And we talk and window shop 'till I forgotten all their names

Carly and the others had no idea of the calamitous interaction they had just left behind. Their focus was on Emmy and her new clothes. At least, that’s what Carly was focused on, anyway.

“Are you sure you’re fine with that?” She asked, looking at her daughter’s outfit. Emmy was still wearing the clothes she’d arrived in, even though she’d had ample time to change in the boutique.

Emmy nodded. “This is fine for now. I don’t really focus that much on my appearance,” she informed her mother. Then she paused. “…At least, not usually… …Huh. I guess I don’t really know, do I? Since I’ve never really had the chance to think about it.”

Things were weird in Emmy’s head. There were all sorts of things that she kinda, sorta thought she knew about herself, but those were all implanted memories brought on by her rebirth. Emmy felt like she didn’t care much about what she wore, but then, she’d just been “born” yesterday, in a sense; so was that really how she felt?

…It was the kind of thing that would give anybody who thought about it too long a headache.

Emmy sighed and rubbed her temples. “…Whatever. It’s whatever.”

Marley laughed. “I’m with you on that one,” she agreed. “I don’t care about clothes that much either, and it drives your mom crazy.”

“Oh yeah?” Carly took that as a challenge. “Well, you’re the one who dresses like she drives a minivan to soccer games every Saturday! And you’re not even 30!”

Dani winced. Low blow there.

“Says the woman dressed like a comic book character in public.”

Sylvia laughed. That was an even lower blow! She whistled in approval of Marley’s harsh tongue.

Emmy just sighed and shook her head.

“Can we not fight, please?” She begged. “I just want to get all this stuff back to my room, and then… sort it, I guess.”

It occurred to Emmy that calling it “her room” may not have been accurate. And again, the problem of closet space was rearing its ugly head.

“We really need to find something to do about all this stuff, don’t we?” Dani looked down at the cart full of clothing they were wheeling down the street. Kim had generously let them use it, but only after they left had it occurred to Dani that the faeries could have delivered it for them.

It was odd. Usually there were no shortage of the little sprites fluttering around the island. What had been astounding at first had become so commonplace that Dani blocked it out the way she would pigeons or seagulls anywhere else.

But now, she couldn’t spot a pair of colored gossamer wings to save her life!

And it wasn’t just on the street, either. As they passed by the shops, they magically closed their doors, as if the girls were in a strange dimension bubble that blocked out the presence of the fae everywhere they went or something.

“Sylvia, are the shops supposed to be closing this early?” Dani stopped and looked in the window of a restaurant, seeing no trace of the faeries who should be running things. “Why are all the faeries not here?”

“Hey, yeah,” Carly said, just now noticing what Dani had picked up on. She looked around street curiously. “All the stores and stuff are closed.”

“The whole Shopping District is closed,” Marley noted curiously. “Mom, what’s going on? Stuff like this doesn’t just happen.”

Sylvia, as the former host and ruler of this island, should know if there was precedent for something like this. But she looked just as confused as the rest of them.

“Dakota created the fae to run things around here,” she informed the girls, stroking her chin thoughtfully. “They’re magical constructs generated through her power as the host. They have some independence, but it’s complicated… um… hm. Well, I guess you could say they’re kinda like those faceless NPCs you see in video games! Nobody really cares about them.”

Marley frowned. “Sylvia, don’t say stuff like that,” she chided her mother. “That’s the sort of thing Dakota says about you. That you’re just a faceless NPC without autonomy, that your thoughts and feelings don’t matter.”

Sylvia paused. She hadn’t really thought about it like that.

“…I’m different, though,” she said finally, shaking her head.

“How?” Dani squinted, frowning. She didn’t like the direction of this conversation; the way Sylvia was talking about the faeries, it really did remind her of Dakota; she was acting like they weren’t people, and that… that wasn’t good.

“The faeries don’t want things,” Sylvia explained. “Not the way people do. They’re like… cells of the island. They exist, they have personalities, but those things are programmed by Dakota when she created them.”

“So, again, like you,” Carly said. She winced. “…Sorry. I don’t actually think that about you, Sylvia, I just meant, like, drawing the comparison…”

Sylvia shook her head. She didn’t mind. “Maybe that was true of me once,” she admitted. “But I’m me. That’s why Dakota couldn’t get rid of me, why the producers made her bring me back.” She placed her hand over her chest. “I’m a person, whether Dakota believes it… or not.”

The fact that she could smile while talking about how her own mother dehumanized her and disregarded her as nothing made Dani’s heart ache. Whatever Sylvia may have done in the past, she didn’t deserve to think that way about herself.

“Mom, you don’t need to care about what Dakota thinks about you,” Marley said firmly. She shook her head. “Everything she did to you… the way she treated you… it was wrong! And maybe you can’t see it, or you just don’t want to, but you need to take off the rose-colored glasses and stop giving Dakota the benefit of any doubt!”

Even as she said it, it hurt. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to feel bad about something. But Marley couldn’t take it. She loved Sylvia too, and seeing the way she suffered while downplaying the way Dakota treated her, acting like it wasn’t a big deal… it was heartbreaking.

Sylvia stared at Marley, a warm smile on her lips. Her eyes moistened and she nodded slowly.

“Thank you, my girl,” she said softly, reaching out and caressing Marley’s cheek. “That means a lot to me, really. But I don’t need Dakota to be happy anymore. Even if she never sees me as a person, it’s fine. That’s her. And I’m me. And I don’t need to have anything more to do with her. Believe me, I’m happy enough just being your mother. And having my friends with me, and Daddy.”

She wouldn’t forget the life she lived growing up under Dakota’s thumb. She had done a lot of things to emulate her creator; some she agreed with, some she was seeing now were wrong. But regardless, Sylvia had been reborn as her own person now. She didn’t need to live in Dakota’s shadow, constantly scrounging for approval from a woman who would never care about her.

And yeah. It hurt. And part of her still wished that things had been different between the two of them. But Sylvia couldn’t change who Dakota was any more than Dakota could have made Sylvia into a puppet for her wishes.

They were their own people. And while Sylvia wasn’t the type of woman to stand up in front of a crowd and call Dakota out for all the things she’d done (that was too confrontational for her; Sylvia liked it when everyone got along) she was unbelievably grateful that so many people were willing to do it for her, like Marley. Or Kim.

Or maybe even Nick, her Daddy.

…Yeah, that was something twisted about Sylvia. But she didn’t see it as wrong. Just as another part of who she was inside, and that was just fine.

“It could be possible, though,” Emmy said, breaking the awkward silence. “Maybe, like, the faeries are self-aware now too, you think? Possibly?” She didn’t have a firm grasp on most of the conversation; it seemed to involve a lot of stuff she hadn’t been let in the loop on. So she was kind of fumbling around in the dark here.

But if it worked…

Sylvia shook her head. She couldn’t imagine that. “You guys just don’t get it. The stuff that went into making me and the stuff that went into making those faeries, it’s completely different. It’s like, um… trying to compare an autonomous thinking computer AI from a sci-fi novel to, like, a graphing calculator or something… see, the AI can think for itself, but the calculator can’t, even if it can do a whole bunch of fancy stuff… agh, I can’t explain it, I’m not a computer person!”

She sighed and rubbed her temples for a few seconds, before brightening right back up. “…Anyway, to answer your question, most likely no. The faeries are probably just responding to a tantrum Dakota is throwing somewhere else! Probably.”

If Dakota was getting mentally unwound, she would probably take it out on the staff. Call a massive meeting or something to berate the creations she had unilateral control over. That was the only thing that made sense to Sylvia, unless the producers were directly interfering with the island or something along those lines.

Notably, her proposal did not elicit warm fuzzy feelings in any of the others, much to her confusion.

“If Dakota’s throwing a tantrum… should… should we be worried?” Dani winced. “She’s not exactly the most stable person around.”

“No kidding,” Marley groused, shaking her head. “But me, I’d rather not get involved with her, thank you very much.”

Carly nodded. “Let’s forget about the shops for now. Hmm… oh, wait, I have an idea! We could do some more experiments!”

She held up her watch, showing it off. “Emmy, I haven’t showed you how this works yet!”

Marley raised her eyebrow, pursing her lips in concern. “What about the clothes?” She gently reminded her sister. Carly really had a problem with getting distracted all the time.

Carly opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, the streets were suddenly filled with faeries again. Her face lit up and she grinned. “Well, that solves that problem!”

“Good!” Sylvia sighed in relief. “It was probably only a minor tantrum, then.”

Emmy gave her a look. If Dakota was really as bad as everyone said she was, and capable of doing all those awful things, was a “minor” tantrum really something to be relieved about?

She didn’t think so.

Dani would agree with her, but she had other concerns at the moment. Namely flagging down one of those faeries to take the clothes off her hands.

The faerie cheerfully carted them off to the hotel, and Dani returned, smiling.

“Well, that’s that,” she said. “Faerie’s gonna bring ‘em back to the Garden Suite for us, we can figure out how it fits later.”

Marley frowned. “Is anyone else feeling a little concerned that we were only JUST talking about whether the faeries are sentient creatures with wants and desires, and that Dani just went and had one go do a chore for us?”

Sylvia shook her head gently. “Marley, I get where you’re coming from, really, and I love it. It’s coming from a wonderful place.” She placed her hand over her heart. “But when it comes to Harem Hotel, some things you just gotta… look past, I guess. Remember, graphing calculator.”

Marley wasn’t sure she’d ever be comfortable with treating the fae as just “NPCs” as Sylvia called them. Maybe because she wasn’t fully human herself; having started her life as a little seedling that eventually transformed into a sentient being, she still believed that such things were possible for the faeries and other creatures on the island.

At the same time, she respected the fact that her mother knew more about this kind of thing than she did, and if anyone should have a problem with relegating sentient lifeforms to being purely a servant class with no individuality, it would be Sylvia.

Maybe that’s why she never really created anything on her own with all those powers at her disposal, Marley considered. She only ever moved Dakota’s things around. Maybe because on some level she didn’t feel comfortable with creating her own pawns.

Or maybe she was putting too much thought into this. It was probably nothing after all, right? Marley shook her head and sighed.

“Okay, so back to the Garden Suite, then?” She looked up at the hotel in the distance, just past the elevator at the edge of the Shopping District. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to move around…”

She couldn’t even begin to wrap her head around how they would make space for all of Emmy’s clothes in their cramped closet. No wonder Carly had been trying to stall things.

“Hey, I have an idea,” Dani raised her hand. Now that she wasn’t being put to work like a carthorse she could actually contribute with some thoughts of her own. “Does it have to be a closet?”

Everyone stared at her.

“…What does that mean?” Emmy scrunched her face up in confusion. She looked to her mom, wondering if this was just some part of life that she hadn’t been taught yet, but Carly looked confused too.

“…Say more,” Carly said, frowning.

Dani shrugged. “Well, I mean… I’m staying in the Romantic Suite with Vivian right now, and she’s taken up practically all of my closet space, since she has so many outfits with her.” Dani recalled the massive stack of clothes Vivian had picked out for herself, and cringed a little, wondering how all THAT would fit, too.

Dani shook her head and quickly banished those thoughts from her mind. “…Anyway, my point is that you know how the Romantic Suite has that whole second room on the side?”

Sylvia nodded. “Right, the sex dungeon. Didn’t get to try that out when I was living there, sadly, but it looked pretty cool!”

Dani rolled her eyes. “Right, the sex dungeon. Anyway, I’ve just been chucking my clothes in there. There’s plenty of space, we could probably fit Emmy’s stuff in there if we wanted to.”

Carly burst out laughing. “Oh man, that’s SO like you!” She said, shaking her head as she imagined Dani hanging up her shirts on a sex rack. The tomboy was so vanilla it was adorable.

Dani blushed a little. “Well… it was just a thought… I mean, it’s not like she has to stay in my room or anything, but she could come over whenever she wanted and pick up her clothes. Unless you think that’s too much?”

Given how Carly had reacted this morning to the idea of her daughter posing for a fashion show, Dani wouldn’t be at all surprised if the cosplayer gave her a hard “no” as well to the idea of Emmy shuffling over to the neighbors’ sex dungeon whenever she wanted a new outfit. There was some stuff in there that Dani could understand a mother being wary of exposing her daughter to.

Carly didn’t seem fazed at all. “I mean, it’s up to Emmy. Sounds like it would work out.”

“Err…” Emmy blushed, a little confused. Like Dani, she’d been expecting a firm no from her mother. But maybe Carly was fine with stuff like this, as long as she wasn’t directly participating?

I guess it would be kind of hard to avoid sex stuff in a place like this, Emmy admitted, recalling some of the conversations they’d had on the topic already.

Emmy didn’t have much experience being around other people, and her “memories” were more vague feelings of what it meant to be human.

But she wasn’t wrong in thinking that normal people didn’t spend this much time thinking and talking about sex, right? Sylvia and the rest of them were just hyperfocused on it?

For the sake of her own budding humanity she really hoped that was the case.

Besides, more than the sex stuff, there was something else relevant to take into consideration.

Emmy cleared her throat. “…I mean, it sounds like that’s the only option on the table,” she pointed out to the others.

Whatever her own feelings were about sex (and she really didn’t care that much about it) Dani was the only one here who had actually proposed a solution.

Hearing that, the others kind of agreed she had a point.

“Well, works for me,” Carly said, shrugging. “In that case… watch time?”

“Sure, we’re not in a rush or anything!” Sylvia nodded excitedly. She turned to Emmy. “You’re cool with it, right?”

Emmy shrugged. As long as they had a plan, she could go with a little detour. And Carly really seemed to want to show her what that watch could do.

“I think it could be fun,” she agreed with a small smile.

Marley nodded reluctantly. “Well… okay then, if that’s what you guys want.” She glanced warily at the watch on Carly’s wrist, remembering past experiences with it.

“We should probably head to that field by the hotel,” Dani suggested, leading the way. “It’s the best place to go if you want to experiment with it. Don’t want to turn into a ten-story Carly, do you?”

“I think that’s your fantasy, not mine,” Carly teased, elbowing her girlfriend in the side.

Emmy laughed, glad that the mood seemed to be lightening. Yesterday had been rough, and this morning had been filled with all kinds of tension, but it seemed like things were finally getting on the right track!

When the girls arrived at the field, they were surprised to see some familiar faces were already there.

“Rose? Hey, what’s up?” Carly approached the blonde with a curious expression on her face. She glanced past Rose, and saw Morgana a few feet away, fidgeting uncomfortably in the hot summer sun. Ella was nowhere to be seen.

“What are you guys doing here?” Rose asked, glancing past Carly and over to Emmy, who was still wearing the same outfit as before. “I thought you guys were going shopping.”

“We just finished, got Emmy a bunch of new outfits,” Dani informed her.

Rose nodded. “Oh, cool. Well, Morgana and I, we wanted a secluded place where she could practice her spells, so I thought this would be the perfect one. …And if you’re looking for Ella, she ditched us. Something about needing to throw up? I assumed she was just being colorful about her opinion on Morgana’s spells.”

The goth girl shrank a little, looking down with a sheepish expression on her face.

“Well, what a coincidence!” Carly laughed, showing off her wristwatch. “We came here to experiment with stuff, too!”

“Mm, that right?” Rose was smiling, but the atmosphere around her turned frosty. “Well… we were here first… and you wouldn’t want to be caught up in Morgana’s spells, right?”

No, Dani most certainly did not.

“Come on, guys, let’s all get along!” Sylvia said, stepping forward with a smile on her lips. “There are plenty of wacky, random shenanigans for all of us!”

Rose and Dani both looked at her. That was precisely their issue.