one mistake's all it takes and your life has come undone

((RP MODE))

Now that's it's a proven fact that the demon's daughter has an alternate...wandering around with ill intent...I've been slightly more open about talking about her plans.

But...something came up today. Something shattering. It's ill news, indeed.

Something the demon's daughter said, to me...she mentioned she'd found writings of her future self...and questioned the meaning of a certain phrase. I began telling her that that phrase was first heard in the 1920's, and that's why she'd used it, because she was, at least partially, and in one timeline, from the 1920's...

...and the penny dropped.

While this daughter was afflicted with a machine virus, and in quarantine in Toxia, she was still involved with the Winter Court in Lumindor. For the opening of the kingdom's gates, many residents, free and enslaved, were put up in auction to support the expense of the opening day celebrations. At that point, I was undercover in the human village, playing a human slave in the House of Doves, so when I went up on the block, I was branded and collared, in flowing rose silks.

This much I remember--the daughter I thought of as the steam android I knew, standing next to a fellow spy in the House of Doves. Her father and I, at that point, were having problems, and I spoke with her privately, asking that she not share my appearance at the auction with her father. I was sold, and the evening went as it went, and I had a few additional chances to speak private words to this new incarnation.

Earlier, I had sent a missive to the demon, changing my tone entirely, my way of pleading for our survival, and I was feeling fairly confident that the new tactic might just save us. To this day I do not know what this new incarnate daughter told her father. All I saw was the fallout.

The demon was enraged. The demon was hurt. This was the woman he loved, this slave on her knees? This is what I wanted, to be some Gorean warlord's toy? This would not be borne. This would not endure. We could not continue, he told me, loudly and at length...

...save, I'd never said that. I'd never done that. In fact, I'd told the demon that I had this opportunity in the kingdom, and what, and he hadn't seemed to mind then...

I can only surmise, the new incarnate daughter said whatever she had to, to sever her father and I. The poison started that far back...

...and we were both taken in.



Is there any wonder I've been spending more time in the wilds in Lumindor, than in Steelhead of late? Such insidious speech...and here we are, no going back.

It's profoundly unsettling.