Chapter 3Tsun-Tsun25 January 2022“And?” Kelynen asks, sitting on a chair and smiling at Ace. “How does it feel?”

  “Um.” Ace probably looks like an absolute freak right now. “Normal, I guess?” She answers, looking down at the panties they gave her, being a rather simple, surprisingly unsexy and bnd white. “They’re pretty comfy, I like the fabric.”

  Kelynen looks at Ace a little puzzled, but moves on, handing her the sports bra, which Ace promptly pulls over her chest. Again, she looks expectantly at Ace, hoping to see a level of excitement that would exist if it weren’t crushed by her own fear of dysphoria.

  “So.” Ace picks up the leggings, and puts them on with only minor guidance on how to do it ‘properly’ by her sponsor. “I just signed five years of my life away to serve some kind of noblewoman and, um. I’m not sure what to expect anymore.”

  Kelynen ughs, standing up and helping Ace put on the maid dress, having seen her dey the inevitable for a moment. “Let’s do things step by step, okay? We’re going to take ye upstairs, to yer room, and then ye get to meet the other girls. They’re absolute darlings, just like ye.”

  “I’m a darling?” She blushes.

  “As long as yer under my roof, ye’re gonna be a darling. Get used to it, I'd say.”

  “Um. Yes, ma’am?” She watches Kelynen adjust her dress a little to make sure it’s all okay.

  “Adorable.” Kelynen smiles and boops Ace on the nose. “I’m going to have to tell Rose and Vivi that I have the most adorable girl.”

  Ace blushes heavily, definitely not being used to any kind of compliments despite Amy’s best efforts.

  “Oh! Before we go upstairs…” Kelynen takes a little note out of her pocket, shifting into her more sponsorly voice. “The rules. We have just one rule.” She throws the note into a nearby bin, realising how useless it is. “You do what we say. It’s all part of your training as a girl. If you do not obey, any of us three sponsors has the right to discipline you. And no, I’m not going to tell you what the punishments are. You’ll have to find out for yourself if you’re so interested.”

  “Are they, uh…” She tries to think of the best formution of her question.

  “Sexual?”

  Ace nods.

  “Sexual punishments are for good girls, darling.” She boops her on the nose again. “Ye don’t want these punishments. They’re all pretty rotten to experience, if ye’d ask me.”

  “Understood.” She holds her hands together behind her back.

  “And agreed?”

  “Um. Yes?” Ace answers, causing Kelynen to ugh.

  “Good! Follow me.” Kelynen takes Ace’s hand and guides her out into the hallway.

  The hallway is rather cold and dark, the walls made up of rge stone blocks. Definitely not bricks, she notes the irregur shapes and the fact that, despite some work to the contrary, some of the stones still stick out more than others. More than anything it seems like a foundation that has been there for centuries.

  They pass by a few cells at first, manacles hanging from the walls, as if it’s an old-timey dungeon. Ace is not sure whether these are for fun, real punishment, or both. Any creepy vibe that may have existed down here is immediately undercut as they pass an old wooden door, left open, behind which is housed a rather extensive wine and other associated beverages celr.

  A very functional celr indeed.

  Finally, they reach the stairs, which are counterintuitively wide and welcoming in contrast to the cramped celrs of the building, with more light emanating down the stairs as they circle up. Eventually they end up in a small hall, with a tall but narrow arched window.

  Ace looks out of the window, seeing a cliff below them, leading into a wooded valley, clouds of mist obscuring anything but the treetops of the forest at its bottom. It suddenly strikes her that they seem to be in what has to be an old-timey castle on top of a hill, likely somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Kelynen stands next to her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting when Eira said it was a manor, but not… this. Isn’t this more like a castle? How far away is this from the nearest town?”

  “Between six and ten miles, depending on the direction you go in.” She smiles, taking Ace’s hand again and taking her up another set of stairs, to the first floor of the building. This floor is more like a pace than a castle. The walls are white and the windows much wider, allowing natural light to flood the carpeted hallways and imposing potted greenery alike. Along this upper hallway are half a dozen double doors, interrupted with a corridor leading even deeper into the manor in the middle, which is where Kelynen takes her.

  Before she’s even able to fully comprehend whatever room she’s been brought into, though it is big, her train of thoughts is interrupted by a very excited sounding girl running up to her.

  “Oh my god! Aoife! It’s the new girl!” She yells, taking Ace’s hand. “Hi! I’m Gwen. Nice to meet you!”

  “Um.” Ace tries to take a little step back, but finds Kelynen holding a hand behind her back. “Hi, Gwen.” She eventually whispers.

  “Gwen. You’re scaring her.” The other girl, Aoife, says.

  “I’m not scared!” Ace insists. “She’s just…”

  “A lot. I know.” Gwen giggles, then smirks. “Now don’t be rude, young dy, you gotta tell us your name.”

  “Alice. But I prefer Ace for now.” Ace blushes. “Alice feels a little far away for now.”

  “That’s such a pretty name!” Gwen squeals, taking Ace’s hand and pulling her to a couch. “Nice to meet you, Ace!”

  “Nice to meet you too, Gwen, uh, Aoife.” She tries to smile, but looks down at the floor instead, embarrassed by the way she looks. “Sorry for forgetting your name there for a second. Ee-fa. Ee-fa. Aoife.”

  “Don’t worry. I can’t hear myself thinking with this… force of nature here.” She points at the brown-haired girl next to her.

  “She’s saying I’d be the top.” Gwen stage-whispers, just to get hit on the head with a cushion.

  “Oh my god! You’re the worst.” Aoife sighs, then giggles.

  “Are you two, uh…” Ace mimes her middle finger going into a hole.

  “No.” Aoife says.

  “She wishes.” Gwen adds.

  “I really don’t!”

  “She's still a bit tsun-tsun.”

  “Tsun-tsun?” Ace asks.

  “I’m not a tsundere!” Aoife rolls her eyes.

  “Oh. Like a girl who hates someone but is actually in love with her too?” She asks for crification.

  The redhead leans back on the couch. “Now you’ve really gotten her started.”

  “That’s the modern misinterpretation of a tsundere.” Gwen says, leaning forward a little towards Ace. “But originally a tsundere was someone who was cold towards someone or annoyed by them but grows in love with another character. But now, they don’t even care anymore! Hate-fucking, just a pin abusive girlfriend, none of the enemies-to-lovers arc that appealed to so many fans of anime!”

  “She’s more of a yandere.” Aoife dismissively waves at Gwen, just to get hit by the cushion herself.

  “I’m not!” Gwen pouts. “I’m very mentally stable, actually.”

  “If I knew the deal came with having to put up with this little ball of energy I would have stayed back home in Limerick.” She stage-whispers to Ace.

  “Rude.”

  “I’m very rude.” Aoife giggles.

  “Um.” Ace blushes, quite overwhelmed by these two girls. “Can I ask some questions, because… they didn’t give me too much when I was, uh, brought here. Like, where are we?”

  "Welcome to a country of hostile ndscapes, filled with a strange people speaking incomprehensible tongues, where beasts roam the skies, monsters infest the seas and the oceans, everything is a century behind the rest of the world, other than the pollution of man that destroys our hills and bogs--" Gwen gesticutes wildly, leaning into her accent.

  "You," Aoife notes dryly. "are in Wales."

  “I’m in a castle somewhere in rural Wales. Got it.” Ace sighs. “And they won’t tell us where in Wales?”

  The others shake their heads.

  “You’re stuck with us.” Gwen grins. “Isn’t that fun?”

  “Maybe?” She says, causing Gwen to giggle and put an arm around her. “I don’t know what you do here, on a daily basis.”

  “Up until now, we’ve not done much other than wait ‘for the third girl’.” Aoife says. “So that’s been my past two days.”

  “And then they said we’d start exercising, mostly, they said. Gotta get in shape, especially you Aoife. Your arms are like, spaghetti.” She pulls on the redhead’s arms, just to get poked in the shoulder. “Ow!”

  “They were also going to give us some csses on how to behave ourselves around ‘superiors.’”

  “They said they’d do it with a whip.”

  “I think that was a joke, Gwen. But you’d need that.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Of course you would.” Aoife says, defeated.

  Gwen smirks smugly at that, and Ace cannot help but ugh.

  ***

  “Girls!” Kelynen cps her hands to gather all attention on her. “Why are ye all hanging around doing nothing whilst there is so much work left to do?”

  “You told us to wait for orders.” Aoife shrugs.

  “Well, that is an ‘order’ then.” Kelynen dramatically points at a pile of ptes and gsses and cups and cans and a bloody kettle and oh dear. That’s all theirs?

  “It’s quite orderly.” Gwen points out. “We’ve made sure all the mess is in one corner so we can clean it up ter.”

  “Would ye leave yer aunt’s house like this, girls?”

  “Yes.” Gwen smirks.

  “Aunt?” Ace asks.

  “I,” Kelynen pauses for a short second, creating dramatic effect. “was adopted.”

  “I’m sorry.” Ace offers some comfort.

  “I’ll forgive ye” Her sponsor grins, as if something is terribly funny that Ace is completely out of the loop on. “If ye clean up that mess.”

  Ace stands up to go clean up, and quickly notices she is the only one standing up to clean. “Um?”

  “I’m gd you volunteered.” Gwen grabs Aoife’s hand and rests her head on her shoulder. “We’ll do the next one, okay?”

  “Will we?” Aoife whispers.

  “Shut up.” Gwen whispers back.

  Ace sheepishly walks over to the pile of dirty dishes and stares at it, unsure where to even start. Not just because it’s a mess: she couldn’t even locate the kitchen if she tried!

  “Aoife?” She raises her voice a little to make sure she can be heard. “Where do the dishes go?”

  “You wash them by hand in the kitchen.” She says simply.

  “Where is the kitchen?” Ace then asks, and the two girls look up at her, and begrudgingly get off the couch.

  “I’ll help you with this once.” Gwen sighs. “I signed up for the sexy dies, not to be a maid! They should have seen my room before recruiting me, like, oh my god– what a disaster.” She picks up the kettle and starts walking. Ace follows her with a pile of ptes in her hands.

  Aoife, carrying a can of milk, can’t help but comment. “You did sign up to be a maid. It was one of the very first sentences on the contract.”

  “You see what I have to put up with, Ace?” Gwen puts the back of her hand to her forehead. “I’m locked up in a castle with a smartass.”

  “Poor you.” Ace mumbles, noting that she very much can’t gesture with her hands right now given she’s carrying ten ceramic ptes.

  Gwen opens the door to the kitchen, and the first thing Ace notices is that it’s rather rge: it’s a kitchen made to feed dozens of guests, and the amount of cabinets and cupboards is rather overwhelming. Ace puts the ptes down on the kitchen top next to the sink and notices Gwen and Aoife at the door. “We’re going to pick up a few more things! Be back soon!” She says to a giggle from Aoife.

  Ace is happy that they’re going to do that – she doesn’t particurly want to walk up and down the entire hallway with piles of dirty dishes – so she tends herself to washing the ptes by hand. She kneels down and opens the cabinet directly under the sink, hoping that this obvious location would be where she can find a brush to scrub the ptes clean with and perhaps a bit of soap, but it couldn’t be that easy: it’s empty down there other than a bit of plumbing.

  She continues to open a few more cabinets to the right of the sink – most of them do hold items, but not the items she needs – and continues down the entire row towards one of the walls, finding nothing. She tries the cupboards above them, filled with no doubt priceless dish- and dinnerware, but nothing she actually needs!

  It feels rather insulting when the things she was looking for, and much more, are all shoved into a rather busy cabinet to the immediate left of the sink.

  Ace picks up some gloves stuck into the cabinet – she’s going to wash quite a few things, and she doesn’t want to get pruney fingers – and some soap and a brush and starts working on the pile of ptes. She wonders whether Aoife and Gwen have just sat down back on the couch and left her to do all the work, and she will get properly miffed if they did, but for now she will continue with her pile of ptes.

  That is, of course, until the inevitable happens. Not quite used to doing dishes by hand, as they always had a dishwasher at home, which they consistently used, she swirls some of the warm water hitting the pte the wrong way and it flies over the top of the counter straight onto her uniform. Ace quickly steps back but it’s not enough to stop the water from hitting her body: her leggings are soaked now. She has to find a kitchen towel somewhere.

  “Oh my god.” Gwen, somehow having spawned behind her, says. “Aoife, she’s turned on by cleaning!”

  “What, because she’s wet?” Aoife asks, carrying a few, but definitely not all, cups.

  “You don’t have to make it so explicit.” Gwen pouts.

  “I do– it was a bad joke.”

  The two pce the dishes they brought on the kitchen top, and quickly disappear again, as if they never existed.

  Ace cleans up the mess she’s left on the floor and continues to clean things until Kelynen joins her in the kitchen.

  “Hm?” She asks. “Are ye not done yet?”

  “No.” Ace sighs. “Should I be done?”

  “You girls had enough time.” Her sponsor compins. “Where are Gwen and Aoife?”

  “I don’t know. They said they’d bring me more dishes as I clean, and they brought me… that.” She points at half a dozen cups, now clean. “I was trying to figure out where they needed to go. Sorry.”

  “They brought ye half a dozen cups in… forty five minutes.” Kelynen raises an eyebrow. “They’re scking off and letting ye do all the work?”

  Ace finally finds the correct cupboard for the cups to go in. “I don’t know. They seem nice, just…”

  “Fucking useless?” Kelynen asks, and Ace nods. “Aye. Ye should know what it’s like trying to get a bunch of twenty-year-old trans girls to do anything. It’s like herding cats, except the cats think it’s funny or hot to be annoying little shits!” She sighs. “They don’t pay me enough for this shit.”

  Kelynen walks off, and returns within two minutes, depositing Gwen into the room first, having pulled her to the room by her ear like a petunt child – quite fitting – Aoife following them and looking rather terrified. Ace would be terrified too; Gwen is taller than Kelynen, she, like the others, is still fully pre-transition and could probably overpower the woman, and she was presumably dragged across an entire building as if it was nothing.

  “You two.” Kelynen says with contempt in her voice. “Why didn’t you help Ace with her work?”

  The two girls look at each other and neither is able to produce an answer.

  “I asked you two a question.” The sponsor, and yes, she is being a sponsor right now, repeats. “Why didn’t you help?”

  “I didn’t want to?” Aoife eventually offers. “I’m sorry, I–”

  “You shouldn’t be sorry to me.” Kelynen says. “You should be sorry to her.”

  “I’m sorry, Ace.” The redhead offers, speaking softly.

  “Gwen?” Kelynen tries. “Why didn’t you do anything?”

  “I’m a zy little shit?” Gwen smiles, a smile that quickly disappears when she notices just how annoyed Kelynen is. “I’m– Ace. I’m sorry.” She eventually adds.

  “I’ll come up with a fitting punishment for you two.” Kelynen crosses her arms. “In addition to that punishment, I’ll be asking Eira to start applying collective responsibility for chores.”

  “Collective responsibility?” Ace asks.

  “Yes– if you three don’t get your chores done, all three of you get punished.”

  “Even if you did all the work?” Ace protests. “That’s unfair.”

  “It is unfair. It’s very unfair how you already got punished with all the work whilst these two pyed Pokémon on the bloody Switch. Your punishment needs to be clear and visible to these two. Maybe then they’ll realise that you’re all in this together.”

  “Isn’t that kinda childish?” Aoife asks.

  “What? Skipping chores?” Kelynen shakes her head, and Aoife blushes in embarrassment.

  “Understood, ma’am.” Gwen says, noticeably pressing her thighs together.

  “And Ace?” Kelynen turns to her now. “You’ve got the afternoon off. Congratutions.”

  There’s an awkward silence in the room, the girls waiting for further orders, but Kelynen just walks out of the room annoyed. Apparently they just have to figure it out themselves.

  “Loonie?” A familiar voice pierces that silence from the hallway, and Ace can’t quite pce it first. “You look rather miffed,” she adds. “Please rex a little. Yes, I know the first years are the worst– I was no better back then. They’ll get better.” The conversation continues for a little bit, and Aoife and Gwen look at each other in ever escating humiliation.

  “Yes, I’ll see you this evening. Love you, sis!” The voice sounds very familiar indeed, and Ace is shocked to see her not just in person, but here of all pces.

  “Oh, Ay!” Amy runs over and gives her a big hug. “What are you doing here?”

  Ace struggles to formute a response to that loaded question.