The Island Ch. 15

I smiled a little at hearing her name.

"But communication, as you may have noticed, has to be initiated by you. I only have the power to get you to the first vision. After that, the choice must be yours. One day, she simply stopped. I didn't know what had happened to her. I have no eyes here aside from the ones I can see through while I am within you."

"Wait... so... erm... possessing me, or controlling me, or whatever we are calling it, is easier for you than just talking to me?"

"Oh yes, much easier. Communicating involves all sorts of effort. Extending my power over range, for one thing. I am here; you are there. I have to expend energy on getting that power to you. When I am with you, I am literally inside you. The energy I spend getting to you is almost instantly rejuvenated by your lust. And don't get me started on the intricacies of translation."

"But, you are talking to me now."

She smiled and raised an eyebrow.

"I am sitting on my own in the river, talking to myself, aren't I? You're not really here."

"I told you I picked you for a reason," she smiled again.

I took a deep breath. "Okay, Dr. Walker said you seem to be more powerful around water?"

"That's not entirely accurate," she pondered slowly. "Water is like a natural conduit for energy. It's not that I'm more powerful, it's that the transfer of energy is easier."

"Ah, okay, that makes sense. So you transfer your energy through water; mother uses the pollen in the flowers."

"Flowers?" she squinted again. "What flowers?"

"The red flowers covering almost all of the island?" We both stared at each other for a few moments, seemingly trying to outdo each other in our squinting abilities.

"Dan, there are no flowers on this Island for the same reason there are no animals," Freja finally said. "The energy that drives them to reproduce kills them. Only humans are capable of the complex thinking required to maintain the high drive to procreate. The animals here before you mated themselves to death. The flowers put more energy into the production of seeds than they did into growth. They all died."

"Errr, well, that answers one question, but those red flowers are everywhere!"

Freja stood up, both of us forgetting about my softening cock that flopped uselessly into the water. She started pacing back and forth in front of me, her lips moving but only the faintest of sound coming out. What little I could hear was like no other language I had ever heard.

"Show me one of these flowers," She suddenly blurted out.

"Sorry?" I asked in surprise. "I don't want to offend you, but knowing what those things are capable of, I don't want to go anywhere near them."

"No, no, no, in your mind. Just think of one of the flowers and then sort of... push it at me."

I opened my mouth to speak, frowned, realized I was probably not going to get a better description than that, and closed it again. I pictured one of the flowers, specifically the one that had been staring me in the face when I had woken up with the others next to the lake almost a week earlier. I took a deep breath, then having nothing else to go on, I looked at Freja and... pushed.

Freja frowned a little deeper, her eyes aiming off to some point in the distance. Yet the change in her expression suggested that she had got it.

"Well, shit, I didn't expect that to work on the first attempt."

"Dan," she finally said. "That is not a flower."

"Isn't it? They sure as hell look like flowers."

"No, it's a...." She frowned again, seemingly growing more and more frustrated with every passing moment. "... Urgh... damned translation." Her eyes suddenly bore into mine. I could feel that scratch at the back of my head again. It was different from the times she had been taking control, but it was still there. It was like she was rummaging around through my knowledge base to find a way to explain it. As it turned out, that was exactly what she was doing. "Ah, perfect... okay... Think of the flowers like a PA system. There can be as many speakers attached to it as you like, but there is only one microphone," she said breathlessly. "The flowers act like speakers; they extend her... her message, her influence, her will, but they are not her!"

"Okay... so where is she? How do we stop Her?"

Freja didn't answer for a few moments, instead reverting back to pacing. "I think," she finally said, stopping in her tracks but still looking off toward the hazy eastern sky. "I think she may have brought a mind flower."

"A what?"

"It's ancient," she replied, finally turning to look at me. "Imagine a flower with intelligence, not much intelligence, about as much as your average frog but still able to think. They went extinct with the dinosaurs, but if she managed to save one, she could have brought it here and bound herself to it."

"Alright, you need to slow down," I held my hands up. "I'm getting lost here."

"Okay, millennia ago," she said, suddenly turning and sitting back into the water in front of me... "Gods realized that the number of worshipers was dwindling to the point that we could no longer sustain ourselves. A few of the more devious gods decided to possess people instead, feeding off their life force, then passing to someone else when they died. Obviously, the higher-ups put a stop to that quite quickly, but it showed us that we could possess smaller, lesser creatures and basically become immortal, we wouldn't have our powers, but we would live. So we started transferring our essences into other beings. I think that she transferred hers into a mind flower."

"Um, okay, where is yours?"

"The volcano," she answered as if the answer were obvious.

"Volcanoes are alive?"

"You humans have a very narrow definition of what is alive or not. But yes, it's alive. My essence is several miles below your feet."

"Ah... good to know."

"You need to find her mind flower and destroy it."

My tongue seemed to take a page out of Ray's book and promptly choked on itself. "How the fuck am I supposed to do that?"

"You are setting up home in a bunker full of artillery shells. How do you think?"

"Wait, what??" I jumped up onto my feet. "Where? We spent all day yesterday exploring the tunnels. We didn't find so much as a single bullet! We are living in a munitions dump??"

Freja smiled, more of a grin of a plan than a smile. But her face made the same shape. "Grace sealed the rooms; she told me about it. She was worried about the sanity of the original engineering team when she first got here. She didn't want them to be able to access the munitions."

"I mean, that's something, but what the hell am I going to do with them?"

"Dan, you are a brilliant man, you are so intelligent, and you are an engineer. Are you saying you can't work with explosives?"

"I work with blasting caps and a few sticks of dynamite, very rarely. Can I work with eighty-year-old munitions designed and built by a foreign army? No!" In a rare flash of inspiration, an idea jumped unexpectedly into my head. "But... Ray might be able to."

Freja's smile grew wider. "I knew you would be able to come up with something."

"But how am I going to get him to do anything when I have to wait for him to be lucid? That could take weeks, months even."

"Have you wondered why you are lucid almost all of the time unless you are with one of your girls?" Freja asked.

"Yes, of course," I admitted. "Aside from meeting you, I have no idea why."

"It wasn't because you met me. It was because I blessed you." she smiled. I arched my eyebrow at her, perfectly conveying in that one expression that she was going to have to do better. "Essentially, I put a tiny part of my essence into you."

"Umm, okay. Also good to know, but we can circle back to that later. How is that relevant?"

"Because if I give you more of me, if you carry me with you permanently, you may be able to use my powers to pull them out of the influence. Snap them out of it, so to speak."

"Them? You mean all of them?"

"No, I'm afraid not. If we were to do this, you would only be able to use it on one or two people at a time. And even then, it wouldn't last more than a day or two. Not without inhuman amounts of lust being absorbed to compensate for the effort."

"But does that mean you will be in control all the time?"

"Not at all, my love. You would still be in control except when absorbing lust. The same as now."

"Hmmm, okay. Well, having Ray would certainly be a help. Amy, too. The munitions and the medical experts being onside would be a huge head start. But then Tom has proven himself a god damned genius as well."

"Tom is already lucid," Freja said simply.

"Come again?"

Freja smiled proudly and almost maternally. "Tom is autistic; his mind is literally built differently than yours. There may be a few times where we can absorb lust from him, but he is completely immune to our influence."

"Wait, so he has been lucid all this time? Why the hell didn't he say anything?"

"Because he has spent his entire life struggling against adversities that you could never hope to understand. One of those is a complete lack of understanding when it comes to social interactions and norms. He has been told since he was a child that what everyone else does is normal, and he needs to accept it without losing his ability to cope. Of course, he has noticed a change in everyone, but he has assumed that it is him who is the problem because he has been told that it always has been."

"Holy shit!"

"All Tom has only ever wanted is to be accepted for who he is and for the world around him to make sense," Freja went on. "To achieve that, he has poured himself into his work, into being someone who could be a benefit or provide a service to society; that is how he thinks he will be accepted by...."

"Stop!" I froze. Freja blinked at me, her face darkening for a moment before she noticed the expression on mine. Something else, something far more sinister, had just popped into my head. "His devotion to service and the way he thinks makes his mind difficult to infiltrate," I said slowly.

"Yes, I just said that," Freja said with a frown.

"No, you didn't," I said slowly, looking up at her with wide eyes and feeling the color draining from my face. "That is what Mother said to the Shadow in the tunnel the other night." Freja took less than a heartbeat to understand what I was saying. Her eyes widened to match mine. "Mother is going after Tom!"

"Gods, of course, he would have been the most obvious target because he is the one she cannot control. And anyone she can't control...."

"Is a threat," I finished. "That means the shadow must have been Louisa!"

"Dan, please, you need to take my essence. You need to get back there. You need to protect Tom!"

I was already running back to the bunker before I felt the surge of energy. I suddenly had an almost overwhelming urge to fuck somebody. I wasn't even particularly fussy about who it was. As long as she was female, I would have mounted her then and there. But that raging desire was tempered by the fear in me. Tom was in danger, all of us were in danger. I was going to find those artillery shells, find mother, and fucking end her. If Louisa stood in my way, then she would meet the same fate.