Rosalyn didn’t wake up in the woods. She woke up to a bitter, chocolatey scent, like coffee beans that had been roasted too long. As soon as she registered her sense of smell, it was as if her hands remembered that they’d been shredded, palms aflame. She took in a sharp breath between her teeth, reminding herself that she’d had it far worse with the wizard demon, that she could get through this.

“There’s a sleepy girl,” Rhizi cooed from somewhere nearby, her voice floating through the air lazily.

Or perhaps Rosalyn’s ears were lazy, taking in the world around her too slowly. It didn’t matter. What mattered was clawing her way back into consciousness. She blinked, eyelids sluggish, the comforting sight of the chat window still there. She wondered how long she’d been streaming for at this point—it was insane to her that people had stuck around while she was unconscious. If KC was at her house, maybe he was talking to people from her webcam? He must be, if he were communicating with the viewers and attempting to have them help her.

She hoped it was working. But she had more pressing things to think about. Like her deranged jailer.

Rosalyn pried her tongue from the roof of her mouth and sat up as slowly as she could to avoid all of her blood rushing to her head. It didn’t work very well, her vision still spinning a bit before she managed to focus on Rhizi’s angular face, far too close to her.

The demon was in the cage with her.

“What?” Rosalyn snapped, or at least tried to, the word coming out a little slurred.

Rhizaid simply chuckled, and reached out, patting her head like a dog. “You’re so feisty for something so tiny.”

“I’m not tiny,” Rosalyn shot back, reaching up to bat the demon’s hand away from her head. As her arm passed in front of her face, she froze at the sight of iridescent blue. Her hands were bandaged with a satiny fabric, wound around her palms and wrists like fingerless gloves, the ends tied into neat little knots halfway up her tricep.

She was suddenly very aware of the sensations along the rest of her body, and looked down at a garment of the same fabric adorning her body. It was essentially a romper, made out of the shimmery blue silk. The shorts went down to just above the knee, the billowy fabric cinching in at the thigh and creating a poof effect. She blinked at the ridiculous sack-like thing, noting the same poof around her upper arms, sloping up her collarbone where the fabric wound loosely around her neck. It was shapeless and weird, but at least it was comfortable.

A blush crept up her cheeks, however, when she realized how she must have gotten into the thing. “Did you...dress me?”

“Your coordination is terrible,” Rhizaid replied with a flick of her wrist. “And you needed rest.”

Rosalyn wrinkled her nose, but she was honestly glad to have missed it. Getting out of her other clothes and into these would have been difficult with the pain in her hands, not to mention it would have been hard not to look at herself and accidentally flash her bits on stream to tens of thousands of people.

She resisted the urge to close her eyes and watch the chat go nuts talking about missing RosieRainbow’s boobs on stream. How would KC handle that one?

“Now, come-come,” Rhizaid said, and leaned forward, something sparkling in her hands.

“Hey, hey, fuck, no,” Rosalyn replied, backing away from the gem-encrusted collar in the demon’s hands. There were multiple colours inlaid into a silvery metal, most of them blue to match the outfit. “I’m not your pet.”

Rhizaid smiled gently. “You are.” She lashed out with lightning speed, snapping the collar around Rosalyn’s neck before she could scramble away. “I scooped you from the wild, because you’re one of a kind, and now you are a part of my collection. You’ll have a much better life here. When I found you, you were wearing rags and covered in piss. I take very good care of my pets.”

“Rags is a little harsh,” Rosalyn muttered, shaking her head. “Thanks for the clothes, but like, I have shit to do here. I can’t just sit in a cage and look pretty for you.”

“You’re right,” Rhizi quipped, and in another one of those super-fast movements, there was another snick as she attached a chain to the collar. “You’ve got to look pretty outside of the cage, too.”

Rosalyn’s knee-jerk reaction was to tell her to go fuck herself, but she remembered KC’s suggestion, to keep her eyes open and look around everywhere thoroughly. If she got to go out and walk around—even on a leash, a damn leash—then she could get a good lay of the land and it would be monitored. Rhizi didn’t know that a ton of people were recording every move they made, scrutinizing every detail to figure out how to get her out of here.

She wasn’t keen on living as a demon’s pet until KC could help her, though. If she were stuck in here, she could be proactive and try to help herself, and hopefully in entertaining ways. If there was a silver lining to this insane adventure, at least she was giving her viewers some good content.

“Where we going, then?” she asked with a sigh.

Rhizaid stood up, and motioned around her head. “I will show off my collection, and then I have a special visitor.” She stepped out of the cage, keeping a tight grip on the leash but leaving enough give so that Rosalyn could comfortably walk beside her.

She took her time, looking around in every direction, at every nook and cranny. They were in a fairly wide hallway, the walls all intricately-carved pale stone with golden braziers lighting the space. The carvings looked almost like tribal designs, but not of any particular thing, just swirls and swoops.

“This is...” Rosalyn trailed off as she looked down the row of cages.

They seemed endless. Shiny, silvery bars, perfect squares like hers, encasing a creature each. She knew she didn’t have a frame of reference for what was considered rare, but the creatures were alien to her, so they all looked like rare prized things. They were all floofed up just like her, in satiny bows and glittering collars. None were particularly humanoid, and none said anything out loud, so she wasn’t sure if they could communicate with her. It would have been handy if any of them could, especially one close to her cage so they could speak without Rhizaid around.

Rosalyn stopped next to what looked like a furry marshmallow, almost the size and shape of a Pomeranian, but just with giant glittering eyes on the side. If it had a nose and/or a mouth, they were buried beneath fluffy pale pink fuzz.

Despite her weird situation, Rosalyn couldn’t help but gawk at it. “So cute,” she whispered, voice soft.

“I call it Smeesh,” Rhizaid said, leaning in. “It’s cute but doesn’t do much. Never seen anything else like it, though. When I first found it, I thought it was a strange flower, because it was curled up in some vines.”

“Smeesh?” Rosalyn cocked a brow. “Not like, Fluffy?”

“Shall I call you Tiny?” Rhizi shot back.

Rosalyn jutted out her chin. “Point taken,” she muttered, and then cast another glance at the ball of fur. She wished she could reach in and pet it. It looked so soft, so snuggly. She was willing to bet that cuddling Smeesh would take at least a tenth of her stress away. At least.

“Come-come,” Rhizaid tittered, jiggling the chain. She didn’t tug it, just wiggled it, which was nice, at least.

Rosalyn tore herself away from the bars and reminded herself that she was essentially recon at the moment, and needed to keep her head on a swivel. She tried not to jerk her movements too much, and wondered if the game screen was captured from her eyeballs or just where her head was facing. Were they able to see her blink? Would it follow the movement of her eyes if she darted them around? Or did she have to face a certain way, like a video game avatar?

She couldn’t exactly ask at this juncture, and didn’t want to risk that it wasn’t her eyeballs, so she made a point to turn her whole head in a wide arc to catch as much of the area as possible.

After a few more odd reptilian creatures, a clicking sound stopped her dead in her tracks.

“Ohmygod,” she choked out, a familiar pungent scent assaulting her nostrils.

It was one of the monsters that had squeezed the life out of her. A smaller one, but definitely one of them. Seeing it in the flickering light of the sconces was a heady experience. She’d seen the pack of them in the moonlight, but in her fear and trying to flee and fight it was a blur of tentacles and slimy noise. Being able to safely stare at this one made her head spin.

“Ah, I’ll admit that this one maybe isn’t as rare as some,” Rhizaid admitted, her hooves leaving heavy thuds as she turned towards the cage in question. “But it was alone, which is an opportunity that I couldn’t resist. Zal would shit his robes if he knew I had it.”

Rosalyn’s mind whirled, and she punched her way through her flashbacks and fear to make the snap decision to play dumb and hopefully glean some information. “Zal?”

“Zalrimith,” the demon replied, as if that clarified anything. “You were wandering dangerously close to his lands when I found you. Or, well, what he claims is his lands. If he had his way, the old cock would claim all of Rol’Guul.” She rolled her eyes.

Rosalyn couldn’t help but wonder how it was that Rhizi had met the terrifying wizard demon and was being so casual about it. Were other demons perhaps immune to his magic? Or had she just never been on the receiving end of his brand of torture?

“Anyway, it’s a gross little thing, isn’t it?” Rhizaid drawled. “I have no idea where the slime comes from, but every morning the floor’s covered with it. I kept trying to clean it up but then it got these awful bumps on the bottom of its tentacles there so I decided to just let it be.” She wagged a finger at the creature, cooing, “Yes, you are a stinky monster, aren’t you?”

Rosalyn’s stomach turned. The scent wasn’t as intense as when she’d been buried in the things, feeling that slime all over her body, but it was still unpleasant. She tried to breathe through her mouth and focus. “So you took it from that Zal dude? Won’t he want it back?”

“If he knew I had it, then yes,” Rhizaid replied. “But this one wandered so far from his tower, I couldn’t help myself. This world is not an easy one, lots of dangers. It is small and was far away from the main pack, which means it likely would have been killed anyway. I assume that’s what he believes happened to it. It has been a terribly long time I’ve had this thing. It looks like they grow very slowly.”

Thirty moon cycles for optimal breeding conditions, the wizard—Zalrimith, apparently—had said, right? Rosalyn tried to remember everything he’d explained to her during that terrifying conversation. She couldn’t remember how many moon cycles the gestation was, but it was a while. Which was months, right? One moon cycle was a month? She wasn’t sure, and even if she was, it could be something totally different here. Some things were coded to be like real life—such as all of the demons speaking English—but things like time could have been written as a totally different construct.

In any case, what she was thinking was that these things probably grew and matured very slowly if their gestation periods were so long. But she wasn’t about to tell Rhizi that. She had a feeling that keeping her involvement with Zalrimith quiet was in her best interests. Not to mention, depending on how long it had been, it was possible that this had been the baby just before the one that had been trampled when Rosalyn showed up. Which maybe explained why the wizard was extra angry over losing another baby.

She wondered what he would do if he did find out that there was one here, alive and well, in a cage. Picturing Rhizaid writhing on the ground in pain didn’t comfort her. The demon had snatched her, yes, but hadn’t caused her harm on purpose. Zal had been brutal and awful and she really didn’t want to ever see him again.

“I don’t like it,” she finally said, to break the silence, and snapped Rhizaid out of some kind of her own deep thoughts. “Can we go?”

“Yes, yes, we need to get ready for our guest.” The demon jiggled the chain again, and picked up the pace, her hooves suddenly seeming light as a feather in a brisk trot.

Rosalyn marvelled at how at one moment she’d be all heavy thuds, and the next she was like a ballerina. She had to learn more about the physiology of these demons.

But first, she had to remember to keep looking around.

She tore her eyes away from Zal’s monster, and continued the arc of her head, trying to look innocently curious about the space she was in. I need to ask about the eyes vs. face camera thing before I end up stiff as fuck, she thought as they finally reached the end of the hallway.

Rhizaid simply stood there and waited, and then a section of stone that had looked seamless a moment before suddenly sunk in on itself and moved to the side, revealing an expansive room with a high ceiling. Rosalyn gawked as they entered, staring up at a chandelier the size of her car, full of glittering crystals that reflected dancing firelight from within.

The ceiling above it swooped gracefully, with accents of gold amongst richly painted gem tones, sapphire and emerald and a deep, gorgeous amethyst. She followed the lines of the ceiling down to large pillars of the same stone from the hall, curling designs carved all the way down, stopping at a charcoal-grey shiny stone floor. It might have been marble, but Rosalyn wasn’t very good with rock identification.

Rhizaid’s hooves clopped loudly on the floor, and Rosalyn practically jogged to keep up. She’d thought the stone would be cold on her bare feet, but somehow it was warm to the touch, not even room temperature but warm.

“This way, pet,” Rhizi quipped, turning sharply to the right.

Rosalyn nearly staggered to keep up when she took in the opulent seating area. It looked like something out of a hedonism resort, all satiny pillows and blankets draped across the whole one end of the space. Little tables sat low to the ground within reach of some of the larger poofy pillows, full of bowls and plates of food.

Her stomach growled at the sight, even though she couldn’t tell what the food even was. It looked like berries, meat, maybe vegetables too, but nothing she’d ever seen in her life or could identify.

“Don’t worry, you can eat shortly,” Rhizi said, whisking them over to stand at the edge of the glorified blanket fort. “Once the King arrives and begins to feast, so shall we.”

Rosalyn’s heart skipped a beat. The King!