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In the tub after midnight, kissing an alien half-fairy in my lap, was not where I expected to end up when my older sisters first appeared. Upon reflection, maybe I should have. They’re fairies, after all.
But leaving that aside, I certainly didn’t imagine this trip… what else can I call it? This sudden infusion of memories and knowledge that went covered a period longer than Tiana’s lifetime, flooding into me without the gentle introduction I received to Tiana’s memories through the HR Manager’s skillful manipulations. Even more than that, since far too much of what I was receiving was the result of the labor of eighteen years that the three male incarnations set themselves to, with the mystic monk Rugau as the medium, the keen-minded Kwelabi as the sorter and the machine-like critical abilities of Daq as the analyst.
Using Fan Li’s deduction technique, which Rugau mastered more-or-less by merging minds with her while she sat as a neutral resource, the trio had tapped into and crawled through Senhion’s memories, mining all five thousand years of them, with the first millennium as an Immortal and four more as an Elder.
So eighteen years was far more than eighteen years. Memories of ancient technologies and ancient magics that Curator and the Training Hall were now ready to teach to my Servants, were already teaching to Ceria, Chiara and Melione, to enable us to use them once more. Memories of hard-won knowledge about demonkind, mortals and others, long forgotten in our modern age. And even memories of other wonders of the Elder Age, which might or might not, like Ilim Below, survive into our era.
As the brief glimpses I had seen so far, places like Ilim Below, like Taihimel’s small world, like the dwarven dwell in the hills south of Cara Ita, the Lord of Greenwater’s domain or my grandmother’s pool, it had become clear that this world had a tremendous wealth of the unknown, far more than someone like Lord Durash and his fellow demons could easily conquer, and with sufficient organization, more than enough that they could reach existed in order to create a resistance to fight back against them as they created havoc like this civil war. The more about all of it that I knew, the better.
Why didn’t Fan Li just perform the deduction herself? Because as she long ago discovered, she couldn’t transfer the knowledge to the rest of us. The difference both in mental age and mystic abilities remained too great. But once she successfully taught Rugau to the art of Immortal Deduction, he became the foundation of their team. Fan Li could sit back and do her own task, which was exploring the state of Huade and better understanding the creatures that inhabit it. Especially Hellspawn…
The more we knew about the Hellspawn, the better for Shindzha, and possibly for others. Fan Li felt I should seriously consider blood bonding every Hellspawn I encountered. They were helpless slaves of the demons anyway…
Fan Li replied to my instant dislike for that kind of reasoning. <Please continue disdaining the making of new Blood Servants, Your Grace. You are not wrong to see it as a weak excuse for forcing the blood bond upon them. But even until now, this one fails to find a better means to release them from their demonic fetters.>
Lhan released my lips and laid her head on my shoulder instead. Big Sister Mitozin, though, turned concerned.
“Innanmi, are you okay?”
“She’s a little stoned right now,” Lhan giggled.
I realized I was just sitting there with slightly glazed eyes and tried to blink myself back to normalcy. I wasn’t having a lot of success.
Hundreds of swirling thoughts kept interfering and I realized Lhan had somehow forcefully expanded my awareness to receive the knowledge transfer. Even as I sat with my hand trying to chase Lhan’s fingers off my bosom, my focus kept haring off toward this memory or that. Just like how I had just been full of all sorts of thoughts with most of my mind while my attention was equally absorbed in the pleasure of a long, somewhat sloppy kiss with her.
Now a little perturbed, I grabbed onto her mischievous hand to make her behave, although I only succeeded in trapping it in position. I closed my eyes and tried to squeeze my mind back into order.
“What did you do to her? Wait, if you’re actually the same person, how are you okay while she’s like this?”
“They are separate portions of the same person,” Big Sister Velerè corrected. “It’s clearly the parallel awareness technique. They are operating in separate streams of awareness. You haven’t mastered that technique yet, I believe.”
“I’m able to make simple observer proxies now,” Mitozin stated.
“Well done. Perhaps you’re ready for your next lesson.”
“Tiana? Tiana-innan?” Mitozin waved her hand in front of my face. I blew air out with bulging cheeks, then huffed and shook my head.
“I’m… okay,” I answered, while still trying to decide if I was telling the truth. “Lhan, that was really an awful lot to take in all at once.”
“Your Grace, if you want an easier method, Fan Li will have to teach it to me. That’s the only way I know.”
Now that I understood what she had just done, I realized we had been, for a period of several minutes, nearly one mind. Lhan’s impish smile told me that she knew her clever revision of Fan Li’s technique worked far better than any other could. These were all methods we were inventing on the fly anyhow, so it made sense for Lhan to have as much wisdom as Fan Li about it. Upon learning the technique, she instantly realized that distracting the very top level of awareness, where the sense of identity holds strongest, with an intimate act like an open mouth kiss was the best way to allow the rest of our awareness to merge into one entity without our surface thoughts interfering.
In other words, that hadn’t been me absorbing all those memories and having all those understandings, it had been Lhan and I mixing together while our separate identities only existed in the space of the kiss, and Lhan’s mischievous hand.
Which I finally peeled off my breast and moved to my shoulder. Then frowned.
“How’d you get bigger?”
“It’s not that much bigger,” she complained. “I guess you haven’t quite absorbed that part yet. Fan Li worked out what I would have looked like at nine years old and created a grown-up model for my effigy. I didn’t even grow an inch!”
“Nine years old?” Mitozin echoed, profoundly confused.
“It’s fifteen of this world’s years,” I explained. I didn’t add, Or eighteen years old on Earth. “The age when you’re full-grown. And you grew at least a couple inches…”
I broke off when I grasped she had not been talking about her height. She gave me a sour look.
But they’re really cute, I wanted to assure her. I guess my permanently petite Incarnation didn’t want to hear it from me, because her look turned into a glare before I could say it.
“Besides, you’re exaggerating,” she grumped. “I’m only an inch and a half taller. This is what I would have looked like, if I lived three more years. Same tiny body, same tiny tits.”
I laughed. “They’re just fine, Lhan. You’re lovely just as you are.”
Moreover, despite her description, they aren’t tiny. On the small side, yes, but not tiny. Although I understood why she would feel that way, given present company.
“You really are, child,” Mitozin assured her. “Why don’t you sit over here, so Her Grace can relax? We have lots of room.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said as Lhan finally slipped off my lap. “What ever did Mother need a tub this size for?”
The one in my old suite was huge. Big enough to accommodate several bathing attendants in addition to myself. Yet it was nothing compared to this. You could almost swim laps…
“Why for visitors, of course!” Mitozin answered as she guided Lhan into place… on her own lap! She had literally meant ‘over here’, not sitting between us? With a slight giggle, Lhan settled into place side-saddle on Mitozin, relaxing on her abundance with her head on her shoulder.
She did stretch up for a brief kiss on the cheek, but the PDA I briefly feared did not develop. Apparently those two were going to behave themselves. Mitozin just wanted to cuddle this alternate version of her little sister.
“Visitors?” I echoed.
“Obviously,” Velerè declared, “It was so we could get together like this. We are all our mother’s daughters, after all. And as Mitozin clearly demonstrates, some are in much more need of Water than you or I.”
Mitozin nodded. “I’m a proper naiad like Grandmother, of course, and Moira is a nereid. We’re full-blooded, since Mother was enough of a water fairy to bear daughters fully of our father’s tribes.”
“It doesn’t work like mortal genetics, child,” Velerè disagreed. “Perhaps the predilection does, but the result is also a product of upbringing. You and Moira grew up at your fathers’ sides. At my father’s side, I grew into a Huldra.”
Was I hearing the fairy version of the nature versus nurture debate?
“But you still need to soak often,” Mitozin observed. “How about you, Your Grace?”
“I do as well,” I admitted. “So does Amana.”
“Even though she’s a High Fairy like Grandfather, and you are… Well, you’re what you are.”
“An Elder,” I told her. “Or the Northerners call my kind ‘Strega’.”
“Mm,” she nodded. I had the feeling she hadn’t entirely accepted the idea yet.
“Mother said so,” Velerè told her darkly, picking up on the same thing.
“Yes, yes,” she waved her hand. “And the need for a tub this size is about to be demonstrated, I see.”
I pushed my [Fairy Sense] outward, because I guessed what she meant. Sure enough, Serera and Amana were entering the castle.
It was another fifteen minutes before they actually reached my suite, but sure enough, they joined us. This was apparently nothing new for either of them.
“Felé Serera, are you here to guard our little sister?” Mitozin wondered
“It’s your grandfather’s insistence, Your Highness,” Serera stated as she shed her armor. Amana, whose raiment making skills are still immature, also showed up in actual clothing, but was undressed sooner.
“So only four more before we’re all here?” Amana wondered. “Or is it five?”
“Mother specifically called for her daughters,” Velerè stated. “Álon isn’t likely to be able to make the trip.”
“Who?” I wondered.
“You have a fairborn elder brother,” she told me. “He’s Álon, Áda’s twin brother. Unlike her, he never wished to make the effort to cultivate fairyhood. He lives in my woods with a lesser fairy who took a fancy to him a couple centuries ago and her daughters. I imagine he’ll pass on some day soon. I’m sure Mother didn’t ask for him because he’s too frail to come. She’ll have some message to pass to him.”
My family… just kept growing, didn’t it? And of course, although Amana, not yet an adult by fairy standards, had yet to acquire any offspring, the rest of my elder sisters all would have many descendants. In Velerè’s case, given the fairy habit of creating mortal descendants through fairborn children, the number of her progeny could well be in the millions. They could well include many of my Servants, or my soldiers, or just about anyone I knew.
The two newcomers slipped into the bath while the chatter proceeded, family and old friends like Serera reunited after long separations. Not long after that, a trio of night shift chambermaids appeared with snacks and sake, as requested by Amana.
And Serera introduced me to a feature of Mother’s bath I was previously unaware of: the retractable roof and wall! When the maids operated the mechanism, the ceiling and the wall from window sill height up slid aside, leaving us in a pleasant open-air setting with the stars and the mountains in the distance.
Naturally, the fairies began coaxing the maids to get ‘more comfortable’, and when the maids gave me uncertain looks, I simply told them, “It’s your choice.” Which resulted in having a trio of lovely nudes serving our snacks and sake. That was a slight miscalculation on my part, I suppose. The three were all Servants. I should have expected they would get naked in a heartbeat for their Mistress.
In this peaceful atmosphere, with the sleeping castle below us and the open sky above, as the center of attention shifted away from me and toward catching up with one another, I was finally able to turn my mind back to the mountain of information from Lhan which had thrown me into a stupor.
Diurhimath’s plans were at the root of everything. My concern for his Servants, about to be thrown into a suicide mission, had set off the whole effort. My concerns were theirs, so the men and Fan Li went into their compressed-time retreat in a desperate search for strength, for knowledge, for anything we could use to strengthen my Servants and my skills in order to protect them.
So, it was now my job to use the results, before his people launched their mission. Which it seems I would have to handle along with a bunch of sisters showing up.
