a collar~”
“I wouldn’t say Quill was the…”
Honestly, you could throw a dart anywhere in the room and probably hit something that’s for protection. Folk magic and medicine is usually about shielding and nurturing, and occasionally spite, unlike video game magic. And of course, every dispenser carries a Bureau of Completely Missing the Point warning that claims about beneficial effects are not backed up by research, and that sophonts should refer to their veterinarians for medical care, and so on.
“...could use a helping hand, even us affini~”
After pondering the herbs fails to distract me from how bad I need somebody to please touch me, I decide to check out one of the bookcase columns in the middle of the room, between tables full of knick knacks. It has an eclectic mix of practical guides in several languages, themed tarot and oracle decks (also in several languages), and journals.
One deck catches my eye, featured prominently at eye level with a spread of cards leaned against the rest of the deck as a display. I pick a card and nearly drop it as the bending motion causes yet more waves of sensation downstairs. I flip it back right side up.
It’s The Hanged Man. The artwork features an ambiguous terran figure suspended upside down in an intricate harness of vines, one leg crossed behind the other, arms behind them. The expression on their face is contented. The vinework takes clear influence from traditional rope bondage techniques. Glancing at the other cards, that seems to be an aesthetic theme in the deck as a whole.
I look back at the terran on the card. Despite their compromising position, they look at peace, and the vines around their body support it safely while complimenting its features.
I briefly imagine Olivine in that position.
My eyes go wide. I reflexively try to shove the thought back where it came from, but my implant prevents me. My mind’s eye lingers on the thought of vines winding and branching along the gentle curves of her inner thigh. Weaving their web around her tiny frame much like the necklace that supports her olivine pendant. Hugging her hips. Tracing the delicate curve of her small breasts-
My brain sputters as I place the card back on the shelf.
We’re just friends, I shouldn’t-
I cannot be blamed for my intrusive fantasies.
But she doesn’t even-
I know that bondage is something she herself has said she’s interested in trying. There is nothing violating about imagining it.
I take a deep breath to ground myself, and that breath is strongly scented by whatever fragrance has filled the room. My eyes flutter, and the warmth in my tummy only increases. I notice some subtler notes in the fragrance that I missed before. Underneath the thick blanket of florals is a middle note that’s almost sickly sweet, over a base note that’s something like a wet animal, or a terran who really needs a post-workout shower. It occurs to me that this fragrance might be dangerous in my current state, but not before reflexively taking another big whiff of it first. The warmth in my tummy bleeds out a little bit and starts to feel gooey. Little tingles flit across my skin. My thighs squeeze together. I decide I should figure out what it is I’m smelling.
I look around and spot the offending incense on a nearby table, in a horizontal incense holder. The holder is fired clay, formed into a rectangular platform on which a nude figure, a femme presenting terran, lounges sensually. The incense sticks out of the holder at an angle, originating from a point above the figure’s head.
My eyes lid without my meaning to, and my thighs squeeze together again. The weird fluttering warmth has only gotten worse, especially since coming over to inspect the smell’s origin. If I were capable of hindsight at the moment, I might deduce that my plan was flawed.
I spot the box the incense likely came in, with many other sticks of it still inside. The packaging is labeled “Foxy Floral Fantasy,” above a long list of caveats, warnings, codes for counteragents, and the like. Conspicuously, I see no list of ingredients. This doesn’t bother me as much as it should.
I shift my thighs the wrong way, and a bolt of pleasure arcs up my body from my cage. I arch my back in response.
It’s so hard to think.
My hand skitters down the length of my dress.
Can’t… think straight… so pent up.
It creeps into my panties and onto my cage. There’s no way I could remove it, but maybe that doesn’t matter.
If I can just-
“Isn’t that right, Chloe?”
I jump. My hand darts out of my underwear. I look up at Olivine, who’s grinning at me. “U-uh, sorry, I missed that.” I pray to no one in particular that she didn’t just see me.
“Oh, don’t worry about it~” she teases.
Our eyes lock. I try to parse how much she knows from the way she looks at me, but her hazel eyes keep their secrets.
“By the way petal, the new photos on your overnet site are breathtaking.” Mistress saves me. She almost certainly caught me uh, wet-handed, but her knowing isn’t as much of a disaster.
“O-oh, thank you Miss! Yeah, I read those geology papers you sent me and I realized I should light my crystals the way they want to be lit, not just how I’d light any old subject, and…”
With both of them distracted, and on the tail end of my adrenaline rush, I take stock of my situation. The fingers on my right hand are… Well, I should avoid touching anything with them until I can find a bathroom. I also feel wet between my inner thighs, which isn’t surprising, as well as all the way down my right leg and onto the floor, which is very surprising.
I look down, and I see a small, clear puddle of precum by my foot. The adrenaline rush comes back full force.
I very casually walk away from the Incense of Doom, hoping my symptoms clear up. I pass the bookcase that’s opposite the crystal display by the counter. It’s full of books about the theory and history of different magical traditions across the several Milky Way Protectorates. There’s another official-looking warning that research does not support the efficacy of harmful magic, but trying it is liable to get you wellness checked. The books I’ve checked out before were really interesting, but I think better of engaging with any of them in my current predicament. Instead, I move on to the crystals.
“...really cool how different herbs and stuff only come from one world, or one part of one world, but a lot of crystals grow almost anywhere with the right conditions, like, it makes them different in such a meaningful way…”
By the counter near the other two is a table covered in and surrounded by pretty rocks. A series of display cases runs down the outside-facing half of the table, divided into sections each filled with small crystal pebbles. Behind the cases are larger crystals cut into shapes like towers on raised platforms, each at a different height.
Small cubbies are cut into the wall around the table and continue behind the counter, each with one or two crystals in their more natural state. Right now, there’s a huge smoky quartz prism rising from a hunk of stone and flanked on all sides by smaller siblings, a disc-like cut of amethyst and some other rock it’s growing out of like a fiery halo, and a chunk of olivine cut only on its top side.
All of it is free to take, of course, and it’s all compiled and easy to replace. Her home collection, on the other hand, is nearly all organically grown. More than a few of the pieces in her hab are gifts from Mistress, actually, found on planetside surveys.
Just as I start to get my mind off of my troubles, I feel a vine squeeze my shoulder.
“Oh, I see you’ve found something, Petal?”
I look down. The box of incense is still in my hand. She takes it with a vine before I can say anything and stows it inside of her.
I decide I should let Olivine know about my uh, ‘incident,’ before some other rando discovers it later. “U-uh, I think I uh. Leaked. Back there.”
Olivine makes a show of rolling her eyes with a wide smile, and then sighs. “Damn florets, always making a mess of things.”
I can feel Mistress's predatory instinct through her rustling foliage. “My my, such harsh words about our darling florets. You should be more careful, we wouldn’t want little Olive to get a wellness check for feralist sentiments~”
Olivine grins right back up at her. “I haven’t been wellness checked yet, you know. And I’m sure there’s a long list of affini who’d love to do the honors. You know. If it ever happened~”
Mistress rustles again. I can see the light of her six honey-gold eyes reflected off of the floor.
“Anyway, it’s no trouble, I want to mop before Quill gets here anyway. Got a shoot later, and they’re doing me a solid by covering for me.”
“We ought to be off as well, I think. However, little Chloe and I are doing a bit of ‘tricking and treating’ today. I don’t suppose my darling Chloe’s good friend has a treat for her?”
Olivine’s confident smirk yields instantly to something more flustered. “Y-yeah, um-”
She rifles around somewhere under the counter. She seems to find what she’s looking for after a minute. The blush only grows. “I-I compiled this for you-”
She cuts herself off and holds out a small box to me, like packaging for jewelry. I open the lid, and learn that blushing can be contagious.
Inside is a beautiful blue piece of stone work. It looks a little like a pointy egg, attached to a stem, attached to a flared base that has a beautifully cut, green inset gemstone. The blue of the stone is streaked with other colors like gold, but its surface is perfectly smooth.
It’s a plug.
“I-it’s really durable too, so you don’t, uh. It won’t break when you play with it.”
I see out of the corner of my eye that she’s looking down at the floor, and I’ve never seen her face redder.
Mistress rescues us both from our fluster. “Oh, that’s a gorgeous plug, petal. I’m sure my beloved pet agrees~”
I do agree, it’s a really beautiful gift. The rushing, swirling, clashing gratitude and fluster and horny and so many other feelings steal the words from me. I make a mental note to thank her more eloquently later, after Mistress is done torturing me.
“In fact, why don’t we try it out right now?”
My heart skips a beat.
I mouth a thank you to Olivine as Mistress escorts me to the bathroom. Olivine says “it’s no problem” with her mouth, and “I am so sorry” with her eyes.
When we emerge I fear my face might literally catch on fire. My cock strains against my cage and my ass hugs tight around the plug’s smooth stem in a dreadful feedback loop, each emerging from and giving rise to the other like an ouroboros of horny.
Mistress hands the packaging back to Olivine. “Thank you again for the lovely gift, flower. My floret felt inspired to give one of her own. I hope you enjoy it~”
I smile awkwardly at her as she takes the box.
“We’d best be off, but I’m sure we’ll be swinging by again sometime soon.”
Olivine smiles. “You’d better!”
“Now say goodbye to your friend, Chloe.”
“I-it was nice seeing you again!”
“See ya later Chloe~”
Mistress escorts me toward the entrance. The door opens, and I feel the air rush under my dress and caress my bare ass. Before the door shuts, I think I hear the building’s ventilation turn on high.