Ben Kidder sat on his parents' couch and rubbed his brow in a vain effort to curb the headache he was suffering as a result of sleep deprivation and the emotional turmoil he had gone through that night. His other hand held his phone to his ear. On the other end of the line was his former slave girl, Krista.

"Come again," he said.

"Sir," Krista said, in a deferential tone of voice, "there is an FBI agent in the lobby, waiting to speak with you."

Ben took his phone off his ear and looked at its screen. He put it back to his ear and said, "Now? It's not even nine a.m."

"I can only tell you what I know, Sir," Krista said. "The agent arrived a few minutes ago and the doorman described him as insistent."

Ben huffed in frustration. He didn't want to be interrogated by the FBI. He didn't want Krista to keep addressing him as 'Sir'. He wanted to apologize and atone for blowing up at the girls earlier. He wanted to get the full might of the federal government behind himself.

Before he could say anything, Krista said, "Sir, the doorman already confirmed to the FBI agent that you are here."

Ben's brow drew down in displeasure. "Well, that takes him off my Christmas list," he thought to himself. "And no more tips, either."

"Should I try to dissuade the agent?"

"No," Ben said. "No." He was about to say that he'll be right there, but his parents were sitting right next to him. He couldn't say that, excuse himself for a moment, and go teleporting to his apartment without provoking his mother's suspicions.

"Hold on a sec," he said to Krista. He covered the mouthpiece of his phone and said to his parents, "I need to take this call upstairs, in my room. I'll be back downstairs in, like, ten minutes, or so. Ok?"

His parents nodded, still shaken up from hearing the President speak of emergency measures to deal with the undead threat, and Ben got up to go to his childhood bedroom. As soon as he locked the door behind himself, he picked up his bag with the jade circlet and teleported to his apartment. He hung up the phone and said, "Krista, send the agent up and keep him occupied at the front door! Offer him refreshments and the like, ok?"

"Yes, Sir," Krista said, with a sharp salute. She marched over to the door and stood by it at attention. Ben didn't know if she was being sarcastic with her pseudo-military act, or if it was for real. He hoped she wouldn't go blabbing to the FBI agent. He walked up the stairs, to one of the bedrooms, and placed the circlet upon his brow. He cast Shapechange on himself and changed into a Djinni.

He took gaseous form and invisibly flew towards the front door. While he waited for the agent to arrive, he took the chance to read the girls' minds.

Krista's mind was focused on the task of distracting the agent, but Ben could tell that she was eager to fight the enemy in the manner he had described. She saw it as a new experience and an adventure beyond compare. She wanted to be the badass scrapper, for once, and not have to rely on her charms and quick wits to get out of trouble. She imagined herself wearing sexy, magically enhanced armor and chopping down waves of crazy cultists with a big machinegun. She didn't even think once about him screaming at her.

Raven was asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Lisa was also lying in bed, but she wasn't asleep. Her mind was consumed with doubts. Ben focused on those and understood that her doubts were about herself and whether or not she had the guts to go fighting alongside him and the girls. Ben wasn't surprised to read from her mind that the girls had a serious tête-à-tête about his rant as soon as he had teleported out of here, but he was surprised to learn that Krista and Raven were completely on board with the idea of entering combat with the cultists.

They were somewhat less on board with the idea of adhering to strict, military discipline and the no-fun approach to preparations that he had angrily spat out earlier, but he guessed that that was to be expected. Krista was a hedonistic adrenaline junkie and Raven had only been deflowered last month. Lisa, too, had only started having orgasms the day before she wound up with Ben. She didn't think it fair in the least to be done with sex so soon.

Lisa seemed to think that a climactic battle with the evildoers was unavoidable, but she doubted if she would be of any use in it. She wanted to help, to contribute to the fight, but she didn't feel confident that she could. She was also frightened that she would come to a bad end if she left Ben's vicinity. Now that the evil side showed their ability to raise the dead, she was very scared of them. She didn't even have absolute faith in Ben's ability to win, anymore.

"Join the club, sweetie," Ben thought.

Ben couldn't believe that neither girl was hung up on the fact that he had been yelling at them, hours ago, over things that weren't their fault. He didn't know if the sleeping Raven felt the same way, but neither Krista, nor Lisa were even thinking about him having suddenly turned into a rage monster and spouted profanity-riddled filth at them.

He was going to humbly apologize, nonetheless. He felt the mind of the FBI agent come into range and focused on it.

The agent was thinking about his wife and her strange reaction to the undead disturbance. Ben felt a bit embarrassed to read in the man's mind the many arguments he had put together in favor of his wife having been cheating on him for quite some time, now. Ben wanted to tune out of the man's silent monologue, but couldn't afford to. He needed to keep listening in if he was to find out what the FBI was thinking about him.

The agent decided that he would just have to weather the coming apocalypse all alone. He imagined his military experience and FBI training would allow him to save quite a few nubile, female survivors that would be most grateful for his heroics. As horrible as the coming apocalypse would probably be, the agent was going to get rid of "the ol' ball and chain" and try to have some fun before the very end.

Finally, the man exited the elevator on the last floor. There were only two doors on offer to him, the stairs to the side and Ben's apartment dead ahead. He pushed the thoughts of his wife aside, for the moment, and reminded himself that the dead had risen, after all. The agent looked at Ben's door and turned his thoughts towards him. If Ben hadn't been an intangible being at the time, he would have sighed in profound relief. The agent opened his folder and skimmed the salient points of his small file on Ben.

The Bureau, Ben learned from the agent's mind, had been ordered by the Attorney General to investigate all reports of the supernatural, no matter how ridiculous they sounded. A scapegoat was needed. If there was a name attached to a report, they were to knock on that name's door and see what they could shake out.

The agent believed that the government was going to hold the modern equivalent of witch trials and that he was tasked with finding likely candidates for burning at the stake. He felt sure that the government would execute some people, if it felt like controlling the masses warranted it. And he might be the one to put someone in harm's way. That thought made him like his job again. After many years of incessant desk-riding drudgery, he felt like he was holding the power over life and death in his hands again. He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and focused fully on the matter at hand.

Ben was surprised to learn that he had been reported by Susan, who had come to the Bureau's local offices on Monday morning and denounced him as a mind controller. She had been politely laughed out the door. When the Assistant Director passed down the Attorney General's order, everyone in the office remembered her at the same time and ran a quick background check on Ben.

The check quickly revealed statements from the four young burglars that had broken into Ben's home, weeks ago. Statements in which they claimed Ben had transformed two of them into frogs. Ben could read in the agent's mind that he had felt ridiculous just reading those statements. The idea of a magician living in a shabby house and turning people into frogs was utterly ludicrous on so many levels, undead, or no undead. If one had magical power, why would they want to live in squalor?

When Ben's very large and very recent influx of cash was spotted, everyone's mind changed. The Bureau tagged Ben as a potential person of interest and sent the agent Ben's way. The agent closed his file folder and tugged on his tie. He cleared his throat, crossed the small lobby and knocked on the door.

Krista answered it very quickly and greeted the agent with a polite smile. Ben was a little incensed to read in the man's mind all the things he'd like to do to Krista, but he reminded himself that he had screamed at her and shoved her around, just a few hours earlier. The two of them may as well be broken up, for all intents and purposes. As he saw in the agent's mind the various poses he'd like to put Krista in, Ben had to repeatedly tell himself to not strike out at him in a jealous rage.

The agent smoothly deflected all of Krista's offers of refreshments and repeatedly asked for Ben. Krista bid him to take a seat and walked off to find Ben. Ben was amused to read fear in her mind. She considered the agent to be competent and she feared him figuring out her criminal past if she hung around him for too long.

Ben took one last look inside the agent's mind. He was trying to get a read on Ben from the things he had in his apartment. He was quickly drawing a general conclusion of Ben being nouveau riche. Ben was going to do nothing to dissuade him of such a notion. He flew back upstairs and turned into himself in one of the bedrooms. He checked in the mirror that he hadn't made his circlet appear and walked downstairs.

As he passed Krista, he gently caressed her wrist and whispered, "Thank you." She looked him in the eye and nodded.

Ben walked over to the FBI agent, who whipped out his credentials and said, "Mister Ben Kidder?" Ben nodded. "I'm special agent Daniel Thomas Fitzgerald of the Federal Bureau of Investigations."

Ben approached the agent and extended his hand to shake. The agent was momentarily taken aback, but then put his ID away, moved his folder into his left hand and shook Ben's hand.

"Nice to meet you, agent Fitzgerald," Ben said. "What would you like to talk about?"

"I'm just here to ask you a few questions," Fitzgerald said.

Ben thought that he could see in the agent's demeanor that he was a little angry that Ben wasn't at all intimidated by him and his three name introduction. "Questions about what," Ben asked, gesturing towards the sofa and taking a seat on the couch himself.

Fitzgerald remained standing and ominously said, "Questions about the accusations that have been brought up against you."

Ben had already decided to play the brash young brat that got rich by inventing something new, so he gave his new persona a twirl. He sat back and relaxed with a small sigh. He spread his arms in wordless question.

"As I'm sure you're well aware, mister Kidder," the agent said, with an air of authority, "this nation is under attack by supernatural forces."

Ben screwed up his face. "Nah," he drawled. "I think that was just CGI."

"What," Fitzgerald barked out in disbelief.

"Yeah," Ben said. "It was Computer Generated Imagery. CGI for short. You see, you can take images that-"

"I know what CGI is, Kidder! I'm telling you that that wasn't it! That was real people getting ripped apart by real undead!"

Ben scrunched up his nose and grinned. "Real undead," he asked, stressing the word real.

"Yes, real undead! Didn't you hear the President speak about it?"

Ben gave a small, embarrassed laugh. Fitzgerald looked at him like he was insane. "I don't know about that," Ben said. "This whole thing smells to me like another one of my friends' practical jokes."

"Practical jokes?"

"Yeah," Ben said, smiling. "We get bored, so we pull pranks on one another. Like this, now. My friends made some CGI of a zombie attack and the President giving a speech and..." Ben's mouth dropped as he faked having an epiphany. "And they hired an actor to come play the part of an FBI agent!" Ben laughed heartily. "Where are the cameras?" He looked around his apartment and then started searching Fitzgerald's lapels and buttons with his gaze.

Fitzgerald put on his best air of authority and kept a tight check on his voice as he clearly said, "Mister Kidder, I assure you that this is not a joke, practical, or otherwise. I am a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and you are under investigation for use of supernatural powers against citizens and interests of the United States of America."

"What supernatural powers," Ben asked, still chuckling in amusement.

Fitzgerald knew exactly how ludicrous his words were going to sound, even after the President had spoken about the undead on national television, but he said them, nonetheless. "You are suspected of using mind control."

Ben stared at the agent for a pregnant moment and then burst into renewed laughter.

"Very well, mister Kidder," Fitzgerald said, reaching for his handcuffs, "you're coming with me and we'll continue this conversation-"

Ben pulled out his phone, stopped laughing and adopted a dangerously serious voice as he said, "My legal team has instructed me in many things." Fitzgerald stood still. Whenever rich people mentioned lawyers, standing still was the wise thing to do. "One of them being that you have to positively identify yourself as a federal agent, or else my bodyguards have every legal right to make your kidneys have an out-of-body experience."

Fitzgerald's brow drew down and he growled, "Are you threatening an agent of the federal government?" He casually swept the tail of his jacket aside, revealing his service sidearm in a hip holster.

"No," Ben calmly said, "I'm pointing out to a two-bit actor that impersonating a federal agent is a felony. Just like concealed carry is in this jurisdiction." Ben drew Fitzgerald's attention to his hand in his pocket. "I'm holding my panic button alarm. If I press it, a group of former special forces operators will show up here in less than thirty seconds. And I pay them handsomely to show up armed and angry. Now, unless you want to be badly beaten and delivered to the actual FBI, I suggest you tell me which one of my friends put you up to this!"

Fitzgerald was a ball of barely suppressed anger as he said, "Mister Kidder, I've already shown you my credentials."

"And you completely blew it by talking about the undead and mind control and... whatever. Now, spill it! Is it Hurley? Chan? Huntzberger? Who put you up to this?"

Fitzgerald wanted to blow the annoying, little pipsqueak away, but he kept his anger in check. The world might be coming to an end, but the Bureau was still operating as usual and he didn't want to meet his end inside a prison, like a chump. He moved his hand from his hip and slowly pulled his credentials out to again show them to Ben. "I am special agent-"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Ben said, interrupting him. "I'm the guy that summons a bunch of mean motherfuckers by tapping a button." He held out his hand. "Gimme!"

Fitzgerald placed his credentials in the palm of Ben's hand, glaring the whole time. Ben silenced his phone and pretended to dial a number on it. He faked a conversation with a lawyer whom he asked to run the ID number on the agent's credentials. He pretended to look at a photo that was sent to his phone.

"Huh," Ben finally said. "I'll call you later," he said into the phone and pretended to hang it up. "My lawyer says you're real and that the undead are, too." Ben adopted a completely lost expression on his face. "Oh my gosh!" He looked at the agent with wild eyes. "The President was for real, wasn't he? Oh, dear!"

Fitzgerald relaxed at seeing the kid finally intimidated by him, like he should be. He snatched his ID from Ben's hand and put it away. He barely suppressed his eyeroll as the kid on the couch started to squirm in fear. His eyes were darting all over his apartment, as if he was desperately trying to spot a zombie in time to react.

Fitzgerald sighed. Even if the kid wasn't scared of him, he at least wasn't acting like a brash, young fuck he'd like to slap upside his fool head anymore. He decided to make the questioning short and to the point. He had four more suspects to visit and he was fairly sure those would turn out to be crazy cat ladies. If he did everything quick, he could squeeze in a visit to a divorce lawyer, right before lunch.

"Until recently, you were employed at a call center as an IT specialist. Is this true?"

Ben acted scared and confused. "Huh? Oh! Yeah. Yes. Yes, I was. What does this have to do with the dead rising from their graves?"

"What was the manner of your departure from the center's employ?"

"Huh? Oh, I uh... I quit."

"Why did you resign?"

"I, uh, I made this new design for a machine that turns raw filaments into clothes. It's a very efficient next generation loom. I made a lot of money with it. "

"We would like to see this machine of yours."

Ben focused all of his attention on the agent and firmly said, "Absolutely not! Not without a warrant! That's proprietary technology! You can't go inspecting it!" He picked up his phone again and pretended to dial a number. "I'm having my legal team get a federal injunction against any warrant."

Fitzgerald rolled his eyes. The world was coming to an end and the rich asshat sitting before him went from scared shitless to worried about his profit margin in five seconds flat. He decided to try a different approach.

"Can you tell me something about the events that transpired at your residence on the evening of the twenty third of June this year?"

"What," Ben said in genuine confusion. That wasn't the date that the cops had come to see if he was murdering one of his girls.

"A group of young men claims that they broke into your house on that night and that you turned two of them into frogs."

Ben's mouth opened and he almost said oh as he remembered the four burglars and their great big gun. He quickly recovered and adopted a confused expression. "Huh?!"

"Four men claim that," Fitzgerald said and trailed off. It didn't matter to him that the dead had risen from their graves, asking a man if he turned someone into a frog was still beyond ridiculous.

"What are you on about? Frogs? A break-in? What's going on?"

Fitzgerald's visit was meant to establish if there was a foundation for a public trial and there clearly wasn't. Kidder's income was explained by his invention and the people that made claims against him were far from trustworthy. A disgruntled, former boss, who had been since fired herself, and a bunch of criminals didn't make for great witnesses in a public trial. "Besides," he thought to himself, "the kid's lawyers would humiliate the Bureau and the government and then I'd be the one to suffer the consequences."

"Thank you for your time, mister Kidder."

"You can't go inspecting my machine! It's the basis for my entire business venture. Just by inspecting it, you'd be placing my enterprise at great risk. That can't be allowed!"

Fitzgerald started to move towards the door. "We will not be examining it, sir. There will be no need for legal action."

"Then why did you ask to see it?"

"I'm sorry for any imposition, sir, and I thank you for your cooperation."

Ben held up a finger at the agent as he pretended to speak with his legal team on the phone. Fitzgerald gave him a bland smile, said, "Have a nice day, sir," and slipped out the door, shutting it firmly behind himself. Once outside, he sighed in relief and crossed the small lobby to press the elevator call button. The elevator was still there and the doors opened to admit him inside.
Ben opened the door to his apartment and said, "Who put you up to this?"

Fitzgerald stopped himself from rolling his eyes and said, "Need I remind you again that this was official business?"

"I mean, who reported me?"

Fitzgerald started pressing the close doors button and said, "I'm afraid I can't divulge that information to you, sir."

The doors started closing and Ben said, "I'm filing a Freedom of Information Act request!"

Fitzgerald smiled and said, "You do that, sir," just before the doors closed.

Ben stepped back into his apartment and closed and locked the door. He turned into a Djinni and read the agent's mind.

The agent was feeling relief to be away from the asshat rich boy he wanted to strangle for daring to threaten him. He was tempted to go back and arrest him for threatening a federal agent and send him upriver for a long stretch, but he believed Ben's legal team would make mincemeat of the federal prosecutor in a trial. Especially since Ben had not, technically, threatened him. Ben had merely mentioned having bodyguards and asked to see his credentials again.

He opened his folder and crossed Ben's name off his list. He then thought back to the woman who had laid the accusations at Ben's feet and decided to add her name to his list. She might be a good candidate for a show trial. He was going to check out her background when he returned to the office.

Ben was relieved to read in the agent's mind that he was no longer considered a suspect.

Krista came back downstairs and said, "Is he gone? Ben? Are you still here?"

He changed back into himself and turned towards her. "Yes, I'm still here."

Krista smiled in relief. "Phew," she said, "that was a close one!"

"Meh," Ben said, making a face, "not really. They had no evidence that a crime had been committed in the first place. How would one prove that they were under mind control, anyway?"

Krista seemed to remember something and stood at attention. "Sir, I-"

"Stop," Ben said, interrupting her. He raised a hand towards her, palm out. "I'm sorry for all the shit I yelled at you girls earlier this morning. I didn't mean any of it."

Krista opened her mouth to say something, but Ben cut her off with, "I have to go back to my parents' place now. I want you to tell the girls that I'm sorry and that they're more than welcome to stay here for as long as they like, ok?" Krista looked unsure for a moment and then nodded. "Just ask them politely to remain here until this afternoon, when I'll come back and apologize properly. We'll talk then. All of us. Ok?"

Krista nodded, after a moment's hesitation, and Ben gave her a small smile of gratitude.

He teleported to his childhood bedroom and went downstairs to once again try and calm his parents down. He failed, but he did manage to channel their panic into more productive things than sitting around and bemoaning their fate. His mother cleaned the house and got rid of everything she deemed unnecessary for survival. His dad set about tuning up the Challenger and seeing to it that the car had the right amount of oil, the right tire pressure, etc.

Ben helped them as best he could. He hauled big items out of the house and loaded them in and on the Fiesta. He pressed the pedals of the Challenger when his dad told him to, so he could check the lights and brakes.

Finally, they finished what they were doing and reconvened for lunch in the dining room. Ben's mother doled out portions of a casserole and they all sat down to eat. Ben loved his mother's casserole. He tasted it and moaned in appreciation. "This is great, Mom."

"Thank you, dear," she said. She looked to be conflicted about something. She exchanged a long look with her husband; a look Ben didn't miss. He shoveled more food in his mouth and waited to see what would happen.

"Ben," she said and then hesitated. "You will stay here with us, won't you?"

"So we can keep you safe, son," his dad quickly added.

Ben took a good, long look at his parents' eyes. He could see their concern for him was genuine. They weren't fishing for him to stay and protect them. He gave a sad smile and said, "No. I won't be staying here." They looked sad to hear him say those words. "You two should focus on protecting each other," he said, "not waste your time worrying about me."

"We're your parents," his mother said, putting her hand over his, "we're always worrying about you."

Ben blinked back a sudden rush of tears and put his hand over his mother's. He patted it gently and said, "Don't. I'll be fine. It's the two of you that I'm worried about."

"Oh, we'll be fine," his father said. "Besides, nothing bad ever happens around here."

Ben's mother swatted his dad on the shoulder. "Jinx," she reproached.

"Sorry," he muttered and lowered his face towards his plate.

Ben's eyes flickered from one parent to the other in confusion. They had never before displayed any superstitions, not even once. He had never before even heard his mother say the word "jinx", and here she was, worried that his dad had jinxed them.

"Will you at least come with us to church so you can receive a blessing," his mother asked.

Ben stared at her in shock. He honestly didn't know what to say. His mother, who had had the lowest possible opinion of all religions and churches for as long as he could remember, was now speaking of going to a church to receive a blessing. If George R.R. Martin finally finished "The Winds of Winter", Ben would be less amazed. His eyes flicked over to his father, but his face was earnestly awaiting Ben's answer, as well. Ben's mouth worked with no sound coming out as he fumbled for words.

"Of course you will," his father said, at length. "As soon as we dump all the garbage in the Fiesta at the nearest landfill, we'll swing by the church."

"Where can we buy crucifixes," Ben's mother asked his father. "And a Bible? Where are those sold?"

"What's going on," Ben finally managed to spit out. "What are you two talking about? You're going to church? You'll buy a Bible? You're atheists!"

"Well, it's never too late to repent, son," his father said.

"Yes," his mother added, "it's said that the church always welcomes lost sheep."

"Repent," Ben spat out. "Lost sheep? What are you two on about?"

"Ben, dear," Ben's mother said, in her best, patiently maternal voice, "this is no longer a matter of beliefs and faith. God and the devil are both real."

"The devil made the dead rise," Ben's father said, "and God smote them down to save the faithful. He even healed the wounded."

"And that awful business in Manhattan," Ben's mother asked before clucking her tongue in disapproval.

Ben's father nodded and said, "Yes. You must have heard it yourself, Son. Every expert agreed that that wasn't natural."

"The devil did it," Ben's mother proclaimed with certainty and finality.

Ben gaped at the two of them in utter disbelief. He hadn't given a flying fuck about not getting the credit for stopping the cultists, but now he was sorely tempted to reveal himself. He just couldn't allow his parents to make such big decisions on the basis of lies. He opened his mouth and tried to decide on whether to say he was a magician, or if he should lead with a demonstration of his power. He decided to first talk about it and then he remembered the many, many times he had walked past his mother and her friends, who had been sitting in this very living room, and overhearing one of them say, "Now, don't repeat this to anyone, this was said to me in the strictest of confidences..."

His mother and all her friends were horrible gossips and that gave him pause. He told himself that she would keep his secret, if he were to reveal it, and not gossip about it, since this was something entirely different. Yet, he remembered how his mother would not shut up about his every, little achievement, from winning spelling bees to getting into college. She was always nagging people about the latest brilliant thing her son had done.

Ben looked at his mother and found himself believing that she'd brag about him if he told her he had been the one that destroyed the rats and undead and healed the survivors. Her eyes betrayed the shellshock she was experiencing from hearing about the undead and Ben couldn't conceive her staying mum about the truth if he shared it with her.

He wanted to tell her, but he couldn't afford to, he finally decided. If they so much as hinted to their friends that their son had intimate knowledge of what was really going on, they'd be hard pressed to divulge any information. They'd probably buckle under the pressure and share the truth with a trusted friend, who would then blab to the entire world in a heartbeat.

Telling them would paint a great, big target on them, Ben realized. They could be abducted by the cultists to draw him into a trap. Or they could be arrested by the government in an effort to control him. He couldn't see a chain of events that would unfold after he told his parents the truth without it ending badly for all involved. He came to a firm decision. He was going to leave his parents in the dark about things. He had to stay anonymous above all else, so he could ambush the enemy come March.

Just as he ended his internal deliberations, his mother firmly grasped his hand and said, "Ben, you need to have your soul saved. The devil has come calling." Ben blinked back another gush of moisture from his eyes and cleared his throat. "You must come with us and get baptized."

Ben cleared his throat again and said, "Yeah, about that... I'm already baptized." His mother and father gasped as one. "I joined a church, back at college, and I didn't tell you guys, cause I thought you'd disapprove."

His parents' expressions quickly changed from shocked to delighted. "Ben, that's wonderful," his mother exclaimed.

His father patted him on the back and said, "'Atta boy, Son! 'Atta boy!"

"You're not mad," Ben asked, affecting surprise.

"No, of course not, Son," his father said.

"We're just glad that you're safe from the devil's clutches," his mother added.

His parents smiled at him and his mother stroked his cheek. His throat was feeling tight, so he cleared it. His father looked down at his plate and pointed at it. He said, "We forgot to give grace!"

"Oh, dear," Ben's mother said. "We have so much to learn! Ben! Can you lead us in giving grace?"

Ben nearly barked out an incredulous "what", but he managed to keep a lid on it. If he had indeed been baptized, then he should know how to give grace. He had seen it done on TV often enough. He gestured and the three of them joined hands around the small table, with him and his dad reaching across it. They bowed their heads.

"Lord," Ben said, "bless us and this bounty which we are about to receive in Your... uh, mercy, and, uh, protect us and our loved ones. Amen!"

"Amen," his parents echoed. They smiled at him and the three of them finished their meal in short order. His dad and he drove the Fiesta to the landfill, which was unattended, and they unloaded all the crap Ben had hauled out of the car. They drove back to the house and Ben's mother joined them on the front lawn.

"Ben, darling, are you really going to leave," she asked.

"Yes, I really should be going," Ben said.

"I just wish you would stay here, with us," she said. "The trouble is hitting the big cities. This is a small town. We'll be hit last, probably. You should stay with us!"

"I would love to, Mom, but I have to get back to the city."

"I'm so scared that this is the last time we'll ever see you," she said. Her lower lip trembled and her eyes moistened.

"It isn't," Ben said. He hugged her. "I promise you it isn't."

She hugged him back and softly sobbed. "Ben," his dad said, "I think I know why you want to go back to the city." Ben gave him a questioning look. "You've met someone, haven't you? Someone that convinced you to convert. You want to get back to her, don't you?"

Ben's mother gasped at the mention of the gendered pronoun and broke their hug. She held Ben out at arm's length and gaped at him in offended disbelief. "Oh, fuck me," Ben thought to himself.

"Ben," she said, "you mustn't! It's a sin!"

Ben rolled his eyes and extricated himself from his mother's grasp. "Yeah, ok," he said, "I'm not-"

"Promise me," his mother shouted at him, after grabbing his upper arm in a death grip. "Promise me you will not fornicate with this girl! It's a sin, Ben. A mortal sin. You will go to Hell for it!"

Ben affected a tight grin and pried his mother's hand off his arm. "Fine," he said, "I promise."

"You have to stay a good boy, Ben," she said. "It's the only path to the salvation of your immortal soul."

"Yes, mother, I promise I will."

"Promise me!"

"I already have!"

His father put his hand on his mother's shoulder and said, "He promised, dear. You know our Ben, if he makes a promise, he keeps it." His mother looked unconvinced, but she nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

"Thanks, Dad."

His father nodded and said, "You just use protection and confess after each time and the two of you will be alright."

"Martin," Ben's mother exclaimed in shock. "How can you say such a thing!?"

"We need to be realistic, Judy," Ben's dad said. "He's young. She's young, too, no doubt. We can't expect them to not give in to temptation, every now and then. Particularly in such high strung times as these."

Ben covered his ears with his hands as his parents started arguing about him having sex with his imaginary, religious girlfriend. "I'm leaving now," he said, still pressing his palms to his ears. "You call me if you need anything at all! I have a friend that lives around here and she'll come over and help you with anything you need." Ben's original plan for taking care of his folks was to teleport here, whenever they needed him, in his guise of an Asian girl. "Anything at all!"

His parents looked shocked that he was friends with a local girl. He turned around and started walking away. They followed him. "Wait, wait," Martin said, "who is this girl?"

"Surely, we know her," Judy said.

"She's a friend of mine and you don't know her," Ben said, "she has just moved here."

"Give us her phone number," Judy said.

"No." Ben shrugged at his mother. "She insists I not give it out to anyone. I already promised. But, don't worry. Whenever you call, she'll be here within minutes, ready to take care of anything."

"You can't expect a young girl to be able," Judy started saying.

Ben interrupted her with, "She will bring her cousins with her and they can deal with anything that crops up. I promise you that! Besides, I'll be stopping by to check up on you once, or twice a week. I promise!"

"That doesn't make sense, Ben," his mother said. "It would be better if you stayed here with us full time and not spent half your week on the road, going to and fro."

Ben stopped dead in his tracks and hugged his mother close. "Mother, I have to go." He let go of her and looked deep into her eyes. "We'll see each other soon." He turned around and resumed walking.

"No," she yelled after him. She ran to catch up and grabbed his sleeve. "No, you're staying with us, here, where it's safe!"

Ben sighed. This goodbye was becoming impossible, especially since a big part of him wanted to stay with his parents and keep them safe. He knew he couldn't. He may have been crazed with anger when he had yelled about it, but he did have a big battle to prepare for. He thought for a moment and came up with a story that would get his parents off his back. He said, "Mother, I've volunteered for watch duty at a graveyard in the city. I have to go."

He gave her another hug.

"At least let me drive you," Ben's dad said. Ben nodded and Martin ran off to the garage to start up the Challenger.

Judy stood still and rubbed Ben's back. He could see she was holding back tears. The car came roaring out of the garage and she said, "I'm proud of you, Ben."

"Stay safe," he said and got in the car.

Martin revved the engine a few times and called out to Judy, "Get back inside and lock the doors!" He gunned it and the Challenger burned rubber as it tore off down the street.

"Dad," Ben yelled out in surprise, "there aren't zombies chasing us! You can slow down a little!"

Martin lessened the pressure on the pedal only slightly. The muscle car roared down the empty streets of their small town, heading towards the bus depot. Ben braced himself through the corners as his dad took them at almost full speed, fishtailing out of them. He was quite a bit scared at seeing his father, who had always been the most sensible and calm of drivers, suddenly transform into a street racer, but he could see the gladness on his face. He looked like a kid in a candy store and Ben decided to disguise his unease.

When the car came to a stop in front of the bus depot, Ben said, "Thanks," and jumped out with his bag in hand.

"Wait," Martin called out after him. He got out to follow his son. "It looks deserted."

"I'm not taking the bus," Ben said. He was getting sick and tired of lying to his parents the whole morning long. His mother's interrogator ways had seemingly vanished with the coming of the apocalypse, but he still feared they might stage a comeback and subject him to a thorough and very circuitous questioning. He had an imaginary, religious girlfriend in the city, duty shifts at a graveyard and now he had to come up with a mundane explanation for going away without a bus. "I'm meeting up with some other volunteers nearby. They're giving me a ride." He decided to start writing things down so he could keep track of it all.

Martin nodded, but then said, "Well, let me drive you there."

"Nope," Ben said. "I have to show up all alone, without anyone following me. It's kind of a final test for new recruits, you know?" He bit the inside of his cheek at the flimsy excuse of a lie he had just put out. A quick glance to his father's face revealed that it might be accepted, but he couldn't risk any more questions. He turned around and jogged behind the bus depot building.

"Wait," his father called out after him. "You didn't tell us who these people are. Which organization did you join?"

"Bye, Dad! Keep Mom safe! Call if you need anything!"

It wasn't a proper goodbye, nor did he leave a convincing explanation for his imminent departure, but Ben couldn't stomach lying to his parents anymore. He turned the corner and did a quick check. No one was around to see him. He ducked behind a bush and made himself invisible before teleporting to his apartment.

He sighed in relief as he materialized at his place. "I need to become a better liar," he thought to himself. "That was pathetic."

He ended his invisibility and reached out to try and sense Lisa and Raven. The telepathic links to their minds had expired and he sighed. His heart started beating at the mere thought of walking downstairs. He feared that he would find the apartment empty, that the girls had changed their mind and left.

"Nonsense," he told himself. "I've read their minds. They want to stay at my side and help me fight. They want to fight." A grin crept up to his face and stayed there. He told it to go away, as he first had to contritely apologize for his outburst, but the grin just wouldn't listen.

He exited his bedroom and went looking for the girls. The other bedrooms were empty, so he lost the grin and descended the stairs. The girls weren't there, either. Ben's heart fluttered uncomfortably as he looked into every bathroom. He even dropped down to the carpeted floor and looked under each bed and behind the couch. The girls weren't there. He was all alone, except for a sleeping Felicia curled up behind the couch.

He shuffled over to the couch in the living room area, with all the energy of a man on death row, and sat down with a miserable grunt. His gaze was unfocused as he stared off into the distance. The empty, luxurious apartment seemed to be mocking him with the numerous, soft sounds an empty apartment filled with luxury electronics makes.
He sat there for a long time, feeling numb inside. The girls had been three sexy rays of sunshine in his life and, with them gone, the dark clouds of doubts and worries gathered in his mind, obscuring the very idea of hope. He was all alone. He had no one he could turn to and the fate of the entire world rested on his shoulders and his shoulders alone.

Felicia was still with him, but a familiar was of limited tactical value and he had already decided not to take her into battle with him. Her loss would also bring him a loss of experience points and that could knock him back to level nineteen, costing him his Shapechange spell and all the power that came with it.

His head fell back as he slid lower in his seat. He couldn't see the point in fighting on, anymore. Even if he did, by some miracle of chance, win against the evil, what would that bring him? He could see no happiness for himself looming on the horizon. There would be no prizes, no parades, not even a passing, "thanks for saving the world."

His unfocused gaze lingered on the ceiling as images of the three beauties he had chased away occupied his mind's eye. He had had the key to happiness in his grasp. He had had happiness, genuine happiness and he had let it slip away.

"Because I was weak," he whispered to the empty apartment.

Ben wasn't sure how long he just sat there, staring past the ceiling tiles at a sky he couldn't see and doing no more than blinking occasionally. He was wallowing in misery, but he was also growing more and more bored by the minute. There was no point in continued wallowing. He most certainly wasn't going to spend the rest of his days just sitting around moping. He resolved to have as much fun before March as he could.

A yawn escaped him. He wiped his face and sighed as he sat up. Tomorrow, he was going to discern the girls' locations and teleport to them; not to win them back, but simply to apologize and make things right. Give them money and teleport them where they wanted to go. But that was tomorrow. Today he needed sleep.

He yawned and debated himself over whether to fall asleep right there, on the couch, or to make the effort to go upstairs and stretch himself out on a bed. He needed to finally catch his forty winks, both to clear up the persistent, dull throb in the back of his head and to restore his spent spell slots. His eyes closed and he drifted off to sleep.

He was startled awake by the sound of his door opening. He grumbled and moaned incoherently as he tried to wipe the fog of sleep from his eyes and make out the figures entering his apartment.

"Ben," Lisa called out cheerfully, "you're here!"

His head throbbed as he squinted at the three blurry figures at the door. "You look like shit," Krista said with compassion in her voice. "Did you get any sleep today?"

Ben finally managed to visually confirm that the girls had walked into the apartment. He shook his head no once and tried to say that he didn't, but the sounds that came out of his pursed lips were more like something a drunk dolphin would say.

"You need to get some sleep," Krista said. The girls set down their shopping bags and walked over to him.

Ben cleared his throat and said, "I thought you were left. Gone. I mean to say. Gone. Left."

"We just left to run some errands," Lisa said. "We didn't expect you until later."

Raven and Krista grabbed him under his arms and pulled him upright. "Come on," Krista said, "it's sleepy time."

Ben let himself be led towards the stairs and said, "Wait, I need to say I'm sorry I yelled at you."

"It's okay," Raven said, "you'll tell us tomorrow!"

The girls led him to the nearest bedroom and made him sit down on the bed. "I didn't mean to blow up at you girls like that," Ben said. "I'm so ashamed."

"It's ok," Raven said. "We get it. You were stressed, you hadn't had enough sleep, you had fought the undead and Krista slapped you. Shit happens. It was no biggie."

"No," Ben protested. "I mean, yes, but I-"

"What you need to do," Raven said and knelt before him, "is relax and get some sleep." She undid his belt and zipper. She smiled up at him. "And I know how to relax you." She squeezed his dick in his boxers, cutting off his second attempt at an apology and making him groan as his dick started to swell in response to her touch. She gently massaged his growing organ and then slipped it out of his underwear.

Ben lay back with a sigh when she lowered her face to his crotch. Her warm breath preceded her wet tongue on the head of his cock. She lathered up his glans with her spittle. She pumped his shaft with one hand and swept her golden hair off her face with the other. She looked him in the eye and smiled before bending down to swallow his cock. Her pursed lips pushed his foreskin down and allowed her flicking tongue to tickle his most sensitive flesh.

He groaned loudly and his hips started to pump of their own accord, driven by the rush of pleasure she was giving him. He closed his eyes and grabbed fistfuls of the sheets. Just as he was about to pop, she lifted her head. Ben shouted in wordless protest at the loss of stimulation. He opened his eyes and raised his head to see Krista and Lisa finish taking off Raven's underwear. She was naked from the waist down and she quickly scooted higher on the bed to stand on her knees. She reached down and held his cock steady as she lowered herself upon it.

Ben let out a long, heady sigh as she sank lower and lower until she was sitting on his hips. She leaned forward and propped herself up against his shoulders. Her golden hair fell down around their faces, isolating them from the rest of the world. She smiled at him and started to squeeze his cock with her pelvic muscles. He groaned and his hips flexed by reflex. She began to grind herself around, stimulating her own pleasure points with his shaft buried deep inside herself.

Lisa and Krista reached between the two and undid the buttons on Raven's blouse. She sat up and squeezed Ben's cock yet again, making him groan. The girls took off her blouse and bra and Ben reached up to squeeze her bountiful tits.

They laughed breathy laughs as they met each other squeeze for squeeze. When she started to grind again, he went from squeezing her mounds to massaging them. Raven's breathing quickened and she again leaned forward to lock eyes with Ben. She started bouncing up and down his cock and he growled as his need for release was finally being addressed. His fingers focused on fondling her nipples. He wanted to make her cum like never before. He needed to feel her writhe in ecstasy.

It took all of his willpower to stop himself from cumming too soon. Raven's bouncing sped up and became erratic as her yelps turned into short screams of ecstasy. She slammed her hips down on him one last time and came with a shriek. The fluttering of her cunt sent Ben over the edge and he emptied his balls into her quivering womb.

He passed out in pleasure.

His wakeup was a slow, protracted affair. His whole body seemed to be very hesitant to respond to his commands. He squinted one eye open and glanced around. Only after he saw he was in one of the bedrooms of his penthouse apartment did his brain finish booting up and grant him a clear memory of yesterday. He stretched in bed for a few minutes, to get his limbs to cooperate fully. He squinted at the window. The shades were drawn, but it was daylight outside. He rolled over and fumbled around for his phone. He found it on the floor, in the pocket of his pants.

It was seven a.m. and he realized that he had slept for almost fifteen straight hours. He stretched again and then rose from the bed. All his spell slots were replenished and he felt perfectly fine. He cast Prestidigitate and cleaned up his clothes from the day before. He laid them out on his bed, the sheets of which he also cleaned, and took a shower to finish waking up.

After a quick shave, he went downstairs to the kitchen, where the girls were busy with breakfast.

"Good morning," he said.

They turned around and smiled as one. "Good morning," they said in unison.

"Did you sleep well," Raven asked.

Ben chuckled and said, "More than well."

"I think I should put you to sleep in that manner every night from now on," Raven teased. "Might keep the crankiness away."

Ben made a sour grin. "About that," he said. "I'm truly sorry I yelled at you yesterday. It was nothing you girls did. I-"

"Ben," Krista said, cutting him off, "I'm the one that should apologize, not you. I had no call to slap you and yell at you like I did yesterday. I'm sorry for that."

"No," he said, "you had a point. I should have thought to use the domination spell to let you know what was going on."

"Oh, for frakk's sake, give it a rest, you two," Lisa said. "Tensions ran high and shit went down. We all reacted in a way we're not proud of. Let's just put it all behind us and work on our communication so it doesn't happen again. Ok?"

Everyone nodded. Ben said, "Well said."

"Food's up," Raven called and began doling out omelets and stacks of pancakes. They sat down and had a slow, leisurely breakfast. The only conversation they had was made up of compliments to Raven's culinary skills.

After breakfast was mostly consumed, Krista sat back in her chair and said, "Lisa made a good point just now. We need to work out some things. Our domination spells have all expired. Do you intend to cast them again?"

Ben shook his head no. "But you're cool with us staying with you," Raven asked. Lisa and Krista leaned slightly forward in their seats in anticipation of his answer.

"Yes," Ben said, "I'd love it if you girls stayed with me. Of your own free will." The three beauties smiled beaming smiles. "Will you?"

All three nodded earnestly. "Hell yeah," Raven added.

"We'll even fight with you," Lisa said. "I mean, alongside you. Against the evildoers."

"I got it," Ben said with a smile.

"However," Krista said and paused, "if you intend to allow us to fight, then you should really brief us on the full extent of your powers. For instance, you mentioned reading the minds of half of Philadelphia the other night?"

Ben nodded. "Yeah, it's an ability I've gained recently. I can shapechange into a Djinni and read minds while I'm invisible."

"A Djinni," Lisa asked, astounded. "Can you grant wishes?"

"Uh, sadly, no," Ben said. "Only noble Djinn can grant wishes when they're captured by someone. I had a one percent chance of turning into a noble Djinni, but it didn't come true. If it had, I would have given you girls the power to capture me and use me repeatedly for three wishes each. That would enable me to cast the Wish spell and deal with the evil cult, without expending a terrible amount of experience points for it."

"Experience points," Lisa asked. "Are you thinking of your magical power in D&D terms?"

"I am," he said. "But only because that is the magic I have." The girls looked at him in puzzlement. "I need my books." He went to his office space and retrieved his Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual.

The girls quickly cleared the dining table and moved to sit around the coffee table in the living room. Ben joined them and laid out his manuals before them. "These books detail my magical power," he said. "Particularly this one." He tapped the Player's Handbook. "And this is my character sheet and spell list." He put his recreations of the two on the table, beside the handbooks.

"Back when Simon had flubbed his ritual, I had just finished playing a D&D campaign in which I was a level nineteen sorcerer. When the bolt struck me, I was holding the original character sheet and spell list in one hand and my phone with photos of the same in the other. Ever since I came to in the hospital that night, I had all the spells and abilities of my D&D character. And I've advanced to level twenty since then."

Despite all that they've experienced with him, the girls still seemed a bit surprised to hear his explanation of his magical powers.

"So," Krista said, "these books outline your powers?"

Ben nodded and said, "Explicitly."

"If you're a character from Dungeons and Dragons," Raven asked, "shouldn't you have, like, pointy ears, or something?"

Ben laughed and Lisa joined him. "No," he said, "I had played a human whose appearance was a copy of mine, thankfully. If I had played a dwarf, or a halfling, or something, in the campaign, I think my friends would have shat their pants at the transformation. As it was, my appearance had not been changed by the bolt."

Krista picked up his character sheet and spell list and perused them. "Thank you for sharing the truth about your powers, Ben, but I think I need some help with this," she said. "What do all these abbreviations and numbers mean?"

Ben sat down and patiently explained every segment of his character sheet, along with giving context for the numerical values given. The girls nodded along with his explanations, but he could see that the D&D mechanics went right over the heads of Raven and Krista.

"Lisa," Ben asked, "do you have any experience with D&D?"

"A little. My friends tried to get me to join their game once, but I wasn't really into it."

Ben nodded in appreciation of her honesty and then looked at Krista and Raven. "You two look disappointed," he said.

They both raised their eyebrows in affected surprise. "What do you mean," Krista asked.

"I mean that you seem to be downright despondent at the fact that the sorcerer, who was your master, not only plays Dungeons and Dragons, but his powers also stem from the books. I can practically see it on your faces. Just by revealing these books to you, I went from the coolest guy on Earth to a dweeb that needs a lot of work to be made presentable." He raised his hand at their protests. "Don't bother denying it! Do me the fucking courtesy of being honest with me, at the very least."

"That's simply not true, Ben," Raven protested.

Ben shot her a look. She blushed and shut up. He shook his head to himself and said, "I can't fucking believe how big a social stigma is attached to so fun a game as Dungeons and Dragons."

"Look," Krista said, "what's done is done." She gestured at the books. "Is this the coolest kind of magic there is? No. But it's the only kind of magic we've got. So let's forget about these books and focus instead on how we are going to fight the... we seriously need a name for the bad guys. Or girls."

Ben crossed his arms and drew his brow down. On the one hand, he was pleased that the girls respected him enough to be honest about their feelings towards D&D. On the other, he was a little miffed that his glad hobby lessened him in their eyes.

"We shall call whoever is trying to activate the portal," Ben declared, "the enemy. That word covers just about every possibility." The girls nodded at his declaration, accepting the new designation. "And the way we shall prepare for the battle with the enemy is by playing D&D!"

The girls' mouths dropped open and they all drew breath at the same time to start complaining as one.

He raised his hand and voice as he said, "No! I don't wanna hear about it! These books detail my magical powers and spells and combat abilities. The three of you shall read them, cover to cover, and know all there is to know about my abilities before you can give me any advice on how to best fight the enemy. Actually, we'll all be playing D&D with my friends come September, when they come back to school."

The girls started another round of complaints, which Ben utterly ignored.

"We'll start with some light campaigning right away, so you don't embarrass me," he said, emphasizing the word "embarrass", "in front of my friends."

Krista and Raven gasped and looked offended at the mere suggestion that they might be the source of embarrassment. Lisa simply settled down and looked to be accepting Ben's decision.

"During play with my friends," Ben said, ignoring their almost red-faced rage, "I will pick their brains for ideas on how to fight best as a dragon. If you girls show enough common sense at the D&D table, you'll be allowed to advise me on those tactics, as well."

Krista bit back her comment and crossed her arms over her chest. "And if we don't," she asked. "What then? You go off and fight the enemy all alone? Like now? Forgive me, Ben, but that seems like a surefire way to lose." She flashed him a tight smile and held up a hand. "I mean no disrespect for you, or your D&D... friends. I only speak from past experience."

Ben gave her a sour grin and said, "No. I shall not be going in all alone, come March. Not if I can help it." He rose and went to the media center. He rummaged through his drawer of Blu-ray discs and returned to the table with four titles in his hands. "I'll be bringing some help with me. Help inspired by these films." He set the boxes down on the table.

Krista picked them up and read the movie titles as she shuffled them in her hands, "Iron Man. Iron Man Two. Iron Man Three, and, let me guess, Iron M-ah, no. This one is titled Avengers." Ben sighed and wondered if he would live long enough to see Age of Ultron. Krista set the boxes down on the table. "What the hell kind of help is in these movies?"

"Iron Man suits," Ben said. "I intend to make them with my magic and put some people I can trust inside them. Then I won't be all alone when I face the enemy. I'll have backup. Or at least some people that can sneak around back and rescue the would-be sacrifice while I duke it out with the enemy."

"Have you thought about bringing actual reinforcements," Krista asked.

"Of course I did," Ben said. "My wish is to bring the full might of the US military with me and surround those islands. I don't want to risk a single one of the enemy getting away during the fight and forcing us to dread at every single eclipse that happens over solid ground in the future. But how the hell am I supposed to do that? I don't think it would be a good idea for me to just teleport to the White House lawn and declare myself. I don't know how the government would react to that. To me."

"Can't you just read their minds," Raven asked.

"Not really," he said. "I can only read surface thoughts. I can't direct them. I can't make people think about what I want to know. If I could just read every mind as I wished, I'd be out doing it right now and I wouldn't stop until I found the enemy and destroyed them. But, I can't do that. It's not how the power works. On top of that, I'm really scared of the enemy learning of who I am and what I can do before we meet in open battle. If that happened, then the enemy would likely try to assassinate me to ensure their success. At the very least, they'd be able to make specific preparations against me."

"I figured as much," Krista said. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV, selecting a recording she made yesterday. "Luckily for you, I've thought up of a way around all that."

She played the recording. It was of a young, female journalist interviewing a general in the National Guard, mostly regarding the zombie outbreak and how the public is to help in dealing with the threat. Ben watched and listened for a few minutes, but then lost patience with the platitudes the officer was spouting and turned to Krista with a frown.

She smiled and said, "The order of the day seems to be to have all senior military personnel flood the airwaves. My guess is that the people in charge think it's the best way to stop a mass outbreak of panic. Raven and I disguise ourselves as journalists and go around interviewing people in charge. We ask them questions that would make them think about things, things like magic, and you read their minds to learn if they might be willing to join us."

Ben thought about it for a few seconds and said, "That's a brilliant idea!" Krista smiled a beaming smile. Raven joined in, but Lisa looked angry.
"What about the brown girl," she asked with a little venom in her voice, "or is the role of journalist just for the tall, white women?"

"Whoah, whoah, hold up," Krista said. "The FBI is doing background checks on all the journalists. I can get fake accreditations and face time with top brass for the two of us, but not for you!"

"Why not!?"

Krista looked at her like she was stupid. "Because you're wanted by the FBI," she slowly said. "Remember? They put you away in that asylum that got all... bloodbathy and stuff..."

Lisa looked to be cooling down, but then said, "The local police are looking for Raven and I'm sure your picture is on a wanted poster somewhere, too!"

"The Feds don't routinely check in with every single backwater police station in the country," Krista said. "They have their own databases and those are the ones they run press IDs against. You're in their database, probably flagged high priority, and you can't even come along with us as a camera operator."

Lisa seethed in her seat, but took no action and made no comment. Ben's eyes just darted between the two, expecting a fight to break out at any point. "Guys," he spoke to them softly, "chill out. I've got a way around all of this." He picked up the Player's Handbook and quickly flipped through it to open it on the page that contained the Seeming spell. "Read this!" He set the book down on the table and the three girls leaned forward to read the spell description.

The Seeming spell could change the girls' appearances and make them look like different people. The only way for anyone to see through the illusion was if they touched the girls and realized the discrepancy between what their eyes and hands were telling them. Even then, they'd still have to have the willpower to resist the spell.

"I can cast this on all three of you and you can go in to do the interviews without running the risk of being spotted," he said. He looked to each of the girls as they pondered the possibility.

"You're not gonna make us look ugly," Raven asked.

"Of course not," Ben said, "that'd make it more likely for you to be found out. I'd cast the spell to make you look very similar to the way you look now, just different enough to not be recognized by the Feds." The girls thought about it for a little while longer. Finally, they nodded, one by one, in acceptance of the plan.

"Sorry I yelled at you," Lisa said to Krista.

"It's ok," Krista said. Ben let out a quiet sigh of relief. "So, can I call my man and have him make us the press passes," Krista asked him. He nodded and she left the table to make the call.

They spent the day watching the movies and vegging out on the couch, taking breaks only to have lunch and dinner. The heat outside was still unbearable. The girls warmed to the concept of Iron Man suits and asked Ben to make a suit for each of them. He promised to do his best and the four of them retired to a bedroom. The girls made out with each other and rode his cock until he sprayed his seed and fell into an exhausted sleep.

By the time Ben woke up the next day, Krista was already back from the meeting with her forger friend. She brought press passes for all three of them. Raven made breakfast and they sat down in front of their wall of screens and flipped on the news channels, intent on observing how real journalists conducted interviews, so the girls would be more convincing, when their turn came.

The screens showed a tableau of horror.

Muslims violently protested the new legislature that dictated the cremation of all human and animal remains. Imams were declaring a caliphate in North America and calling for all the people to convert to Islam and be protected by Allah. Their main argument was that the dead had risen from infidel graves.

Christians of all sects and denominations responded that it was their God who smote the undead and that that meant their religion was the only one that brought salvation. The more moderate ones called for the nation to be baptized as quickly as possible, the more extreme ones called for the outlawing and extermination of other religions, along with atheists, gays and undesirable scientists. Other religions mostly sat out the fierce media debate, but they didn't sit on their thumbs.

Jews gathered around their cemeteries and chained themselves to the gates, hoping to stop the National Guard from carrying out the President's order to exhume and incinerate all corpses buried in the last five years. Orthodox Jews went a few steps further than that. They took up arms and blew up crematoriums, wherever they could.

A nationwide curfew was put in place and martial law was declared in several states and dozens of cities. The streets of half the cities in America were beginning to look like post-apocalyptic movie sets. Blood was spilled as the National Guard fired at crowds of protesters. The sovereign citizen movement popped up in full force and started gaining thousands of armed followers daily.

"Fuck me," Ben whispered, taking it all in.

"The world is tearing itself to pieces," Lisa said. "The enemy doesn't even need to do anything about it."

They sat in stunned silence and watched and listened as the worst possible scenario unfolding before their very eyes. Their breakfasts lay cold on the table before them.

At length, Ben stood up and went to his desk. He retrieved pen and paper and came back to the shell-shocked girls. "Come on," he said, "this doesn't change anything. We still have a job to do."

"What do you mean, 'this doesn't change anything'," Raven asked. "There are people dying in the streets, right now!"

"Yes," Ben said, "and they'll all die in March if I don't save them. There's nothing we can do to stop all this bloodshed and we would risk losing everything by even trying. We need to focus on our plans and work out the wording of the questions we will ask the generals and officials in the interviews."

"Jesus Christ, Ben," Raven said, "how can you be so cold?"

Ben paused at her question, looking at the blank page on the table. "Because I have to," he said and started to write down the first question.

Simon peered around the corner and scanned the well lit street before him. It was past curfew and no cars, or pedestrians, were on the streets. All the humans were in their homes, huddled together for comfort against the things that went bump in the night. He smiled gladly.

Americans reacted to his little exploit in Philadelphia even better than he had hoped they would. Their society was collapsing in on itself. Faced with the terrible fear he had sent their way, they forgot their greatest weapon was mutually beneficial cooperation. He imagined it wouldn't be long before every little splinter group abandoned the greater whole and decided to strike out on their own. They were all doomed to fail.

He was actually starting to get a little worried that America might become a deserted wasteland before the eclipse came along. "Oh, well," he thought, "that's only three hundred million souls less to reap." The rest of the world was reacting to the raising of the dead in almost the exact opposite way and would doubtlessly survive in great numbers until he activated the portal and brought his brethren through it.

A faint sound brought him out of his ruminations and he focused on his immediate environment again. He stayed in the shadows and patiently listened. Before long, he heard the Humvee's engine thrumming closer. He stood still and waited for the National Guard patrol to pass. When the sound of their engine faded in the distance, he left his hiding place.

He crossed the street with haste and quickly made the turn around a dark corner on the other side. His eyes readapted to the darkness and he scanned the seemingly empty alleyway that ran parallel to the main street. Not everyone was indoors at this time of night. He listened for the telltale sounds of his quarry as he proceeded slowly down the alley. He passed less than sixty yards when he heard it.

He crept even closer and hid behind a dumpster.

"Oh, yeah, baby," spoke the woman's hoarse, but flat voice. "Give it to me. Yeah, that's it."

Simon peaked out from behind his shelter. Not thirty feet from him, a man was fucking a prostitute, doggy style. She was bent over at the waist and propping herself against the building's wall with her forearms to keep her face from being mashed into the plaster with every forceful thrust of her john. Simon smiled and looked down on the ground, checking it for any debris he might crunch underfoot and alert his quarry of his approach.

After picking out his footing, he slowly and silently snuck up to the rutting couple. The john was thrusting harder into the hooker. His grunting became louder than her flat encouragements so she changed them into a passionless, continuous moan.

Simon extruded his tentacles from beneath his skin and waited for the man to finish spurting his seed into the hooker's womb. As soon as the john finished blowing his wad, Simon's tentacles seized him and pulled him away from the girl, snapping his neck at the same time. Simon tossed the corpse aside. The thud drew the girl's attention and she spun around to see the man that had just fucked her lying on the ground with his head twisted the wrong way around.

Before she could react, her eyes were drawn to Simon standing behind her with his tentacles wriggling in the air. She froze in terror and incomprehension. Simon seized her with his tentacles around her limbs and throat. He gagged her mouth with a thick tentacle, to prevent her from screaming, and held her immobile in a spread-eagle position. He lifted her off the ground and pressed her against the wall behind her.

"Don't worry, little human," he said. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to rid you of your greatest problem." His assurances made the girl struggle as hard as she could, though it was all futile in his grip. He could see the mortal fear in her wide eyes.

His tentacles spread her legs wider and drew them up to expose her hairless sex to his view. He used his human hands to undo his zipper. The girl's eyes followed his hands and her struggles lessened. Simon chuckled as he pulled his hardening cock out of his pants. The girl's wide eyes took in the sight of the seemingly ordinary cock. She couldn't be sure if it was ordinary, not in the dark of the alley, but the sight of something she was familiar with made her stop struggling and lift her gaze to Simon's eyes. Her face was trying to affect a flirty smile around the thick appendage in her mouth, but her eyes screamed the truth as Simon looked into them. She was scared to death.

Simon felt her tongue start to move against the gagging tentacle in her mouth. Her body started to slowly, rhythmically grind her hips, as much as his grip on them allowed it. He shook his head, lifted a finger and pointed it downwards. She lowered her gaze until it hit his groin again.

Jutting from his groin was another tentacle, only this one had his hard cock on its end. Her futile struggles resumed as his tentacle cock came closer and closer to her defenseless pussy. He pressed it against her opening and found it to be squeezed shut. He pushed harder and forced his shaft inside of her.

Her whole body clenched up as her muffled scream of agony rose in pitch. Her jaw locked down on the hard tentacle in her mouth, but she only succeeded in driving her teeth deeper into her gums. He slowly pushed his tentacle deeper through her soft, hot cavern, enjoying the feel of it, until he felt another point of great resistance. Her eyes shut firmly in denial as he shoved his tentacle cock past her cervix and into her womb. Her muffled scream turned into a series of muffled sobs, punctuated by desperate gasps for air.

He lodged his tentacle cock deep inside of her and began squirting material into her. His first spurt delivered the seed pod from which his servant would grow. It was the size of a pea and trailed inch-long, silky tentacles. It immediately lodged itself into the womb's tissue with the tiny tentacles. The following spurts deposited the growth medium for the servant in long, gelatinous strings that clung to the inner lining of the girl's womb like glue. After a few minutes, he was done. The seed was planted.

He reached behind himself and withdrew plastic ties from his back pockets. He drew the girl's body to himself and clamped her limbs together and secured them with the ties. He ended hobbling her by replacing his tough tentacle in her mouth with a proper ball gag. He pulled her short skirt down past her ass and positioned her body atop his shoulder. He retracted his tentacles and walked back the way he came.

The girl made pathetic, whimpering noises all the way to his car, where he stuck her in the trunk. He slammed it shut and drove to his safe house, evading the National Guard patrols with ease.

He spent the next few days minding the girl. He fed her four times a day, removing her gag only to shove more food in her mouth, and made her run on a treadmill twice a day. He didn't remove her gag for that. He took her skimpy clothing off when he first put her on the toilet to pee and didn't replace them.

The girl spent the first day bawling quietly in the corner. On the second day, she stopped crying, but flinched violently whenever he approached her and avoided looking at him whenever possible. On the third day, she was completely catatonic and he had to threaten her life to get her to eat and drink. She didn't signal him when she needed to go to the bathroom and wound up sitting in a pool of her own urine for hours.

On the fourth day, it finally happened. Withdrawal hit her hard, punching through the adrenaline haze the fear of the tentacled human had placed in her brain. Her skin was clammy and cold and every muscle in her body was trembling, despite her bonds. She was mewling in agony the whole day long.

"That's it," Simon gently told her. "That's what we need." He used a little of the power he had, no more than it took to create the seed, and sent a signal into her womb. The creature inside it reacted to the power and, having already eaten the growth medium and grown to its full measure, it extended its soft tendrils into its host's flesh. They flowed through the soft tissues of her womb and followed the nerve bundles coming from her clit all the way to her spine.

Simon sensed the seed managed to attach itself to the girl's peripheral nervous system and smiled in satisfaction. "Ok, now to the fun part," he said. "Well, fun for you. Not so much fun for me. You see, I've placed a servant inside you. It is now attached to your spine. Whenever you do something that pleases the servant, it will..."

The woman's eyes shot wide open. She shook her head in denial, but she soon started to shake in a different manner than before. Her skin flushed from neck to navel as she experienced a massive climax. Her muted wail of horror turned into a scream of pleasure that slowly petered out when she started struggling for breath.

"Of course, life for you cattle isn't always honey and roses," he said to the girl, making her open her eyes and look at him. "Whenever my servant senses you're about to do something it doesn't want you to do, or reveal its existence to anyone, it will do this to you."

Simon sent his servant another signal. The girl looked up at him with a questioning frown, for but an instant, before her agony of withdrawal came back. Only this time, it was greatly amplified. She squirmed in agony as her breath hitched. Her whole body felt like it was being frozen and burned at the same time. Her insides were being torn by dull knives and she couldn't even draw a deep breath to scream out her agony. All her muscles locked up, turning her into a flesh statue. She was trapped inside her own body, which had become a vessel for ultimate pain. She lost track of time and space. Nothing mattered in the face of the pervading agony. There was no escape.

Simon coldly regarded the trembling human before him. He assessed her movements and judged that his servant had complete access to her nervous system. It couldn't overwrite her will and take direct control of her brain to operate her body like a puppet, but it could tap into her sensory inputs to know what she was doing and train her with strong positive and negative reinforcements. Simon could create a servant capable of rewiring a human's brain and install it inside women, but creating a creature with such fine capabilities would cost him a lot of power and require many humans to be reaped. He had already decided that he would lie low until the eclipse and not risk discovery by harvesting humans in big numbers.

Even if he had plenty of power, he doubted he'd be using it to make human puppets. Proper servants were installed into the brains of species like the Ay'hicans, who were behemoths capable of erecting and flattening mountains. Putting servants into humans seemed like a waste of time and effort, but he didn't know what to expect once he activated the portal. The first thing The Primes send through might just be an assassin to finish him off and make it look like he had sacrificed himself to activate the portal. It would be the ideal outcome for them, he knew, and it would give his supporters no cause to rise up in rebellion..

He couldn't defeat an Outsider assassin, no matter how many humans he reaped before activating the portal. He was a half human hybrid and that made him far too vulnerable to be compensated against. He couldn't stay here on Earth and try to rule it with magic, even if he wanted to. For all the power that he could gain by reaping them, the humans themselves could eliminate him, if they ever found out about him.

His best chance of surviving an encounter with a would-be assassin was to create servants and hide them among the humans. They were his insurance. If he was slain, they would activate and emit a faint, coded message. Once his supporters from the home world started arriving on Earth, they would pick up on the message and dig out its source, which would lead to them finding out the truth about him. Once The Outsider public learned of The Primes killing a hero and lying about it, they would rise up in open rebellion. He wouldn't live to become Prime, but most of the existing Primes would be deposed in the uprising and their places would be taken up by his supporters.

Of course, that was only plan B. Plan A was to blackmail The Primes with the existence of the servants and force them to not kill him in the first place. Then they would have to share power.

Both his plans for what came after activating the portal hinged on successfully creating a lesser servant construct. He was now happy to see it functioning properly. His happiness was slightly tempered by the fact that the servant couldn't communicate with the girl's mind in any other way, except with the massive doses of pleasure and pain. He was going to have to hang around her for a few more days and explain to her, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she was allowed and required to do from now on. After that, he was going to move to a different corner of the Earth and repeat the procedure with the first drug-addicted prostitute he found there.

Her face smoothed over as the servant stopped flooding her brain with agony, but she remained a whimpering mess on the floor for a while to come. At one point, she became faintly aware that the agony was gone, so she blinked her eyes open and looked up at the face of her captor.

"The servant is successfully installed," he said, more to himself than the girl. "Now that you've felt what my servant inside of you can do, it is time for you to begin your training! You are my slave, controlled by the creature implanted inside of you. You do not yet understand the meaning of those words, so let us being your training by enumerating your various duties and responsibilities!"
The girl cried softly on the floor. She shut her eyes and pretended she wasn't there. A sharp jolt of agony made her body clench up. The pain made her breath explode from her lungs. "Your first assignment," Simon deliberately said to her, "is to listen to me when I am speaking to you. Understand?" She forced herself to open her eyes and look up at the monster that was holding her captive. As soon as the servant in her womb saw its creator with her eyes, it stopped the agony and applied a little pleasure. Her pussy tingled. She nodded yes. The tingling encompassed her whole body.

Simon smirked and said, "Good."

By the time September rolled around, the nation had managed to return to normal. For the most part. The National Guard was still posted at cemeteries and crucial infrastructure, but the curfew was lifted and martial law was no longer in effect anywhere. The religious warfare that threatened to break out never came to pass, mostly because nobody really wanted it, except for a few hotheads that quickly found themselves turned out by the very communities they had claimed to be speaking for.

Life went on as usual. The exception to the norm was that zombies were everywhere. Not the actual undead, but rather their fictional counterparts. Every movie theatre was showing zombie movies, ranging from Romero's genre-building works to the latest blockbusters inspired by the event in Philadelphia. Zombieland was the number one show on TV, narrowly edging out The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead comics boomed and utterly dominated the market, followed by hundreds of similar works. Every superhero was facing down the undead.

Every single facet of daily, American life was adapted to the possibility of encountering zombies. FEMA had issued guidelines on how to deal with another zombie outbreak and now everyone had a grab bag by the door, or in the trunk of their car. Evacuation routes were as routinely discussed as the weather.

Even fashion changed. Oprah did a special in which she completely ignored the fact that the undead in Philadelphia had been undead. She treated them as if they had been infected by a virus and were going to infect other humans with their bite. She brought on experts who recommended, among other things, wearing motorcycle suits to protect oneself from infection, since the suits were made to be untearable and waterproof and were thus bite-proof. Now everyone wore a motorcycle suit. Custom paintjobs for motorcycle suits were the biggest growing industry around.

Senior military and civilian officials were no longer needed to appear on TV daily to reassure the general public, so they stopped giving interviews to everyone who asked. Ben's girls had managed to interview almost a hundred of them during the summer. They even managed to get face time with a government undersecretary. Ben read all the officials' minds and was disappointed to learn that any kind of cooperation between them was out of the question. The military and the civilian leaders were surprisingly of the same mind on the subject of magicians. They would all consider a person like him to be a threat to their power and they'd act accordingly.

If he revealed himself to them privately, they'd try to subdue and study him and his power, without any intention of listening to what he had to say. If he did so publicly, they'd arrange for him to be quickly and thoroughly discredited first and then subdue him for dissection and study. When the girls asked questions about how the government could possibly subdue or defeat a magician, the officials made no comment, but Ben could read in their minds that they'd find people the magician cared about and hurt them to get to him.

Ben was disappointed to learn that the government would not fight on his side, but he rolled with it. He taught the girls about his powers and magic and continued working on Iron Man suits, which turned out to be far more difficult to create than he had originally thought.

He teleported to random, deserted places and shapechanged into dragons almost each and every day so he could cast spells, just for the sake of casting spells and learning what they feel like to flow out of him. By mid-August, he learned enough about the spells to be able to create his first new spell.

He called it Greater Fabricate. He created it as a level eight spell that did exactly what Fabricate did, except that it allowed him to make things out of up to three materials. If he made something out of two materials, the quantity he could make was cut in half. If he fabricated from three materials, the maximum quantity was only a quarter of the original volume. He made three source materials the upper limit of the spell, because casting it with four was too complicated for him to pull off, anyway. He couldn't add it to his personal spell list, but casting it was just a Shapechange spell away.

As soon as he revealed the spell to the girls and demonstrated its capability, the girls asked him if he could use it to make couture clothing. He replied yes and the girls grabbed drawing implements and started to design their own clothing line. Ben turned their drawings and ideas into reality that came in all sizes. He sold the clothes to his contacts for even more money than he made before. He used the cash to buy the raw materials for the suits of powered armor. He worked on the suits in his warehouse, though the quarters were quite close for a dragon.

He made the armors out of a supercomposite made out of titanium, nickel and carbon nanofibers. It was much harder than steel and ten times lighter so the girls would be protected from shrapnel and bullets. Even with the ultralight composite, the armor was far too thick and heavy for the girls to do more than stand still. Raven was the strongest of the three of them and even she could barely shuffle around in it. He needed to put the power in powered armor and he also needed to do something about the gaps in the armor that flexing the joints opened up.

His second attempt at creating the suits started by covering the girls in a thin layer of soft, impact-absorbing foam. He then covered the foam with filaments that generated electricity when mechanically contracted. He learned of the filaments from the minds of the military officials in charge of weapons development. He lay the filaments over the girls' limbs so they'd generate electricity with each flex of the girls' muscles. Each filament was connected to a colored LED light, for the testing phase, and they lit up with each motion. The girls laughed as they moved around in their form-fitting foam suits.

After the girls had had their fun, Ben removed the LEDs and replaced them with electrocontractive fibers which he fabricated over the electrogenerating ones. These fibers were activated by the charges generated by the filaments under them, but they could exert a lot of power, depending on the charge being run through them. Ben fabricated a dozen graphene batteries, each the size of an iPhone, and each battery could hold enough power to run the whole city for the better part of an hour. He hooked the batteries up to the power grid and waited for them to charge. It was slow going, but they would be fully charged before the end of the year.

In the meanwhile, he connected the suits to the main power grid so they could test the power amplification of the contractive fibers. This had the horrible consequence of ripping Raven's arm right out of the shoulder socket when she lifted it with all her strength. Ben, who was already in dragon form, immediately cast Cure Serious Wounds on her and she barely had the time to register the pain before her arm was fixed.

Following that little prototype test, they decided to take a break from creating the suits.

All of Ben's college friends returned to school in September and they gathered in his luxurious penthouse to play D&D every Saturday night. The first night was kind of awkward, as the guys clammed up in the presence of three hot chicks. Instead of quickly catching up on how they spent their summers and proceeding to playing the game, the guys spent more than a few hours exploring Ben's place, fucking around with his media center and repeatedly expressing their disbelief at his sudden influx of cash. By the time they relaxed around the girls, it was so late that they only had time to talk about their summers and the undead, before everyone got sleepy. Ben offered the guys the chance to sleep in his spare bedrooms, but they declined and shuffled off to their dorm rooms.

Next Saturday, the guys were much more relaxed around the girls, though none but Jake would ever go so far as to try and flirt with them, or ogle them too obviously in Ben's presence. Sean said it was just as well that they hadn't started his new campaign, since they now had three extra players. "I had the chance to adapt your encounters' challenge ratings this week," he said, "otherwise, the campaign would be all wonky. It'd be too easy for you at the beginning, because of your greater numbers, but it would become too hard for you as it progressed, since the new players would split up your experience point rewards and you'd all be too low level to defeat the challenges later in the game."

The girls didn't take to D&D with ease. Ben was frustrated with their flippant dismissal of the entire game, even now that they knew his magic followed those exact rules. All during September and October, they'd just sit there, look bored and watch the guys play. When their turns came, they'd ask what they could, or should, do. They made next to no effort to actually play, let alone immerse themselves into the game. While the guys went out of their way to explain things to the girls, over and over, Ben picked the guys' brains about combat as a dragon, under the pretext that he was going to make a campaign which featured a blood feud between dragons.

He was given a lot of great ideas, which he would debate with Felicia on the following Sundays. Some of the spells he was advised on he rejected, like Simulacrum, which cost experience points to cast, or Greater Magic Weapon, which would only enhance fifty bullets per casting and he intended to have much more ammo than that. The rest of the advice led him to adopt a sequence of spells he would cast on himself and his allies right before heading off into battle.

Aside from discussing magic with his familiar, Ben spent Sundays seeing the world with his girls. They would pick out a place to visit and he would teleport them there to do some sightseeing, sample exotic cuisine and meet interesting people. The girls absolutely adored their little Sunday trips. They also made sure to have sex in crazy places during them.

A professor called Ben aside in late October and pointed out to him that his essay was unsatisfactory and that he seemed distracted and inattentive in class. The professor further advised Ben to meet with his counselor and consider which classes to drop from his current load. The brief and polite conversation made Ben realize that he was really dropping the ball, academically speaking, so he resolved to make up for the lost time. It also made him put his foot down with the girls.

On the afternoon of the last Saturday in October, before the guys started arriving, he called the girls together.

"What's up," Lisa asked.

"I've run out of patience with you," Ben said. "I'm sick and tired of watching you squirm during the games, like you're being forced to eat live worms, or something. If you can't get over the uncoolness society associates with Dungeons and Dragons, then so be it. I'm not going to make you demean yourselves anymore. Not after tonight. Tonight, you're playing your last game. During the game, I am going to leave the room every now and then, leaving you alone with the guys. While I shapechange into a Djinni and read their minds, you are going to ask the guys questions about Iron Man and fighting evil and magical adventures and such.

"Before the Sun rises on Sunday morning, I need to know exactly who I can take with me to those European islands in March."

"Us," Raven said. "Obviously, you can take us!"

"I don't think so, girls," Ben said. "I have no idea what I'll find when I get there, but I am certain it won't be anything pleasant. You've already shown your inability to adapt to circumstances you find to be beneath you by refusing to play D&D and-"

"We're playing it," Krista protested.

"-and I can't count on you to adapt to the gruesome and deadly things that await me and those that come with me in March."

"Then why have we been playing all this time," Krista demanded.

"I've already told you Sean's campaign was your audition and you failed it," Ben said. "I'm not mad at you. You were presented with an obstacle and you failed to overcome it."

"I don't see what a silly, little game has to do with," Raven protested, but was cut off by Ben.

"Everything," he half yelled before checking his tone. "Everything. And you keep ignoring and dismissing it." He picked up his Player's Handbook and tossed it on the coffee table, where it landed with a loud thud. "That book explicitly explains and enumerates the spells I can cast." He tossed the Monster Manual next to it. "And that book explicitly details which creatures I can turn into and which abilities I can acquire. And you are ignoring them both! I've received no insight, or advice, from any one of you!"

The girls stood still and quiet, so he continued. "I've already made my battle plan for March, thanks to advice from Felicia and the guys. I'm going to shapechange into a dragon, cast a series of buff spells on myself and a fresh Shapechange spell and then I'm going to teleport invisibly and fight as a spellcasting dragon who will fucking die if an antimagic field is somehow cast, because that shit would turn me back into me.

"Now, I was under the impression that the three of you wanted to help me fight and even fight alongside me, but I don't see it like that anymore." The girls started protesting, but he cut them off with, "The sad thing is that my friends have helped me a hell of a lot more than you and that's without being read into the actual matter at hand. Hell, even Jake's advice was more help than your nigh-indignant lack of input, cause at least he tossed out a bunch of loony tactical ideas I now know not to even consider.

"That got me wondering. Maybe I'm relying on the wrong people to help me out. Maybe I should confide in my friends." The girls looked down at the floor in shame. "The three of you have your orders. You are to make my friends think about how they would behave if they found themselves in an adventure of might and magic in real life while I read their minds from the bathroom.

"Like I've said already, I'm resuming my efforts at making powered armor and I need to know exactly who I'm making and adapting it for. Time is running out. Tomorrow, I'm making up for my lack of studying but, starting next week, I'm going to be teleporting to the islands and reading the minds of the entire population to see if the enemy doesn't already have a presence there. It's long past time for me to get a lead on them."

The girls grumbled under their breaths and then retired to a bedroom to work out how they could best build upon each other's questions to get Ben's friends to think about what he wanted to read in their minds. Ben walked around the apartment, readying it for his guests and putting out an impressive assortment of snacks and finger foods. During all that time, he was becoming more and more nervous. He wiped his sweaty hands on his pants again and again, wondering what had gotten into him. When the phone rang, he nearly jumped in place. It was the doorman, informing him that the first three of his guests were on their way upstairs. Ben's heart almost skipped a beat and he realized he was feeling nervous about his friends' imminent arrival.

Ben thanked the doorman and hung up. He took a few deep breaths to try and calm down. He hadn't been nervous in the slightest when the guys had come over for the first time, but he was now. He didn't know which potential outcome of his little mind reading evening was making him more apprehensive, that they would be eager to join him and get in harm's way, or that they would be freaked out and disgusted by his secret. Whether his friends turned out to be brave, or weak, he felt like a snake for planning to invade their thoughts.

The doorbell rang, making him flinch. He let out a long sigh and mentally shook himself. "No backing out now," he told himself and answered the door.

When Ben excused himself for the first time, claiming he had to go video chat with an Asian business partner, the girls pounced at the boys with their questions. The guys expressed utter disinterest in the possibility of real magic and otherworldly evil. Ben read in their minds that they didn't want to appear nerdy in front of the girls, cause they deep down harbored the fantasy of the girls fixing them up with other pretty girls and they felt that would be impossible if they admitted they ever considered such nerdy things.

Ben rolled his eyes and came back downstairs, claiming he'd need to field another call in about an hour. He asked the girls to help him bring out more snacks and, as soon as they were out of earshot of the guys, he berated them for being so blunt with their questioning. He quickly advised them on how to be more circumspect and then they resumed play.

He started the conversation ball rolling himself, during battles. It was quite easy to do. With nine players at the table, only Sean, the Dungeon Master, actively participated in every second of the game, either making sure the rest weren't cheating, adjudicating matters on which rules gave latitude, or playing as the enemy. The rest of the players decided and made their move, then watched what everyone else did while they waited for the next turn. The downtime was filled with arguing about the best tactics, heckling the player making their move, and cheering the dice to roll the way they wanted. Ben slowly filled the downtime up with talk of things he wanted them to consider. The girls joined in and the topic of talk around the table soon turned into an even mix of how best to clear the dungeon and how they'd use D&D powers to fight a modern-day opponent.

Ben soon excused himself to use the bathroom, placing the dungeoneering on a pause. The girls kept the other topic of conversation going, prodding the boys along with their questions. The guys still spoke dismissively about such nerdy things, not yet given up on the possibility that they might be introduced to a bunch of supermodels by Raven, but the topic had taken root in their minds and Ben read them.

Much to Ben's distress, the guys turned out to be wholly unsuited to wielding magic, or fighting evil. They still dismissed the idea of having magic, or an Iron Man suit, when the girls asked them, but Ben read in their minds that those words weren't entirely untrue. For Sean, D&D was an outlet for his creative talents and an escape from the world of engineering and its rigid rules. The undead had already damaged his reality matrix and he was depressed by the seeming futility of his efforts to master the laws of nature. If he saw that useful magic was real too, he'd consider himself and all his time spent learning about electronics an utter waste and he'd be too depressed to be of any use to anyone.

Kurt had a schizophrenic aunt and her madness had left a deep impression on him. Now that the dead had risen from their graves, he was plagued with doubts about how much of what she said and did was truly insane and how much was real. Ben could see in his mind that he was on the verge of losing his own sanity, questioning everything he believed to be immutable and true. He was on the verge of slinking away to hide somewhere, curl up in a ball and cry himself to sleep every night. Putting him in a suit of powered armor would be a bad idea as he wouldn't feel confident enough in what he thought he knew to be able to act with lethal force against anyone.
The rest of the guys were also disappointments. Micah had already accepted magic as real, convinced by the Philadelphia incident, and he'd feel very special to be around it, but he'd never have the guts to fight and kill, despite confidently saying the opposite out loud. Ben wasn't surprised to hear Jake claim that he'd use any magic he was given in real life to make a harem of sex slaves for himself and make himself the richest man alive and so on. He was very surprised, however, to read in Jake's mind that that was exactly what he'd do.

As the night went on, Ben took two more opportunities, when they took breaks for hot food, to keep reading minds, but the guys weren't going to change them. No matter how much he would have liked it to be true, his friends weren't the people he could rely on, come hell or high water. They each had their limits and, for all of them, the dead rising from their graves was already over the limit. Strapping into a suit of powered armor and fighting alongside a dragon to save the world went even farther out than that. An hour after dawn broke they thanked Ben for his hospitality, said goodbye and left him there, feeling deflated.

He shuffled off upstairs and said, "On Monday, I'm making suits for all of us." The girls paused with the cleanup to share uneasy looks.

Ben spent most of Sunday catching up with his schoolwork, but on Monday, he dove into powered armor construction as soon as he returned from classes.

The girls were very reluctant to continue with the development of the Iron Man suits, so Ben worked on his own, fabricating a suit for himself. He put an exoskeleton over the filaments and fibers and fabricated hard locks on all the joints so they couldn't be extended or flexed beyond what his own anatomy allowed. He also created and installed a power regulation system which kept the power of the contractive fibers on a low setting until they encountered resistance, at which point they would increase the power as needed. The system also cut the power to the fibers when the joint locks were activated, as an additional safety against ripping one's own limbs out of their sockets.

Ben adapted the system for his own body and tried to cajole the girls into letting him create suits for them, but they were still hesitant, despite his demonstrations. After the third time he demonstrated all the safeties he had installed and adjusted, Krista said, "Wait! What happens if you extend your limbs all the way, say under a heavy load, and the safeties engage and cut the power to the fibers? Do you lose strength and get crushed by what you had been lifting?"

The girls looked at Ben expectantly. He looked at Krista with a blank expression on his face for a few moments and then he said, "We'll continue development of the suits as soon as I address the issue that has just been raised." The girls groaned and grumbled. "It's just a minor hiccup, that's all!"

"Minor hiccups lead to major dislocations," Krista said, lifting Raven's arm.

"It was the other one," Raven said.

"This'll all be fixed," Ben said, defensively.

"Ben," Lisa complained.

"It'll be fixed," he said. "That's why we're doing this now, so I can fix it all in time for your training."

"Training," the girls asked as one.

"Yeah, dude," Ben said. "As soon as I make proper suits, we're off to the woods somewhere to learn how to fight together and do some target practice and so on."

"Target practice," the girls asked as one.

"Well, yeah," he said, frowning at their incredulous tone. "There's bound to be shooting there and I want you guys to be able to shoot back. I mean, I'll give you swords, or naginatas, or whatever, and I'll put spells on them, but you can't go into combat without a ranged weapon. That's just crazy." The girls shared incredulous looks but made no comment.

Ben took them to a firing range the next day. After the girls tried to shoot a gun for the first time in their lives, they were escorted out of the shooting range and banned from ever coming back. Ben had only this to say, "Well, look on the bright side! You can only get better at this. It doesn't get any worse."

After they visited two more shooting ranges during the next week, Ben said, "I'll mount a gun on a robotic arm and I'll work out some kind of computer-aided targeting system." Off the girls' looks, he added, "It'll all work out, you'll see!"

He resumed work on the powered armor, fabricating one version after another. Once he created the alloys with Greater Fabricate, recycling them from one version to the next was done with the simpler Fabricate spell. He was having trouble with the safeties against joint dislocation until he simply decided to make the fibers that powered the opposite motion incapable of extending that far and got rid of the power cutoff safety.

Shortening the fibers lessened the power the suit had, but the suit still amplified the wearer's strength by a factor of approximately seven. Ben installed a safety harness inside the suit. It fit snugly to the wearer's body underneath the impact-absorbent foam and was tethered to the outer armor with elastic cords threaded through the gaps in the outer layer of fibers. The harness cut down on the g-forces the wearer could experience and offered additional protection in case of falling from a great height, or being propelled into a wall by an explosion.

He demonstrated the new safety features to the girls. They hesitated still and Ben had to harshly order them to submit for fabrication and training. They participated under silent protest, frustrating Ben until he threatened to never again shapechange into an Ogre Mage.

The girls gasped in dismay and stood there, just staring at him with pleading eyes. Ben sighed and said, "Fine. If you do a good job today and stop acting like petulant children, I'll change into Mister Ogre and DP your brains out with my magic cum tonight." The girls squealed and hugged him. "But that's only if we get anything done!"

The armors were fabricated and tested for mobility in short order. After the girls repeatedly jumped off a tree and landed flat on their backs unhurt, Ben called it a day and teleported them all home. He cast a fresh Shapechange spell, changed into the Ogre Mage and fucked the girls with his big, hard dicks until they passed out from all the pleasure his demonic cum inflicted upon them.

On the last Sunday of November, he teleported to the Faroe Islands and cast Endure Elements on himself as soon as his magic resumed flowing. The place was covered in snow and the wind was both freezing and had a bone-chilling dampness to it. He changed into his Djinni form, became invisible and intangible, and flew around to read minds. The language barrier stymied his efforts. He couldn't read the minds of the locals, because he couldn't understand the language in which they thought.

After casting the Tongues spell on himself, he understood the language of the first person whose mind he could read. It was Danish. He quickly determined that person wasn't involved with the enemy in any way and had no information relevant to the portal. The next person whose mind he read thought in Faroese and he was given the ability to understand it as well.

He teleported from town to town and island to island, reading minds until he had gone through almost fifty thousand of them. He was dead tired and his search had yielded no clue as to the identity of the enemy. He left an anonymous message to the local police, alerting them to several lawbreakers he had identified in his search, and then he used his last seventh level spell slot to cast Greater Teleport and go back home.

The girls greeted him in front of a bedroom door, wearing transparent negligees and broad smiles, but he flashed them a tired smile in response. "Sorry, girls," he said, "I'm out of spell slots. Mister Ogre can't come out to play tonight." He yawned and turned to a different bedroom. "And I'm too tired to play, myself. Good night!"

"Wait, Ben," Krista called after him, "you forgot something!"

Ben turned around to see what it was and Krista placed a hand on Raven's chin to gently turn the blonde's face towards hers. She planted a soft kiss on her lips, while her hand strayed lower to caress her big tits. Lisa stepped up behind Raven and placed both her hands around the blonde's hips. She stood on tiptoes and kissed between her shoulder blades as she slowly started to knead the globes of her ass.

Ben's cock immediately responded to the erotic sight and he said, "Oh, that! Heh, I guess I did forget. Thank you for reminding me, Krista!" He walked over to the girls and they dragged him into the bedroom and made him lie down on the king-sized bed.

"You just relax, honey," Krista whispered in his ear, "we'll do all the work." Ben giggled and shivered at her hot breath in his ear, but he soon gasped in delight as Lisa undid his zipper and fished out his hard cock to suck. After he blew his load down her throat, Krista licked him to hardness and then rode him like a cowgirl. She came and relinquished her place to Raven. Ben grabbed the blonde's huge, perky tits and hung on to them as he shot his load into her. After that, he couldn't help passing out, no matter how hard he fought it.

The first Sunday of December found Ben teleporting to Svalbard. His reconnaissance of the islands was much quicker than that of the Faroes. There was only a few thousand Norwegians and Russians there and none had a single clue about what Ben wanted to know. He teleported home and threw himself on the couch in disappointment.

"Hey, Ben," Krista said, setting aside the book she was reading, "how did it go?"

"Awful."

"Did you find anything?"

"No," he said.

"Nothing at all," Krista asked.

"A big, fat zilch," he murmured.

Krista squinted and said, "So you couldn't read anyone's mind, or something?"

Ben frowned and looked at her. "I read everyone's mind! I read them thoroughly! I know who's fucking whom and who's scared of what! I know their innermost secrets!" He closed his eyes and grimaced. "Fuck me, I hate reading people's minds..."

"But you did find out one thing," Krista said.

"Yeah, everyone's dirty laundry, for all the good it does me."

Krista leaned forward in her seat and said, "You now know that the enemy has no presence or allies there and that's not nothing, Ben."

Ben screwed up his mouth in a grin of displeasure and said, "Yeah, but that doesn't give me a single clue on how to find the enemy."

Krista's face screwed up into a fearful expression and she flipped open the laptop. She turned it around for Ben to see what she was looking at. On the screen was a map of Svalbard. "Ben," she said, in a worried tone of voice, "if you don't find someone who can guide you to the enemy, then... how the fuck will we be able to find them? These islands are huge, Ben! There's no way for us to cover them all! Not with just the four of us!"

Ben clasped one of her hands in his and engaged her eyes. "Calm down, Krista," he said in a forceful voice. "I've already got that bit covered. Sean told me about some eggheads in Croatia that make Heliospheres. I'll use those to find the enemy."

"Helio-what's-its?"

"Rigid balloons filled with helium gas," he said. "They've got surveillance and station-keeping equipment attached to the underside and can cover huge areas with infrared cameras and such. I'll teleport to their warehouse and borrow all the prototypes, when the time comes."

Krista relaxed and sighed in relief. "So," she said, "we know where they'll be and when and we have a way to spot them in time for you to teleport us up their asses. We'll win. Right? We'll win this thing?"

"Definitely," Ben said, smiling with a confidence he didn't really feel. "It's just that I don't want to fight the enemy at the last possible moment. I don't want to go in there, guns blazing, with a sacrifice to rescue and only the three of you to back me up. It would be much better if I could find their hiding place and ambush them beforehand. And I have no idea how to do that."

Krista smiled. "I've been reading your books," she said and held up The Player's Handbook, "and this one tells of a spell called 'Speak With Dead' that sounds kinda useful."

Ben made a face and said, "Bleh."

"But you could interview the victims of the enemy and ask them what had happened to them," she excitedly said. "You could find out who the enemy is."

"I already tried that," he said, "with the True Resurrection spell and the soldier they blamed for the base massacre. He was attacked from behind and didn't see who, or what, killed him."

Krista looked stunned at the news. She flipped through the Handbook and read about True Resurrection. "Well, where's the soldier now," she asked. "We could, maybe, get him to-"

"Dead," Ben said, interrupting her. He glanced over at her confused face and said, "Killed himself when he found out how everyone... I couldn't resurrect him again, even if I tried. He'd refuse to come back again. Just like the Order of the Hammer zealots."

Krista frowned and bit her lip as she read the Handbook and thought for a minute. "But Speak With Dead doesn't need the dead soul's consent," she said. "If you were to cast it on the corpses of the people that don't want to be resurrected, then..."

Ben gave her a sad smile. "Now, see, this is more like it," he said. "Giving me advice, asking questions... that's all I wanted from you girls, someone other than Felicia to discuss things with. Someone who would challenge what I think I know. That sort of thing." Krista grinned at his words of approval, but she kept staring at him expectantly. "If I were to cast Speak With Dead, the corpse gains the ability to answer basic questions, provided its voice box is still mostly functional. The answers would be short and unclear. Plus, there's a chance the corpse could refuse to cooperate, if its alignment was different than mine, while it had been alive."

"Next to nothing is better than nothing at all," she said, "which is what we've got now. Come on! Let's go dig up some graves and ask some questions!"

"No," he said.

"There are some spells here that are just made for digging up graves," she said, flipping through the Handbook.

"No," he said.

Krista looked questioningly into his eyes. "Why not?"

"The soldier's corpse won't tell us anything new, I'm sure of it." Ben said. "No other victims could tell us anything new, either. As for the Order of the Hammer zealots... Their voice boxes had been destroyed when they had been killed." He picked up a mug of tea from the coffee table and took a sip from it. It was lukewarm and he let out a small noise of approval at the taste of it. "And the autopsies made double sure that the corpses wouldn't speak ever again."

Krista's cheeks puffed out as she slowly let out a big breath of frustration. She set the Handbook down on the table and sat back to look up at the ceiling. Ben sipped at the mug of tea. He looked over to Krista's mug and briefly wondered whose mug the one in his hand was. He shrugged and sipped some more.

The nearby toilet door opened and Raven came out. She walked over to them and put her fists on her hips as she shot Ben a look. "That was my tea," she said.

"Was," Ben said, grinning and taking another sip.

Raven snorted a brief laugh and then sat down on the couch next to him. She put her arm around his shoulder and asked, "Any luck in the North Pole?" He shook his head no. "Damn. So, what's our next move, fearless leader?"

Ben screwed up his face and shrugged. He opened his mouth to speak, but Krista beat him to it, saying, "We contact The Order of the Hammer."

Raven immediately blanched at the mention of The Order. "No," she whispered in fright.

Krista didn't hear her and said, "They could be a source of information, Ben. Or maybe even allies."

Raven withdrew her arm from around Ben and said, "No!"

"It's ok, Raven," Ben said, trying to keep her calm.

"No, it's not ok, Ben," Raven suddenly yelled. Her eyes darted between him and Krista and her expression was horrified as her mouth worked without any sound coming out. Ben tried to hug her close to him, but she stood up. Her eyes fixed on Krista's, with an accusing glare in them. "Those crazy bastards tried to kill me!" She turned back to Ben. "They would have killed me if you hadn't saved me. Ben, you can't be thinking about this! Please, tell me you're not going to get in touch with those homicidal maniacs!" She glared accusingly at Krista. "Why the fuck would you even suggest this!?"

Behind Raven, Ben could see Lisa emerging from an upstairs bedroom, drawn by the noise and Raven's alarmed tone. Their eyes met for but an instant, before Lisa started for the stairs. Raven started hyperventilating and fidgeting in place.

"Whoah," Krista exclaimed, finally perceiving Raven's panic.

Ben stood up and shot the redhead a dark glare before corralling a restless Raven into his arms. He hugged her tight and applied even more pressure when she started sobbing. Lisa came up behind the blonde and started rubbing her back. Ben and Lisa hushed Raven, as she shivered in his hug. Tears slowly rolled down her cheeks.

Krista stood up and awkwardly tried to get in on the comforting action. She gave up with a sad sigh and said, "I'm sorry." Raven calmed down after a few minutes and Lisa took her upstairs to lay her down in bed and keep her calm. Ben and Krista remained standing in place and watched them go. "I'm sorry. I didn't think she'd react so badly."

Ben watched Lisa close the bedroom door behind herself and said, "Well, they did show up in her home without any warning and almost executed her after killing Simon right in front of her." He shot Krista a glowering look. "That kind of thing tends to stick with you, you know?" Krista blushed and grasped for words under his gaze. His features softened and he gave a small wave. "Forget about it. Just don't remind her of them in the future."

"Ok," she said. "But I am right. You know that, don't you?" Ben nodded and then heaved a big sigh. "We need to publish those rituals that had drawn them to Raven and Simon the first time. We'll publish them from a computer someplace else, where you can lie in wait for them. They'll come to investigate and then you'll read their minds."

Ben grimaced. "I don't know about that."

Krista spread her arms and asked, "What's not to know? They come, you read their minds, we know about the Order and that's that! Easy-peasy!"

"I'm not gonna publish those rituals," he said.

"Why not," she demanded. "They're harmless! You said so yourself!"

Ben shot a quick glance at the door of the bedroom Lisa and Raven were in. He took Krista by the arm and led her to the media center on the other end of the apartment. "Those rituals are harmless," Ben quietly said, "that's true, but only if they're done perfectly. Want me to call Lisa down here to tell you what happens if you make even the tiniest of flubs while drawing the spells?"

"That was a freak accident," Krista said. "They messed up the spells and then got drunk and that one girl fell and broke her neck. What are the odds of that happening again?"

"I don't know what the odds are," Ben said, "and I don't care. I'm not going to just put those spells out there for anyone to stumble upon them and do something terrible."

"Oh, come on, Ben, publishing those rituals is our only way of finding out about a major player in all this mess. Think about it! This Order of the Hammer is obviously in the know. Hardly anyone's ever heard of them and they obviously don't go around killing every kid with a henna tattoo, or they'd be notorious by now. They showed up to investigate Outsider spells. That means they know, Ben. They know about The Outsiders."

Ben rubbed his temples in frustration. "Look, all that makes sense. Everything you just said. But I simply can't publish such dangerous things, ok? I can't."
Krista looked into his eyes for a long moment and then nodded. "Show me which ones are harmless and I'll publish-"

"No, Goddamn it," Ben hissed at her. "No! They're all dangerous and I'm not having them published under any circumstances!"

Krista's face screwed up in displeasure. "Now you're just being unreasonable," she said. "Need I remind you that the entire world is literally at stake? If a bunch of teenagers download the rituals and kill themselves doing them very, very wrongly, then... fuck 'em! They're acceptable losses! If they manage to fuck up as badly as Lisa's dead friends did, then they were going to kill themselves anyway."

Ben shot a nervous glance across the apartment. The door which hid Lisa and Raven remained unmoving. "Be quiet," he admonished her. "Look, I'm not going to publish those rituals and that's that!" Krista opened her mouth and took a deep breath for a second bout. "But!" Ben held up a finger before her eyes. "But, I've just realized I had a lead on them all this fucking time and I never thought of it until this damn moment."

He stood still and closed his eyes as he silently berated himself for being so stupid. Krista looked at him expectantly for a few seconds and then punched him in the shoulder. "Well," she demanded, "what's the lead?"

"The priest that buried them," he said. "I never read his mind." Krista's mouth opened and she slowly nodded her head as she realized he had a point. "Come on!" He made himself invisible and then took her by the arm and led her up the stairs, past the door behind which Lisa was comforting Raven. Once on the roof, he changed into a golden dragon and cast Seeming to make her look like the photo on her fake press credentials. "You'll pretend to be a newspaper journalist and interview him while I read his mind!"

"Sure thing," she said, nodding. She held up a finger. "One sec!" She ran downstairs and asked Felicia to tell the girls where they were if they asked. Felicia jumped on the Ouija board on the coffee table and tapped the "yes" with her front paw. "Thank you!"

Ben changed back into himself and teleported them invisibly to the church, where they found the priest taking confessions. He ended their invisibilities in a corner, when no one was looking, and changed into a Djinni, instantly assuming gaseous form.

They had to wait until the priest was done, but then Krista had no problem talking him into giving her a brief interview, despite showing up out of the blue. She asked general questions about serving the church and seamlessly segued into asking the cleric what it was like to hold the funeral of a colleague. Ben read in the man's mind that he knew nothing about The Order and that he had performed the funeral for the three zealots upon a direct order from his bishop.

He used his spell-like Persistent Image ability to make an image of himself appear behind the priest, in Krista's line of sight. She didn't react as he signaled for her to wrap it up. She asked a few more questions and then thanked the priest for the brief interview. He saw her out of the church, obviously enjoying talking to her and she had to walk around the corner to be parted from the cleric's company. Ben changed back into himself behind some bushes and joined her on the sidewalk.

"Did you get what you needed," she asked.

"Yes and no," he said. "This one doesn't know shit. We need to go talk to his bishop."

Krista just smiled and said, "I'm ready if you are."

Ben looked up the bishop's information online and teleported the two of them to his cathedral. Krista managed to sweet talk the bishop's people into giving her face time with the man and Ben probed his mind. After the brief interview, she met with Ben outside the cathedral. "Well," she asked.

"The bishop was just passing down the orders to hold the funeral from the archbishop in Boston. He didn't know anything himself. You ready for round three?" Krista shrugged, as if to ask what other choice they had. Ben nodded and teleported them to Boston.

The archbishop's staff turned out to be far more professional than Krista could handle and they insisted she make an appointment for the interview in two weeks' time. She did and left dejectedly. Ben appeared next to her and said, "I read from their minds that the archbishop is at home. I'm going there to spy on him solo. You want me to take you home first, or...?"

"You won't need me to keep watch, or anything?"

Ben shook his head and teleported her home before teleporting to the archbishop's house. He materialized in the archbishop's living room, standing next to the cleric, who was watching soccer on a very large plasma screen. He turned into a Djinni and probed the old man's mind. His thoughts revolved solely around the game on the screen and he was very frustrated with his team's performance. Ben's efforts were yielding no results, as he didn't really have a way to get the archbishop to think about what he wanted to know. He decided he was going to have to return with Krista, just before Christmas, and see what he could learn then.

Just before Ben was going to turn back into himself and teleport home, the archbishop let out an angry string of juicy swear words. Ben suppressed a chuckle and checked the screen. He could read in the archbishop's mind that his team had conceded a goal and that the man considered it to have happened due to the defense players being sissies. Ben could tell the game would be over in less than half an hour, so he decided to amuse himself by reading the angry thoughts of the elderly cleric. He was particularly amused by the utter conviction with which the archbishop told himself that he could have done much better himself, if he were only half his age again.

After the game, Ben teleported home, where Raven had calmed down and recovered from her panic-inducing flashback to her near-execution. He told Krista that they would have to go through with the pre-Christmas interview, as he was far too busy with school and making the suits to stalk the archbishop and await him to think about The Order of the Hammer. Krista made a note on the calendar on the refrigerator.

Sean's campaign was completed the next weekend and they all celebrated their success. The guys hinted at their desire to have the girls bring some friends over for the next campaign, but the girls easily deflected their unspoken requests. None of them had the assertiveness to openly ask if they could be set up on a blind date, except for Jake. Lisa gave him a blunt, "no," in response, making him sulk.

Ben found himself on the spot as the guys expected him to start his own campaign next week. "My campaign," he asked in confusion.

"Yeah," Kurt said, "the one with the feuding dragons? And us in the middle of it all? You know, the one you've been grilling us about for weeks on end. It must be ready by now, and we've figured out some of the traps you've planned for us, based on your oh-so-innocent questions."

"Yeah, um," Ben stammered, "it's not, uh, not ready. Yet."

"Will it be by next Saturday," Sean inquired.

"No," Ben said, shaking his head. He hadn't been working on any campaign and he couldn't imagine ever gathering up the ten-or-so hours needed to create enemies, dungeons, quests and challenges for the guys. Between his schoolwork, making the armors and making love to the girls, his every waking moment was accounted for, except for the Saturday nights. He wasn't going to cut back on his time with the girls, or school, or fight prep. "Sorry, guys. The campaign was total shit, so I trashed it. I'll make another, but it won't be ready for quite some time. Sorry."

"Well, what are we going to do next Saturday," Kurt asked. "We were all kind of assuming that you had a campaign at the ready."

"Hey, what about you girls," Jake asked. "Any of you wanna 'run' us?" He waggled his eyebrows at the girls. They rolled their eyes in slight annoyance and Krista smirked at him. Sean elbowed Jake. "Ow! Why couldn't they do it?!"

"Christmas is coming up," Kurt said. "We've only got one more Saturday before most of us go home for the holidays, anyway. We might as well take a break from D&D now. Some of us have finals to study for."

"I've got a campaign," Micah said. "It's not yet finished, but I've got, like, three Saturdays' worth of gameplay all worked out already. Numbers and everything. I'll definitely finish it over the break."

The guys were delighted by that news and they came to the decision to not play next weekend. They were going to meet up at a Dusty's near the campus that was frequented by the college crowd, but it would be a short affair, just dinner and conversation before the following week sees them break up for the holidays.

When Ben saw his friends out the door, Raven held up her character sheet and said, "Are you going to turn me into my character?"

"Of course not," Ben said, taken aback by the question.

"But, I'm a level sixteen druid," Raven said. "Wouldn't that prove useful?"

Ben gaped at her for a moment and then said, "Raven, don't you remember the requirement for that spell to work? I'd have to kill dozens of innocent people to turn you into your character!"

"Dozens of people who would die anyway," Krista offered.

"No," Ben shouted. "Hell no! We're not even gonna go there! I am not going to go play God and pick and choose who lives and who dies! No turning anyone into D&D characters!" The girls apologized for even bringing up the question and they cleaned up the apartment, while Ben went to bed. It was customary for them to not have sex on Saturdays, after the D&D sessions, so they didn't think too much about him sleeping alone. When he didn't want to have sex with them on Sunday, too, they got a little worried.

On Monday night, Ben was pouring over his schematics for the suits when the girls came into his office. "Ben," Raven called out to him, softly. Ben let out a faint, questioning noise in the back of his throat, but didn't lift his eyes from his work. She rolled her eyes and looked at the other two girls, who wore small, disbelieving smiles. She walked around his desk and bent over it to present her bountiful breasts for his inspection.

Ben's eyes wandered to the plentiful cleavage, encased as it was in a white, lacy bra. He let himself admire the fleshy mounds for a few moments, before lowering his eyes back to his work. "Want something," he idly inquired of her.

"Yes, Ben," she said, "I do want something. The girls and I would love it if you were to turn into your Asian girl shape and come up to the roof to join us in the hot tub."

Ben lifted his eyes to hers and asked, "We?" She smiled and glanced behind him. He turned around and saw Lisa wearing black lingerie and cuddling provocatively with Krista, who was only wearing a see-through, powder blue teddy. He stared at their sensual play and debated over whether or not to join them, until Raven walked into his line of sight. Her perfect ass was completely exposed by her skimpy thong and it was swaying seductively from side to side as she walked away from him.

Lisa and Krista followed the blonde and Ben dropped what he was doing to cast the Shapechange spell. He assumed his female form and rushed up the stairs after them. As soon as he opened the door, the polar cold slammed into his naked body, making him come to a sudden halt. "Come on, the water's warm," beckoned Krista from the lit tub and he ran towards her voice, without even thinking of turning back into himself and casting Endure Elements on himself.

The girls made room in the big hot tub and he slid under the surface of the water as quickly as he could. After the shock of the cold, night air, it felt as hot as a furnace to him. He quickly shook off the rapid temperature shock and sat up in the tub, next to Raven.

Before he could speak, Raven leaned over and kissed him, sucking his soft lips in between hers. Her tongue flicked out to force itself into his mouth. She put a hand behind his head and held him still as she wrestled his tongue with hers. Ben let out a small noise when he felt soft hands on his other side. They were stroking his soft skin and working to massage his breasts and ass. He relaxed his body and let the three pairs of hands do their will upon him.

The girls descended upon him with a passion. They stroked his tits, pinching lightly at his sensitive nipples and making him arch his back and drive his pert, little ass back into their grasping hands. In no time at all, he was panting around Raven's tongue in arousal.

The girls pushed him up on the bench surrounding the tub. He let out a noise of protest at the exposure, but he felt no cold. His skin only tingled pleasurably. He relaxed fully and let the girls do what they wanted to him, without giving a fuck about anyone that might be watching from the neighboring buildings' windows. If anyone was watching, they were certain to see the sight of their lives as the other three girls divested themselves of their skimpy coverings.

Three pairs of hands worked on his body with deft, featherlight touches while three mouths, with three agile tongues, feverishly pressed their attacks on any sensitive flesh of his they could get at. He shut his eyes and surrendered to the pleasurable sensations. With a mouth sucking at one of his nipples, a mouth licking his erect clit and a mouth nibbling his earlobe, he climaxed loudly and wrapped his hands in the soft locks of two of his lovers.

The girls kept at it for a long time to come. Their hands and mouths expertly kept him near the peak of orgasm, sending him over every few minutes, after he begged for it. He was feeling hot enough to endure being naked on the North Pole, if need be, but the girls still cupped hot water in their hands and poured it over his blushing skin. In the cold, winter air, the hot water felt like lave beading down his skin.

He lost track of time as the girls kept on pleasuring him, without any regard for their own desires. At one point, he opened his eyes and looked deep into Lisa's brown eyes. Her expression was that of intense concentration as she stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and worked three fingers in and out of his pussy with in a feverish tempo. He climaxed with a loud wail and then began to flinch and writhe away from their touch.

"No more," he gasped with a hoarse voice. "Please! No more!" The girls' fierce touches and probing kisses turned into light, comforting strokes and tender pecks. He rolled over and splashed into the water. They sat him upright in the tub and settled down around him.

"Feel any better," Krista asked him.

He gasped for breath and then said, "Yeah."

"Good," she responded with a smirk. Lisa sat in Raven's lap and began to kiss the skin over the blonde's collarbone. Ben watched as her kisses slowly went lower and lower, until they settled at the tops of Raven's tits, just above the surface of the water. He could see the Latina's hands stroking the big orbs under the water's surface. Despite his exhaustion, the sight was giving him a second wind.

He stood up and walked on wobbly, shaking legs to the door that led downstairs. "If any one of you girls wants to play with Mister Ogre, I'll be turning into him in ten seconds."

The girls gasped in delight as one and ran buck-naked after him, already squealing at the thought of getting plowed with the double dicks and sprayed with the demonic, orgasm-inducing cum.

During the week, Ben improved the impact-absorbent layer of the suit of armor by fabricating a durable foam filled with a non-Newtonian fluid that would solidify upon sudden impact and liquefy immediately after it. He took advantage of the laxed rules for firearms acquisition that have been put in place after the Philadelphia incident and bought a handgun. He tried to get the girls to shoot at him, but they declined, so he mounted it on a stand he fabricated and fired at himself with a remote control. He laughed as he could hardly even sense the impacts. The bullets flattened on the outer shell of the armor, dissipating their energy across all of it, and the harness, fibers and foam completely cushioned the impact.

Ben was delighted with the results of the test. His armor was now capable of shrugging off bullets and would probably even be impervious to smaller bombs. The only thing that was wrong with the suit were the joints. They still opened up gaps in the armor, whenever the wearer moved. It seemed to him a vulnerability that simply couldn't be compensated for. He fabricated big, durable shields to compensate for that. None of them had any problem wielding them one-handed, once they were in their armors. He also made greatswords for each of them.

The Saturday before Christmas, Ben and Krista teleported to the archbishop's street. They found some cover and he ended her invisibility before they walked over to his house. She rang the bell and was soon admitted inside, where she was bid to wait for the archbishop to finish with a phone call. She made herself comfortable in an armchair beside the roaring fireplace. Ben flew around in his gaseous Djinni form. He idly read the archbishop's mind, while Krista ran her gaze all over the man's impressive collection of rare books and paintings. She mentally tallied the cash she could get for stealing and fencing the stuff and came up with a seven figure sum.

Ben changed into himself when he felt the archbishop coming their way. "Heads up," he said and quickly changed back. Krista stood up and smoothed down her clothes. The archbishop smiled warmly upon entering the room and clasped her hand. They sat down by the fire and she started asking him questions. After she relaxed him with the first dozen, she delved into asking him questions about how the Church combats supernatural threats, all in an effort to get him to think about The Order of the Hammer. His replies were so blandly phrased and evasive that most politicians and diplomats would envy his ability to say nothing while employing so many words.

Ben wasn't paying much attention to the man's words, focused on his thoughts instead. The questions he was asked made the archbishop think about the public image of the Catholic Church and little else. Ten minutes into the interview, one of Krista's polite questions about combating evil was delivered in a dismissive tone, making the cleric feel slighted by the implication that he was just a powerless figurehead. Images of all that he had accomplished in his life ran through his mind, but Ben found nothing even remotely connected to secret orders, or the like.

Krista picked up on the fact that she was close to being asked to leave, so she changed tack and asked about the Church's charitable projects. The archbishop relaxed, somewhat, and talked about those. Ben was starting to lose patience when Krista asked about burials for the poor and then segued into what it was like to preside over the burial of a member of the Church. The archbishop thought about all the colleagues he had known and whose funeral services he had held over the years and Ben caught a glimpse of the funeral arrangements for the Order's zealots.

The archbishop had been called by an Italian cardinal, an old friend of his, who asked him for the favor of burying the trio. The archbishop knew nothing else of them and the cardinal hadn't indicated that they were important in any way, so he had simply kicked it over to the bishop in whose diocese they had died.

Krista was running out of questions and the archbishop soon grew tired, so the interview wound down and Krista was escorted out of the house. Ben appeared next to her as soon as she was away from prying eyes. "Well," she asked.

"A cardinal in Italy," Ben simply said.

Krista smiled and hugged his arm. "Ben, amore mio, do you remember the last time we were in Italy," she asked him.
"Vaguely," he said.

"Oh, I remember it like it was yesterday," she said. "We teleported to this house for sale and there was a young couple, engrossed in passion, right before us." Ben chuckled as he remembered opening the door to see the amorous couple right next to it, too busy getting it on to notice them. "And then we joined them and taught them how to make love properly."

"What!? We never did anything of the kind! We snuck past them, as quiet as a pair of mice."

Krista's mouth screwed up in mock disbelief. "Really? That's not how I remember it."

Ben rolled his eyes at her. "Come on," he said, "I'm teleporting us home. I've got to go meet the guys at the bar and grill."

He teleported them home, where Lisa and Raven were getting ready to go out. Krista ran upstairs at the bedroom that housed her clothes and shouted for the two of them to wait for her. Ben took the chance to give the girls a once-over. They were both definitely dressed to impress and he felt a twinge of jealousy at the thought of them going out clubbing.

"What," Raven said, "you didn't expect us to just sit around while you went out drinking with your buddies?"

"Relax, Ben," Lisa kindly said, "we're just gonna have some fun, nothing else."

Krista ran back down, wearing a snug, red dress that showed lots of cleavage and didn't come down to her knees. She dashed past him and planted a quick peck on his cheek. "Bye, hon! Don't wait up for us!" Ben was too stunned by her superfast change to reply.

The girls filed into the elevator, their heels clicking loudly against the floor of the cab, and blew him kisses before the doors closed. Ben just stood there, wondering which car they would take. Then he decided to take one himself, instead of teleporting, in case he might need to ferry the guys home at the end of the night.

While the girls were away, he took the chance to cast Discern Location and find out that the cardinal he was after was in Rome, in an apartment not too far from Vatican City. He looked up the local time online. It was one a.m. in Italy. He was curious as to what a cardinal would be doing outside of the Vatican City walls in the middle of the night. He made himself invisible and teleported to the apartment.

The first thing to grab his attention was a loud, roaring noise. Ben flinched down into a crouch on pure reflex, before he realized it was snoring. He saw an old man asleep on the bed and relaxed. He took a look around the apartment and saw nothing amiss in the darkness. He had expected to find the man doing nefarious things, not sleeping like a lamb.

A brief and quiet search of the apartment, illuminated only by the light of Ben's smartphone screen, revealed nothing of note. He teleported back home and went to meet with the guys. When he descended into the garage, he saw that the girls had taken the Phantom, so he took the DB7 and drove over to Dusty's.

His night out with the guys was more fun than he had had in months and he realized it was because the guys censored themselves around his girls. He decided, right then and there, that whenever he would hang with his buddies, he would send the girls out beforehand. He announced to the group that the girls were not going to play D&D with them anymore and they collectively groaned in polite disappointment. They feebly suggested Ben convince them to keep playing, but he could tell they were secretly also glad to be rid of the wet blankets.

Jake, on the other hand, looked to be near tears at the news. He excused himself to the bathroom and stayed in there for ten minutes, before emerging refreshed and relaxed.

All of them got drunk as the night went on and they wound up leaving their keys with the bartender and hailing a series of cabs to take them home. They drunkenly hugged as they parted ways, with the guys mostly heading off to the University and Ben being driven to his apartment in the opposite direction. They promised to call over the holidays and meet up when classes resumed to play Micah's campaign.

Ben's Sunday was spent nursing a hangover and futilely studying for his last final of the semester on Monday. After the third time he asked them, the girls agreed to give him a break that day. On Monday, he took the final and came back to the apartment.

"So, how did it go," Lisa asked him.

"Pretty well," he said, nodding. He didn't ace it, that would have been impossible with all his spare time spent on making powered armor, but he was fairly certain that he would get a passing grade. "Now, I've got a surprise for you girls! Gather around!

"We are going to spend the holidays traveling!" The girls' eyes bulged out in surprise. "We will spend Christmas in the Swiss alps and greet the New Year partying in Moscow!" The girls gasped in delight. "After that, it's ladies' choice for the first ten days of January. Sound good?"

The girls hugged him and squealed with joy. They babbled their thanks. "You're welcome! Now, go and pack! Our chalet awaits!"

"When's our flight," Raven asked.

Ben frowned and chuckled. "Seriously," he asked her, "How long have I been teleporting us everywhere? Do you honestly want to waste time flying?"

"Hell, no," she said. The girls laughed and rushed off to pack. They were done in less than an hour and Ben told them to bundle up. They put on their coats and insisted they were going to be fine. Ben zipped up his thick, Gore-Tex jacket and teleported them to Switzerland. The girls shivered in the alpine cold mere moments after that. Ben ended their invisibilities behind a snow drift and led them into the hotel proper.

The girls congregated by the roaring fireplace, grateful for its warmth, while Ben checked them in. Their chalet was big and located behind the hotel, in the shadow of the peaks looming over the picturesque village they were staying in. The girls explored all the amenities it had and then showed him their appreciation all night long.

They spent their nights making love in front of the roaring fire until they fell asleep on the furs on the floor. Their days were spent skiing and having snowball fights, while the girls made a habit of using the spa facilities in the afternoon. Ben told them he'd use the free time to relax and get some of his required reading for next semester out of the way.

On the second day they went to the spa, Ben made himself invisible and went out in the snow. He cast shapechange and turned into a dragon to cast Tongues on himself. He also took the time to leave a perfect dragon-shaped depression in the snow. He smiled, changed into himself and teleported to the cardinal's apartment. The man was there, talking to someone on the phone. Ben changed into a Djinni and read his mind.

Even before the cardinal finished his phone call about paying the ransom for some kidnapped missionaries in west Africa, Ben struck gold. The cardinal was neck-deep in clandestine dealings, mostly of the financial kind. Ben stuck with him and was quickly rewarded for his efforts as the cardinal was tempted to contact The Order of the Hammer and ask them to go rescue the missionaries. He gave up on that line of thought and rebuked himself mentally. "The Order isn't here to take orders from the likes of me," he reminded himself.

While the cardinal turned his mind to diplomatic options for ensuring the safety of the missionaries, Ben focused and worked through the burst of information about the Order he had gleaned from the cleric's mind. The cardinal was responsible for funding the Order and he funneled generous amounts towards them, though those varied greatly, depending on whether the Order was just training or had any missions out in the field.

The cardinal had been inducted into the work by his predecessor cardinal, before that man retired. Ben was disappointed to learn that the man had died in the meanwhile. This cardinal was extremely security conscious. Ben could read in his mind that he even had intelligence training in his youth, while he had been serving in the military. It was part of the reason he was chosen to act as the Order's contact to the official channels. His only manner of contact with the Order was via an email account he logged into on a daily basis. Their communication was done by editing an email draft which was never sent. Access to the account was routed through a bunch of proxy servers meant to make it untraceable, so the cardinal couldn't name any members of the Order. He was only contacted for funds and the occasional official document, or burial, as needed. He wasn't really in on the whole thing.

Ben learned the username and password of the account and teleported back to the chalet, to await the girls' return from their rubs and treatments. He sat in a comfy chair next to the fire and pondered the dilemma before him. Should he contact the Order and tell them about the eclipse, the Outsiders, the sacrifice and the danger to the entire world, or should he not?

He was sick and tired of the fate of the world hanging on just his shoulders and the very thought of failing was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat and feel like he needed to throw up and take a shit at the same time. He wanted to have help. He wanted to have backup. He needed to share his burden with someone who wouldn't just dismiss him as a loony. He was leaning towards letting them know about everything, but their casual execution of Simon gave him pause.

If he told them everything, would they try and kill him, too? Worse than that, would they try and kill Raven again? What would they do with Lisa and Krista? Kill them to preserve their secrecy? He didn't think such a scenario far-fetched. Those thoughts gave him pause about logging into that email account

The girls came back before he came to a decision. They went out to eat and then spent the evening singing karaoke. They spent a week there and celebrated Christmas. The girls also decided that they'd spend the week after New Years' Day someplace tropical, so Ben made reservations in Tahiti.

They rang in the New Year in Moscow, engaged in utter debauchery that only the world's capital of billionaires could provide them with. Ben found himself surrounded by dozens of young women that were just as pretty as his girls. And they were clearly willing. His girls encouraged him to play the field and he was tempted, but he decided to stick with the three of them. They rewarded him by letting him fuck their asses all night long. Before he passed out in exhausted pleasure, Ben resolved to make another new spell, one that would increase his sexual stamina.

In Tahiti, they mostly relaxed in the Sun, swam in the sea and let go of the chill of the Alps and Russia. He found himself wishing his life would just be one long stay at the beach. Sunshine, tropical fruit, cocktails, swimming and wild sex all night long was all he would ever need to be happy. He lay on the beach one evening and watched the Sun set. The girls were getting rubbed down in the spa and he had an hour to kill. He had given up on his college reading materials since before Moscow and spent all his free time debating contacting the Order.

The pink and orange sky made his choice for him. He couldn't let this be destroyed. He couldn't let everything hang on his success. He teleported to a random apartment in Johannesburg and went online to log into the email account. He opened another draft of an email and quickly typed up all he knew about the enemy and the portal. He took the images of the Outsider spells Lisa had drawn for him and attached them to the draft for authentication. He didn't tell them anything about himself, or his girls, and only stated that there would be others fighting against the enemy during the eclipse.

He teleported back to Tahiti and sat down in his beach chair. He felt a sense of relief wash over him. He felt like he had done the right thing. Just as he relaxed and started to let tension he didn't even know he had drain out of his body, the girls showed up, dressed in tiny bikinis and see-through scarves and dragged him off to go dancing around a bonfire down the beach.

When school resumed, Ben teleported himself and the girls back home. The girls hauled their bags up the stairs to the bedrooms and groaned in protest. "I know," he said, "I know. I wish we could just have fun all day long and travel and stuff, but... The eclipse is coming. We need to be ready for it and there's still much work to be done. After we win, I promise I'll make all this up to you. I'll give you the world."

The girls turned around and kissed his cheek before going to their respective bedrooms to unpack. Ben stared after them and admired the sight of them walking away until a stray thought ruined his amorous mood. "Uh, girls! You get that when I said I'd give you the world, I meant that in a non-dictator way, right?" The trio giggled and closed the bedroom doors behind themselves. "Girls? Seriously, I'm not gonna, you know, take over the world and shit... Ah, fuck it."

After sparing a few days to adjust to school and his new class schedule, Ben tackled the final stage of armor construction, which consisted of the electronics suite and the robotic arm with the gun. He intended to fit the ammunition in a backpack they'd wear, with the robotic arm wielding the gun overhead. He teleported repeatedly into an army base armory and simply stole the machineguns and ammo, but he shopped for and bought the robotic arms. He fabricated the whole thing together and had to admit to himself that his girls and he cut a very intimidating shape in their armors, particularly with the machineguns sticking over their shoulders.

He made the armors white, to better blend in with the snowy landscape they'll be fighting in, and started work on the electronics suite. He hired a few freelance programmers and worked with them to program the targeting, communications and sensor systems for the suits. He didn't tell them what the purpose of the programming was, claiming instead that it was for a video game. They didn't really care. He had rented a floor of an office building and furnished it with many amenities, so they worked and played in the same place. They made and tested all the code he would need in less than a month and he only spent a few hours installing it into the armors' onboard computers.

While the programmers were busy doing the work, he spent more and more time shapechanging into metallic dragons and casting every spell in the Handbook. His understanding of the nature of D&D magic grew with every day and, before February was out, he made another new spell. He called it Lightsaber and he dearly wished he could cast it as himself, too, but he didn't have room for another seventh level spell inside himself.

The spell projected a four-foot long saber-shaped blade of light from an ornate, metal hilt, which was the necessary focus for casting the spell. Whatever the blade struck would either be disintegrated or, if it made its fortitude saving throw, merely sliced up. It was completely silent, bore a color of the caster's choosing and was a million times cooler than its fictional namesake, at least in Ben's eyes. Its drawbacks were that no one could wield it, except the person that cast it, and it ended instantly if the hilt was dropped for any reason. Otherwise it only lasted for six seconds per each level of the caster. The spell was of limited tactical use and would probably not come into play in the coming fight, but creating it still bolstered his spirits. Plagued with questions about the identity and strength of the enemy, he needed every encouragement he could find.

"Let's recap," Simon cheerfully suggested in fluent Swahili. He smiled a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes at the ebony-skinned beauty standing at attention before him. "You are to never..."

The young woman swallowed nervously, making the beads of sweat rolling down the front of her throat glisten in the half-light coming in through the room's single, dirty window. "I am to never communicate the presence of your servant in my womb to anyone, nor allow them to come to such a conclusion for any reason whatsoever," she whispered in Swahili. Her knees almost immediately buckled as she shuddered through an intense orgasm. She struggled to stay upright as she gulped air.

"Good girl," Simon said. His smile faded. "Now, do we need to go over what happens if you-"

"No," she yelled out, raising an arm as if to fend off his signal to the creature nestled deep inside her womb. She nearly winced and immediately checked her tone of voice. "No, no, no, no, Sir, we don't need to go through that again, Sir!"

Simon coldly regarded her trembling body. She was still shaking with the aftershocks of her orgasm, but those were slowly fading away to be replaced by her limbs trembling in fear. He judged her to be fully trained. She stood at almost six feet in height, with a slender, athletic figure and a firm, muscled ass. Her tits were also quite attractive, by human standards at least, and her facial features were soft and decidedly feminine. In many a land, this fine specimen of femininity would be celebrated for her beauty and probably making money off it, yet she was reduced to whoring herself out for drug money in this African city, for some reason.

He didn't care what her history was and why she did what she did. She had no future, since she was considered too old to marry at the "ripe" age of twenty-four and she had no friends, or family to be bothered with. "No future to fight for, either," Simon thought to himself. He had learned to refine his search for servant-carriers through hard experience. Those that had some kind of ties to the world resisted his training and forced him to waste time on them. The one hooker that had a child even had to be put down after three weeks of not getting with the program.

This one was thoroughly broken and would be an obedient hiding spot for his servant. He was sure of it. He left the shack without any parting words, or a second look at the girl.

Upon exiting the shack, he walked down the narrow alley, covered in trash and filth, until he joined the main thoroughfare. He soon lost himself in the mass of flesh. He slowly negotiated his passage towards the market and the taxi stop at the corner. He took his phone out of his pocket and checked it. He had two weeks until the eclipse and he had a flight booked for Helsinki later that day. His lips twitched as he briefly considered his options.

"Yes, why not," he thought to himself as he decided he would take the time to plant a servant in some Finnish, drug-addicted whore and train her to be obedient and discrete. He put his phone back in his pocket and continued with his efforts to make it to the market square. His slow and frustrating progress reminded him of those fish that swam far upstream to mate and die.

He was so annoyed by the press of flesh on every side of him that he almost missed it when it happened. His phone was pulled out of his pocket by light fingers. Reflexively, he extruded a tentacle from his hip that followed the phone and seized the wrist of the human that dared pick his pocket. The phone, containing his itinerary and travel information, was already gone from the hand, which was now tugging in a panic to come loose.

Simon rounded on the little boy and covered his tentacle with his hand. "Where's my phone," he demanded in English, while scanning the mass of people surrounding him for any sign of it. The people all around him gave him strange looks for holding the boy, but they pushed past without any comment. When the boy started yelling out for help, the crowd surrounding Simon froze in place, glaring at him.

Simon opened his mouth to tell them the child was a pickpocket, but he remembered his universal translator spell was expired. He had only the Earth languages Simon knew at his disposal. He decided to try English. "This kid is," he said and then screamed as the kid stomped on his instep with all his weight. He reflexively let go of the kid's arm and then had to retract the tentacle to avoid being exposed.
The men around him pushed in closer to challenge the perceived child molester in their midst and Simon lost sight of the kid. He hadn't even managed to get a good look at the slippery, little pickpocket and he doubted he could recognize him if he ever saw him again. He raised his arms in a gesture of peace as angry voices berated him in Swahili, Arabic and English alike. "Fuck it," he thought to himself, "I'll just make different arrangements."

Simon turned back towards the market and began to slowly push through the crowd surrounding him. The men refused to cooperate and only got louder. Simon's personal space vanished as he felt sweaty flesh pressing in on him from all sides at once. Hands seized his arms and he felt himself lifted off his feet. A machete appeared out of nowhere and was waved in front of his face, but the arm wielding it couldn't quite reach him.

Simon growled as the crowd carried him away from the square. He wanted to lash out and start killing people, but he was so hemmed in that he couldn't even bring his tentacles to bear in an effective manner. Gunshots were soon heard and the crowd began to yell out in fright, instead of anger. Simon tried to see what was happening, but the men around him were still pressed in tight, forming a wall of sweaty, ebony flesh and torn, dirty shirts and wifebeaters in every possible color.

After a few more seconds, the gunfire, which Simon noted was automatic, came closer and the crowd began to scream in panic as it dispersed itself. Much to Simon's annoyance, the dozen burly men closest to him weren't budging a bit. Instead, they led him down a side street, much like the one he had come from, until they emerged on its other side.

Simon was shocked to see green tree branches overhead, even though he still couldn't sneak so much as a peak past the men to see where they were taking him. After a few minutes of walking through the forest, the men relaxed somewhat and formed a single column. Simon counted that there were eleven of them. One shoved him to keep walking the way they were taking him and Simon rounded on him to extrude his tentacles and unleash his wrath.

He stopped on a dime as he spotted that three of the six men behind the one that shoved him carried AK-47s. The shover shoved him again, this time hard enough to nearly make him fall over on his ass. Simon stepped quickly backwards to regain his balance and nearly ran into the man behind him in the front of the column. The shover barked out an order and angrily gestured behind Simon.

Simon turned around and followed the man now in front of him. He noted another man further up ahead in the column also carried an AK-47. The shover behind him said something Simon couldn't understand and the rest of the column laughed. Simon gritted his teeth, knowing he was the butt of their joke. His wrath made him feel like there was white hot molten metal running through his veins.

He was The Reaper, The Destroyer of Worlds, The Enslaver of Species, The General of the Mighty Thunderbolt Horde and a bunch of filthy humans were laughing at him. He threw all caution to the wind and decided to execute the laughing fuckers right there and then.

His tentacles extruded and seized both the guy in front of him and the shover behind by their throats. He lifted both of them in the air. Their legs began kicking out and he held them so they couldn't kick him. The rest of the column yelled out in confusion, as none had a clear view of what was going on. All they saw was their comrades three feet in the air.

Simon spun and glared into the bulging eyes of the shover. He sneered in delight. His sneer froze and vanished when he heard the AK-47s' action levers being cycled. His adrenaline immediately spiked at the ominous sounds and he found himself experiencing everything around himself as if it was happening in slow motion. In the corner of his vision, he could see that the column was spreading out to give the riflemen clear shots at him, even while the two closest men were shrieking in horror at seeing his tentacles.

Running on pure instinct, Simon tossed both the men he was holding aloft at the riflemen in the back of the column. The shover and his mate knocked down three others, two of whom were riflemen, and Simon immediately spun around. He was faced with the sight of the forward rifleman shoving his panicked comrade aside to be able to shoot at him. Simon took advantage of the delay in his execution and seized the rifle with two of his tentacles. The rifleman finally noticed the tentacles and panicked as well. He tugged at his rifle and Simon turned its muzzle towards the back of the column.

The rifle fired, spitting out tiny flames and a nigh-deafening roar. Simon roared in agony as the hot metal of the barrel singed his tentacles. He let go of the rifle at the same time as the panicked rifleman. With two unhurt tentacles, he reached towards the wooden parts of the falling rifle. The other two men from the front of the column had spread out to the sides and had been advancing towards Simon with machetes drawn when they spotted his tentacles. They froze in place and watched as Simon's tentacles seized the falling AK-47.

Simon's eyes twitched towards one macheteman's face and then the other. The adrenaline flood had such a grasp on his mind that he could count the beads of sweat on the men's faces, even as he admired their expressions of horror and denial. His tentacles were bringing the rifle towards his arms and Simon relished the thought of having the weapon. His eyes turned back to the rifleman and he noticed the man was looking scared, but he was also looking behind him, not at him.

Simon didn't even stop to think as his body tucked as hard and as fast as it could. The rifle was almost in his grasp, now. The stock was inches away from his hand when the horrid noise came again. Simon could feel the bullets whizzing through the air between his flailing tentacles, inches above his bending back. He flinched as he saw blood erupting from the fronts of the forwards rifleman and his panicked comrade.

Simon kept crouching and whipped his head around behind himself. Five men were down on the ground. The sixth, a red beret wearing rifleman was standing still and looking down at his chest in shock. His drab T-shirt was sporting some dark holes that were starting to get a distinctive, red fringe. Simon didn't have the time to appreciate the accidental kill as he saw that the seventh man had picked up and fired a rifle towards him. He let go of his trigger and his rifle stopped spitting out bullets.

Simon finally grasped the handle of his AK-47 and brought it up to see where he was shooting at. The man was just standing there, gaping behind Simon as he brought his rifle up to aim.

At the last possible moment, the staring rifleman looked at Simon's face and the Outsider relished at seeing the man realize he was about to die. Simon squeezed the trigger. The rifle roared and spat flames as the man's chest shook and his green shirt erupted in an outbreak of dark holes.

A sneer was working its way to Simon's face, right as the rifle stopped firing. Simon glanced at it in confusion, snapping out of his adrenaline-fueled haze. A tentacle of his cycled the bolt action lever and he found himself staring into an empty chamber. He realized he was out of ammo and he looked up to check on the other rifles in play.

Two of them were in the hands of the shot men who were both in the process of falling flat on the ground. One was on the ground, next to a rifleman that was struggling to get up from under the shover that Simon had thrown at him. A whistling sound caught Simon's attention at the same time as he felt the air around him be disturbed. A sharp pain in one of his tentacles struck him immediately after and he clenched up in pain. The hurt tentacle reflexively retracted towards his body, while the surrounding ones swung out into the space the hurt tentacle had been occupying a moment ago.

His tentacles connected with a solid body and tossed it away. Simon spun to see one of the machetemen flying through the air towards a nearby tree. He struck the trunk with a loud, crunchy boom. Simon knew he was down, so he spun towards the other guy with the machete, his tentacles on guard, only to see the man break and run.

Simon reached out with a pair of tentacles and seized his ankle before he could make it two yards. He yanked the man's leg out from under him and tugged him towards himself. He seized him with more tentacles and brought him up to face him. The man's eyes were spread wide, but they were pointed behind Simon.

Out of reflex, Simon spun and held the man up in front of himself like a meat shield. The shover and the other man he had thrown had rolled over to the corpses of the riflemen and seized their weapons. Each was down on one knee, with the AKs pointed at Simon. He could see the corners of their mouths turn up as the triggers were squeezed. The shover's rifle did nothing, but the other man's fired. Simon tossed his shield man at the rifle.

The bullets ripped through the man Simon tossed, with little difficulty. They were mostly deflected outwards by passing through his body, but two shot off Simon's tentacles and one zipped straight through Simon's shoulder. The pain punched through the haze of adrenaline and nearly brought Simon down to his knees. He grit his teeth and looked up. The shooter and his rifle were flattened under the man Simon had just thrown. Three men were scrambling to get up and one of them was holding a rifle. Most worryingly of all, the shover had worked the safety on his AK and was aiming it at Simon with murder in his eyes. Simon only had a second left to live.

His tentacles reached aside and wrapped themselves around a tree trunk. With strength borne of desperation, Simon pulled his body sideways to safety, just before the shover fired. The burst of fire went on for a few more seconds, during which time Simon reached up with his tentacles and pulled himself up a few branches. The adrenaline could only mask so much pain and Simon bit his tongue to stop himself from sobbing and revealing his position when the gunfire ceased and the men started yelling. He heaved big breaths of air and peeked down at them from his leafy cover. He held himself steady with many tentacles wrapped around the surrounding branches.

One of the five survivors was yelling at the shover, while the others moved the corpse Simon had thrown to get at the rifle underneath it. They took it away from the guy that had fired it and checked its ammo. Simon looked down at them in confusion for a few more seconds and then figured out that they weren't carrying any reloads. They had a limited ammo supply. They were bickering amongst each other, yelling out in desperate voices and Simon grinned, despite the throbbing pain in his tentacles and shoulders. He retracted the wounded tentacles back inside himself and knotted them up to prevent internal bleeding. He also retracted three tentacles to plug up the hole in his shoulder.

They were standing their ground, he realized, not only to blame one another for shooting their comrades, but also because none of them had seen where he had vanished after he had pulled himself aside. They stood almost directly beneath him and peered into the dimly lit jungle to try and spot him. The bickering escalated into shoving and the smallest and scrawniest of the five of them exploded in anger and began getting into everyone's chests until the wind went out of everyone's sails but his. He held his hand out and the remaining two magazines were removed from rifles. Two other men began removing the ammo from the magazines and placing the rounds into the palm of the man's hand.

Simon wiped the sweat off his brow with a tentacle and had to keep himself from laughing. While they were redistributing ammunition between the four rifles they were holding, only two rifles had a live round in their chambers. He braced himself to pounce down on their defenseless asses when he realized he had lost track of the rifles and didn't know which two were live and which two weren't.

The bullets were counted and they started putting them back into magazines and Simon realized it was now or never. He unwrapped his tentacles from the branches and aimed a few of them at each rifle, sparing only a few to stick the landing. He stepped off his branch and fell. None of the five had the time to react as he came crashing down on them. His tentacles slammed the rifles out of their hands and down to the ground.

The four that had been holding rifles and loading the magazines fell to the ground, leaving only the shover standing. Simon faced the scared man and smiled. His tentacles reached out and slid down the mouth of each of the four men as they started to scream. He ripped through their airways and squeezed their hearts, making their whole bodies writhe impotently as they died slow, agonizing deaths.

The shover watched this with an expression of horror on his face, but his feet stayed in place. While his comrades were dying, the expression on his face slowly went from horrified to grimly vengeful. He made a wide circle around Simon and picked up a machete.

Simon smiled as the last of the men died and then faced the shover. "I'm gonna take my sweet time with you, shitfucker," he sneered at him. The shover raised his machete high and roared as he charged at Simon.

The peace and quiet of a section of forest somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains was suddenly shattered by the sound of automatic fire. A series of trees, each bearing alternating red and white stripes upon their bark, was rapidly cut down by streams of bullets that splintered their trunks. The bullets were coming from three different directions, but they converged on the same spots in a seemingly concerted effort.

When the last of the trees fell and the dust their falls kicked up settled, three white suits of powered armor appeared out of thin air. Krista walked over to one tree which bore significant damage to its trunk and said into her microphone, "We clipped an innocent."

"Fuck," roared Raven over the comms in frustration.

"It's okay," Lisa's voice was heard in everyone's headset, "only one is way better than what we did when we started training. Besides, look at all the innocent sacrifices we had just saved!" The smallest of the three suits gestured all around at the still standing trees.

"Yeah," Raven reluctantly conceded, "but I don't wanna kill any innocents."

"No one does," Krista said. "We just have to-"

A draconic voice sounded in everyone's headsets, cutting her off, "Contact, South by South-West, three hundred away and closing fast!"

Each girl's eyes immediately went to the compasses on their HUDs and they spun their armors around to face the indicated direction. They raised the robotic arms with the machineguns and cameras high above their heads and scanned the forest floor for targets. "Form up," Krista ordered.

Lisa ran forward, her shield and sword held on guard. Krista stood beside her in the same pose, while Raven stood behind them, hefting her Mk19 automatic grenade launcher and taking aim.

"I can't see shit in all this wood," Krista complained. "Dragon, describe contact! Are there civvies present?"

Ben's golden, draconic lips curled up into a smile as he said, "Yup-yup, three civvies present!" The headset he had fabricated for his draconic head transmitted his voice to the forest he was flying over. "Dozen enemy contacts, now stationary at your twelve, two-fifty away!" He glided lazily through the thermal current that was bearing him aloft and focused his attention on the copse of trees he had indicated.

"Terrain," Krista harshly inquired over the comm.

Ben chuckled to himself. They were practicing combat for weeks now and he pushed the girls into leadership positions during that time. Lisa turned out to be unable to make up her mind under duress and Raven's entire tactics repertoire consisted of nothing but blindly charging in. Krista was the only one that showed the ability to lead under pressure. "Flat for fifty all around," he spoke into his comm indicating to them that the cops of trees he had designated as targets were surrounded by a clearing that was fifty yards wide. The girls and he had developed their own verbal shorthand for combat conditions which would probably make anyone with any proper training twitch, but it worked for the girls and he rolled with it.

"Invisibility," Krista inquired.

"Neg-neg," he said, turning over in a lazy barrel roll. "I'm under attack up here."

Krista would have rolled her eyes at being ordered to attack while denied the comfort and huge tactical advantage of the Greater Invisibility spell, but Ben had a point. They needed to be able to fight even without his assistance. The enemy might even show up with an air force, for all they knew.

"Follow," Krista said and led the trio towards the target area. Ben watched from above as they snuck up towards the unsuspecting copse of trees. "Dragon, any change?"

"Neg-neg," Ben said, "all same." He watched as the girls crept to the edge of the clearing and looked across it at the target area.

Krista and the girls hid behind trees. She lifted her robotic arm with the camera and gun and poked it out from behind cover. She brought up the camera feed on her HUD and examined the targets. Several trees bore alternating red and white lines, designating them as baddies, while two trees were absent any markings.

She frowned and grimaced inside her air-conditioned helmet. She wished she could wipe her face, as she usually did when frustrated, but the armor was designed to open into two parts at the waist to allow the wearer to get in and out. It was not made with a removable helmet, or faceplate. She settled for a big sigh, instead. The problem was that she didn't have clear lines of fire on each possible target. She pointed her robotic arm to the side and activated her laser designator.

"Sugar, go there," she said.

Lisa lifted her head and followed the laser beam, which was visible through her visor. When she saw the position Krista was indicating, she said, "Yup-yup," and began to move.

"BigBird, stay here," Krista ordered.

Raven nodded her head inside her big, rigid helmet. It took her a second to remember no one could see her gesture. She said, "Roger that, Krista-I mean Venus! Roger that, Venus!"

Krista growled over the comms at the use of her real name and then stalked off to her own firing position. Ben watched them from above and was delighted to see that Lisa and Krista hadn't moved to directly opposite sides of the copse, where they'd risk shooting at each other. Instead, they were at about a hundred degrees between one another, with Raven in the middle.

"BigBird," Krista said, "on my mark, grenade behind them!"

"Yup-yup," Raven said. She engaged her camera and brought up its feed on her HUD. She zoomed in on a rock behind the copse of trees. She aimed her designator at a particular spot on the rock and marked the first fix. She then moved her robotic arm to the side and reaimed the designator at the exact same spot. After she marked the second fix, her onboard computer calculated the distance to the rock and she had her computer lock her left arm at the appropriate angle to fire the Mk 19 to hit that spot. "BigBird ready."

"Sugar, watch my laser," Krista said as she aimed her designator at a target tree in the center of the group.

"I see it, Venus," Lisa responded.

"Fire starboard of target," Krista ordered. "I fire port, BigBird takes the front. Got it?"

"Yup-yup," Lisa and Raven said over the comms, one after the other.

"Ready," Krista said. "Steady... Fire!"

Raven squeezed the trigger of the grenade launcher and a stream of 40mm HEAT grenades shot up in the air only to land behind the trees, turning the clearing there into a hellpit of fire and concussive force. With her arm locked, she sidestepped to spray the explosions all around the target area.
While the explosions lit up the clearing, all three girls opened fire with their machineguns, aiming them by moving their heads inside their rigid helmets. They only stopped firing for split seconds while shifting their aim across the innocents and the copse of trees was cleared within half a minute.

"Halt, halt, halt," Krista yelled out over the comms.

Everyone ceased firing. The red and white trees were all felled. Krista walked over to the unmarked trees and checked them. She ran her armored hand over their barks. Her laughter was heard over the comms. "All clear," she said, followed by whoops of joy from Lisa and Raven.

Ben smiled and did a loop. "Ammo," he said. The girls read their ammo counts from their HUDs and called them out in alphabetic order, by nickname. "Basically, you're out. It's ok, we're done here for today. That was the last target area I prepared. Let's go home!"

He swooped down and landed in the part of the clearing which Raven hadn't grenaded. The girls ran up to him and he teleported them to his warehouse. He changed into himself and the girls doffed their armors there. "Reload and," he started saying but was cut off by the girls who started reciting the list of tasks that needed to be performed to ensure the armors remain functional. "I trained you well." He chuckled.

He oversaw the girls do their maintenance, particularly removing the graphene batteries from the suits and plugging them into the main for recharging, before teleporting them home. "I'll fix us something to eat," Raven said and went to the kitchen.

"I need a bath," Krista said and went to the bathroom.

Ben sat down on the couch and sighed. Lisa sat next to him in silence for a while. "So, tomorrow is your D&D game with your friends," she said.

Ben grunted in confirmation. "We'll probably end Micah's campaign."

"Looking forward to it," she asked.

Ben scratched his chin and said, "Well... Yeah?"

"I mean," she said and paused for a deep breath, "tomorrow might just be the very last time you play with your friends. The eclipse is on Friday." He shot her a dark look and then picked up the remote to turn on the TV. She swallowed nervously. "I meant to say-"

"I know what you meant."

They sat in silence as Ben shuffled through channels, looking for any distraction. Less than a week from now, they were going to fight for the very survival of humanity. No matter how much he masked it, he was in the grips of fear. The battle that had sounded like something out of a fantasy novel was now looming in his mind looking more like the start of "Saving Private Ryan". He sighed and did his best to push the thoughts of failure out of his mind.

Krista called out from the bathroom for someone to come wash her back. Raven hadn't heard her over the noise of all the pots and pans she was clinking in the kitchen. Lisa looked at Ben, who didn't look back at her. He nodded at the door and Lisa went to the bathroom, doubtlessly to talk to the redhead.

Ben sighed and relaxed further in his seat. He kept surfing the channels, hoping to find a comedy, until he came across "Saving Private Ryan". It was the landing scene and everyone was getting riddled full of bullet holes. Ben turned it off and wiped his face with both hands. His heart was pounding in his chest, threatening to give out at any moment.

He didn't know what he feared the most; failing to save the world, or succeeding at the cost of his girls dying on him. The thought of getting killed himself was beginning to look like a reprieve from all the anxiety next Friday was giving him. He felt like he was waiting for his date with an executioner's axe.

"Dinner's ready," Raven called out and started to set the dining table. "Where are they?" Ben pointed at the bathroom door. "Tell them dinner's ready, would you?"

He slowly stood up and shuffled over to the door. He opened it without knocking and was surprised to see Lisa sitting naked on the edge of the tub. Her swarthy skin was glistening with suds and moisture. Krista's long, auburn hair was visible between Lisa's legs and Lisa's plaintive moans left no question as to what the redhead was engaged in.

Ben enjoyed the sight for a few seconds longer, as he had expected to find the two of them in here talking about how to cheer him up, not cheering each other up. He finally said, "Dinner's ready!"

Lisa kept moaning, but Krista pulled her face up and said, "I'm eating!" Lisa grabbed her hair and pushed her face back down before she could say anything else.

Ben chuckled and left them to it. He sat at the dining table and Raven served the two of them dinner. They ate in leisurely silence and were starting on dessert when the girls emerged from the bathroom, looking pleased as punch. They sat down and ate their own dinner, ignoring the other two.

"That was a great idea," he said to Krista. She paused her eating only long enough to give him a quick look with an arched eyebrow. "Firing grenades behind the enemy, making them face the wrong way. I mean, if they hadn't been trees, that would have totally worked." She smiled as she chewed her steak. "You've been reading those army field manuals I got us, haven't you?" Her smile grew wider still. "Good girl! I'll have to reward you for that."

Krista finished with her mouthful and looked at Lisa. "Thanks, Ben, but I think I've got my reward laid out for me tonight," she said, making the Latina blush and giggle.

Raven's calf brushed up against his under the table. He looked at her and was immediately drawn into her huge, blue eyes. She smiled a sultry smile at him and the two of them fed each other the remnants of their desserts. He leaned in and kissed the whipped cream she had on the edge of her lip. She gave a small moan of delight and he kissed her on the lips. She responded to his touch and they quickly lost themselves in their passion.

All thoughts of fighting and war evaporated from their minds as their tongues touched and wrestled for supremacy. His hands reached over to caress her shoulders and she put one hand on his thigh in response. Soon, they broke their kiss and stood up. He took her hand in his and led her upstairs. The girls' giggles followed them until they went into a bedroom and Ben shut the door behind them.

Raven immediately threw herself into his arms, nearly tackling him. He grabbed hold of her and ran his hands all over her back, exploring the perfect body he already knew by heart. She rubbed herself against him and he walked her slowly over to the bed. She sat down on the bed and smiled as she started to undo his pants. She looked him in the eye until she fished out his hardening cock. Then she lowered her face to it and blew over its head.

Ben groaned at the feel of her hot, moist breath on his glans. His cock hardened visibly. She licked out at his glans, making him inhale a gasp. Her tongue danced around his cockhead until she grasped him in her hand and pulled his foreskin back, revealing his most sensitive flesh. Her lips engulfed his glans and she started sucking him off in earnest. Her hand slowly worked his shaft, while the other went into his undies to gently cup his balls. Her tongue worked on the underside of his glans while her lips made a tight seal around it. Her cheeks hollowed as she sucked.

Ben groaned as Raven's expert ministrations were drawing him ever closer to orgasm. Her hand sped up on his shaft and her face started bobbing up and down, drawing him to the edge of her throat and then backing up until he was on the verge of popping out. Her pace kept accelerating and his body responded in record time. His thighs began to buck and he groaned, "I'm gonna... I'm, uh... I..."

Raven murmured in approval and the vibrations of her tongue against his pisshole sent him over the edge. He slammed his hips forward, straining to make it all the way past her tonsils, and shot his load into her mouth. He saw stars dancing on the backs of his eyelids as he gulped for breath. He could feel her swallow against the cock in her mouth. His whole body shook in the most delightful agony as she licked his softening cock clean of spit and cum.

He looked down at her upturned face. She was flashing him her most enchanting smile. He ran a hand along her chin and bent down to kiss her. He could taste himself on her tongue and that excited him. He frenched her until she shared all she had with him, then he gently pushed her to lie back on the bed.

He knelt before her and reached under her ass. He grasped the firm globes in each hand and massaged them, making her moan in appreciation. He lowered his face down between her legs and snaked it under her loose skirt. She spread her thighs wide, letting him smell her arousal. He smiled and kissed the insides of her thighs. They were smoother than silk. He grasped the waistband of her panties and gently pulled on them. She lifted her ass, allowing him to pull them down her legs. She stepped out of them and he lifted them to his nose. She sat up on her elbows and watched him smell them. She softly laughed as he licked at their crotch.

He tossed them at her face and then buried his into her crotch. He nuzzled her outer lips, making her hiss in delight. He kissed them softly and licked up and down until they opened fully on their own and revealed her pink inner lips. He then pulled back and kissed and nibbled at her inner thighs on either side of her pussy. She tried to close her thighs to force him to focus on the center, but he reached around and pinned them to the bed, splaying her.

He continued to tease her until her plaintive moans morphed into threatening growls. Then he touched his tongue to the bottom of her slit and slowly licked all the way to the clit at the top. She shuddered and called out his name at the touch. He repeated it a few more times, getting pretty much the same response every time, and then moved on to penetrate her with his tongue.

She squirmed and squealed at the touch and her actions only became more passionate when he replaced his tongue with a finger. He wrapped his lips around her clit and teased it with featherlight touches of his tongue while he stuck two and then three fingers into her pussy. Her squirms became more and more erratic as her moans rose in pitch and he had trouble keeping contact with her clit. Finally, sensing he had brought her to the very edge, he began curling his fingers inside her.

Raven exploded in orgasm, shuddering from head to toe and wailing out loud as she clamped her inner muscles around his fingers. He let off her clit and allowed her to enjoy the sensations, only twitching his fingers inside of her every now and then to send another round of aftershocks through her system.

When she finally came down from her high, she gasped, "That was awesome!"

Ben smiled and stood up to undress fully. His hard cock was sticking out and drawing her eyes to it. "That was only the beginning." She laughed breathlessly and scooted higher on the bed as he got in beside her.

Around midnight, Ben came down the stairs and went into the kitchen to take a cold beer out of the fridge. He took the cap off the bottle and poured it into a glass, making a nice head of foam.

"Hey, Boss," Felicia said after jumping up on the counter. He grunted in response. "Can't sleep?" He shook his head. "How come? The blonde usually wears you out each time and she sounded pretty active tonight."

"Nightmares," he said.

"About what, Boss?"

"About the girls getting their joints shredded by enemy fire and becoming dismembered to lie bleeding in the snow, begging for my help while I keep flying higher and higher away from them. And then the enemy walks to them with a gun in hand and I wake up."

"That's hardcore, Boss!"

Ben took a big sip of his beer. He sighed and said, "Tell me about it."

"Well, as always, it's Felicia for the win!"

Ben shot the cat a look. Back when he had explained his powers to the girls, they hadn't cottoned on to the concept of familiars right off the bat, but after the guys had explained it a few times in a row, they began insisting he summon a familiar. He then finally told them the truth about Felicia. At first, they had been insulted that he hadn't trusted them with that particular information and gave him the cold shoulder for a few days. It had seemed like an irreparable rift in their relationships, but then Felicia fixed everything by simply interacting with the girls. Even though she couldn't speak with the girls, she could use an Ouija board to communicate with them and she got them to forgive him, somehow.

Ever since then, Felicia was always smothered in attention from the girls. She even gained a few pounds from Raven using her as a taste tester and those really showed on the cat.

"Felicia for the win," he asked her.

"I figured out how to cover the joint weaknesses in your suits of armor, Boss!"

"Seriously?! How!? Show me how!"

"Right this way, Boss," she said and jumped off the counter to jog to the office space. She jumped up on his desk, after first spending a few seconds working up to it, and stepped on the track pad of the laptop. The screen came alive and Ben sat down at the desk.

He scooted his chair in and said, "What am I looking at?"

"This is the schematic of an experimental exhaust vectoring system from a Soviet fighter jet that never got built. Look at it, Boss! It's made up of asymmetrical ducts!"

To Ben, the sections that comprised the jet exhaust looked like plumbing U-bends that have been sawed in half and taped back together to make a straight pipe, even though its cross-section was no longer perfectly circular. He wasn't impressed by the sight. Felicia tapped the track pad again and the animation played. The sections rotated around one another and the end of the engine to divert its thrust in every possible direction.

"So, why isn't there a Soviet, or Russian, super-jet with those kinds of nozzles flying around scaring the shit out of the Ukrainians right now," Ben asked.

"Well, this is a very old concept, Boss. Back in those days, they didn't have carbon nanotubes and the like. The websites I've checked it out against, Boss, state that the engineers could never figure out how to attach the wedges, both to each other and the first one to the engine, in a way that would allow them to rotate on command and yet not be blasted the fuck off whenever the engine was throttled up."

Ben was beginning to see what his familiar was getting at. "But I'm not working around a jet engine," he said. "I just need something to enclose the joints at all times with a circle of composites. If I made something like this for the armor's joints, then..."

"Complete protection from all sides at all times, with next to no loss of mobility, Boss. Am I brilliant, or am I brilliant? Huh?"

Ben was engrossed in the animation as he said, "Yeah, yeah... I'd have to make, like four wedge sections for each joint, separate them from the lining underneath to allow for free rotation and install fibers to rotate each wedge around its neighbors and the rigid sections, and get the programmers back to write up the code to convert simple movements of the limbs into the correct rotational alignments of the wedges and install sensors, but... This is doable. Totally doable."

He laughed in delight and kissed Felicia atop her head, before rubbing it vigorously. "Hey, hey, lighten up, Boss! Please! You're messing up my hair!"

He picked up and hugged his familiar, saying, "Thank you so much!"

"Yeah, yeah, you're welcome, Boss. Now, please, set me down so I can fix my hair!"

Ben set her down on the table and teleported to his warehouse. He went to work on fabricating the prototypes. As soon as it was light out, he started calling his freelance programmers, but they were still sleeping off their Friday night benders and he had little to no patience to wait for them. He tried working something out himself, but was too sleep-deprived to make any progress. He teleported back home where he finally fell asleep on the couch.

When he woke up, it was afternoon and he ate a bowl of oatmeal he Prestidigitated to taste like chocolate covered bananas as he called his programmers. They flat out refused to come in on a Saturday and he had to cough up a lot of dough to get them to come in on Sunday afternoon. He was frustrated by the time delays, but had no choice other than to accept them.

His girls came down the stairs, dressed to the nines, and waved goodbye as they went out for their customary Saturday night club-hop. He was left all alone in his apartment until his friends started arriving. They played Micah's campaign to the end and then watched funny clips on YouTube. Around four in the morning the girls came home and joined them in front of the big screen for some laughs and snacks. Finally, just after dawn, everyone was yawning and Ben saw his friends to the door after they all refused his offer to spend the night there, as always.

Ben yawned and went to bed, himself, reminding everyone to wake him up in time to go brief his programmers. Now that he could completely encase the girls in impenetrable armor, he felt a renewed hope regarding Friday. They were going to stop the enemy and save the world and nothing was going to stand in their way.

He skipped classes all week to get the modifications done by Wednesday night. On Thursday, he and the girls took a critical look at the changes. In addition to changing the joints, he made all the surfaces of the armor more round to better deflect explosive force and projectiles, instead of just stopping them. With the roundness, white color and puffy joints, the finished suits looked like a cross between Bibendum and the Pillsbury Doughboy. The girls tried them on and approved of the work, mostly because nothing about how they functioned had been changed.

Ben stowed the suits and plugged the graphene batteries back into the main. When he finished, he turned and faced the girls. They all held the same pose, with their arms crossed over their chests, faces cast down and they were shifting their weight from leg to leg. He could plainly see that they were nervous. He stood before them and mimicked their body language.

Krista was the first to respond. She raised her head and looked him in the eye. There was no mistaking the fear in her big, green orbs. Even her impish grin couldn't cover it up. "So," she said, prompting the other two girls to look up as well, "tomorrow's the big day."

"Yup," he said.

"And," she drawled expectantly, "what do we do until then?" She gestured at the suits. "We're obviously not going to train some more."

"No, we're not," he said. "We're as ready as we can be." The girls gave perfunctory nods at his statement. He could tell they were anything but convinced of their success tomorrow. He felt the same way himself. The doubt was gripping his insides with an icy cold touch, making his skin break out in goose bumps randomly.

He gave the girls a small, but sincere smile and said, "We have but one last thing to do before we can be sure of our victory tomorrow."

The girls' breaths hitched in anticipation of hearing what the last ingredient was. They turned their ears towards him and leaned in closer with each second, desperately hanging on to hope that he really had the antidote to their doubts and fears.

"We have to have fun," he simply said. The girls stood up straight and shared uncertain looks amongst themselves. He shrugged. "Mull it over all you want, but you know I'm right. We have to do everything we want, so we don't freeze up thinking about something we would have loved to have done, or tried."

"But, we've done everything," Lisa said with a shrug. "We've been everywhere, we've tried every food that wasn't too disgusting... I honestly don't know what else we can do."
Krista chuckled and said, "She does have a point. I mean, our second visit to Paris is pretty much unbeatable in my book."

"Yeah," Raven said, "dinner up in the Eiffel Tower, with the whole city lit up below us... Oh, that was so romantic!"

"Well, I was thinking more about when Ben bent me over the original Mona Lisa in the Louvre's basement and fucked my brains out while I smiled at her but, sure, that was cool, too."

"Let's face it," Lisa said. "These past six months, we've spent our Sundays going everywhere we wanted and trying everything that sounded fun. We're plum out of ides. At least, I am."

"Me, too," Krista said and then smiled. "Do we spend our potentially last night on this Earth vegging out on the couch, watching TV?"

"That would be a perfect way to end the evening," Raven said, "but there is one thing we've never done and I'd like to do it before the day is over."

"Just name it," Ben said.

"What didn't we do," Lisa asked, her brow bunched in confusion.

"We've never," Raven said and paused for dramatic effect, before finishing her sentence with a dramatic flourish, "flown anywhere!"

Everyone looked at her wide, gleeful smile in confusion. "You want to fly," Krista asked.

"Yeah," Raven said. Off the confused faces of her lovers, she added, "I want to go flying so I can join the Mile High Club."

Everyone nodded and let out an, "Ah," at her explanation.

She shrugged and smiled, saying, "You asked me if there's anything I still want to do, and I want to join the Mile High Club. I'm a simple girl with simple desires."

"More like base desires," Lisa jabbed.

"You're welcome to sit this one out," Raven fired back.

Ben raised his hands and said, "Ladies! Let's not fight! There's plenty of me to go around! And, honestly, I'm game for this."

"I'm in, too," Krista said.

"I'm not sitting this one out, either," Lisa said.

"Well, then," Ben said, "we've just planned our Thursday. We're joining the Mile High Club. I'll just... uh, find us a plane to charter, or something."

He went online and quickly found a plane for hire. It was an airliner extensively remodeled to serve as executive transport. It had seats for less than sixty passengers, but the accommodations were luxurious, to say the least.

Ben teleported them to Los Angeles, where the plane was waiting for them, and they boarded their flight for New York. Ben hired only a pair of pilots, and cast Seeming on his girls, giving them the appearance of flight attendants. The plane taxied through LAX to the runway and spent a few minutes waiting for its turn to take off.

When the plane started accelerating down the runway, Ben, Lisa and Raven found themselves enjoying the rush. Krista, the only one with previous flying experience, smirked at their excitement. The three of them gasped when the plane suddenly tilted its nose up and separated itself from the ground. It kept accelerating as it climbed higher and higher. They looked out the windows to see the ground get progressively further away below them. The higher they got, the more the ground looked like a drawn map.

Pretty soon, clouds obscured their view of the ground and the captain switched off the seatbelt sign. Ben and the girls unstrapped themselves from their seats and got up to explore the cabin. After sampling some of the onboard amenities, Raven whipped up some cream in the galley and asked Ben to make it taste like strawberries. While he cast Prestidigitate to do that, she took hold of the hem of Lisa's T-shirt and pulled it up over her head.

Lisa didn't resist, even when Raven took off her bra, leaving her topless. Raven stuck her hand in the cream and scooped some of it out. She smeared it slowly over Lisa's breasts, making the swarthy girl shudder and squeal. When she was done covering her tits, Raven stuck her fingers out in front of Lisa's face. The Latina licked out with her red tongue and tasted the strawberry-flavored cream. She smiled and locked eyes with Raven before slowly sucking each of the blonde's fingers into her mouth and licking them clean.

Ben found the sight so sexy he had to undo his zipper and release his hard cock. Krista reacted to this by kneeling in front of him and slowly stroking his hard on. Ben hissed in pleasure. He clasped his hand around her wrist and pulled her with him as he walked backwards to his seat. He sat down and relaxed while she knelt between his legs, stroking his shaft.

He watched Lisa finish cleaning off Raven's fingers and then the blonde leaned in to kiss her. Raven moaned in appreciation as she tasted strawberry on Lisa's lips. Their kiss slowly built up to a passionate frenching, while Krista locked her lips around Ben's glans. She slowly ran her mouth down his shaft, her cheeks hollowing as she applied suction. Ben's eyes fluttered closed as Krista's hand slipped into his underwear to cradle his balls. He spread his thighs further and lay his head back on the headrest.

Raven planted a trail of soft kisses down Lisa's chin and neck, nibbling at the skin over her collarbone, until she reached her breasts. She stuck her tongue out and took her time licking up the cream spread over one of Lisa's breasts. Lisa shuddered and gasped at the tickling. Lisa's vocal encouragements sent Ben over the edge and he erupted into Krista's eager mouth. Krista sucked up and swallowed every bit of his seed. He relaxed in his seat and nearly dozed off.

When he opened his eyes again, Kirsta was standing in front of Lisa, slightly bent over, and licking at her cream-covered breast. Lisa was holding onto the back of a seat with both hands for balance as her legs threatened to give in at any moment under the onslaught. Raven finished with her tit and nuzzled into the action over the other one. Krista and she alternated licking the cream off Lisa's tit with licking it off each other's nose and cheeks. Their hands were busy groping and stroking Lisa's back.

After they finished licking off the last of the cream, they shared it between themselves. Krista then returned her attention to Lisa's erect nipple, while Raven kissed lower across the Latina's taut tummy until she reached her navel. She stuck her tongue in and tickled, making Lisa give off a throaty laugh.

Raven undid the button and zipper on Lisa's skirt and let it fall down her hips. Lisa stepped out of the skirt and the girls helped her to a seat, where they proceeded to lift up her feet and remove her shoes. They rubbed her feet, easing all the tension she was still feeling, and then sucked at her toes, making her squirm in her seat. The two of them kissed slowly up her legs, until their heads met over her upper thighs.

Krista and Raven kissed one another and then Raven decided to go higher and kiss and knead Lisa's breasts again. Krista grasped Lisa's thighs and spread them wide. She kissed the insides of her thighs, bypassing her engorged pussy lips until Raven got her to focus on her breasts. They Krista dove in, giving Lisa's pussy a long, slow lick from bottom to the top of her slit. Lisa writhed in her seat, but Raven pushed her down.

Krista teased the brunette's outer lips while Raven worshipped her breasts. Lisa was panting and heaving, grasping at the heads of her two lovers, trying to press them harder into her flesh. When Krista finally licked at Lisa's clit, the Latina screamed as she came. Her whole body shuddered as her skin took on a ducky glow. The girls gently massaged her flesh while she rode out the waves of her pleasure. When Lisa came down from her high, Raven knelt beside Krista and started licking Lisa's juices off the redhead's lips and chin.

As usual, the Sapphic display had brought Ben's blood to a boil inside his rock hard cock. He stood up and cast the Shapechange spell, unnoticed by the girls. He changed into his Ogre Mage form and closed the distance between himself and the girls with just one stride. His claws sank into the clothes of each kneeling beauty. Before they could react, he ripped their clothes into shreds which slowly fell off their bodies. His nose was assaulted by the smells of their arousals and his eyes wandered to their tits. Raven's nipples were puffy and Krista's were erect.

He sat down on the floor and grabbed Raven under her arms. He placed her over his hard lower cock and let her slowly slide down it. She groaned loudly as the rigid meat split her open. He hissed at how tight her wet pussy was around him. Krista leaned over to kiss Raven, but Ben grabbed her, too. She squealed as he lifted her up and held her over his upper cock.

Krista started mumbling, "please," over and over again, unsure if she wanted to be spared the uncomfortably huge cock in her pussy, or if she was begging for it. Ben grunted a laugh and slowly impaled her on his shaft. She stiffened up at first, but her resistance was useless so she relaxed and let him use her body as he saw fit. She soon felt the phallus stab at her cervix as she became wedged between him and Raven. Their tits touched and she could feel Raven's excited breath against her forehead.

Ben took the pot of strawberry flavored whipped cream and dumped it down on Krista's front. "Have at it," he ordered Raven.

The blonde smiled and bent over to start licking the cream off of Krista's front. Krista moaned at the sensations of Raven's tongue against her skin. Pretty soon, Raven started to shift her weight around to be able to get at all the cream. This jostled the dick inside of her against her g-spot and she started to ride it, as if suddenly remembering its presence and purpose.

With Krista tight around his upper cock and Raven riding his lower one, Ben was rapidly nearing orgasm. His three balls pulled up and he roared out his pleasure when he felt Raven climax on his dick. His cum shot out of his dicks and into the girls, where it made them orgasm with each shot he spent. The girls embraced each other and shuddered through the piled-on orgasms together.

They were exhausted by the ecstasy, so Ben set them aside and turned his attention to Lisa, who was watching them from a chair and lazily touching herself. When she looked into his black eyes, she froze in fear. "Oh, no," she said as he advanced on her, his hard dicks leading the way. He laughed as he tore her clothes off and idly wondered if the pilots could hear him all the way to the cockpit. As he lined up his dicks with Lisa's pussy and ass, he decided that it didn't matter in the least. He roared as he stabbed his cocks into her.

When the pilots announced that they have begun the approach to La Guardia airport, Ben and the girls were startled awake. They found themselves lying on the floor of the cabin in a sweaty tangle of limbs. Only Ben had his clothes on and intact. The girls grumbled a little at the fact that their threads had been shredded. When they got up to strap into their seats, they grumbled a lot at the soreness and stickiness Ben's cocks had left them with.

After the plane landed and started to taxi to a gate, the girls looked at him expectantly. "Well," Raven finally spoke up, "are you going to make us some clothes, or what?"

"No," Ben said, sporting a mischievous grin.

"Oh, come on, Ben," Lisa said. "We have to get off the airplane. You can't just teleport us home, people would wonder where we disappeared during the flight. It'd be a Philadelphia-type media riot all over again. Make us some clothes!"

"I'll only teleport us home after we've left the airport and found a secure location," he said.

"As you should," Lisa said. "But we need clothes for that. Make us some clothes!"

"Not gonna do that," he said.

"Well, at least cast Mending on the things we wore," Krista said, looking at their torn clothes, strewn across the cabin in ribbons. "I think it might just work."

"Not gonna do that, either," he said.

"Then, what are you going to do," Lisa asked. "Do you expect us to just walk out there, into a mess of people and security cameras buck naked?"

Ben's grin turned into a smile. He nodded and laughed evilly.

"You've gotta be joking," Raven exclaimed.

The plane pulled to a stop, prompting the girls' frightened exclamations. They undid their seat buckles and Ben stood up to cast Greater Teleport. They found themselves in his warehouse. He cast Shapechange and changed into a silver dragon. The girls rubbed their arms to their chests at the cold.

"See," Lisa said, smiling, "I knew you wouldn't make us go around naked."

"We still have to walk off that plane, or we'll end up on the news," Krista calmly said. "Please hurry up with the casting. Whatever you make for me, I want it to be warm." Lisa and Raven agreed, but Ben cast Endure elements on the three of them, making them ignore the cold.

Now that keeping warm was no longer a concern, the girls began stating their clothing wishes, but Ben simply cast Seeming on the three of them and made them look like they were wearing skirts and blouses. He changed back into himself and teleported them back to the airplane before they could ask him what he was doing.

The girls were astonished to find themselves back on the plane, utterly naked. The plane was parked and connected to the terminal via a tunnel.

"What's the meaning of this," Raven hissed. "Make us some clothes, right now!"

Ben went through a privacy curtain and they ran after him. As soon as they passed through the curtain, they came to a dead stop, looking like deer caught in headlights. The copilot was standing by the open door, politely smiling. Before they could think of anything to do, the copilot nodded his head at them and respectfully said, "Ladies."

"He's cast Seeming on us," Krista whispered heatedly. "Don't make any moves that suggest you're really naked and no one will see through the illusion." The girls nodded.

Ben walked off the plane and the three of them filed out after him. They had to really struggle to not cover up their naughty bits as they walked into the airport as naked as the day they were born. Lisa trotted up to walk next to him and she whispered, "Ben, you've got to dress us! We're naked!"

Ben just smiled and kept on walking. He led the girls through the entire airport facility, while the three of them followed his lead, too focused on everyone else's eyes to notice the merry-go-round he was leading them on. Their eyes rapidly darted from one face to the next, searching for that look of astonishment people get when they spot a gorgeous girl walking naked in a public place. He loved seeing them squirm in embarrassment and desperately try to hide it at the same time.

He finally led them to the taxi stand outside and called for one to come for them. They filed into the back seat, with a naked Lisa perched in Ben's lap. He had the cabby drive them to Central Park, where they got out and mingled with the crowds of people that were enjoying a Thursday evening in the park. No one could see through the illusion of clothes and the girls' embarrassment got old, after a while, so Ben led them behind a bush and teleported them home.

"Ah, finally," Raven exclaimed. "You're evil!"

Ben laughed and said, "But you love me for it! Ok, it's time to get busy! You all know what to do?"

"I'm making dinner," Raven said and went to the kitchen.

"I'm getting dressed and then I'm parking my butt in the media center to watch the feed from the heliospheres and make sure they're keeping station," Krista said.

"I'm with her," Lisa said.

"Me, too," Felicia said. "Except for the getting dressed part."

"Ok," he said and nodded. "Showtime!"

He made himself invisible and teleported to Croatia to get the heliospheres and deploy them over the Faroes and Svalbard. It was the dead of night and nobody was around to watch him as he connected a charged graphene battery to each sphere, so they would work without sunlight. He activated them and saw that they were as easy to use as Sean had described them. He selected from their menu to have their surveillance feeds transmitted to his apartment via satellite uplink.

He phoned Krista's cell and she confirmed the feeds were coming in clear. They coordinated him handing her remote control of the spheres and then he cast Shapechange and turned into a dragon. He cycled through all his dragon forms twice and spent every possible spell slot on teleporting the spheres into position over the islands.

When he finished, he teleported home and had dinner with the girls, before settling in for the night in front of the screens in the media center. They watched the snow covered islands and commented on cars disappearing into tunnels in the Faroe islands and tracked people driving across Svalbard on snowmobiles.

They found no activity that would suggest the presence of the enemy and they marked each and every place that had snow cleared to reveal the earth beneath.

"Ah, fuck me," Ben groaned as he stood up and stretched. He yawned and the girls yawned as well. The airplane fuck had drawn a lot of their energy and they were all tired. "We need to get to sleep! Felicia, make sure we're all up before-"

"Before four a.m.," Felicia said, finishing his sentence, "so you can cast the protective spells on all of you and head off to war together. I know, Boss. I'll get you all up in plenty of time."

"Thanks," he said and petted her on the head.

He led the girls upstairs, where they all undressed, got into the same bed, hugged and quickly fell asleep together. Felicia remained in front of the screens, watching for any sign of the enemy.

She hated Ben for not taking her with them, but Ben had explained to her, over and over again, that she would just be a liability. She glared at the screens and watched the clock tick the minutes away, bringing the celestial bodies closer and closer to the alignment which would give the enemy the chance to end the world. She found herself wishing the enemy would oversleep and miss it. It wasn't such a pipe dream, she thought, the eclipse would only last two and a half minutes and the sacrifice would have to go from completely healthy to completely dead in that short timeframe. The enemy might fuck it up, somehow.

She sighed and stopped daydreaming. She focused anew on the screens, working the track pad of the laptop that was adapted for her paws. She had to find where the preparations for the ritual were taking place. The snow, representing the element of water, had to be cleared down to the ground and the activation spell drawn on it before the eclipse came.

The horizon was sunset red in every direction at once. Thousands of faces smiled and quickly alternated between taking off their protective eyewear and looking at the endless sunset surrounding them and putting the eyewear back on and looking up at the big, black dot covering the Sun. Cameras flashed extra bright in the dusk, pictures were taken and videos shot, but most would come to disappoint their makers since they didn't account for how much darker it would be once the eclipse started.

A series of gasps erupted and the cameras were either forgotten, or pointed where everyone was pointing. All eyes were now covered with protective eyewear as people looked up. They witnessed the bright twinkles and flashes of light as the Sun was starting to emerge between the mountains of the Moon. This enchanting display lasted for just a few seconds and then the Sun emerged from behind the Moon as a crescent.

People wowed and applauded, raising their eyewear to look at their loved ones nearby. They made small noises of disappointment as they noticed the sunset all around them disappeared. The eclipse had passed, leaving them with wonderful memories.

As the shadow of the Moon passed to the east of the Faroe islands, an invisible golden dragon soared through the skies above them. On his back were three powered armors, just as invisible as him.
"One down, one to go," Lisa said.

"Fuck," Ben swore. "I had hoped it would go down here. Svalbard is way bigger than the Faroes."

"Yeah, but it's a snowy waste," Krista said. "Any activity will stick out like a sore thumb on our infrared feeds! Our job just got a lot easier, actually."

"Hang on," he said, "I'm teleporting us to Longyearbyen!"

He cast Greater Teleport and they materialized in the air, two miles above the city. "Base camp," he said through his headset, "we have changed our location. Redirect the satellite uplink to Longyearbyen! Sugar, reconnect the feeds!"

"Yup-yup, Dragon," Lisa said and activated her manual HUD control. She typed and pointed in the air in front of her and her suit tracked her motions and applied them to her HUD as if she was in virtual reality. "Done! The new feeds are coming in!"

"Focus on the ones-"

"Near the settlements, where the victim would most likely be taken from," Krista finished his sentence. "We know! You told us a dozen times already!"

"Keep at it," Ben said. "It goes down in Svalbard. We've got twenty seven minutes before the eclipse comes here."

"I don't know if we can cycle through all of our feeds before that," Raven said.

"Just keep looking," Ben ordered.

For twenty tense minutes, three girls and one cat cycled through IR camera feed after IR camera feed, desperately looking for any sign of the enemy. With each passing minute, Felicia's hopes that the enemy would miss this chance were rising, but then she saw it.

"Text from base camp," Krista said. "There's a whirlwind clearing snow from the ground about four miles inland of Barentsburg."

"That's gotta be it," Ben exclaimed. Barentsburg was about thirty miles away, so he teleported them to the sky above the city. Krista indicated the direction of the whirlwind to him and he beat his mighty wings to fly there. While he was flying towards the location, he took the chance to recast the buff spells that had expired by then. They were still under the effects of spells that protected them from the elements and various forms of magical energy, as well as Stoneskin.

He cast Greater Heroism, True seeing, Death Ward and Spell Resistance on each of them. When he spotted the whirlwind in the distance, he cast Mass Invisibility and the six mass spells that would enhance their attributes.

"Holy crap," Raven exclaimed after the whirlwind died down enough for their camera to see what was under it. There were two figures visible on the ground.

"Two contacts," Krista said, "one stationary on the ground, one circling around!"

"This is it," Lisa yelled into the comms. "This is it! The other figure is drawing Outsider symbols around the first one! It's the enemy caster and the sacrifice!"

Ben swept his wings backwards and dived towards the tiny patch of earth in the snowy wilderness. His blood was boiling and his limbs were desperate for the fight, but it wouldn't do to scream out his approach and blow the element of surprise at the last moment, so he had to consciously keep himself from roaring in wrath.

The thing that was giving him pause was the fact that only one enemy was present. They were all under the effects of True Seeing, so they knew no invisible enemies were around. The snow that the whirlwind had kicked up was settling and this was plain to see.

The ground loomed ever closer and he just could make out the drawing figure with his draconic eyes. "Time," he said.

"Four minutes until the eclipse," Lisa said. With the snow settling, she zoomed the camera all the way in and switched filters. "Holy shit! This thing has tentacles! It's drawing in its own blood! Holy fuck!"

"The sacrifice is tied to stakes driven into the frozen ground," Krista said. "We need to cut them loose and protect the sacrifice!"

Ben didn't speak, worried that his target might overhear him. The tentacled enemy caster looked to be too engrossed in his drawing to notice anyone, or anything. Ben would love to breathe fire on the enemy, or to crush him under his body, but he was standing too close to the sacrifice for either tactic. Instead, he spread his wings and netted all the air he quietly could to slow their descent.

"Lock on to target," Krista said. Three robotic arms sporting machineguns aimed at the unsuspecting caster. "Can't keep our aim steady while airborne. Dragon, land!"

Ben angled his wings upwards and rapidly bled off his airspeed. He let his powerful limbs hang loose under him to cushion the impact with the ground. They were almost upon him.

Simon flinched when he heard the crunch of snow nearby. He spun in the direction of the noise and peered at the vast, snowy landscape before him. There was nothing there, but he could have sworn he had heard the distinct noise of snow being crunched underfoot.

Before he could so much as shrug it off as the wind playing tricks on him, fiery flashes appeared in the corner of his vision. They were followed by a hellish roar and the otherworldly sensation of his vulnerable, half-human flesh ceasing to function properly.

In the split second after Ben landed, the girls checked their aim and fired, without needing to be ordered to do so. Hundreds of bullets ripped up the flesh of the enemy caster, turning it into pink mist that they also carried away from the would-be sacrifice. With a few seconds of fire and noise, the bundled up, erect, humanoid figure with tentacles became no more than a bloody, wet rag on the snow.

"Halt, halt, halt," Krista ordered and everyone stopped shooting. "Save the sacrifice!" All three girls unbuckled themselves from the saddle and slid down Ben's sides to race over towards the humanoid bundle on the ground. Their guns kept being trained on the bloody smear on the ground, even as they drew their swords. "Sugar, cut 'em loose!"

"Yup-yup!" Lisa knelt next to the sacrifice and saw that it was a man. He was babbling hysterically in a language she didn't understand and he flinched away from the white, metallic, sword-bearing figure as soon as he saw her. "It's ok," Lisa said through her external speakers. "We're here to rescue you." The man kept trying to scoot away from her and her sword, complicating her efforts to cut him loose without slicing him up. "Stay calm!"

Ben started feeling strange. There was something wrong, but he wasn't sure what it was. He stepped over to the spell drawing and cast Read Magic on himself to confirm that it was what they were looking for. Read Magic was a spell he could cast as himself and the familiar magical sensations flowing out of his draconic body reminded him of his actual body. With that memory, he revisited his mental image of himself and realized he was feeling something strange inside himself. He set the feeling aside and focused on examining the spell.

Krista and Raven ran to the remains of the enemy caster and poked at it with their swords. The trio had fired almost a thousand bullets at them and those had made sure there were no pieces of the enemy caster bigger than a cellphone left. "We should take a chunk for, like, DNA testing, or something," Raven suggested.

"Do it," Krista ordered. A text message from Felicia popped up on her HUD and her jaw fell when she read it. She engaged her loudspeaker and spoke in a shaky voice. "Ben, I mean Dragon, Base camp congratulates you on reaching level twenty one."

"What," Ben blurted out, loudly.

The sacrifice froze at hearing a booming voice right above him with no visible source and then began to toss and writhe in a blind panic. Lisa growled over her loudspeaker, "Stay calm, damnit," further aggravating his mental state.

Ben ignored the sacrifice as he focused on the weird feelings inside of him. He realized his base attack bonus had increased by one and he had skill points to allocate, as would happen if he advanced to level twenty one.

He looked at the bloody stain and tentacle chunks that had been the enemy caster. He hadn't killed him, her, or it, but he had been a member of the adventuring party that did and that entitled him to a quarter of the experience points the kill brought. And those points raised him from level twenty to level twenty one. He couldn't even imagine how something that was worth at least eighty thousand experience points could be so utterly destroyed by a quick burst of machinegun fire. He quickly accepted all the advancements in level.

Lisa finished cutting the sacrifice loose and he rolled over and curled up into a ball. She sheathed her blade and cooed softly at the man, trying to get him to loosen up.

"Wait," Ben said, snapping out of his internal deliberations, "what's that noise? Can any of you hear it?"

The girls froze and listened. Their electronically enhanced hearing soon picked up on an external noise that was rapidly becoming louder. It was a kind of low rumbling that wasn't coming from below them. It sounded ominous, especially when it was joined by another tone that reminded Ben of sewing machines. He glanced up at the Sun. The Moon was covering all but a crescent of it. The eclipse was almost upon them, and with it came another dose of dread. "Zoom out with the camera! Check our surroundings!"

No sooner had the girls pulled up their HUDs and zoomed out to see a pair of infrared trails approaching them, than had two gunships popped up from behind a mountain in the distance. They were flying right at them and they were fast. "I don't like this," Ben said. "Gather around! I'll teleport us all away from here!" He lifted his claw to try and destroy the frozen ground which housed the spell drawing. The light dimmed and he looked up to see the Moon twink out the last of the Sun. The horizon all around them turned to dusk. The eclipse was now.

Raven's scream over the comms froze him in place. His head snapped towards the gunships to see a stream of missiles flying their way. Out of pure reflex, his powerful limbs launched him into the air and he spread his wings wide. All the missiles slammed into his body and detonated on impact. The wind was knocked out of him as his draconic body's scales buckled under the blasts. His body stopped the explosions from harming the sacrifice, or the girls, but he was blown away as a result of it. He flew over Lisa and the sacrifice to land in a big snow drift.

The girls screamed out Ben's name in horror as they realized the one-sided explosion meant that he had sacrificed himself for them. Since he was still invisible, they didn't know if he was still alive, or how badly he was hurt. "Form up," Krista hollered and brought her gun camera up on her HUD. She aimed at one of the gunships and was shocked to see more missiles be fired. "Protect the sacrifice!"

The three girls crouched around the cowering man and braced their shields against the incoming explosives. Their shields and armor, enhanced by Ben's buff spells, stopped all the shrapnel from harming them, or the man, but the concussive force of the blasts nearly knocked them asunder like rag dolls.

"Return fire," Krista hollered as she stood up. All three raised their robotic arms to take aim at the gunships. The fast-flying gunships were less than a quarter of a mile away by then and they didn't wait for the girls to take aim before opening fire themselves.

The girls braced their shields against the rapidly flowing bullets. The noise of lead hitting supercomposite sang through the girls' bodies, all the way to their bones, but it didn't stop them from returning fire. Their machineguns sang their own song of destruction as they poured bullets out of their backpacks and into the gunships.

Krista was horrified to see the gunships shrug off the rain of bullets as if it was a light drizzle. "BigBird," she ordered, "the heavy!"

Raven unslung her Mk19 automatic grenade launcher from the underside of her ammo backpack and grasped it in both hands to start shooting at the gunships. Her aim sent explosions all over the countryside, barely coming close to the choppers, but it did make them stop shooting at the girls. Instead, they split up to bob and weave as they flew to flanking positions. The gunships fired their own grenade launchers.

The girls panicked and froze as lines of explosive death started to converge on them and the man they were trying to protect. A seventy foot high cone of flame erupted behind them, making them cower in fear, despite Ben's buff spells having made them resistant to fire, among other things. The gunships diverted their fire towards the source of the flames, a colossal, golden dragon.

"Ben," Lisa cried out over her loudspeaker.

Ben jumped up in the air and beat his wings to gain altitude. The grenades exploded harmlessly as they glanced off his scales. He roared the magical incantation of the Time Stop spell and was suddenly accelerated beyond all measure. The grenades flew through the air in slow motion as he beat his wings with all his might to get at the closer gunship before the spell's effect ended.

Ben got to the gunship and identified it as a Mil Mi-24 "Crocodile". It bore no identifying marks, or air force roundels, which confused him. He watched in fascination as the barrel of its snub wing mounted grenade launcher was wreathed in flames for a second before a spinning grenade lazily left it to go explode where he used to be. He hung in the air and patiently waited for the spell to end so he could affect the world around himself.

When the spell ended, the pilot was shocked to see a giant golden dragon hovering a yard ahead of him. He tugged at the stick to get away, but Ben blasted his fiery breath right at the engine intakes. The engines flamed out and the gunship lost power. The pilot tried to initiate an autorotation, but Ben lashed out with his tail and destroyed the gunship's tail rotor, dooming the machine to crash.

With one enemy down, Ben turned around to see the other gunship maneuvering to get a clear shot at him. With his buddy no longer in the line of fire, the gunship fired switched to missiles and fired two at Ben. Ben had spent his only ninth level spell dragon slot, so he changed into a silver dragon and cast another Time Stop. He swooped under the slowly approaching missiles and beat his wings with all his might to get at his enemy.

The gunship was quite a distance away and the Time Stop ended before Ben could close all the way there. When the spell ended, the gunship twitched in mid air as the pilot reacted to the dragon closing most of the distance in the blink of an eye. He quickly recovered and stabilized, allowing the weapons operator to reestablish a lock on Ben. They fired missiles at him.

Ben took the blasts head on and nearly lost consciousness. The gunship was now flying backwards and firing everything it had at him. Ben turned sideways to evade the fire and began circling them, while still closing in. When he flew over a small, wispy cloud, he planted his legs on it and stopped cold. The gunship kept spinning and firing where it thought he would be. Ben hurled himself off the cloud towards the gunship.

The gunship swerved to evade and Ben breathed ice at it. The engines withstood the cold, but the spinning blades of the rotor did not. They iced over in a flash and lost their ability to provide lift. The gunship spun out of control and crashed.

Ben looked up and scanned the sky all around. There was no sign of any more gunships. He looked down to see if there were any ground enemies and froze in horror. The Outsider spell that activated the portal was spinning, meaning it had been successfully cast. He screamed in utter terror and dived towards it.

He landed next to it and shouted, "What the fuck happened!? Why is the spell active?!"

"I don't know," Lisa screamed in a tearful voice, "but it is! What do we do?!"

The girls keened and wailed in anguish. Ben changed into himself and rushed over to the sacrifice. When he put a hand on the man to roll him over, he immediately recoiled. His bones were jelly. The horror of failing to protect the world gripped Ben's guts with claws of ice.

"We protected him," Krista said. "We shielded him from all the bullets and explosions! He's not dead! He can't be dead!"

"He is," Ben said.

"No, no no no," Raven screamed, "no, he's not fucking dead!"

Ben's eyes scanned the white desert all around them. The spell was cast, the man's soul had powered it, but the portal was not yet open. There were no monsters coming. He glanced up at the sky. The Moon was still covering the Sun. Was that it? He stood up and looked at the slowly spinning spell. No, that wasn't it. There was something else. There had to be.

"Time," he said.

The girls keened in misery, utterly crushed at their failure and ignored his question. Krista was turned towards the horizon, standing still. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and saw that the eclipse would only last for a minute and ten seconds more. He had that long to fix this. Undoing the man's death was impossible, as his soul had been destroyed by using it to power the spell, so Wish and True Resurrection were out of the question. He turned his attention to the spell and read it. There had to be something there.

The spell was terribly simple, actually, and he had read it right the first time, though he had been too distracted by advancing in level to comprehend it at the time. He realized he had advanced in level yet again and was amazed that he could accomplish that by defeating two gunships. He decided that that hadn't been it. The tentacled caster must have been worth even more than eighty thousand experience points and he had been capped out at one experience point shy of level twenty-two by the rules of D&D which prohibited characters advancing by more than one level per encounter.

Ben slapped himself on the face to get his head back in the real world. His gaze ran all over the spell, desperately searching for a way to save the world until he spotted it. The spell read that he who spills the blood of the sacrifice shall have complete control over the portal. His girls had protected the dead man from bullets and shrapnel, but the overpressurisation blast waves of the explosions still got him and turned him into a bag of skin. A bag of unbroken skin that contained all of his blood inside it.

Raven and Lisa knelt beside the man and tried to coax him back into life.

Ben realized that if he was the one to spill the blood of the dead man before the eclipse ended in fifty seconds, he would be given control of the portal. The Earth would be safe as long as he was alive. That was a sobering thought. He was mortal, even with his magic, he was only mortal. If nothing else managed to kill him, then old age would. The Earth was still doomed. All he could do was buy it more time. Four or five more decades of life for all of humanity.

Raven and Lisa started budging the dead man's corpse. They were wailing hysterically inside their armors, but he hadn't heard them with their loudspeakers off. Ben gasped in horror. If they pierced the corpse's skin by pressing it against the bone shards it now contained, it was game over in an instant.

"Get away from him," he ordered. "Don't touch him!"

The girls kept up with their hysterics and Raven raised a hand to smack it down against the corpse. Ben changed into a Solar, an angel in the shape of a tall, muscular man with golden skin and gleaming, white wings. He caught Raven's armored fist before it could come down on the corpse and used it to toss her aside. He tossed Lisa aside, too. Both the girls started impotently thrashing about, reminding him of petulant children who had their toys taken away from them.

Children. A bloodline. He suddenly, instinctively understood how he could stay Earth's execution for a potentially indefinite amount of time.

He picked up one of the tentacle bits of the late caster and started squeezing blood out of it. With one eye on the clock on his phone, he drew an additional line inside the slowly spinning spell as quickly as he dared. The new line seamlessly joined with the rest of the spell and modified it. With just two seconds to spare, he picked up Lisa's discarded sword and sliced the sacrifice's corpse in half, spilling all of his bodily fluids everywhere.
He clenched up, uncertain if his little idea would work. Nothing happened in the first heartbeat, but then the sunset painting the entire horizon began to fade. Ben looked up to see the first light of the Sun sneak past the Moon. He squinted his eyes and lowered his face. As the sunlight hit the ground all around him, he felt it.

A huge thing was starting to spin above him. It wasn't made of matter, motion, or force, so it didn't disturb the air through which it spun, but it kept spooling up faster and faster, until it became a vortex made exclusively of probability, eager to make the impossible possible. Ben felt the portal come to life. It was anchored to the Earth and spun incessantly, as if driven by a hunger for matter and energy to displace between its two ends. It was connected to Ben's blood and he immediately commanded it to shut.

The portal slowed down, like a computer being placed in standby mode. Ben let out a breath he didn't even know he was holding and fell to his knees in relief. It worked. The portal was lazily spinning through the air, inactive. Nothing could come through it.

"Get up," Krista commanded through her loudspeaker. "Get up! Weapons check! We're going down swinging. Come on! Get up and fight! We... Holy crap! Ben! Ben, is it true?!"

"Is what true," he asked, looking up at her helmet.

"Felicia sent me a text message that says you took control of the portal," she said. "Did you?!"

Ben nodded. "Yes. I did. I had to."

"You control the portal?!"

"Yes."

"How did you do it," she asked.

"I spilled the blood of the sacrifice. I don't think that was supposed to be the way the portal was controlled. I think it was supposed to be open for use by anyone who could pay the price and the caster added that control clause to the spell." Ben smiled up at Krista. "Good thing he did, otherwise I couldn't have modified it."

"What did you do," Lisa asked.

Ben looked over at her. She was lying still and her head was probably turned towards him, but he couldn't see for the visor of the helmet. "I took control of the portal in my own name and the name of my bloodline."

"What bloodline," Krista asked.

"My descendants," Ben said.

"You don't have any descendants," Krista said.

"I know. I've got to get to work on that."

"Back to the portal," Krista said. "What's gonna happen now? Are the monsters coming, or not?"

"No," he said. "As long as I, or any of my descendants are alive, the portal stays shut."

"Can you switch it off," she asked. "Make it go away? Disassemble it, or something?"

"No."

"So, what do we do? What happens now?"

Ben sighed. "First, we need to get Raven back," he said. "She's probably gone completely bonkers and-"

"I'm here," Raven said, sounding tearful, but joyous. She sat up and waved. "I'm ok!"

"Oh, ok," Ben said, pleasantly surprised. "Well, then, uh, I guess we go to the gunships and see if any of the crew had survived."

"Who do you think they were," Lisa asked.

"Why did they shoot at us," Krista asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Let's go ask them!"

The gunships contained four corpses and next to no clues as to their identities. Ben pulled a phone from one corpse's pocket. It contained no information whatsoever, but it had been used to check an email account, more specifically, a draft of an email saved in the account. Ben's fingers went numb when the recognized the handiwork of The Order of the Hammer. They had sent these two helicopters and they had probably only done it because he had tipped them off. He had to breathe deep and pinch the bridge of his nose to keep from throwing up.

"So, this is a dead end," Raven said, shuffling through the wreckage of the gunship. "What now?"

"Now I return the heliospheres and then we go home," he said. After he returned the heliospheres, they gathered around him and he teleported them to his warehouse, where they doffed the armors.

They checked each other for injuries and then Raven said, "You mentioned descendants, earlier."

"Yeah," he said. "I have to make some."

Lisa laughed and said, "Got any moms lined up yet?"

Ben smirked and said, "I think I might know one." He adopted a faraway look in his eyes. "She used to go to school with me, had red hair, the color of wine. We always clicked, you know? Meshed really well together. I think she'd be the best possible mother to my children."

The girls were horrified by his serious tone of voice for a long moment, but then Krista laughed. "Oh, fuck, you almost had us, you evil, evil man," she said, laughing.

"Almost," Ben inquired, also laughing.

After a few seconds, their laughter trailed off and Lisa seriously asked, "Are we really going to do this? Are we really going to raise a whole bunch of kids together?"

"Why not," Raven asked. "We can share the burdens of parenthood, have them grow up together... I think it sounds like a great idea! Provided, of course, that I get a personal trainer to regain my shape after each birth."

"Deal," Ben said.

"And you're going to be happy to have us as your broodmares," Lisa asked of Ben.

"Don't make it sound so crass," Krista said before Ben could answer. "We've made love together, we've fought together and now we're going to have kids together. The three of us are Amazon sister-warriors, not broodmares. And Ben is our man." She kissed him and said, "I for one, would be honored to have your children, Ben." Her lips quirked into an impish grin. "And I promise to teach them every dirty trick in the book!" Off of everyone's looks of disapproval, she added, "So they never fall for them themselves."

"That sound grand to me," Ben said. "Lisa?"

She shrugged and said, "When do we begin?"

Ben teleported them to the apartment, where they ignored Felicia's excited greeting and immediately went about making babies. The life-giving purpose added new passion to the girls' lovemaking. Ben responded to it and they fucked all the way until noon. He had shot a load into each girls' pussy, as practice for when their contraceptives wear off.

He went to the bathroom to take a leak and Felicia walked with him.

"So, the girls sound very excited, Boss," she said.

"Yeah, they do."

"But you're not as excited as they are," she said.

"Yes, I am."

"We share an empathic link, Boss."

Ben sighed as he shook off his member and flushed the toilet. He leaned over the sink to wash his hands. Felicia was looking at him in the mirror. He looked down at his hands and said, "It's just that... I'm not going to be making kids with just the girls."

"No?"

"No," he firmly said. "I can't put all my eggs, all the Earth's eggs, in one basket. I'm going to spread my seed all over the planet and have hundreds of kids so my bloodline never goes out and the Earth stays safe for as long as there are people on it."

"That sounds like a responsible and reasonable plan, Boss."

"Yeah," he said. "But don't ever breathe a single word of it to the girls!"

"I promise I won't, Boss."

They exited the bathroom and walked towards the kitchen. They could hear the girls talking in bed about how they hoped their future kids will turn out.

"You know, Boss, that's kind of depressing, when you think about it."

"What is?"

"Leaving the fate of the Earth in the hands of your progeny," she said. "When you look at the kids these days, with their twerking and YOLOing and whatever... How the fuck could they be counted on to keep the world safe? Even when all they have to do is survive. Oh, and have kids!"

"They'll have some guidance on their way," he said.

"I dunno, Boss. You can guide them and protect them, but only up to a point. Sooner or later they gotta cut loose and be on their own."

"I'll always be around to watch them," he said.

"How so, Boss?"

"Well, vampires never age," he said and poured out a bowl of cat food for her. She ignored it and stared at him in shock as he poured a bowl of cereal for himself. He cast Prestidigitate. "What do you want your food to taste of?"

"Fuck the food, Boss, what's this about vampires?"

Ben shrugged and said, "I've got to be around to watch over my bloodline. It's actually my fault it went down like it did and..." He sighed. "It's my responsibility. I broke it, I bought it."

"First of all, Boss, I don't buy this 'it's all my fault' spiel, and secondly, vampires? They're evil. Always evil. You get turned and you turn evil. Plus, I don't know if you know this, Boss, but they're actually fictional."

"I can shapechange into a vampire and bite someone and kill them. Then they turn into a vampire and bite me back, turning me into a proper vampire that doesn't age."

"But... Evil, Boss."

"Yeah, the whole plan hinges on me making a spell that would stop me from becoming evil once I became a vampire. Or a slave to the vampire that made me. Hopefully, it would also allow me to keep you on as my familiar. I'm going to try and research that kind of stuff, along with spells that would protect a vampire from its weaknesses, like daylight and running water. Don't look at me like that! I've already made some new spells, you know."

"Yeah, you did, Boss, but this is too much."

"We'll see," he said. "Anyway, that's all in the future, probably decades from now. And it all hinges on me making it to level twenty three and getting the Spell Knowledge epic feat. For now, let's just enjoy life and all it has to offer. What do you want you kibble to taste like?"

More than a dozen women scattered throughout the world writhed in simultaneous agony. Cold sweat covered their bodies and beaded across their clammy skins. Each was all alone in her little world of pain and misery and none knew of the others that were in the exact same situation as they were. They tried everything they could think of to relieve the pain, but nothing worked. Only after they gave up and exited their homes to scream for help did they receive a sudden and pleasurable reprieve from the misery.

The servants inside of them drove them towards the portal they could feel pulsing away. Whenever the women stopped moving, they were hit by agony which prodded them along. Whenever the servants sensed them moving away from the portal, they were hit with agony. Only while they were moving towards it, they felt ecstasy.

Slowly, the women moved towards the portal. Slowly, the servants assembled themselves.