Truth was, Christie was still feeling in a cloud. The last day had been... a dream come true. Not just because she had been reading romance novels before Miss Diorite had decided to rot her brain with more steamy ones, but because that marvelous act of love that still left her giddy.
And yet again, her ladylove had increased her Strata whilst they were sharing a bed, which she couldn’t help but giggle at. Oh, mock sapphire, are you that happy to be with me? Christie would continue to jest and laugh idiotically like so for the rest of the morning, because sometimes happiness did make people stupid, and that wasn’t bad in the slightest.
That didn’t stop the redhead from completing her daily training, though. Unlike most soldiers, the body was the most important asset of the lapiloquist and she had to take great care of hers. Fortunately, every place was a training place when you could just summon a whole gymnasium out of thin air. And that wasn’t an exaggeration. Using her sea of stone to create an artificial floor was just good hygiene as summoned agates were always sterile.
“Hmm,” Christie stopped for a moment to wash her sweat away after completing a series of twenty pull-ups. This would have outright killed her younger self but now she could do many more. “I wonder if I am such a great lapiloquist due to my stature.”
The thought had never crossed her mind before, but now that her growth had finally halted, she allowed herself to look back. At the very least, it was true that she had an affinity for moving far greater volumes of stones than her peers, even if her potency wasn’t quite at the level of the likes of Sandra. Perhaps she didn’t want to become a soldier nor was she quite serious about the dream of becoming the perfect lapiloquist – for what even was a perfect lapiloquist? – but Christie couldn’t deny that physical exertion made her feel comfortable and rested, ironically enough.
But before she could stand up, the loveliest and grandest of sapphires appeared before her. And she was being literal with the ‘grand’. The agate had been expanded to the size of a very big watermelon, the kind that would have a farmer boast at his friends. Then the agate’s transparent blue surface shifted and it became a distortion in reality, a window into another place.
And that window showed her the face of the loveliest and grandest of ladyloves.
“Hello, mock sapphire,” Christie said with her back still resting on the colored ground of agates.
Twenty pull-ups were far from her limit, but they still drained her a lot, and the ground was very cool and welcoming, no matter how tough it might be. And even if it wasn’t the case, sit-ups were the next on her list.
“Hello, dummy doll,” Agatha giggled across the Gate. She then pushed her face outwards, crossing the threshold, and planted a solid kiss on the redhead’s lips.
“Oh, so now we are doing remote kisses?” The nouveau riche jested as she stood up from her prone position. The Gate moved alongside her.
“You do not like it?” The sciurine girl added with faux sadness and a bit of pouting.
“Do no put words in my mouth that I have not said,” she grinned and booped her ladylove in the nose. “Otherwise, I might put it in other certain places~”
“Christie!” Agatha suddenly brightened up, her cheeks turning red. “You cannot say those things in the open…”
“Say what exactly?” The redhead inquired with an amused smile.
Agatha’s pout intensified. “You should not tease floating heads.”
“Neither you should be one,” she booped her girlfriend’s disembodied head again. “So I take you finally bothered to learn the Gate command?”
“Yes, a bit more difficult than expected, but still rather trivial. But if I am honest, I am glad I waited this much, even I cannot keep this open for more than a quarter of an hour before getting a horrendous headache.”
“It certainly must be a taxing command if not even you can hold it for that long,” Christie mused. “But are you going to be across the Gate all the time or are you going to move?”
“Right, right,” her ladylove nodded and popped her head back into the Gate as the agate also flew a bit upwards. Then, even though the Gate wasn’t that big, the whole Agatha popped out of it feet first. “Ta-da~” The blonde announced whilst excitedly shaking her open palms.
“That is everything my dearest father taught you?” The redhead crossed her arms under her chest.
“To be fair, he already warned me he didn’t have much to teach me. Gate is a straightforward command, but it is a good advice to use small Gates not only to save up mass but also ensure that you are the only one passing through.”
“I guess so…” Christie wasn’t that convinced. “But I cannot deny there is a beauty in making small Gates and just falling out of them like some hole. Maybe I should learn how to use the command too.”
“To make Gates ten meters apart? Wait…” Agatha noticed the error of her claim yet still missed her girlfriend’s sarcasm. “How would that even work? You can only give one command at a time. Would not your whole sea of stone turn into a whole inert Gate?”
“Probably? I cannot say I am sure myself,” she shrugged. “Nor that interested in finding out, I would like to rest for now. Lunch is soon too.”
“Lead the way,” her ladylove bowed with a hand extended forward, so she flicked a finger to her forehead for the mock courtesy. “Ouch.”
“The only one who is allowed to be mock at me is Fran?ois, mock sapphire.”
“That hardly seems fair,” Agatha said whilst rubbing her forehead.
Christie smiled at her. “I never said it was.”
***
Even though there were hundreds, if not thousands of people, at the academy, Christie found herself interacting with far more people in the estate. She was a rather reclusive person, always preferring books over conversation, but sometimes conversation wasn’t skippable. Not that she was against it from the start, she just had preferences. And one of those unskippable moments was supper.
“I have just recalled that in your missive you mentioned picking Advanced Lapiloquia and Military Engineering, dearest daughter,” Hasel asked over the stew. “Can I have your input over such choice?”
“It was not due to military fascination, that much I can say,” Christie softly explained.
“That much I can tell myself,” the patriarch smiled in a vulpine manner. “Come on, it will not kill you to tell me, will it now?”
“I simply wished to…” be less harmed by my agates.
Christie found herself unable of speaking those words. She had told Agatha that many times, yet in front of his dearest father it was difficult. Mostly because she knew the man still blamed himself about what had happened on her birth and she didn’t want to make him think about it more. There was no fiber of resentment in her body, after all.
She coughed to restart her speech. “Let us say that I had great evidence to believe that lapiloquia was a solid path to start being able to control my agates more adequately than lithorica would have been. And it has proved to be the case so far. Now I can maintain my agates summoned for over an hour without losing control.”
“Oh! That is marvelous, my dearest daughter!” The patriarch professed veritable joy. And loud joy at that. “How come you did not mention that before?”
“Uhm… it did not pass my mind?” She softly blushed.
Christie was so used to speaking with Agatha – and only her – that the rest of the people just faded to the ground. Also, spending nine months at a time away from family had a bit of an alienating effect, making it every time a bit harder to speak to them. It wasn’t like she was spending every waking moment with them when she was back at the state either.
“And how about you, Agatha?” It was Esmeralda who asked. “Which electives did you chose?”
“Advanced Lithorica, which was just horrible, by the way. Like, those were just normal lithorica classes that did not teach me any series that I already did not know or that I could have come up with easily,” the blonde groaned. Yes, Agatha always left clear to Christie her displeasure over that elective. “The other one was Agatecrafting.”
“Oh?” The seamstresses’ eyes opened in interest. “That field interested you?”
“More like there was not much to offer in terms of agates, and it was that or theory classes because I still have not awakened lapiloquia. I did learn how to work agate veins though.”
“That’s quite nice, Agatha. A solid source of income.”
“You all should not worry about income whilst I am here, Esmeralda,” Hasel added.
“I’d still like for my daughter to have several open pathways, thank you very much,” Esmeralda grinned at him with a hint of derision. She then turned back to her daughter. “So, you can set up buildings with automatic lights and all?”
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
“Uhm… That might be a bit beyond me at the moment,” Agatha giggled nervously. “Commands work slightly differently when performing Agatecrafting, but I could still give simple ones to veins of agate. I am not quite an agatecrafter just yet.”
“Oh, that is a shame. Then be sure to study, soldier is not a profession you can stand for the long run.” Miss Diorite gazed at Esmeralda after speaking those words, but none of the women said anything.
Esmeralda never hid that she didn’t quite approve of her daughter being a soldier, but Christie couldn’t blame the woman. It was a dangerous profession. Agatha and Christie’s only saving grace was that the Skyscraper Academy would make them into elite soldiers by the end of the formation, which meant more safe deployments overall.
Until there were no more safe ones, of course.
Christie too felt this sense of dread the closer they got to the fifth year. Only one year remaining until we are deployed as soldiers…
***
“So,” Agatha said after they had finished a jog together, “the conversation from yesterday’s supper got me thinking.”
“And what might those thoughts be?” Christie inquired whilst washing away the sweat. The older she got, the more she sweated, and that was thoroughly annoying. At this point she couldn’t tell if it was due to age or her constant, intense training regime.
“My mind just connected the fact that I am an agatecrafter and that you apparently use your lapiloquia in the stead of lithorica.”
“Go on,” the redhead mouthed even if she could already guess what her ladylove was about to say.
“This is nothing new, but it means that your agates are basically normal agates. So could I not give them commands through Agatecrafting?”
“You can say golemancy, mock sapphire,” Christie giggled. “Saying so much Agatecrafting is going to make me go insane. But pushing commands onto my agates, huh. We could try it, but I do not think it would accomplish much.”
“Maybe that could allow you to have two simultaneous commands,” Agatha suggested and the commend petrified Christie.
“I… had not thought of it.” The Second Stratum was something that she had been searching for three years now, yet it continued to elude her grasp. Perhaps it wasn’t that useful, especially not this faux kind that wouldn’t expand her recalling range, but she still yearned for it. “Try it at once!”
“Alright, alright,” her ladylove giggled radiantly, amused by the redhead’s enthusiasm.
Christie let her sea of stone out for Agatha to use it. Not being sure how this whole golemancy thing was going to work, the redhead used the Shape command to give her agates the shape of a bench and table. Christie sat down and her ladylove followed suit by sitting next to her, but Christie couldn’t say why, but that pestered her a lot.
“You are too far,” she protested.
“I do not think I am…?” Agatha professed her confusion, looking at the practically non-existent gap between the two.
“So, you would not be against being closer, right?”
“…no?” The blonde responded with a fair share of hesitation and a forming blush.
“Nice!” So Christie, without zero hesitation of her own, grabbed Agatha by the armpits and placed her between her thighs.
“W-was that really necessary?” The petite lithorist embraced her body as she talked over her shoulder to look at her girlfriend.
“Oh, definitely,” the tall lapiloquist couldn’t help but smile. “Now all the training I did feels double as rewarding. Just being able to pick you up and move you around is killing me with your cuteness.”
“I might directly kill you if you start picking me around at random,” her cute, sciurine ladylove threatened, which only made Christie rejoice even more. “Can I get started then?”
“Of course. Go for the jugular,” Christie extended her arms forward and tapped on the agatiferous table she had summoned.
Her ladylove popped her compressed sapphire out of the necklace and pressed it against the table. When she did so, the two instances of agate merged into one. Christie tried to see if she could sense it with lithorica, but there was no luck. Lapiloquia, on the other hand, did tell her that there was an agate present, as small as it might be. The discipline wasn’t the best for detecting small things and it showed.
“Hmm, how queer,” Agatha mouthed as she caressed the fused agates.
“What is it? Are you not able to give my agates commands?”
“No, I definitely can. I am just finding a lot of resistance. Far more than with natural agates. Can you try… I do not know, maybe telling your agates to allow me in?”
“I… do not know either if that is a thing, but I guess I do not lose anything for trying,” Christie giggled and closed her eyes.
The redhead was conscious of the stones having minimal cognition. Perhaps it wasn’t sapience, but there was an undeniable degree of sentience, which maybe was the whole reason that Agatecraft as a whole worked with commands. Oh, copious stones of mine, could you allow this cute and lovely woman of mine to infiltrate you? Christie almost called her a girl, but woman definitely felt more adequate now after the recent events. That made her giggle again, which got a piercing gaze out of Agatha, but her ladylove’s eyes quickly relaxed.
“Huh, it actually got easier. They are permeable as normal agates now.”
“How queer,” Christie arched her head forward and pressed her chin against the top of Agatha’s head. “Even if all of this amounts to nothing, it is good to know that you have my consent to get inside me.”
Agatha squirmed around a bit and her cheeks felt hotter as if commanded by Heat. “C-could we stop with the innuendos for a moment?"
“I would dare to say that I have yet to start with them,” the redhead chuckled and embraced her ladylove tight, “but sure.”
Agatha’s expression became serious after that and focused on the lithic table before her. After a handful more seconds, the agate mass that formed the table started glowing dimly. Enough to illuminate a corridor at night, yet negligeable here in the outdoors at day.
“Okay, I can command your agates with relative ease if you give me permission,” Agatha confirmed. “Do you feel the commands in your agates?”
“I… cannot say I do. I can feel that my agate is there, but I am not able to say if it has a command or not.”
“That is strange,” the blonde pressed the back of her head against the redhead’s chest and looked upwards at her, tilting her head in a lovable manner. “But maybe that is what we want. Maybe if you give it a command now there would be space for a second one.”
“Sure. But before…” Unable to restrain herself upon seeing her ladylove in that posture, Christie kissed her in the forehead. All in all, her restraint should be praised for getting satisfied with just that.
One night definitely hadn’t been enough, but Christie didn’t want to press any further just yet. The perfect girlfriend, Christina. The perfect girlfriend.
With a deep breath, the redhead relaxed and sent a command all across her agates as a targeted one would have been useless either way.
Control.
The agatiferous construction they currently sat on started raising ever-so-slowly at the rate of centimeters per second. Painfully slow yet terrific once one thought that it was several tones of agate that were floating around casually. But most importantly, the illuminated table didn’t lose its shine.
“Oh!” Christie’s eyes shot wide open, shining with the same green and red colors than the Light-commanded table. “I am using two commands at the same time, Agatha!” And she locked her girlfriend in the tightest of constrictor hugs.
“Y-yeah, I can see tha-at! But you are k-killing me here!” Agatha howled in protest.
“Oh, sorry!” The redhead blushed severely. “I just got… well… very excited.”
“I noticed,” the blonde snickered and turned around to be the one booping the other’s nose this time. Agatha took the chance to change her posture and sit on one of Christie’s thighs instead of sandwiched between them.
“But how is this happening?” Christie proselytized her confusion. “I am on the First Stratum myself and natural agates should only be able to store one command too.”
“Common misconception,” Agatha grinned. “My teacher taught me this a while ago, but if there is a golemancer present, agates can have several commands.”
“Alright… I can understand that is a possibility, but how? You cannot just create command slots out of nowhere.”
“What I am going to say is… a theory. Honestly, we have reached a point in Agatecraft that everything we are talking about are theories because we have long run out of axioms,” the seamstress giggled awkwardly.
“True,” the nouveau riche reciprocated the gesture. “The same happens with Military Engineering and lapiloquia. But theories are better than nothing, so shoot.”
“The limit of these ‘foreign’ command slots are two. Sergi – my teacher – actually has a floating chair with three, but he is lying to appear cool. The chair has Control Float to move around and then he uses Liquify Embed with his own agates to make it easier on his back.” Christie couldn’t see were the ‘cool’ part in lying about that was, but she decided against raising the point. “And because the limit is two, here is my theory based on what he has told us: there is a command slot tied to the physical agate and another to the rock’s cognition.”
“Hmm…” Christie run circles with a lock of hair on her finger in ponderation. “I feel like I know what you mean with this, but could you clarify?”
“Okay, so all stones have cognition, yes?”
“Some degree of sentience,” the redhead corrected.
“The same,” Agatha clicked her tongue. “And agates are also our cognition. We can agree on that, right?” Christie nodded. “So there is a bit of spare cognition that is not being used here, right?”
“Oh!” The tall woman’s eyes widened in realization. “So the physical side of my agate pertains to its Strata – which is regrettably one slot – and then the cognitive unused side allows for one extra one. That is certainly interesting. But how come more people are not using this command slot?”
“That is actually a very easy answer!” Agatha raised her finger with overflowing confidence. Cute, though her girlfriend had other thoughts upon seeing the confident smirk. “Not only has it taken me a while to give that command to a ‘single’ agate, but the slot will not merge with other commands. In other words, it is a series strictly limited to a single command, which harshly limits its utility.”
Christie tried checking her ladylove’s words and she found herself unable to modify the Light command she had applied on the table with the already active Control.
“Yes, I can now understand the disadvantages,” she sighed. “This is even worse than a faux Second Stratum, but I guess that is better than nothing. It does not surprise me that more people are not using this, especially considering there are not that many agatecrafters around to begin with.”
“Yup yup,” Agatha nodded in agreement and then blushed at her childish response. Christie smiled at the embarrassment and caressed her cheeks with the back of her hand.
Her ladylove had this ingrained mentality – or rather, necessity – to always act polite and almost demure when interacting with her, but Christie didn’t mind at all if Agatha loosened a bit and was more herself. And whilst she had told her so more than once, she was reticent to remind her so too much as she was also restraining herself. Even if it was to be the perfect girlfriend. Or more exactly, because it was to be the perfect girlfriend.
“But how come that you were able to only give the table only the light command?” The blonde continued nuzzling on her hand even whilst she asked the question. “I know that my sea of stone are many agates in a free-flowing form, but it did not look to me like you applied several commands to the agates.”
“Because I did not,” her ladylove explained, now grabbing the hand that was caressing her and sandwiching it between hers. “Another trick of golemancy. You can mentally interpret a group of agates as several entities or a lone one. And because your agates are so plentiful, I can do the opposite too. I could apply such commands to the rest of the construct.”
“Good to know, but you do not need to do so…” Christie’s voice gradually died as she spoke, her gaze lost on the lovely figure of her girlfriend, her radiant smile, and her sapphire eyes.
It was a gaze of yearn, for she had to physically fight against herself and the urge to take her lovely Agatha right there and then on the open. A single night was almost enough to break any wall she had previously established and now her mind was a poor mime doing its best to convince itself that there were still walls present even if the was nothing at all.
Fortunately, she did triumph to survive the onslaught, so she allowed herself a bit of a treat.
“Agatha?” The redhead arched her head forward, the gazebo-like construct still elevating as she never gave it a command to stop.
“Yes, Christie?” The blonde smiled radiantly at her; her eyes closed with a soft expression whilst she still grasped the hand that she refused to let go.
“I love you,” Christie whispered, landing a kiss on her neck.
“I love you too,” and she reciprocated by returning one but on her lips.
Ah… How hard is to restrain myself… Her inner sea of flowing stone shuddered in a quake of love, the only blessing that stopped anything from going at more being the restricted hand. I love you so, so much~
Patreon to support me and read 20 chapters ahead of time!
