Welcome to the holy order of suffering.

The village was a charming, beautiful place full of friendly people.

Not that either Vivi or Kiki could care much, or note the details of dwellings carved from pure white stone. Evidently, the Sunfire Confederation had fallen out of the stars, only to build themselves back up an entire way of life on this ocean world. The Violetta sisters were too absorbed with themselves to care.

The cause was somewhat new; their bladders were on fire.

Their entire lower bodies were seized in clenching pain. Muscle fatigue from having to tense up for so many days on end, rain or shine, awake or asleep, zero gravity or full gravity. Need to release, the fluid pressure building up. The humiliation of not even being able to hide it from judgmental eyes.

Okay, so maybe none of that was new to these girls. While this was certainly the worst single incident of needing to pee that either of these bottomheavy bitches had ever encountered, and it rendered them unable to think, instead just moaning pathetically about the bathroom… it was far from the only one.

They were kitsune. They had pranced among the stars under the watchful gaze of their mother for hundreds of years. Through following dearest mom’s evil schemes, they’d had to endure hardship. Forget the fact that Iktomi only had a single, lowest-bidder built bathroom that broke every few days, for days at a time. That was the easy part; long hauls through the black, full of sake.

The ceremonial wine they’d had to take down, one gasping gulp after another, one shivering bowl they dared not spill a drop from at a time, had a lot more in common with kitsune brews. The ones only administered to hardened criminals, not the more common social-control drinks that made the entire civilization run, lubricating its gears by making sure a certain mechanism of nature couldn’t.

Kitsune law actually resembled what they were getting down here strongly.

Once they arrived at the temple that dominated the village’s low skyline with its pear-shaped domes, Tamah insisted they just had to get Kiki and Vivi out of those obscene, over-covering flight suits. By that point, both girls were too busy fixating on how badly they needed the bathroom to so much as comment on them being stripped. Those suits were rolled off their sleeker, feminine upper bodies and huge asses without incident.

Allowing every inch of their foreign, pale figures to be inspected by chattering priestesses, who were suffering every bit as much, but far more used to it. To them, a distended bulge in the abdomen, that both kitsune now prominently sported, was so ordinary it wasn’t even worth comment.

Not that commentary would do them much good, for as Kiki and Vivi finally realized, their universal translators were in that suit.

Without them, everything the locals said to them was gibberish, and vice versa.

Humiliation was one of the most painful things a kitsune could endure, a weakness which made every other suffering worse, for their pride would not admit need like that except in the worst cases. Causing them to suffer, first gladly, then in silence, then far past the point where it was obvious to everyone but themselves. They were shivering, they could barely stand, they held their lower bodies and pressed their hips together, they did little dances of sheer, brutal desperation.

Yet when their suits were reluctantly returned and they were asked by Tamah, flashing a certain gleaming golden key, if they perhaps had anything they needed, anything they were so **** for that they would beg forgiveness, Kiki merely shook her head and said, “C-C-Can’t think of any, no.”

Tamah was so delighted that a reward of tea and fresh clothing was necessary.

Kiki wasn’t intimidated, even dressed now as she was in the inadequate loincloths of this tribe. On a human frame, even a particularly absurd one, they served well enough, but this outfit wasn’t designed for a kitsune. Much like with the high priestess, their robes didn’t even attempt to cover the swell of their breasts, or did a particularly good job imparting modesty between their thighs.

The idea, as a young devotee of the order explained through chattering teeth though she couldn’t be understood, was that thigh coverage wasn’t so important, given your hands would always be placed between them in agony.

Annoyed by the gibberish, Vivi expected that to be her biggest concern. She was at maximum capacity already, an overfull balloon, a water bladder **** to expand in fact far past design tolerances. Life was pain.

So what was one more little bit of tea?

As it turned out, that bit of tea, laced with the most powerful of chemicals the island had to offer, was far worse than the pitchers of holy wine.

“This is part of our induction ceremony for acolytes,” Tamah explained joyously, having removed the tiny black box translators, and bestowing them back upon her latest recruits. Sampling some of the tea herself purely because she delighted in its rich, dark taste. Somehow, even though the sisters had seen Tamah drink plenty, she exhibited exactly no signs of any suffering whatsoever.

An impervious endurance that only magnified their own agony and humiliation.

“It is not purely to cause suffering, though suffering is divine. This chemical also suppresses various bodily reactions to a degree. In the past, this was what gave our warriors and sailors an edge over the competing tribes.”

“But there’s a powerful side-effect?” Vivi asked bitterly, her own teeth now machine-gunning out random patterns.

“Just so! In exchange for repression other needs, your body will produce more… of what you’re already so very full of. The change isn’t permanent, but all priestesses are required to undergo regular treatments.”

“You can’t keep us here forever!” Kiki protested, though she had no basis for that.

“Certainly not,” Tamah replied. “Everyone dies someday. Maybe before that point comes, you two will earn not just your freedom, but our assistance in repairing your spaceship. We’re not made out of stone here, just our houses!”

“Without a jump drive, we’d have nowhere to go…” Vivi glared daggers at Tamah. “I don’t suppose somebody who lives in stone huts would even… uh…”

A senior priestess of the order had entered the room, carrying under her arm an extremely familiar looking module.

“No way.”

“You weren’t the first to come here, though our last visitors crashed some hundreds of years ago. Their vessel did not survive, but they became valued members of the community and taught us not to fear the sky. They said this device was a treasure worth preserving through the ages, in case other travelers came. So, if you have a working ‘hyperdrive’, and your ship could be restored to function...?”

Sure, Iktomi had snapped to pieces on landing, but those pieces were all there, as far as the tribals could report. None of her had washed into the ocean or burned up. It was easy for racing imaginations to think that repairs could be effected.

Of course, no points for guessing how these two priestesses were going to work off their sentence, and earn that ancient, but very possibly still functional hyperdrive.

How many days, weeks, months, years, decades, or centuries would it take? Only the Goddess could say, and she would be whispering to Tamah tonight.

After just one more keg of holy wine apiece.