Lupusregina Beta trusted her sisters. That wouldn't surprise anyone of course, though Yuri might feign to be surprised on a lark. Still, Solution's absolute bombshell about Lord Ainz nearly pushed her to disbelief.
She was going to get to try out just being friends with Lord Ainz, Lord Ainz off the clock. Well, just Ainz, actually, as he apparently wanted them to call him in private. There is being honoured beyond words, and then there's this, several steps further along.
All the Pleiades were, of course. But that included her! Lupusregina had seen the clip of Solution's audience the night it was made. Her sister had stumbled into their shared room on the ninth floor late, an uncharacteristically silly smile on her face.
"Lupu!" Solution had tackled her back down onto the bed Lupusregina was rising from. A move much more frequently done with parties reversed. "Lord Ainz is wonderful! He is the greatest of the supreme beings, and I'm so glad he's here" She began, cryptically.
Everything just said was true, obviously. But it was usually an understood thing. Not said as a greeting, or as a tackle-justification. The tackles were rarely even ever justified at all. They just happened!
From beneath her sister Lupusregina spoke. "Well yeah! He's amazing, did you get to give our Lord your kinky little slime bath?" She teased, preparing to turn things into a tickle fight. She was undefeated at those.
"What? Oh no, I didn't." Sol continued to be cryptic, deftly avoiding Lupusregina's probing fingers. "But he's here Lupu! Lord Ainz stayed with us!"
This was still very basic information, but something important had clearly happened because Lupusregina could see her sister positivity glowing with excitement and satisfaction. Switching tactics Lupusregina twisted to the left, bringing them both crashing to the carpeted floor, her on top, as was proper.
"Something good happened to you Sol, you're almost actually glowing!" She said as much.
"Yeah" Solution said, gazing into the middle distance. "Lord Ainz honored me beyond words this afternoon."
Lupusregina's eyebrows rose so high she'd be surprised to ever find them again. "What!" She screamed gleefully "So not a slime bath but other even kinkier things!" That certainly would explain the silly smile and long private audience that she heard Lady Albedo raging about. "That's amazing Sol!" She smiled, and it really was. Though Lupusregina was a little shocked at Solution being the first one called to her Lord's bed.
"What? No! Oh no, not all all! I think Albedo might actually kill me, and Shalltear definitely would, that didn't happen!" Solution denied fervently. "I mean that he said we could be friends! Have an actual friendship like he had with the other supreme beings!"
"When he doesn't need to acting as our ruler, I mean."
If anything that was an even more shocking turn of events. Lupusregina paused, and then, for the first time ever, lost a tickle fight to Solutions' sudden giddy assault.
After the laughter subsided the two were leaning against one another, propped up on a wall, breathing hard. "I can show you!" Sol exclaimed, recovering quickly and pulling a plastic wheel surrounded by shiny tape from wherever slimes store things. "Lord Ainz gave me this to show you all our conversation!" She passed the item over. "Hold it to your eyes and say 'playback.'"
Obliging Lupusregina took the disk, and spoke the word. Doing so she blinked and opened her eyes to see Lord Ainz's office as it was several hours ago. Looking through what seemed to be her Lord's eyes she saw Sol enter the room, clearly nervous but hiding it well enough that only her sisters would ever notice.
Lupusregina watched the whole event play out, from request to confession, and was amazed.
"Oh." She said wisely, when the clip was over.
"Yeah" Sol responded.
"Fuck…"
"Yeah"
"I have so many emotions right now Sol!"
"So do I Lupu." Solution responded, hugging her and taking back the disk.
"Lord Ainz really loves us, doesn't he"
Her sister nodded into her shoulder
"I can't believe I never thought about what the Supreme Beings meant to him."
"I don't think any of us did." Solution replied, sliding down and settling her head onto Lupusregina's lap.
"But we can try to actually be his friends… he wants us to!" She spoke in disbelief, feeling another nod against her thighs in response.
"Holy. Shit."
"Holy shit." The reply came unhelpfully from below.
"Also, I was right! There was so much cuddling! You got real close to Lord Ainz, I knew it!"
"You thought we did a bit more than that Lupu!" Solution laughed
"I don't know what you're talking about Sol, I'm the picture of innocence and cuddling was the extent of my implication! Honest!"
"Hmmm, your usual flavour of honesty at least." Solution deadpanned.
Lupusregina chuckled. "What about after that memory? You were in his office for a while." She asked, curling her fingers into Solution's hair, and beginning to braid.
"We just talked. He asked about my mission to the council state. Not as a report, just how I felt about it, what I liked"
"The gruesome vore bits?" Lupusregina asked, knowing what tended to be her sister's favorite parts of missions.
"And the sneaky bits, planning takedowns and executing them well. He cared, Lupu, Lord Ainz was so interested in the story, in just listening to me talk."
"Not gonna lie Sol, I'm a little jealous."
"That'd be a first."
"Would it? Which one, jealousy or honesty. You wound me!"
"Neither, admitting to it."
"Well it's apparently a day of revelations Sol."
"Sure seems like it." Solution acknowledged
"Should we round up everyone else?"
"Yes, but in a minute. I still need to process before I can stand up, I think."
"He had some great advice too, knew a lot about 'rogue play-styles' and infiltration tactics." Solution added after a moment.
"I'm not surprised about that." Lupusregina said, finishing up the intricate side braid she was weaving into her sister's hair. "Lord Ainz is a genius."
"I'm so glad I got to really talk with him. That I could be a person, and more than just a subject. He said we were perfect Lupu, that we were special, that he was glad we were here" Awe crept into her sister's voice.
Smirking, Lupusregina responded. "I saw, it was very emotional."
"I'm glad you did too." She continued after a moment of silence. "I wouldn't have been brave enough to ask to be actual friends with Lord Ainz. Even after all that first bit."
"I'm so happy." Solution replied simply.
"I know, so am I." Lupusregina said, pulling her sister to her feet. "Come on, let's go find everyone else."
Lupusregina smiled at the recollection, it was a beautiful thing. And now, three days later, she would get to see for herself.
She was a few minutes stroll into the woods outside Carne village, waiting for Lord Ainz – just Ainz for the day – to gate over from Nazarick. Enri had asked for Lupusregina's help finding a lost child that her goblin patrols couldn't locate. As it happened, she already knew exactly where the scared idiot had gotten off to, but Lupusregina feigned otherwise, it would make the inevitable delivery of bad news all the sweeter.
Ainz was going to join her on the walk through the caverns under the Great forest of Tob. More specifically the section she recently 'excavated' just a little ways out from the village.
When Lupusregina was nearly finished with her stick-and-dirt sketch of a dragon burning the village down, complete with screaming and flambéed humans, the Gate finally appeared a few feet ahead of her, and Ainz stepped out. Presumably flanked by the invisible eight-edged assassins that had been sworn to secrecy, not that they would have gossiped anyway, nor that she could detect them.
"Hi!" She began, dashing away the sketch "Lo – Ainz how are you! Are you sure this is okay!"
"I am well, and yes it is" he chuckled, chuckled. "Are you still doing well at Carne?"
"I am! They're not, people keep going missing in the woods, it's all very sad!" She said, beginning to walk deeper into the woods
"Nobody important I trust?" Ainz asked, following, which, right, there were important people in the village, she was supposed to be protecting it.
"Nope! Nferia, Enri, and Nemu are fine! They even finished a new version of the purple-potion with only new-world ingredients!" Lupusregina spoke in a rush. "I sent it with flat-chest-vampire airlines yesterday! Did you get it?"
"Flat-ch-? Ah, eeerm, yes, Shalltear sent it on to me. I'm very pleased with the progress."
"Yay!" Lupusregina cheered "Nfeira seemed extra motivated because people kept coming back super hurt from the forest. If they came back at all!" She bounced cutely.
"Oh-ho?" Ainz responded, a little awkwardly. "Has something been prowling, or we're you just being creatively-motivational?"
"Both! I was prowling motivationally!"
"Well that's fine if nobody knows that you're the local monster, but things might be difficult if they ever piece things together." Ainz rebuked kindly.
"I'm being careful, they only ever see me transformed! And only long enough to be properly terrified." Lupusregina grinned.
Seeing her Lord's approval she continued. "They trust me as the strongest one here, the only one who can save the missing people. That makes their faces when I walk back carrying someone's broken body even more fun! The best is when I say I was just barely too late to stop them being disembowelled!" Lupusregina shivered in pleasure at the recollection.
Ainz laughed at her evident joy. "That's the evilest thing I've heard in a while, and I've just had a meeting with Demiurge about his proposed farm-expansion."
Lupusregina internally cheered at the unlooked-for victory, and outwardly giggled, everyone knew of Demiurge's expansive happy-farm, she wondered what sort of expansion he had planned. "Thank you!" She said.
"Where have we been walking towards anyway, Lupusregina?" He asked, after a few moments.
"Oh, one of the unimportant village children got lost in the woods, they fell down the new cavern entrance a few days ago. Enri wanted me to look for it." She answered.
"Are they still letting kids play in the woods with a monster about?" Ainz asked in teasing disbelief
"Nope!" Lupusregina denied with a pop. "But a ghostly critter came out of the pit and lured the kid away down the tunnels! They don't know that though, they just think it ran off."
"I hadn't thought there was an entrance around here?"
"I dug it a few months ago to see if I could get something to torment the village. Nothing came out though, so I ended up doing the tormenting myself!" Lupusregina admitted, worried for a moment that maybe she had gone too far in potentially losing unknown dangers. Even if nothing had actually happened until now.
"I was careful!" She added quickly "I watched for anything coming out for weeks, and Lady Aura couldn't sense anything actually dangerous anywhere down there!"
"Hmm, I'm glad you took those precautions." Ainz said after a few moments walking. "I suppose we've yet to properly explore those caverns. How about we do so today while we fetch the child."
"Yes!" She gasped, exploring dungeons was something the Supreme Beings did for fun before the world-shift. Getting to do that with Ainz was an more exciting prospect than Enri's devastated face. "I would love to!"
"What sort of ghostly critter was it anyway?" Ainz asked.
"It looked like a Will-o'-the-wisp to me. Nothing strong at all."
"Hmm, we're not near any swamps, and the underground would be an unusual layer for something like that." Ainz mused. "It was probably under something else's control. Maybe our little dungeon will have a boss-monster."
"Should we be worried?" Lupusregina asked, mostly for posterity.
"I doubt it, if Aura said there was nothing strong down there I trust her. Besides, you're a hard counter to most undead we're likely to find."
Ainz's apparent total confidence in her (and Lady Aura) was staggering and her breath hitched. "I won't let you down!" Lupusregina shouted frightening off a few birds.
After a few more minutes of walking the pair arrived at a shallow pit in the forest floor that descended on an angle into a stone cavern.
The initial descent was uninteresting, Lupusregina knew, it was a few hundred feet before the caverns properly started, and even then they were mostly dull, so she began a conversation. If she was going to get to be friends with Lord Ainz, she was going to try to actually understand him as much as she could. "What's the most evil thing you've ever done Ainz?" She asked apropos of the earlier discussion.
"Ahhh, I'm not sure, why do you ask?" He asked, stooping to avoid a low patch of ceiling.
"I'm just curious, you said my sadism was pretty evil earlier. Should I not ask? You don't need to answer!" She reassured, waving her hands in front of her to dispel any transgressions.
"Oh no it's fine, you should probably know this anyway, but how to phrase it?" After a moment of silent descent he pressed on. "Do you remember from that clip of Solution's when I said we made all of you NPC's as perfect ideals?"
"I do!"
"We made the setting for your personalities as a part of that. In all your backstories we wrote how you would think and behave if you were real. And when you actually did, those things all became true."
Lupusregina hoped this was all preamble because she couldn't bear the thought that he was going to say that making them was a mistake.
"Evil is a relative thing." Was his next non-sequitur, and the confirmation of mere background info had her shoulders relax from tension. "And so is Good, in its way. When you were doing evil to the Carne village these last weeks, it was doing good for Nazarick."
She smiled at the complement. "Thank you for your words Lord Ainz."
"Oh, of course, you had done well." He praised again, and she nearly very nearly swooned, and did actually trip over a loose rock.
Catching her Ainz continued. "The good of Nazarick and it's denizens is the most important thing to me, the only true Good. So anything I do towards that good hardly even counts as real Evil in my mind, whoever else it may hurt." Which was wise, Lupusregina silently swore to live by that ideal.
"So the most evil thing I've ever done, was an unkind thing to two denizens of Nazarick." He continued after letting the moral lesson sink in. "I changed Albedo's settings before the shift, I marred Tabula-san's ideal, and made Albedo something she wasn't supposed to be."
"What did you change?" She asked, desperately curious.
"Aaah, it's embarrassing." Ainz admitted quietly, stopping his decent, they were almost down to the stone of the caverns proper. Which was such a non-Lord Ainz thing to say that she forgot who she was talking to and fell back on old habits, teasing him about the answer.
"Oh!" She cocked her head back to look at him over her shoulder. "What, you made the sexy succubus desperately in love with you?"
"Uuum, yes actually. That's exactly what I did."
Lupusregina stopped, absolutely floored.
"What, really?" She asked.
"Just before the shift I was curious about her backstory. I ended up changing the last line to 'She's in love with Momonga.'" Ainz confessed.
"What was it before?" Lupusregina asked in a squeak, too stunned for more pressing questions.
"Eeer, that 'She was actually a bitch' if I remember. And then a few minutes later it all became real, and I couldn't undo it."
"Wow." She responded smartly. "Wait! Why would you want to undo that change? Lady Albedo's already a bit… I mean she's great of course but, sometimes… I mean she'd be downright impossible to work with in the original."
"Bu- but she's good the way she is!" Lupusregina finished lamely
It was Ainz's turn to be speechless.
"Shouldn't you be disgusted?" He asked, confused.
"Disgusted by what?"
"For forcing Albedo to love me?"
"You didn't force her to love you though, she just does, that's who she is." Lupusregina responded, wondering if they had very different interpretations of the whole backstory-to-reality shift.
"I changed her backstory, she's like that because of me." Ainz said, sounding a little unsure now.
"I mean yeah, but If you hadn't she wouldn't be Albedo. She'd look the same, be called the same, but she'd be someone else." She wasn't sure how to best portray how she or her sisters understood the whole backstory thing.
"We only exist the way we are because you all made us this way. But we are this way. We are everything that was written down in our backstories. Maybe we can grow and maybe we can't, but those settings are the fundamental basis of what we are.
Albedo doesn't just love you just because you made her that way, or because she thinks she has to, Albedo loves you because that is what she is. Being in love with you is a part of her." She paused, wondering if she was explaining herself well.
"It's like how I wasn't tormenting the village only because I knew Mekongawa-sama made me want to. I did it because I actually wanted to. I actually enjoy it. My enjoyment is real, even though it's only like that because I was made that way. Her love is real too."
"I never thought of it like that."
She smiled at him. "My sisters and I have been doing a lot of thinking about the 'settings' thing."
"I think you can grow, can become even more than what we made you, even better."
She jumped at Ainz, and hugged him, dangling from his much taller neck.
"I don't think that was Evil at all, by your 'for the good of Nazarick' definition.' She reassured her Lord.
"Thank you." He whispered, like a great weight had been lifted.
Hopping down Lupusregina began to continue into the cavern, but stopped as another thought crossed her mind.
"Wait, is that why you've been rejecting her? You felt guilty?" She asked?
"Yes, I thought it wouldn't be right to be romantic because I made her be that way. It would be cruel to-"
"What!" She interrupted. "No, Ainz you've got things backwards! Like totally flipped around!"
"Pardon?" He sounded shocked. She hoped she wasn't out of line, but they had fine candor until now.
"It's the other way around, loving you is part of what Lady Albedo is, forcing her to repress that is what's cruel!"
'Huh, this did turn out to be pretty evil apparently' she thought.
"Even so, it would be selfish of me to have made her that way, then abuse that for my own gain."
"No!" 'Well maybe a little yeah, but not in a truly bad way.' Lupusregina thought but didn't say. Denying his claim with fervour!
"But it is selfish to make her love you and toss her aside out of shame! I- Lord Ainz that's who she is." She was getting heated now, and took a moment to breathe.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't say anything. You must know best, I apologise for speaking out of turn, Lord Ainz." She said, worried that she may have gone too far in speaking her mind.
The tunnel was silent for a moment before Ainz spoke again.
"No, you're right. It was selfish of me. I don't think I understood how much a part of you all those backstories are, how real they were. I value your input Lupusregina, please tell me if I'm being stupid in the future." He bowed at her.
Bowed
This was too weird.
"Aah, uuum. Thank you for listening Ainz, please stand up!" She scrambled. "I don't even know if I'm right, that's just how I see things, you'd have to talk with Lady Albedo!"
"I should, you're right." He acknowledged "but first we were going to go cave-exploring. Shall we?"