My baby girl, she's the sweetest in the whole wide world

“Oh, Daddy, I had such a dream,” Sylvia sobbed, bawling her eyes out. “Please, comfort meeeee!”

Nick stared blankly at her.

Then he flicked her on the forehead.

“Ow! Daddy! What the fuck!?” Sylvia exclaimed, dropping the cutesy voice and clutching her forehead. “That fucking hurt!”

“Yeah,” Nick said, placing his hands on his hips. “I bet it did.”

“I’m calling child protective services!” Sylvia pouted, crossing her arms brattily over her chest. “This is child ****! You’re being all monstrous, Daddy!”

“Sylvia…” Nick really wasn’t in the mood for this. He may have just let off a lot of pent-up tension with Gina, but at the moment Sylvia was really doing a great job of working him up all over again.

And not in the fun way, either.

Meanwhile Gina was doubled over, trying unsuccessfully not to laugh herself silly.

“Oh, this is great!” She cackled. “This is just classic!”

“Gina…” Nick sighed, shaking his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. He really didn’t want to have to deal with this right now. But the issue was, he knew that Sylvia’s statements weren’t exactly baseless. After all, given what he’d been told about Morgana…

He took a deep breath and exhaled. “…Okay. I heard that Morgana wrote a bunch of stuff in her diary, and everyone had dreams. Is that what you’re talking about?” He asked, trying to keep things as neutral and detached as possible. He really didn’t want to turn this into another opportunity for Sylvia to twist things into an erotic area.

“Yes Daddy,” she said, giving him a cheeky smile meant to destroy all of his hard work.

Nick just sighed.

“Would you like me to tell you about the dream, Daddy?” Sylvia asked eagerly.

“No, of course not,” he replied automatically. Whatever dream Sylvia might have had, he knew that it would involve a bunch of fetishes that he REALLY didn’t want to endorse. So why on earth would he want to hear about them?

“Are you sure?” Sylvia batted her eyelashes, sticking out her lip pleadingly. “Because Daddy, it’s really important that you help all the other girls, don’t you think? The ones who aren’t feeling so good, about their dreams?”

“Well, yeah, obviously,” Nick replied, not sure what she meant by that. “But I don’t think that means-”

“If you hear about my dream,” Sylvia pressed, “then maybe it will help you get a grasp of how the other girls are feeling. It couldn’t hurt, right? To be careful and considerate of me, so that other people can benefit? Think of it like a trial run to grind your skills before you try to help the others!”

Nick stared at her. He really, really wanted to toss her idea out… but somehow it actually sounded convincing.

He hated that it sounded convincing.

“…Fine,” Nick relented. “Tell me about your dream…”

He knew he was going to regret this the second the words left his lips.

Sylvia was eager to spill the beans.

“Well, Daddy, first I was being a bad, bad girl,” she said, flashing a wicked smile that made it clear she didn’t care one whit about that. “I was being SOOOO very naughty… so naughty, Mommy said I needed to be punished-”

“Wait,” Nick cut in, holding up his hand. “What the fuck are you talking about? Mommy?”

Suddenly, Dakota’s face popped into mind. He turned pale. “Okay, um… that’s…”

“By Mommy I’m talking about Morgana, of course,” Sylvia clarified, winking at Nick. “After all, she had quite the mommylicious transformation thanks to that mirror.”

Nick pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please… never say anything like that ever again,” he pleaded. He could die happy if he never had to hear the word “mommylicious” for the rest of his life.

Sylvia smirked, amused that she’d gotten under his skin.

“So that was it, right?” He cut her off before she could keep going. “Morgana played the role of your mommy, and punished you? Well, gee. That’s rough. But I guess you’ll just have to-”

“No, Daddy,” Sylvia interrupted, shaking her head. Her blue eyes were shining and she bit her lip playfully. Her eyes skipped over Nick like she was watching a jump rope. “YOU were the one who punished me for being a naughty girl…”

Of fucking course it would be him. Morgana would OBVIOUSLY have made him the one to carry out the punishment, why wouldn’t she?

“First off, Daddy, you held me down, and I was kicking and screaming!” Sylvia began, starting to drool a little. “Then because I was being such a little brat, you grabbed some rope, and then-”

“Okay, no, that’s enough, I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Nick cut her off immediately, slapping his hand over her mouth. He didn’t care that she was mumbling, or even that she licked his palm. The last thing he wanted was to hear a recounting about how he’d disciplined Sylvia while she was going around acting like his daughter and calling him “daddy”.

Not to mention that it was Sylvia.

And the worst part of all was the fact that Gina was in the hallway with him, smirking in amusement.

“Oh, come on, don’t stop her right before the good part!” Gina groaned, playfully socking him in the shoulder. “…Daddy.”

“Gina…” Nick shot her a look that said she should take this seriously. Gina feigned like she was considering it for about two seconds and then she smirked and stuck out her tongue.

Nick sighed. She was an absolute annoyance. Of course she was into something twisted like this. It was Gina, after all, she was probably even getting turned on.

He dropped his hand from Sylvia’s mouth.

“I think that’s enough of the story,” Nick said. “Can you please-”

“But Daddy!” Sylvia whined. “All that stuff WORKED in my dream! I wasn’t a bratty little girl anymore, I had been properly disciplined like a bad girl should be, and that inspired me to turn things around and be your good, obedient daughter!”

She batted her eyelashes. “That’s what you want, right Daddy?” She cooed. “For me to not be so bad, and be your good, obedient daughter?”

“I don’t want you to be my obedient anything,” Nick clarified testily. “Daughter or otherwise. Good, yes, but that doesn’t mean-”

“You should spank me!” Sylvia turned on her heel and leaned forward, shaking her trim dancer’s ass in his face. “A good spanking should knock some sense into me, and turn me into your good girl, Daddy! Don’t you think?”

She glanced at Gina for moral support, and Gina nodded eagerly.

“Gina, don’t encourage her,” Nick chastised, and Gina blushed bashfully and nodded her head. After all, as much as she liked where Sylvia was coming from, Nick still held her heart (and the keys to her cuffs) in his hand. She mouthed an apology to Sylvia who just rolled her eyes and huffed.

“You two are no fun,” Sylvia pouted, straightening up and turning back to the two of them. She crossed her arms and blew a fringe of hair out of her face. “I was just playing around a little.”

“Sylvia, this isn’t a joke,” Nick said. “This is serious. Morgana gave people a bunch of bad dreams. I’m not just going to sit back and do nothing about that. I want to help everyone if I can, and you playing around like this is absolutely not that.”

Sylvia stared at him quietly.

“But… I wasn’t joking around completely,” she said softly.

The sudden burst of sincerity in her voice caught Nick off-guard.

“What? What do you mean?” He asked, confused.

“I was serious,” she whispered, looking at him with watering eyes. “About the punishment thing. Don’t you see, Daddy? It could work. It really could!”

“Sylvia…” Nick stared at her in amazement, shocked that she would say something like that. “You can’t be serious. You actually want me to punish you?”

“Yes!” Sylvia nodded. “Morgana showed me! If I get punished by spankings and stuff like that, then I can be a good girl! I won’t be a bad person anymore!” Her voice was ****. She looked pleadingly at Nick, begging him to understand. “Don’t you see? This is the answer! I can be a good person, I can! And everyone will like me! You just have to punish me, Daddy!”

Nick sighed. Sylvia was so twisted. And it wasn’t even her fault, either. She’d become like this because Dakota had created her this way. It wasn’t like that had escaped him. He wasn’t completely naïve. Dakota had made her to have this twisted view of the world, seeing the people around her as demented puppets she could use as she pleased, without concern. And Sylvia was trying to change that aspect of herself, she really was.

But it wasn’t easy, given how she had begun.

Nick firmly opposed the line of thinking that said Sylvia wasn’t a person. He was certain that she had free will, and could think for herself. Dakota’s words and statements to the contrary didn’t matter as far as he was concerned.

The problem was that the road to her destination of being a good person was a long and difficult one to navigate, and she didn’t exactly have the best starting point. And now she was looking for a quick fix through something like this?

“Sylvia,” he said softly. “It’s not that easy. A few spankings won’t help you become a good girl.”

“But it worked for Gina!” Sylvia cried desperately. “You spanked her, and you held her, and you told her you loved her! You… you made her feel loved, and accepted… and now she’s good, right?”

“Hey!” Gina frowned. “I’m not that good! I’m still a rebel at heart!”

“Oh, please!” Sylvia snapped, sneering at the punk girl. “You think that just because you dress up in studded bracelets and black leather you’re not a big softy inside? You’re no rebel, Gina, you just like being punished. And you want Daddy to do the punishing. If Daddy asked, you’d do whatever he wanted like a good little girl should.”

Gina opened her mouth to rebut Sylvia’s accusation, but her voice died in her throat.

Because Sylvia wasn’t wrong. Maybe she wasn’t as bad of a girl as she claimed to be.

Is there anything wrong with that? A distant voice in the back of her mind asked, and a shiver went down her spine.

She was so distracted, she didn’t know if that shiver was from excitement or worry.

Meanwhile, Nick had been given a lot to think about too. He could hear the desperation in Sylvia’s voice, and he knew he should do something for her…

But he didn’t know what that something was.

“Sylvia…” He said weakly. “I don’t know how to make you feel loved and accepted,” he admitted. “I’m trying to understand you, I really am. But spanking won’t get you there. I can’t just turn you into Gina, you know.”

“…Yeah,” Sylvia sighed, looking down. “I know.”

It would be nice, though. If she could become someone else. Someone better. A good girl who could be what everyone wanted her to be.

Then she looked at Gina, and a great idea struck her.

“Wait!” She gasped. “That’s it! It was staring me right in the face the whole time!”

Nick eyed her warily. Her mood had turned on a dime, from sad and downtrodden to energized and excited, and to him that was a massive red flag. He could already tell she had some wild, zany idea up her sleeve.

“Sylvia, what are you thinking?” He asked, frowning.

“My transformation!” She exclaimed. “My veto! If I can’t be good on my own, then I can just **** myself to do it!”

She turned to Gina. “See? Gina’s got that transformation, Take the Clothes, Leave the Cannoli, right? It’s the one that’s subconsciously compelling her to be a good person! If I just take that with my Fuck the Voters transformation, then I’LL have that! How could I have been so dumb?” Sylvia laughed, slapping herself in the head.

“That, uh…” Gina wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not. To start with the fact that she couldn’t be sure if it would work, she also didn’t know if she wanted it to. After all, her transformation was a part of her, and she’d also come around a bit on the idea of doing good things (in spite of her proclamation not five minutes prior).

Did she really want someone to take it from her for the rest of the round? What would she revert to? She wasn’t even sure. But she knew it wouldn’t be anything good.

Nick had other, more serious issues.

“You can’t do that,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t use a transformation to turn you good, Sylvia, that’s insane.”

“Why not?” Sylvia demanded stubbornly. “You don’t get it, Daddy! This is the way! I can be a good, sweet person, the kind of girl that everybody likes! Then they’ll all want to be my friend, and they won’t want to eliminate me… I won’t… I won’t get punished…”

She sounded so scared by the end of her plea. But Nick didn’t waver.

“Don’t take Gina’s transformation,” he urged her. “Sylvia, this is just another trap from Dakota, don’t you get that? Her whole thing was that she didn’t think you were a person, remember? That your thoughts and feelings weren’t really your own, but just things she’d implanted into you. If you just use a transformation to turn yourself into the person that you think everyone wants you to be, aren’t just reinforcing that?”

Sylvia winced. On some level, she knew that Nick was right. Dakota would never accept a dodge like this one. She was just spinning her wheels.

But what else could she do?

“…Okay, Daddy,” she relented, hanging her head and sighing. “I won’t take Gina’s transformation, happy now?”

Nick was very much not happy. He was about as far from “happy” as it was possible to be at the moment. He was concerned. Sylvia wasn’t his daughter and he certainly didn’t think of her like she was, either. But she was important to him. In her own way, she’d helped him. He knew it was a little sick to be grateful for that, given the suffering and misery she’d spread in the process, but at the same time, he could also see that she genuinely did care.

She just had a twisted way of showing that she cared, which made everything even worse.

I need to talk to Dakota again, he thought, trying to push the terrible discussion they’d had a few days ago out of his mind. He wanted to think of Dakota as the woman he loved, the girl he’d known all through his childhood. He didn’t want her to be a monster any more than he wanted Sylvia to be a monster.

I need to get her to see how wrong this all is. How much pain it’s causing Sylvia to try to live up to these expectations while also trying to find herself, and how hard she’s working. Dakota has to see that she’s a real person.

Maybe Nick was incredibly naïve to think something like that was possible. But he wanted to believe that he could get Dakota to see reason.

“Daddy?” Sylvia looked at his troubled expression, her eyes watering. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, Sylvia,” Nick said, forcing a smile to his face. “Everything’s fine.”

Also, he needed to see Dakota in order to get her to change the term Sylvia called him. He knew that there had to be something she would let slide.

Shaking his head and regaining his composure, Nick filed “speaking to Dakota” in the back of his head, along with some other stuff to do later. He needed to focus right now on mitigating as much of the damage Morgana had inflicted as possible.

And it certainly wasn’t going to be easy.

“I’m going to go look for Dani,” he said. “I think she’s probably going to be the one who took the bad dreams from Morgana the hardest. I don’t want the two of them to have any bad blood between them, given they seem to be doing better.

He’d noticed the way they seemed a little closer after taking Mary’s cooking classes. That was a positive connection he wanted to foster. Morgana needed more friends, and Dani needed more positivity in her life in general.

“Actually, I think Dani seemed pretty okay with her dream,” Gina noted.

“Really?” Nick was caught completely off-guard.

Sylvia nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, really,” Gina said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, she was definitely bothered by it. But she didn’t blame Morgana or anything like that, or get mad at her. I thought that was a pretty big improvement on her part.”

Nick couldn’t help but smile. That was good. …Sure, yes, it sucked that Dani had been bothered by the dream, but if she didn’t blame Morgana for it that was a positive at least. Still, he needed to make sure she was alright. “Are you sure I don’t need to look for her? She does have that transformation.”

Gina shook her head. “She actually left smiling, so I think she’s good.”

Nick sighed in relief. Dani was the one who he had been most concerned about. But it was good that she was okay. “So who was bothered the most, then?” He asked. He wanted to know who he should be talking to in order to help them work through their feelings.

Gina and Sylvia looked at each other.

“Dawn, maybe?” Sylvia suggested. “She wasn’t at breakfast this morning.”

“I stayed a little later and she was here,” Gina said, glancing at Nick. “Last time I saw her, she was talking with Rose.”

She licked her lips, remembering what had happened right after that.

“Oh, yeah, Rose is gone,” Nick nodded. “Maybe they went off to do something together? I mean, they’re kind of friends… wait!”

He suddenly realized who probably had the worst dream out of everyone here.

“We need to go find Mary,” he said, frowning. “Knowing Morgana… or, I guess, the evil Morgana… she might have showed Mary something really bad.”

Gina and Sylvia glanced at each other. The tension that flashed across their faces told Nick all he needed to know.

He turned and went to go find Mary, leaving the two girls behind. Or they could tag along with him if they wanted, he didn’t really care either way. Mary occupied his thoughts completely at this point.

“I’ll go with you!” Gina chirped, skipping playfully after Nick. She glanced over her shoulder at Sylvia. “Wanna come?”

Sylvia tried to smile, but it wasn’t a very good one. She shook her head. “No… I think I’m just going to wander around for a little bit, honestly… I have a lot of stuff to think about.”

If Gina was a bit more empathetic she might have been able to tell that Sylvia wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the moment. But she wasn’t the most perceptive girl out there, and she had a lot of other stuff on her mind at the moment. So she left Sylvia alone to her own devices and headed off after Nick to go find Mary.