Back in her bedroom in the Crescent Bell Palace, Jenna was pouting her lower lip and wishing she was still in the Dahlia Palace. Her head hurt like crazy and she wanted to be in a place that was more familiar. She loved the Dahlia Palace where she had made so many memories. It was the place where she had pulled Fallcet’s crown off his head. It was the place where she and Vash had uncovered all the money that Vinia had hidden. It was the place where she’d had her spats with Ryatt, who turned out to be Sardius.

“I wanna go home,” she moaned quietly, but not quiet enough for Ixy to miss the complaint.

“You can’t go home to Earth,” Ixy reminded her coldly.

“I wasn’t thinking of Earth!” Jenna retorted. “I was thinking of the Dahlia Palace and that time you shot Fallcet with a tranquilizer dart. Wasn’t that a great day?”

“Bitchin’ really,” Ixy agreed.

Jenna thought about the glorious moment when the dart had hit Fallcet and the wheels in her head started turning. “Hey, Ixy… Is this room outfitted with the same artillery as the bedroom in the Dahlia Palace? Are there guns with bullets and tranquilizer darts ready to go?”

“Naturally. Those features came in handy last time,” Ixy replied.

“You should shoot me with a tranquilizer dart, right now,” Jenna said.

“I can send Vash in with a pile of pills if you want. There’s really no need to start medicating you by firing tranquilizer darts at you, although that might be fun, I’d surely be punished for it.”

Jenna barked a laugh. “If those guys are right, you won’t be able to hit me. The forcefield generated by my jewel should stop it from hitting me.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” Ixy asked skeptically.

“Then it will hit me and I’ll be out for the count,” Jenna said with an unconcerned drawl. “I want to run it as a test.”

“Okay. I got you on record explaining why you want me to shoot you. So, we’re good. Authorization accepted.”

With that, Ixy fired at Jenna.

There was a flash of white light as the silver dart was taken out before it got anywhere near her. There was a flsk sound, like metal skidding on water, and then a snap. The dart lay on the carpet by the bed, the juice from the dart left a few drops of the blue tranquilizer as it seeped out.

Jenna leaned over the bed and looked at it. “Test successful. Okay, Ixy, fire a bullet at me.”

“Yeah… no. I’m not going to do that,” the personal assistant said crossly. “I mean, I sometimes think you’re annoying, but I’m not firing things that could kill you. When I aimed the tranquilizer gun, I shot at your arm, not at your eye, but who’s to say it wouldn’t accidentally hit you in the eye? That was a risk I was willing to take, but I’m not willing to fire a bullet at you. It’s cause I don’t want to be charged with killing the person I volunteered to assist. And if Sardius found out that I killed you, it wouldn’t matter that I am in Xypher Zone or that I’m in prison, nothing would stop him from harming me in a way I could never be corrected… Not even with surgery.”

“You make him sound wildly vicious,” Jenna commented crossly, as she rearranged her blankets.

“If you think he isn’t, you’re making up your own version of him. I know he talked you out of looking him up, but now that the cat is out of the bag, are you sure you don’t want to read all about him?”

Jenna snorted. “Why are you trying to take the glitter off his wings?”

“Yo. There is no problem with you being in love with a terrorist, an arsonist, a mass murderer, and all that. I’m the last person to tell you that you shouldn’t do something everyone would tell you not to. I just think you might be smarter about who he is while he’s gone and it might help you miss him a little less.”

“Okay, bring up some dreamy pictures of Sardius and display them on the screen,” Jenna instructed.

“Easy. They’re all gorgeous.”

The pictures Ixy displayed really scratched the itch. It wasn’t just him, it was a vastly romanticized version of him that he had used to convert people to his cause. Ixy showed her a few promotional videos. When they were finished playing, Jenna wanted to join the revolution and fight whoever alongside him. After all, he was so charismatic that his enemy was your enemy.

“He’s a pretty dangerous guy,” Jenna reflected as she looked at the screen. “If he got up and told me that the Octavians were my enemy, I’d believe him. Without any proof, I’d believe him. Just like that. Ixy, does the AAMC have anyone like that working for them?”

Ixy laughed. “No, they do not. You have to understand that Sardius never would have risen through the ranks of a traditional army. The admirals, the generals, the men who have all the power would do everything to make sure that a man like him stayed down. They don’t want to have any conflict within their ranks. They try to make themselves faceless so that when things go wrong, fewer individuals take the blame. However,” Ixy said, clearing her throat. “Sardius went against them. He didn’t go along with the existing revolutionaries either. He went outside their ranks and did what he wanted to do until he was so loud, no one could ignore him. Too many people died for them to ignore him.”

Jenna felt her mouth fill with saliva. She shouldn’t have been excited by what Ixy was telling her, but the truth was, she was very interested in someone who had the intelligence to see what needed to be done and the guts to do it. Obviously, he had been very successful, but would he be successful on Don Leo’s ship?

Jenna was rolling it over in her head when Ixy suddenly informed her, “Temptic is in a pod that has just landed on your dock.”

Jenna was just as confused as Ixy. “He is? Why? If he was coming down to the surface, wouldn’t he go straight to his father’s underwater palace instead of coming here?”

“I don’t know. I just sent Vash with a goblet chair to get him,” Ixy said. “Should we bring him in here?”

“Yes.”

“You have a minute before he gets here. Would you like to change into something else to give him a more formal reception?” Ixy asked, a minimum of snark in her tone.

“No. He’s my son now. He can come in here when I’m sick without me fussing over my nightie. Besides, he’ll be naked,” she reminded Ixy.

Ixy chuckled.

She was still chuckling when Vash rolled the blue and red octopus into the bedroom. Jenna smiled at him when he came in and welcomed him by changing her position so that she was resting her arms on her footboard. “It’s good to see you,” she said kindly.

He rolled his eyes. “I’d rather I didn’t have to see you.”

“Aw!” she whined.

Temptic shook out two of his tentacles in a frustrated whirr. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m here because I need to have a meeting with you about the orbital security team. It would be much better if I didn’t need to come down here, if I could trust those morons enough to have a confidential conversation with you without fear of leaks, but I can’t. So, you’re a delight, Jenna, but I would rather I didn’t have to come down here to admit to you that they are utterly failing at their job.”

“I see. I agree. In that case, it’s a shame to have to see you. Sardius was working on them before he left. It was my understanding that he made some headway with them before he left. What’s wrong now?”

“I don’t think it’s going to matter who we hire,” Temptic said sadly, sounding like a depressed parrot. “It’s not going to matter if we hire Adamis, or Octavians, or if we put up an automated system. Everything is traced back to a person and none of them are to be trusted no matter what race they are. I’d do it myself, but I don’t know enough about how the dang thing operates. What we really need is Sardius back on the floor with his techy head and his pointy knuckles. I’d be at my wit’s end, except every time I speak with my father, he claims that your safety is not a priority right now, something about an augmentation to your crown.”

“Yeah,” Jenna said, curling her knees up under her. “You’re all the way over there because my crown has placed a forcefield around me that no one can approach. Apparently, it chops off arms and tentacles alike.”

Temptic slooshed into his goblet in an expression of relief. “Thank goodness someone had a solution to our orbital security problem. The Hipposyphis arranged that for you? Excellent.”

“It’s less excellent the deeper you get in. Do you see that?” she said, pointing to the broken dart on the floor.

“What’s that?” he asked curiously before he submerged himself in his goblet to look at it closer through the glassy bottom.

Jenna waited until his mantle was out of the water before she explained her primitive experiment with the tranquilizer dart.

Temptic looked at the barrel of the railgun in the corner of the room, just under a camera where all spiders build their webs. “If she had shot you with the bullet, it would have had the same outcome. If it didn’t deflect bullets, it would be a pretty meaningless gift. It has to break anything that comes at you.”

“So, those are things that are moving at meters per second. What about something that was moving slower?” Jenna wondered.

Temptic didn’t wait and slapped a tentacle full of water at her.

The splash of water was stopped mid-air, falling immediately to get absorbed by the carpet.

“Hmm…” Temptic hummed, making bubbles in his goblet. He pulled himself out enough to ask, “If you’re doing more experiments, can I throw more things at you?”

Jenna nodded.

The blue and red Octavian raised himself out of the water and slooped over to her couch. “Can I throw this pillow at you?”

“Sure.”

He tossed it and it was blown to bits in midair. Feathers and fluff went everywhere.

When it cleared, she saw Temptic as close to the ground as anyone could be. He had turned yellow and he was shaking with soundless laughter. “Can I throw another one at you?” he asked in high-pitched glee.

Jenna rolled her eyes. “Why not?”

That one exploded too.

“Ixy, get Vash in here,” Jenna said into her earpiece. Her bedroom was covered in fluff, though not a single particle of it had landed on her.

She turned to Temptic. “I don’t understand this.”

“The force field is powered by your nervous system. That’s why you’re in bed, no? It’s taking too much energy, so it’s leaving you a little wasted, but on the bright side, it will work for you whether you are asleep or awake. As long as you’re alive, it will protect you.”

“Joy,” she said crankily. “What else do you know about it?”

“It was originally a body augmentation that the Reliovenix used.”

“But it didn’t stop them from being killed off.”

Temptic smiled. “Obviously, there was a way to get around it.”

“Do you know the way around it, Temptic?” she asked cautiously.

He glooped back into his goblet. “The only thing I know,” he said wisely, “is that now I don’t need to worry about the slack-jawed boneheads that work for us in orbital security. I’m relieved to know that we can take care of you with our own technology. Now I never need to worry about you getting kidnapped or hurt again. I may do what Sardius did by simply firing everyone and starting afresh. We’ll see. I’m going back up to the stars. Oh,” he turned to say one more thing. “I wanted to tell you how batty my father is for you, in case you didn’t know. He’s so interested in your comfort and care that one would think you were his wife in a more literal way. Love is alien, isn’t it?”

Jenna did not know how to answer.

Vash arrived and wheeled Temptic back to his pod, then the butler came back and vacuumed up the disarray left over from their pillow fight.