This is still a story of the Becoming Monsters universe by Ai Loves, setting used with permission. All canonical and mechanical errors are my own. The yarrb is the exceedingly cute creation of FelisRandomis, used with permission.

  —

  Chapter 41: Thinking Forward

  I was in a seriously pensive mood once I dried up, despite the power of the orgasm I just had. At risk of sounding casual about something I don’t take casually, intense orgasms were something that had become a common occurrence. My daughter having an issue was something new as of this afternoon. The doctor described a problem, I accidentally confirmed it, and now it was time to do something about it.

  Thing is, what could I do? Not too much, not directly, but I had people on my team who might. This is why, thirty minutes ter, I had three of my Demonesses seated at the kitchen table. Nurse Emily Johnson, Berserker Whitney Cunningham, and Enchanter Sarah Castellán. Gloria was in the kitchen preparing dinner, but not at the table for this one. Lucy was still not feeling fit to be company after I delivered the news of what I spotted, and decided to sit this one out. I’d need to make sure she was alright, but this needed to get started immediately. I id out what we knew. The symptoms, the prediction, the theorized cause, my own observation. My look wasn’t the only heavy one at the table.

  Emily was first up. “I’ve never actually dealt with a case before, though if Dr. Akisame Honda of all people confirmed it then I know it’s legit.” Her tails swished. “Nothing I have in my direct power set sounds like it will help. This isn’t an injury to remove, or a disease to cure.”

  Whitney shook her head, feathers ruffling. “Same. I can help keep her body healthy and moving, but this is a Hunger problem. I mean, we can definitely all pitch in to keep her stores up, that’s a team effort these days for us.” She referred to the uniquely free-flowing energies of my Guild. “If the cause is energy drain, that might help insute from shocks.” Emily nodded at this.

  Sarah, though, was thinking hard. “I think it’s more than that. We are trying to offset an active drain, passive fill might not be enough. A pump, like we’re filling a water tower. That’s more like what we need to look at. Maybe…”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

  I could see her brain working at a million miles an hour as she tried to work her way through things. “Maybe if I can finish up the Hunger Battery, we can use it to… kind of downstep your stores and direct them into Lucy’s womb. Like a transformer. You have way more in stock than any of us, if it works then we can push an overcharge. Got some advice from an Alchemist over in the Harvard Dungeon. Succubus who invented a potion for it. Sex specialty and everything. Still, I have the components and just finished one of the two trial runs applying it.”

  That was a really, really big deal. The base fact of our entire existence was that I could Feed from my dies, but none could ever Feed from me in any way. I was capable of holding more than twice the amount they could put together, so forcing THAT to help things out was a game changer. “Was that the fsh of light and smudges on your scales, earlier?”

  “Yep. Let me know that version wouldn’t quite hold up. The other will. I’m close, Jay. I can get it ready to run as soon as tomorrow if nothing else crops up. Might be a bit of a Hunger drain on the Guild, but I can do it.” Sarah was a Sloth demon. While she could easily feed from others resting too much, it also meant that when she got into a groove and overdid things she could drain herself dry in a day. I’d seen her nearly do it twice.

  “That’s fine, for a day. One. Just be careful! I’d rather a good solution take a couple days more than you push to get it ready and make a mistake that will lead to another explosion. Especially when it’s pointed at my wife and daughter. Whitney, if she tries to go past midnight, drag her to bed. Please.”

  Whitney grinned, an intimidating expression coming from someone who was six and a half feet of solid muscle. “You got it.”

  “Emily, I need you to research what effect this might have on Lucy if implemented. You’re our safety check, medically and magically speaking, I won’t let it proceed without your thumbs-up. Whitney, you too. Emily is very good at what she does, but two pairs of eyes are better than one. I need you to look up every physical manifestation of this you can and be ready for anything. Sarah, until we get confirmation that this will work the way you think it will, I’m going to keep searching for alternative solutions. I’ll be at the Guild Hall on Saturday, there might be a Cleric of Teteoh or the World Serpent who can give some advice.”

  From nearby the stove, Gloria let out an undignified snort. “If Clerics could be a solution then the hospital would have called them in. Don’t waste your time, Jay.” Nibbles was trotting over, smelling meat cooking.

  “Their abilities are as widely varied as ours are. One might.”

  “False deities give false solutions.”

  Ah. Right. Gloria’s upbringing had a very particur bent to it. Deeply religious, a Catholic family in Juarez. Despite everything, she still took that part of her life very, very seriously. I think she’d missed all of one Sunday service since coming to join my team, and that one was because we were all in the hospital under direct observation. “I care much less about the Pantheons than the people, Gloria. Anyone willing to help will at least get my ear.” She grumbled something under her breath. This wasn’t over by a long shot.

  Sarah went to get to work while Whitney and Emily got to research. They had a lot to do. So did I, walking back to the main bedroom as I heard the front door open again. Paige and Amber were back. Lucy… was still not taking things well. She was curled up on our bed, crying into a pillow. I could see chocote wrappers on the bed, which was impressive because it meant she had managed to hide chocote in the room without me finding it. Between her sobs I could hear muttered words, a litany of pain mostly directed at her own self.

  Her body. Her Hunger. Her willpower. Words I had heard for years, in one variation or another, since well before the Change. She had always been unbelievably harsh on herself for any shortcoming. Whether or not they were actually her fault. Turning into a Succubus had given her an extra dose of power plus a triple-dose of beauty, but also nearly-uncontrolble needs and urges alongside other Systemic peculiarities that became her everyday life. Any failing, at all, fell directly to herself in her mind.

  Like so often before, I held her in my arms and gave her the reassurances she needed so desperately. There was nothing she could possibly have even known in this case, and it was MY body doing this to her. I would not let her keep bming herself for what amounted to merely a dey. That we would get through this, and our daughter was still perfectly fine. It took a while, but Lucy calmed. A bit. Even managed to ugh when I joked about her saving room for dinner. Her tears flowed, but now they were onto my chest and not a pillow. I considered this an improvement, really. I could hug her back.

  Her breathing smoothed against my chest. She could not hide that her emotions were still a turbulent boil under the surface, but she was under control again.

  A knock at the door and the smell of steak is what eventually stopped us. Paige’s voice came from the other side of the door. “Dinner is in five minutes, you two. Come on, you still need to eat.” She said nothing else, but it was enough. Breakfasts were for pnning in the Kithkin household. Dinners? Dinners were for togetherness. My family, every evening, sharing the updates and quirks of our life. Talking it out. The whole “Live, Laugh, Love” bit that people talk about. Wouldn’t trade it for the world.

  We sat down at the table, a spinach sad was there already as Gloria finished up what she was doing. Iron and Fote. Makes sense, both featured on the pages I had handed over to Gloria. I wasn’t compining, either, as I dished out the start to everyone there. The chatter was varied. Paige and Amber had come across a couple of minor escaped monsters and took them down. Some coppers and fangs resulted. Emily and Whitney were successful in what they had gone to do, which was good news if Emily ever needed to pull out the medical kits. Knowing us, that was an inevitability. We began to tell the others about the appointment, when I noted something odd.

  Gloria was an absolutely incredible cook. Self-taught entirely in order to be able to enjoy the massive amount of food she was obligated to consume, her instincts and senses let her do things over a stovetop unequaled in most high-css restaurants on Earth. I had, admittedly, become a bit spoiled by this in the four weeks she had been in our home. She also, notably, knew that I liked my beef as rare as the format would let me safely consume. All seven of the dies had their favored orders up, along with onions.

  It was odd, then, that mine in particur was looking like it had been cooked by being dipped in napalm. It also tasted void of anything remotely resembling seasoning, not even salt.

  I did not say anything and didn’t have to, I could feel that she was not feeling embarrassment or shame. Instead, I proceeded to stand up and walk to the kitchen, and there I grabbed something from a drawer I hadn’t thought about in months. Specifically, two ketchup packets that were excess from a fast food meal about two and a half months prior. By now, the others all realized something was up, so as I sat back down every pair of eyes was on me. I was looking Gloria in the eye. Without needing to look, I felt my hands follow motions long-forgotten as I opened the two packets, squeezed them over the steak, picked it up, and bit in.

  It should be noted that they felt like they had the consistency of lightly toasted shoe leather. It should also be noted that my Strength score was 22. It took a fairly significant effort, but I managed to chew and swallow it. More effort was spent keeping the expression off of my face as I did so. The thing was vile, I couldn’t understand why some people ate them this way voluntarily.

  As soon as it was done, I picked my fork back up and ate some more of the spinach. Needed to get that taste and feel out of my mouth. Everyone seemed to understand that something had occurred, but decided as one to not ask. I could feel Gloria’s emotions through it all, she apparently decided that was enough penance for now.

  I mean, good. I didn’t want to repeat this particur meal.

  Despite its… quirks… the meal and time together helped all of us. I could feel the tension leaving my shoulders (if not my jaw), could see Lucy getting calmer. It was nice. I helped with dishes as Sarah got back to her work desk. Emily was deep-diving research, while Whitney was walking around making sure everyone did their stretches and took care of themselves. Though I had the worst scarring by far, everyone had some.

  Speaking of. Once the dishes were done, I had a task left before I could surrender to sleep. Well, a list of them. Over a half hour of stretching, flexing, pressing, and rolling. One of the doctors had told me that it would be uncomfortable. Whitney had a much more charmingly direct description.

  “If you don’t feel like you’re being tortured for state secrets, you’re not doing it right.” She was correct, of course, and I will certainly say that my pain tolerance took a serious jump those few days. Previous experiences capped out at getting put in the hospital by void energy, wrapped in fmes then crushed, or struck by lightning. I knew this was to help, but ow. After my doctor-ordered torment, Sarah gave me a much gentler massage. This, of course, led to the st part of the night.

  Both Sarah and Amber were, to put it lightly, horny. Amber was also assisting Sarah with her part of the solutions we had discussed earlier, her unusual css making her able to call upon the skills of those who made the tools she used… such as Sarah’s hand-made Enchanting tools. It made her an ideal backup to anyone on the team. It also meant that both of them really needed to be able to focus, and everyone in the house had gotten very used to getting good sex on command given how all of our abilities worked. After all, the more I did, the faster my Abilities and Css progressed and the more rapid gains I got on my Attributes.

  Sure Jay. Tell yourself that’s why you’ve been averaging five a day while on break. Training. That’s why they’re enjoying each other almost as much as you are.

  Sarah’s solution to sex was simple. She never stopped massaging me. As soon as she rolled me over onto my back, she speared herself on me and just kept going after tense muscles and stiffening scar tissue. That wasn’t odd. What was odd was how, every minute or two, she would find something that got her thinking hard and either drift off or look over in the direction of her workbench before coming back to the present. When eventually I came within her, I could feel her react to the pleasure of being Fed upon… and then the spark of inspiration that hit her hard enough to just jump off and run to the project she was boring on. Either post-nut crity, or she realized something about the mechanics of things. I would likely never know.

  On the other hand (er, hands…), Amber had a different conundrum. Until a week ago, she had been almost literally living inside my head. The curse that she had accidentally id upon herself long ago means her entire being was shaped for my pleasure, specifically. Mind and body. Everything from her favorite kinks to her proportions to her sensitivity and size were just for me. She was still there, but the st week meant that she wasn’t getting supernatural course corrections anymore. That what she liked and responded well to were evolving independently of my preferences. She was still unused to needing to make that kind of effort, to doing things that felt out of her way.

  Same to me, really. I hadn’t needed to take her actual needs into account, sexually, in our entire retionship. Now I did, just like the others, and we were both getting used to what this meant. It still worked, and well. She was amazingly sensitive where it counted, could take me any which way like a champion, and had been learning from the best (AKA my wife), but it was still an effort. Worth it, though.

  Lucy and I left the others to do what they needed to do. For us, we needed rest. The emotional toll of what we had to do, along with the physical ones of caring for ourselves (and the fact that Lucy was growing somebody), had us both beat. We needed the time to breathe and cuddle. Time asleep, to restore ourselves.

  It was unfortunate that my nights had become so consistently occupied, as of te.

  I knew the moment I had crossed the line between waking and sleep. The inside of my soul was represented in my dreams as a ft pin of onyx, under a bck sky unbroken by moon or star or cloud. Before me stood the enormous frame of a mirror, about half-filled by silvery gss. Where the gss wasn’t covering, what was within that mirror’s frame was a red wound the color of arterial blood. The ground was cracked and scarred, most of those glowing with a sullen purple fme. Scattered as far as I could see were specks, slivers, and shards of that same silvered gss of the mirror.

  There was work to be done. The mirror had been whole the first time I saw it, two nights after the injury that originally shattered this pne of onyx. It reflected a version of me I had no wish to be, but from what I had been able to see my own will and self-sacrifice had overcome that dark corner of my soul. The reflections were broken, but I could make out myself… ish. A changed version of myself. It was hard to tell. Still, when I originally broke the thing, shards of it scattered over an acre of metaphorical nd. Where the shards nded in the burning cracks, both interfered with each other’s healing. The cracks couldn’t close until the mirror shards were extracted. The mirror shards were much harder to see when buried in those cracks. I set off towards an area I had nearly completed the night before, so that I could keep my patterns going.

  It would not do to get this pce mostly done, then be unable to find the st slivers.

  I knew I’d be here until my body awoke. It wouldn’t be done tonight. Even if I fully comprehended its scope it was… okay, hopefully not sisyphean, but definitely herculean. My steps took me to where I was going in short order, and I began to gather what shards I could see easily. More of the fine glitter was in those sullen purple cracks, slightly singeing my hand as I retrieved them.

  A fsh of memory. In front of the shattered mirror, an enormous inky-bck and scaled humanoid with a white eye drawn across its otherwise-bnk face knelt. The Cursebringer, an entity whose actual name I had never learned, but who had been responsible for so many of the attacks which had come to my city. For the upending of the lives of the women who had come to be with my Guild. Standing before it, cd in mail and carrying a glowing cavalry saber, was a much smaller stone-gray and winged humanoid. Me.

  This was the end of the fight. The Cursebringer had invaded my mind, offered to make me powerful in exchange for servitude. Svery. He had meant it, though. Never did lie to me. The entities I had fought that he had created from the demonic women of my Guild were horrifyingly strong compared to what they had been before. It took all eight of us, plus Nibbles, to bring this threat down. One slip, one error on any of our parts, and it would have ended very, very differently. Instead, he knelt before me, and I watched myself jump high into the air to execute him after listening to his st words.

  And then the shock. The entity’s head struck ground separately from his body, and the corpse remained. A life I could not save, no matter the circumstance that led to this moment. He was not a true monster. He had a soul. He had once been human, like I had once been human. I had no way to know if the evil he had committed was from himself, or from some unholy drive his new body forced onto him. All I could do was mourn.

  Tears streamed down my face, as they had then. As soon as I realized what I had done, as soon as I got over myself, I had given him as much of a funeral as I could. Lit the pyre, to return his body to the dust from whence it came. I could hear the words I said. Once again, as I heard the old me call for a response, I said with the rest of my guild: Amen.

  And with that, the memory was over. My mourning was over. No matter what I knew now, at the time I could only act on what information I had. A monster attacking me and mine, literally inside my own head. My defense had been comprehensive and decisive. All seven of my dies had survived it with all of their limbs intact, only scars to show for it. And once I knew to do so, I had observed what limited courtesies I could in this pce. What respect for the corpse I could muster.

  My hand felt prickly. Full of slivers and grit, all shining silver. While my brain had been repying its pain, my metaphorical body had continued its work. I could hold more. The purple fmes of this area had dimmed almost to the point of being fully extinguished. The cracks in the onyx pin were again starting to seal themselves. The hairline ones were smoothing. My strides carried me back to the mirror, pausing occasionally to pick up random bits of painful silver that came to be within my reach. At the destination, I released the palmful. A cloud of glitter flowed up onto the mirror’s face, finding their pces without needing too much more encouragement from me.

  In the back of my head, the constant headache I’d had for the st week lessened, just a hair. It was still there, to be certain. It could find itself sharpened by other circumstances, or help other more normal aches get worse. But now, I was able to work on the hard parts. My eyes closed for a moment. It still felt early. Perhaps I’d be able to find some rger shards left over in the next section I needed to clean up. Perhaps I’d be able to make better progress towards healing myself. To restoring my shattered soul, my shattered Css. I took back off at a trot, my route ever so slightly different than before, pausing occasionally to pick up those bits that came within my reach.

  Hours ter and with significantly more of the pieces returned, my eyes opened back to the waking world. The light of the morning sun shone through the window, illuminating my wife and I. My body felt rested. It had done what it needed to do. My scars were ever-so-slowly reintegrating. My physical health was coming back. Slowly and gently, I disentangled myself from my wife… and from Emily, who had as of te taken to coming and joining us. They both needed what they could get. So did I, but if the st few days had been any indication such would not be coming any time soon.

  In my head, in my soul? Both were feeling worn out. Worn thin. There was no rest for the weary, no sanctuary from the storm. In my Status screen, I could see one consequence of my shattered state. My Css Progress was at 99%, so were more than one of my Ability Score progress meters, and all seven of my powers granted by my dies. They refused to roll over, to increase, no matter if my experience said they should have. I forced myself to move, feeling as though I was outside of my own body, pushing myself forward by force. Every movement was an effort, the inertia wanting me to do nothing. To curl up and cry.

  My hands found the pocket sized notebook I’d tucked into an out-of-the-way corner. Flipped to the random page near the middle of it, to the map I had sketched of the acre of onyx. I slowly updated what I could remember of what I had cleaned up. Though the pce had no definite directions, I started by telling myself the mirror faced north and plotted from there. Simple lines and shading let me look at what I had finished, pn what I was going to do the following night once I realized I wasn’t going to get normal dreams again. It was… concerning.

  I’d cleaned up more of the acre than had yet been restored on the mirror’s face. What I was doing might not be enough.