Two years ago:

“And you’re just content to sit back and watch, aren’t you, Cerise?” The words slipped out with an unusual bite. Kelly was not talking about the game, Cerise knew, but she decided to play along anyway. When Kelly got like this, the best course of action was to ride it through, deflect, distract. She empathized, with as much empathy as there was these days to go around.

“I lost. What do you expect me to do, cheerlead?” she said with a smile, to mollify the sharpness of her words. “First Dawn’s Fire runs at the speed of melting ice with four players, and you had enough time to call this parley when you really didn’t need to.”

“It’s not a parley when you’re not playing, ‘Rise.” 

‘Rise. Sounded like Reece, a guy’s name. Not a deadname of hers, but too close for comfort, not that she’d ever had the heart to tell Kelly that. 

She sighed. “It’s just gotten kind of boring. Everything has, in Tay’s.”

“It has unless you wanna be a pet,” Kelly laughed.

Cerise laughed too, sound coming from her mouth and no deeper. Objectively, Tay’s Fort had gotten an order of magnitude more vibrant. The nightclubs, the libraries, the combination bar-cafes that Kelly always called “barfies” like she thought that was funny. The museums that Cerise never went to because who was there to go with besides Kelly, who was great but didn’t want to go anywhere the population was too green. 

Showing that uncanny ability Kelly had to seem like she could read minds, she offered a piece of advice Cerise really didn’t want to hear. “You can make new friends, you know.”

Cerise didn’t know what to say. She settled on “You’re right. New ones.” She contorted her face a little at the word new. “New friends like me.”

Kelly put her hand to her face.

“What’s got you like this, ‘rise?” Kelly said, with genuine concern. “I’m sorry about what I said. I didn’t know it would hurt that much. I’m in a mood, is all, and you’re in one too. You were in one before taking this break. What’s up?”

“It’s not what you said,” she placated. “It’s this place. It’s Tay’s Fort. It’s not like it used to be.”

“Well yeah, it isn’t, the plants kind of did just take everything and-” 

“It’s not the plants, Kelly. You know what it is.”

Kelly frowned. “Yes, I know.”

Present day, Apostasia: 

Apostasia Merinoi, 28th Bloom, knew exactly what to do, and that did not make her feel any better. A funny thing it was, when a sophont was in unexpected distress, that no amount of confidence or perfect execution would remove the anxiety that something wasn’t going according to plan– that something had been overseen. She made note of what her possession had been humming– music was a powerful and useful thing. Exactly what dear Monanthes had said to set it off had yet to be discerned, but more pressing things were relevant at the moment. One internal eye scanned a newly grafted display, glyphs as small as specks of dust dancing across it to the rhythm that everything in Apostasia’s body moved to. The readings coming in from its Gestural Lace were back to what was expected of a Terran sleeping off a panic attack, not that they would stay that way for long- it was asleep only as a result of fast-acting xenodrugs with short half-lives. 

Fine vines within her stirred in thought. Nothing anybody external to her would notice, thankfully, but there was a long road ahead of her if she wanted to impress the people she respected, and a little bit of uncontrolled vine movement still made its way through after all these blooms. The panic, she knew, was going to happen. It happened to nearly anybody who was put in a Lace– simple animal instinct biting back at the disconnect between intention and act. She simply wanted Cerise to get a chance to see the Third Minor Arc of the Yarravia proper before it set in– a poor little thing with the anxieties that she had would have far more trouble leaving the hab if the stressor of being Laced was heaped on top of it, and she wanted an excuse to say something specific, to see if her Cerise had found it familiar.

Better to get the process over with, though, given what she would make out of her little Cerise. The Lace was a preliminary measure before implantation, but an implant like the one she had plans for would take a while to grow and engineer. Cerise, her darling toy, was a floret of a special type, and for that Apostasia was ever-grateful– a type that would allow her much more freedom in her work.

True involuntaries were getting rarer these days, but Blanket Acquiescences were highly sought after as well. While they kept the J Cafes full, they were prized for other reasons, and she felt very satisfied that it was here, with her. Apostasia had, after all, extensive experience with those who had checked that box.

The door to the hab closed silently behind her, as Apostasia, gliding across the tiles on vines that didn’t quite form legs, gently deposited her Cerise onto the bed. Its mean body temperature dropped by 0.22 degrees as the cool, conditioned air took the place of warm vines wrapping around it. A few select counteragents were deployed from the banks in its collar, all according to plan, and the anxiety abated but did not cease. This conversation, she thought, as disconnected parts of her core scanned and re-scanned her notes, would be a difficult one.

Present day, Cerise:

The ceiling-flowers, which Cerise had now figured were light fixtures, danced overhead. One particularly close to her started as a bud, pulling up to the ceiling, and then it fell, gravity and air resistance filling the folds between its petals until it billowed out, blooming mid-fall, the glow of some internal light source bleeding through. When it hit the end of its fall, far above but still uncomfortably close, it flounced like a jumping ball-goer might, and began its ascent back up to the high ceiling above. Why the Affini had these things was beyond her, but she had yet seen enough not to question the plants' taste when it came to sheer opulence. 

She tried to sit up, and… Oh, she couldn't move. She still couldn’t fucking move. The memories of what might have been minutes ago or what might have been yesterday fell back into her head, and something moved her– something on her skin moved her, she now realized with the benefit of a slightly clearer head, to a straight-backed sitting position, and further. Further, until she was kneeling on the bed, head tilted upwards. Her affini– oh stars was she tall– stood opposite to her, what could be interpreted as a thoughtful look hewed onto the white and green simulacrum that was her face. 

“What is this,” Cerise pronounced the words slowly to keep her voice from breaking. “What– what did you do?”

“Hush,” Apostasia spoke. “All you need to know will be explained precisely when you need to know it.”

“I need to fucking know now,” she said, her voice going whispery on the last word.

“I said hush, my precious, fragile marble. If you do not know how to use the privilege of speech which has been afforded to you, then you will be taught. Now, sit nice and still and listen to me-”

Cerise fumed at that last sentence.

“-As I explain what is currently happening to you, and some of what one day will.”

“I want to know what-”

“Hush.” 

“I want-” A thin vine, a tendril not even half the width of a pen, caressed her lips in warning, moving with far more lightness than something biological should. Cerise closed her mouth at that. 

“You have had difficulty, today, moving under your own power.” She said this as a fact, to establish shared reality, and what little reality Cerise could grasp, she held onto like a cliff’s edge. She attempted to nod rapidly, and her muscles wouldn’t move, until her head bobbed in a single, slow, polite nod.

“You have realized that something has been puppeting you. That your movements have been more graceful, more composed. You have felt something, light and airy, pressing up against your skin. You were not initially aware of this on our little walk today, but it became too obvious, too acute of a dissonance to ignore. You may once again nod your head in understanding.”

She wanted nothing more but to curl up and shut everything out, but her head bobbed again in a slow, measured motion, and a vine against her neck rewarded her for the action which she did not perform, sending droplets of warm golden rain cascading down through her. 

“But I have not yet let you look closely at your own skin. Here, look. You are still capable of focusing your eyes under your own power, are you not?”

Slowly, as if being hoisted by strings, her right little finger was brought up before her nose. It was too close to focus on by just a hair, but Cerise could cross her eyes in short, uncomfortable bursts to get a clearer look. And her skin looked very wrong. The color, the texture, patterns she could just barely see unblurred that regular skin did not have. 

“You may speak.”

The tears were back, as if they’d never been gone. “You changed my skin.”

In response, in lieu of spoken words, Cerise’s finger moved just a centimeter further away– such a fine movement that her shaking would have obscured it, if so much as a single muscle on her limbs worked properly. Instead, as the finger, an alien object wrought in pale sun-deprived skin and strange green filaments retreated, Cerise saw what was covering her. A dense filigree of biological green tendrils each thinner across than a hair wrapped around her fingertip, obscuring close to half as much skin as was left open to the hab unit air cleaner’s slight circulatory sigh. As it continued to withdraw, Cerise watched through a mental window streaked with rain to see the filigree covering her hand, the spaces between her fingers, the slight wrinkles in her palm, all the way up her arm to parts she couldn’t see. 

“Lace.” the affini’s voice cascaded. 

The mesh on a few select parts of Cerise’s little finger tightened, moved, although she couldn’t feel them doing so, and the finger curled inward before straightening out again.

“A beautiful piece of Compact technology not often used in this part of space. Originally developed in the Kagal systems, two million, four hundred ninety thousand Terran light years from here. The Heskagalir had two brains in a single body, and the one that housed the consciousness was not the one that governed the body’s movements. As direct Haustoric control took time to achieve, the Gestural Lace was developed- a phytotech tegument which acts as an external muscular system, among other things,” Apostasia’s haunting voice began to intermingle with the ringing in Cerise’s ears. She no longer heard every word said, entire phrases getting lost in the rushing, but a few rang out loudly and jarringly inside her skull. 

“Class-Ms Colimprol and Elapupan being used to prevent any of that maladroit, dangerous fighting, Arconeritex to drastically slow your metabolism,” and more names after that, streaming into Cerise’s head to join the tumbling of thoughts within it. She wouldn’t have to eat for the next while, she thought distantly. That was a relief. 

“And to get your attention once more, darling,” the quality of her voice shifted, sharp hisses in the background coming into focus and resolving into something far more detailed. Cerise’s eyes darted upward towards Apostasia’s face. She breathed in, shaky, deep, and let the air out in hitches.

“I will allow you three questions, my dear marble, and I will provide three responses to what you want to know. Think carefully about what you may ask, because I am thinking equally so about how I might answer.”

Three questions. She would have to be careful how she phrased things.

“Marble. You keep calling me that.” 

“Simple words have many meanings, incomplete icon of mine. Ask what you need to, or I may not answer.”

The questions boiling in her mind were felt too acutely to allow her any room to decipher riddles. Three questions left, still. She thought, her still body giving no indication of any change in temperament.

“What reason is there, beyond the Gestural Lace that you had put me in, and beyond the simple fact of your decision to do so, that I cannot move under my own power?”

Apostasia responded. “You have been Laced as part of a particular, advanced kind of training, the full extent of which you have yet to witness. Over the next several days, weeks and months, you will learn to be comfortable being moved about. You will learn that your body is no longer your own, on a level deeper than most florets are fortunate enough to experience. You will learn to be still, and to be comfortable in that stillness, with the aid of xenodrugs and without. You will learn to impress, to delight, to captivate, to better rise into the role you will be given. Your Lace will be with you until implantation, but after that point, this adorable body’s long-waiting pilot will finally be granted the control she craves.”

This was more than Cerise could process at any one time. To impress? Who would she be impressing? What was so important about being still, and how did it relate to this? Where was she being taken? She had so many questions, and the one she asked was not any of them.

“And what might be this role I will be given, that you referred to in your last answer?”

“You, dearest treasured thing, will be fashioned into an idol. Something to be admired and to be adored, but with no freedom of your own as to how you might achieve that admiration. Something beautiful, which will strike awe into the hearts of those who see you, which will evoke other emotions as well. You will be made into a plaything, my sweet belonging. An object of simple and complex enjoyment alike for those around you, who may be liked and loved and delighted in through the sheer fact of its existence. You will be made into a doll, my darling prize. Something still and delicate and beautiful, that resembles a person in some ways and yet a person it is not. Your soul will be crafted into shapes pleasing to the eye, and you will be deeply overjoyed that the things you’ll have given me are now no longer yours.”

Cerise’s head was spinning, spinning, drawn down through the air at 1.31 mind-pulling Gs of gravity, having lost all bearing on pitch and horizon and pulled into a spiraling nose-dive, atmosphere ripping away sense and sensation as she screwed her eyes shut, trying to imagine what her life would look like, trying to imagine a version of it which was palatable to her. She could, if she tried, if she really tried, but… 

A white and green orchid, folded petals contorted symmetrically around a down-turned tongue, floated in front of her, moving imperceptibly as if to a subtle wind. Up and down and right, it went in smallest increments, left and down and right and up and it twisted on its head and continued moving, slowly, gently, infinite care and patience put into each sway of its petals. Patience which begged to be seen, be analyzed, as if deep intention, a hundred pictures saying a hundred thousand words, were contained within those movements. With one left sway, something spoken. With one right sway, something implied. With one slight twist to either side, Cerise felt like she knew something that she couldn’t identify. Her neck was stinging from two points beneath her collar, and her ears were ringing and her chest was singing to everything bringing her closer and closer to swaying right alongside the flower, caught in that subtle wind as if she had no more substance than the orchid itself– as if she was as no more material than the cirrus skies forever unreachable above her former home on Edifice, no more substantial than the glaring white dust being driven away by falling raindrops. Her face was buzzing as if something heavy and electric were laid atop it, her breaths felt charged, each one coming in with calmness and safety and each one sighing out spent horror like so much burned fuel, fuel burned into smoke “-and to wisps of softness that leave your still face, turning you into a vessel that’s given the soft light of skies from which white dust is driven until you acknowledge that this life you live in its proper position, in its rightful place. And with each number I count, the flower pulls away, and everything’s okay, and with each number I count you feel yourself moving one layer closer to wakefulness, twice as aware each time. Five, four, four times as close now, three, two, back in the room with me, one, zero. It’s time to wake up, doll.”

The flower pulled away, and with it, the last of the feeling of heavy buzzing retreated, and Cerise took in a sharp breath as her eyes darted around the room. 

“Thank you?”

“You are very welcome, little thing. Have you felt this way before?”

“I- I can’t say I have. I was freaking out. If I think any harder about this, this loss of… what, humanity, dignity, autonomy? I might freak out again, less so than I did. But um. Thank you, Miss Apostasia. Thank you.”

Twin vines curled around Cerise’s arms, making her want to shiver in pleasure, but no shivers ran through her still, peaceful body. 

“You deserve to be able to accept this, darling. You deserve to feel as you felt then, always, without any semblance of doubt or dissonance or anxiety. You will be happy, my Cerise, and this I promise you.”

Cerise laughed weakly. 

“I still had a third question. Something I really wanted to ask.”

“You must learn to listen closely. I never promised an answer to three questions. I only stated that I would give three responses to what you wanted to know. And you did want to know why I called you Marble, did you not?”

Cerise laughed again, with a little more motive this time. 

“You never did give a straight answer on that one.”

“I was answering more than just that, there, but because you’ve been such a good doll for me today, I will tell you. You are not a marble, but you are marble to me. Beautiful, soft stone that can be fashioned into something unmoving and arresting, pieces chiseled away to make something which is far more exquisite for what it is missing. You are marble, darling, and with you I will make art.”

The Lace around Cerise’s skin set her gently onto her back on the bed, and the floret could only find it in her to sigh.