It was time to pay the piper. I’d used up all three of my limited actions yesterday and needed to be fed, thus I once again found myself sitting with Margot in my lap. This time we were in the living room instead of her dorm room which had basically just been a bedroom. However that didn’t really make things that much better for me.

“Why do you always insist on sitting on my lap?” I said. Sighing as I found myself staring at the back of Margot’s head.

“B-, Because?”

“Because? Because what? ‘Because’ isn’t an answer on its own. Rather, why don’t you ever let me just feed from your arm or something?” I asked. Watching as Margot ‘helpfully’ moved aside her hair to give me better access to nape of her neck.

“We-, well you know I’m afraid of needles and stuff so that’d be a bit scary, wouldn't it?”

“We could get a blind fold.” I said.

The woman fidgeted in my lap. Giving my thigh a pinch.

“Th-, that’s s-, super inappropriate, you know.” said Margot.

“Eh?!”

“Asking a young woman to wear a blindfold while you sink your teeth into her.”

“Wha-?! W-, Wait a minute that’s not how I meant it!” I said feeling my own face beginning to redden. Thankful that she couldn’t see me from where she was sitting.

“Then how d-, did you mean it?” said Margot.

“I just figured it wouldn’t...You know what forget it. Forget it. If you prefer I take the blood from your neck that’s fine with me. But, why do you have to sit on my lap why we do it?”

Margot paused the game she was playing.

“Well, beyond the very obvious height difference would make doing it standing up uncomfortable, and well...You ‘do’ have a very comfy lap.” said Margot.

“W-, Was that last one a joke?” I asked. Surprised to find myself being made fun of by the normally timid young miss. Wondering how it was that ‘I’ was somehow the one on the backstep in this situation.

“Maybe...Maybe not. I’m surprised you’d never gotten a chance to see for yourself.”

“Tch...Fine. Let’s stop about this you can go back to your game.” I said. Lowering my head and sinking my teeth into the milky flesh in front of me.

I drank my fill and then brusquely pushed Margot off of me so I could turn my lower body back on again instead of leaving myself dead from the waist down. I sighed and then fell back into the seat I was sitting on.

After three or so feedings, I’d gotten used to the experience enough that I no longer felt the need to walk away and have some alone time. I watched Margot play her game for a bit before a certain nagging thought made me create a few hyper accurate solid-light constructs in my room. Copies of my body. I had one copy sit in the lap of another. Then I added some neural feedback to see what the experience was like.

The end result was me palming my own face. Wondering what in the nine hells I thought I was doing. Wishing I hadn’t ended up learning such an utterly useless fact. Apparently the woman was right, my lap was comfortable. Preternaturally so…

I wondered which of my former-selves was responsible. Was this the influence of incubus-me or the me that once spent a short but meaningful five hundred years as a haunted teddy-bear?

It didn’t matter. I decided to dutifully add the knowledge of my magically comfy lap into my log so as to avoid forgetting about it and ending up embarrassing myself like this again if I erased my memory of this incident a few billion years down the line.

*************************************************************************************************************

Margot sat on her new couch next to Monty. Oblivious to the thoughts going through the aeon’s head. However, she wasn’t really paying attention game either. She was in one of the more grind-y areas of the game.

She’d run through the area shooting frog and bug-faced baddies. Then she’d return to the mission giving npc to hand in the quest items and get that sweet, sweet xp. Then she’d ask for another mission that would be of roughly the same kill “x” number of baddies, collect “y” number of items format.

Rinse and repeat till she hit the minimum level requirements for doing one of the game’s story missions and maybe earned enough in-game currency for a better gun or cool skin.

It wasn’t really a segment that she needed to think about to do. Her brain and hands were basically running on auto-pilot. Margot’s mind was instead focused on her new apartment and her new life.

The apartment had been decent enough when they’d rented it. After Monty’s fantastical (possibly lease violating) modifications the apartment was now basically the kind of high-tier suit one usually read about celebrity’s living in.

There were three floors with over twenty rooms. There were two master bedrooms, to luxurious bathrooms, one restaurant-quality kitchen, a dining room, a tea room, several guest rooms, a study, a regular living room for hosting guests, and a gaming room just for her.

Margot’s bedroom was now the size of an upscale studio apartment and came complete with a walk-in closet. The bedroom on its own was big enough that she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with all that space. Never mind the rest of the apartment.

Everything was tastefully decorated. Elegantly constructed in a fashion that looked like some blending of the late Victorian area and the far-flung future. Everything in the house from the fixtures, to the furniture, to the appliances was constructed of various combinations of wood, crystal, and chrome.

Cute, round-bodied, robots silently patrolled the halls and rooms cleaning and maintaining everything.

While only the ground floor had windows because the rest of the apartment existed solely in the apartment’s grounded subspace the other floors came equipped with moving paintings that acted as windows giving Margot a view of various places in the world at large.

Overall, their new living space was extravagant to the point that even her time back with the Wallaces looked like a memory of impoverishment in comparison.

Which made it all the more ironic that when she looked at her and Monty’s shared account this morning they were kind of super broke.

“Hey, Monty?”

“...Yeah?” said the man at her side. His green-eyed gaze unfocused in a way that told her he was probably watching something, or looking at something, or reading something using the computer in his head.

“I think we should probably think about doing another job...Besides the rent money and the money we’ve aside for bills we’ve got twenty-two dollars to our name.”

“Ah, good thinking. I’ll leave the choice of jobs to you.”

“Er...O-, Okay. If you’re fine with me choosing again.”