Chapter 188: Robes, Rituals, and a Rude Awakening

Later that day, Vuvi and Glorin sit in his office, deep in a sprawling discussion covering everything from ore alloys to soul-bound circuitry to the finer points of Pip’s own construction.

Glorin sighs, rubbing at his beard. "We’re still nowhere close to replicating your neural integration. I’m half convinced it’s simply the Great Mother’s own hand at work."

Vuvi shrugs. "I gave up trying to understand it a while ago."

"I would love to examine him myself, if you’d allow it."

Vuvi glances toward the stack of crates already piled by the door, gifted to her over the course of the day. "Least I can do, after all this."

Glorin lights up. "I’m available for him anytime."

"I’ll bring him by tomorrow, actually," Vuvi says. "I was already planning to squeeze in a few upgrades while we’re in the city, and I can’t think of a better workshop than this one."

Glorin practically glows. "I’ll have a full setup waiting for you." He leans across the desk. "On one condition."

Vuvi leans in too, smirking. "I’m listening."

"I get to help."

She sticks out a hand. "It would be my honor."

"The privilege is entirely mine," he says, shaking it firmly.

They both laugh, and Vuvi rises to go. "Speaking of Pip, I should go check on him." The hair on the back of her neck prickles. "I’ve got a feeling he’s up to something."

She heads for the Pleasure Palace with an armful of boxes, Thari trailing behind and pushing a small cart loaded with the rest of the day’s haul, the two of them winding down through the terraced streets as evening light turns the copper piping overhead a deep, burnished bronze, the smell of hot metal and dwarven ale drifting out of every open doorway they pass.

They round the corner onto the Palace’s street, and both freeze.

Dozens of people kneel across the road in perfect, disciplined rows, every one of them dressed in matching robes of white and gold, sashes embroidered with a stylized golden sunburst crossed over a single, unmistakably suggestive glyph. Hoods pulled low, hands folded at exact right angles, eyes fixed with unblinking devotion on one particular window of the Pleasure Palace. A few are already weeping.

Near the front, a robed figure raises both arms and begins a slow, rhythmic chant, and the rest of the congregation falls in behind him, voices layering into something that sounds unsettlingly close to an actual hymn.

Vuvi groans, dumping her boxes unceremoniously into Thari’s cart, and stomps straight into the middle of the gathering, robes parting reluctantly around her. "What," she demands, hands on her hips, "is going on here?"

Nobody answers. Nobody even looks at her.

Then a shrieking moan tears out of the window above, and the entire crowd gasps in unison, chant abandoned entirely, before breaking into something louder, more fervent, fists raised to the sky. They praise the Promised Prince, the Golden Redeemer, the Shining Shaft that will save the world, the words calling and answering back and forth across the congregation like a proper liturgy, complete with a ragged but earnest attempt at harmony.

Vuvi drags a hand down her face, groaning harder.

Thari sidles up beside her. "What exactly is this?"

"A cult," Vuvi mutters. "They’ve been following us since we left home. Convinced Pip’s some kind of prophet or savior or... I honestly don’t even know anymore."

Thari nods along, thoughtful. "They’re not exactly wrong, though. You said it yourself. He’s a blessing from the Great Mother."

"I know I did." Vuvi shakes her head. "Doesn’t mean I want a whole cult dragging along behind us." She glances around. "At least they’re not waving signs this time."

Thari clears her throat and points further down the street, where a second cluster of cultists dances in a slow, joyful circle, waving professionally painted banners of Pip’s likeness, rendered with varying degrees of anatomical enthusiasm beneath an escalating collection of increasingly unhinged titles.

He Who Glows. The Himbo Of Hope. The Golden Rod Glory.

One banner, larger than the rest and clearly commissioned at some expense, simply reads PRAISE THE SHAFT OF SALVATION in gold leaf lettering a foot tall.

Vuvi gasps, her jaw setting hard. "This is mortifying. If there’s a Saint Sister mixed up in this, she is getting a piece of my mind." She marches toward the entrance, where Sera leans against the doorframe, grinning, arms crossed like she’s been waiting for exactly this reaction.

"Our fans are back," Sera says.

"They’re a cult, not fans," Vuvi snaps. "Fans I can handle. This is absurd." Her eyes narrow. "Is there a Saint Sister in there right now?"

Sera nods, and Vuvi storms past her.

At the front desk, Veena and Mysa sit hunched over a card game, greeting her with lazy waves.

"Where’s Pip?" Vuvi demands.

"Busy," Mysa says. "Saint Sister number—" She glances at Veena, who holds up five fingers without looking up from her hand. "Five."

"Why," Vuvi says, "would you let a Saint Sister anywhere near him again, after everything that happened last time? They blew him up."

Veena shrugs. "I asked him. He seemed excited."

"He’s always excited for a fresh pair of tits, Veena. You can’t just ask Pip these things."

Veena shrugs again, laying down a card.

"You’re doing this on purpose."

Another shrug.

Footsteps pound down the stairs, and Raenly appears, face streaked with tears, one hand pressed dramatically over his own heart. Vuvi catches him by both shoulders. "What’s wrong?"

"It’s so beautiful," he sobs. "And I’ve never once gotten to experience it, because of the curse." He clutches at his own chest. "I pray the Shining Shaft of the Golden Redeemer brings healing to men like me. I want to clap cheeks too!"

Vuvi shoves him aside. "Pull yourself together. That cult is brainwashing men in every direction, and you are apparently first in line." She stomps up the stairs, boots ringing against polished wood, past framed portraits of Pip that someone has clearly not gotten around to straightening.

At the top, she finds Lula, Penelo, and Raikya crowded shoulder to shoulder around a half-open door, faces lit intermittently gold from something happening on the other side.

She shoulders through the three of them without ceremony. "Back to work, all of you."

Then she throws the door open, already halfway into a furious speech.

And the words die in her throat.

A rush of wind slams into her, knocking her hair back and stealing the breath clean out of her lungs. Pip has combined air and holy magic into something she’s never seen before, never even imagined.

A swirling column of luminous wind rising floor to ceiling through the center of the ruined room, holding both him and the Fifth Saint Sister suspended within it, spinning slow and weightless, tangled together, her legs locked tight around his waist as her whole body trembles with the effort of holding on.

Loose feathers from a shredded pillow drift and orbit lazily around the column’s outer edge, caught in its current, glinting gold every time they pass through the light. Holy light pours off the two of them in cascading sheets, like a shower of falling stars caught mid-descent, illuminating every splinter of broken furniture and every hairline crack running through the walls, the whole chamber pulsing bright and dim, bright and dim, in perfect time with the rhythm building between them.

Whoosh~

The current shifts entirely, and the column tips them sideways, rotating slow through the air until she’s braced on nothing but momentum and the grip of his hands at the small of her back, her blond hair streaming out horizontal, whipping around them both like a comet’s tail.

With each thrust, light pulses visibly through her skin, tracing veins of gold beneath the surface that flare and fade like something alive, her cries rising and breaking against the rush of wind circling them both, echoing back off the walls a half-second later, layered over themselves until the whole room sounds like a chorus of her own voice.

"D-Divine," she chokes out between gasps, barely audible over the wind, "this is... this is—" The sentence never finishes.

Her back arches instead, and wings of pure light stutter into existence from her shoulder blades for one impossible moment before fading out again, gone as fast as they came. Even she looks startled by it, eyes flying wide, mouth falling open around a moan that has no words left in it at all. A stray feather from the ruined pillow drifts down and sticks to her sweat-slick shoulder, and for one absurd second she looks less like a Saint Sister mid-miracle and more like a bliss-drunk angel.

Pip’s wraith-glass gleams white-hot at every point of contact, servos humming beneath a sound like distant, ringing bells, while below them the wrecked furniture rattles and skids inch by inch across the floor, dragged loose by the current sweeping through the room. A nightstand finally tips over entirely, spilling a wash basin across the floorboards with a hollow clang~ that nobody in the room even registers, and somewhere beneath the bed a second, smaller object rolls loose and clatters against the far wall equally ignored.

Thari pokes her head in beside Vuvi, eyes blown wide as moons, hair whipping back in the current. "Mother’s mercy," she breathes. "Is this... is this actually real?"

Vuvi only nods, slow and silent, unable to summon a single word of the furious speech she’d walked in with, every ounce of her earlier irritation burned clean away and replaced by something far warmer, far more dangerous, curling low in her stomach as she watches the column spin faster, brighter, the Saint Sister’s cries climbing toward something that sounds less like pleasure now and more like prayer.

She wipes a thin trail of drool from her own chin without even noticing she’s doing it.