Author's Note - Please read from Chapter 1 to make sense of this. This is not a quick stroke story. There will be sexy-times, but they will only happen as the story's pace dictates, and that won't start quick.
Edited 9 November 2019
All characters participating in sexual activities are 18 or older.
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Chapter 12
Ray drove them to his condo. This late at night, the city was much quieter. It wasn't quite as bad as a small town that 'rolled up the sidewalks' each night, but very few people were visible outside the occasional other drivers. Tauriz still was watching everything with the pleasure of discovery.
He frowned a little as he realized he'd gathered her emotional state from her without thinking. The nature of the Hinn was addictive in its ease of gathering information, worse than any smartphone or search engine. Those took some minor effort, whereas Hinn just took the slightest hint of attention.
Pulling into the parking garage and his assigned slot, they got out and walked to the elevator, the first one Tauriz had ever ridden. He was amazed how much of a big deal it was for her, and her joy bubbled over to affect him as well. He could feel her consistently drawing more information from him, pulling in his incomplete understanding of how a button could move a room up and down. She was shocked that she could understand so much of it - she knew of pulleys and ropes, this was just another variant on that technology - but how the information flew through wires was a mystery to her and his very rudimentary understanding of electronics wasn't up to the task of explaining it all.
Deliberately, Ray drew on Tauriz, looking for foods she particularly enjoyed. He was surprised -- she didn't have any. She was as happy eating half-spoiled raw meat as she was eating delicate pastries or fresh, ripe fruit. Digging deeper, the depths she'd been driven to in her past saddened Ray to cause this, as not all of her Masters had cared to keep her in good health. Some seemed to have deliberately been happy to ensure her sickness and weakness, an attitude that disgusted and angered him.
Tauriz felt his strong emotions and quickly realized the reason why. She came over and gently laid a hand on his arm, turning him to meet her eyes. "That was in my past, Ray my Master. That is over. We are here now. I have far too much history to allow it to drive me. That way leads to nothing pleasant, nothing useful. So, instead, show me what foods I can come to enjoy with you."
Taking a deep breath to try to leave the emotion behind, Ray nodded. Picking up his cell, he called in an order for a Chinese meal with several small portions of his favorite dishes. Tauriz showered first and came out wearing the black silk tube she'd first appeared in as she dried her long hair. She must have changed it, as it was in no way long enough to have made up the braid she'd been wearing.
He showed her the money he'd put out for the delivery in case they arrived while he was in the shower and went to clean up. Of course, the delivery did show while he showered, but Tauriz was more than capable of this new task and had no problems with it. The hardest part for her was to resist bartering with the delivery girl. Ray came back out barefoot in a pair of sweat pants and a plain grey t-shirt to find her with her hair tucked up in a messy kind of bun, opening the various packages and sampling the different tastes.
She was enjoying the food, except for the ginger-heavy dishes - something about that taste wasn't to her liking. The rest she devoured happily, and Ray joined in with her. He pulled out a tablet computer and shared his knowledge of its use with her, letting her access the internet and pull in more information that he didn't have.
He half followed along via Hinn with her activities as she retrieved scattered information, from electronics to linguistics, from economic theory to haute cuisine, meteorology to mathematics. Each piece could be felt settling into a gestalt, expanding her knowledge segment by segment, aiming to reach some unstated goal. Still very human, Ray didn't feel it was right that he pull that knowledge from her via Hinn.
While she accessed the world's learning, he handled the mail (ads, ads, bills, and ads), his email (more ads), and skimmed summaries of recently published research in his field. He made a note of several that he intended to review in more detail later but didn't spend the time yet to do so.
He felt a pleasing surprise come over Tauriz and looked over. She was now manipulating the tablet with jawhar, and the sites she directed it to flew across the screen. She looked up and smiled happily at him, and he could feel their knowledge expanding with every page visited.
Ray took a moment to dig into some of the sites she'd accessed and found some questionable information. He pointed it out to her and explained the concern - on the internet, everyone's an expert, even if that ends up being an expert buffoon. Her eyebrow quirked (for all the world like the most famous half-Vulcan), and he felt her setting up checks across all the information she was pulling in looking for signs of dissent or falseness.
He pointed her at an introductory course on Java programming and another that introduced python to new programmers. He explained in Hinn without words that this would allow her to leverage the strengths of computers to assist with information gathering and management, but also pointed out some of the weaknesses that automated systems brought into the mix as well.
She inhaled the information, coming to know programming almost instantly. She compared and contrasted her knowledge with that which he'd gathered over the years of his intermittent interest from his roleplaying preferences. The two different takes revealed benefits to each approach. Tauriz was quick to assemble the different strengths into a composite knowledge structure that she shared back with him.
His fumble-fingered approach instantly improved dramatically, even as his lessons learned helped arm her with ideas and architectures that would make starting from scratch much less painful.
Putting the few leftovers into containers and the containers into the fridge, he opened his mind to her and queried where she wished to sleep. She drew from him and understood the immediate question and the context behind it.
She came over to hug him and stared into his eyes, stating, "With you, Master. However you wish it to be."