His gifts are getting more invasive and more lavish.

The new whip is rust red, and it feels tainted by his desire. Aradia likes heavier whips, anyway.

He likes the lowblood in her, physically weak and always overheated. It's lucky he's too bashful to send undergarments, but even the boots he chose were insultingly delicate. She perma-lent them to Sollux, who liked the color.

It's cloying, the way he underestimates her, and sometimes it gets under her skin. There were moments during her digs when she remembered him, thought about how useful it would be to have that slippery STRENGTH at her disposal, lugging rocks around and lifting pillars. Then she would feel like she had lost some invisible game against herself.

He's nothing to her, nothing, not an enemy and not a servant. She could steal a packbeast if she needed any more pillars moved. (He would never get her a packbeast, but he will probably get her a horse.)

Sometimes, in the middle of the day, when her recuperacoon feels too small, she thinks about cracking open that thin skin of his with a real whip. She sees herself standing on those clammy hands with a real pair of boots. It wouldn't be the first time she hurt a highblood. Would this highblood ask her nicely to hurt him? Would he still appreciate her when the pain and the cold viciousness began? Is that her own desire, or is his desire taking over her thoughts? She hopes it's all him, but what kind of troll is she, if she wants to disclaim her own cruelty?

His next gift is eye paint, and she flushes it down the load gaper. She takes her own paints, plebeian and garish, and paints hieroglyphs down her cheeks. She sends a picture with a virus attached - a relic, not one of Sollux's slick new inventions. If she's right, it should allow him to view the photograph for seven seconds, until his computer melts. Not enough to decipher the hieroglyphics, not unless he's smarter and quicker than she gives him credit for.

The next letter she gets is in Ancient Alternian, but there is a new camera attached as well, so she tears it up unread. She sends back a flower in a glass jar, one of her newest finds.

All he sends back is a picture of himself, swollen and covered in hives. The flower worked perfectly, she writes, and grins, so what's your next move?