For the heroic type in a mind controller-rich environment like Mercí City, it’s important to take precautions. Every pamphlet, mentor, and introductory blog post dedicates a paragraph to good psychic defense and cognitive security. Jokes about how the worst place to commit a crime is a mind shielding¹ class are completely anodyne at this point. A viral post² on telepath-frustrating thought patterns is still going strong from last week. You can still get a laugh from “horse titty biscuit is a valid telepath-frustrating thought pattern”. Costume designers suggest headgear designed to accomodate a layer of tinfoil³. Your more enfranchised heroes get calls from sales staff asking if they want to “take it to the next level”. Typically, this takes the form of a CBB (“checkpointed brain backup”) product. They claim to let you “roll back” to before, for example, you wound up a cute little brainwashed dolldermaid, usually by trusting a friend or two with the reset button. The cheaper plans won’t help until you wind up in a service center so they can shove you in the “completely indestructible” rollback pods, but the really expensive “call for a quote” enterprise plans include multiple access levels, shell personalities, memory quarantining with offsite review, DRCNM⁴, automatic/remote sensory suppression⁵, and the crown jewel: customized quantum mesh ideoforms that don’t trip metal detectors, blend in with your own thoughts to evade psychic detection, and allow remote administration “anywhere in this or several popular parallel universes”.

So, really, it’d be a shame if someone’s sinister sinister claws got in there.

Brilliant Badger sinks into her favorite chair. A friend asked if she wanted “this old armchair” when she first moved to Mercí City and, as this sort of thing goes, it became her only furniture for the first two weeks. She slept in it until the mattress store finally delivered. So, naturally, it’s the first thing she brought to the Sett’s lounge. Better than nothing when you just can’t work up the energy to head home.

“Fuuuuck. Hard day.” She peels her mask off and throws it over the couch. “How’s things back here?”

“Oh, pretty good. Got some groceries, picked up some packages, made some phone calls.” The Kosmic Kobold cups her starry-sky balls with one claw and strokes her shaft with the other. “Glad you get to rest, at least.”

“Jeez, K. Mind doing that somewhere else? We eat in here.”

“Awww, don’t you wanna watch? You can help if you want.”

“Is something wrong? Are you trying to tell me something? Look, I’m asking as a friend, I don’t want to have to pull rank on my sidekick—” She does catch herself staring. Obviously, she knows how big it is. Their friendship started way before their crimefighting careers. They’ve suited up together, they’ve showered off together, they’ve joked about “how does a three foot kobold have a twelve inch dick?”⁶, they had to find a place that’d tailor a set of hammerspace tights to get her bulge to a reasonable size. It’s a known quantity. But this is the first time she’s really looked at it. The tasteful starry speckles. The patches that reflect like gemstones. The freckles forming a swirling milky way from tip to balls.

Brilliant Badger swallows. She blushes a spotlight. Worst possible time to be a photonic amplifier. It looks so good. Something is wrong but it looks so good. Fuck, Kosmic is so cute with that little smile on her snout. She’s been so busy. She can’t even remember the last time she got… really any kind of relief. Of course she’s pent up. Of course her cock strains against her sweaty tights and flashes orange. Of course her claw starts stroking.

“Like what you see? Maybe I’ll let you touch yourself when I’m done.”

Of course she noticed. The claw jerking itself away is… unexpected. A few very urgent dots connect in Brilliant Badger’s head while her body succumbs to the pull of kobold cock.

Her snout rolls open and her tongue rolls out. Slow, shaky breaths while a Kosmic claw guides her mouth into place. BB’s last few free thoughts shoot through well-practiced pathways. One extremely specific high-frequency pulse. Let the training take over.

Ten seconds⁷ later, Kosmic and Brilliant start recreating the famous Brilliant Boobjob from the porn parody of their first big bust^8,9. Three long beeps ring from Badger’s subdermal implant and one of Kobold’s horn piercings. Twin synthesized voices speak in unison.

EMERGENCY ROLLBACK. Three. Two. O-

A click. A different voice chimes in. Synthetic, but clearly an artistic choice instead of a technical limitation.

“Cut!”

They freeze. Brilliant’s tongue smeared just all over whatever it can find. Kosmic in the middle of a full-body shudder. Three maids and their supervillain stroll onto the set. Modemoiselle, in her director’s beret and jodphurs, strides right over to her heroes. She coils a lock of the badger’s hair around her claw while she thinks and throws some ideas to her scriptermaid. A murdermaid retrieves the mask from the cardboard box couch while another resets Brilliant’s favorite folding chair.

A single claw on the forehead levers Badger’s body backwards. Tongue still out and eyes still rolled back, of course. The chair straightener deftly switches jobs to badger holder. Modemoiselle scoops up the kobold– supporting the butt like a cat, of course– and sits her up on the styrofoam “end table” by the “couch”. Hooking the tail around the edge offsets her big ol’ koboner just enough to keep everything upright. “Can we get a shade for the lamp, please?”

“…Maybe two.”

It takes some doing and coordination with the control room to actually get something workable. After some back and forth and a lot of trial and error, the throbbing kobold cock gets a kiss from a curious maid and a light pink number borrowed from the rumpus room while the empty little head gets a snout smooch from Mod herself and an inverted werewolf-sized Elizabethan collar.

The scriptermaid pages through her notes while Mod gets into costume. “Costume” in this case means a headband with a vague mockery of the Kosmic Kobold’s horns instead of the beret. Fae settles into the only comfortable chair on set, pulls her pants down, relieves the badger holder of her duties, positions that brilliant snout just so, and claps.

“Action!”

Brilliant Badger’s eyelids flutter. Dim awareness creeps in. She takes a few quick licks– does Kosmic’s cock taste different? She opens wide, presses her tongue against the tip, and prepares to test for a mouthfeel change¹⁰. She looks up, of course. It’s only polite to make a little eye contact. There’s a quick double-take when Kosmic smiles back down and runs a claw through her hair. She’s so close to putting something together when something vibrates under her skin. Her thoughts shift like sand beneath her feet. The firmer her grasp, the more it slips away. Noticing the forgetting means forgetting the thing you’re trying to remember. Her implants helpfully route her focus around, breaking her concentration on any potential hypnotic foci, and seamlessly smear her perception of reality back to normal. Really, what’s more normal than sucking kobold dick?

The lamp’s a lamp.

“Aww, who’s a cute little hero with terrible taste in cogsec firms?” Skunk claws curl around locks of badger hair to guide the head just so. Blowjob Badger’s eyes flicker with recognition before her implant clouds them right back up. “It’s not your fault– this sort of thing is super hard to get right and the reward for success is obvious. Any tiny flaw could let a virus right in. Especially one with, say, a team of dedicated hackermaids who know exactly where a little living information can do a lot of damage.” Mod blows a quick kiss to the camera for the maids enjoying the rewards of a job well done. “Honestly, it’s impressive. I couldn’t take ten percent of the city’s heroes out of action, but they did it with one update. Maybe I’m in the wrong business– I hear they’ll need new executives soon¹¹.”

One of those dedicated hackermaids rushes in and whispers into Modemoiselle’s ear. “Oooh, bad news, dear. Turns out it was the kind of obvious flaw they could have caught if they hadn’t laid a bunch of engineers off and actually bothered to test their work. Just half a dozen things they could have done to catch or mitigate this. If they’d done the easiest right thing and deployed updates in stages, you might have been fine.” The maid with the update gets a kiss on the cheek before hustling back to the control room. “At least you’d be in a more exclusive club. Maybe you could get T-shirts made. ‘I got my brain hacked by a hot virus exploiting an irresponsibly untested subconscious implant, but at least I got to suck some dick.’”

Modemoiselle throws her head back for a well-earned cackle at faer own joke. It’s enough to make Badger sit up and think until a scratch under the snout and a “Is something wrong, dear? You’ve barely deep-throated your kobold penis.” pull her back in.

Mod stage whispers to faer scriptermaid. The words bead up and roll off Brilliant Boner’s brain. “What’s next?”

“Well, let’s see.” She cups her non-clipboard paw around her mouth and “whispers” right back. “236 has some great slow-burn enemies-to-lovers-to-kinky-roleplay-mishap-to-latex-skunk-drone fanfic.”

“Once we have a proper set. Gotta let the story breathe.” Badger takes a deep breath and goes right back to normal.

“We have princessification (twinning style)¹², princessification (gay knight style), a few coffee shop AUs, a bunch of outfit suggestions, and, of course—” She unclips one of those big yellow legal pad sheets, filled front and back with tight handwriting. “—the Twin Spiral.”

“Well, obviously, we’re doing the one with the cool name next.” Mod’s claw pulls Brainfucked Badger off faer dick and looks into those happy, empty eyes. “Mask up, dear. Showtime.”

Brilliant Badger sinks into her favorite chair. “Fuuuuck. Hard day. How’s things back here?”

“Oh, pretty good. Got some groceries, picked up some packages, made some phone calls.” The Kobold Formerly Known As Lamp barely notices the stagehand maid recovering both shades. “Glad you get to rest, at least.”

“Good to knock out some errands. Did you get your horns done? Pink looks good on-“ Brilliant blinks. The thoughts bump together.

“Aww, thank you! It comes free with the Gracing.”

Badger, to her credit, does exactly what you’re supposed to do in this situation. Roll back first and figure it out later.

EMERGENCY ROLLBACK. Three. Two.

Click. “Cut!”

Blissful Badger sinks into her favorite skunk tail. Kosmic figures it out first this time.

Brilliant Badger sinks into her favorite chair and watches Kleanup Kobold dust the Sett. Something about the way her tail lifts the skirt just lights up the room. “Fuuuuck. Hard day. How’s things back here?”

“Oh, you know. A maid’s work is never done.”

“I suppose you’d know.”

“You should try it sometime. You might like it.” Kleanup finds a place to dust just left of her beloved badger’s head.

“I’d give it a shot, but who has the time?”

“Well, we can always make time. How hard can it be? You made me a maid!”

Badger blinks.

She has to convince herself to start the rollback.

Mod and the Scriptermaid share a smile in the wings.

Brilliant Badger sinks into her favorite chair. “Fuuuuck. Hard day.” She decides not to mention the murdermaids handing out pamphlets at the train station. “How’s things back here?”

“Oh, pretty good. Got some groceries, picked up some packages, made some phone calls, got some cleaning done.” The Kosmic Kobold’s bulge is as contained as it ever is, so it’s still about the size of her fist. “Glad you get to rest, at least.”

“Yeah. Makes you wonder if it’s worth the burnout and the stress and the terrible hours.”

“They don’t tell you that when you sign up. You don’t even get holidays off half the time.”

“We either gotta get the Woimsong Wiggler next year or stop making plans.”

“You know, I hear the murdermaids get eight weeks off a year.”

The sound of maids high-fiving and cheering in the control room doesn’t even register.