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Session Zero 4
🕑 Added 2024-06-09 18:44:58 +0000 UTCI was a husk, a man lost in the desert, neither alive nor dead, heart pumping through willpower and accursed grit alone. How was I alive with so little fluid left in me, was I mummy, a revenant? All I knew was that the witch had desiccated me. Even my brain, so totally drained of all the many life liquids must have been but a walnut now, rattling around a dusty skull.
"Annie," I croaked to my senior student, "you'll have to continue the school alone. My voice grew weaker. "My…soul's leaving my body…"
Annie looked down at me with a mix of bewilderment and concern, as best she could while avoiding my nudity. I was lying on my back atop the bearskin rug. I had not bothered to get dressed.
The redhead took my hand. She had let herself in with a spare key I'd given her, taking us both by surprise, here a few hours earlier than I'd expected. Behind her, I saw an increasingly embarrassed Maki pinch her brow. "Aww, you poor baby. Did…the ghost do this?" She was still no less confused about my ghost hunt than she was when I first dropped it on her casually. The longer I could drag out giving her a proper explanation, the funnier it became for me.
"Suc—" I coughed. "Succubus."
"What, really?" asked Annie. She didn't know, she was so new to all this that anything could be true at this point.
I limply pointed at Maki behind her.
"Oh. Wait, what?" Annie followed my finger with confusion and then looked back at me, repeating the motion a few times before she got it. She turned to look at Maki with a new understanding, appreciation, and, if I wasn't mistaken, a bit of competitive spirit. "Oh. Wow," she exhaled in breathless awe. "And you're still standing? That's amazing. Are you also a martial artist?"
Annie stuck out her hand to Maki in a gesture of dazed respect. Maki, too polite to turn it down, shook her hand, even as the rest of her threatened to curl in on itself like a startled fern or maybe a neutron star moments before it became a singularity.
"He-he's exaggerating," stammered Maki. Then, the moment Annie ended the handshake, she did a running soccer kick to my ribs. I started laughing hysterically, only infuriating her further. Switching to Japanese, she shouted, "Just what the hell are you telling her, you bastard! Get up and introduce me already, it's your apartment! And put on pants!"
The ding of my slow cooker interrupted the farce. I kipped up to my feet with new vigor, my penis all aflopping, drawing the attention of both my guests.
"Woo! Dinner's ready, thank god. Good timing, Shine! You're off early tonight. How you feeling? You like my new scars?"
"Of course I'm early, I rushed here as soon as I could! You told me you were fighting a ghost last night and then your phone broke at three in the morning!" Annie put both of her hands on top of her head. "Gah! That's how I feel. Gah! James! Gah! And also I feel, AHHH! And a little bit of Whawhawhwahwahwah-whaaaaaaaaat?!"
I nodded knowingly. "Mm, yes, all appropriate reactions to a spooky ghost story. Did you eat dinner yet by the way?"
"James," she whined pitifully, "please, you've been teasing it out for days!"
"Sure, sure." I put on my boxers and made my way into the kitchen to put dinner together. Annie gasped in horror at the sight of the scars on my back. "Am I making you a plate, by the way, or did you already eat?"
"James! Are ghosts real?! Did a ghost give you those scars?!"
"Uhuh, sure did. Although, these were all me" I said, holding up my arms. The burns I'd suffered from harnessing the distilled alcohol had healed into a neat speckled pattern, only visible when they caught the light. "Fire tornado."
"What!? What does that mean!?"
"This is Maki, by the way. She's a priestess at the Shinto Shrine in Little Tokyo; it was her brother we were avenging with the ghost fight. She'll be helping us out from now on."
Maki bowed. "Nice to meet you. James has told me a lot about you. I hope I can be of use."
As desperate as Annie was to finally learn about the ghost hunt and the broader Underworld, she too was too polite to ignore a greeting. "Oh my god, yes, of course. I'm sorry I rushed in here like I did! I thought something had happened to James. It's so great to meet you!"
"It's alright. Your master is a very dramatic man."
"Ha! Yeah, that'll happen. We're both performers, you know." Annie's cheesy smile dropped as she had a realization. "Sorry, did I hear correctly that you two were avenging your brother? Was he, um…"
"Killed by a ghost? Yes. There was a Hungry Ghost in Chinatown feeding on injured martial artists; that's how I met James. I'd asked a mutual friend who drives a taxi to keep an eye out for strange phenomena in the area."
Annie's eyes went wide. "That's…something that can happen?"
I gave Maki a meaningful look. "Would you mind—"
"Not at all." She took Annie by the elbow and led the startled woman to a stool by the kitchen. "I'd be happy to answer any of your questions. I don't trust James to not continue to baffle you for his own amusement."
I pointed at her with the spatula I'd been using to stir the chicken curry into a pot of steaming hot rice. "It's true, that's exactly what I would have done. Also, get a whiff of this," I said, wafting the modestly delectable scent of a three Success meal over to the girls. The sixth Die I got from Maki's handjob made a huge difference. "He's improving! Pretty cool, right?"
"No, not cool!" shouted Annie, thoroughly affronted. She'd been going tear recently with fresh recipes for training snacks and meals in a poorly concealed attempt to steal my heart by way of my stomach. "I told you not to get better at cooking!"
"Hey, I didn't try to get better, but you're bound to improve at anything you do often. Wait – what am I even defending myself from here? I cook for you all the time; you're upset that it's going to start tasting decent?"
"Cooking's my thing, James. A girl's got to have a thing. You get it, right, Maki?"
She nodded. "He's annoyingly competent, yes. I understand your frustrations completely."
"Yes! Like, be bad at one thing, guy. Jeez."
"And it's made worse by how flippant he is about it all, too." She cast her voice in a deep, parody of a himbo, "'Bound to get better by doing stuff, relax.' Hmph. Unbelievable."
"Exactly!"
"Thankfully, your master was too traumatized by becoming a death god's champion to edge in on my 'thing', as you call it. I'd suggest you focus on an area of your expertise or your personality that he's grateful for out of a genuine reticence to adopt himself."
Annie's face and body language, which had been rapidly untightening, instantly returned to the near panic that she'd arrived with. "I'm sorry, what?"
Maki turned her head and gave me the slightest hint of a smile; she too enjoyed teasing the other woman. There was also an unspoken promise to me written on her face, 'Don't worry, I'll defend your secrets,' it said. "Don't be cruel, James, give the girl a hint. What are you the happiest to leave in her more capable hands?"
"Cars, for sure. I don't know shit about them, while Annie can build one from scratch." And I hadn't gotten any of those skills from her Companion Quests either, so that wasn't likely to change any time soon.
"Is that so?" asked Maki, raising an eyebrow. Like me, she was a lifelong local to Black Harbor, and like most locals, knew little to nothing about the four-wheeled, noisy abominations clogging our streets. "Remarkable. I too may have to rely on you in that field."
"Th-thanks. And, sure, anytime."
"I appreciate that." She patted her arm, and took her hand, holding it in both of hers. "Now, I'm going to tell you everything you could want to know, and if James tries to interrupt with a," she cast her voice into the himbo parody again, "'Uh, hey, two ever think—', or, 'Say, Annie, how about we—', you and I are going to talk right over him. Okay?"
Annie exhaled a sigh and finally relaxed fully since she'd entered the apartment. "Oh, thank God, you have no idea how much that means to me. I could kiss you right now."
Maki shot me a quick smirk. 'That's right, I've got game too,' it said.
I smiled to myself over the pot. It was nice that the girls were bonding. A little worrying that they were doing so over how annoying I could be, but if that was the price I had to pay, then I'd gladly be two or even three times as irritating.
"You know what, Maki, for making me sound like Yamcha in your impersonation, I am going to explain the ghost fight." I took a deep breath and started from, where else, the sort-of-middlish-part-just-after-the-start. "Chinatown on a warm, late Summer night smelled like pot stickers, charcoal, and home. It was Friday and the people were out, about, and buzzing with excitement. Plastic tables with chain-smoking uncles playing mahjong were out on every block. Men stood outside karaoke bars hocking their specials…"
I'd thought that being overly thorough and needlessly descriptive would irk them as I started from well before I even met Kuze and had the fateful brawl that kicked off so much, including earning me the attention of the Egui on the walk back home. But when a man with 7 Dice in Charisma starts in on his noir origin story, even the impatient sit quietly. Maki had heard an abbreviated part of the tale in Tamaki Grill, but I'd been, despite appearances, very professional with her prior to our exorcism. I'd been trying to get to know her better for the sake of our imminent team-up; this was not great for that, only I was talking at length while they sat quietly.
It wasn't until I got to the part where I was waiting for Maki in the hallway of the Shrine that I realized how little we'd spoken about what had happened from my perspective. After the fight, the last thing we wanted to do was a full debrief, and I'd assumed that Maki got the important parts by sensing my roaring Qi. She shivered when I described the way Funikugami courted me. Evidently, he barely showed himself to most people in the Shrine, their mostly silent guardian.
Funikugami had asked me why I'd let my younger sister watch our father fight two men to the death. I had told him the honest, simple truth, that she would have been gutted if I hadn't let her see one of the rare occasions where Dad busted out his martial arts. "Brotherly love and a child's joy, so rare in our Domain," said the death god in response. That line seemed to weigh heavy upon Maki, and I was glad that she had Annie to rub her back comfortingly while I continued.
We paused upon the scene on the rooftop, when I'd been trying to bait the monster into showing itself. "It attacked you and a woman?" said Maki sharply, her first interjection. "That's…" She trailed off, but I could read the issue on her face. The idea that the ghost would attack two people at once, or that it would attack women had been firmly outside of what she'd expected from it. I'd antagonized it to that point, yes, but it was still harsh evidence that she could be wrong.
"Yeah, and it was for sure eating a lot more than one person every three to five years judging from what I saw at the end. I'm guessing those were just the disappearances that were reported on." I added, seeing her despondent face, "Don't beat yourself up. Nine times out of ten that a martial artist disappears from town without a body, it probably doesn't register outside their immediate circle, let alone the news. You had no way of knowing."
Annie, who had been listening enrapt, was next to stop me. Upon hearing about the fire tornado, she said, "You're responsible for destroying that warehouse?! Holy shit, the pictures were on the news; they're blaming it on a faulty moonshining still. Everyone at work had their personal conspiracy theories though. Can you believe that not one of them came close to the truth?"
At the end of the tale, Maki was smiling again at the reminder of her brother's freedom. The mistakes of the past were forgotten; as she had told me when we got back, it had all worked out for the best.
"Sorry, I don't want to sound ignorant, but does that mean you guys are…related now?" asked Annie, no doubt remembering the state in which she'd found me.
"Oh boy. How about you take it from here, Maki?"
"Of course." She nodded seriously. "And thank you again for everything you've done for me. I was taking your strength for granted. I didn't realize how close I came to…remaining brotherless," she added with a wry grin, unable to help herself, "Kenji."
I threw a light lead leg roundhouse to Annie's sternum, catching her by surprise and knocking her to the ground off-balance.
"Ow! Why? You said you'd only be dodging and blocking."
"You were beginning to take that for granted."
She grumbled an objection, but I could tell that she understood and agreed with the lesson.
We'd made our way outside to my gym, giving Maki the peace to finish her preparations. After filling Annie in on what had happened post-ghost fight, she'd sent us out here to work up a sweat; she wanted to see Annie's energy when it was in full flow.
Annie stood up and brushed herself off. She feinted by shifting her weight onto the front leg and started to half torque her hips, but as her back leg came off the ground, she let herself fall and roll forward. I slid a few inches to the left to dodge her single-leg takedown by a hair and hopped back a few steps.
She was slow to stand up, and already gritting her teeth in pain. I'd been running her ragged, according to miko's orders, of course, but Annie had stepped up the pace further by herself. My senior student was fighting like she had something to prove.
Annie wasn't jealous. She was so not jealous, that she had done absolutely everything in her power to make that clear to us without coming out and saying it. She'd been ecstatic to learn that Maki had been present to help me heal myself through my Erotic Sorcery, and doubly so when she found out she'd be taking a hands-on approach to helping me research sex magic. She had even made a few 'sister wife' jokes in a strained effort to make it clear just how unbothered she was by it all.
The amount of nervous laughter from the former cheerleader had ratcheted up exponentially when Maki started talking about my sex magic. Maki had adopted an academic tone, speaking forthrightly and honestly about her thoughts and observations regarding my Erotic Sorcery, while still covering for my stranger powers. Clearly, she had hoped it would neatly sidestep any issues of jealousy – it had not. Annie had hit her with a number of, 'Oh, haha, cool,'s and, 'wow, that's so crazy,'s, more than could ever be believable, and all while avoiding eye contact.
Neither Maki nor I had bought it, but if the redhead wasn't going to be honest with herself about her feelings, there wasn't much we could do to help alleviate her fears of abandonment. Annie had promised me, unprompted, during our first training session that she'd be the ideal casual hookup, that she'd never expect more than what we had, and that she'd never be envious of other women. Frankly, I thought that was a pretty unrealistic goal to set yourself, but I didn't know how to address it. 'Hey, you're allowed to be angry at me for my philandering, by the way. I'm not going to stop, but we can fight about it if you'd like,' didn't seem like the answer.
She took a more conservative entry, coming in with a series of long jabs. Each of them hid the intention to start a grapple, but that didn't matter. I ably smacked her wrists aside each time they entered my space. Annie was my student, however, and a great student at that, always ready with another trick. By deliberately catching the front of her sneaker on one of the stone tiles we were fighting on, she faked a stumble and a fall – the setup for a brutal surprise headbutt. It may have worked on me not long ago, before I'd had to buy my Martial Arts Dice to 11 to keep parity with my Erotic Sorcery.
I stepped forward and checked the headbutt by directing it into my shoulder instead with a hand on the back of her head. My other hand went to her waist, picking her up off the ground, and spun her around to deal with the momentum before she could turn it into an impromptu full-body tackle. I held her close to me, feet dangling over the stone tiles of my outdoor gym. Fast moving clouds had obscured the moon, leaving the early autumn night dark and cold, but Annie's tremendous body heat could warm even me. It chased the cold away, and our combined temperatures wreathed us in a misty layer of condensation.
She struggled a bit, but she was gassed, and my arms may as well have been steel cables to the exhausted woman. Annie sagged into my hold and groaned. "I can keep going," she mumbled weakly.
"I know. But your head's not in it, so we're taking a pause. Don't want to build bad habits."
"Gotta get my energy flowing – doctor's orders."
"Ha! Maki would have been satisfied twenty minutes ago, and she'd have been silently stewing about potentially encouraging an injury five minutes after that. Now relax, shifu's orders."
I put Annie back down on her feet. She leaned forward into my hug, her earlier protests having been mostly aesthetic. No one wants to be known as a quitter, especially not someone as competitive as a former collegiate athlete. It was as much my job to make her stop as it was to keep her going. A decent coach could push you past your limits, a good coach understood the difference between soft and hard limits, and a great coach taught you to recognize exactly where your own lay.
"Yes, shifu. Sorry, guess I'm still processing it all."
"Want to talk about it?"
She was still speaking into my chest, words half muffled by flesh. "It's dumb, and I know it's dumb since I went to taekwondo last night and literally felt the difference, the huge leap in skill since you've been training me. But," she sighed, "fighting you tonight, it's like I've regressed or something. I mean, I know I haven't, but it feels like it."
"Makes sense, people make big leaps in skill after fighting with their lives on the line and by teaching, putting words to their formerly half-understood realizations; I've been doing a lot of both recently. But that's the point, right? You improve, I improve, we improve together."
She laughed a little. "You're right, sorry. I'm being silly." The redhead unburied her face from my armpit and looked up at me excitedly. "You did get better, way better! Maybe I should find a ghost to fight?"
"Maybe we start a little smaller, build your way up to dueling the spiteful dead. Speaking of, you kind of brushed off my mention of wanting to step up your training next week."
"Oh! That's right. My bad, there was a lot of information to process at once. I was a woman of science once, you know? At least Qi effects can be more-or-less replicated through tremendous effort and therefore studied, kind of like quantum physics except instead of particle colliders it takes decades of training and instruction. Magic seems to be too fickle and dangerous for scientific inquiry, too reliant on the whims of 'gods'."
She pronounced the last word with an overtone of skepticism that even her faith in me and acceptance of my full retelling of the Bell Street exorcism couldn't shake. It was easy to forget that Annie was a trained and degreed if not licensed, engineer. She tended to adopt a ditzy demeanor, a natural outgrowth of her bubbly personality, probably for the same reasons that I portrayed myself as a himbo. Intelligence was alarming in the really, ridiculously good-looking, whereas idiocy could be disarming. Early on in her career, she'd decided to choose cheerleading over the nuclear sciences since Penn State didn't allow students to study the classified literature outside of their secure research library. In another life, perhaps, her curiosity may have won out over her drive to perform and compete. Maybe she'd have ended up as a side character in Ted's new life, working on reactors and batteries in Ryuukai for cybernetics conglomerates.
"We did drop a lot on you all at once. You're handling it great though, really rolling with the punches."
"Thanks. Maki helped a lot; she has a very calming influence. I like her."
I grinned so that she could hear the smile in my words and teased, "You made that clear, as well as exactly how not jealous you were of her."
Annie jumped back, wriggling out of my arms. "I'm not, I swear! Not sexually, at least, or romantically, or anything like that, I promise!"
"Hey, it's all good, Annie. We spend a lot of time together and we have sex regularly – it would be weirder if you weren't catching feelings. It's only human."
"James, I swear that's not it. Honestly," she licked her lips and turned a shade of pink, "I've been thinking a lot about, ah, performing for you with another woman, maybe more than is strictly healthy. Like, I've suddenly been looking at my roommate differently and I'm pretty sure she'd noticed – well, she bought me two MFF romance novels, so she's definitely noticed. When I found you naked and exhausted, I was actually disappointed that I'd missed a chance to finally enact the fantasy. I don't know – I think I might be bi? Does it work like that when there's got to be a specific man involved somewhere in the process?"
"Oh, cool. So you were—"
"Just being weird and awkward for no reason? No, I guess not. If I am jealous of Maki, it's because she can hang, and I can't. When you started telling me about the ghost hunt, I was upset that you didn't bother to involve me, but then you kept going, and I realized that I would have one hundred percent, absolutely died, and that made me feel even worse. I don't want to hold you back, James, and I hate feeling like I'm the weak link. It's like freshmen year, high school cheerleading all over again, except that if I fuck up the pyramid this time, my teammates all die. Hearing you two talk about the Underworld made me feel like the adults had let me sit at their table on Thanksgiving – it just…sucks, you know? Ugh! Look at me, it's got me mixing my metaphoofs!"
"First of all," I said, gently taking her wrists and pulling her back into the hug, "teaching you has been amazing for developing my Art. You aren't holding me back at all, and I don't regret a single second I've spent with you." Except for maybe when I gave her a new fetish in her sleep – that didn't feel great to reflect on. "But I feel you, and I'd rest a lot easier if I knew you could survive accidentally running into a supernatural horror or getting jumped by Tigers, which is why I want to prioritize your training before I start antagonizing things further."
Annie sniffled and discreetly dried her eyes with her sleeves before wrapping me in a backbreaker of a bear hug. "Thanks, shifu. What did you have in mind?"
"Ideally? How would you feel about taking a full seven days, Monday to Monday, and fully devoting them to training? I can give you a couple grand to help you out; don't expect your work will be accommodating."
Her head snapped back, her eyes disbelieving. "You'd do that, seriously, a whole week?"
"Pshh, hell yeah. Fuckin' love a training montage. You down?"
"Oh my god, yes!" Annie leaped up, arms wrapped around my neck, and kissed me. She refused to let go after, feet dangling, body molded to mine, kissing my face, chin, and neck with machine-gun pecks. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
"Alright, alright," I said, laughing. "It's my pleasure, Shine. How about we go check up on Maki, yeah?"
"Okay!"
The meditation chamber's fake sky turned from crystal blue to a speckled, shimmering black at night, illuminating the room with thousands of stars twinkling and a moon, full and slightly larger than normally possible.
"Here, James, catch." Maki threw me a wooden charm that had been freshly inked with an esoteric design.
A near-taser-strong electric shock shot up my arm when I caught it, making me accidentally fling it up at the chamber's covered porch ceiling. I caught it again with my other hand as it tumbled back down; this time, anticipating the pain, I was able to overcome my reflexes and hold onto it tightly. The charm continued to pulse waves of pain up my arm, but it wasn't actually electrified, that was merely how my body was interpreting the mystic sensations.
"What the fuck, Maki? It feels like I'm sticking my hand into a wasp nest. What is this thing?"
"Then pass it back, you maniac. Why are you still holding it?" she asked, as though she hadn't told me to catch it.
"Goddamn menace," I grumbled, lobbing it back to her.
Annie giggled. "You two are cute together. What is that thing, Maki?"
"It is a simple tactile ward against spiritual entities. I wanted to test if it was working properly. I suspect it would have caused James a small amount of harm if he was a little further in his transformation before shattering. These paper charms," she lifted a small stack of rectangular rice paper pieces with different designs on them, "ward against more specific threats, though they will only glow harmlessly in their presence. We'll, if you're willing, use them to test what might be occurring to your body, but I'd like to give you a few of the wooden ones to leave with today. I can, hopefully, modify them to leave you unharmed."
"Of course! I'm so grateful for your and James' help. I still think whatever's happening to me is strictly positive, but it'll be nice to know more."
"Excellent." The miko reached down and picked up one of the now full, one-quart mason jars of my cum. I paled a little, remembering the orgasm hell I'd had to suffer through to fill it, its three siblings, and its many smaller cousins. "Have a few sips of this," she said, handing Annie the jar. "It doesn't take much to be effective. I want you to take the jar home with you and have a tablespoon with every meal. Whatever is happening to you, I'm certain this will have a beneficial effect; it is without the most potent nootropic and nutritional supplement you've ever encountered, of that you can be sure."
Annie held the jar up to her face, blinking in confusion at what she was seeing. Her brain was refusing to come to the obvious conclusion. "Is this…it can't be…"
"It is James's semen, yes. Before you balk, I insist you try it first. Have you not given him a blowjob yet? It's a most delightful experience, you really should give it a try."
Her eyes went wide, and her jaw dropped. "Holy shit, no wonder you put him on the floor. My god, James, how are you not in a hospital right now?"
I shrugged. "The gods weren't so merciful."
Annie continued the girl talk as though I wasn't here. "You must have milked him dry!"
"No, not dry, we merely filled the jars I'd brought. He could have continued; like I said, he was being dramatic."
She nodded. "He gets like that when he's trying to distract you. You've just got to power through when you know best."
I raised a hand impotently. "You guys know I'm in the room, right?"
"The jar's still warm! Did you heat it up?"
"No, I didn't have to. According to James, it will remain as hot and fresh as it was when it left his body indefinitely."
Annie popped the lid off the jar. It opened with a satisfying 'whump' sound as the airtight seal broke and let the fragrant scent of its contents into the room. To me, my cum smelled unique and unobtrusive, but it had a much stronger effect on the women, who both shivered slightly.
She stuck her nose over the open jar and took in a big breath of it. "Wow! It's better than I remembered, but then, I've been making him finish inside. I've only given two blowjobs in my life, and they were both disasters, total, total disasters, and James is so big—"
"Don't be concerned with that," said Maki, with a tinge of the same mania she'd possessed this morning. "It is an immutable law of the universe that it will always fit. For your first time, have him take you roughly; it'll alleviate your fears and it truly is a sublime pleasure, unlike anything else. I assure you, I had zero experience and it went fantastically."
"Alright. That could be fun." She turned to me. "You good with that handsome?"
"I don't know what's happening right now," I said, looking around the room to check I wasn't dreaming.
"Before you continue," said Maki, ignoring me, "you should prepare yourself for the taste. You'll want to chug it down, but that's a very inefficient use of an extremely precious resource. It provides its benefits for as long as it's in your system - much more sensible to administer it regularly."
"Right." Annie gave the other woman a serious look and nod. I continued to not have any idea what was happening. She raised the jar to her lips and took a small sip which, after a short pause, became a large gulp. "You weren't kidding! I nearly went bottoms up there. Wow, thanks, Maki."
[Hidden Quest Complete!]
Unwittingly have a partner feed your cum to another person.
Reward: 30XP, Gain Minor feat Social Lubricant (Semen Upgrade)
Bonus, She prescribed a semen regimen: 20XP, Gain Major feat Liquid Luck (Semen Upgrade)
[Minor Feat] Social Lubricant (Semen Upgrade)
Other people who have consumed your semen gain a temporary +1 to Charisma and Empathy for as long as it remains in their system
[Major Feat] Liquid Luck (Semen Upgrade)
Your blessed nature extends into your life fluid. Other people who have consumed your semen may reroll all the 1's they get on any Dice pool result, accepting the new results regardless of number, for as long as it remains in their system.
Maki led Annie over to the meditation chamber's shrine, continuing to explain more about the preparations she'd taken. I stood back with a blank expression, still processing the last few minutes.
The cum thing was whatever, just another strange, lewd twist in an increasingly bizarre, lewd life. Liquid Luck was more upsetting than exciting after my earlier, extended milking, but the danger of my seed falling into the wrong hands had already been so high. No, I was more concerned with what Maki's wooden charm had done to me, and the implications therein.
I'd internally brushed aside Maki's theory that I was mid-evolution into divinity. She couldn't have possibly concluded that I was an interdimensional reality TV contestant, so she had found an answer that worked in-universe, or so I thought. But hadn't she just confirmed her theory?
What did this mean for me? I smoothed my eyebrows with my thumb and forefinger in a repetitive, soothing motion as I tried to wrap my head around it. The answer came like a gut punch, though thankfully, the meditation chamber's calming, elucidative atmosphere dulled the blow somewhat.
I was not immune to the consequences of my actions through the system, nor would I be spared from the fallout and secondary effects of whatever the Producers blessed or blighted me with. I had 10 Dice in Aura; in this world, that meant I was already well into the process of shedding my humanity, full stop. Eventually, defenses and spells that worked against supernatural beings would work on me. My strengths could become vulnerabilities if I wasn't careful – no, that was wrong. My strengths would become vulnerabilities, eternally. As steel hardened, it became more brittle. When my Dice in an Attribute or Skill went up, the change didn't occur in a vacuum, it cascaded through my mind, body, and spirit.
I looked down at my scar-crossed chest. If I was knocked out, would my Force Armor allow a surgeon's scalpel through? To my shame, I hadn't considered that once.
A sharp inhale from by the shrine broke me out of my reverie. Annie was lying on her front, shirt and bra removed, on the soft grassy mound amidst the roots of the blossoming plum tree. Maki had laid a hand on her lower back, and it was she who had gasped. The rice paper talismans had been arranged around Maki's hand in a circle. They were glowing, but not uniformly and not at the same time, instead the glow seemed to dance and shimmer in and out of visibility at random across them all.
"Is something wrong?" asked Annie.
Maki hesitated. "No, only…surprising." The miko shot me a concerned glance, beckoning me closer.
I cleared the distance to them with easy two hops. "What are they supposed to be reacting to?"
"I made as many types as I could from memory. Clockwise from the top, they glow in the presence of the Tuatha de Danaan, spirits of wind, spirits of fire, spirits of night, spirits of fertility and life, wandering shades, tsukumogami, spirit beasts, and one of my own design that covers many yokai."
"Oh wow," said Annie, "I didn't realize how many, uh, things there were out there. Are any of them glowing?"
"They all are." I knelt and put my hand over Maki's, and circulated my Qi along the same paths that she was circulating her spiritual energy. Annie's Qi was lively and active as it repaired her muscular strain, affecting minute changes outside my perception. If I had to anthropomorphize it, I'd describe it as playful and proud, almost showing off for its two witnesses. "What's this mean, Maki?"
Maki lifted her hand off, taking mine with it, and knelt back with a heavy sigh. "Annie, how closely do you resemble your siblings and the rest of your family?"
"Moderately? I take after my mother strongly, we're the only two redheads in the family, everyone else is blonde like my dad. If you put a filter on my cheerleading photos, they're almost identical to my mom's from the same age."
"And your father, how closely do you resemble him?"
Annie rolled over and propped herself up on her elbows, eyes wide and disturbed by the insinuation in the question. "Not a lot. Why? What are you saying?"
"Not a lot? So, you have his nose, or earlobes, or…"
"Well, I guess…not at all, really. But like I said, I'm almost identical to my mother."
Maki nodded, unsurprised, and continued her questions in an even-keeled tone. "How much do you know about your conception?"
"Jesus, Maki," I said, palming my face. "What kind of question is that?"
But Annie answered decisively. "I know the basics, my mom likes to tease my dad – and me, I suppose – with it whenever he leaves for a long business trip. It was goodbye, night-before-sex."
Maki shook her head. "I'm sorry, Annie, but I don't think that's the case. I don't know if you possess non-human heritage or were affected by a powerful spell, but I can say with total certainty that you were not conceived in the typical congress of two human beings."
I furrowed my brow, there was something else bothering me as well. "Little weird that your mom frequently teases you with your conception – didn't take her for the type from what you've told me about your family. I only know how my parents conceived me because Funikugami has boundary issues and a tenuous grasp on human relationships. Did she mention how your siblings were conceived in front of them?"
"N-no, I don't think so."
I leaned forward. "But she's brought yours up multiple times?"
"Yeah. Why? Maybe theirs weren't as significant."
Maki nodded slowly, seeing where I was going with this. "I see. James thinks your mother is hiding something through her conspicuous mentions of your conception. I'm inclined to agree. Tell me truthfully, is she really the sort of woman who would make lusty jokes?"
Annie let herself fall onto her back and covered her face with a loud groan. "No, no she isn't. Shit."
Maki and I shared a look. I patted my senior student's thigh. "That's some good news at least, Annie. It means that your mom knows something – we have a lead."
"More than one," added Maki quickly. "We know a place of interest too. Where are you from Annie, or rather, where were you conceived."
"Same place – same house, actually. Good old Crucifixion, Missouri, in the Ozarks; Middle-of-Nowhere, America, basically."
I nearly fell over. Annie had only referred to where she was from as 'the country', 'the Ozarks', or with that same 'middle-of-nowhere' epithet before. "Crucifixion, Missouri?"
Annie chuckled. "Yeah, I know, and it's exactly as nutty as the name implies. I try not to tell people, especially on the East Coast; they end up thinking I'm waaay more country than I am. You can see the shift behind their eyes, that little worrying, 'Oh no, I hope she's not crazy or racist.'"
I had to stand up and turn away, both palms slapped over my face. Jesus Christ on the cross, it had been in my face the whole time. The Producers had called Black Harbor the 'City of Shadows' – get it, Black Harbor, shadows, it was right there in the name. Victor, who I had essentially given up on finding on my own, was lost somewhere in the Flyover States; he'd been sent to the 'Crossroads of Destiny', a small, rural town of strange import. Crossroads, Cross, Crucifixion – it was like being slapped in the face. And while there had been some pretty wild names for towns back on Alan's Earth, I doubted even rural America could come up with something as unhinged as goddamned Crucifixion.
"What? Something wrong?"
My voice came out strained. I tried to think of anything that could indicate a secretive order of wizards was operating out of there. "Are there, like, any old institutions there, maybe a university or something? Or did any semi-mysterious organizations move in, in the Cold War era or something?"
"There's Saint Christophers, which is a small, private university. And I don't know about semi-mysterious organizations, but there's an army base nearby. Why?"
"You wouldn't happen to know what he's the patron saint of, would you?"
Maki answered for her. "Travel and transportation are the most well known. He was said to have carried the child Christ across a river." I didn't have to look at her to know she was staring at me – I could feel her intelligent, prying gaze on the back of my head.
"A lot of the bus drivers at my school hung little cards for that reason," added Annie, "and if you see a picture of saint dangling from a rearview mirror, it's probably good old Saint Chris. But how on Earth is that relevant?"
Holy shit, Annie had been in my very first scene in this world, and she had been immediately in simpatico with me. The Producers had clearly tugged on Fate to arrange our meeting. It had been right fucking there the entire time, a connection to Victor, to the others. What other glaringly obvious clues had I missed?
"I—I can't get into it yet. But we need to pay your family a visit. Soon."
"Is it about what's happening to me? Because I still don't think it's a negative."
"I really can't get into it, but no, it's something else. You'll have to take my word for it, sorry. I'm pretty sure I've got some pressing business in the area, and if strange non-human entities are impregnating human women, then we should probably look into that as well while we're there."
"Okay," she said, with an easy acceptance. I was profoundly grateful. "It has been a while since I saw them, might be nice. And I don't think I'll be able to get anything out of my mom on the phone, anyway. It'll be easier in person when she can't get out of the conversation by pretending my dad's calling her in the other room. When do you want to go, before or after our training montage?"
"After. I want you in fighting shape." There was no question in my mind. I wasn't taking my half-trained student to a place called the Crossroads of Destiny.
"Will that matter?" she asked with alarm.
"It might."
"Then I'm coming as well," said Maki, before blushing. "If that's okay with you, Annie. I know we just met."
"Sure, no problem. It'll be easier to sell to my parents if I'm coming back with a boy and a girl – they might actually believe that I'm not dating James." She let out a long breath. "Thanks, guys. I was worried for a minute about confronting my mom, but having some friends around will help."
"Okay," I said, "it's set then." I looked at the two women, Annie, breasts bare in the fake moonlight, and Maki, kneeling placidly, expression distant as her genius mind worked to piece together a new mystery. This was the squad. "Our first team field trip will be to Crucifixion, Missouri."
Jesus, what an ominous sentence.
END OF ARC 1: The Tutorial
AN: We got there folks! Session Zero is the longest chapter yet, but it neatly bookends the first Arc with Welcome to Black Harbor, the second longest chapter. At some point, I'm going to re-touch these first chapters and release them as an E-book.
Still debating if I'm going to put it on Kindle Unlimited. If I do want to sign it to KU without having to take it down from here and other websites (which I will never do), I'm going to have to make enough significant changes and expansions to the 'novelization of the web serial' that it firmly qualifies as its own thing, without actually changing the core story. I don't know how, or if, I'm going to do that, but if you have any requests for 'Asides' (World Building Explanations), or ideas in general, please let me know.
Comments
Einar Strandberg
I love that he just found out that there was a connection the whole time. It feels exactly like something in a DND campaign, where the DM has just silently been smirking as people miss it, waiting for it to come up and for everyone else to give them dirty looks. It's great. I hope he figures out some way to explain more about what to expect from the town, though he really doesn't know much IIRC so it probably makes more sense to wait to explain until he knows more
Spessgot
I don't really know where to publish the character sheets on RR since I don't want them taking up space in the chapters list. I'm just going to make the sheets public and post links to them in the comments there. 'Can I trouble you' came up in the scene with Maki's mother, it was a big part of why she entrusted a relative stranger with cheering up her daughter. I might not always reference the feats directly, but I keep them in mind while plotting things out. "Ai stopped me before we could leave the shrine’s interior courtyard, pulling me over to ostensibly take a look at the koi. I could tell she was working herself up to ask something. I let the small talk we’d been filling the space with die down and stood in amicable silence. After a minute or two, she said, “James-san, I know this is very forward of me, but I must ask you something as a mother.” Finally, I was wondering when my feat Can I Trouble You? was going to trigger. It had been almost a week. “Of course. To ignore a mother’s earnest plea is against my martial Dao.” “Is that so? This might be a headache for you.” I waved her off. “It’s fine, really.” She looked wistfully at my reflection in the pond, the activity of the koi disturbing it slightly. “My, my, it’s like he’s here with me again.” Turning to me directly she said, “James, my daughter has been very depressed these past few years. Do you think you could reach out to her during Huo Sensei’s class?”"
Bob
On royal roads the characters sheets are not published, and some special feat given at character creation time and reference later are only described there. "Can I trouble you" for example. Wondering if it is a conscious choice.
