Sympathetic Spirits Pt. 03

She split back, but the girls kept being phased through each other on top of me.

"Okay, if you need it... girls, you have... on your back."

"It's okay, you can touch them. You will not hurt us."

Fins? Wings? Petals? Their backsides were covered in dozens of floating, barely tangible shining ethereal leaf-like ornaments, the biggest coming from shoulder blades, and the smallest appearing all the way to elbows and hips, shivering and unraveling rhythmically as the girls bathed in arousal, making them look like exceptionally exotic deep-water tropical mermaids.

"You have two marks on your bellies now. Is any of this in any way normal?"

"Absolutely not. This is, in fact, very special, very precious, and very ra-a-are." Girls were still separate, but spoke in unison; the last word came out with a solid tremolo, and their entire front sides, from the lower belly to the lower lip, got covered in glowing, shining, rhythmically shimmering stripes. They finally merged into Lera completely, apparently this selective phasing-through game taking its toll on their stamina; now, the sensation of their combined self covering my privates in the most intimate flurry of gentle jolts took toll on mine.

"(Danny... Squeeze our hips so hard that your fingers sink into us.)" Before I could object, she continued. "(Pretty please. We'll say "Disco" if we want you to stop. But we will not.)"

I tested my grip in several attempts. With each, Lera got more ecstatic. Finally, my fingers did sink into her. I could not hold myself from playing around inside her condensed ether just a little; my fingertips feeling like they sank through a portal into the universe of gentle sloppy kisses.

"(Thank you. It doesn't hurt. You are close, aren't you?)"

"I am holding only by thinking how terribly today's evening began."

"(...Daniel, do you love us?)" She stroked my face with the backside of her hand, that also got covered in tiny ethereal petals.

"You are scaring me. Is this a goodbye, or what?"

"(Absolutely not. Were you afraid that you accidentally fucked us into ascension? We are not actually souls of the deceased trapped by regret and grudge, as far as we know. We are not going anywhere.)"

"This is reassuring. And I'm not going to become a happy dad to half-ghost triplets any time soon? Not that I'd have anything against, but it's not why you need to leave tomorrow? I'd respect your choice anyway but would like to know." Lera let out a silent laugh, her glowing marks merging into a single broad line going from the very point of our coupling all the way up to the top of her head. "Wait... are you... charging?"

"(Close to it. Now, you can stop trying to avoid the question. Do you love us?)"

"I don't know." I lost my temper a little and sounded maybe too rude. "I'm sorry. I very much want to say yes, but I don't know. I like being with you. I want to be with you. I'm happy with you. And I want you to be happy. This, I do know. All things considered, knowing that you both... or all three, are way better experts on love than I am, my best response is - you tell me."

"(Always our Dan. You cannot imagine how much we appreciate your honesty.)" She let out a couple weightless floating tears. "(Let us try to nudge you to certainty.)"

And with this, Lera moved faster.

Forward and backward. Up and down. Just a little to the sides. With a couple tiny twists to spice it all up.

With a simple long kiss, we completed our love journey for tonight. Not with moans and grunts and spasms of ecstasy, but with what felt like a full minute of heavenly piece of ice cream melting in our mouths. When the minute ended, I felt so exhausted and satisfied that I was barely awake. I felt the angelic petals on her hips dissolving first under my palms, but just a couple seconds after reaching her skin, my touch sank even further.

"Sleep well."

The mist she dissolved into left a sweet scent.

"Time for scum to wake up." Miranda freed her face from clothes thrown into it, rose on her elbows, and went to check the bandages. "It does not mean looking at scum's scratches. It means a couple minutes to dress, remove sheets and covers soaked in scum, and arrange the pillows neatly. In that order. Although if not for money reasons, I'd also burn the pillows."

"Daniel... just let me..."

"I have not said that murderer got a word."

"Look, it's not my..."

"Minute and fifty seconds."

She understood. I saw in her eyes that she understood - I was serious, and only two ethereal angels behind me were the wet napkin separating me from stomping her ribcage in. Partially because they were physically holding onto me, but she knew that if she makes me angry, it will not be enough.

When she was done, I did not let her sit.

"In twenty-five minutes, we will be busy with stuff that is none of scum's business, and by that moment scum must be behind the horizon. Which means that maybe scum has seven minutes to explain herself. Murderer gets a word."

"Dan, dear, I know how it all seems. I never wanted... I..."

"Again."

"Daniel..."

"AGAIN."

"What? I don't understand!"

"Then kick yourself in your fish brain for once. It's not me who you tried to kill, and it's not thanks to me that you spent the night here and not in jail."

"Um... Kara, right? Kara... I did a terrible thing to you. I..."

"Wrong pose." She threw a confused look my way. "On your knees."

"Dan, this is too much." Kara tried to calm me down.

"Forcing her to eat both your assholes out five times in a row would be too much. Three times would be just right. This is nothing. Scum has six minutes."

Miranda fell on her knees... and the moment she raised her eyes up, it got to her. I did not know it, and the girls told me only a couple days later. Clouded by my own anger, I could not tell when she was expressing emotions or faking them, because everything she did, or said, or expressed with her face, seemed fake at that moment.

But looking into Kara's eyes, Miranda's entire internal defense just collapsed so hard that emotional crack was visible to sympathetic spirits. All her "not my fault"s and "it's not what you think"s and "just a mistake"s evaporated.

And realization struck.

She almost did something that she could not fix even if she lives for eternity. She hurt and tried to kill a person out of jealousy after causing her own relationship to fail. And this person healed her, defended her, and washed and dried her clothes.

She bawled like crazy. She fell on all fours, tears falling on the floor, crawled to Kara and hugged her legs. Occasionally she seemed to have tried to say something, but just could not get enough breath.

Leda kissed my shoulder and went to intervene and try to calm her down, but Miranda started kissing her feet.

Three minutes later, I allowed her to sit and told to speak normally. She collected herself.

"I am not asking for forgiveness. I don't deserve one. But I am sorry. And I hope that some time later, we can all meet again. Even if just for once. When we have a little more time. And when we can speak if not as friends, then at least as reconciled acquaintances."

"This, I can promise you. Your debt is not paid off. And I will come to collect it. Contacts."

"What?"

"Contacts of the person who sold you the weapons. I do not trust you to send them yourself."

"Sure." She messaged the deal's logs to the girls' communicator. "Can I wash my face before leaving?"

"No. But thanks for asking. Move. Walk by the path under my window, so I see you leaving."

I was tired, and even glad that I'll get to spend the night alone. Mister Azur welcomed me, and we allowed the girls to explain the situation themselves, which they did in the terms of "heheh, we already need to vent".

"Remarkable," Azur said, looking at their glowing tummy marks.

"It's Holy Shit in old people's speak," Leda informed me.

"I suggest we come inside."

For the first time, I got to see the locked room fully. It was dark, but mister Azur in his infinite grace switched the lights on.

Faraday cage, I immediately noticed out loud. Upon looking around, my first thought was "a doll skyscraper-castle", my second - "a hive".

Myriads of sympathetic spirits, hundreds maybe, all the size that I would describe as "probably the smallest they can turn into", within a finger's length, floated, walked, pushed and pulled carts of materials and trinkets, worked, manipulated miniature machinery, built new sections of their living space and remodeled the old ones, had fun, even played sports, and most definitely experimented with something. Aside from the living space was a smaller one, entirely fit within a large glass bulb. Next to it was another, similar bulb, but opaque.

Above the main living space, which seemed to span twelve levels, was what looked like a multi-layered honeycomb with some cells glowing in pure white, and others dark.

Kara and Leda shrank to the size of every other spirit, floated to the upper structure, and came back from there and reformed without the tummy marks. I did not see it, but deduced that two dark cells must be glowing now.

"I recommend the six-week visitations because usually it is how long it takes. And for you it took what, four days?"

"For what? What have you harvested me for here?"

"The one thing we haven't found how to make them live without. Human love."

"That thing on top is a... storage of love?!"

"Exactly."

"Well, a brothel suddenly does not seem like a bad idea. But why store it?"

"The scope of this project was always above and beyond simple reinforcement for the troops or fun time for dissatisfied individuals."

"So what, you are building them their own tiny paradise in every chapter of Rent-a-Nite? And then what?"

"That would be pointless. Even if god existed, the dumbest course of action would be to repeat his mistakes. Pray tell, you have ideas and beliefs that you want to spread and preserve in eternity, and creatures that share them, and are immune or resistant to most known forms of physical damage, poisons, hunger, thirst, cold, extreme pressures, vacuum, and aging. One their vulnerability that makes them incapable of functioning is radio busts from stars of type G and hotter. Where is this not a problem?"

"I guess, almost everywhere else in the Universe? Most stars are red dwarves if I remember right, also there are wandering and tidally locked plane... oh..."

"Exactly. It's not a paradise. It's a spaceship. Well, a particularly crude model, and two smaller models closer to actual conditions. I assure you, I will not suddenly demand Kara and Leda from you for expedition. We are far enough from interstellar travel that your grandchildren will most likely die of old age before we are ready. I just hope that we also solve the problem on our side while spaceship engineers solve on theirs. Having someone depend on you like this is a bitter fate. Because of this, we try not to spread the word around, and where possible, keep our wards within the legal status of toys. It's better for everyone."

"I thank you for trusting me with this, but not sure why you decided to do so."

"I thought it's obvious. To offer you a partnership. We are understaffed, especially by people who remember distribution of stars by spectral types, know what a Faraday cage is, and can overload two women with love in four days, all in one person."

Let's say, an entirely new chapter of my life began that very evening, but this is another story.

To conclude this one, Leda decided that she wasn't missing her pals too much yet to spend an entire night with them, thus ruining my plans to spend it by myself alone.

Which I did not mind in the slightest.