Outsiders Pt. 06

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.