For the most part Jenny had been expecting the hard domestic work for her indenture. Labour like cleaning, laundry, and dusting were all seemingly normal things.

She hadn't expected playing video games to be anywhere on that list.

It was as she'd been running over an entire hallway carpet with lint rollers and a carpet scraper that she'd heard the step of boots and the crunching of chips, as one of the slaves, Felicity, wandered into view.

Initially looking a little confused, Felicity had stood watching her work for a few minutes, munching on her snack as she did until Jenny couldn't stand it any more.

'Can I help you?' she asked irritably.

Felicity shrugged, swallowed, and offered the open bag to Jenny, shaking it for emphasis.

'You want some?'

Not knowing what to say, Jenny slowly nodded and stood up, 'Uh, sure. Thanks.'

'No prob. But hey,' she continued as Jenny took a few chips from the bag, 'You're that indentured girl that has to do anything we say, right?'

Jenny had initially dreaded what Felicity was going to suggest, but she had been proven delightfully wrong.

Felicity, having visited at a point where both Mistress was away on business and her Majesty had confined herself to solitude, had been wandering the mansion without much to do. So, in feeling a little bored, she'd decided to conscript Jenny into helping her beat a few levels of a platformer she was having difficulty with, some game where you played as some kind of constantly exploding science experiment gone wrong.

Jenny hadn't often cleaned Felicity's room when she served as a maid, though she remembered the smell. The latex in the room covered the scent of just about everything else, cloying her in it almost as if she herself was covered in it. The thought made her shudder a little with delight. She hadn't properly done anything deviant or kinky since she had left the mansion. Even now that she was back here she felt as if succumbing to that temptation might mean losing more of herself than she would have wanted.

As the pair passed time with the platformer, Felicity tried to make conversation.

'So you knew Precious, huh? Or Nicole I guess.'

'Yeah I,' Jenny answered, trying to find the right words to say, 'Worked with her.'

'Sounds like you two were close from the way she tells it.'

'I don't…' Jenny began to say though her words got stuck in her throat, 'I guess. I just never thought about it like that.'

'Yeah?'

'I dunno. Getting close to people is just … hard. They always leave. Like,' an empty sigh escaped Jenny’s lungs, 'They get sick, or they just get sick of you, or you fu- I mean, screw up bad enough that they never want to see your face again. Or sometimes they just,' she had to swallow, 'Disappear. ‘Cuz they know you’re not good enough for them.'

Felicity put a commiserating hand on Jenny's shoulder, 'Fuck, that's rough.'

'Yeah,' Jenny agreed bitterly, 'I guess I couldn't help but fall into that. Leaving first just felt better than getting left behind. Besides, this whole place creeped me out. Plus that kill phrase they have is terrifying.'

'Oh, the memory thing?' Felicity asked, 'Yeah, when they explained that to us it was confronting. But I understand why they did it. I've been here since basically the beginning of this whole thing, so I've seen a lot of shit go wrong. Mistakes got made, some slaves turned out to be dangerous, or blood got so bad that nothing could be done,' Felicity shrugged, 'Don't get me wrong, I don't condone it, but since Mistress and her Majesty figured out some of their shit they've since removed it from every one of their former slaves, and us, and restored their memories as best they could. I know I'm a drone, but even for me it's pretty much impossible to "delete" memories, y'know?'

Jenny shook her head in disbelief, 'How do you know that they actually did remove it, though? How can you trust them after all that?'

Felicity paused, giving Jenny's words the thoughtful contemplation they deserved. Eventually she said, 'Because they told me without being forced to, I guess. Besides, you've gotta trust somebody in this world. Who does that leave you with otherwise?'

Jenny sat quietly for a moment, letting Felicity's words sink in before noticing her deranged little character had fallen into yet another infinite death pit.

'Ah, shitfuck,' she reflexively said, 'I di- Ow!'

Jenny dropped her controller and angrily tried to tear at the collar of the jumpsuit which had just zapped her, the reinforced material entirely unyielding to her bare fingers.

'That looks like fun,' Felicity chuckled, 'I wonder if I could ask Mistress for one of those.'

Jenny grunted, 'You're welcome to have this one if you want.'

Felicity laughed, and Jenny couldn't help but give a chuckle of her own.

There was a curt knock at the door before it swung open a moment later.

Her Majesty was standing there, dressed in a flowing and expensive sundress. Her expression, once serene, soured upon seeing Jenny.

Felicity stood up to greet her owner, and Jenny somewhat reluctantly did the same.

'Jenny,' her Majesty eventually stated.

'Your Highness,' Jenny greeted her, tension in her own voice.

There was another small silence before her Majesty drew breath and spoke again, 'I think you and I should have some tea. Attend me, won't you?'

'Yes your Majesty.'

As Jenny followed her out of the room, she cast one final look to Felicity, who offered a small but encouraging thumbs-up.

Jenny sat opposite Diana at a patio table outside of the greenhouse, the late afternoon sun as warm and fragrant as the tea they drank.

Her Majesty drank her tea from extremely fine china, likely imported from somewhere extravagant and European, decorated with delicately inked roses on the nearly transparent ceramic.

Jasmine, meanwhile, was required to drink her tea from a coffee mug with “World’s Okayest Boss” printed on the front.

‘A white elephant gift Jasmine received from an office Christmas party,’ her Majesty explained, ‘She may not look like it, but she really appreciates silly little things like that.’

Knowing it belonged to her Mistress made it feel about as delicate to drink from as the paper-thin crockery Diana held in her dainty fingers, however. Breaking this would likely get her into a truly unimaginable amount of shit.

There was a painful silence between the two. The sounds of the estate hummed in the background. Trees swayed in the wind, a few sparrows and grass parrots picked and plucked at the lawns and frolicked in the garden beds.

Jenny took a sip of her tea.

It was delicious.

‘I want to know why you came back,’ Diana said suddenly, apparently having worked up some of her resolve, ‘But I also wanted to know why you did what you did. Why you made that file.’

Jenny’s tongue felt like a stone in her mouth. What was there to say?

‘I don’t know,’ she decided, ‘Maybe I wanted to suffer. For what I did. Maybe I wanted to just … stop running. Maybe I wanted to feel like the things I did actually meant something. Even if they were bad things.'

'I think I wanted security, a weapon. I didn’t think I’d actually use that file I'd had commissioned, I just wanted it. Needed it. Sure, that file was something I had some stupid fantasies about. Like I'd sneak into the mansion and play it over the PA system to break everyone’s mind control. I spent way longer than I want to even think about editing it, trying to make it sound exactly right. Exactly ... Exactly like you. Just so I knew it would work. But that wasn’t anything that I thought could really happen, even if all the work I just put into it was for my own sake. And that didn't happen.’

Diana didn’t respond. Jenny continued.

‘I know I hurt Nicole. And you. But I think I was afraid. Of you and Mistress, mostly,’ she breathed, ‘You treated people like objects. I mean, they’re slaves. Your property. That’s kinda the whole deal, they belong to you, I get that. But just the way you would just throw them away? That hurt to see. And I think I understand why I felt that way now.’

Diana put her teacup down, her expression a porcelain mask. She leaned back into her chair and stared at the birds digging and pecking in the grass, ‘When Jasmine and I received Rachel’s application to be our plaything, it was pretty much decided then and there what we’d do with her,’ she began, ‘She’d left home very young, had a lot of legal trouble following her, had fallen into drugs and debt and was looking for any kind of escape. Since she’d been bouncing from shelter to shelter, changing hands and running away so many times, we thought we’d try to give her some form of “forever home,” as it were.’

Dianna shook her head.

‘We managed to help her through rehab, but I was overeager. Her conditioning didn’t take right, and she needed far more "encouragement" than was necessary to cooperate. Play along, you might call it. It was hurting her. This wasn’t bratting, like Lisa. It was … she knew what she was doing, that pain she wanted wasn't sensual, but harmful,’ her hands fidgeted with her dress in her lap, ‘So we had to remove it. All of it. Admittedly, the trigger I used, “c’est fini,” I thought for the most part it was a kindness. Taking the bad memories necessitated taking the good memories away. Or at least, plastering over them. But really I was playing into my own paranoia.'

Jenny interrupted, 'Mistress said that trigger to me in Rome.'

'She did?' Diana asked.

'Yeah. But it didn't work. I think. I don't know why.'

Diana snorted a small laugh, 'We only gave that trigger to our playthings. Could you imagine how much of a hassle it would be to personally hypnotise every single servant in the manor?'

Jenny felt pretty silly hearing that. Of course they didn't just go around hypnotising everyone. What the hell was she thinking? And why did she feel so ... let down by it?

'But yes, there was a reason for creating the memory trigger beyond protecting our own reputation,' Diana continued, 'Not that it didn't have any part in it. I was so scared not just that people would come for us, that we’d be exposed and publicly humiliated for the life that we live – such a thing would ruin Jasmine’s entire career – but I was terrified of my … well, my parents.’

Jenny had to try and replay Diana’s whole sentence over again in her head. Her parents?

‘But you’re royalty, right? Aren’t your parents like, King and Queen of … Somewhere? Wouldn’t they know where you are already?’ Jenny asked, totally baffled, 'You like … you wear tiaras and crowns! Aren't you from some European micronation or something?'

Diana gave a melancholy smile, ‘I’m about to tell you something. You’re going to keep it secret. I’m telling you this because I want to trust you as a person. I’m not even going to hypnotise you. I would hope I don’t need to.’

Jenny’s jaw dropped. Why the fuck were these words coming out of this woman? What the hell was going on?

Diana leaned in, her words dropping to a whisper, ‘I grew up in Maine. I ran away from my parents because I got sick of their crap after I came out as trans. I worked as a domme in New York before I met Jasmine. And we got carried away. A fantasy taken to its extreme that Jasmine was only too happy to enable. We set up this whole mansion so I could still feel like the Queen I wanted to be, but also to try and shed some of the guilt I felt. About doing all of this just for our own desires,’ she leaned back, sighing as the sparrows and parrots suddenly took flight from the lawn, ‘I had hoped we were helping people, but even though I know we have, we also made horrible mistakes that should not be easily forgiven. I can’t lie to myself or hide that from others any more. But if a plate gets broken, there’s nothing to do but get a broom and sweep it up.’

To emphasise the point, Diana drained her teacup and daintily dropped it onto the hard terracotta, shattering it instantly.

‘Oops,’ she shrugged, ‘Jenny, please go get one of the maids to clean this up. You’re dismissed afterwards.’

‘I…’ Jenny’s words faltered, her mind utterly failing her. Diana was trans? She grew up in Maine? ‘Y-yes your Majesty.’

Jenny stood up and wandered away from the table, feeling like she’d just been punched from the inside of her brain. Diana looked up to the setting sun, a weight gone from her shoulders. She just hoped she’d made the right choice.