She was tall.
John knew she was going to be tall. He had typed the height. Six foot nine, he had written it himself, he had no right to be surprised. And yet standing in the same room as her, with her eyes open and her voice still hanging in the air between them, he was surprised. He was surprised and he was scared and he was something else that he was going to deal with later.
"I — yeah, so," he started.
Marrianetta said nothing. She stood with her hands at her sides and her dark red eyes on him and waited.
"Cool. So. I'm John. Which you probably — I mean you were just created so you might not — but yeah. John. That's me." He pointed at himself. Immediately regretted pointing at himself. "I'm the lord. Of this place. Which I built. Just now. Recently."
She continued to say nothing.
"The office is — I like the office. Good room. I chose it because it has a desk, which I think communicates seriousness, which I have. Serious. I'm very —" He stopped. He looked at her face. She was not reacting to any of what he was saying in any way that suggested it was having the intended effect. "I just wanted to say welcome. To the palace. My palace. Our palace. Well, mine, technically, but you live here so — I mean not our palace like — I'm not saying —"
He ran out of words. Not because he'd said everything he meant to say but because his brain had looked at the situation from all angles and concluded that language was not going to save him here. She was six foot nine. She was wearing crimson silk with no bra and he knew she was wearing no bra because he had specified it in a form field twenty minutes ago and was now confronting the consequences of that decision in real time. Her nails were two feet long. Her eyes had not moved off his face once.
John melted.
He melted the way he always melted when a real woman looked at him with any degree of directness, which was completely, structurally, like a wax candle someone had left too close to a radiator. Every cool thing he'd been trying to say drained out through the floor.
He said nothing.
She said nothing.
The office was very quiet.
Then she bowed.
It was a deep bow, formal, practiced, one hand coming across her body in a gesture that would have looked perfectly dignified if not for what the motion did to the silk dress. The fabric pulled across her chest as she bent forward and her nipples pressed clearly through the thin crimson material and John looked at the wall with the focused desperation of a man trying to read text that wasn't there.
She straightened. "Has your servant been given a name?"
"Uhh," John said. He was still looking at the wall. "Marrianetta?"
He said it like a question. It came out uncertain, which was not the energy he'd been going for. He forced himself to look back at her face. "Marrianetta. That's — if that's not good then you can pick your own, it's totally f—"
Her hand moved.
Two fingers, the nails curling with slow precision around his chin, tilting his face upward. Her touch was cool and deliberate and her eyes were about eight inches above his because of the height difference and she was looking down at him with an expression that he could not classify but that was doing something significant to his cardiovascular system.
She made a sound. Low, drawn from somewhere in the back of her throat, half breath and half tone, unambiguously sexual in a way that made his vision briefly pixelate.
"Marrianetta," she repeated, and in her mouth the name became something else entirely. Something that sounded like it had always existed and had merely been waiting to be discovered. "That is the finest name in all of existence." She let the last word sit for a moment. "My darling lord."
She released his chin.
John stood very still.
"Is there anything," she said, and her voice dropped a register in a way that was clearly intentional, "we might do to ease your stress?" Her eyes moved downward, then back up, and she made a motion with her hand that was unambiguous, her hand made a hole as she pressed her tongue against her cheek in a blowjob motion.
John's mouth opened.
"That won't — I'm fine. I'm good. I need to look some things over first. Logistics." He gestured vaguely at the floating interface behind him. "Administrative."
Marrianetta straightened to her full height, which put her eyes somewhere near the ceiling as far as John's nervous system was concerned, and then she did something he hadn't expected. She clapped once, a clean crisp sound, and her expression shifted into something that was almost cheerful, if cheerful had been filtered through a sensibility that found medieval weaponry beautiful.
"Shall I be given a living quarters?"
He blinked at the subject change. "Yeah. Yes. Obviously. You live here."
"A closet will suffice," she said, and she meant it. "I require very little space."
The words connected with something in John's brain. A closet. She'd said a closet was fine. He had fifty-one thousand rooms and seven thousand five hundred bedrooms and she was offering to live in a closet, and something about that was both deeply sad and an enormous missed opportunity.
"Follow me," he said.
He led her down two corridors and through a connecting gallery before finding a room that felt right. Not one of the bedrooms, those were enormous and he'd figure out that arrangement in his own time and at his own pace, but one of the larger miscellaneous spaces, a room that the scan had probably filed under empty/unnamed, thirty-eight thousand of them available, this one sitting off a secondary corridor on the first floor with good ceiling height and an arched window that looked into the interior courtyard.
He pulled up the tablet interface — still floating, still the expanded workspace — and scanned the room.
822.3 square feet.
"This is your room," he said. "It's empty right now but—"
"I do not mind," Marrianetta said, standing in the center of the space and looking around with those dark red eyes moving slowly across the walls. "I assumed I would spend most nights elsewhere." She paused. "In my master's quarters." Another pause. "In his bed."
She said it as a statement of logistical fact.
"Yeah," John said, looking at the interface. "Eventually. Probably. We'll... — yeah." He pulled up the room generation option he'd noticed earlier, a sub-function that let him describe a purpose and have the space configured accordingly. He'd used broad generation for the palace itself but this was finer work, a single room, a person's space.
He typed: Art room and living quarters for a being who finds beauty in torture and bloodwork. Victorian aesthetic. Functional as both studio and residence.
He hit generate.
The room changed.
It didn't reconstruct violently — the walls didn't collapse and rebuild, the floor didn't crack and reset. It was smoother than that, more like the room revealing what it had always meant to be underneath. Dark wood paneling spread across the walls. Shelving appeared, and on the shelving, arranged with the precision of a collector who had very specific opinions: doll sets, porcelain and articulated and dressed in tiny formal costumes, at least thirty of them, each one slightly unsettling in its own specific way. Wardrobes materialized along the far wall — twenty of them, floor to ceiling, dark-lacquered handles, clearly full. A vanity with a mirror framed in dark iron scrollwork. And in the center of the room, arranged on the stone floor with the aesthetic intentionality of a gallery installation: medieval torture equipment.
An iron maiden, hinged open, its interior spikes cleaned and almost decorative in their arrangement. A rack, scaled to proportion. A chair with restraints, elegant in a terrible way. A table with implements laid out on dark velvet. All of it spotless. All of it displayed the way someone who loved something displayed it.
Marrianetta went completely still.
Then she walked forward, slowly, her nails trailing along the edge of the rack with a sound like rain on metal, her head tilting as she took in each piece. She stopped in front of the iron maiden and looked at it for a long moment with an expression of pure unironic appreciation that John recognized because he had made the same face looking at Zero, figures.
She turned.
Her expression was open in a way it hadn't been yet. Not soft — softness was not in her design — but unguarded, genuinely affected, the look of someone who had been given something they actually wanted.
"My master," she said, and the words carried a weight they hadn't before.
She crossed the room in four long strides and was in front of him before he fully registered that she'd moved. Up close she was overwhelming in a way that the office encounter hadn't quite prepared him for, the silk, the height, the smell of something floral and faintly metallic, the two-foot nails resting with deliberate gentleness on either side of his shoulders.
"You must accept your payment," she said.
"I really don't need —"
"My master." Her eyes were serious. Then something shifted in them, a heat that had been present since she opened her eyes but was now making no effort to stay contained. Her lips parted. She looked at him the way the iron maiden looked at potential.
Something in John's body had been conducting its own separate assessment of the situation since approximately the moment she'd bowed in the office and arrived at a conclusion that conflicted with his stated position on payments.
She looked down. She looked back up. She smiled, and it was the kind of smile that knew things.
"JUST GO AHEAD AND FUCK ME!"