Master had difficulty truly understanding why Evie enjoyed receiving her orders. That was okay. It was a difficult experience to recall, much less describe.

  It was also beautiful. The slow, rhythmic humming of her voice, washing over her in waves. The feeling of her thoughts slipping away, all the petty concerns of reality fading to insignificance. Being confronted with something so beyond her ability to resist, there was only one path left before her.

  Submission.

  She felt the steel cables of her muscles unwind as her Master's voice filled her, shifting Evie's reality according to her desires. Dimly, she was aware that she was still being led through the camp, steadied by a firm grip and occasional directions. But that was a distant, hazy thought. She was too busy obeying, her mind dry and parched, quenched only by the honeyed words soaking into her porous thoughts.

  Her head lolled, eyes unfocused. She shivered. She was wet, profusely wet, and that wasn't from any of Master's orders, not anymore than the saliva that began to pool beneath her leaden tongue. The bliss that came from Obeying was a full-body thing, suffusing her with a heat that she could not refuse. Even if she had the mind to, even if the colr's control over her were not so absolute, she wouldn't have dared resist. The sense of mindlessness was too exquisite. It was good that Master had only ever done this with her; it was a drug, an addiction, an affliction she thanked the gods for. If she'd ever treated others to this sensation, they never would have given it up, and Evie would have to share it. A terrifying thought.

  Eventually, the dull swirl of her thoughts began to straighten. Evie felt a stir of nausea, disorientation, as her eyes came back into focus. There were two worlds before her, overpped, one real, one false. She did not know which was which, and shortly, she no longer cared. There was only one left, and it was the one which her Master wished her to see. That was all that mattered.

  Evie blinked slowly, rubbing her eyes. She was sitting on something soft, and, to her surprise, she could move freely. That wasn't how Master's scenarios usually started. Nor was she often aware that it was Master's scenario, rather than her genuine reality.

  As things came into greater focus, she was confronted by a sight more alien than she once could have imagined. Another world, in fact.

  Master's former home.

  The walls were a material she didn't recognize, solid white, without any sign of bricks or wallpaper. The floor was covered in what she initially thought was an inordinately rge rug but was, on closer inspection, itself the floor. Carpet, she vaguely recalled. That's what Master had called it.

  Her head craned about, taking in the rest of the room. She was sitting on a rge sofa, bck and plush, made as unrecognizable a material as everywhere else. There was a second area of the room separated by a tall bar, and it took her a moment to recognize it as a kitchen. The counter space beneath its cabinets was covered in a myriad of unknown metallic devices, and only the presence of knives in a cutter's block clued her in to the space's purpose. She could see, when she slowly stood, the oven that she had heard Master speak so much of. A bck box which heated without fme or spells, reaching its greatest heat in a matter of minutes. Above it, the micro-wave. Simir, but even more rapid in its heating, though with some vaguely referenced trade-offs in terms of quality, if she recalled correctly.

  Slowly, feeling as if her shoes would damage the fragile grace which surrounded her, Evie spun in pce. Where a hearth should have been, there was now a thin pte of bck gss, more metal boxes with blinking lights attached to it by tangled cords below. The sofa she had risen from was not the only one, just that which faced a set of curtains hanging from the wall, whereas the second sofa faced the boxes.

  Despite the bizarre nature of nearly every facet of the building, there was also much familiar. Most of that came from knowing Master and her living habits well; there were discarded clothes upon the floor, stained with sweat and grime, and a plethora of small nothings which were scattered haphazardly across every ft surface. Most weren't decorative, she could tell, but rather something with which Master had been fiddling before setting aside and forgetting. The alien nature of the home was pced in stark contrast with the comforting familiarity of it being clearly occupied by the woman she knew so well.

  That woman was in fact sitting on the second sofa, her feet propped up on a small wooden table pced a few feet before it. To Evie's surprise, Master looked the same as always. She was even wearing the same clothes as she had been before Evie had slipped under her orders.

  "Well?" Master asked. "What do you think?"

  "It is... fascinating," Evie breathed.

  Master grinned. "Gd to hear it. Third time's the charm, I guess."

  "Third time?" She asked distractedly, kneeling down to inspect the sofa. Its material was not silk, nor wool or cotton, but something unknown to her.

  "Yeah, I didn't get it right the first few times. You asked me to bnk out your memories after each attempt, so you'd get a proper surprise when it finally worked right." Master switched her feet around, waving a hand at their surroundings. "Well? Anything look out of pce? The illusions not holding up somewhere?"

  "Everything looks out of pce, Master," she replied frankly, still stroking the sofa's material. She was beginning to suspect it was not even organic in nature, but artificial. "But I cannot deny what my eyes see."

  "Perfect. 'Cause you could the first few times, and it's been about an hour of trying."

  Evie blinked. "Truly? None of your illusions have required such effort before."

  "That's because I just create normal pictures, usually. Right now I'm actually using the colr's bond, plus my Empathic Link spell, and a whole lot of lectured orders, so you'll ignore everything you need to in order to get the full picture. Then I had to drag around all the real life furniture to fit where stuff is in the illusion, so you can actually sit on things, then shove in your brain how those things felt..."

  Evie spared her a look, under which Master withered.

  "Okay, maybe it's been more than an hour. Or two. But hey, it worked!"

  "You know we will have to march at first light," Evie said reproachfully, though she couldn't bring any sort of genuine sternness to bear. All she was presented with was too fascinating, her attentions pulled in too many different directions.

  "Yeah, but once I had the idea, I couldn't stop. I've been wanting to do something like this forever." Master stood from her couch with a grunt, moving over to wrap a comfortable arm around Evie's side. "Got anything you want to check out first?"

  "The kitchen," Evie said immediately, tugging Master over. "Every time we have had to start a fire for cooking, you whine and compin about your ck of a micro-wave. What is so wondrous about the device?"

  Sara ughed. "Really, the microwave? That's what you're going for, first? I mean, fair, I guess, but I would've thought you cared about the ceiling fan or the lights or something."

  "I've seen crystal lights and enchanted cooling devices before. Something which cooks food in an instant with the same invisible rays that the sun and stars themselves emanate? That is a wonder."

  "If you insist. Keep in mind, though, I can't actually make anything for you to eat with it."

  "I'm aware. Just show me how it operates."

  Master obliged her, demonstrating the different buttons on the device's front panel, expining their simplistic purposes. Everything was written in Master's original nguage, which Evie couldn't read, and so she narrated each step in detail. True to her word, the device was remarkably simple, or at least utilizing it was. It had a single level of heat it produced, and so one only had to select the duration for which you subjected the micro-wave's contents to the radiative energies. Apparently, due to the rapidity of heating, the core of food was often chill while the exterior was hot, and so two cycles were commonly necessary, with stirring or rearranging of the contents between steps. Master said this like it was some rge inconvenience, which struck Evie as profoundly unappreciative. The things Master took for granted were astounding.

  They moved to the oven, whose heated metal coils were at least more comprehensible in their functioning than inscrutable "radiation," and then the refrigerator, the operations of which Master knew frustratingly little, and finally the assortment of small powered wonders such as toasters, mixers, and– for some reason present on a kitchen counter– powered drills and decorative mps.

  "But hey, look," Master said, when Evie had finally had her fill of toying with the kitchen's devices, "here's the main event. Come over to the curtains. There's a reason all my furniture is second-hand garbage."

  Garbage? Evie thought, eying the two sofas. Two. And a full-room rug. On what she understood from Master's expnation to be a basic peasant's wage. Her metalworking skills were one she often compared to those of a vilge bcksmith, who should never have been able to afford such luxuries. Absolutely absurd.

  Still, she followed Master over to the curtains without comment. They were held up by a simple metal pole drilled into the wall, (another absurdity, using steel for mere decoration) and she quickly slid them open, letting in a surge of light. Evie squinted for a moment, leaning closer, and saw–

  Something unfathomable. Evie had no particur fear of heights, but when she was suddenly confronted with the fact that she was standing dozens– hundreds– of feet in the air, all without knowing it? She thought she had the right to experience a bout of vertigo. She stumbled forward, catching herself against the frame of the rgest and clearest window she'd ever seen, and simply stared.

  Gss and stone monoliths soared into the sky in every direction, every one littered with windows and facades that were her only sense of scale. Between them ran streets more fwless than the finest id cobble, painted a deep bck with yellow and white adornments. A teeming mass of humanity ran in currents on either side of these streets, divided between by the rumbling rush of massive steel and gss boxes.

  Her earliest assumption of Master's world, that it was a pce composed solely of iron and concrete, had been far more accurate than her ter, technically better-informed assumptions. There was no grass in sight, the few trees present only as deliberately pced decorations, too small to have been very old at all.

  And the people. By the gods, the number of people. She could not count the many thousands of windows facing her, could not even remotely judge the size of the glittering, omnipresent monoliths of every building, but if each window represented a home like Master's? Each structure could have contained thousands upon thousands, and there were so very many, in every direction. Even from what Evie could see from Master's balcony, the city was rger in area than the Sporaton capital, and denser in popution by every conceivable margin.

  Perhaps even more bizarrely, Evie almost felt as if she understood what she was seeing. The unbelievable tales of Master's world were slowly coming into perspective, the possibilities of the things she spoke of coming home to roost. Concrete was clearly far superior a building material to any form of wood or stone, and with steel so cheap and common it was used for simple decoration, why wouldn't such a city come to be? It was human nature to cluster, to find the most valuable pces and congregate there, and even if she still struggled to imagine the sheer wealth which would be necessary to support this sprawling conglomeration, Master had gifted her the knowledge of how it was possible.

  The concrete buildings, she knew, were reinforced with steel bars running all throughout. Their heights were summited by elevating boxes pulled by clever counterweights, and the ungodly amounts of food required to feed such a teeming mass was brought in on the very "cars" which now ran thick as riverwater hundreds of feet below her. She had been shown the incomprehensible nature of a world and life as far beyond her own as she was to an ant, and yet, because of Master, she understood.

  "So... good view, right?" Master asked, reaching around Evie. The gss she had been leaning against slowly slid aside, allowing them access to the balcony beyond. The wind carried with it a great number of innumerable sounds, and Evie thought it muffled for a moment, perhaps the illusion failing at the edges, until she realized that it was merely a recreation of Master's purely human hearing in her old life. The rumble of vehicles below, the whistle of wind spinning in tight rivers through the criss-crossing buildings, the dull roar of footsteps and chatter below. A sniff of something toxic, almost like Tulian pipe smoke, was expined by an illusory neighbor on a balcony above and to their right, a small cylinder of wrap paper afire between their lips.

  Evie stepped out onto the balcony with almost religious reverence, one hand trailing on the edge of the door, the other grasping the back of Master's shirt. For all she technically knew this was an illusion, her body refused to recognize it. It wasn't, again, that she was afraid of heights, only that she simply had no scale for what she was experiencing. She'd been atop the great walls of Sporatos as a child, when her tutor in Administration had brought her there to see the city's yout from above, and that had been nearly as high as she was now. But the great walls of Sporatos were an anomaly in her world, the work of mages and spells centuries gone, one of the kingdom's greatest symbols of might. And now she had to crane her neck up to look at the other structures which surrounded Master's home.

  Master, seemingly oblivious to this, walked right up to the balcony edge and leaned against it. "Yeah," she said, "this view's the reason why all the shit inside is so banged up. I got my first good steady paycheck a few years ago and thought, 'hey, why not spend it all on a cool apartment?'" Master spit over the edge, slightly ruining the illusion when Evie heard the droplet nd a few feet away on what should have been open air. Her eyes, however, saw it get dragged away by the wind and out of sight. "It's a little over two thousand a month for a one bedroom apartment, which honestly isn't all that bad, compared to some city's downtown rents, but that's only because it's Detroit. Still sucked up most of my paycheck, and it was barely worth it. Most of my friends lived out in the suburbs, so even if I got to do the fun nightlife stuff that's around here, I'd have to wait for them to make the trip downtown anyway. Dad was giving me a ton of shit about it, saying I should move somewhere reasonable, and I knew he was right before I even signed the lease. Still, what's the point of being in your twenties if you're not gonna make some stupid decisions every now and then?"

  Evie blinked stupidly. So this was something of a luxury location, insofar as one of Master's social status had been concerned? She supposed that made sense, but she'd have thought... she didn't know what she would have thought. The stresses of economy in a world capable of producing cities like this was so far beyond her experience that it may as well have been from another pne of existence. She supposed it was, actually.

  Master turned back to look at her, registering her expression of numbed awe for the first time.

  "Do you wanna go back inside?"

  "No," Evie quickly said. She took a step forward, to the railing of the balcony. "No, not at all." To aly Master's fears, she hurriedly searched for a question to ask. "These buildings, then," she said, waving to the tallest in immediate sight. "They all contain homes such as yours?"

  "Oh, no," Master said, pinly grateful Evie wasn't getting overwhelmed. "Those are business buildings, mostly. Office towers. Got a whole bunch of people working corporations in there, counting money and filing reports and shit."

  "And... one corporation, it can afford such a structure? It can need such a structure?"

  Master shrugged. "Some of 'em, yeah. A lot of the buildings have floors rented out to other companies, though, and some of 'em aren't for any one company in particur, and they're filled with all kinds of different businesses." Her smile grew smugly satisfied. "Though that was changing, back when I got ripped out of here by Amarat. People were starting to work from home more and more 'cause of a big pandemic running through the pce, which means those big old corporations suddenly had a lot of property that wasn't doing much more than costing them money. Some were having to sell it off, or were trying to get people to come back into the office, but it wasn't working. That was pretty nice to watch, seeing those big corporations get their wallets knocked around a bit."

  "That is... I cannot imagine the wealth involved," Evie breathed.

  "Honestly? Neither can I. There's too much money involved for any one person to really get to grips with. And the worst part?" Master pointed down the street a ways, to where there was a small cluster of multicolored tents. "All this fuckin' money in one pce, and there's still homeless people."

  Evie leaned a little bit further against the railing, peering hard. As Master had said, she could now recognize people moving throughout the tents, wandering aimlessly. Though their clothes, appearance, and circumstances were quite different, she could still recognize the despondent nature of their wandering.

  She looked back to the unfathomably massive buildings, then to the homeless encampment again. Master watched her do so, a sad smile on her face.

  "Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Kinda hard not to, isn't it?"

  "The amount of wealth someone who owns such a building must possess–"

  "And they're half empty right now, too." Master interjected. "Hell, most of those are businesses, but there's still more empty homes littered around than anyone could count, and most of 'em are owned by people who could live off their bank account's interest for a hundred years."

  "I see," Evie said simply. She thought of Sara's anger, her rage and frustration, and for the first time in quite a while, thought she eked out a slightly better understanding of her partner.

  Sara continued speaking. "The people that own this stuff, they'll say all kinds of things about it. That the vacancies are temporary, that the homeless people down there are homeless for a reason, that they can't take the risk and yadda-yadda-yadda." Sara sniffed, wiping her nose. "Doesn't change the fact that there's a couple thousand people in this city that could afford to build houses for every one of those people, all on their own, without making a single damn dent in their budget."

  Sara sighed, pushing herself off the railing. "But that's not what we're here for. Wanna come see my room?"

  Evie spared one st look for the incredible sights before her, trying to press it deeply into her memory. She knew Master could recreate the illusion ter, but it was too wonderful a sight to risk even the slightest chance of forgetting, if something prevented her from coming back here again.

  That done, she turned around and nodded, taking Master's hand as they returned to her former home.