Artist's depiction:
About an hour later, Aria had gotten a good groove going for turning pages with the tip of her snout, though she wasn't quite down with the It's Nuzzlin' Time face Adagio kept making when she did. The urge was restrained, but the threat was still very real. It had almost happened once already, but Adagio's stomach rumbling again led them to the kitchen. It turned out that making toast was easy enough for them, or at least, hunger gave Sonata some kind of boost to dexterity.
Aria kind of wanted to roll a thief in that game now, but she doubted any of them could even pick up a character sheet without tearing through it.
Anyway, they again sat in the living room, Aria turning pages and Sonata happily consuming a plate of dry toast. They were going to need more juice pouches soon.
"Servants," grumbled Adagio, more than a hint of a blush on her frustrated face, "we were supposed to go looking for servants right away to help with... things." She glanced at Aria and groaned. "I know, I know, it's my own fault for fawning over you two instead of getting straight to work with the book."
Frowning a little, Aria rolled the thought around in her head. "Well, don't beat yourself up. Even if we got some brain-slaves right away, I don't think it'd make much difference." When Adagio looked back at her in confusion, she flicked a back-fin upward, the equivalent of a shrug. "I mean, even if you had somebody else there, we'd still be attached to you when you needed to go."
Adagio sat wide-eyed for a moment, then slammed Aria's face against her own forehead.
"OW! Don't beat me up either!!"
"S-sorry," stammered Adagio, barely feeling the red mark on her own head, "I usually facepalm with my right hand! Here, I'll kiss it better!" Not waiting for a reply, she immediately kissed Aria's head several times, drawing another scaly blush.
"Gah, s-sto-q-, I'm fine, I'm fine, quit it!"
Apologetic though she was for the accidental headbutt, Adagio couldn't help a little smile at Aria's flustered expression. "You know, I can't decide whether you're cuter when you're angry or-" She was cut off by a loud belch from her own mouth, which left her and Aria in stunned, perplexed silence. They looked at Sonata, who licked her fangs over the crumb-covered plate. She looked back at them, the three of them looked down at their shared stomach, connected the dots, and giggled like schoolgirls.
"So," asked Sonata, "what're we doing with our new magic first?"
"Revenge, of course," answered Aria, "we hop a bus back to CHS and make every one of those cheating bitches lick the dirt we wa- err... well, lick the dirt Adagio walks on!"
"No," amended Adagio, "we-" She was cut off by Sonata blowing raspberries.
"That sounds boring! I'd rather be licking free snow-cones! All the free snow-cones!"
Aria rolled her eyes. "We can pig out when we've got the Rainbooms wallowing in mud naked for everyone to point and laugh at for our amusement, like pigs!!"
"Ooh, on second thought, I want bacon!"
Shaking her head, Adagio tried to maintain order. "The first thing we should do is-"
"Payback," shouted Aria, looking squarely at Sonata. Sonata responded in kind.
"Screw that! The whole reason we tried to get so much power was to do whatever we wanted, so let's just do that!"
"The Rainbooms'll just show up and stop us again if we do that, stupid!"
Adagio raised an eyebrow. "Girls?"
"We'll just get 'em when they show up, or move somewhere far away and be boss of our own city!"
"They'll follow us, they're too high on their Hero High-Horse not to!"
"Girls?"
"Then we'll have the home-field advantage! Problem solved!"
"That doesn't even make any-"
"YOUR FACE DOESN'T EVEN MAKE ANY!"
"WHAT?!"
Raspberries were blown and things continued in the usual fashion, but at amplified volume with the two heads much closer than usual to Adagio's ears. She tried exerting control and shaking them both, but they just kept at it.
I remember now; they were always harder to break up before they had each others' hair to pull, have a short-lived endurance contest, and call a truce until the next time. I miss my scales, but perhaps there were merits to being human after all?
Regardless, she stood up as the argument continued, looked around for a means of silencing her bickering appendages, and spied a pair of dirty socks that had been left out again. She exerted control, quickly thrust Aria and Sonata's heads toward the socks, and scooped both up in such a manner as to make muzzles out of them; one for each mouth. This granted her a second of peace before both heads registered the stench now covering their mouths and noses. Sonata tried to push her sock (it was indeed one of her socks) off with the tip of her tongue... with predictable results, by the enhanced look of anguish in her eyes. Their expressions and the pained, muffled complaints suggested that Adagio had found her new means of punishment.
"Now then," she said with a sweet smile, "whose body is this?" She had hoped to enforce the points she was about to make by dragging things out a bit, but both snake-arms turning to her at once with wide, watery eyes was like a sucker-punch to her heart.
Those puppy-dog stares, the ears folding back, the drooping antennae, I can practically see their pouting lips! Too cute! Too cute!!
"W-well," she quietly stammered, moving Aria and Sonata's necks to brush the socks off of each mouth, "I'm sure you've learned your lesson."
All but gagging, Aria shook her head, those lovely eyes now looking back at their host with pained betrayal. "That was just cruel, even for you."
"ShutthefuckupAria," Sonata loud-whispered through clenched teeth before looking at Adagio with a wide, panicked smile, "Yea, totally, lesson learned, haha! We'll be super good, promise!" The smile cracked. "Please don't do that again."
While aware that Sonata rarely remembered her promises, this was still a harsher lesson than Adagio had intended, something she would have to discreetly make up for later. For now, she maintained as authoritative a voice as she could manage. "Just as long as you two behave." She got two slightly nervous looks, but there were no objections, so she paced back to the tome on the table. "Now then, the primary method of acquiring servants is to employ that hypnosis power, which might actually be faster than singing. What say we go give that a try?"
"Right on," said Aria with a vicious grin, "can't wait to make people do what we say again!"
Adagio was halfway to the door when Sonata got her attention.
"Uhm... Are we really going out in just a bathrobe?"
Aria and Adagio glanced down, the latter raising an eyebrow. "Well, what can we do? I'm still mostly covered like this, so-"
"We could at least put on something a little baggier," Aria said noncommittally, "just something that covers me and Sonata up a bit more?"
Weighing her options for a moment, Adagio was forced to admit that going out with unconcealed snake-arms right away still wasn't in their best interest. She sighed. "Well, what do you propose?"
Aria's back fin flicked upward. "I've got a baggy hoodie with pretty long sleeves, that oughta cover us up pretty good."
They went to Aria's room, Adagio letting Aria's outstretched neck act as a beautiful, living dowsing rod to lead her to the garment in question. She slipped off the bathrobe, let the others slither into the hoodie, and help pull it over her head. The frumpy, grey hoodie wasn't the most flattering thing she'd ever worn, but it covered enough of her body to work as a full shirt and miniskirt. However, long though the sleeves were, they weren't long enough to cover Aria and Sonata from shoulder to snout, which left them back at square one.
"Ooh," Sonata said with a smile, "idea!" She moved over to whisper into Aria's ear, drawing little chuckles as Adagio raised an eyebrow.
"What? What do you have in mind?"
Giggling, they retracted into their respective sleeves, a portion of their necks coiling up in the torso of the hoodie, making Adagio shiver as their smooth scales brushed against her bare skin.
"H-hey! Watch what you're-ooh!" She felt herself blush, looking down to see two large, bulbous lumps over her chest. Aria's full-body mirror helped her put things in perspective; that her arms had pulled themselves into the hoodie and bundled up in just such a way as to make it look like she now had a pair of massive breasts. Hearing them giggle from within the sleeves, she had to clench her jaw to not join them. "Cute, you two. Very cute." They laughed a little louder, but she just smiled and shook her head. "If that's that, then-"
"Wait," demanded Aria, whose head poked out of her sleeve, "don't you need, y'know, pants?"
Adagio glanced down. "The 'indecent' bits are covered, what's the problem?"
"Ooh," chirped Sonata, momentarily popping out of her sleeve to grab a pair of Aria's carelessly discarded pants in her teeth, "puh theesh on!"
Their host paled. "Oh, absolutely not!!"
This made Aria a little defensive. "H-hey, what's wrong with my pants?"
She got a slight scowl. "Even if I weren't much wider than you," she said with a meaningful hip-sway, "I sincerely worry about your circulation sometimes."
"Pfft. They aren't that tight."
"On me, they would be!"
Sonata's stare was almost lecherous. "Yea they would." The two slightly perturbed stares snapped her out of it. "What? Picking outfits might be a little harder now, but at least we got to keep Dagi's great ass!"
Adagio raised an eyebrow. "You're part of my body now too, you know."
She smiled almost proudly. "Doesn't mean I can't appreciate it!"
Aria, for her part, averted her eyes and refused to comment. She knew they were siblings, she knew Sonata knew they were siblings, but what she knew best was that pointing it out just wasn't worth the headache. No amount of 'Shut up, Sonata!' was worth having to sit through twenty minutes of 'We can't actually make babies, so-' this or 'Sexy is still Sexy,' that, so she was grateful when Adagio shrugged dismissively and moved on.
"Maybe we could just wear a pair of my own pants. Are either of you feeling confident about working a belt?" Two head-shakes. "Well, I'm sure we'll find something."
Ten minutes later, Adagio found herself in the strange combination of a baggy, grey hoodie, a soft-pink, ankle-length skirt, and a pair of sandals. For the time being, it was the best they could do, so she got a little help drawing the hood up and getting the book into a pocket, then set off to find their first mind-slave. They wandered the streets for a while, getting a few odd looks even while Aria and Sonata remained in their sleeves. It may have been the way they were dressed, and it may have been the sizable bulges in Adagio's hoodie, lightly bobbing with every step, but they didn't stop to ask anyone. Instead, Adagio (the only one of the three whose eyes weren't covered) searched for someone by themselves, someone they could focus on alone without worry of interference.
"Y'know," whispered Aria, "it just hit me that we didn't take a shower this morning."
Adagio answered without stopping to look into Aria's sleeve. "I'm sorry, did you want to rub yourselves over every inch of my body with soap in your mouths?"
There was no further discussion on the matter.
Before long, she spotted a pinkish girl with wild, green hair, dressed in a dark, reddish-purple school uniform and a plaid skirt. She moved carelessly down the street, eyes closed and head bobbing along to the beat only she could hear through her pink headphones. The sight of her made Adagio grit her teeth, remembering the girl that had, out of nowhere, appeared precisely when she was needed with precisely what was needed to stop them at the Battle. This likeness would be a fitting first victim.
She followed the girl until she turned down a path away from the road, not quite an alley, but definitely an area with little chance of witnesses. No one else was around.
"Excuse me, Miss," she called out, not even surprised that the girl either didn't hear her or didn't care. Walking faster, she moved beside the girl and stuck out a leg to trip her.
"WOH-OAH," the Crystal Prep student cried out as she fell forward, but instead of face-planting on the pavement, she stopped herself with both hands flat on the floor, transitioning to an unbalanced hand-stand. She wobbled back and forth for a moment, blushed as her skirt fell, then landed flat on her back with a grunt. She stared up at the sky in a daze until a strange figure loomed over her. In the stranger's wicked smile, she saw long, snake-like fangs.
"Woah," she breathed, "metal. Where'd you get-"
Adagio wasted no time, focusing her will to dominate by boring into the girl's yellow eyes with her own. It was with a modicum of satisfaction that she noted that her headphones had been jostled off of one ear during her fall. "Look me in the eye," she commanded, feeling the energy well up in her chest (unrelated to the two lumps of snake-arm), "you will now serve me, you will obey my every whim, you are a tool for me to do with as I see fit."
The girl looked up at her, wide-eyed, but otherwise expressionless. "'Kay."
The snake-woman blinked twice, but Sonata popped out of her sleeve to say it for her. "What, seriously?"
At that, their first servant expressed shock, leaping up and unconsciously brushing her skirt back down as she beheld the creature coming out of the stranger's sleeve.
"Hold," the human head demanded, her tone harsh, "you will not run, you will not scream. Understand?"
She indeed did neither of those things, but she did raise an arm to point at Sonata. "You got a talkin' eel!" It was more like a fishy snake-thing, but still!
There was a moment of audible silence as Adagio processed the statement. "Y...Yes. Yes, I do. Two, actually."
Aria took her cue, popping out and lightly shaking her head. "Man, that's a crick in the neck."
Slave #1's jaw dropped as she raised the other hand to point at Aria. Adagio chuckled at this. "Magnificent, are they not? Count yourself in high fortune, for from this day onward, these beautiful creatures will be among those you call 'Master.'" Her malicious smile slowly slipped away as the girl continued to gawk, pointing at random heads with both arms. "...What?!"
"You got two talkin' eels! I haven't seen anything this freaky since the Friendship Games!"
Artist's depiction:
Three heads exchanged a look, Adagio raising an eyebrow. "You've seen something like this before?"
"Yea," nodded Green-Hair, "there was this girl with a fancy doo-dad that went all-" she pumped one fist in the air before miming a guitar solo, "-WICKED FLYING RAVEN-CHICK, Deedlenerneedlerneedlerneerooo!!"
There was another pause. Aria cocked her head a little. "I can't tell, is this one bewitched or just another nutcase?"
"Very good question," intoned Adagio, who was having second thoughts about her first choice in mind-slaves. "Servant, you have no qualms about fulfilling our every wish?"
The girl chuckled. "Nah, it's pretty much the same back home. 'Go here, Lemon, do this, Lemon, wear that, Lemon.' But, hey," she said with a shrug, "all the wealthy families are like that, right?" Her words came without resentment or bitterness, but carried an air of tired acceptance.
She is used to being servile, thought Adagio as she focused for another dose of hypnotic snake-woman magic, I can work with that.
"You will obey only me and my sis-... arms... until the day I decide you no longer needed. Do you understand?" This time, she saw a clear effect in Lemon's eyes; momentarily widening as they flickered with red. This would have been the point where Adagio started laughing maniacally, but Sonata (adorably) tapped her on the shoulder with her chin, instead drawing a little smile. "What is it, Sonata?"
"Can you order her to get us a mirror?"
"What?"
Aria looked just slightly uncomfortable. "Yea. Seconding that. I thought you were scary before..."
"Why, what-" She noticed Lemon holding a pocket mirror very close to her face. Then she saw her own red-violet eyes, the pupils now morphed into sharpened slits resembling those of a snake. "Ooooh," she cooed, equally pleased to have fangs again, "that's a welcome change! Do you think I'll get my own scales back, too?"
Sonata flicked her back fin upward. "I'unno, I kinda like you better fuzzy." She was startled by Adagio's head immediately snapping in her direction.
"Only because you were blessed with the likeness of our old bodies," she hissed, "will I not slap you for that blasphemy." There was a pause as she took in the wide-eyed stares of her arms. "...And, y'know. No hands."
Aria bit the edge of Adagio's hood to pull it back and reveal her hair. "Is it really that bad?"
"YES," she groaned in exasperation, "the bangs are the only part I bother brushing, and even then it's strictly to keep them off my face!" Shoulders drooping, she let out a sigh. "I know, I know, it's soft and warm when it needs to be, not as heavy as you might think when it's wet, but, still...?"
"You miss having scales," came Sonata's guess, "not just because yours were super golden and shiny, but for that pretty-much-invincible thing we had going back home? That was half the reason the pony wizard guy couldn't touch us, right?"
Adagio didn't answer, instead staring listlessly up at the sky. "...Why don't you two ever miss our old bodies? Since we got here, I haven't heard either of you complain about it even once, no matter how much I rant and rave on the subject."
Despite feeling that something was out of place with that question while the two of them were snake-things welded to Adagio's shoulders, Aria did her best to answer. "I'unno. This world kinda sucks in a lot of ways, but once you get over the total lack of magic? Having hair and fingers ain't all that bad."
"Yea," added Sonata, "and like, hugging feels a lot better in these bodies, right? All soft and warm? We might'a been untouchable before, but sometimes touching is nice, y'know?"
Remembering recent nuzzles, their host chuckled. "I suppose." She looked away from the dozy clouds overhead to focus on her twin snake sisters with a little smile. "If you two can let that go, perhaps I can too."
Aria and Sonata smiled back, lightly wrapping around Adagio in some kind of bizarre, three-person self-hug. Then all three of them were startled by the voice of their servant.
"Awww!!"
Pretending not to have forgotten she was standing there, Adagio looked squarely at AlreadyForgotHerName to find her wearing a wide, cheerful smile. "Err... I don't think I've properly introduced us yet, my name is Adagio Dazzle," she held up Aria, "Aria Blaze," then Sonata, "and Sonata Dusk. I could come up with my own designation for you, bu-" A sudden gust of wind made Adagio shiver and squeak in surprise, earning her no small amount of embarrassment when her arms turned to her with confused stares. Their new servant giggled.
"Goin' commando, huh? I wouldn't do it in school, if I were you, but don't worry, you get used to the breeze eventually."
"N-noted," Adagio muttered through clenched teeth and a rosy blush. On the bright side, she remembered her first order. "You will accompany me to the nearest tailor to find something suitable for my sisters and I, starting now."
"Sure thing," she said while turning to lead, "just follow me. Name's Lemon Zest, by the way!"
Aria and Sonata pulled Adagio's hood back up and retreated back into their sleeves (thus returning Adagio's comical torso endowments) as they followed Lemon. On the way, Aria whispered from within her sleeve.
"So... If you're really getting over the scales thing... does that mean you'll quit with the face-rubbing?"
Adagio chuckled. "Ohh, Aria..." She quickly exerted control to lift Aria enough to be able to nuzzle her head through the sleeve. "Of course not~!"