Favela Pt. 21

Author's Note: This Part of the story is dedicated to Asagi Ryu, patron saint of yuri and panty fetish iconoclast. May you dwell within the hallowed fragrant valley of the lilies forever my friend.

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It had been fifteen days since Olivia spent the night in her mother's bed. Fifteen long days since she'd bred Marcella all night long and then on into the morning. For every one of those days she'd religiously opened the dating app and read and reread the chat. Marcella was still messaging Baduro, although with slightly less frequency. The day after they'd 'consummated' their brief yet fruitful sexual relationship her mom had posted a picture, of her dark slender wrist, ringed with a milky-white plastic band.

"I got this today at the bazaar. It's a biopolymer hormone detector that changes color when you're pregnant; blue if it's a boy or pink if it's a girl." Olivia wanted to say something in response, but every time she started typing a reply the shock and immensity of it all hit her square in the stomach. She felt sick, nervous, moody and uncharacteristically sensitive.

She deleted whatever she'd written, and sulked silently in whatever dark corner of the villa she'd managed to ensconce herself. Even despite this strange depression, part of her was unbearably excited, like a bird trapped in a tiny cage, fluttering wildly against the bars. Of course it's going to be a girl! Her brain inserted triumphantly into the swirling milieu of doubt, terror and indescribable pangs of elation.

Ever since they'd taken that debaucherous bath together, the intense heat and passion the three women shared that night had cooled somewhat. Maithri had taken another shift at the factory, which meant she came home later, and Olivia wasn't meeting her at the gate every day. Marcella was working more hours too, albeit remotely from her desktop. She wasn't trying to avoid her daughter, there just wasn't as much of a margin for play between work, sleep and her erratic meals.

At the moment the two of them barely crossed paths, but it wasn't anything like before, there was a warm and fuzzy bubble of fondness, affection and excitement surrounding and pervading them both now, it had completely and forever replaced the cold anxious void that had nearly consumed their tenuous mother-daughter relationship. Olivia could sense it whenever they spotted each other flitting through the kitchen or hall. The flash of a shy smile, a glimpse of some shared secret inner light.

They had resolved on one fun little physical diversion though. Olivia had started it of course; while walking past her mom's room one night she'd impulsively taken off her thick girly pink and white panties and hung them over Marcella's door handle. She was pleasantly surprised when she and Maithri went to bed the following evening and discovered a pair of sheer black lace boyshorts draped aesthetically over her own doorknob.

Maithri snickered and then smiled gently, she held out her hand, gesturing and tilted her head. "Go ahead." She murmured indulgently. Olivia gratefully took off the comparatively plain panties she was wearing, handing them off to her friend, and then quickly slipped into her mom's lingerie. They were already pinned up to fit her slightly smaller frame. The sight of those little golden safety pins sent a powerful rush of contentment and arousal through her entire body.

"Well, I might as well too." Maithri simpered smugly, dropping her vivid turquoise panties around her ankles and pulling on Olivia's boring light-blue briefs. She sighed with satisfaction and picked up her shimmery discarded underwear. "Should I go put these on your mother's door handle filha?" She asked with a casual consummately feigned disinterest. Olivia felt her crotch clench hotly at the perverse suggestion, even as an ugly stab of jealousy deflected her arousal.

"No." She nearly snapped, her eyes locking fiercely onto her girlfriend's comically innocent yet clearly bemused face. "This is something between me and Marcella." She replied, forcing her voice to remain calm. "Only my panties are going to be hanging off my mother's doorknob, okay?" She reached out suddenly and grabbed Maithri's lingerie out of her hand. "I'll be taking these." She smirked, then realizing she had nowhere good to put them, pulled them whimsically down over her head.

Maithri clapped both hands across her mouth and started laughing, her black eyes sparkling over her splayed fingers. Then she quickly and quietly moved in on her girlfriend, pulling back her hands so that she could plant a wet sensual kiss on Olivia's surprised half-open mouth. She also reached up and took hold of the waistband of her turquoise lingerie and pulled it down farther over Olivia's forehead nearly blocking her eyes.

"This is a good look for you." She murmured happily. Cutting Olivia off with another kiss before she could respond. "I think it tells me that while your mother has you down here." She reached between her friend's legs and gently stroked her lacy mound. Olivia squeaked and actually squirmed, embarrassing herself almost immediately. Maithri peered intently into her girlfriend's flashing eyes. "But I have you... Up here."

Maithri glanced up and grinned as she lovingly stroked the top of Olivia's head with her other hand. Olivia could feel the crotch of Maithri's panties squishing into her hair, they felt moist and it made her shudder with intense arousal. It was probably her imagination but she thought she could smell her girlfriend's unique scent filling her head, seeping into her skull, she started to get a little dizzy.

Maybe she was falling in love, just a little. She snorted and grinned down at Maithri. "Let's hurry up and get dressed, it looks like it's going to be a nice day today, I might actually enjoy walking to work." And she was right. Ever since the air had cleared up it seemed like the climate itself was changing too, the heat wasn't quite as insufferable and the humidity had mellowed a bit. The jungle with all its genetically engineered organic machinery looked perkier somehow.

Before she was even able to fully appreciate the less oppressive conditions inside the factory Olivia's shift ended and she waved goodbye to her friend before leaving the compound. It was so nice outside that she actually wandered off the beaten path instead of going straight home. Following an atypical burst of intuition she ended up stumbling onto the main road that led to the Favela dump.

It had been years since she'd been there with her mother, so she decided to pay it a visit, if for any other reason, merely to see how much it had changed since she was a child. Suddenly emerging from between the two parallel walls of the towering synthetic canopy, she gasped and froze in her tracks. The surface of the dump itself, a towering mountain of trash perhaps eight meters high and hundreds of meters wide was unrecognizable.

Its surface no longer a chaotic landscape of abstract broken and misshapen artifacts of every shape, size, color and conceivable material. It had been transformed into a living carpet of knee-high pale blue-gray grass. Olivia's mouth opened and closed several times, unable to make sense of what she was seeing, and yet the former berm of garbage was not even what had caught her attention.

Off to the left, partially intersecting with the curious field of unexplained vegetation, was the beginning of a structure unlike anything Olivia had ever seen. That alone still would not have stopped her from advancing. Around this alien structure swarmed... Living scaffold? Spurred on by abject curiosity her legs finally thawed and she cautiously crept closer.

"What?" She breathed, as her new vantage point allowed her to finally discern individual objects within the constantly shifting geometric patterns of metallic rods that surrounded what was now clearly a sloped cylinder, similar to a nuclear cooling tower but without a flared top. The rods were in actuality entities, Olivia hesitated to call them "robots" because they were vaguely human in proportion and form, but they were also a bit too minimal to be labeled "androids".

The things, whatever they were, reminded her of the Phasmida she'd seen as a child, or conventional modern androids that had been stripped for parts leaving only their quintessential skeleton, but without a head. Even that wasn't enough to describe their striking lack of complexity, these things were bare-bones. "Stick men." Olivia found herself calling them internally, just a few main segments connected by odd spherical joints. "How are they even moving?" She wondered aloud.

The only thing vaguely human about them was their hands and feet, which had fingers and toes, although due to the lack of a head, it was impossible to tell which was which. The Stick men crawled around the base of the structure following an elliptical course up one side, around the back and down again to the ground. The closer she got the more Olivia could see. The metal creatures were not just around the cylinder she now realized.

She hadn't notice before, since they were practically invisible when not offset by a distinct background. The Stick men were also roaming through the field of grass, dragging their metal fingers through the blades. Olivia watched in awe as the dusky fibers detached soundlessly as though being mowed by an invisible scythe, then inexplicably twisted and fused themselves into a slender braided cord that seemed to wind itself around the Stick man's body as though it were a bobbin.

By the time one of the mysterious figures had left the field, their body was ensconced in a thick cocoon of shimmering opalescent thread. These burdened Stick men would then head directly to the foundation of the structure and begin their ideocyncratic ascent. Olivia could now see, nearly invisible stands like spider web, trailing from both hands and feet of the metal "men".

They were building, she realized, stunned. As the Stick men returned to the bottom of the cylinder their bundles of thread had disappeared, but now she could see that what she now recognized as a tower was growing in both thickness and height. The surface which looked remarkably like the inside of an abalone shell was crisscrossed with innumerable delicate lines of growth, and it had exactly the same shimmery opalescent sheen as the spools of thread.

No, "building" wasn't an accurate term, Olivia mused, as she dared to creep even closer to the mysterious entities and their structure. The Stick men were weaving their tower, as though it were a monolithic basket! She marveled at how the field of grass on top of the dump never seemed to deplete despite their incessant harvesting. Then she noticed a small clump on the outskirts of the berm, just a few yards away. It was growing right before her eyes, rising a milliliter or two every time she blinked.

She also noticed that the surface of the dump was actually lower than she'd remembered it. The trash is turning into grass, no, the grass is eating the trash! Inexplicably her heart started racing. Olivia didn't know why, but watching this bizarre and remarkably complicated process unfold before her eyes was extremely exciting. Losing all her fear, she suddenly stood fully erect and started striding boldly toward the base of the opalescent tower.

Just in the time that she had been laying in wait, the height of the ring had risen almost half a meter. "This is incredible." She breathed, overcome with an unfamiliar optimism. In moments she was just a few paces away from the nearest entity, it was surprisingly beautiful up close. Its highly polished silver segments flashed in the sun and reflected everything around them like mirrors. The headless stick men ignored her completely. Olivia marveled at her complete lack of fear, realizing that she probably should have been terrified, but instead she felt calm and even oddly content.

There was just something about watching these mysterious metallic creatures diligently building their fantastical trash basket that set her very heart alight. She sat down, crossed her legs and just... Watched, until the sun started to set. By the time night proper had fallen, the tower had risen two hundred meters or more. The stick men had intensified their efforts, their speed increasing gradually over time, their movement patterns evolving. They now moved in curious figure eights, rising up and down the structure's sheer walls. It was breathtaking.

Olivia's stomach growled and she knew that she had better head home if she didn't want Maithri and her mother to worry. She got up slowly and stretched, incredibly stiff, her neck cracked uncomfortably as she looked away from the tower's faintly glowing pinnacle, glancing down her eye just happened to catch a faint sympathetic glow by her feet. She stooped down and scooped it up. Twisting and turning the slithering specter in her hands, she realized that it was a short fragment of the spun grass the stick men carried.

Squealing with delight she looped it tightly around her wrists and knotted its ends together with her other hand. Holding it up to catch the moonlight she inhaled happily, pleased to note that it continued to glow faintly just as the tower did. "Incredible." She whispered, turning slowly and making her way back to the opening in the jungle wall.

This, she knew, was going to be the first of many trips to the dump, now that there was something so interesting to watch. And she was right, almost every day after her shift ended the first thing she did was head directly to the dump to watch the progress of the mysterious stick men and their even more mysterious project. In just a matter of days the tower passed beyond her ability to see. After that she found it slightly less interesting, but still checked on it every once in awhile.

Otherwise Olivia was left with more free time and freedom than ever before. She spent her other hours at home researching everything even remotely connected to childbirth, including all kinds of parenting techniques. Although her primary focus was on the actual birthing process, since she wanted more than anything to ensure that her mother could have their baby safely and smoothly. She spent countless hours between work and recreational activities studying medical textbooks and watching videos of advanced procedures.

She even went so far as to take a few of her old stuffed animals, disassemble and reconstruct them with needle and thread into a crude set of anatomical models that she could practice on. Maithri helped her out at times, when she had the energy, and if not she would watch quietly and give Olivia occasional constructive feedback. Sometimes she would just laugh and shake her big curly mop of shimmery black hair. "You're going to make an excellent mother." She would say, a soft smile on her angelic face.

After one particularly grueling session practicing a French AmbUlatory Cesarean Section, Olivia came to a striking realization: Baduro was dead, she decided at last, after a week or so of silence. He'd died in the jungle like her brother, ambushed by Caeté cannibals while attempting to secure one of the Favelo's numerous illegal rubber tree plantations. She stared blankly at the languidly pulsing text prompt. Poor Marcella would never know what happened to her erratic lover. He just as easily could have chosen to bow out after knocking her up, she mused morosely. Mission accomplished.

She picked up her phone and scrolled down to the bottom, to her mother's latest post, it stood at the end of a long line of increasingly desperate and progressively overt pleas for attention. Olivia's guts seemed to twist painfully inside her, she felt an agonizing sense of guilt and remorse. How could she be so cruel? Why couldn't she put her feelings into words, and send them to Marcella? As tears welled up in her eyes, she blinked through the shimmering haze, forcing them to focus.

This new picture of her mother's wrist, seemed to glow, emblazoned with a pink band, outstretched, expressive and open; both joyful and somehow beckoning. It was then that Olivia experienced a revelation. Baduro was gone, but she wasn't. Her mother's hand had never been meant for him, it was always hers, to hold and to claim. There was nothing tragic about what she was feeling. This was what she'd been waiting for.

Jumping up Olivia felt as though she were swimming up through deep cold dark water, violently she used every muscle to thrust and push and propel herself higher. The more she moved the easier it got, the cold turned to warmth, the darkness to light, the water itself turned into fresh air. She was panting, her heart was pounding, but she wasn't tired at all. She had never felt so full of life, and she couldn't stop smiling.

The next thing she knew, her body was gliding through the Villa's maze and she was at her mother's door. Without even knocking she opened it and rushed inside. Marcella was laying on her bed, on her back in nothing but her panties, she'd probably been napping after pulling another all-nighter. Olivia felt an instant response, this particular sight had become so familiar, albeit in a very different context.

Marcella turned her head slowly, her face unreadable. She manged to look both unseeing and strangely alert at the same time. Similarly her body appeared exhausted and brimming with energy. Olivia climbed up onto the bed without asking and quietly lay down beside her mother. "It's been awhile." She murmured softly.

Her mom rolled over slowly, her legs lifting mirroring the posture of her arms which were folded as though she were praying. Except her hands were balled into fists that were pressed tightly together. "Since your boyfriend came over." Olivia concluded smoothly, suppressing the overwhelming eagerness that she felt, her eyes darting up and down, anxious butterflies bouncing around in her belly.

She reached out and put her hand on her mother's jutting hip, letting it drift casually over the crest, lingering on her narrow muscular waist and then back again to rest securely with the side of Marcella's underwear touching the palm of her hand. Her boldness gave her the strength to look her mother straight in the eyes. They stared back, unfaltering, burning with an ineffable internal fire.

"Yeah." Marcella finally replied. "He hasn't written either, even though I sent him a picture of this." She briefly held up her right wrist, the pink bracelet jiggled impotently for a moment then lay still. Olivia licked her lips, resisting the urge to blurt out that she knew what it was and what it meant, instead she wanted to savor the explanation her mother would certainly offer if prompted.

"It's pretty, what is it?" Olivia asked, keeping her voice low and trying so sound only mildly interested. "It matches these panties really well." She continued unexpectedly, squeezing Marcella's hip and bunching up the material under her hand. Her mom smirked and let out a soft little sigh.

"I didn't even notice." She breathed. "This bracelet is all I've been able to think about since it changed color." She sighed, more dramatically this time. "But you're right." She moved her wrist over to her hip, holding the bracelet against the front of her underwear. It was almost a perfect match. "I love how you see things that I miss." She mused. "And I feel like I've been missing a lot lately."

Olivia wriggled a little closer, letting her hand slide from Marcella's hip to lightly grip her mother's wrist, she let her fingers play freely with the bracelet, turning it and tugging on it until her mom pulled it away. "This bracelet means there's a baby growing inside me." She said, almost whispering the words as though she were afraid to say them out loud. "A little sister, just like you wanted." She rasped. "Right here."