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Perhaps a small correction is in order. When Mireia said she would feed me, that was her plan for the grand finale, not the opening act.
Anyway, Genette (who also hugged me first, upon seeing me, before recovering her aplomb and apologizing for her behavior) led me to my dressing room, where I baffled her when she wanted to undress me by switching to my naked mode in front of her.
She had seen Mother do such a thing before, though, so she recovered quickly. She dressed me for bed and led me back without comment, even ignoring the most obvious question.
But once Mireia opened my yukata, my body was no longer hidden from view, and the others weren’t going to ignore it.
If it were my real body, they would see me at the mid-point of pregnancy, but Fan Li adjusted my effigy image to make me look five months away on a mortal’s eight-month schedule. So, three-eighths along rather than half. The bump was there, but a bit less prominent.
Either way though, it was decidedly not my twenty-three inch fairy-type waist, anymore. And decidedly not what I looked like, the previous night.
Rod looked like he wasn’t sure what to ask. Mireia didn’t care. She just put her hand on my waist and asked, “You’re sure they’re okay?”
“I’m absolutely certain, Mir,” I told her. “I can feel them, healthy and strong.”
She then surprised both Rod and myself by dropping to her knees and kissing my tummy, a place that the evening’s lingerie selection happened to expose. Then she pressed her cheek against my skin while wrapping her arms around me and warmly said, “I’m so happy you’re okay.”
I didn’t know how to reply, especially given she was addressing the babies and I could feel moisture from her cheek trickling onto my skin. I just caressed her hair and let her continue to hug.
“They’re my babies, too, My Lady,” she whispered, still not letting go. “You have to be more careful with them!”
She had, in fact, made love to their father in order to conceive them in her own womb. She wasn’t wrong.
After that scene, we had that pillow talk explanation about where I had vanished and how I came back, right? Well… No.
It seemed that Mireia was determined to make sure I knew how much I meant to her, and of course she then made sure Rod knew that he meant just as much to her. I even noticed her sneakily using her healing powers on herself and my husband to make the night last longer. That buff is meant for combat, Mir…
After the first round with each of us, Mir still didn’t want to feed me just yet and I had to reciprocate somehow. I began to use the knowledge I had picked up from the maids. It was quite gratifying to hear her sudden uncertainty as I took over, and her gasps of things like, “What are you kissing?” and, “I didn’t know you could do that?”
And the wonderful sound of her voice losing its words as I continued…
Mir did manage to retake the lead after that, and persuaded me to let my husband taste my bosom for the first time. After convincing me to allow that much, she teased me to let him go farther, but I refused. Honestly, I only allowed him to go that far because of the state she had me in at that particular moment. I couldn’t imagine any way for her to help me to go farther.
I worried that Mireia’s libido might prevent my husband from staying awake to hear the story, but with her power-up as my Servant, even her lightest buffs are no joke. When she finally settled down, he propped his head up with his arm and stared at me across her, waiting for an explanation.
Actually, his green eyes and her amethyst ones both stared and waited. It was time to explain.
I propped my head up the same way, and reached across to take my husband’s hand, giving it a squeeze. Mireia snatched our hands up with both of hers, hugging them to her chest. We stayed in that posture while I chewed my lip for a bit, wondering where to start. I finally decided that only one place would work.
“Mir, I think you understand this better than my husband, but you both know about the goddesses looking after me.”
Nods from both.
“In the long run, they’re doing it because I’m one of them. Or more accurately, I used to be, thousands of years ago, before I came down to the Mortal Realm. Although a celestial maiden isn’t really a ‘goddess’, the way you think of them. We just say ‘Immortal’.”
“This is what Rhea told me,” Mir replied quietly. “She said you used to live in Heaven with her.”
“That’s right,” I nodded. I slipped my hand out, to brush her hair, which was a mess at the moment.
“And you used to be lovers?”
I giggled. “Well… when, celestial maidens spend a lot of time together, they will definitely spend some of it doing that. We were pretty inseparable, for what would be centuries in the Mortal Realm. Which is part of your explanation for why she spends so much time looking after me.”
My husband wondered, “Are you one of the lesser goddesses in the stories we learned?”
“Not the Ostish ones, no,” I said. “But I and my fellow celestial maidens, who came down to Huade together to become the Elders, were the ‘Stregas’ that the Northerners remember. And just like it says in their stories, the humans made war on us and killed us. But we left descendants, like fairies and vampires.”
I booped Mir’s nose. “Which means you two are both our descendants, since you both have fairy blood. You’re my who-knows-how-many-greats grandchildren, since my son is the Fairy King.”
They were both listening, and not rejecting anything. Well, they had heard parts of this before.
I rubbed my tummy. “Which is why these two here were also my descendants. Well, they’ll be my precious daughters from now on, but they’ve been family all along.”
I needed to get back on track though, so I focused after that on the things I needed to say. I told them about Immortal Mother, and how she and Oranos carried me away to a place where I could heal, and how I had actually spent twelve weeks over there, not just the six or seven hours I was missing, here.
Patting my babies, I finished with, “That’s why these little bugs are coming out sooner than we planned. Around the seventh of the Month of Turning, I think.”
Rod coughed as the ramification of that hit him.
“So you’ll have to accept that the public will see you as the lout who knocked up your cute fiancée before you were even officially betrothed,” I teased. Putting the back of my hand to my forehead, I bemoaned, “No wonder he had to marry her so young!”
Rod put his hand to his face. Before, if people counted back the mortal eight month term from my old due date on the 7th of the Month of Greening, they would arrive at a date safely after the wedding. Those that knew it was ten months and not eight would at least arrive at a date when we were already engaged. But now?
I smirked. “If you’re doing the math, then you either got me this way in the Month of Early Flowers, on the mortal schedule, or the Month of Last Snows, in fairy terms.”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you!” he accused.
“I am,” I agreed.
Mireia started giggling as she told him, “You terrible, terrible man!”
“You’re enjoying it, too!” he glared at her, which just made her giggle harder.
He scowled for a moment, then asked, “You at least were fifteen at that time already, right?”
‘Fifteen’ in Orestania is roughly the same age as ‘Eighteen’ on Earth, and functions in the same manner, at least for commoners, in urban society. Out in the sticks, girls get married and/or pregnant younger than that, but in society, it’s the youngest ‘decent’ age.
I pouted and said, “My husband doesn’t know his wife’s birthday?”
“Wait,” he put his hand to his head again, then muttered, “Twenty Ninth of First Harvest. Yeah, you were fifteen.”
“Just barely safe,” I critiqued, giving him side-eye, and Mireia giggled again. I brushed her hair into place again as she beamed up at me.
“Well, I have a few more things to say. First of all, you know how Lhan and Fan Li and Captain Sirth showed up here while I was missing my memories? And how my original form showed up here, as well?”
My husband scowled, and noted, “Not that I understand how that worked.”
“You don’t need to understand, Husband. You only need to know that they showed up the same way I’m showing up here right now.”
Blank looks from both of them.
“My main body cannot leave that safe place for a while longer. I’m not able to come back into this world as my physical self yet. The time will run normally over there from now on, to make sure my babies don’t grow any faster than they should from now on. Meanwhile, what is here in front of you is a [Blood Effigy], the same technique that we used to come here before.”
Frowning, Mireia poked and pawed my body in several places.
“For all intents and purposes, I’m real, Mireia. And the one talking to you is the real me.”
“The goddess said that you almost died and she brought you to a special place to prevent it.”
“Exactly.”
Her hand rested on my tummy. “So… they aren’t here?”
She wanted to know if he babies she had worried so much about were really here with us.
“They are in both places, just like me,” I said, putting my hand over hers. “Their real body is with my real body, and we’re also here with you.”
I wasn’t going to get hung up in the details. That’s how it was anyhow, in my opinion. Even if their main bodies were in Sky Ocean, little effigies of them dwelled within this effigy of me, and their little auras glowed within me in my senses. So if I was ‘here’ then they might as well be ‘here’ too.
“When I embrace you… do you really feel it the same way?” she wondered.
Did she mean ’embrace’ as in ‘hug’ or ’embrace’ in the euphemistic way? It didn’t matter. It was the same answer.
“It feels the exact same,” I assured her. “Didn’t I feel the same to you?”
She giggled and pulled my hand to her bosom. “Maybe we should check one more time?”
I bent down and gave her a kiss. “We have to keep things fair, you know. If you and I do it again, my husband gets another time too.”
Her eyes went wide and she giggled more.
“It really isn’t an equitable arrangement, you know,” my husband observed as we smooched a little more. “Ti and I alternate while Mir doesn’t get a break.”
I let go of her lips and noted, “This little hussy seems to like it, though?”
She gigglesnorted and then squeezed me with a happy bear hug.
“Can… can you feed like this?” she wondered.
“I can,” I confirmed.
“Prove it,” she whispered, her voice growing husky.
<Fan Li, you removed the suppression for feeding too, right?>
<It is done,> the ancient scholar confirmed.
I kissed her while letting my hands roam, to stimulate my fangs.
“Wait,” she said after breaking free. “Good night kisses first, remember?”
This is a Mireia rule. When she wound up as the centerpiece of our strange wedding bed, she set up several rules to avoid becoming the trouble in our marriage. One rule is that we have to goodnight kiss before she feeds me, or else she might fall asleep without doing them afterwards.
I kissed her good night. Rod kissed her goodnight. Then she stared at us. She wanted me to give my husband his good night kiss as well.
Fan Li commented, <You’re going to, eventually. Why do you continue to drag it out?>
Yeah. I leaned forward and my slightly caught-off-guard husband responded. It was just a normal kiss, but Mireia was thrilled that I finally did it.
“But you need to do better than that, next time,” she pouted.
I’m pretty sure Mireia is secretly hoping that I do a lot better than that. Honestly, I still don’t think it’ll happen. I just gave him a wry smile and told him, “Good Night.”
He responded the same way, and settled down to watch.
“Time to grow your fangs, My Lady,” she crooned.
