Lemon Warning! This chapter starts with a bit of smut. It is clearly marked with -Lemon Starts Here- and -Lemon Ends Here- so you can skip it if you so desire.
Chapter 16 – Relations
-Lemon Starts Here-
Momo moaned. It was an unabashedly lewd sound that Rylia had come to adore since their first few ‘encounters’ together. This time was special, though, as it came not at the tip of a toy or Momo’s own efforts, but at the movements of Rylia’s fingers and lips as she caressed Momo’s folds and gently sucked a nipple.
Getting here had taken time. Mostly, Rylia thought, as Momo had felt the need to satisfy some level of propriety. It had been silly in a way, given how quickly they’d fallen into mutual masturbation sessions, which had in turn given way to experimenting with the Erotic Delights toy line even before they’d started dating. Even so, while the original Rylia might not quite have understood, Hazel got it enough that she’d never pressured Momo for more than she was ready to give.
Flirted outrageously? Absolutely.
Tempted mercilessly? Of course.
But she’d never pressured Momo, letting the other woman give ground only at her own pace. That pace had still been…fast. By non-Asari standards at least. Yet it had been a steady series of escalations, not a single deep plunge, and that seemed to be enough for Momo. Enough, at least, that she’d been the first one to break the rule about ‘touching’ that had been silently established by Rylia. She had, in the middle of a makeout session, hesitated for an instant before working her hand under Rylia’s pants and exploring her own folds.
The action had taken Rylia by surprise, but it had never been her that slowed their advance, and after she’d gotten over nearly cumming from the action, had initiated her own slow assault. One that, as she’d slowly stripped Momo’s clothes and worked steadily over every inch of her body except her most sensitive bits, had given the human woman more than enough time to pump the breaks.
Momo hadn’t done so, and now Rylia stopped caressing and plunged into moist heat with her fingers. Momo’s back arched and her hips practically left the bed as the long buildup resulted in her cumming just from that single rough thrust. Grinning and already knowing from their toy sessions that Momo was very close to truly multi-orgasmic, Rylia nipped a nipple and used her thumb to gently circle Momo’s clit. Aftershocks shook her lover, and Momo’s hands reflexively went from the back of Rylia’s head to gripping the bedsheets.
Rylia had no intention whatsoever of letting up, giving Momo only a few seconds to recover before she replaced her lips with her free hand and began kissing and nibbling her way down Momo’s tight abs. She was going to make absolutely certain that the girl wanted to come back again…and again…and again, now that she’d gotten a first taste…
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… … …
“This seems like a…questionable…form of exercise.”
Rylia giggled at the expression and blush on Kara’s face, even as she idly spun around one of the poles she’d had installed in the private gym. She was fully clothed and wasn’t running through one of her stripping routines, but her gym clothes were admittedly rather provocative by human standards. Nor was it really possible to ‘pole dance’ without it looking a bit sensual. Well, not with a body like Rylia’s, anyway.
Still, it actually was a legitimate form of exercise. Even among humans, let alone for Asari. The basics were a super-common Asari exercise, almost like Tai Chi for humans, only a fair bit more mainstream. Which, come to think of it, probably explained a bit about how so many Asari became strippers. Not that the exercise version was particularly lewd, focusing on a solid balance of moves that legitimately worked amazingly well as a full-body workout that built strength, flexibility, endurance, and coordination. The truth was that only swimming was better general exercise for Asari…which was an actual fact that had let Rylia lure in Momo and Kara.
“Oh, come on, Kara. What I’m going to show you is literally something Asari children are taught. It really is a great general-fitness routine. Which you agreed you needed to keep up! Besides, its fun. Of course, if you want to learn the sexy version, I’ll happily teach it to you after you get the basic exercise version down!”
Kara blushed even deeper and rapidly shook her head ‘no.’
“Pity, you’d look amazing doing some of my routines! Still, we’ll stick to the exercise version! Now come on, you two, grab a pole and I’ll walk you through the basics!”
Momo didn’t hesitate to move forward and take the pole to the left of Rylia, causing Kara to more reluctantly move to take the one on the right. Rylia grinned but refrained from teasing. She genuinely wanted Kara to enjoy this, not regret agreeing to try it.
“Alright! So, basics of basics! Stand to one side of the pole and grab it with your dominant hand, whichever that is for you. Now, to do even the most basic spins, you start up on your toes to get the most height possible…”
Despite some initial embarrassment, Kara would come back for more, after realizing that it actually was a fairly fun way to exercise and gave a solid full-body workout. Momo, on the other hand, would ask for some private sessions to learn the ‘sexy’ version, which Rylia was positively thrilled about!
… … …
Rylia was seriously nervous. In fact, she was mentally working through some anti-anxiety tricks from her Hazel self. Reasonably, she personally thought, as she waited in the spaceport lounge. After all, she was about to physically meet with the original Rylia’s mother. Telefia T’aani was hardly a scary woman, and Rylia had spoken to her a couple of times over the extranet since the merger of Hazel and Rylia had happened. The truth was, though, that she’d felt like a guilty imposter every time she did so.
She knew it wasn’t quite true. Despite the ‘dominant’ mind winning out being Hazel’s, everything that Rylia had been was still here. It had been a true merging, not a hostile takeover, to the point that she still had many of Rylia’s habits and idiosyncrasies alongside Hazel’s. When it came to Rylia’s mother, though…it was complicated. Half of her felt nothing but affection for a mother who’d genuinely been a great parent. The other half, unfortunately, completely rejected any notion that this was her mother. Hazel’s human mom had been just as awesome as Telefia was, after all.
Perhaps that wouldn’t have been too big an issue, really.
If, you know, not for the fact that Asari were touch telepaths and family members regularly did shallow melds.
Forcing herself to calm down wasn’t a winning strategy! She needed to actually calm down. Worse, she knew she was being stupid. Rylia was old enough that they hardly melded every time they met, and it would be easy to avoid it. At least at first. Hopefully, by the time it happened, she would have readjusted. She just really wished that her ‘mother’ hadn’t decided to surprise her with a visit out of the blue.
A little warning would have been nice!
Sighing, she was surprised when her body instinctively relaxed upon spotting her ‘mother’ coming out of a shuttle. Well, if the reflexes were still there, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all? She just had to remember that she was still Rylia! Just…Rylia plus! Yeah, that was the way to think of it. She’d just gotten a kickass upgrade!
… … …
“Oh! You must be Momo! My darling daughter has had a lot to say about you! You’re just as beautiful as she described!”
Momo blinked as she found herself wrapped up in a hug, lifted slightly, then swung out at arm’s length to be examined. The teasing smile on Telefia T’aani’s face was so familiar that Momo was abruptly certain where at least part of Rylia’s personality had come from. Still, she’d gotten used to Rylia already, so this wasn’t enough to throw her off.
“Yes, that’s me. You must be Rylia’s mother. Would you prefer Telefia? Or Ms. T’aani?”
Telefia finally let her go and smiled broadly.
“Telefia is fine, dear! You’ve been making my Rylia happy, so be as familiar as you want! Imagine, my daughter managing to land herself a human! I’m so proud! Even more so than I am of the new toys! Even if I do so love the premium models Rylia sent me!”
That threw Momo for a momentary loop. Yes, she’d gotten somewhat used to the idea that Asari were more…sexually open…as a species. But the idea that Rylia had sent her mother sex toys was just a bit too mind boggling for her to compute for a moment. It must have shown on her face, as Telefia laughed.
“Oh my, that’s nearly the same expression my dear Sulilus gave me from time to time! Though a much more expressive version! Turian flanges aren’t quite as mobile as human faces, even if you can still read a lot from them!”
Momo’s brain stuttered back into gear, even as the older Asari spun toward a wide-eyed Kara. Right, Rylia’s father had apparently been a Turian, one who’d died a good few decades ago. Turians had similar lifespans to humans. A slight bit shorter on average in fact. So that had been a bit inevitable. Though humans, at least, were going to be in for a bit of a shock to their collective system in the near future. Rylia had already pulled medical tech from some reality she’d called ‘Cyberpunk’ that could extend a human lifespan for several centuries…and had offered to give Momo some sort of super soldier serum from yet another reality that would slow her aging to roughly Asari levels.
Momo hadn’t accepted yet, though she had gone through a round of the Cyberpunk version, and had to admit that she felt better. She might only be twenty-five, but Hero work tended to be rough on the body, and the ‘advanced biosculpting’ that was part of the Cyberpunk rejuvenation treatments had fixed quite a few old injuries. Nothing major, but enough to be noticeable when she exercised. That and the reduced back pain from modifying a few select muscles with additional cloned tissue. Which is what had convinced her to try it in the first place. She liked her boobs, but even as fit as she was, they’d caused their own issues…
Ah. Kara looked like she needed rescuing. She was rather red in the face from hints about ‘harems’ or ‘if Rylia wasn’t to Kara’s taste, might she’d prefer an older Asari?’ Telefia, Momo had a feeling, was going to end up being a bit of an experience…
… … …
“Oh, that’s a nice design element! You’ve got the equation a little off for the ME field though. See here? You changed the Eezo ratio but didn’t propagate that change into the field equation.”
Even if the Hazel part of her found it really bizarre that her mother was helping her refine a new sex toy design, Rylia still found herself relaxing and enjoying her mother being around. After a couple of days, her nerves had faded as Telefia simply bulldozed through every situation, seemingly unaware that anything had changed. Well, no. Not unware so much as uncaring. So long as Rylia was happy, she seemed to accept that the changes were just the result of the normal ‘Maiden’s Path’ to finding oneself.
“Ah. That’s why it was exploding after three minutes. I’d completely forgotten I had to shift the ratio to account for power output. The initial alloy produced too strong a result. Less ‘fun tingles’ and more ‘holy shit someone set my Azure on fire.’”
Telefia grinned at Rylia’s deadpan delivery of that statement, even as she kept looking over the design work. Rylia had known, or at least part of her had, that her mother was almost as much of a statistical outlier as Rylia herself was. Original Rylia, of course, not current her. Said original had very much inherited her genius from her mother, as well as her love of engineering.
Telefia T’aani was a skilled and in-demand engineer who specialized in ship systems. She had, in fact, even been on the initial design team who’d worked on the Destiny Ascension. Not the lead designer or anything so grand, but she’d spent a good couple of decades helping design some of its internal systems. She was brilliant and, more oddly yet for a Matron, remarkably high-energy and active.
Rylia was actually her only daughter, which was a bit unusual for a Matron approaching five hundred, though hardly unheard of. While outsiders thought of the ‘Matron’ stage as being where Asari had kids/families, and that was generally true, it wasn’t even close to universal. More accurately, Matrons settled down into stability. Often, that did mean having kids and making a family. Just as much, however, it was the period of an Asari’s life where they really buckled down into serious jobs in whatever career interested them.
Maidenhood was when they went out and tried everything. Matronhood was when they’d finally figured out what they wanted to do, by having tried it all, and settled in to make a career out of whatever they’d found. Matriachhood was when they got bored of whatever that thing had been, usually hitting near the top of their field by dint of experience, and started telling other people how to do their jobs better. To the point of dipping into politics so they could tell everyone how to do shit ‘better.’
“Well, this one looks good! I demand a test model when it stops exploding! Now, where are we going for dinner? You said you invested in some small company bringing in human foods right? Something about a thing called pizza?”
Rylia grinned at the excitement in her mother’s voice. It wasn’t only Maidens who were interested in new things.
“Yep! Since I’m employing some humans now, I was able to quiz them about the best foods to import! Not the fancy stuff, but the tasty stuff for regular people! Pizza has been a huge hit here on Nevos! So have something called tacos. Apparently Tacos are best on Tuesdays though, even if I’m not really sure why. So we’ll get some of those tomorrow! For now, I can share the glories of pizza with you! Oh, we’ll grab Momo and Kara, too. They both love pizza and can answer questions about it!”
Feeling silly in pretending pizza was super exciting, she nevertheless towed her mother after her. It had actually been Momo who’d suggested they start up a ‘human food’ chain on Nevos, pointing out that the tasty, unhealthy stuff would be loved by the vacation goers at the resorts. She’d been right, too, with the resorts even giving them a kickback as their new human-food chain was drawing in more tourists than usual.
Honestly, Rylia was doubly glad Momo had suggested it, since it was a bit of a crime to do engineering projects without pizza and too much caffeine helping fuel you…
… … …
Telefia T’aani hummed in thought as she boarded the shuttle to leave the planet of Nevos. She wasn’t quite sure what was up with her daughter. It was her daughter, she was certain of that much at least, despite the radical changes in her since the last time they’d met. Even if there had been an underlying nervousness the only time they’d melded, just before she left, it was more a thing of furtively hiding details. Nothing dangerous to Rylia, as far as she could tell. More likely, based on a few bits she’d put together, her daughter was planning something a bit…bolder…than just selling sex toys and doing medical research.
As in, big and bold enough to possibly put her in the sights of dangerous people. Get faster updates on g.com.
That was admittedly an odd turn around, even more so than her sudden decision to delve into making a major business. Rylia wasn’t precisely risk-adverse, but she wasn’t the type of Maiden to rush into combat with a sense of immortality either. Yet, there were clear signs in how she moved that she’d refreshed and improved upon the basic self-defense training that Telefia had put her through. Which didn’t even cover that CEO girl. Momo was genuinely sweet, and seemed seriously sweet on her daughter too. Yet she also moved in a way that said she had serious training.
As in, Telefia was damn sure the woman had killed people before. Possibly with her bare hands.
All of which, added up, was why she was more than a little uncertain just what was going on with her kiddo. She was doing her mother proud, and Rylia wasn’t the type to get up to serious mayhem without a very good reason. Meaning that, whatever this was, Rylia felt she did have a very good reason. Well, Telefia could be patient a bit longer. A year or two, at least. Though she should probably contact a few old friends who own her minor favors. One or two of them should be willing to take a lucrative job that would let them keep an eye on…and a trained gun covering for…her daughter.
Rylia was thankfully showing good instincts in keeping some dangerous people close. But that could backfire if you weren’t dangerous yourself. Making sure someone she fully trusted was protecting her little girl would make Telefia feel better. Besides, now that she was approaching five hundred herself, maybe it was time to start properly condensing her network? It would likely be another century before she cared to bother poking her way into the Matriarchs council. But she had been getting a bit bored just fiddling around with some interesting human designs, like those disruptor torpedoes of theirs that actually made fighters potentially viable again.
Hmmm, maybe she’d even start a business of her own to build up toward becoming a matriarch? It wouldn’t be anything as exciting as her daughter’s fantastic new toys, but she had enough contacts in the various shipbuilding groups that she could put together a company to R & D a new gen of military hardware. The Republics would probably be wanting to do a token update in the next few decades, at least. Which would give her some soft power if one of her designs was chosen.
Nodding at that thought as she considered who to contact, Telefia put the oddities with her daughter aside for now. She’d find someone to keep an eye on her dear Rylia, then wait until they gathered a bit more information for her to work with…
… … …
“So, my mother didn’t completely scare you off, eh?”
Kara jumped, clearly not having noticed Rylia entering the lounge. She’d bought the entire floor of luxury apartments below her penthouse early on, both for security reasons and figuring she’d want them for employees of some flavor eventually. Currently, the only two that were occupied were a unit each for Momo and Kara, though Momo slept in Rylia’s penthouse increasingly often.
Like most Asari-built buildings, the floor of apartments had included a communal area to socialize in with the basic design. Which Rylia had then revamped and updated with some acquisitions of her own, like bookshelves, a pool table, and a well-stocked snack area. Prior to Hurricane Telefia coming through and temporarily using one of the other apartments, the lounge had been a meeting place for the three of them to hang out. A little less ‘intimate’ than one of their apartments, while still being ‘away from work.’
“U-um…your mother was...nice…it’s just…”
After just two encounters with Telefia, Kara had obviously become overwhelmed by the older Asari and retreated mostly to her apartment and work. Frankly, Rylia got it. More accurately, Hazel got it. Kara wasn’t quite a true introvert, but she certainly leant more towards introversion than extroversion. The result, from what Rylia had gathered via dropped hints here and there, of having been somewhat socially isolated for various reasons in her old reality. As a true introvert, the part of her that was Hazel could very clearly understand that Telefia would be a bit…much.
Honestly, her mother was pretty typical of Asari in that respect, with it being Rylia who was now the outlier. Not all Asari were extroverts, but the majority were, and even Asari introverts tended to be more touchy-feely than their equivalents in other races. Again, very much a societal and cultural thing, with a hefty helping of genetic predisposition, given the whole ‘touch telepath’ thing.
“Way too little respect for your personal space? Too prone to random hugs when she’s a stranger? A bit too forward with offering to set up a nice Asari orgy for you since you’re single?”
Kara blushed, but nodded, having at least gotten used to Rylia’s own flavor of teasing. Rylia giggled and sat down across from Kara, making sure to leave her plenty of space.
“Sorry about that, really. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it’s a bit of a cultural/societal thing. Most Asari that deal with aliens at least try to respect the differences we know exist, but mom is a bit…willfully herself? Unapologetically herself might be a better way of saying it, I guess? The fact that her force of personality generally leaves anyone bothered by it feeling a bit confused and concussed means she never really got use to the concept of personal space.”
Kara snorted at that description, voice drier than the average desert when she responded.
“I could tell.”
Rylia giggled again…but then offered up an olive branch.
“Well, for your pain and suffering, how about I treat you to something nice and nerdy on her? Specifically, she arranged a chance for a crash course in Mass Effect shuttle craft. Apparently, the daughter of one her old friends works on the ships for one of the major Nevos resorts, and she got her to say she’d let us work with her for a few weeks. Given we were just talking about needing to get a bit more hands on with the local ship tech, to make better sense of the data uploads…”
Kara had brightened immediately, eagerly nodding her head.
“That would be perfect. I’ve been playing with possible shuttle designs, but I really need to get hands on with one to help understand it better, I think. We could, and probably should, acquire one to play with. But getting a crash course from an expert would help a lot…”
Rylia nodded.
“I had much of the same thought, as well as thinking we could prod said expert about the best models and features. Get some valuable opinions from someone whose gotten their hands dirty working on them. You’re up for it then?”
Kara jumping to her feet and asking how soon they could go certainly answered that question quickly enough…
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A/N 1: So, I struggled more than a little with the stuff related to Rylia's mother. Unfortunately, I HAD already established that said mother was alive and implied they were on good terms. So it was something I needed to tackle sooner or later. Hopefully, I did a decent job of it, and at least I found legitimate ways to make it/her useful to the story going forward, rather than JUST causing some distress for Rylia. As an older and successful Matron, Telefia has connections. Not as many as a Matriarch would, but they just happen to be in fields that might be critical for Rylia's plans in the future...while also having that provide background as to why Rylia was an engineering prodigy. If a lazy and unmotivated one.