She looked at them with her constantly moving eyes, and then she spoke.

"I am not a dumb bitch," she said, with the specific conversational directness of someone who wants to establish the foundational premise before proceeding further.

"And I need you to listen very carefully because I am only going to say this once."

Her voice carried the chatty warmth of her ordinary register underneath the Absolute Luxuria’s sharpened cadence, the two qualities coexisting in the specific way of a being who has become more without ceasing to be what she was.

"I know that to have my dream, to have Sir Osmont’s big hands wrapped tightly around me...holding me tenderly, I have to be more than just a variable in his equation."

She tilted her head slightly, her rose-crimson hair remaining perfectly still while her expression cycled through three distinct configurations in quick succession. "I have to be the constant. If others in this world find the strength to hunt one Gilded One, I need to be the one who hunts twenty."

...!

She began to pace, slowly, through the space in front of the seven glazed Ira Gilded Ones.

"I have to be unfathomably exceptional in order to remain under his radar, to be the only thing he sees when he looks at the horizon." A pause that carried genuine weight beneath its manic surface.

"I have already given him my heart, and I am an intricate part of him now. But that is just the beginning of what I am prepared to offer. I need to give him Existence, and I need to do it with a smile like the good girl I am while I am covered in your blood..."

Her smile arrived.

"I have your Egos and your pathetic little emotions under my absolute control, and I plan for so much more than you could ever grasp. With his permission, I am going with you all to THE Braneworld because you come from a powerful Ira House of Gilded Ones, don’t you?" Her eyes found the specific Gilded One she was addressing and held them with the fixed attention of a being who can read emotional architecture the way others read maps.

"And you, ah, you have a very interesting connection with a Superbius friend who thinks he is far too important to be touched?"

She stopped pacing.

"Who are you? You are tools in a kit I haven’t even finished organizing. Everyone in this place has their own emotional bonds and their secret weavings, and I can see every single one of them like a map of your failures." Her head tilted again. "We are going to do many things together, ah, very glorious and messy things. You are going to help me achieve my dream because the alternative... is a silence you aren’t prepared to hear."

BOOM!

She turned toward the waiting Apeiron armor beside her, the opened front presenting itself with the patient readiness of something that had been made for her specifically.

She stepped into it.

The armor closed around her Absolute Luxuria form with the specific rightness of two things discovering they had been built for each other, and behind the sealed Apeiron architecture, Emotive’s rose-crimson hair continued its perfect stillness, and the seven glazed Ira Gilded Ones continued their patient waiting without will or choice.

She had plans for all of them.

She had plans for considerably more than all of them! She had plans to make her Fixation shine more than anyone could imagine!

The Gilded Ones? Fuck em all. Her Fixation would stand above them all in time!

BOOM!

---

<THE Early Veiled Shore>

His feet were in the golden sands.

The golden sands of THE Early Veiled Shore pressed up between his toes with the specific warmth of a substance that had been absorbing Infinity from the surrounding environment for long enough that the Infinity had become part of its composition.

The waters lapped at his ankles in slow patient repetitions that carried the same multicolored luminescence as everything else in THE Infiniverse, the waves small and rhythmic and carrying no urgency whatsoever.

He breathed out as he thought about the glorious battle and displacement of Gilded Ones across Observable Existence as he took a moment.

Around him THE Infinite Tongue’s passive operation created the specific quality of silence that arrived when all the Infinity in the surrounding environment was running according to his Directives rather than its own ambient patterns, the silence of a perfectly administered space, everything in it doing exactly what it had been told to do and doing it without requiring his attention to maintain.

He looked up.

THE Infiniverse stretched above and around him in every direction simultaneously, her Three Thousand Realms visible to his Hadean perception as a layered arrangement of growing things, each Realm larger than it had been the last time he checked, each one carrying the specific vitality of an environment that had been given catalysts and was running hard with them.

THE Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Infinimum still pumped its warming Infinity through the upper atmospheric layers. THE Cretaceous Infinite Revolution had diversified the geological and existential substrate of the Realms into configurations that natural development across ordinary timescales would not have produced for billions of years.

THE Mousterian Pluvial had expanded the populations and wildlife across every surface that could sustain them.

Good. But not enough.

He could always do more!

He pressed his feet deeper into the sand and let THE Infinite Tongue extend outward through his sitting body, feeling the Infinity in THE Infiniverse’s substrate the way a conductor felt the full orchestra before raising the baton, each instrument present and accounted for and waiting.

"Miniature Infinite Causes..." he said to the surrounding water and sand, not as an invocation but as an acknowledgment of what he was about to do. Something new he wanted to enact!

He began.

"THE Infinite Emergence..."

HUUM!

He spoke it into THE Infiniverse’s substrate through THE Infinite Tongue, not as a word with specific meaning but as a Cause being catalyzed into the foundational architecture of the domain, the Tongue making the difference between installing a technique and installing a truth.

THE Infinite Emergence held the axiom that life desired to emerge, that consciousness pressed always toward the surface of whatever contained it, and that within THE Infiniverse this pressure would be amplified to the degree that even the most inhospitable surfaces of the Three Thousand Realms would find life pushing through them with the insistence of things that had been given a more compelling reason than usual to exist.

"THE Infinite Flood..."

Not merely water. Infinity-rich substance pouring downward from the upper atmospheric layers into the deeper substrate of the Realms, filling the geological cavities and underground formations with concentrated Infinity that would serve as raw cultivation material for any consciousness that found its way to it, the Realms becoming saturated from their cores outward rather than only at their surfaces.

"THE Infinite Resonance..."

WAA!

A catalyzing cause that made the Three Thousand Realms aware of each other, establishing Infinity-carrying channels between them that allowed the growth in one Realm to propagate as encouragement to the Realms adjacent to it, the specific amplification of a domain where individual growth compounded into collective growth rather than remaining isolated.

"THE Infinite Stratum..."

Geological and existential layering of the Realms’ foundations at accelerated rates, compressing what would ordinarily be eons of tectonic and foundational development into the current timeframe, each Realm building the deep substrate complexity that ancient Primordial Realms carried as their base characteristic.

"THE Infinite Canopy....!"

BOOM!

A directive rather than a cause, spoken through THE Infinite Tongue with the full backing of THE Infinite Mandates: that THE Infiniverse herself would redistribute the Infinity flowing through her Three Thousand Realms from uniform distribution into stratified intensity, concentrating the highest densities at specific points where the convergence of multiple growth catalysts had created conditions suitable for the emergence of something grander than what a uniformly distributed Infinity field could produce.

He called out grandly as he raised his hand!

"THE Infinite Culmination...!"

BOOM!

The sixth and final catalyst, the simplest and most direct: a directive that THE Infiniverse would use every resource available to her to rush toward becoming an Observable Existence, that the pace of her development was to be treated as the primary operational priority over every other function she currently maintained, and that the Calabi-Yau folding concealing her from external perception would not slow but would simply have to coexist with the growth accelerating inside it!

Oh!

He opened his eyes.

And watched as magisterial glory began to unfold!

He watched as he really wanted THE Infiniverse to become an Observable Existence, but he knew it was far away as he wanted to accelerate it!