Well... that took a lot longer than I had hoped.

Now on with the story -- Nova.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The world was foggy, hazy. The bleary-eyed return from sleep's warm embrace was not something that I had missed in the time since my awakening, but in a massive break with recent tradition, I had fallen asleep the old-fashioned way. My sleep-addled brain didn't quite register the shifting of weight on the bed next to me, and I was halfway through the process that would have returned me to my bunker for a proper rest when my manhood was enveloped in a warm, wet set of lips.

The touch was gentle, tentative, affectionate and the soft groan that escaped my throat only spurred on the one that was trying to swallow my whole length. I managed to crack an eyelid open, the sheet-covered mound hovering around my waist started rhythmically bobbing up and down. Slow and steady strokes, measured and deliberate suction, the expert application of tongue to all the sensitive areas of my crown. This was a mouth intent on providing the most amount of pleasure it was capable of. I smiled and rested my head back into the pillow. "Good morning, Evie," I said through the curl of my grin. Only a cute little giggle vibrated around my shaft before my newest lover shifted her attention back to the task before her.

There are many stories like this one. The erotic section of your local library, not to mention the scores of websites out there, are filled with them, and in each of them the hero of the story is some noble, benevolent, altruistic, larger than life character who always does the right thing and puts the needs of others ahead of his own. This is not one of those stories. At least, it hadn't been until now.

It had been a month since my departure from the hospital and although I had kept contact with my nurses, the promised night of drinks and the rendezvous with Becky had yet to happen. With so many of the nursing staff being invited to the party, a whole new shift rotation had to be devised to accommodate them all being off on the same night and it was taking some time. That month, however, had been filled with what I can only accurately describe as the abject abuse of my powers. I told myself that I needed to practice, to explore and master my new abilities, and I had practiced... A lot.

I'd had more random and anonymous sex in the past few weeks than I'd had in my entire life before that combined. The methods that Charlotte had taught me of gaining access to an Evo's mind, I quickly realized, worked just as well on the average human. Instead of intricate cities and their curtain walls, there was just an avatar of that person standing in the middle of a meadow. Mute and motionless, anything I said to them in the mindscape -- as I came to call it -- was akin to direct mental control.

You will flash your breasts at the next man you see.

You will let me have every drink I order for the rest of the night for free.

You will empty your wallet and hand it all to me.

You will drag me to the bathrooms and give me the best blowjob you are capable of.

Okay, I admit it, I had used the last of those examples more than I would like to think about, but the effect of this practice couldn't be denied. I may not have had the opportunity to duel with another Evo but entering the mind of a normal human had become child's play.

You are now bisexual for the rest of the evening, and you desire nothing more than to make out with that girl over there.

You are going to put your name down for karaoke. You will sing 'Don't Stop Believing' by Journey whether you know the words or not. You will be physically incapable of reaching the high notes.

It had all been so easy. Until I saw Evie.

It was just like any other night; the same bar, the same nameless faces, the same crowd of college girls ready to be bent to my every whim. Then I saw her, her eyes capturing mine in the reflection of the mirror behind the bar, and I say it that way intentionally. As soon as I saw her, every other girl in the bar ceased to exist. They drew me in like a magnet, like the gravitational pull of a star. I may have turned my entire focus onto her, but I was as incapable of walking away from her as she was from me.

I sucked in a deep breath, Evie's tongue working its magic on the vee of my frenulum pulling my mind back to the moment. I flicked the sheets off her head to gaze down at her, her eyes sparkling mischievously back to mine before she pulled them back over her again with another giggle. My replying chuckle was strangled in my throat by another long moan as she took my entire length into her throat.

It wasn't her face that had drawn me in, although she was astoundingly beautiful. It wasn't the memories of her kind words or smiling face over the past two years; although, there were plenty of them. It was her mind.

Like every other human mind that I had seen, her avatar had been alone in the field, just as I had expected. But unlike theirs, hers was neither mute nor motionless. Hunched over a small campfire and warming her hands, she had immediately looked up to greet me as I approached. A smile curled at her thin, but friendly lips as her eyes took me in. But this was more than an appraisal of my vastly altered outward appearance. It was as if she was looking into my very soul, and in a moment that I couldn't fully explain, I felt an overwhelming urge to gain her approval.

It was hard to describe, much like the rest of the night. It wasn't hard to win her favor; she already seemed to be harboring a certain level of affection towards me from the time she had known me before the accident, even if the immediate target of her amorous intent had been Jimmy. I had no idea why but I wanted to be a better man for her. The internal monologue from her that had been so clear with everyone else was like trying to listen to a conversation from underwater. It was muffled and garbled, I could only make out parts of it with intense concentration and direct physical contact. I had spent a lot longer than I cared to admit trying to get her to lick the rim on my glass -- yes, I know it was juvenile, but I had cut my mind-controlling teeth on a lot stranger commands - my frustration at her resistance building the more I pushed, but I simply couldn't get her to comply.

I am the kind of guy who is very much in favor of calling a spade a spade, so you will understand that all notion of Evie being simply another experiment went out of the window very early in the night. I could have manipulated my way into the panties of a hundred other girls in the bar. But Evie was special, her mind was unique, and her eyes captured me in a way that no others, before or since, ever had. I felt myself falling for this angel long before I brought myself to admit it. Then I started singing to her. Even now, after all these years, I still feel the heat burning in my cheeks and inwardly cringe when I think about how I butchered Elvis Presley to a girl I had known properly for less than an hour.

But the more her mind resisted, the more I wanted her.

Eventually, I had given up on the brute force approach that had worked so well with the other humans and had simply asked her avatar if I could join her by the fire. With an adorable smile and a simple nod, she had moved over on the log that she had perched herself on to make room. As soon as I sat down, her hand curled itself around mine and I was hers.

It was another part of the night that was difficult to describe, let alone explain. It was as if her acceptance of me around her campfire was a direct route to her mind, both in terms of her feelings towards me and mine to her. The only thing that I could compare it to was the kiss that I had shared with Charlotte outside the walls of my city, complete and undiluted trust, and affection. I fell for her in an instant, and she fell just as hard.

Love is an impossible emotion to describe at the best of times. I felt no small amount of it towards Becky, a different, albeit no less substantial version of it towards Charlotte after our kiss, and now the same could be said for Evie. I had made a point of not thinking too much about it for the rest of the night, but it was something that Jeeves and I would have to discuss in great detail at some point in the near future. But as soon as I wrapped my fingers around hers and accepted her into my heart -- and my place in hers -- her mind opened to me, just as Charlotte's had.

The monologue became crystal clear, not coming from some disembodied voice as they did with other humans, but directly from the lips of her avatar. I was given a running commentary as each touch, each gesture, each word, and each kiss drew her inextricably closer to me. By the time we had made it to my apartment, she was so overwhelmed by the emotion of it all that I thought I might have broken her. Yet, that single tear, wiped away by another almost instinctive gesture, was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. It was at that point that she dropped the last of her resistance. From that point onwards, there was little question in her mind where the night was going or how she felt about me.

I may have had a slightly better idea of what was going on than she did, but not even I could adequately explain the depth of emotion that we suddenly felt for one another. I had mentally influenced or outright manipulated countless nameless girls over the past few weeks, dozens of them, yet not a single one of them had left a fraction of the impression on me as Evie had. I couldn't even begin to expound upon the differences between her avatar and theirs.

The lack of a city discounted her being an Evo, the lack of an Aura meant she was not an inquisitor, even if I did have trouble reading her thoughts to start with. There was clearly more to her than the average human, but where she fit in my admittedly limited understanding of this new species hierarchy was beyond me. Maybe that's what drew me to her, maybe it was that feeling that I felt from the moment our eyes met that, had my walls not been up, she would have been as capable of reading me as I was of her. Despite my ability to hear her thoughts, I could not plunder the depths of her mind like I could with the others. I couldn't access her memories or get her to divulge secrets to me, if she wasn't thinking about them at that precise moment, it was beyond my reach. There was no other way to describe it; she fascinated me.

Another hissed breath and another guttural groan were pulled from my throat as Evie picked up the pace and once again yanked my thoughts back to the present. Increasing her suction and working some voodoo magic with her tongue, she sucked my entire length back into her throat, withdrew to the tip, and then repeated. Over and over again she inhaled the whole of me, the throat muscles and tongue both working in tandem to fulfill one of her more memorable internal thoughts from the previous night.

I will make him beg for me tomorrow.

I sucked in another whimpered breath as Evie held her rhythm, her lips, tongue, throat, and the relentless suction was edging me closer much faster than I was used to. Of course, it was well within my powers to hold off my orgasm indefinitely; the internal editing station had seen to that, but through the tangled maze of her thoughts came one overriding desire. She wanted me to cum. No parlor tricks, no build-up, no input from me whatsoever, she wanted the simple satisfaction that she alone had brought me to climax. Who was I to refuse such a siren?

I flicked the sheet off her head, her eyes coming up to meet mine as our gazes burned into each other. The sparkle of mischief had gone from hers, replaced by a pang of hunger that spoke volumes. The look on my face was no less obvious. I started to roll my hips into her mouth, matching the pace of her bobs, pressing deeper into her talented throat each time she sank down and relaxing my hips as she pulled away. One of her hands came up between my legs to cradle my heavy balls; this wasn't the desperate, pornographic fondling I had received so many times over the past month. This was gentle; an affectionate caress designed to bring pleasure, not to hurry along my release. The involuntary, strangled moan in my throat told both of us that it was having the desired effect.

My neck was arguing with itself, torn between the desire to hold my head up so that my eyes could watch Evie work and the almost overwhelming urge to let it loll back into the pillow. My eyes were being forced to stay open as her throat contracted, swallowing the copious amounts of precum leaking from my tip and sucking in deep, labored breaths each time my crown was pulled out of her throat. Her eyes remained locked on mine.

"Jesus... Evie." I panted as the cum-ladened balls beneath her featherlight fingers started to pull up into my body. The creases of her eyes stretched as her full mouth smiled around my length. "I'm close." She arched a single eyebrow; we both knew what she wanted to hear as she held me right on the very edge. "... please! ..."

The final begging plea was all she needed, despite my mind vowing playful revenge. Her fingers squeezed a little harder, milking the cum from my balls like over-ripened fruit. She pressed herself all the way forward, my balls and her fingers resting against her chin as her nose buried itself into my pubis, the suction increased, her tongue swirled and pirouetted around my shaft, rubbing against every millimeter of skin it could find and she swallowed. Again and again, her throat muscles squeezed around my crown as my manhood started to swell between her already stretched lips.

With a final whimpered groan and another revenant call of her name, I let go. My throbbing cock started to pulse, twitching as my orgasm raced up the length and exploded into her mouth. The first blast was almost explosive, firing straight into her throat before she pulled back, resting the head on her tongue and allowing the rest of my climax to splash against the roof of her incredible mouth before pooling on her tongue. My legs were trembling, my whole body was almost vibrating in orgasmic pleasure, my ragged, panting breaths were the only sound in the room as I looked down at her in wonder.

Evie swallowed. There was no dramatics, there was no desire to show off the load she had coaxed from me, nor was there a need to over-emphasize what she had done with it. She simply swallowed, her eyes never leaving mine for a second. "Wow," I gulped. "Just... wow."

She popped my manhood from her lips, her eyes briefly flicking down to it before pressing her lips affectionately against the tip and smiling up at me. "Good morning to you, too," she said with a wink.

She shuffled up the bed, finally resting her head on my shoulder, sighing contentedly as I turned my head to press my lips into her forehead. My mind almost instinctively wandered to hers, her avatar leaning affectionately up against me as I sat next to her on her log. At first, the silence confused me; expecting to hear some form of internal monologue, it took me a few minutes to realize that it wasn't a difficulty in reading her that accounted for the silence, but an overriding sense of contentment. She was basking in the glow, enjoying it, and there was nothing in the world that needed to be thought about instead of living in this moment. A small part of me fell in love with her all over again at the realization. Not even Becky had been this happy just to be with me. No sex, no conversation, no motive, no desires--just simple happiness. I seriously doubted that anyone else in my life had ever been this content to just lay with me.

The stillness of the moment was interrupted a few minutes later when my front door swung open and Jimmy walked in, followed closely by a grinning Lori. There was a small squeak next to me as Evie pulled the sheet over her head to hide from the sudden intrusion. I arched an eyebrow as my eyes met Jimmy's. "I am gonna regret giving you a key, aren't I?"

Jimmy smirked and sat down on one of the bar stools next to the breakfast bar in the kitchen area. "Hey, blame her," he nodded at Lori who only giggled in reply.

"Lori!" Evie scolded with a sheepish grin of her own as she uncovered her head again and glared at her friend. "Why? Just... why?"

"It's about time that I get to be the disapproving friend." Lori shrugged, still laughing.

Evie turned to look at me at the same time as I turned to look at her, our eyes meeting for only a moment. Her thoughts told me what she was thinking: aside from the unexpected intrusion, she had no regrets about our night together "Are you embarrassed?" she asked me playfully.

"Nope."

"Good, me neither. Now, if you don't mind..." she eyeballed both of our new guests, lifted her arm and twirled her finger around, gesturing for them to turn their backs to us. Jimmy chuckled and spun around in his seat. "You too!" She scolded Lori again, drawing another giggle as Lori turned her back to us.

She leaned out of the bed, my eyes roaming the bare skin of her back as she reached out for my shirt which was still sitting in the place it had fallen the night before. She stepped out of bed, my eyes taking in her naked figure as she pulled the shirt on. I hadn't paid a huge amount of attention to it the previous night, but her body was magnificent, even from the back. Her shoulders narrowed down to a delicate waist before flaring invitingly out to her hips, and her ass was a sight to behold. She turned to look at me over her shoulder, flashing a little wink as she noticed where I was looking and wiggling her ass playfully before covering it up with the garment. I smiled widely in response. "I may need to borrow a toothbrush." She said in as calm a voice as she could muster.

I nodded to the door to the left of the bed, the only other one in the room. "Help yourself. Do you want me to bring your clothes in?"

"This one's a keeper!" Lori called from across the room, still laughing to herself.

"Shush you!" Evie shouted back, a smile pulling at her lips before thanking me and heading into the bathroom. I swung my legs out of bed, retrieving a pair of loose sweatpants from the chest of drawers next to it, and was pulling them on when Lori turned around.

"Yup, definitely a keeper!" She called out, her widened eyes fixed on my groin before I had the chance to turn around and make myself presentable.

"I knew you'd look!" Evie laughed from behind the door.

"No wonder you and him get on so well." I laughed, nodding towards Jimmy and tying the drawstring before collecting Evie's clothes and passing them around the door. The lyrical, almost musical sound of her thanking me echoed out of the bathroom just before being replaced with the sound of the shower being turned on.

I arched an eyebrow at Jimmy as he turned back to face me and he knew what I was thinking. "I think he's pissed 'cos he can't join her in there," he whispered comically to Lori. She only laughed again.

"I think I'm gonna have to invest in a deadbolt," I said with a wry grin as I walked over to the kitchen, flipping the switch on the Keurig and pulling a bottle of Dr. P from the fridge. "Keep out unwanted visitors."

"Might be a good idea. Wait, you're drinking coffee?"

"Not for me," I answered as the machine hissed and hummed to life. I poured a large glass for myself before putting the Dr. P back into the fridge. "You want one?" I asked, looking up at Lori.

"Oh, no thank you. I already drank this morning." She winked at Jimmy who almost choked on his own tongue. I didn't need to be able to read minds to know what they were talking about. "So," she said, drawing out the syllable as she leaned over the kitchen counter, her dress from the night before doing nothing to hide her cleavage as she looked at me. "Have a good night, last night?"

"I did." I smiled back, making a point of maintaining eye contact as Jimmy did the exact opposite.

"Care to share the details?"

"Nope," I said with a wink.

"Aw, come on," she teased. "You know she's gonna give them to me anyway."

"No, I won't," Evie called out as the door to the bathroom opened and she stepped back into the room. She looked dazzling with her damp hair tied in a loose ponytail and cast over one shoulder, still wearing my shirt over her top from the night before. I had almost forgotten how good she looked in those jeans, but there was something indescribably sexy about the way she looked in my shirt. She smiled and blushed a little as she noticed me looking before turning her attention back to Lori.

"Spoil sport." Lori playfully pouted. "What if I told you what we got up to last night?"

Jimmy choked on his tongue again.

"No, thanks," Evie and I said in unison as she stepped off the raised part of the room which contained my bed and into the kitchen area, kissing me on the cheek as I handed her a cup of steaming coffee and not questioning for a second how I knew how she liked it.

Even Jimmy noticed the smile on my face as he tried to remember how to breathe.

Lori huffed and checked the time on her phone. "Oh, we've got to be going soon."

"Have we?" Evie asked, looking confused.

"Yeah, dress shopping, remember?"

"Err... No. What dress?" Evie was squinting now, eyeing Lori from over her coffee cup.

"The dress... for the thing?"

"What thing?!? What are you talking about?"

A simple perusal of Lori's thoughts told me exactly what she meant. There was no dress, and there was no 'thing,' as if anyone needed mind-reading powers to tell that. Lori genuinely wanted to grill her friend for the details, not necessarily the sordid, blow-by-blow account of our time together, but all she knew for sure was that Evie had spent the night. She was excited and happy for her friend. Apparently, Jimmy had spent a good portion of the previous evening telling Lori how much of an outstanding guy I was, so neither of them was entirely sure if we had done more than just sleep.

It would appear that Jimmy's vow of celibacy hadn't survived the night with Lori either, and I had to force myself to tune out of her mind as pictures of her own escapades began a slide show behind her eyes. Contrary to 'looking for trouble,' as they had put it, they were up the stairs and into Jimmy's apartment less than five minutes after we were. I managed to tune out at the point where Lori had shredded Jimmy's shirt in her long-awaited conquest of my friend. As far as I could tell, the offending garment was still in pieces on his floor.

I did a quick mental sweep of the room. Lori was joyous; absolutely delighted that she had finally scored with Jimmy, but also inordinately pleased that Evie had come out of her shell a bit, and with an apparently decent guy, no less. Evie was in an almost euphoric state of mind. She thought she should be feeling awkward as she had done in every other one of her previous relationships after the first night together, and more so at the arrival of our guests. But the only thing that was even remotely concerning her about the whole situation was how utterly content she felt. She felt like she belonged.

Jimmy was just plain happy. Jimmy had gotten laid. Jimmy was always happy when he got laid.

I chuckled as the back and forth between the two ladies continued. By now, Evie had caught on but was still making Lori work for it. The slightest hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

"Evie, how could you forget? I've been talking about this... err... wedding for ages."

"Wedding? This is the first I'm hearing about it. Who is getting married?"

"My... um... my cousin."

"Oh, Jonny?" Evie asked, still trying to hide her smirk. "I thought he was already married."

"No, Gwen."

"Isn't Gwen like, fifteen years old?"

"Shut up, we're going dress shopping." Lori had given up on maintaining the lie. Evie rolled her eyes and finally let her smile show as she looked towards me. "Oh, I hate you." Lori had finally caught on and poked her tongue out as the rest of us burst into laughter.

Evie put down her finished cup of coffee and stepped towards me. "Well, apparently, I'm going dress shopping," she laughed and leaned up to kiss my cheek again. A small squeak escaped her mouth as I turned my head and pressed my lips against hers, surprising her.

"Alright, you two. Get a room." Jimmy chuckled.

"You're in my room." I quipped back before turning my attention back to Evie. She had picked up my phone and was tapping the display, waiting a couple of seconds before her phone dinged and then repeated the procedure on her own.

"There, numbers exchanged," she said with a smile. "I'll text you later in the week?" Her smile faltered a little as her confidence left her for a moment. As much as she knew how she felt, she was suddenly worried that she had overstepped.

"I'm looking forward to it," I smiled back before kissing her again. The two ladies said their goodbyes, Lori and Jimmy sharing a chaste kiss before they headed out the door. With one look over her shoulder at me and another happy smile, Evie followed Lori out of the apartment.

Jimmy turned and looked at me. "Should I even bother to ask?" he smirked.

"Nope," I smiled back and made my way over to my desk.

"Thought not." He laughed before crossing the room, dropping himself onto the couch, and loading up the Xbox as I went back to work on my college project.

* * * * * * * * * *

A games engine, for those not in the know, is a difficult concept to explain. Imagine, for a moment, that you are trying to build a house. You don't just walk up at an empty plot and start building. There are zoning laws and planning permission to take into account, the availability of power and water supplies, the cost of materials, tools, and equipment, architect and engineering plans, and even the laws of physics and the local weather come into play. Then there are the tools--where you get them from, knowing how to use them, which ones are needed, and who is going to operate them. When you build a house, a hell of a lot of work has already happened before the first brick is ever laid.

Essentially, this groundwork -- for lack of a better description -- is what a game engine is: it is a platform on which a game developer can build their game. It determines the level of graphics that can be used in the game, the number and complexity of the assets within it, the physics algorithms that will determine how each of them will interact, and the coding structure that will allow the programmers to develop their games.

Load up any game, any one at all, anything from Minecraft to the newest Grand Theft Auto title, and what you are looking at are the assets -- the blocks, the people, the cars, the buildings, the guns, the everything -- interacting with each other via the physics engine and rendered through the graphics engine in a way that the programmer wants them to so that you get a playable game.

It is the architecture behind any game. Maybe that would be a better way of putting it. But however you wanted to describe it, that is what I was trying to build. The problem with game engines is that very few of them are truly unique. Almost all of them are improvements on previous iterations and even the new ones that had been built from the ground up still heavily borrowed their construction from older generations. It was very much a case of 'this part works, so we will keep that, but we can improve this other part and call it new.' The one area in which these engines could be distinguished from their predecessors was in the field of artificial intelligence.

Now, I know what you're thinking: we aren't talking about some science fiction Skynet type of AI here, just a generic -- albeit elaborate -- system of "if this happens, then do that" to the point where the computer is able to manage the game assets without the programmer having to account for every single variable in a world of increasingly complex games. The final area of improvement was size. The better the engine, the bigger the game that could be fitted onto it. That is why even open-world games like Grand Theft Auto, or the Fallout series had to have border. The maps couldn't go on forever.

But what if they could? Sports games took up a large chunk of the gaming market, but there are only so many football fields in existence. It was the ever-increasing number of 'sandbox' games and first-person shooters that dominated the market. What if the next Modern Warfare game had the ability to generate huge, randomized maps, each one different from the last? What if the next GTA spanned not just a single intricate city, but an entire country? What if the newest addition to the Fallout or Skyrim franchises weren't restricted to a single, albeit large, map, but instead spanned an entire planet? And what if the game's AI was capable of populating those areas with enough visual detail and randomly generated tasks and quests -- without a programmer's input -- to keep them interesting and playable? That is what I was aiming for.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, I have said many times throughout this story that I was a shy and isolated child, mainly thanks to my parents, but I had tuned out my own bleak existence by delving into the world of video games. I had mastered every single one in my possession. I had built soaring cities whose residents lived in perpetual bliss. I had led grand armies on historic campaigns. I had battled demons, monsters, and zombie hordes and lived to tell the tale. From the seclusion of my bedroom, I had dominated galaxies and conquered worlds.

But as much as I loved them, as much as I had enjoyed every single game, each one had eventually ended. It didn't matter if I deleted my progress and started again or how complex the story's programming was, there was always the same plot, the same strategies, and there was always the same endpoint. Eventually, I would get bored and move onto the next pastime, that game being relegated to a shelf from whence it would rarely escape.

I was aiming to build something endless, or as close to endless as could be identified by a single player. There was only one game out at the time that came anywhere close to what I was imagining, and that was No Man's Sky. It was revolutionary in that it had randomly generated worlds, trillions of them. So many that no single player, not even a huge group of players, could ever hope to visit them all. In fact, it was so large that it was unlikely that every player combined could still visit every world. Yet, it was still limited, these worlds only had a certain number of variables to differentiate between them and what you did when you got there was restricted because most of the game engine was dedicated to its admittedly impressive size, rather than the functionality of the game. You could go to a new planet, walk around for a bit, maybe fight some local wildlife, build some shit, and that was about it. After the first thirty planets or so, it became quite repetitive.

It was playing this game that had first given me the idea. As I took off from my elaborately constructed base, flew out of the atmosphere, docked with the space station that was exactly the same in every system, sold my mined minerals for credits -- remembering that I had nothing left to spend them on - and hopped back into my ship to repeat the process for the umpteenth time, a thought occurred to me. What if each one of these planets was alive? What if every single one of them had the intricate detail of Grand Theft Auto, the backstory and questline of Fallout, and the cultural depth of Skyrim? What if each of them was a living, breathing, distinctive planet where people could be met, missions could be found and completed, and where whole story arcs could be discovered, lived through and completed before moving onto the next world instead of moving onto the next game?

"Isn't the whole thing a bit... much?" Jimmy asked as another green mutant thing fell to pieces in some overly dramatic cinematic mini-cut scene as he battled through Fallout 4. "I mean, look at this game: hours of fun." He grinned maniacally as he dispatched another irradiated monstrosity.

I spun around in my office chair to face him. Jimmy had said very little about the previous night since the girls had left an hour or so ago. He hadn't mentioned Evie at all, nor Lori, nor anything else that would have seemed completely out of character for me before the accident. He had evidently gotten used to my new playboy lifestyle better than I had. He had taken to regularly walking the few feet from his apartment to mine to play games simply because I had the nicer TV, and it would appear that this was what prompted his visit today, although the timing of it was all Lori. I didn't mind; in fact, I enjoyed his company, but with the third year of our course already a few weeks in, I was getting more and more concerned that his pep-talk from Professor Jacobs had gone to his head. As far as I could tell, he hadn't even looked at his final project, let alone done any work towards it. But still, his question was a valid one.

"All right, Fallout 4..." I started in reply. "It's a good game, there is no arguing about that. You've got the main quest which can only really be done in one or two ways up until a certain point, which you have to do, then it branches off into another point you have to do, then you can finish the game in three or four different ways..."

"Don't forget the side quests," He interrupted.

"And the side quests," I conceded with a roll of my eyes and a shake of my head. "But once you have finished the main quest in every different way, found and finished every side mission, found all the cool shit they have hidden in the map, built the best base you can, and completed all the DLC... then what?"

"What do you mean?"

"What do you do next? You can't buy another game, the map and the enemies can't really be changed, there is no real progress after the end of the story... So what do you do?"

"I dunno," he said with a shrug. "Start again, maybe?"

"And how many times could you do that before you got tired of the game completely?"

Jimmy frowned for a second as he considered the question. With his mind occupied elsewhere, he failed to take cover, his character taking a round to the head, which in turn, unceremoniously blew up. "Fuck!" He spat, throwing the controller down onto the couch next to him. "All right, I see your point. Maybe four or five times before I'd get bored of it."

"Okay, so what if, once you have finished in Boston, where the game is set, you take a walk over to Chicago or maybe down to New York. There are things to see and do on the way, maybe even whole story lines before you even get there. And once you've finished there, you decide to head down to Phili or keep heading west? What if, after seeing a dozen different cities, you decide to go back to Boston and the house you built is still there, what if there is a whole new story waiting for you that is based around the decisions you made the first time you were there? What if the faction you sided with and the decisions you made led to a real difference to the rest of the game world? What if these cities and the country around them are laid out so realistically, that you could actually go and find your real house in the game?"

"Dude, we're in the UK, I don't think Trans-Atlantic flights are still running in a post-apocalyptic reality." He shrugged again. I arched an eyebrow at him. "All right, yes, that does sound pretty cool. But c'mon, there are whole departments of eggheads with huge budgets working on these kinds of things in some massive software companies. Isn't this a bit much for you to be taking on for your final project?"

"Probably," I replied with a nonchalant shrug of my own and turned back to the computer.

Jimmy could only blink a few times before picking up the controller and resuming his quest from the last checkpoint. "Well, as long as you've thought about it."

It says a lot of my arrogance and sense of invincibility in those days to think that if Jimmy had been paying a little bit more attention, he would have seen lines of entirely self-invented code sprawling across my screen as if by magic. One trick I had learned through my many conquests over the past few weeks was to be able to look like I was doing something in the real world while being busy in either my bunker or in the mindscape, but even so, the typing of my fingers on the keyboard in no way correlated to the lines of code that were flying across the screen.

In my bunker, Jeeves and I were busy. My abilities and the self-editing aspect of my bunker had given me more than just a comprehensive understanding of computer game development. It had allowed me to understand the ways that a computer's software works on a fundamental level. Specifically, it allowed me to understand what a computer was capable of and it came as something of a surprise to me to find that modern computer hardware is grossly underutilized. We have all heard the rumor that humans only use 10 percent of their brain's capacity. And, apparently, the same could be said for computers. The way that coding systems were being used was unbelievably inefficient. and by writing a totally new coding language that streamlined the way that software and hardware interacted, I could speed up the process exponentially. More speed meant better performance and what I was creating was the equivalent of jet engine power in a propeller-powered world. It wasn't just faster; it was a completely new way of doing it.

"Have you given any thought to your project yet?" I asked without looking up. "Time is a-ticking."

"Mine is already almost finished." He answered with a smug grin as he wandered the electronic wasteland on the TV.

Even I was incapable of processing that nugget of information and working at the same time, so I turned around to face him with a look of utter astonishment on my face. "You're gonna have to run that one by me again." I said after a few blinks of my own.

Jimmy remembered to pause the game this time before turning back to face me, his smirk remaining firmly fixed to his face. "It's simple, I take the virtual reality interfaces for games like Modern Warfare, alter the code a little bit to make them more realistic... ammo count, health bars, that kind of thing, and then write up an essay on how this could replace training for the military or help with post combat therapies. Aside from writing up the theory, most of the work has already been done." he said with a triumphant look.

"O...kay..." I said with a squint. "I'm almost certain that this has already been thought of."

"Hey, nobody ever said anything about the idea needing to be original, just that it had to be a unique contribution to the world of game development," he answered with a shrug.

"And which part of yours is unique?"

"The theory, obviously." He looked genuinely confused by the fact that he had to point this out. "I have read all the other proposals for this idea and none of them have the Jimmy take on it. They lack both my prowess on Modern Warfare and my grasp of the applications of virtual reality."

"Grasp on virtual reality?" I scoffed, swallowing down a cough of surprise. "How did you get such a great grasp of VR?"

"Porn."

"Ah." There were a lot of follow up questions bouncing around my head, but none that I felt an immediate urge to vocalize. "Well, as long as you've thought about it."

That is how things stayed for the next six hours, Jimmy was battling his way from one mission to the next and thoroughly enjoying the game that my work would one day render obsolete. Meanwhile, I was well and truly in the zone. Those six real-world hours translated into well over a week in my bunker where I was doing the work, the code coming on screen as my mind interfaced with the computer in front of me as fast as the processor would allow it. My fingers were just randomly moving over the keyboard, but Jeeves had kindly pointed out a skill that allowed the mind to send information directly to the machine. He called it the MMI, the man-machine interface, and it would grow to become one of my more useful skills as my understanding of my powers grew. By the end of those long hours, the basics of the new coding language had not only been designed, but had been implemented onto my PC. The difference in response times was incredible.

A computer is basically a series of electronic signals, and if you could slow down time enough to see the individual processes -- as I could -- you could measure how fast it was by timing the delay between the input and the output. Think of typing, something that most children are familiar with. Your finger pushes a button on the keyboard that sends a signal to the corresponding slot on the motherboard which then sends a signal to the CPU -- the microchip. That chip translates that input, interfaces with the word processing software via the computer's operating system, which in turn, sends a signal to the graphics card. The end result being that it sends the signal to the monitor to display the corresponding symbol on the screen--all of that just happens very quickly.

Scale that up to the actual functionality of the computer as a whole and you are left with an idea of how computer speed works, albeit a very basic one. The computer before me was pretty advanced already, any computer tasked with designing complex games needed to be. But with the new coding language implemented throughout its system, it was now running at speeds comparable to a low-grade super-computer. It was more than capable of going even faster, but although the operating system now ran on my new code, the applications it was running weren't. This lag in translation was slowing it down considerably.

It was amazing what could be achieved with a few hundred hours of work when your knowledge and comprehension of a subject was being augmented by the self-editing station and the time-dilation attributes of my bunker. But with the computer now capable of handling the workload, I was about ready to start working on the actual game's engine itself. But first it was time for a break. My mind was capable of working at this level almost indefinitely but being hunched over a keyboard for that long was playing hell with my back.

I sat myself up straight and rolled my neck, feeling the satisfying pops as the tension in my spine released itself before getting up and heading to the kitchen. Working like this required energy, and although it was possible to get a few hours of bunker sleep in a few short real-world minutes, food seemed to be the more logical option. Besides, I hadn't eaten anything since the day before and my stomach was starting to growl in protest. I still hadn't quite gotten the hang of my body's new nutritional requirements. Although it would seem that I was capable of going for long periods of time without food or rest, my body would rather I didn't.

I was halfway through making myself a simple sandwich when a strange feeling washed over me. Jimmy's head jerked up, a strange look on his face as he stared blankly at a small point on the living room wall for a few seconds. He stood up, letting the Xbox controller fall from his hands and onto the couch before turning towards the door. "I have to go," he announced in a vacant, monotone voice and strode towards the exit.

"Huh?" I blinked at him as he pulled the door open. "You okay, dude?"

"Yes. Fine." He answered simply, then walked out of the apartment, leaving the door open behind him. I was about to jump into his mind to see what was going on when another presence washed over me, a warmly familiar one.

"Jesus." Charlotte beamed as she strode into my apartment and closed the door behind her, "I thought he would never leave. I've been sitting in my car for an hour!"

"Did you just..." my frowning gaze flicked from Jimmy's vacant spot on the couch and to the door.

"Yup." She nodded with a wry grin. "Impressive, right? Although controlling someone like that gives me one hell of a headache."

"How did you..."

She was obviously expecting the question, either that or she was somehow already in my mind without me knowing it. "Oh, it's easy when you know how." She waved her hand dismissively. "Young Jimmy has an almost irresistible urge to clean his stove... immediately."

"I'm not sure he would appreciate that," I said with a grin of my own.

"I'm sure he'll live." She quipped back; her look of mirth still splayed across her features. "And judging from his memories, it could really use a good cleaning."

I shook my head with a small chuckle. Jimmy's head would explode if he had even the slightest notion of what had just happened, but even I had to concede, it was inconceivable that he would piece it together on his own. "So, what brings you to my humble abode?" I asked as Charlotte crossed the room and leaned herself against the breakfast bar.

"Sex." She answered a little too quickly.

"What?"

"You've had sex." She smirked.

"Erm..." I could feel the flush burn in my cheeks as I recounted not only the previous encounter with Evie, but the other girls who had made it back to my apartment in the month since I had last seen Charlotte.

"Oh, that many, eh?" her smirk grew into a full grin. "Oh, relax, Petey," she said, as she finally let that dazzling smile spread to her cheeks "Evo men are expected to take a lot of women, it's the only real way of propagating the species."

"What about women?" I asked, letting myself relax as instructed.

"Um..." she pondered her answer for a few seconds. "We can be pretty promiscuous as well, but we can only add to the species one child at a time. Once we are knocked up, our sex drive drops dramatically for those nine months, so we only tend to hook up with other Evos. It makes it more likely to birth a gifted child. But imagine how many human women a man could knock up in that time if he put his mind to it? Human men are a fun distraction, but the chances of a gifted child are a lot lower for some reason, it means we aren't as attracted to them." She shrugged as she tore off a chunk of my untouched sandwich. "It's a biological imperative. You can't fight nature."

"Right..." I squinted. "So, the men sleep with as many women as they can..."

"And the women don't," she finished for me.

"Hardly seems fair."

She thought about this for a moment. "Do you remember what I said about being inside an Evo's mind being the most intimate act we have?" I nodded. "Once an Evo has bonded with another, the physical act of sex, especially between an Evo and another human, just doesn't seem that important. Jealousy isn't really a thing in our society."

"Bonded?"

"Oh, that's a whole other lesson." She chuckled as she swallowed another mouthful of my sandwich. "Talking of which, that brings me to why I am here. Have you heard anything more from Marco?"

"Not a word." I shook my head as I slid the plate closer to her and started making another sandwich for myself, sacrificing the first to Charlotte.

She also shook her head, adding an exasperated sigh. "Fucking useless!" She muttered to herself as she pulled the plate closer and hoisted herself onto one of the barstools. "You know, I cannot believe how badly he has handled this. If I didn't know better, I would say it was done on purpose."

"Handled what?"

"Your training," she said, her hands waving animatedly around. "You think we are born knowing how to do stuff like that?" She gestured back to Jimmy's absence on the couch.

"Aren't we?" I asked. With the exception of Charlotte unlocking my city and showing me how to enter minds, I had worked out to do almost everything else myself. Although her outright control of Jimmy was, admittedly, far beyond what I thought I was capable of. That being said, she didn't have a Jeeves.

Why, thank you, Sir. I appreciate your confidence in me.

"Not now, Jeeves."

"Of course not," she answered with a frown. "Some of it is instinct, and I'm guessing that a lot of yours has to do with the strength of your powers and the fact that you were an adult when you were awoken. We don't really know what effect that level of maturity will have on your education, but no, we have to be taught and Marco, I'm assuming, is supposed to be your teacher."

"You assume?"

"Let me finish," she said with a playful smile. "Marco is fucking it up. So, I have decided to train you myself."

"Cool. Sounds good to me. When do we start?"

Charlotte blinked a few times. "Now, obviously."

"Oh, sorry."

"Anyway, the last time we were in that impressive little head of yours..." she tapped her finger against her forehead, "...I sort of told you about the split between my part of Evo society and the rest of it. So, we will start there. Let's call it 'Evo Societal History 101' and we will build from there. You've gotta know where we started before you can really understand where you fit in. We can get to training individual abilities another time." She swallowed the last mouthful of her sandwich just as I finished making mine. She looked around the room, her eyes finally settling on the empty space between the TV -- still showing the same point in the game as it was when Jimmy was compelled to leave -- and the sofa. "Come on," she said with a smile, stood from her seat and walked across the apartment.

I took one last look at my untouched sandwich, sighed and followed her into the living area. "I'm gonna starve at this rate," I mumbled to myself.

Charlotte smiled as I approached, positioned herself to face me and sat on the floor, gesturing to a spot a few feet in front of her to do the same. Once I was sitting in the same cross-legged position as her, she placed her hand on her knees and took in a deep breath. "Okay," she said in a calm voice, "I want you to rest your hands on your knees like I have, take a deep breath, close your eyes and exhale with a deep 'Ohhhhhhmmmm' sound. Try to clear your mind."

I nodded slowly, placing my hands on my knees as she had done, taking a deep breath, closing my eyes and exhaling. "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm." Charlotte burst out laughing.

"I can't believe you fell for that! You watch way too much TV." She laughed. "I'm just fucking with you. Just make yourself comfortable and shift a little closer. We have to be touching. Remember?"

I chuckled; I had no issue with being the butt of a joke if she was willing to train me like this. I scooted closer to her, still in the cross-legged position, until our knees were almost touching. Charlotte smiled at me. I had almost forgotten how staggeringly beautiful she was. She reminded me of a young Liz Hurley, and her smile lit up her face in a way that only Evie could compete with. She reached out her hand to mine. "Ready?"

"As ready as I will ever be." I took another deep breath and let my hand reach out for hers.

As soon as we touched, existence melted away.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The issue with anything I have learned from Charlotte is the difficulty in translating those lessons into words for my tale. Yes, there were times that she spoke, but usually our lessons in the mindscape were more like watching a narration layered over a series of images and memories. Some of those memories were hers, but the overwhelming majority were ones that she had been given by others, and some of those had been received second-hand as well. I came to understand a lot of what I knew about the Evos came from Charlotte's interpretation of second, third, and sometimes even fourth-hand memories that had been passed down through the generations. It was the equivalent of watching a documentary about the Second World War, made up entirely of the eye-view perspective of lots of different people, and narrated by someone who wasn't even alive when it happened. To say it was confusing was a huge understatement. But, as with many things in this story, I will try to translate as best I can.

In the beginning, there was Maria, or at least that's how Marco told it. She wasn't the beginning, even he had conceded that point, but she was the one credited with bringing the first known group of Evos together. That first assembly had taken place in the small town of Ulm in Germany around the turn of the 1400s. Over the course of a few years, they designed an almost cult-like secret society called 'The Conclave,' roughly based around the Catholic Church; there was a leader -- the Archon -- and varying lesser ranks beneath him.

The purpose of the Conclave wasn't as straightforward as you might imagine. The church, for example, was based around a shared belief, a communal place of worship where those beliefs were reinforced and spread. The Conclave was more like an imagined nation, a shared sense of identity that separated the first Evos from the rest of the world. This identity, however, was not based around geography, ethnic identity or a shared history like other nations of the time, but around the very real biological differences between its members and the rest of humanity. It was a place of learning, a place to share ideas, a place to explore abilities in safety and, as it grew, a place to guarantee the security of its members.

Each new acolyte was made aware of, and expected to uphold, certain responsibilities -- these would eventually become laws -- the number of which were mind-boggling. But the absolute highest of these was the need for secrecy. One fact that is as true today as it was all those centuries ago is that humanity is dangerous, and it fears nothing more that something different. Different cannot be understood, what cannot be understood cannot be controlled, and what cannot be controlled is a threat. Despite their obvious power compared to the average human, the Conclave were no match for the rest of the world in terms of sheer numbers. The Evos that found themselves exposed to mankind were, without exception, killed. It was a painful lesson that the Conclave took on board very early on.

Each rank below the Archon was expected to oversee the training and security of the rank below it. Each member of the lower rank was assigned to a mentor in the rank above, and this mentor would train the apprentice in how to make the most out of their abilities, the power of which varied massively from person to person. As cringe-worthy as it may seem, you wouldn't be far off course if you were to think of all this in the same terms as the Jedi Order in Star Wars. The mentors were also directly responsible for maintaining the discipline and security of their subordinates and, in many cases, this was enforced with a merciless iron fist.

The difference between The Conclave and the Church -- or even the Jedi Order - however, came when you looked at the manner with which these ranks were achieved. There were no experience requirements, there was absolutely zero chance of promotion, no need for respect or superiority, there was no list of achievements or accolades that were taken into consideration, and you could never graduate. There was only power.

A rank was earned simply by the virtue of how powerful an individual was.

This meant that the mentor was, and always would be, significantly more powerful than the people beneath them and there were many tales of the punishments dished out for lapses in the Conclave's expectation of secrecy. Charlotte had already taught me about duelling and the damage that could be done by one Evo against another. A more powerful mentor could easily breach the walls of a wayward apprentice and compel them, by force if necessary, to follow the rules. And if that didn't work, a subordinate could be drained of their powers at their will, have their memories wiped and simply be cast out. The rank system was permanent, and the rules they passed down to those assigned to them were to be followed without question. It was the only way, they thought, to guarantee the safety of the whole collective.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. In a society still made up overwhelmingly of serfs and the peasantry, being born into power was a simple and universally accepted fact of life. You were born into a class and, invariably, you would die in it. But as the ranks of the Conclave solidified into a bonafide class structure, a toxic mix of ego and avarice set in; ranks became forbidden to mix with one another outside of the various apprentice-master relationships. There was an almost god-like reverie for the class above yours, and utter contempt for the class below. Any mixing between the two, even outside the walls of the Conclave, may not have been strictly forbidden, but was certainly a subject of scorn, mockery, punishment and -- in extreme cases -- banishment.

Over the course of the next few centuries after the Conclave's founding, Evo numbers had exploded. A mix of pestilences and epidemics coupled with the dramatic increase in the human population led to more and more instances of unborn fetuses contracting diseases which caused the Evo mutation. Almost all of the known members of this new species found their way to the Conclave; they were welcomed, awakened, assigned a rank based in their power, and then spent the remainder of their very long lives in service to the new society.

But again, this is where the issues of translation come into play. Even as I was told this, I had pictures in my mind of large, ornate, church-looking halls filled with Evos bowing and scraping to the ranks above them. Living their lives like monks, confined to a single building and dedicating themselves to the good of the Conclave. But I was wrong. The Conclave itself rarely met in one physical location. Its members were free to go about their lives in much the same way they always had done, but there were certain commitments that had to be honored. If one member was discovered, for example, the others were obligated to offer assistance if they could. Much like an extreme predecessor of the Underground Railroad, this could involve hiding fugitives or killing their pursuers or anything else to help their brethren. But the overriding goal of every Evo was to work their way into positions of power within their own communities.

It was rare for individual members of the Conclave to meet in person outside of scheduled gatherings, an example of which would be the party that Marco had invited me to in a few short weeks, and was almost exclusively either between a mentor and one of his apprentices, or a chance meeting during the course of their day-to-day lives like had happened with Charlotte and me. An apprentice's training was done in the mindscape over several very short spans of real-world time. They were given the rules they were meant to live by, occasionally assigned a specific task and, aside from being expected to attend the gatherings, were left to their own devices accruing more and more power. It was a system that was wildly successful.

As with many orders like this one, the Conclave became indescribably powerful, able to influence monarchs and merchants to do their bidding almost at will. People these days talk about conspiracies such as the New World Order, a shadowy group of powerful individuals who pull the strings of governments, international corporations and military institutions, and although such an organization would normally seem laughable to an educated person, this is exactly what came to exist in the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance era. The Conclave was, in a very real sense, the power that drove the world. It was a power that they wielded with complete disregard for the humans that power would affect.

There was, however, a fatal flaw in the system. The Middle Ages were a time of almost universal religious belief. Everyone believed in God and everyone followed the teachings of the Church, and the members of the Conclave were no exception. It would seem that the existence of the Evo mutation was seen by the members of the Conclave as proof of the hand of God at work. He had personally ordained them to guide humanity. Whatever the rationale, humanity's reverence of the Catholic Church seems to have been as present in the Conclave as it was everywhere else, and being the institution that was founded by one of Jesus' disciples, the respect that the Conclave held for the Church forbade any Evo from finding their place of power within it.

This would turn out to be the Conclave's Achilles' heel.

As the Conclave wielded power with impunity, its effects started to become more and more apparent to other institutions able to see it. It is important to remember that there were no methods of long-distance communication in the 14 and 1500s. News of an event would take months to travel from one side of the old world to the other and often would never make it there at all. So, a Conclave-play for power in London, for example, would rarely, if ever, be known by the people living in Constantinople. There were only a few institutions other than the Conclave capable of seeing the bigger picture and the most capable -- and by far the most powerful - of these was the Vatican.

Through strict adherence to religious teachings and blind reverence to the supremacy of the Church, the Conclave had constructed their own blind spot. No Conclave member was allowed to build their power base in opposition to the Vatican because the Church held primacy no matter what. But when push came to shove and the leaders of grand armies and local officials were forced to choose between their commitments to the Conclave and their allegiance to the Church, there was no competition. When the Church eventually demanded it, the institutions that the Conclave had spent decades infiltrating turned on them with a single word from the Pope.

The more extreme instances of the Conclave's thirst for power finally and inevitably drew the wrath of the Church. Able to disseminate orders beyond the sight of the Conclave, the Church acted to stem the perceived threat of the Evos with merciless and ferocious effectiveness. The Spanish Inquisitions, the European witch trials and the countless accusations of heresy were, in most cases, thinly veiled attacks on the Evo society. Nations such as the Netherlands and England, for example, thought by the Vatican -- correctly -- to be powerbases of the Evo, were invaded by righteous armies with Papal mandate. Hundreds of thousands were killed, perhaps millions over the course of numerous Holy wars. But despite the vast majority of those casualties being ordinary humans, thousands of Evos were killed in the process. Somehow, though, through all this, the main structure and security of the Conclave remained a secret and mostly intact. Individual Evos were hunted down without mercy and they, along with anyone thought to have aided them, were executed with nothing more than a show trial. The branch of the Church tasked with the systematic hunt for the Evos became known as the Inquisitors, it would be a century or more before Evo society realized the biological difference between the rest of the church and those who made up the ranks of the people hunting them.

But an unexpected benefit of the Conclave social structure stopped a massacre from becoming all out annihilation. Individual Evos knew nothing of the whereabouts of other members, even within their own rank and certainly nothing of the ranks above them. The strict and rigid class structure of the Conclave that had forbade fraternisation between the ranks had turned it into something resembling a modern day terrorist cell network and had allowed it to survive.

As the Renaissance dawned some 300 years after the founding of the Conclave, and the Age of Enlightenment spread through humanity, new ways of thinking started to pervade. The idea that a man's worth could not be judged by the manner of his birth and that a rigid and immobile class structure were bad for a society started to gain popularity within the Conclave, despite fierce opposition from the higher ranks. Arguments became heated, sometimes turning violent, civil war became a real and very possible fear and this was all on top of the relentless threat posed by the inquisitors. Using the cracks in the system caused by the Church attacks, a group of Conclave members decided to act. Under the backdrop of the American War of Independence, a few hundred of the more disillusioned members -- some of whom were old enough to have witnessed the Conclave's foundation -- broke away from the rest of Evo society, retreating into hiding and weathering the inevitable storm from their former friends and being left to fend for themselves against the Church.

Despite all odds, and after suffering enormous proportional casualties, the new sect -- choosing not to give themselves some auspicious name -- survived. Barely a quarter of the numbers that had fled the Conclave remained alive, scattered all over the globe but, through sheer force of will and a granite-hard resolve to protect each other, they thrived.

They had learned the lessons of their forebears. The search for power was outlawed, and the use of an Evo's power on the human population was to be limited to only as much as was necessary for their survival. Over the course of a century, the members of this new Sect moved to Britain where the power of the Church was weakest. They set themselves up as doctors, teachers, employers, politicians, important and revered members of society just like the old Conclave mandate, but benevolent ones. Any member of the new Sect attacked by the Church would find whole communities of humans ready to defend them. But, strangely, these attacks never came.

The class structure was also completely dissolved. It would be years before the realization that it was this structure that had allowed the Conclave to survive but the Sect valued absolute equality of its members above the need for self-preservation. It was run by a council of seven members. Each member was nominated and voted for by the rest of the Sect and would hold that position permanently. If a council member was determined to be unfit for office, they could be removed, either by the other council members or by a vote from the rest of the Sect, at any time. Every decision was completely transparent and, being geographically located -- for the most part -- to a single small nation, the Sect gathered for meetings on a frequency that was unheard of in the Conclave. As far as I could tell, Charlotte felt that they constituted an almost second family for their members. She knew almost every other member of the Sect personally and, if necessary, would drop whatever she was doing to come to the aid of any one of them. For someone lacking even the most basic of familial connections, I would be lying if I said that those kinds of bonds didn't hold an appeal. But it would take decades after the schism -- as it came to be known -- for the modern Sect to grow into something resembling its current form.

The first puzzles that had plagued those early years was to explain why -- for the most part -- they had been left alone by the Church. It had been proven in the years since then that the Inquisitors were very aware of the internal struggles within the Conclave and had followed the schism with great interest. But although their zealous attacks on the Conclave persisted, they had almost ignored the new Sect entirely. It was a question that, to this day, still hadn't been answered to anyone's satisfaction. The most popular theory was that it was the Conclave itself with its relentless thirst for power that was the Church's main target, and by separating themselves from it, the new Sect was no longer a means to bring down their old institution. But even that was a best guess, and not a great one at that.

It was the Conclave itself that posed by far the greatest threat to the new Sect. With Evos able to detect each other over vast distances, individual Sect members were hunted down by their former brethren with relentless zeal. Whether it was through a sense of betrayal or the thought that they could compromise the Conclave as a whole was anyone's guess, but after their numbers dropped to dangerously low levels, the Sect was forced to implement a universal teaching program to its members to ensure their proficiency at duelling. Taking an Evo life was still the highest of all crimes, as it had once been in the Conclave, but allowances were now made for self-defense. Sect losses slowly dropped off as Conclave members were beaten back, eventually leading to the two institutions living in relatively peaceful, albeit suspicious, co-existence.

The second puzzle, one brought up by the Conclave attacks, was that of recruitment. Any un-awakened Evo was a potential enemy of the new Sect and eradicating the children of their own species was simply not an option. So, they started a recruitment drive of their own, taken straight from the play book of their former masters. They would sense a child ready to be awoken and get there to welcome them before the Conclave did. With training geared towards staying off the radar and being able to defend themselves if that failed, these new initiates became expert infiltrators and many of them faked another awakening to work their way into the Conclave, feeding the Sect information and warning members of an impending attack. It would seem from her intimate knowledge of the modern Conclave that Charlotte had once been one such member. It didn't take me long to realize that Marco was a loyal member of the Conclave whereas Charlotte was obviously in the Sect camp and the disdain that she held for Marco was no secret.

It was an odd feeling, to be taught like this. As the lesson went on it became clearer that Marco, assuming he had been assigned as my mentor for the Conclave, had seriously mishandled my initiation, and the memory of Charlotte's reaction to that missing information when we first met became easier to understand.

Like I said, Fucking useless!

If I was understanding it correctly, Marco should have awoken me and immediately told me about the Conclave, assigned me a rank and initiated me into the order, a process that was extremely difficult to undo. Even if he had been pressed for time, the concept of leaving me that night without the slightest notion of how to unlock my city, duel, block, or perceive a threat from other Evos, not to mention the Inquisitors, was an enormous lapse of responsibility on his part. The error seemed to be more apparent when Charlotte told me that it was incredibly rare for a newly indoctrinated member of the Conclave to even hear out a member of the Sect, let alone allow himself to be associated with one. The fact that she was teaching me the things that Marco had failed to, and I was still expected to attend Marco's party, was a massive boon to the Sect. Apparently, they were watching my progress with great interest.

The modern relationship between the Conclave and the Sect was a hard one to quantify. Judging the Sect's attitude towards the Conclave was difficult; even Charlotte had to concede that her opinions -- and my education -- were filtered through the lens of the memories that she was sharing with me, memories from people who had a very real and very justifiable fear of the Conclave. Yet Charlotte herself felt very little fear of them. It would be some time before I fully understood her relationship with the Conclave, but much like the rest of the Sect, she viewed them in the same way modern Americans view the slave trade: distasteful, misguided, downright abhorrent, but something to be learned from and never repeated. To her, the Conclave of history and the Conclave of today were entirely different beasts, and the modern Conclave was to be watched, never trusted, but not openly feared. But the lessons to maintain a safe distance from the Conclave were never far away from anything she said.

There was a cautionary tale that Charlotte taught me, one which had been told to Sect children since the founding of the order. It was the tale of three brothers, a tale that had become almost folklore in the sect. In a twist of irony, the real story -- I would later learn -- was that of two brothers and a sister. For a society who prided themselves on equality of all men, gender equality was apparently a step too far, but I digress. A series of typhoid epidemics in the Spanish city of Malaga hit one particular family very hard during the late 16^th Century, the mother catching the illness while pregnant with twins. Miraculously, all three survived and two healthy baby boys started their journey to adulthood while their mother made a full recovery. A few years later, another outbreak hit the family again. The mother was pregnant, this time with a baby girl and again, somehow both mother and child survived.

When the older twins were about seven years old, another outbreak hit, and once again, both parents caught it, this time succumbing and dying of the disease, leaving the children to fend for themselves. As children in these situations often do, they banded together, looked out for each other and, through sheer grit and determination -- along with some strange but useful abilities -- made it to their teenage years when, one day, a man sensed them, awakened them all on the same night, and brought them to the Conclave.

They were welcomed to their new family, were washed, fed, given clothes and then, Judged.

The youngest of the twins was the most powerful and placed into one of the highest ranks. The older was only a single rank lower. The sister was the weakest of the three, being placed only one rank higher than the bottom rung of the class ladder. It was then that they learned that they would never be able to see or interact with each other again. Even the briefest of hello's or the most subtle of nods would be grounds for severe punishment during their training. These children, who had relied on each other and bonded over their very survival, were torn apart by a society that promised to save them. The oldest twin was Charlotte's grandfather, and one of the members who would later split from the Conclave. Age and life expectancy, I was quickly learning, was a very fluid concept among Evos.

It was a strange and oddly humbling experience to watch not only his life, but his initiation into the Conclave, his time there, his struggles and eventual escape through the lens of his own eyes. I suppose it was a lesson that was somewhat lost on me. I could see that its moral was to show the breakdown of any bonds you had if you were to join the Conclave, but I didn't have any bonds to break down. Although rebelling against the compulsory dedication of your life to a cause that was almost forced upon you was one that I could understand. I had no desire for power, and the Conclave's almost pathological quest for it was already something that I could see myself rejecting.

But as the intricacies of the relative recruitment techniques were explained to me, I somehow overlooked one simple detail, one that would become a huge part in my later life. I remember it being said, it just didn't seem relevant at the time, but it came in the form of a simple statistic. The process of a child being sensed, and summarily awakened, was a lot more complicated than I had thought. They had to be powerful enough to be sensed in the first place, and geographically close enough to another Evo powerful enough to sense them and then, in the Conclave's case, be close enough to an available Mentor to be initiated properly. This meant that of all the Evo children born in the world, less than 30% were ever found and awakened. With only a rough correlation between parental lineage and the possession of powers, there was virtually no way to track or predict an Evo child's birth, so being discovered was something of a fluke, a statistical anomaly combining the child's relative power with the geographical availability of someone capable of sensing and awaking them. There were hot spots, of course; Chernobyl and the children born in the aftermath of the nuclear fallout caused a massive spike in the number of Evo births, as did the Cholera outbreaks of the early industrial revolution and the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic. But for more than two-thirds of Evo children, being found and brought into either fold, Conclave or Sect, simply never happened. More importantly, nobody seemed to know what happened to them.

Regardless of all this talk of recruitment, I never got the impression that Charlotte was actually trying to enlist me into the Sect, nor, did it seem, was she actively trying to dissuade me from joining the Conclave either. It seemed to genuinely be something of a history lesson. History was something I had always enjoyed at school and was my second choice of university majors if computer game development hadn't been available. So, I found this completely tangent history of an entirely unknown human sub-species fascinating.

Watching the faces and these people flash through my mind was a little harder to explain. Learning about a certain time frame, for example, or a certain person, from books is all well and good but a student would never really know what that person looked like, or how they sounded -- if you went back before the age of photography, at least. So, when a face flashed before my eyes, it was surprising to find that I instinctively knew who they were. William Shakespeare looked nothing like his portraits, neither did Oliver Cromwell or King Louis XVI. George Washington wasn't quite as tall as everyone made out and the real reasons behind Benedict Arnold's betrayal of the American revolutionaries suddenly had a whole new dimension. Imagine a memory of a conversation you had with someone a year ago, but you are able to recall it with perfect clarity; the color of their eyes, the way their lips moved when they talked, the smell of their cologne or their breath, the way their hand felt when you shook it, the place it happened, even the weather at the time. These tiny, almost imperceptible details are impossible to convey on paper, and so inconsequential at the time that you would never think to record them, yet they all make up part of the picture that tells you about that person and your interaction with them. It sets the scene, so to speak, and there were hundreds of them.

I could recall, with uncanny clarity, a conversation that someone had had with Joan of Arc, someone fighting alongside Lord Charles Cornwallis, fighting against Lord Cornwallis, discussing scientific theory with Leonardo DaVinci, watching Lincoln make his second inaugural address, travelling to the far East with Marco Polo, Opening the tomb of Tutankhamun, finding the new world with Columbus, exploring the African sub-continent with David Livingston and hearing those famous words first hand.

Dr. Livingston, I presume.

Some of mankind's most memorable moments were suddenly in my mind to be browsed and re-lived at my leisure, in exactly the same way that my memory of Olivia had been a few weeks earlier. It was incredible. What was even more astonishing was the fact that I could somehow tell that these memories came from only a handful of people in the Sect. A memory had been shared with another Evo, who in turn and shared it with another, who had passed it on to someone else, all the way down the line of history to me. But there was more, so much more, that had been lost during the schism. It was one of the few things that the members of the Sect mourned from their separation with the Conclave. Not every memory of every Conclave member had been shared with every other member. It was only those you were lucky enough to encounter that were passed on. There was a vast, unimaginable source of history contained within the minds of the Conclave Evos that were lost to the Sect and it grieved them deeply. Memories of every point in history, every major event and every person of significance for the past 700 years was contained, in vivid detail, in the vaulted recesses of the Conclave psyche. Their questionable thirst for power aside, it was almost enough to get me to sign up immediately.

Over the years, as I would meet more Evos and as my powers grew, a whole new historical timeline would become clearer. Parallel, influencing and yet entirely separated from the history taught in high schools all over the world. The Conclave, with their lust for control, had influenced human history far more than the vast majority of people could even imagine and in their move to separate themselves from the Conclave, and the Sect had made just as significant an impact.

What was more amazing, and something that I still hadn't quite gotten used to was the fact that Charlotte and I had been conversing in the mindscape for hours. If we had been talking in the real world, the sun would have set long ago and the new dawn would be approaching, yet less than a few minutes had passed outside of the mindscape. Despite the enormous amount of time I had spent in my bunker, or wandering my city, in the month since my awakening, - not to mention the day's work on my University project - the dilation of time between the mind and the world outside of it was something that still astounded me.

Charlotte seemed perfectly happy to talk and share those memories as we idly wandered the streets of my city, her hand, more often than not, linked with mine. It was still a novel position for me to be in. I had something of a relationship already with Becky, and the beginnings of one with Evie, but this simple act of intimacy in no way contained the guilt -- or the thrill, if you are that way inclined -- of cheating. It was if each relationship was on their own separate plane of existence. Becky was my human relationship, Charlotte was, in a way, my Evo one. I still had no idea where to place Evie's, but they all seemed entirely independent of each other, not intertwined or connected in any way other than the fact that I was in them. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my entire life was run in the same way; there was my life as a human, with my human friends, my human concerns and commitments, my human relationships, my human desires for wealth, success and happiness, and then there was my Evo life, completely separate from my human one and one that I was only just beginning to explore.

"A lot of us feel like that." Charlotte smiled, stopping for a second to gaze in wonder at one of the many plazas we had passed on our walk. This one seemed to commemorate the day that I left home, a grey marble statue of myself, suitcase at my feet, staring off into the future was surrounded by ornate fountains and perfectly manicured gardens. Ghosts and motes of light flitted around the open space in the same casual manner as my own stroll with Charlotte. "It's a function of the mind," she continued as we resumed our wandering. "We are biologically programmed to keep our Evo identity secret from society, it's a survival mechanism, it's instinct... Darwinism in practice. If our mind was incapable of separating those identities so completely, mistakes would happen which could lead to public exposure. Historically speaking, that meant death." She let her sentence fade off as a mote of light shot over our heads and off into the distance, her eyes raising to follow it. "What do you think they are?" She asked, changing the subject.

"I thought you would know," I answered, my own eyes tracking the light as it faded into the distance.

"No, I mean, the ghosts I understand. They are no different from mine, there are just less of them. I have never seen those lights before."

"Jeeves?"

"They are impulses, Sir. Spontaneous thoughts in their purest form."

"Cool, thanks."

I relayed the information on to Charlotte. "Who is Jeeves?" She asked with a quizzical smile.

"How do you..."

"We're in your head," she said through her smile. "It's the same way that you can receive those memories. There are no secrets in here, that's one of the reasons we consider it to be so intimate. Compared to this, we could jump out of here and have wild, rampant sex and it would be no more significant to either of us than if we had coffee."

"Oh." I blushed slightly at the idea of the sex, not because she mentioned it, but at the hardening in my pants at the idea, I didnt miss the wry grin from my companion as I did. "Let me see if I can do this." I squeezed her hand slightly, consciously pressing my memories of all my interactions with Jeeves into her. Her eyes flickered a few times before refocusing.

"Wow," she said after a few slack-jawed seconds. "So, you actually communicate... like, real, two-way communication... with your own subconscious?"

"Err... Yeah, I guess so."

"That is..." her lips floundered for a second as her mind raced to find a suitable word. "That is fucking incredible!" she finally exclaimed.

"Why, thank you, Madam." Jeeves faded into existence in front of us. "And might I say, your tutelage has been most informative. I have greatly enjoyed processing it."

"Does he always talk like that?"

"Yes, I do," Jeeves answered before I could. "He..." he nodded his head at me, "...thinks it's funny."

Charlotte looked at me, another grin pulling at the corners of her lips. I just shrugged with a smirk of my own.

"Jeeves, it was very nice to meet you," Charlotte said after rolling her eyes playfully. "I look forward to getting to know you better in the future."

"And I, you," Jeeves replied with a formal nod of his head before shimmering away into nothingness. I don't know why I had expected more of a conversation between the two, though it quickly dawned on me that Charlotte now knew as much about Jeeves as I did.

"Jesus, Pete," Charlotte said as we remained standing in the middle of the street. "You really are full of surprises. I don't think I can even properly grasp how powerful you are. It's..." Her voice faded off as she once again grappled with her grasp of the English language.

"Interesting?"

"Scary," she corrected with no hint of humor. "Not in a bad kind of way..."

"No," I chuckled, "I totally understand the good kind of ways to scare someone."

"All right, maybe scary wasn't the right word, although I can't even begin to imagine what that mind of yours could do if someone pissed you off. Especially with those enhanced combat abilities." It took me a second to work out how she knew about them until I realized that knowledge of them would have been included in my memories of Jeeves. "Maybe 'intimidating' is a better word."

"Is that any better?" I asked with a grin. Charlotte's thoughts were enough for me to know that I needn't take offence at any of this, but it was always fun to play along.

"Hey, some girls find it sexy. The big strong man who was able to protect her."

"Hmmm... are you one of those girls?"

"Now that would be telling," she said with a wink before pulling me on with our walk.

"So, what about Evie?" I said after a short time of silence. "Why is she so different?"

"I have no idea," Charlotte admitted after a short pause. I squeezed her hand again, trying to push these memories into her as well. "That won't work," she said after glancing down at our hands and realizing what I was trying to do. "Mindscapes are unique," she continued. "Think of it like an encryption. What you saw in her mind was not her mind, but rather your interpretation of her interpretation of her own mind.... if that makes sense. You cannot communicate it with another person because they would probably have their own separate interpretation."

I blinked a few times. "You like that word, don't you?" I chuckled.

"You have a better one?"

"Understanding, explanation..."

"Shut up, you know what I mean. Anyway, back to the point, I would have to meet her myself to be able to see her mind, and that could be a little awkward. Especially if she already thinks she is different, which she almost certainly does."

"Hmmm..." The puzzle that was Evie was getting more and more intriguing the more I thought about her. "Yeah, we may have to put that on the back burner for a while."

We carried on walking for a while, stopping every now and then for Charlotte to stare up in wonder at the towering skyscrapers, bathed in their blue light as they reached for the endless cloudless sky. Very little was said. We just walked as we each took in the city around us, our fingers entwined and the simple contentment of just being together. We wandered for hours. Of course, I had already seen most of the city in the time I had spent exploring it, but there was something indescribably special about sharing it with someone else. The more Charlotte saw of my city and my mind, the more I understood; it was pure intimacy.

After an unknown number of almost silent hours, we found ourselves in another plaza, at least a dozen miles from the last one we had stopped at. This one commemorated my sixth birthday. My grandparents had taken me out, away from my parents and for the first and only time during my childhood, I knew what it was to have a birthday that wasn't filled with mockery and misery. Willful ignorance: that is how I came to understand my grandparent's place in my life. They knew what was going on, they did what they could for a while, but it was never enough to make a difference and eventually they just left me to my fate. But for a large portion of my life before leaving home, those few hours were my benchmark for what happiness could be. It was odd to think that my idea of happiness back then was the simple lack of abuse for a short period of time. Happiness and the absence of misery, I had come to realize, were very different things. It took Jimmy, my first real friend, to show me what belonging truly felt like.

We sat on a bench, the warm sun bathing the plaza in light, the cool breeze coming from the east, the motes of light playing in the temperate air as Charlotte and I watched. I would later learn that the weather in my city was based entirely on my mood. Contrary to the depiction in front of us, it would seem that at that moment, I was genuinely happy. But, of course, I had to spoil it by speaking.

"Tell me about the Inquisitors," I said after a short while sitting, realizing that my training had been replaced with wandering.

Charlotte, who had seemed just as happy and content as I was, changed in an instant. The soft smile vanished, her eyes darkened with the rest of her exquisite features and she let go of my hand, leaning forward to rest her elbow on her knee, rubbing her mouth and jaw along the palm that had just held mine.

"The Inquisitors..." she repeated quietly. "It's strange, we have been fighting them, fleeing from them or hiding from them for over seven centuries, but we know very little about them." She said after a short pause. She turned to look at me, "Your abilities are impressive, Pete," she went on, "but the powers you have given yourself in your 'internal editing station', we can all do that. Over the years, countless of our kind have dedicated their gifts to science, to genetics, to medicine; some of them did it to help people, but most did it to try to understand an enemy who, for reasons we still don't understand, seem hellbent on our extinction.

"Centuries of research, centuries of infiltration, some more successful than others, but more than anything else, there have been centuries of death. We know where our species come from, it may be unpredictable, but we understand our mutation. We have no such luxury when it comes to the Inquisitors. We don't have the first idea how their biology works, or how it is passed on, let alone where it comes from and more people than you or I can imagine have given their lives trying to find out."

There was another long pause before she spoke again, there was a tremble in her voice, the soft words vibrating with unspeakable fear. "We don't know where they came from, we don't even know if they know, but our kind first recognized their biological distinction from other humans in the late 1500s. It was like a bastardization of our own mutation, it was like they could feel us in the same way that we can sense each other. Not our powers, they couldn't sense us, but it was like they could see the effects of our abilities. My grandfather told me it was like painting a room, they may never have seen the painter or the paint, but they could tell that the room was different when nobody else saw it, and by seeing the paint on the walls, they knew to look for the person with paint on their hands.

"They hate us, Pete." She went on after another pause. "And nobody knows why. In the beginning it was easy to put it down to religious zealotry, maybe that was a lazy explanation but the church doesn't have the influence that they used to and some of the Inquisitors we have encountered have no affiliation with the Vatican at all, as far as we can tell, and yet they still hunt us."

"I thought they had left the Sect alone." I asked after Charlotte stopped for another pause.

"They have, for the most part." She nodded softly. "Their coordinated attacks seem to still only be targeting the Conclave, but individual Evos? They make no distinction, if they identify one of us, they will use every one of their considerable resources to hunt them down and kill them. Take you, for example, and me, neither of us look like this naturally, if an Inquisitor got close enough for long enough, they would see that... and that would be it, a lifetime of being chased, inevitably caught, and executed, just for the crime of being born an Evo."

"Alright..." I said after another silent pause. "Let's start at the beginning. Tell me what you know."

The memories and the knowledge came pouring into me as she retook my hand. The Inquisitors really were a mystery. There were theories that they had been around for as long as the Evos, a separate but distinct evolution of mankind who seemed to be biologically programmed to be in conflict with our species. It was a long time before the Conclave recognized that the Inquisitors were more than simple humans, what started as an unexplained rise in the number of Evo exposures and executions suddenly turned into horrified fear as the source of this murderous trend announced itself with a vengeance. A curious anomaly quickly became an existential threat.

The early Conclave had sought to dominate and control the human population, causing them actual physical harm was rarely considered, let alone used unless as a last resort to ensure an Evo's survival. If an Evo was exposed, the human population could be coerced into leaving them alone, they could have their memories altered or wiped completely to guarantee and Evo's safety, there was never really a need to harm them. A dead human was of no use to the Conclave.

My own editing station had filtered my reading of human thoughts to those directly concerning me. It would have been easy to change that so any human thought concerning anything about Evos would be detectable and it would appear that this is exactly what the early Evos had done. Then, one day, a group of them had been ambushed and massacred. The Conclave was still in its infancy at the time, barely 70 years had passed since the order's foundation and although that may seem like a long time in terms of an ordinary lifetime, it was nothing compared to the ages that most Evos could reach and a blink of an eye in the longer term history. Secrecy and security, although were taken seriously, were not top priorities for the fledgling Conclave.

The attack that changed it all had been brutal. The ambushed group had been made of low ranking -- and therefore, comparatively weaker -- Evos who had been at a gathering with their mentor at an inn on the outskirts of Munich. They had been talking for less than an hour when a group of heavily armed men bearing papal insignia had burst in, the man closest to the door had been cleaved in two by one of the armored intruders and the rest of the Evos had been slaughtered with the same levels of ferocious violence. Only one man had escaped, and his story had been terrifying, so much so that it was doubtful that his survival had been an accident.

Aside from the acts of barbaric violence, the most concerning part of the survivor's story was that none of the Evos had sensed the men coming until it was too late, the mentor freezing, mid-sentence, only seconds before the doors to the inn had burst open and the carnage began. At first, the higher Evo ranks, including the Archon, had viewed this detail with suspicion, suspecting that the ambush had been the result of negligence more than anything else. But to be certain and to quiet the spreading rumors, they dispatched a group of higher ranked members -- ones with military experience -- to Munich to find out for themselves.

It had taken less than a day for the blurred, intermittent minds of the inquisitors to be found. One of the investigating Evos described it like trying to view a damaged painting, you could view the whole, if you had some idea of what you were looking at but picking out individual detail was almost impossible. What was worse was that their zealotry had spread to the general population. The Evos had kept a low profile, hiding in plain sight and doing nothing to draw attention to themselves while slowly making their way towards the source of this new hostility, hostility towards a species that these people should have had no knowledge of.

It didn't take long to find what they were looking for.

There, on the steps of Munich's ancient and beautiful cathedral were seven members of the clergy, a cardinal at their head and proselytizing against enemies of god, abominations that the frenzied crowd became more and more determined to hunt down and kill. It was there that the members of the Conclave first heard a word that would be used against them for the next few centuries: 'Heretics'. Within a decade, the Spanish Inquisitions that had once only targeted Jews and Muslims for conversion, was now hunting the Conclave, not for religious conversion, but for extermination. Evo men were hung, drawn and quartered, the most horrific of medieval execution methods. Evo women were burned at the stake as witches, none who were found were spared.

The twelve Evos who had been massacred at the inn, however graphic and violent their deaths may have been, were shown a modicum of mercy compared the wave of torture and public executions that spread across Europe over the next hundred years. Each story told by Evos who had somehow survived this onslaught had been the same. There had been no change in the minds of the human population, not before their exposure, at least. All had seemed normal. The more powerful Evos had sensed them coming; almost always less than a mile away, always with murderous intent and a full knowledge of the Evo's identity and whereabouts in every single case. It was this intent, however blurred and unclear, that had alerted the Evos to the danger heading their way. The less powerful Evos had no such luxury, they were almost always caught off guard, only those with military training or friends in very high places had been able to escape. The rest were not so lucky. Invariably though, after the initial attack, the minds of the local human population grew significantly more hostile towards the Conclave. Although it had never been confirmed, it was hypothesized that the Inquisitors influenced the humans against the Evos in a similar way that the Evos had manipulated them for their own ends.

It would be decades, almost a century, until the nature of Inquisitor powers was known enough for their nature to be guessed at. Even now, after all this time, an Inquisitor's abilities were measured in comparative terms to the Evo who encountered them. Some Inquisitors could be detected, others couldn't, some Inquisitor minds were able to be read, others weren't, some were as easy to manipulate, others couldn't be at all, and even stories concerning the same inquisitor changed depending on the Evo who encountered them. A powerful Evo had a chance, a weaker one didn't. All inquisitors seemed to be proficient at hand to hand combat and -- in later years -- the use of firearms, they almost always worked in teams and only in the encounters with the largest comparative difference in powers could the inquisitor be detected by anything more than the aura that seemed to surround all of them.

It was a complicated subject, complicated further by the massive variations in details given by Evos who had encountered them. Even Charlotte had trouble explaining it, but there were a few details that seemed to be almost universal. The Inquisitors detected and identified the Evos long before the Evo knew they were being watched, the more an Evo used their powers, the faster they would draw the attention of an Inquisitor, and if they were not affiliated with the church, they almost always worked themselves into positions of, maybe not authority, but certainly positions where they could monitor the local population.

Law enforcement departments, newspapers and reporters, government officials, any position that would be able to detect a change in an Evo's circumstances or environment was sought out and filled by Inquisitors. There were only a few exceptions and one of those were the 'High Inquisitors' that Charlotte had mentioned before.

Whereas the propagation of the Evo population was something of a game of chance, Evos at least knew how it worked, the continuation of the Inquisitor species was very different. Evos were usually born spontaneously, meaning that they were not often born due to the mutation being passed down by their parents, hereditary considerations were rarely a factor. Nobody in the Evo community knew how the Inquisitor ability was caused at all, but one fact was indisputable: Inquisitors were rarely female, and the coupling of a male and female inquisitor invariably produced a child known as a 'High Inquisitor'. These children grew to positions of power within the Inquisitor hierarchy itself, rather than positions within human society and were -- as far as anyone could tell -- completely immune to any Evo powers, were utterly unbeatable in combat and would relentlessly pursue and invariably kill any Evo unfortunate enough to cross their path. More than this, the hunting of Evo's seemed to be their sole occupation. The abject terror Charlotte had displayed at our first meeting suddenly became easier to explain; if a High Inquisitor was close enough to you for their void to be detected, they already knew you were an Evo and immediately fleeing was the only chance you had to survive, and it was a slim chance at that.

Everyone, even Charlotte, understood why the Church had declared war on the Conclave, but although the Inquisitors had started their existence as a branch of the Vatican, the centuries since had seen them form their own distinctive organization with only the most circumstantial ties to the Church. Some Inquisitors happened to be a part of the clergy, but the overwhelming majority of them in modern times had nothing to do with the church at all. Yet, their obsessive and zealous attacks on any Evo they found, not to mention their relentless pursuit of the Conclave was as paramount in their actions today as it had been during the inquisitions. The Inquisitors hated our kind with a passion that was totally unexplained, and the fervor with which they still hunted down and murdered -- publicly, if possible -- any Evo they came across hadn't diminished in the slightest and nobody knew why. It was a terrifying opponent to face and the fear in Charlotte's eyes was impossible to miss.

The longer my lesson went on, the darker Charlotte's face became. Her tutelage about the Conclave was something akin to a lesson on mutual distrust, her lesson about the Inquisitors was one of total and abject dread. There was nothing on Earth that scared her the way that the Inquisitors.

"They could be watching us right now," she said, her voice still trembling as she spoke. "Their eyes could be on us as we sit in your apartment, planning their attack and we would probably have no idea until they came for us. Yeah..." she paused for a second, her eyes wandering anywhere except to face me, "... they scare me."

Part of me felt guilty as I hooked my arm around her and pulled her into me. As with many things about my life as an Evo, it would be a while before I understood the story behind the lesson, but whatever it was, it had affected Charlotte deeply. For the time being, I learned all that I needed to know, and Charlotte seemed emotionally incapable of teaching me anything more. Both of us seemed content to just sit and look on an icon of my own history that suddenly seemed utterly irrelevant.

I couldn't even begin to guess how long we sat there, each of our minds silently mulling over the lesson that I had just been taught. But eventually Charlotte spoke up. "In other news," she smiled weakly. "It looks like our party might get the go ahead for next weekend."

My eyebrows shot up in delighted surprise. "Really? That's awesome!"

"Yeah, Becky has been chomping at the bit to see you again. She has been running herself ragged trying to get the new shift rotation to work."

I already knew this; she had said as much during our frequent text conversations. Becky was a busy person at the best of times, but the demands being made of her recently meant that our chats had become shorter and less frequent as the month had gone on. It was more than a little flattering to think that she was making this sacrifice on my behalf. I retook Charlotte's hand and gave it a soft squeeze, smiling to her as he turned her head to mine. "Are you going to be able to make it?"

"I wouldn't miss it for the world."

We wandered my city for a little while longer, finally finding ourselves on the northern walls. The talk of the party had lightened the mood slightly since the lesson on the Inquisitors, but nothing could return the buoyancy it had before that. The Inquisitors were clearly a sore subject and I didn't want to sour the mood any further by pushing it. Since our kiss, I had complete and total trust in Charlotte, if she hadn't told me what it was about the subject that was bothering her so much, then there was a good reason for it. I had no doubt whatsoever that she would have if it had been relevant to my training, and I was sure she would tell me eventually.

"I don't think I'm ever going to get used to this." She said through a soft smile, her hand back in mine and her body leaning against me, her head was resting on my shoulder as we looked out over the sprawling, remarkable metropolis as it spread out beneath us. "Maybe your next lesson should happen in my city," she chuckled. "Less distractions."

"Sounds like a plan." I smiled back. It was another strange occurrence of social situations that I still hadn't grown accustomed to, but we both seemed to instinctively know that our time together in my city had come to an end for this session. Nothing was said, there were no dropped hints or awkward silences, we both just... knew. I suppose it is akin to knowing when a date is over or when a conversation has run its course, not that I would have known back then, but with a few blinks, my vision cleared and I was sat, cross-legged in my apartment, holding Charlotte's hands as her eyes focused on mine.

Without a word, we both stood up and walked to the door. She turned to face me, a soft smile playing on her lips, her mind, crystal clear in its clarity, was telling me that although we were done for the day, she had genuinely enjoyed my company. I was sure that my mind was returning the sentiment. She stepped in, wrapping her arms around my waist and pulling me in for a warm embrace. My own arms snaked around the small of her back, pulling her gently back into me, her whole body melding into mine. She leaned up, pressed a wet kiss against my stubbled cheek, smiled again, turned and left. Not a word had been uttered since we returned from the mindscape. Nothing needed to be said, and in a stark contrast from my socially inept life before my awakening, I was totally fine with that.

I mean, look. I know what some of you are thinking. This is way too much detail to be going into for such a mundane act, but you have all probably lived your lives with close friendships where a parting hug was nothing to write home about. You may have been friends with someone that you wanted a whole lot more with but it hadn't progressed that far, and that parting kiss -- be it given, or received -- would have been nothing more as a token of affection for you. But for me, with a complete and total lack of any of those things in my life, it meant the world.

My social isolation may have been the result of my parents' abuse, but it would be lazy and dishonest of me to place the blame for my life entirely at their feet. I could see that now. I had tried, for years, to be the happy-go-lucky, laid-back, life of the party that Jimmy pulled off so effortlessly, but I always felt like the fifth wheel on a four wheeled carriage; just useless and in the way. The more my ability enhanced memory looked back, the more I came to realize that the problem had been as much me as it was everyone else. I didn't make as much of an effort as I could have, and with no reason to pick up the slack for me, neither did anyone else. I would immediately pick up on their disinterest, take it personally and walk away. Jimmy was the first to really put in the leg work for a friendship to work, and, although my help with his understanding of the course materials may have been the initial incentive to make the effort, he had gone above and beyond what was necessary to be my friend. It's funny how the little things can make you appreciate people and events so much.

As if on cue, my phone dinged. I walked over to the desk to pick it up, my eyebrows scrunching at the screen; it was a Facebook messenger notification, and more importantly, it was from Olivia. Again, this seemingly inconspicuous event has to be taken in the context of my experiences up to this point. As with any other child of my generation, I had grown up in a society where escaping the lures of social media was almost impossible. I had tried twitter, but the people on there just annoyed me. Call me a misanthrope, but unless you have a PhD in Astronomy, your ridiculous theories of why you think the Earth is flat should be kept to yourself. Twitter just seemed like a platform for any idiot to express any mundane thought that popped into his or her head. I avoided it like the plague.

Facebook was harder to get away from. Some teachers in high school assigned homework via the platform and the entire social calendar of the school's population was organized on it. Most events were open invite, so I can't even claim to be the one guy that was never invited, but for the most part, Facebook just served to reinforce my own self-inflicted isolation. There were the random posts that could be fairly entertaining, but after leaving high school, the majority of my feed was filled with pictures of what people were eating, pictures of people's dogs, nights out involving people I didn't really know and the odd quiz to find out what kind of flower you were. It was Jimmy who changed all that.

It would seem obvious for a person in my situation to have attended a university as far from home as possible. The problem was that my university was one of the best in the country when it came to computer science programs, including game software engineering. I guess it is the equivalent of being born in Oxford, only to attend Oxford University, or being born in Cambridge and attending Harvard. That school was always the one you were going to attend. Regardless of where it was geographically, it just happened to be in your hometown. I would have loved to be on the other side of the country from my parents, but it just wasn't meant to be.

My point here is that like many other students, I had arrived at university determined to reinvent myself. I knew nobody and nobody knew me, I could be whoever I wanted to be. For the first few weeks that seemed to work out fine, but my awkwardness in social situations eventually shone through and the few 'friends' I had added to Facebook during that time had invariably drifted away. Jimmy was the first person of importance in my life I had added since arriving, and with him making a point to put his entire social calendar on there, I was forced to keep the app on my phone. The second person I added had been Olivia, but in the entire time I had used the app, I had never, not once, received a message through it.

Hey. Heard you got out of the hospital. Just wanted to check in. How are you doing? The message read.

My fingers were already working on the keypad before my mind had fully processed the situation. For a long time, Olivia was my dream girl. It was only the presence in my life of Becky and the other nurses, not to mention Charlotte and Evie, that had distracted me from the eternal puzzle that was Olivia.

I'm doing good, thanks. Got out a few weeks ago. Healing up nicely and ready to get back in the saddle. How are things with you? I sent back.

Good here, I'm glad you are doing okay. Back in the saddle, eh? What are you planning on riding, or should I ask who? 😉

There was the teasing flirt that I remembered so well, but my newfound confidence was more than up for the task that the old me would have run from in terror. Haven't decided yet, but I've had my eye on this girl for a while. She keeps teasing me, so I wanna see if she can back it up.

Ohhh. Anyone I know?

Be at the Queens Head on Saturday night and you might find out.😉

I still cringe at sending emojis on messages, don't ask me why. But if you can't beat 'em...

I'm intrigued. I'll be there.

Great. See you then. I smiled, tucking away the thought of how easy this was and the silent scolding of myself for not doing it sooner.

It's a date. She sent back. I was tempted to add something more to the conversation, but playing the better part of valor, I dropped the phone back onto the desk and got back to work.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

University, for those of you unfortunate enough to have not attended, is much like you would imagine and I would strongly recommend it to anyone, at least, that is, until the final year. With the last stretch of the course dedicated to completion of your final project, there weren't many classes that required mandatory attendance. Whereas in the previous two years, there were usually two or three classes a day, plus all the workshops and seminars to help get a student through the materials, the third year only had two compulsory classes all week. The workshops still ran, but they were now entirely geared up to support students needing help with their project, this not only made them optional, but with my project being so revolutionary, there was little, if anything, that they could offer me. I spent the vast majority of that week hunched over my computer, the lines of code appearing on screen as if by magic while Jimmy either typed away on his laptop on the other side of the room -- he had finally taken the hint from the professors and myself that he needed to get started -- or, more often, played the Xbox.

The two classes went as you would expect as well. Although the classrooms didn't have assigned seating, we had been in the same room for the previous two years and had all stuck to sitting with the groups that Professor Jacobs had lumped us with at the beginning of the first year. With only Jimmy and I left from ours, we sat on the extreme right of the class about halfway back. Evie, the only other person in class I had any interest in seeing, was at the very front, on the far left, about as far away from us as she could get without leaving the room. It wasn't intentional, it was just the way things had worked out. This meant that the only conversation we had outside of text messages was either waiting to enter, or immediately after leaving for class. Lori wasn't on our course so I didn't see her at all.

"Happy hump day." She beamed at me on the Wednesday morning as I arrived a few minutes before class started. She was leaning against the wall next to the classroom door, her figure-hugging jeans reminding me of the exquisite body underneath while the more conservative knitted sweater told me that she was as uncomfortable with the British October weather as I was.

"Hey there, beautiful." I smiled back, walking up to her and kissing her cheek before leaning against the wall next to her. Her mind was still a little hazy to me, not as unclear as it had been a few nights earlier, but nothing close to as clear as the other minds around me. What little I could glean from her told me that she was very happy to see me, and the kiss had gone a long way to dissuade her fears that the previous Saturday night had been a one off. I know she couldn't read me, but my smile and my mind were both in agreement that I was just as glad to see her as well.

"So, how is the third year treating you, so far?" I asked as she unconsciously leaned her body against mine.

"Not bad," She smiled. "I think I have a solid grip on what I want to do for my project."

"Yeah? What are you doing for it?" I was genuinely interested in what she had in mind. Not only was she one of the few girls in the class, a number which had dropped disproportionately since the first day, but with our new personal involvement, I wanted to see how her mind worked. Jimmy had surprised me with his choice, I had always assumed he would want to design a new game like most of our other classmates were. His idea wasn't only novel, it was incredibly well thought out by his normal standards.

"Well, so far, I've managed to hook up with you so I can steal your ideas, they are better than mine." She said, trying her hardest to keep a straight face. "We'll see how that goes." I chuckled, turning to her with a grin. Her composure collapsed in a matter of seconds and I was treated to another of her addictively musical giggles. "Alright, fine." She smiled again. "So, have you ever played a game and there are only a certain number set characters you can be?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I have always been really annoyed by the fact that there is only ever one token female character." She said, her smile fading from her lips a little. "So much so that I have refused to play a game because I can either be an armoured tank of a man, or a scantily clad delicate wallflower. I mean, it's ridiculous. Having to wander around online RPGs wearing a bikini is stupid in this day andage. Then you have the games where you can design your character at the beginning and it doesn't make a difference if you are male or female, those are better, but still... lacking."

"I'm with you." I nodded, impressed by the enthusiasm she was showing as she became more and more animated the longer she spoke.

"Lots of games don't do that because character design systems can be quite complicated, it takes a lot of time to build and takes up space they want for something else." Her hands were waving around in the air as she spoke. "So, I want to make a stand-alone character creation kit where you can design your character down to the tiniest detail, then make it compatible with the games out there that need it. Either a designer can bolt it onto the game they are making, or have the player directed to this site and their character could be ported in from there, and no matter what you chose your player to be, there would be no lasting effects on the game unless the designer wanted there to be. Kind of like a way to remove sexism from games." She smiled, letting her hands come to rest at her sides. "It would be nice to have the ability to make strong female leads in games without changing them too much." She finished with a shrug.

"How would you get past the voiced dialogue element?" I asked after thinking for a few moments.

"Well, that's the thing." She said, smiling again at the fact that I was showing genuine interest. Apparently, I scored some major points for following so far without accusing her of being a raging feminist. "Some of the games are text based, especially RPGs, and the ones with voice already have a female part for their token female character. Besides, it's not as if I am expecting any games developers to actually use my project." She finished with another laugh.

It was true. University projects rarely attracted the attention of companies willing to implement them, mine had a better chance due to the revolutionary nature of the idea but it was by no means guaranteed. They usually served as more of a proof of ability that you presented to prospective employers when you applied for a job. The better the project, the better your mark, but also, the better your chances of finding employment once you had earned your degree.

"It's a great idea." I nodded once it became clear she had finished. "I guess, being a guy, I hadn't really thought about it, but now you have said, I have to agree. Either you can design a character, get a very limited choice of a few selected ones -- and the female is always the weakest -- or you play as a specific person who is almost always male."

"Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause, Rage, Far Cry, Modern Warfare... all men. Although Modern Warfare I can understand." She huffed. "Made by men, about men, for men. Seems to be an awfully big waste of half the market." I just stood there, silent but for a small smirk on my face, enjoying the enthusiasm with which she discussed her project. She finally noticed my look before she burst into another fit of giggles, nudged my ribs with her elbow and then rested her head onto my shoulder as we waited for class to start.

"Hey, are you busy after this?" I asked after a long but easy silence. "We could grab some food at the cafeteria."

"Aww, I can't, I'm sorry." She replied, genuine disappointment flashing through her mind along with a glowing warmth that I had asked her at all. "I've got a meeting with Professor Jacobs straight after class and then I have to meet Lori."

"That's okay," I smiled back. "Another time. How is she doing?"

"Lori? Yeah, she's good." Another adorable smile curled at her lips. "She's pretty pleased that she got to be with Jimmy. She's been crushing on him for a while now. Sounds like he didn't disappoint."

"She gave you all the gory details, eh?" I chuckled again.

"Urgh. As if I could stop her." Evie rolled her eyes with another laugh before leaning back into me. "Sounds like it was a good night all round."

Another flash of worry flitted through her mind. She seemed to be struggling with how to define our relationship as much as I was. Her statement was as honest and genuine as any she had said, but she seemed to have this constant fear of overstepping. I let my hand slide into hers, my smile invisible to her as I kissed the top of her head and gave her hand a soft squeeze. Her mind relaxed immediately, she was practically purring on the inside. Professor Jacobs chose that moment to appear from one of the corridors and we, along with the other students milling about, filed into the room ready for his class. With a glowing, happy smile to each other, I turned right towards my seat while Evie turned left towards hers.

"So, how did that go?" Jimmy asked as he planted himself into the seat next to me a few moments later. "I saw you guys talking and thought I'd give you some room." He finished with a self-satisfied grin. "You both looked cozy, though, snuggling up there."

"It went fine," I laughed. "She was telling me about her project."

"Is it better than mine?" He asked, the smug grin not shifting for a moment.

"Obviously." I laughed back.

A quick, but stern glance from the professor was enough to end the conversation, Jimmy leaning back in his seat, barely noticing the lack of what had once been habitual and frantic notetaking on my part. Mimicking my friend, I leaned into the back of the padded lecture-hall chair and got comfortable while Professor Jacobs delivered his class, all of which I knew on a vastly greater level than even my learned lecturer.

* * * * * * * * *

The next few days continued in the same way as the days that preceded them, and much the same as they had in my life before the accident. I spend an inordinate amount of time hunched over my computer, although Jimmy's frequent company was a welcomed addition to the routine I had enjoyed for the past two years. I still found it strange; how the two separate parts of my life - human and Evo - could so quickly and seamlessly transition from one to the other and were yet so distinct. It was almost as if one life simply ceased to exist while I was living with the other, and, during that week, if it hadn't been for the massive amount of time spent coding in my bunker, I would have been hard pressed to tell that there was another side of my existence.

The limited hours of each day were stretched into weeks, thanks to the time dilating powers of my bunker. Each real time day was roughly equivalent to three mindscape weeks and even though there had only been three full real days since I had seen Evie, for me, it had been significantly longer. More than that, as far as my own perception of time was concerned, more than two months had passed between leaving class that day and the long awaiting party with my nurses.

With Becky.

But finally, after almost as much work as could normally be fitted into a full academic year, Friday came and I was ready to party.

* * * * * * * *

For those of you familiar with British pub culture, you must forgive me, but I would be remiss if I didn't take some time to explain the nuances to our friends across the pond. There are, for all intents and purposes, two types of drinking establishments in the UK: pubs and bars, and yes, there is a difference.

A pub is quiet, it is reserved, there is no loud music and the vast majority of them serve food. Good food in many cases. They are where you take your family for a decent roast dinner, or your workmate for a quick drink on your lunch break. Liquor stores - with alcohol being unrestrictedly sold in every supermarket and grocery store - are almost nonexistent, and with the British weather being what it is, drinking outdoors; cookouts, barbeques and the likes, is entirely dependent on the notoriously unpredictable and unreliable British summer time, and therefore, are quite the rarity. Hence pub culture. You don't go there to get drunk, you go to have a drink, literally 'A' drink in many cases and not necessarily an alcoholic one. It is best to think of a pub as more of a social setting where alcohol is available to those who want it.

A bar is different. Bars are loud, they cater to the party scene, they have huge speakers playing deafening music where blind-drunk revelers dance provocatively on the dance floors that are conspicuously absent in most pubs. Bars have neon lights, strobe lights, flashing colored lights, and occasionally, Bud Light - That shit is rarely available in a pub. The only other real thing that separates a bar from a club is the hours at which they are open.

The Queen's Head, for example, was technically a pub, it opened well before midday every day of the week, served food and didn't really play music during the daytimes, most bars opened later than the Head. But after a certain time in the evening - almost entirely due to the demands of the local student population - it changed to a bar, with all the music, the lights, the dancing and the drunken revaries that go with it. Pubs could sometimes be bars, but bars were rarely able to become pubs, simply because they lacked the atmosphere to cater for the people who generally went to pubs. Clubs were only different because they were legally allowed to stay open past 2am. That is still the only difference I can find between a bar and a club.

The British October weather is not, in any way, conducive to being in the party mood. Unless you are already well on your way to drunkenness, the wandering from one bar to the next in the damp, cold, utterly miserable, dark Autumn nights was usually enough to douse even the most buoyant of spirits. So, as my nurse friends were demonstrating that Friday, most sensible people picked one bar for the evening, and stuck to it.

The bar in this case was called 'Revs'. Don't quote me on this, but I have the feeling that it used to be called revolutions and people were just too lazy to say the whole name. Or it may have something to do with the fact that it was built inside a long disused church and could have been short for Reverend. Another of life's great mysteries, I guess.

Revs was on the other side of the city from the university campus, almost within walking distance of the hospital where I had been treated and where my nurses all worked. It made sense; only Jimmy and I lived far enough away from the hospital to justify an alternate venue. For the overwhelming majority of the party attendees, a bar close to their place of work was much more central. Besides, the distance was nothing that a taxi couldn't fix. We were more than halfway there before I turned to the driver, instinctively expecting to see Moe, and realising that this was the first time I had been in a cab since the night that had changed everything. It was a sobering reminder, but a question from Jimmy wrenched my mind back to the present.

"I said," He repeated a little louder, "I wonder how Philippa looks when she is all dressed up. I mean, she looked hot as a nurse, but no make up, no real choice in her clothes..." his eyes took on a far away, wistful look for a second. "Ooof, I can't wait."

I laughed with a shake of my head, although it quickly became obvious that I was equally curious, not only about Philippa, but about Becky, too. I couldn't even imagine what a girl like her would choose to wear on a night like this. It's not that I was arrogant enough to know she was going to sleep with me, or even that she was going to try to impress me, even without the powers that would almost guarantee it. But she had practically told me it was going to happen before I left the hospital, and in multiple text messages since.

The taxi pulled up to the corner of the street that held the majority of the city's bars, the main strip, so to speak. I handed the cash to the driver, stepped out of the cab and rounded the car onto the pavement. "So, How do I look?" Jimmy asked as he puffed out his chest, straightened his back and flashed his finest shit-eating grin.

"Like a used car salesman." I deadpanned.

"Har Har."

"A middle aged one. You know, one with a few extra tyres around the gut."

"Alright, alright"

"One who is right in the middle of a mid-life crisis."

"Fine! I shouldn't have asked." He rolled his eyes humorously and started down the road, his shoulder bouncing in silent laughter.

"Wait for me," I called after him, jogging to catch up. "I haven't told you about the sports car or the newfound need to wear hula shirts."

"I'm gonna get you too drunk to perform!" He called back over his shoulder with another laugh.

You have no idea. I thought with a smile as I finally pulled alongside him only a few doors away from Revs.

The party had been a great idea, even by my own humble standards, but something seemed to have been lost in translation. Although I was enormously grateful to the entire nursing and doctoral staff of the hospital, including the ones who had tended to me during my long period of unconsciousness, when I had suggested the party, I had only really meant it as an invite to the few nurses I had gotten close to: Charlotte, Philippa, Amy and, of course, Becky. Somehow, that had evolved into the entire nursing rotation being invited and a sizable portion of it turning up to the party.

Out of the thirty or so people there, I only really knew about four or five of them. It's not like I had been told the names of the people who were now hugging me in greeting or shaking my hand as I entered the room, and then forgot them, my powers allowed me to remember everything. I had never even met half of them. It's not as though I minded, per se. The nursing staff were as entitled to a good night out as much as the next profession, probably more, but I was getting the distinct impression that I was, to these people, little more than a passive novelty. Something interesting that had interrupted the monotony of their day-to-day work because aside from a few "hello again's" and the odd "How are you feeling?" I rarely saw or spoke to most of them for the rest of the night.

I found my four girls at the bar. Amy, the first nurse I met after awakening from the accident, was the first to see me tonight as well. Her face lit up as she pushed herself off the bar and almost bounced across the room, wrapping me up in a deep, maternal hug. Her lips echoed her mind almost word for word.

"I am so happy to see you." she beamed, holding me away from her body to get a good look at me before crushing me back into her chest with another hug. "You look amazing!" she went on breathlessly. "I go on leave for a week, come back and you're gone! I couldn't believe it, my own little medical miracle." I found it endearing and deeply warming when I found people who spoke the words echoed in their minds, rather than the duplicitous ones who said one thing while thinking something completely different. As much respect as I already felt for my redheaded nurse before, I felt even more now.

"It's nice to see you too, Amy." I grinned back, finally managing to suck in a breath as I stepped out of her crushing embrace. I had genuinely regretted not being able to say goodbye to Amy, I had noticed she hadn't been around for the last few days of my hospital stay, but had never thought to ask anyone about it.

"So, hey." she said as she allowed her cheeks to relax from the radiant smile that was pulling at them. "I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to spend with you tonight, I'm on the early shift in the morning and... um..." Her eyes flicked over my shoulder and into the room.

I turned to follow her gaze, finally landing on a guy, sitting alone at a table for two, a friendly smile brightening his distinguished features as he watched us from across the bar. My mind snapped into action before I even thought about it and I entered his psyche in less than a second. John was an honest-to-god nice guy. He and Amy had met through one of those online dating sites aimed for the more mature clientele and they had hit it off immediately. He was, in a word, smitten. More than that, he had two children, the mother of whom had absolutely no interests in the welfare of her kids. Amy's almost overwhelming maternal yearnings and his rightly prioritised desire for any lady-friend to be accepting of his children matched perfectly. If I believed in that sort of thing, I would have said they were made for each other. Especially considering that Amy was as taken with him as he was with her.

"He's new," she beamed from behind an adorable little blush as I turned back to her with a grin. "I don't get many weekend evenings off, so.. two birds and all that. Sorry, I'm rambling, first date nerves... But it's sooo good to see you." The wind was squeezed out of me as she crushed me back into another motherly hug.

Jimmy clearing his throat saved me from suffocation. "Oh, Jimmy. I'm sorry." She released me from her arms and hopped over to my friend. He was sensible enough to take a half step back and lean into the hug to save himself from being smothered as I had. "It's great to see you, too. Are you well?"

"Mmmph mmmmph mph mmmph"

"Oh you." Amy laughed as she released the grinning Jimmy

"Well, if I've gotta die, that's the way to go..." Another little blush tinged Amy's cheeks as Jimmy flashed her one of his trademark winks and grins.

"So, I'm gonna..." she threw a thumb over her shoulder towards her man-friend with a smile. "But I'll be sure to catch up with you later."

"Have fun." Jimmy and I both said at the same time.

Amy flashed another one of those smiles that could light up the darkest of rooms and made her way over to her 'friend.' I turned my head back towards the bar in time to see two sirens sauntering towards us.

To say that Becky and Philippa were dressed to impress would be an understatement of almost criminal proportions. The only thing that separated their painted-on dresses was the color; the navy blue, almost black of Becky's dress was a stunning contrast to the waves of her impeccably tended blonde hair. I had heard the phrase 'made her eyes pop' my entire life, but this was the first time I had really seen it. Her eyes practically glowed, the color of her dress, the dark of the room around us, and the glints of the flashing lights reflecting off those orbs of pure green made them the most vibrant and 'alive' pair of eyes I had ever seen. I was so mesmerized, my confidence and cockiness fled me in an instant, and my jaw hung loosely from my skull.

I hadn't even had a chance to really take in Philippa yet, although it was clear that she was having the same effect on Jimmy as Becky was having on me. Her dress was an emerald green, an almost identical color to the shade of Becky's eyes and it too accentuated her long flowing brown locks and deep, dark eyes. My eyes flicked back to Becky, held to her radiant face and teasing wry grin, before sliding down over her slender, delicate neck, along the fabric of her shoulder straps and into the deep, plunging neckline. Her cleavage was heaving with each heavy breath. She was excited, she had aimed to make an impression and was euphorically pleased that she had achieved her goal.

Her mind was singing, just like the last time I had seen it, although my skills at reading it had vastly improved since then. I reached out and took her hand, raising it to bring her knuckles to my lips as I let her thoughts run wild. Despite the frequent text messages between us, she had been worried that the month since our last time together had tempered my desires for her, that the overwhelming lust that gripped her chest and wetted her thighs with every thought of me would no longer be reciprocated. The slack-jawed look on my face, and now the adoring look in my eyes as I brushed my lips against the back of her hand was enough to dissuade those fears. She was beyond happy.

And she was wet!

I let my mind slip into Philippa for a moment as Jimmy did a much better job of regathering his composure than I did. She was impressed, both with her suitor and with me. Jimmy always scrubbed up well-he was the kind of guy who knew how to dress for an occasion, and she wasn't surprised that he looked good. But as her eyes flicked to meet mine, her breath caught in her thought, my abilities washing over her in an instant as they added to the general attraction she already held for me. Jimmy may have looked good, but to her eyes, I looked practically edible. She would have her fun with Jimmy tonight, but she silently promised herself that she would get a taste of me as well. Sooner, rather than later.

"You look beautiful." I finally said, letting Becky's hand fall loose. "Both of you."

"Awww, still the charmer." Philippa grinned, stepping over and planting a kiss on my cheek as Becky blushed and beamed happily. "So," she said, stepping in next to Jimmy and hooking her arm through his. "What does a girl have to do for a drink around here?"

"I can think of a few things." Jimmy chuckled as Becky copied Philippa and stepped in with me, leading us back towards the bar. Myself and our ladies laughing heartily as the last of my guests came into view.

Charlotte, looked like Charlotte. Objectively speaking, she was considerably more attractive than either Becky or Philippa; it was a natural and effortless beauty that didn't require a lick of makeup or a single wasted moment to tease those perfect locks into place. She was just Charlotte, there was no other word for it. She was leaning against the bar, a warm smile on her gorgeous, friendly face as she watched the courtship procession before her. It quickly became clear from her mind and the minds of my friends that none of them knew that we had met since my leaving the hospital and she would rather it stay that way.

"Pete, Jimmy, nice to see you both again." she smiled.

Compared to Becky and Philippa, Charlotte was dressed fairly conservatively; a maroon halter top with an embroidered effect that made the fabric look scaly. But her faded and ripped jeans... She looked like she had been made out of wax, melted and poured into the garment before being allowed to reset. Any man lucky enough to get into her panties tonight would need some heavy duty power tools to cut her out of her clothes.

"It's nice to see you again too," I smiled back. "You are looking lovely tonight."

"Um.. yeah." Jimmy agreed, his eyes gawking as they fixed on the beauty leaning on the bar.

Philippa and Becky both giggled and rolled their eyes at each other, although I had scored points with both of them for not being overly flattering, while Jimmy - with his gawking eyes and practically drooling tongue - had not done himself any favors, at least not with Philippa. Openly ogling another woman in front of your date was not a good move, even my limited experience told me that. It may have only been momentary, but Philippa's tiny inward frown, imperceptible to anyone else, was as clear to me as the neon lights that were flashing around us.

I shook it off. Jimmy liked Philippa and, for the most part, she liked him too. But they weren't together and any expectations of chivalry and gentleman-like behaviour on my friend's part may have been asking a little too much considering the player's life he had led up until now. Besides, Charlotte really was blindingly beautiful.

"Alright." I announced, trying my best to change the subject before Jimmy's gawking stare got him into trouble. "What are we all drinking?"

"A pint for me, my good man." Jimmy replied, snapping his attention back to the group with a less than subtle guilty glance to his date.

"Mine is a...."

"Red wine." I interrupted, remembering a conversation from the hospital on the first day we had met.

"Impressive," She smiled. "Yes, please." Casting a thoughtful look my way whilst also pretending she hadn't seen Jimmy's guilty one.

"And for me, please, Pete." Becky said with an adorable smile up at me. It took me a few moments to realise why she seemed so much shorter than I had remembered, but even with heels on, she was still towered over since I had grown from a modest 5'7 to a respectable six foot. I was taller than her even before I made the alterations. Good thing she liked taller men.

"I'm good with an orange juice." Charlotte smiled, stepping to the side so I could approach the bar. A quick flash of inspiration in the bartender's mind made him bypass the other patrons who were at the bar before us and come straight to me. Something about three gorgeous women, the dates of whom would be very generous tippers.

I should probably point out here that it would normally be inconceivable that students like myself and Jimmy could afford the lifestyle we were living. Even with the family discount on the apartments, they alone would have consumed almost every penny of the funds made available to us by our student loans and neither of us worked.

Jimmy's answer was simple. Being an only child, his parents' estate had been left entirely to him when they died, held in trust until he turned eighteen. Not even he could burn through that amount of money in two short years. Besides, it's not like he flashed the cash, so to speak. Aside from the apartment and a few heavy nights on the town, he actually lived a pretty conservative life. I, on the other hand, had no such trust fund. Before the accident, I was, in a word, poor. I was sensible with money, never spending it on anything that I could do without, my computer being the only real exception. But my abilities had given me a different sort of revenue stream.

Contrary to stealing money from drug dealers or massive corporations who wouldn't miss it, or manipulating my way into a fictional job for an exuberant amount of money as some people do in tales like this do, I simply took my debit card to a cash machine, held my fingers on the pad and all of my money disappeared. In its place was left a simple string of numbers, letters and symbols which essentially meant that my bank account was bottomless. "Thank you Jeeves and your MMI!" No matter what I spent, or what I needed to buy, the money would always be available and nobody would ever notice the difference. The records of the sale would be kept as they normally would, the money would appear in the vendor's bank, and all relevant taxes were paid as they always would be. The money just happened to appear from nowhere. A simple enough solution to a simple enough problem.

The bartender placed the drinks on the white, speckled marble bar in front of us, a not-too-subtle, lingering glance at each of the ladies before asking for, and taking, payment - along with the promised sizable tip. The girls all seemed very impressed and appreciative of the round I so readily purchased for the group, the tiny knowing smirk on Charlotte's face told me that she was the only one who even suspected that they had not really cost me a penny.

Three 'thank you's' and three kisses on the cheek later, we began the customary bar-drinking tradition of hunting for a table for our group. Miraculously, - add air quotes at your leisure - a group sitting at the perfect table decided that they were ready to go just as we approached. We waited for them to get their things together and exit our new accommodation before taking our seats. I couldn't miss Charlotte's little giggle as she slipped into the booth after Jimmy and Philippa whilst I let Becky sit first before planting myself on the chair next to her.

We had barely been sitting for a few minutes before the small talk and casual flirting started to get underway. There was a lot of casual, yet intimate touching between the two couples; Philippa was leaning slightly against Jimmy, while Becky appeared to take an inordinate amount of joy and comfort with the simple touches of my arm as I spoke, or leaning against me with her hand resting idly on my leg. Jimmy had hoisted his arm onto the back of the chair, putting it around Philippa's shoulders which didn't seem to bother her in the slightest, but Charlotte was becoming increasingly annoyed with the 'accidental' brushes of her hair as Jimmy's hand waved around animatedly as he spoke. He was starting to concern me with the sheer amount of alcohol that he was putting away, even by this early stage of the night. My abilities were filtering the alcohol out of my system as fast as I could put it in, but he was still outdrinking the rest of our group by three drinks to one; his speech was already starting to slur by the time thirty minutes had gone by and his pupils had passed the point of being able to be called 'dilated.'

Over time, it was also becoming clearer that Philippa had noticed too, eventually taking his arm from behind her and resting it on the table, holding it in place with her own hand. She also seemed to be actively engaging herself in the fourway conversation between Becky, Charlotte and I rather than talking to Jimmy directly as she had done up until now. If my friend noticed any of this, he made no attempt to show it, he just kept ordering more drinks and downing them in short order.

I was allowing myself to feel the buzz of the alcohol, not a state that I would even call tipsy, just loosening up a littl,e but I was making no effort to hide my moderate pace of drinking. Becky and Philippa, matching my pace drink-for-drink, seemed to appreciate this and were riding their own waves of tipsiness. Although neither of them could be said to have been uncomfortable, nervous, or awkward at the beginning of the night, both had loosened up considerably and the conversation was quickly moving to more scintillating subjects. Charlotte wasn't drinking, but the happy smile, dancing eyes when she laughed and the frequency with which she involved herself in the conversation told me that she was enjoying herself as much as I was. Jimmy seemed to be enjoying the conversation, but was happier to sit back and listen, rather than actively participate.

"So, come on, be honest." I said, still laughing at the jokes being made at the other nurse's efforts on the dance floor, but talking several decibels higher than I would like to be heard over the music. "How long has it been since you all had a decent night out?"

"Oh, it's been forever!" Philippa drawled, emphasising the last word with a dramatic roll of her eyes.

"Actually," Becky chimed in, "I don't think we have ever had a night with all of us. There have been a few with small groups of us, like, Philippa and I went out a few months ago, but all of us..." she paused to think about it. "Nope, I don't think it has ever happened. At least not since I have been working there."

"I'm not sure that is such a bad thing, though." Philippa laughed, nodding to a male nurse on the dance floor, grinding himself against a less than enthusiastic-looking colleague. The flush in his cheeks and the clumsy levels of coordination made it unlikely that he would remember most of these moves in the morning.

"Oh, they've been fucking for ages." Becky said casually, before clamping her hand over her mouth.

Philippa and Charlotte both immediately burst into laughter, not at the revelation of the nurses' relationship, but the way that Becky had said it. It had sounded no more conspiratorial than if she had told us they were both brunettes. Philippa wanted the details though.

"Noooo!" She shrieked through her laughter. "How do you know that?"

"She caught them in one of the empty rooms." Charlotte added with another beaming and dazzling smile, shouting to be heard over the thumping bassline of the music.

"And you told her, and not me?!?" Philippa replied between panting breaths.

"She was with me! It wasn't me, it was her!" Becky laughed back, throwing a faux accusing look at Charlotte. Only Charlotte knew the reason I found that so funny. She would have been very aware of what the two nurses were up to from the other side of the county, let alone in the same hospital and she had roped Becky into walking in on them for no other reason than her own amusement. She caught my eye as we all laughed, flashing me another knowing wink.

"So, spill the beans then. Was he...?" Philippa held her two hands up to illustrate size, a fairly impressive gap between them, Becky wrinkled her nose with another smile and shook her head. Philippa closed the gap to something a little more realistic; another giggle and another shake of the head. The hands closed further, Becky's head still shaking and the cringe growing as the gap passed what would be considered average.

Phillipa slapped her palms together with a grimace. "Well, that wouldn't be too far off." Charlotte said with a shrug, the three women once again bursting into laughter.

"I was sooo embarrassed." Becky went on, struggling to get her words out from between her laughs and heavy breaths.

"Hey, you looked, you floozy." Philippa replied, battling the same laughter.

"Where was I supposed to look??" Becky almost had tears in her eyes by now. "I looked where you would look. I didn't know who to be more embarrassed for, him or her."

Even Charlotte's teasing smile had devolved into full fledged laughter by this point as her shoulders bounced along with the conversation. "What did you do?" Philippa asked. "What did they do?"

"I just left, I was mortified!" Becky answered.

"I'm pretty sure they carried on." Charlotte finished with another wink. That was it. Becky and Philippa were laughing so hard and for so long, that the conversation could go nowhere further until they had regained the ability to breathe. One would stop laughing for a few seconds, take one look at the other and both of them would burst into a new fit of laughter. Eventually, they calmed down, but both of them were watching the nurses move on the dance floor. The female nurse had decided to throw caution to the wind and was grinding back with abandon; I would have found that surprising in itself if it wasn't for another wink from the Evo across the table from me. Charlotte's tongue darted out to wet her lips as she held my eye for a second before turning her attention back to her targets.

They were practically dry humping each other. I heard Becky's breath catch in her throat, her eyes fixed on the sight before her as her hand involuntarily gave my leg a soft squeeze and the tops of her chest started to flush with her heavy breathing. I could feel the sexual tension starting to rise again, and I was almost certain it wasn't my doing, although based on some of the hungry looks I had been getting from the other women in the club, I couldn't rule it out.

Everyone seemed to be feeling it. Becky's hand had started to almost massage my thigh, having moved a few inches higher than where she had originally left it. Philippa had leaned back into Jimmy, who had, in turn, placed his arm back around her shoulder, this time caressing the bare skin on either side of her dress strap instead of annoying Charlotte with it. Her hand had disappeared under the table as well, but Jimmy's eyes were as fixed as the girls' and his expression was giving nothing away. More importantly, he seemed to have slowed his drinking. I had let myself get carried away with the moment, too, when I felt Charlotte's foot against my leg. Travelling down from my shin, over the cuffs of my pant leg before sliding underneath, the bare skin of her sandel-less foot brushing against the skin of my ankle.

"Ask her to dance." Her voice sounded in my head.

"What?"

"Ask. Her. To. Dance."

"I don't know how to dance!" Contact was broken for a fraction of a second before being reapplied when she kicked me under the table. "Oh, right... Yeah. Hang on."

It took only a few real world seconds to slip into my bunker and learn everything I would ever need to know about dancing, then slipping back out again. Don't get me wrong, we aren't talking about the Waltz or the Roomba here, just enough modern dance moves so that I wouldn't make a total ass of myself. With a wry grin to the beauty opposite me, I leaned towards my date, feeling the soft curls of her hair brush over my face as I slide my lips closer to her ear. "I think we could do better." I whispered. Her whole body trembled, and I could practically feel the jolt of electricity running down her spine as she sucked in a sharp quivering breath.

I didn't have to look to be able to see the smirk stretched across Charlotte's lips. I may have had a pretty sharp talent for reading people and the use of my powers, but the Evo across the table was highlighting the benefit of experience. If I was good, she was extraordinary. If Becky was thinking something, I could read it, everything else took a little more effort, not a lot more, but I would have to go looking for the information. Charlotte, on the other hand, could almost recognise desires and urges in a person that even they didn't know they had. Each encounter with Charlotte was illustrating just how much I still had to learn. Being all-powerful is one thing, being able to wield that power effectively was quite another.

I took Becky's hand from my thigh, giving it a soft squeeze to get her attention, then slid out of the booth. Becky, finally understanding my meaning, replaced the confused look on her face with a radiant, albeit hungry smile and allowed herself to be pulled from her chair. The smile on Philippa's face faltered for a second as she turned her head to watch us walking towards the dance floor, quickly realising that Jimmy had no plans to follow my lead.

For her part, Becky was almost vibrating. I wasn't the first man she had been with, nor was I the first who had asked her to dance, even though I technically hadn't asked. But there was something about me that ignited every nerve in her body, she had felt it from the first moment she had seen me in that hospital bed so long ago. Maybe that was the difference between the likes of her and Evie and everyone else, I thought to myself as we passed along the row of tables towards the moving masses. If Becky's mind was anything to go by, she had felt a deep and intense desire for me before I acquired my powers, for the old me. The 'me' who would never in a million years have thought that someone like her would be attracted to him. It was only the confused first attempts at reading her mind that allowed me to follow through with it and let things run their course.

I may have heightened those desires for me a little in the days after that, but not by much and I had never outrightly toyed with her mind. Tonight was the first time I realised that Becky had given herself to me before I had met Marco and unlocked my abilities. Her affection for me was sincere, it was honest. Evie, on the other hand, seemed totally resistant to the powers that made other girls throw themselves at me, I had to work inexplicably hard just to gain access to her mind, and by then, she had already decided. Maybe that is why, after all the nameless sex I had enjoyed those past few weeks, none of them had left an impression anywhere near as deep and meaningful as the two I was quickly coming to think of as 'my girls.'

The timing of our arrival on the dance floor was almost poetic, albeit totally coincidental, as a new song started playing. Ne-Yo's Because of You started thumping through the speakers and Becky's eyes sparkled just that little bit brighter; apparently she was a fan, the meaning behind the lyrics was lost on neither of us. Neither of us moved for the first few acapella drum beats before I took a single step towards her, our bodies meeting just in time for the bass to kick in and the artist's smooth voice to fill the air. The red and green lights flashed rhythmically from the gantry above us, the color reflecting off Becky's golden hair in just the right way. We started moving.

It was almost like an instinct; with no more thought to my movement than the ones needed to guide my footfalls when I walked, but my hips started to move. Small gyrations perfectly timed to match hers. Becky's were deep, grinding, sensuous movements that somehow made me think of flowing water. Mine were more subtle, matching hers in just the right way to put pressure on her hips in just the right place, at just the right time. By the end of the first verse, her stance had widened enough for my leg to slide between them and my hand to move around her and onto the small of her back. She dropped her weight almost immediately, pressing the vee of her legs against my denim-covered thigh. Both of us silently and momentarily wondered if there would be a hint of a wet patch there by the time the song had finished. From the moment of the first beat, my eyes hadn't left hers, the intensity of my gaze left little doubt in her mind of what I wanted tonight and she was mirroring it back with enthusiasm. Her breaths became a little more shallow as she ground harder.

With the beat dropping that little bit more as the second verse started, I let myself get lost in the song and in the moment. My shoulders started to move, twisting and bouncing to the rhythm as her mental bereavement at the loss of my leg between hers was quickly silenced when I pulled her tightly against me, her chest pressing to mine. I could feel her hardening nipples scratching against my shirt as she let herself go and started moving with me, no longer being led in our dance, but releasing the temptress within, I moved my chest a little more energetically against them to make sure she knew who she was playing with. One of my moves let my eyes glance downwards, into the claustrophobic space between us in which her chest was trapped.

Her cleavage looked spectacular, proof of the divine as it rose and fell with each provocative breath. The heat of the moment and the thick club air was lost on neither me, nor her flushed skin as a single bead of sweat traced its way from the hollow of her neck, over her chest and into the valley between her luscious breasts. My eyes traced it ravenously, counting down the seconds until my tongue could follow it. Becky knew where I was looking and was practically purring, grinding her chest against me with the same fervor being used on her hips. With a wink, I stepped away, each footfall in perfect time with the beat as I rounded her.

For the first time since the song or our dance began, I looked away from the object of my obsession. An odd thing can happen in bars and clubs sometimes, and it had happened here. A circle of space had developed around us, and although the groups of people on the perimeter were still dancing, their eyes were on us. The girls among them were watching hungrily, their eyes wandering over me as I moved behind Becky, most of them wanted to be in Becky's place, one or two wanted to be in mine. The men were watching jealously as well. They wanted the attention that every female in the room was giving me, but more than that, I was that one asshole in the room who could dance and was making them look bad.

One group of girls stood out, and of that group, there were two who caught my eye. Jimmy and I referred to them as Peacocks. In every bar, and in every club, on any weekend, anywhere in the world, there are a few girls who just stand out. Stunningly good looking, flaunting it for the world to see and able to walk out of the bar with any man of their choosing with little more than a sultry look and an affirming word. Dressed to impress and unused to any attention not being given to them, they were at the very top of the dance floor pecking order and when their position was threatened, they did what any peacock would do: they rustled their tail feathers.

These two were exceptionally bold, at least in comparison to the rest of the crowd surrounding Becky and I. I finished my half orbit around my partner as I held the eyes of these girls, placed my hands on Becky's hips and pulled her back into me. The instant contact was made her ass was grinding into my groin, and her head was falling back to rest under my chin;her eyes closed, totally lost in the moment. I leant my head down, my lips once again pressing through the sea of blonde hair, and just as I had with Evie a week earlier, I sang along with the words, my eyes still fixed on the peacocks.

And it's all because of you.

The two girls stepped forward as if of a single mind; where they moved, their little group followed, and as any barman could tell you, where the ladies go, the men go. too. The circle around us collapsed as the peacocks placed themselves directly behind me, the hips and chest swinging sultrily as they tried, in vain, to get my attention. I turned my head back to my lady.

"They want you." Becky said, barely loud enough for me to hear. I was genuinely surprised she had even noticed them, let alone was aware enough to know what they were doing. I chuckled in response as the group closed in and Becky ground her ass back into me even harder, swinging it with the beat of the second chorus and my hips matching it move-for-move. "I want them to watch, I want them to want you," she continued, a timed beat between each sentence before the next one came.

"They can watch all they like," I whispered back. "But everyone in this room knows who I am taking home tonight." Becky's body shuddered so hard that I wondered if she had cum. A body 'accidentally' brushed up against me from behind, waited a moment for a response, then did it again.

Becky must have felt the small jolt. "Let them touch." She purred, turning her eyes up to mine. "It is so hot." With that, she turned herself around and pressed her chest back into mine, her arms resting on my shoulders and jutting out into the air behind me. Her eyes were looking past me as she once again parted her legs to make room for my thigh and once again, started grinding her wetness against me.

I could feel it in my mind more than I could see it; the moment her eyes met those of the girls trying to seduce me, the pause in their movements, waiting for the challenge from Becky but instead finding permission. The wink from my partner, the smile from each of the peacocks and then the strange body pressed itself against me, then another. A hand wandered down my muscled arm, another traced down my back and onto my ass, another travelled down Becky's arm and onto my shoulder. A whisper of hot breath trickled past my ear as a body pressed into me from behind. I was the filling in a four-way dance, and every jealous male eye in the room gave up and huffed towards the bar.

I turned my body to the left, hooking an arm around the girl I found there and pulling her into me as my hand travelled down over her ass, and then back up under the hem of her impossibly tight dress. Becky fell in next to me as the other peacock did the same on my right. The girl in my arms, now grinding herself against me with the same hungry arousal as Becky had shown, flicked her head back, exposing her long slender neck to my lips as her fiery red hair - not auburn or ginger, but cosmetically purchased red - swatted against my face before disappearing over her shoulder. Another hitched breath from Becky as my lips pressed against the girl's skin, and my tongue darted out to taste the saltiness of her sweat. She was taller than Becky, but not by much and it was entirely possible that the height difference was the responsibility of her three inch long heels. Her chest was nothing to sneeze at either, although it didn't hold a candle to Becky's voluptuous curves, but her ass was spectacular under my hand as a finger traced the line of her g-string between her cheeks before teasingly withdrawing. She was on fire, almost as hot for the moment as Becky was. But I didn't get a chance to bask in their combined heat before the second peacock pulled me away from her friend and into her.

She spun herself around, pressing another impressively curved and tight ass into my groin as Becky, not one to miss a beat, slid in behind me, her hands coming around me and pulling the girl tighter against me. Both girls ground their hips against me, one from the front, one from the back, with exactly the same rhythm, my hardness quickly finding and nestling into the cleft of the second girl's ass. This one was blonde, platinum, store bought blonde, almost white in comparison to Becky's natural color. Her chest - as she arched her back to press her ass and her shoulders into me at the same time, with a gap in the middle, taking my hands and moving them up her body and onto her heaving mounds - was bigger than her friends, but still noticeably smaller than the set being pressed into my back. Becky's hands moved off the girls hips and onto my arms, following the contours of my muscles down to my wrists, finding them on the other girl's chest and promptly forcing my hands to caress them deeper. Hard nipples scratched at my palms as my head was tilted by the first girl and a set of lips captured mine for a moment before my head was turned even further and pressed into Becky's as the redhead fell in behind my nurse and started grinding.

The second girl ground a little bit harder and let out a giggle as my cock twitched against her.

Somehow, as my lips left those of my lover, my eyes landed on our table. Jimmy was watching with a smirk on his face, Philippa, on the other hand, was almost breathless. Her lips were parted, her pupils were dilated and her mind was telling me that she would sell major body parts to be in the shoes of one of these other girls, let alone Becky. She didn't masturbate often, but this would be the material of choice for the foreseeable future and she was already pressing her legs together to temper the itch that was burned in the core of her womanhood.

Charlotte seemed to be no less interested. She had turned her whole body in her seat, looking past Philippa and Jimmy to the scene on the dancefloor. Her powers wouldn't let me see what she was thinking and her face was giving away nothing more than interest, but the amused smile and the flirtatious wink that met my eyes as they met hers was enough to tell me she was enjoying the show.

My mind was yanked back to my current situation as Becky's lips brushed aside the collar of my shirt and started nipping and licking at the back of my neck. I felt a tingle of my own crawl down my spine as a peppering of goosebumps blossomed on my skin and radiated out from her lips as her breath purred against me.

The newcomers to our dance were getting into the spirit of things, not just grinding themselves against me, but against Becky as well. She, in turn, was pulling the blonde's hips back into me whilst simultaneously pressing her own curvaceous rump back into the redhead. I hadn't even noticed the song change as I turned myself around and slid my leg back between Becky's, Blondie matching my movements and wrapping herself around my back, her hands wandering up and down my arms and shoulder blades before placing one on the back of my neck and pressing my lips into my date's.

With Becky's hands accounted for, one around my shoulder and another grasping against my chest, I was slightly surprised to feel a hand run down my sides, around my hips and between my nurse and I and onto my pulsing bulge. The fingers traced the outline of my member, expertly applying pressure on a few sensitive spots they somehow found through the unyielding denim before giving my whole bulge a gentle squeeze. Reaching down, I took hold of it and lifted it away, giving a considationary smile and a soft shake of my head to its fiery-haired owner. As much as I was enjoying the attention, as much as Becky was relishing in it, and as much as I would have taken them both home in a heartbeat on any other night, tonight was about Becky. Harmless, sanctioned fun was all well and good, but there were lines that I wouldn't cross tonight, maybe in the future, but I had promises to keep and my first real time with the first of my girls would be all about her. The redhead seemed to be a good sport though, with a faux pout, a wink and a smile that could almost put even Charlotte's radiant beam to shame, she nodded and went back to dancing.

We danced through song after song, each one becoming increasingly more lively; the thumping bass of the first fews songs that allowed for the sensual bump and grind dancing was replaced with the more energetic dancing that used to terrify me. Our little foursome spread out a touch, each of us taking it in turns to dance with another, before swapping. I ended up dancing with the Blonde first as a Bon Jovi anthem vibrated through the speakers. By the time that song had ended, being replaced with Cole Swindell's Flatliner - it would appear that the DJ was confident enough in his abilities to throw in some country music in a nation known for not really appreciating it, and being wildly successful in the attempt - I was dancing with the redhead. Her dancing basically consisted of swaying her hips in time with the music as I pulled out my best foot slides and shoulder bops. Normally, I would consider this type of dancing to be ridiculous, but it seemed to be working.

During all of this, my eyes kept flicking back to my date. Becky seemed to be having the time of her life, dancing with the redhead first, then the blonde and enjoying herself thoroughly. Although her mind was telling me that she too hoped for our first real night together to be one-on-one, it wouldn't have taken much for her to be persuaded to let these two join us. For their part, our new friends were more than eager to get involved, the redhead especially had some pretty graphic fantasies of what she wanted to do to me, her eyes wandering up and down my body with panted breaths and a heaving chest each time one crossed her mind. The blonde was just as interested in Becky as she was with me; I wondered for a moment how Becky would react if she saw the images running through her dance partner's mind; platinum blonde hair buried between the thighs of my natural blonde lover.

There is nothing quite like energetic dancing to hide the need to readjust my groin.

Finally, the beat started to slow again, and our group swapped a final time, Becky finally rejoining me and our two friends dancing together for a while. Becky threw her arms around my shoulders and kissed me deeply, her tongue pressing into my mouth with a frustrated urgency as my hands rested on the small of her back. Her smile was mesmerizing as we parted. Despite their fantasies and their boldness, it looked as though our friends had taken the hint that nothing more would happen tonight that involved them.

"Give me your phone," The redhead shouted to Becky over the music. "I'll give you my number, we need to do this again sometime."

Becky's eye widened for a second, glancing back across the room towards the table as she realised that her phone was in her bag. I smiled, and pulled mine out of my pocket and handed it to my date, who in turn typed furiously into it as the redhead recited her number, then took the phone and typed something else, both girls giggling conspiratorially before handing it back to me.

I looked down at the screen. The number was preceded by the name the redhead had chosen for herself and Becky had apparently approved.

Redhead booty call.

Becky was still giggling when my surprised eyes rose to meet hers. A thought crossed my mind. "Jeeves, how much of this is Becky being herself? And how much of this is the result of my powers?" I asked quickly as I smiled back down at my phone. There was something pure about Becky's affections for me being the result of her own desires, and not my manipulation. Using that to get sex was all well and good, but this was... different.

"Still all her, Sir. Or as close to all her as would make a difference."

"Jesus..."

"I'm afraid he had nothing to do with it, Sir."

I rolled my eyes and tucked the phone in my pocket as the redhead hugged Becky, squeezing her tight, their chests pressing together appealingly before they parted, the redhead stepping towards me and the blonde taking her place with Becky.

"Next time, big boy." she winked, before pressing her lips to mine in a chaste kiss.

I didn't even get a chance to answer when my lips were claimed by the blonde girl for a second before she backed off and held her hand out expectantly. I handed her my phone and waited for a moment for her to type her details into it, no prizes for guessing the name she used. With a few happy smiles, and a promise of letting them know the next time we were out, they left us to rejoin their own group. I hadn't even gotten their names, nor had I thought to ask. This thought followed them as they, along with their group, cast a few flirtatious glances back to Becky and I before heading for the bar.

"I'm parched." Becky finally said, fanning herself and smiling as the group faded from view, giving my hand a soft squeeze and once again arresting all of my attention back to her. With a smile of my own, I led her back to our table. I couldn't help but smile at the beaming face on my date as she practically hopped back to our friends.

"Oh my god, that was so much fun!" Becky exclaimed as she dropped back into her seat a few moments later, drinking deeply from her glass.

"Fun? Girl, that was HOT!" Philippa laughed back. "I may be a little jealous." She was only half joking.

"You should have joined us." I quipped. "The more the merrier."

"We could see that." Charlotte chimed in, Jimmy nodding with a smirk.

"Yeah, well... This one..." Philippa nudged Jimmy playfully with an elbow, "...wasn't up for dancing."

"I may have.. um.. overdone it on the drinking." My friend admitted with a wince. "I'm not sure that kind of movement would have been good for anyone."

"Doesn't mean you couldn't have joined them." Charlotte joked, flashing Philippa a quick wink. She knew exactly what was on Philippa's mind, we both did. I, on the other hand, was trying to spend as little time watching the increasingly steamy fantasies as possible, it was already hard enough to hide the tent in my pants and the thoughts and desires flashing through Philippa's mind were not making it any easier.

Each time I caught her eye, or a sideways glance, a new image would jump into my mind. Each one more erotic and explicit that the last. Jimmy was going to be getting laid tonight, that much was certain, what was less clear was whether his sex was a result of Philippa's attraction towards him, or her arousal at me. Jimmy, for his part, was a little harder to read. His mind was swimming, I could almost feel the dizziness of the spinning room as my mind entered his. Only two thoughts peaked above the drunken fog, He needed to sober up before he got Philippa home, and he really didn't want to hurl.

Charlotte was impossible to read, and even if she wasn't, it was considered impolite to read the minds of another Evo within the Sect so I didn't bother trying. Becky, though, was feeling alive. for the first time in years she felt like she could be herself. Not just the submissive, not just the nurse, not just the friend, not one of the many masks she wore in her day-to-day life. She was free to be herself and to release the girl who had been hidden away for so long. She didn't know why she trusted me, maybe it was because outside of the hospital visit, the chances of us ever meeting were practically zero, which meant that if things went wrong, she wouldn't have to worry about seeing me afterwards. But more than that, she felt confident that things weren't going to go wrong, and the more she realised this, the freer she felt. She was going to take me home and let me do whatever I wanted to her, and she was going to love every minute of it, of this she had no doubt. But her thoughts were not explicit like Philippa's, they weren't even particularly sexual. She was just overwhelmingly happy.

The night continued like this for another few hours; with drinks and conversations flowing easily before being interrupted with a quick session on the dance floor. Becky and I didn't see our other friends for the rest of the night, nor did anyone else try to join us again, although Philippa and Jimmy joined us for our last trip under the neon lights. Philippa's hungry eyes flicked to me when Jimmy wasn't looking but her dancing and gyrating hips stayed with my friend. He didn't notice, but Becky did. Each time their eyes met, the girls would share a knowing smile, Philippa has already announced her intentions to join us back in the hospital, and it would seem that not only had neither of them forgotten about it, both were becoming increasingly eager to make it happen, even if not tonight. But for now, the brunette behaved herself, treating Jimmy to some moves that rivalled the ones that Becky was giving me.

Only Charlotte didn't join us. She seemed perfectly happy watching from her perch at our table. What the others didn't know was that she was having an inordinate amount of fun messing with the other patrons in the bar. I would sit down at the table, wait a few seconds before her toe would inevitably brush under my trouser leg, and her voice would sound in my head. We were having a completely separate conversation in our minds to the one we were having with our friends; yet at the exact same time, somehow being able to follow and contribute to both simultaneously. It was a strange feeling. Despite that, my appreciation for Charlotte's unique sense of humor and deviance was growing by the minute.

Check out that girl over there, She didn't need to point, She is about to have a major wardrobe malfunction.

That guy dancing is about to cum in his pants, and it's not even me doing it.

That bartender is a nice guy. His girlfriend just broke up with him, and I think he deserves some head.... yeah, she'll do. And we would both watch with a smirk as a curvy blonde whispered something to the surprised-looking bartender before she dragged him off to the back room.

I wonder what it would be like if someone forgot the word 'and'... She'd smirk.... let's find out.

All this going on while we were both talking, laughing and drinking with the rest of our group. I had been out a lot of times in my student career, almost all of them with Jimmy. But each time, even last week when I had met Evie, it had seemed like it was his show, with his friends, and I was just along for the ride. That wasn't a complaint, I loved the guy for making sure I was kept involved. Tonight just felt different, it felt equal, and it was the most I had enjoyed myself in as long as I could remember, maybe ever. The fun I was having with Charlotte in my head, the casual, almost instinctive touches of affection from Becky and the laughs and smile from all of us made this one of the most memorable and enjoyable nights of my life. But as with all things, it finally wound down to its end, and before long, we were all standing outside the bar.

At some point during the evening it had stopped raining, although that did nothing to alleviate the chilling wind as it howled along the urban canyon formed by the tall buildings of the street. We huddled together, each of us silently berating ourselves for not bringing coats. I mean, come on, it was October.

"Right, I'm this way." Charlotte announced, nodding her head behind her whilst keeping her arms firmly wrapped around her body. "I've got to say, that was a blast."

"Are you sure you don't need us to walk you home?" Becky asked, the endearing concern for her friend showing in her voice as she unlinked herself from me and wrapped Charlotte in a hug.

"Nah, I'm good. It's only a few blocks." Charlotte replied with a smile as she returned Becky's hug. Both Charlotte and I knew she was more than capable of handling any threats posed by inebriated and handsy men.

"We have got to do this again!" Philippa grinned, stepping in to mirror Becky's gesture as my lover released Charlotte. "Maybe next time, we can see what this famous Queen's Head is like."

"You just want to be closer to a certain bedroom." Charlotte grinned as she wrapped her arms around the brunette.

Philippa blushed slightly as Jimmy grinned. The knowing look Charlotte gave me, the quick glance from Philippa, and the almost imperceptible squeeze from Becky's hand in mine, told me that they weren't talking about Jimmy's room. I would have to take some time to mine Becky's mind later to find out exactly how much these ladies had been talking.

"Jimmy..." Charlotte said, stepping up to my friend and giving him a chaste hug, his arms wrapping carefully around Charlotte as she did. He seemed to have learned his lesson from earlier. "...always a pleasure."

"Um, yeah." He spluttered, trying very hard to sound indifferent to the goddess with her arms around him. "You, too. We should do it again soon."

Finally, Charlotte turned to me. "And you..." she said with that dazzling smile, stepping up and wrapping her arms around me. I returned the hug, my hands on the small of her back and pulling her in tighter. There was a level of intimacy between Charlotte and I that could only be felt between Evos, I was starting to understand that now. It was an intimacy that the others neither noticed, nor could comprehend. "...I am so glad you are feeling better. It's good to..." I lost track of the words coming from her lips as her voice echoed behind my eyes.

"I had a great time tonight." She said. "Honestly, I thought it would be quite boring, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself."

"As did I. I will never think of you as prim and proper again."

Her musical laugh bounced around my mind. "Oh, you have seen nothing yet. You have a lot to learn, young padawan."

"Talking of which..." I started.

"Soon." She answered the question before I could ask it. "I have some time off later in the week, so I will come by and we will work on some new stuff."

"Sounds like a plan."

I closed my eyes as a phantom hand traced affectionately along my cheek, goosebumps sprouting across my skin before an invisible set of lips soothed my cheek with a kiss. Charlotte stepped away. "Right then... girls, have fun." She flashed a wink to Becky and Philippa before turning and walking away into the night.

Silence descended on our little quartet for a few moments. It was that awkward point that I had only recently learned about. Each couple was going back to a single home, and sex was almost guaranteed, but none of us wanted to be too forward in voicing that assumption, nor did we want to offer to call it a night in fear of our partner thinking that the festivities were already over. Of course, it was Jimmy who spoke first.

"So... Taxi?" He announced with a smile, hooking his arm around Philippa and pulling her closer.

"Oh, someone is assuming he is getting lucky." Philippa smirked mirthfully.

"Me?" Jimmy grasped at his chest in faux insult. "I would never! I was merely suggesting that we should all get a single cab and drop you ladies home first to make sure you are safe."

The rest of us just looked at him.

"Nice try." Philippa finally laughed, "But you are coming home with me tonight, and I have it on good authority that Pete here is getting lucky, too."

"Oh really?" Jimmy grinned, pulling the brunette tight against him. "And who's authority would that be?"

"That would be mine." Becky smiled, pulling my head down and pressing her lips into mine. The drink was obviously having an effect on her and her forwardness. I chuckled into the kiss.

"Well, I guess that settles it." Jimmy said with his customary shit-eating grin. "So... Taxi?"

Finding a cab in this particular city was always a bit hit and miss. You could get to the rank and find a whole queue of them waiting, or you could find a whole queue of people waiting for the one taxi that was actually working that night. However, in a totally inexplicable stroke of luck - more air quotes - a passing cab happened to pull up alongside us outside Revs. Not missing a beat, Jimmy stepped up, confirmed he was available and hopped into the front seat. I jumped into the back with the girls on either side of me.

I felt two hands on my legs almost immediately. Silence filled the taxi, only punctuated by Philippa shouting out directions to the driver as Becky's hand became more adventurous. We were less than a mile into our journey when she reached over, took Philippa's hand and pressed it onto the bulge that had formed in my pants.

Her eyes went wide as her fingers deftly traced the outline of my throbbing tool, glancing past me and holding Becky's gaze before mouthing the word "wow" as Becky encouraged her to rub and fondle at my manhood, an enthusiastic nod and smile being her only response. The darkness in the back seat meant that I could hardly see what was happening so the chances of Jimmy catching on were incredibly slim. Becky leaned in closer to my ear.

"She wants you." She whispered, her tongue running along my earlobe and down my neck before coming back up. "Just like those two girls earlier. Next time, I want to watch you with them." A shiver crawled its way up my spine as Becky's lips and tongue went back to teasing the skin at my neck and Philippa's fingers started softly stroking up and down my length. "But tonight, you're all mine."

I was painfully hard by the time we pulled up to a nondescript building on a poorly lit street a few minutes later. Both sets of hands released me as both Becky and Philippa started climbing out of the taxi. "Wait," Jimmy said, looking around in confusion. "You both live here?"

"Yup," Philippa said with a smile. "We share a place. It's cheaper."

"I... did not know that." Jimmy said with a shrug before paying the driver and climbing out as well. I had to admit, despite all the times I had been inside Becky and Philippa's minds, I didn't know that either. I shuffled along the seat and followed Becky onto the sidewalk, waiting as Jimmy rounded the car and tucked himself alongside Philippa. Despite his efforts to slow his drinking and pull himself back from the stupor of earlier, he was still looking a little unsteady on his feet and his pupils were dilated. The signs were subtle, but they were there. He was wasted.

The brake lights of the taxi hadn't even made it to the end of the street by the time Philippa had fished her keys from her purse and led Jimmy towards the front door, Becky pulling me only a few steps behind, clinging onto my arm as Philippa worked the lock. The brunette beauty wasted no time in dragging my friend up the stairs and into her room, the sound of the door clicking shut silencing his chuckle. Becky turned to me, her face flushed with alcohol and arousal, her breathing heavy and her eyes sparkling with hungry mischief.

"Count to thirty, then come up." She said, her voice a little more than a husky whisper. "Second door on the left." She perched herself onto her tiptoes, pressing a searing kiss into my lips, then headed upstairs, the intentional and exaggerated sway of her hips holding my eyes as she rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, flashed me a wink and disappeared from view.

I took a deep breath, smiling inwardly to myself. "Okay... one."

Twenty-two seconds later, I was walking up the stairs. Walking past the first door on the left, smiling to myself at the playful giggles coming from inside, noting the bathroom behind the slightly ajar door on the right and finally pausing outside the door to what I assumed was Becky's room. With another deep breath I twisted the handle and pushed inwards, stepping into the room.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the low lights. The room was pretty big, as bedrooms go, with more than enough room around the double bed to fit a vanity unit, an armchair, a few chest of drawers and a wardrobe, yet still seem spacious. It was far too large to be lit by the single bed-side lamp, the only source of illumination in the room, even more so when I noticed the red thong draped over the bulb. How she knew it would catch my eye was beyond me, but it served to paint the room in a dull red aura as my eyes started scanning for my lover.

It took longer than you would have thought for my eyes to grow accustomed to the low light, the soft red glow casting long shadows into the corners of the room. It was in one of these corners that I found her. I had already noted the discarded dress on the floor between us but as my eyes grew more used to the darkness, her beautiful form came into focus. Standing in the shadow to one side of her bed, she posed with hips thrust to one side invitingly and her naked body displayed for my approval. The wetness between her thighs glistening in the low light and her dancing eyes looked towards me as I stood by the door. A smile of apprehensive excitement was painted across her face and her proud, firm breasts rose beneath her with each hungry breath.

Something in my mind clicked. It hadn't happened to this degree since the hospital when she had committed herself to me, but, just like then, I suddenly knew exactly what she wanted. It was as if her every desire, each deeply buried fantasy and every carnal need was flashing through the air, telling me in graphically intimate detail what she wanted. I started to walk forward, my face a mask of impassiveness as I slowly started to unbutton my shirt. She licked her lips, her eyes burning into mine as - after a few steps - I shrugged my shirt off my shoulders and let it drop to the floor.

Her hungry gaze was returned with my stoic, impassive one, my resolve holding strong; with less than a twitch of change in my facial expression and another step forward, I lowered my hands to the button on my jeans. Her eyes dropped to follow them, I stopped, waiting until her eyes had risen to mine before I allowed my fingers to keep working and take another step forward. Letting the button pop loose before slowly... agonizingly slowly... drawing down my zipper with each step I took towards her. Holding her eyes, I finally let my jeans pool at my ankles, stepping out of them and my shoes as I strode slowly and deliberately closer to her.

She understood the silent instruction, fighting every fibre of her being to keep her eyes fixed on mine and not drop to the tenting bulge in my tight boxers, stifling a moan when she realised that I was making no attempt to remove them. I wasn't just taking my time, I was drawing it out for as long as possible, I was making her wait. Her whole body was vibrating with pent up desire; the subtle increase in her heartbeat, the tremble in her breathing and the almost imperceptible flush on her cheeks and chest told me that she was loving every torturous second of it.

She stood herself up straighter as I approached, arching her back slightly to thrust out and display her chest to me, a tongue darting over her lips as she caught my eyes flicking down to admire her. I stepped closer, my chest pressing into hers and forcing her to take a single step backwards, laying herself against the wall before I pinned her body in place with mine. I brought a hand up to her face, cupping her cheek gently, my thumb dragging across her slightly parted lips, pulling at her bottom lip but drawing it away just before she had time to snake her tongue out to taste it. Pressing into her hair as I leaned forward, my lips a fraction of an inch from hers, letting her breathe in my level breaths, inching closer before grasping her hair and turning her head, her whimpering lips missing mine as I pressed my mouth to her jaw.

Soft kisses - punctuated by deeper, probing ones - peppered her skin; everywhere except her lips. A quivered breath escaping her each time I came close, only to leave her in agonizing disappointment as they moved away. Her cheeks, her eyelids, the tip of her nose, the soft curve of her jaw and the hollow between it and her neck, over her throat, under her chin and up to her ear. Another pleading moan trembled from her lips as my other hand moved onto her side, contrasting the delicate kisses of my lips with the rough grasps and heavy pressure of my hand. Dragging down her sides, my thumb outstretched to tease the side of her breast as I passed it. Over her hips and then breaking away from her body to take hold of one wrist and drawing it up the wall and holding it in place above her head. One arched eyebrow and a pause in my lip's work was all it took for her to bring her other hand up to join it.

Her reward was a searing kiss as I released her hair, she moaned loudly, parting her legs slightly to allow my bulge to press into her wet slit, the slight rocking of my hips towards her running my shaft along her lips and teasing her clit. It was taking all of her willpower not to buck and jerk her hips onto it as she coated my boxers in her juices. I traced my tongue over parted lips before pressing inside, seeking out hers and wrestling it into submission. Her hard nipples scratched at my chest as my free hand moved onto her hips, squeezing firmly but holding her in place as I teased every inch of her.

Suddenly I broke away, breaking contact with every part of her body, spinning her around and pressing her wrists against the wall again, arching her back and presenting her ass out to me invitingly. She almost instinctively lifted her chin, exposing her neck as I pressed my lips deeply into it and my cock found a new home nestled in the cleft of her ass cheeks. My free hand reared back, coming down with a loud slap on her ass. The yelp from her lips was quickly swallowed by a low, throaty moan as I watched the rose handprint blossom on her skin, it was barely formed before I brought another spank down onto the other cheek. Her head hung forward as I leaned up her body and whispered in her ear. "Hold. Very. Still."

With a sucked in breath and a nod of her head, I slowly kissed against the back of her neck and released her wrists. By the time the second kiss pressed into her spine between her shoulder blades, she knew what was coming and a deep tremble vibrated through her body. A kiss on the small of her back and another on her coccyx as I brought both hands onto her ass, spreading her as I sank to my knees behind her and pressed my face between.

She wasn't sure what to expect, most other attempts at licking her had lacked any enthusiasm, they made her feel as if she were an obligation. They didn't want to lick her, previous men had felt they had to and had treated her pleasure as a chore. She was quickly discovering that all men were not created equal. With her hips and knees bent, her legs parted and her back arched, my tongue drew slowly, but firmly, from her clit, over her weeping entrance, to her ass and then back again, she lost herself in her own pleasure, surprised by my desire to bring her to the point of ecstacy. The groan - bordering on a purring growl - that escaped her lips was about as voluntary as her heart beating.

It was my turn to taste her, as she had tasted me in the hospital. I let my senses be consumed with the feel and scent of the first of my girls, exploring her with my tongue, learning every inch of her and savoring her freely flowing nectar. I craned my neck under her, flicking my tongue quickly over her nub, then flattening my tongue and dragging it over her magic button. The stubble of my cheeks teasing and tickling the soft skin of her folds as I moved down, probing her sopping entrance with my tongue and pressed in. One had released a cheek, only to spank it and spread it again, as I pressed my tongue into her as far I could, feeling her inner walls clench around the new visitor, wanting me deeper inside. I wiggled and lashed my tongue with as much power as the muscle was capable of, tracking her high as it approached.

Just as it was about to crest, I pulled away. Becky almost sobbed at the sweet, agonizing torture applied by someone who apparently knew her body better than she did. I stood myself back up, molding the front of my body to the back of hers, hooking a finger under her chin and turning her head to kiss me. Her lips attacked mine with furiously frustrated passion; sucking my tongue into her mouth, rubbing hers along it, licking along my lips, doing everything in her power to taste as much of herself on me as she could. She was so consumed with the feel and the taste of my lips on hers that she didn't notice my free hand easing down her side.

Two fingers pressed into her, stealing the breath from her lungs; deep and wandering, curling up against her g spot and rubbing firmly along the sensitive ridges. I reached out a thumb, pressing the rough pad into the soft skin of her nub, slowly rolling it in small circles as my fingers maintained their probing assault. The high that had faded in the time between my tongue and fingers touching her had started building again almost immediately, all she could do was breathe gasps and high pitched moans into my lips as my free hand reconnected with her wrists on the wall, holding her in place.

This was torture and we both knew it. She could tell by the force and fervor of my fingers that they were going to build her to a powerful climax, yet the subtle shifts, the altering of my rhythms and the pressure that was close to - but not quite - enough to hurtle her over the edge of her high were stopping it from building properly. It was like I was teasing her with the promise of an orgasm that would never arrive, which was exactly what I was doing.

Higher and higher, closer and more desperate, she bucked and rolled her hips, trying anything to ignite that one more spark needed for her climax to explode inside her. But no matter how close she got, no matter how near or hard she pressed her sensitive spots to my fingers, they were always one step ahead. Her mind was swimming, everything she thought she knew about her body was now being sacrificed at the altar of these new experiences. She had played with herself, she had edged herself, she had spent countless hours exploring her femininity, learning the things that made her tick, and in the space of a few minutes, she had learned that all that had amounted to almost nothing. She cried out, as much in frustrated denial as in indescribable pleasure.

I held her on the crest of her wave for what must have felt like an eternity; neither allowing it to crash into her and provide exquisite relief, nor allowing it to fade into frustrated agony. Even her moans had devolved into pleading whimpers. This wasn't so much orgasm denial as it was a masterful demonstration of orgasm control. I could only smirk into her lips as I followed the increasingly desperate thoughts racing through her mind. But finally, I decided to show mercy.

Breaking from the kiss, I moved my lips up the soft curve of her jaw, feeling the sweat matted hair clinging to my stubbled cheek as I pressed my lips to her ear. With a flick of my fingers over the grooves of her g spot and a sudden jolt of pressure into her clit, I whispered into her ear.

"Cum for me!"

Fireworks went off behind her eyes as her jaw fell slack in a silent, soul searing scream. I could feel her mind shatter as her vision distorted - a result of her eyes rolling into her head, - every muscle in her body tensed and her legs gave out beneath her. It was only my still-working fingers inside her that held her up. This wasn't an orgasm of loud screams and voiced profanities, this was an orgasm that robbed her of conscious thought. Every fibre of her existence condensed down to the feelings of abject euphoria as her climax rattled through her body and mind. She thrummed and vibrated in pleasure, her legs trembled, barely supporting her weight as she sucked in a deep, desperate breath and her voice returned to her.

"Ohhhhhh.... Ohhhhhhhh" It was a moan of life altering pleasure, and earth shattering surprise.

My reply was the only two words her mind was capable of processing as I held my lips to her ear... "Good Girl."

I held her there for a moment, enjoying the feeling of her silky inner walls rippling up and down my fingers, the aftershocks of her climax still clamping rhythmically against them. Finally, I slowly withdrew them. I moved slowly - delicate but firm - as my other hand turned her wrists and spun her back around to face me, looking deep into her eyes. Without breaking eye contact, I brought my fingers up, glistening with her juices in the dim light, her eyes dropped from mine to watch them approach, her tongue coming out to wet her dry lips, her mind wondering which of us would get to taste her as her eyes stayed fixed on my hand.

"Do you want them?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

She could only nod her head. I paused my hand in mid air, making a show of licking my lips and the juices covering them for their time between her legs, before bringing my fingers close enough for her mouth to reach. She dove onto my fingers; her mouth inhaling my digits and her tongue swirling around and between them, working to clean every drop of her juices from them, a satisfied moan vibrating from her throat as a new surge of energy washed through her.

"Tell me what you want." I whispered.

Her mind exploded in a haze of thought and imagery, each one seeming to pull her with equal force in different directions. She whimpered; not only due to the fact that she was more aroused than she could ever remember being in her entire life, but because she couldn't force herself to choose only one of the myriad of desires in her mind, even if she had wanted to. Her body trembled against mine. Her legs almost gave out again as I pulled my fingers from her lips.

"Please..." She mumbled in a panted, strangled breath. "I want... I want you." The next movement seemed to come to both of us at the same time. With a hungry glint in her eyes, another lick of the juices on her lips, she lowered her weight. My hand allowed her wrists to follow her down the wall as she sank to her knees, my free hand waiting just long enough for her to get settled before dragging my tented boxers over my hips. My granite-hard and precum soaked manhood springing up to meet her gaze.

Her eyes flicked up to mine for a moment before returning the real object of her desires just in time for her to see my hips lean forward. Her lips parted immediately, instinctively, opening wide as her eyes fell closed and the bulbous crown of my impressive engorged cock slid onto her waiting tongue.

With her arms straining above her head, there was almost no room for her to move her mouth on me, not that this fact stopped her from trying. With what little movement she could manage, she pressed herself forward, her lips forming a seal around my head as it slipped past and dragging down my shaft as I pushed deeper. Her tongue rubbed vigorously around every inch of hard, warm skin that it could reach. There was no rushing on my part, I inched with almost sadistic restraint deeper into her mouth. She wanted me to use her, she wanted to be ravished, to share her darkest desires with me as a new resolve solidified in her mind. The woman on her knees was an entirely different creature to the one who had been whimpering around my fingers a few minutes ago.

I pressed forward, feeling her lips stretch around my sword as I sheathed it deeper into her mouth, grateful that I hadn't grown it to the obscene, unusable sizes that others in my position had done. Her eyes had flicked back up, holding my gaze as she worked to please me. I couldn't help but let the corners of my mouth curl into a smile. Her eyes beamed back before she let them close again and concentrated at the task in front of her. I finally released her wrists. She didn't miss a beat, throwing them onto my ass and forcing me deeper and faster into her mouth, impaling herself on my cock over and over again as I met each bob with a swing of my hips.

I finally felt the precum-soaked tip of my cock nudge against the opening of her throat. I held it in place for a moment before slowly starting to pull back, the whimper of disappointment vibrating along my length as I closed my eyes, relishing in the feel of her tight lips dragging up my shaft, the suction trying to pull me back in, and the bobbing of her neck to keep as much of me in her mouth as possible, for as long as possible before thrusting herself forward to swallow my length again.

I bucked my hips forward before immediately pulling back again. All the way into the entrance of her throat and back to the tip before repeating, over and over again with her enthusiastic efforts trying to take me deeper. My free hand moved to the back of her head, running my fingers through her hair but also giving myself something to thrust against. Her mind was singing as my pace increased, a long purr of excitement vibrated through her lips, punctuated with a deep moan every time I pulled away just short of entering her throat.

I can take it. Her mind was saying, I want it all! I want him in my throat!

I smirked to myself, I knew full well that she could take it all, she had already proven this to me in the hospital and she wouldn't have to wait long until I gave it all to her... but she would have to wait. My fingers wrapped themselves in a handful of hair, controlling the movement of her head and only leaving her with authority over her tongue and the amount of pressure applied by her lips. I could almost feel the tingle between her legs as she realised what was about to happen.

My hips went from powerful, firm, yet restrained strokes into her mouth, to full blown rutting. Fucking her salivating mouth with increasingly deep and relentless thrusts. No longer stopping short of her throat, my crown was pressing into it with harder and harder jabs. None of them quite strong enough to push through, but hard enough to let her know that it was only a matter of time before I claimed her throat. Far from being an inanimate prop for my use, Becky's tongue was pressing and wiggling against the underside of my shaft, her lips altering their pressure depending on if I was slamming my cock into her mouth, or dragging it back out, and throughout it all, there was the ceaseless suction.

Coherent thought had all but vanished from her mind; her entire consciousness was consumed by euphoric images of her fantasies being fulfilled and the blissful revelling in the sensations I was subjecting her to. If she had sat down and written a script for how she had wanted this night to go, it would have been no different to this. Her body was screaming at her for another release, the pulsating throb between her sopping thighs demanding attention, the building need to cum, to be filled, every fibre of her being was telling her that the tension was building, the energy in the elastic had reached its peak and was about to break if not released. Her eyes fluttered closed, her legs ground together, her fists clenched, pressing her nails into the palms of her hands and the soft purring of her throat evolved into a series of deep grunts, "guh"s and guttural groans. For the first time in her life, Becky was learning what it was to be taken and I watched with a satisfied smirk as she gave in to temptation and slid a hand between her thighs.

I slammed my cock into her throat.

To her credit, she held onto her gag reflex; her eyes shooting open in surprise before quickly acting on the one image that had filled her head the most since I had begun. She swallowed; over and over, depositing the huge amount of saliva and precum in her mouth into her stomach and milking the head of my cock with her throat muscles. I allowed a small groan to escape my lips, less an involuntary gasp at the indescribably pleasure she was giving me and more a reward for her efforts. Her mind corrected itself, the jolt of pleasure she received from that one groan made the pent up desire of a few minutes ago seem like nothing. Tonight, she was experiencing arousal like never before.

I held in her throat for a few moments, just long enough for her to realise that the new intruder was blocking her airway before pulling back, giving her just enough time to suck in a breath before pushing back in. Long, deep, and increasingly fast strokes claimed her throat over and over again as I fucked her mouth. Pressing my abdomen into her nose, tapping my balls against her chin, feeling the spittle gather around the base of my cock before pulling out to the tip and sliding back in. Her tongue never stopped moving, her lips never broke their seal, the suction barely eroded by her biological imperative to breath. This was the kind of oral sex she masturbated about. Each stroke staking a claim to her throat, each thrust possessing her completely, each rub of her tongue, each press of her lips and each strangled breath became an achievement that marked her absolute mastery of providing pleasure. And that pleasure ended in only one way, her mind started to sing a different tune.

I am man enough to be able to admit that if it wasn't for the self- control that my abilities allowed, there would be no way I would have been able to last as long as I had. Becky had an almost instinctual knowledge of how to provide pleasure. Despite my use of her, despite my control over her, despite her lack of mobility, she was still showing herself to be a savant. The rub of her tongue, the right application of pressure in the right place, at just the right moment, even that hungry, almost challenging look in her eyes; I may have been the one in control, but she had all the power. Her mind was made up, she was going to keep this up for as long as I could manage, it was the defiant streak in her that separated her fantasies from that of being a slave. She was determined that she would either keep going until I threw her on the bed and fucked her senseless, or until I exploded in her mouth and made her drink me. She wanted both.

Of course, it had never occurred to her that having both was an option.

My voice, when it left my lips, sounded more of a growl than a question. "Do you want my cum, kitten?" I knew that name would send another shiver of arousal through her core and tracked it with a smirk as it blossomed. Becky could only moan in response as my cock continued to piston in and out of her throat. "Then show me!"

I suddenly stopped my hips, releasing her hands and her hair at the same time, standing myself up straight and stepping back, releasing her from the wall. I watched as she pounced into action. Her reflexes were lightning fast, even by my standards and my pounding heart hadn't even managed a second beat before she was impaling her mouth on my cock. Her hands moved to my ass, her nails digging in slightly as she pulled me into her again. It was even more frantic a face fuck than I had subjected her to; slamming herself onto me, easily taking me as deep as I had gone when in control, her head cork-screwing from side to side as she took my full length over and over again, moaning and grunting with each downward stroke. One hand moved around me, reaching underneath to run the tips of her fingernails against my heavy swinging balls. I could only gasp, letting out a groan of my own as I let myself go to this Siren.

Lost in the fantasies and imagery from her mind - and with the mental blocks removed - my resolve quickly crumbled. Her skills, her enthusiasm and her determination making short work of the walls of my resistance. My legs started to tremble, the last semblance of control fleeing me as balls started to tighten. I could almost see her smiling to herself, that inner sense of pride and accomplishment at having beaten her master shining like a light through the fog of her delirious arousal. The point of no return came and went in the blink of an eye.

Clenching my eyes closed, throwing my head back and roaring out the arrival of my orgasm, the dam broke, and I erupted into her mouth. The first shot went straight into her throat, but Becky wanted to taste me. She pulled her head back, both hands moving onto my shaft to stroke the rest of my cum into her mouth while her lips surrounded my head. My cock swelled and flexed as each rope pulsed between her waiting and hungry lips, painting the roof of her mouth, bathing her tongue and letting the full contents of my balls drain onto her taste buds. With a whimpered, trembling breath, I let my eyes open and look down at her; her gaze was already fixed on me, watching the pleasure wash across my face as she held both my cockhead and my load in her mouth. Just like she did the first time, she tasted me, letting her senses be filled with my seed, swirling her tongue around to make sure that not a single millimeter of it was kept clean and coaxing out the last few drops.

Finally she pulled back, opening her mouth and looking up at me, displaying the results of her efforts for my approval. With a twinkle in her eye, she closed her mouth, swallowed with one large gulp and smiled dreamily back up at me. Those two words escaped my lips almost by instinct: "Good Girl." In her pleasure addled and beaming mind, she thought that it was finished, that she had drained me and it would be a while before I could go again, if I could go again at all.

How little she knew.

I wasn't even close to being sated. I had no idea if there were any limits to my enhanced prowess, but I was certainly going to find out tonight. I reached down with both hands, hooking them under her arms and lifting her to her feet and then off them, turning and throwing her the few feet onto her bed. A squeal of delight pierced the air before her eyes drifted down to my cock, still iron hard; her eyes widened in shock as the reality of the situation and possibilities dawned on her. Any ebbing of the tides of arousal between her legs was reversed in an instant. She knew what was coming, whether her mind could quite believe it or not.

She clambered her way further up the bed as I approached, the look in my eye told her everything she needed to know. She had been given a taste of control, but only because I had allowed it, The power was now squarely back with me. Her pupils dilated and her heartbeat skipped at just the thought of it; of truly letting go and giving in to my every carnal desire, and much like hers, my mind was swimming in them.

I was making a show of it. Before my powers, my body had been nothing to write home about, But now every muscle was sculpted, the exquisite detail of my masculine form resembled a Greek Demigod. Crawling towards her, I stalked her up the bed like prey. Becky giggled, squirming towards the headboard, hungrily watching every movement as I got closer to her.

I crawled up her body. My eyes never leaving hers, the tip of my throbbing cock brushing along the inside of her thighs. She couldn't quite believe what was playing out; over the years a few men had tried to play out her control and submission fantasies. However, they had never lived up to her expectations. This was different. I had fulfilled one of her deepest desires, and I wanted more. I craved her with a deep, primal, sexual need that could not be sated and she knew it. There was no mistaking the glint in my eye nor my rigid cock as I approached... She could only lick her lips in anticipation. "I'm going to get fucked!" her mind sang, it would be the last of her coherent thoughts for a while.

With one hard thrust, I plunged my entire length into her. Becky's eyes rolled a little as her head fell backwards before her arms gave way beneath her. She wanted it hard, rather than rough, although she had some dark fantasies towards the latter, it was the former on her mind right now and I was more than happy to oblige. Another animalistic growl was pulled from my lips as I immediately started driving in and out of her sopping pussy with long, hard and increasingly fast strokes. Each impact echoed around the room, my balls slapped against her ass as I ground every downstroke into her clit and the ripples and minor contractions pulsed through her inner walls. The first minor tremors of her impending orgasm signalled its imminent arrival.

She was surprised at the speed at which her first orgasm ripped through her body, her eyes bulged and her breath caught in her throat as she tried to scream, swallow and breathe at the same time, resulting in a gargled moan as she clamped down around me. Holding back a chuckle, I was not. She had been subjected to pure sexual torment, her desire exploited for the better part of an hour and the scale of the orgasm that ripped through her was almost inevitable.

Still pistoning into her, I could only watch with a satisfied smile as her chest blushed a healthy hue of pink and the whites of her eyes stole her irises, her whole body jerking and convulsing under the climax that had been teased for so long. The gargled moan was replaced with a desperate, sucked in breath as her fingers clenched around the bedsheets "Oh my god!" she finally groaned, one word almost slurring into the next, "ohmygodohmygodohmygod! Fuuuuuuuuuck!" Her eyes snapped open, regarding me with a mixture of shock, reverence and challenge. Grunting with each new thrust, greeting them with new words of encouragement as she rode out the last of her orgasm and started chasing the next.

"Yes!... Just like that!... Oh god!... So good!... Don't stop... oh fuck!... Yes, fuck me hard!... Take me, I'm yours!"

I never slowed my pace, nor altered my rhythm for a second. Ploughing into her with long, deep, and hard trusts, watching her lips as she panted around her words, her face twisting and contorting in pleasure. This was the definition, in her mind at least, of frantic fucking. It wasn't necessarily fast, but each thrust was brutally hard. The bed rocked, creaking in complaint as the head board thudded against the wall with the force of each hammering stroke. And it was deep. Becky had several toys and plenty of hours worth of practice with each, but she couldn't remember anything being as deep inside her as I was at the apex of each downward thrust, let alone anyone.

She was breathing hard, juggling each inhalation around her continued dirty words of encouragement, the flush still heavy on her chest, up her neck and onto her cheeks. She had rolled her hips upwards, giving me a better angle as she tried to hook her legs behind me, giving up after a few failed attempts and, instead, contenting herself with just resting her thighs on my hips and holding them, spread wide, in the air. I was not about to pass up such an invitation.

Pushing myself up to a more vertical angle, I grabbed each of her legs behind the knee and lifted them onto my shoulders. Not only did this change the angle of entry for each new thrust, but it lifted her ass off bed as I leaned forward again, almost folding her in two. Her head shot back again, her eyes widening even further at the new sensation "Oh fuuuck! So fucking deep... So fucking.... Aaaaaaaagh". Her words fell away, replaced by incoherent mumblings and drawn out groans of life altering pleasure.

Resting my fists on the bed underneath her arms, this new angle meant I was fucking down deeply into her. The headboard stopped thumping against the wall but the pops in the mattress springs made me question if it would survive the night. The welfare of her mattress was the last thing on Becky's mind; her eyes had lost focus, her hands had moved from clutching at the bedsheet, to grasping at my arms, then my chest, then around my shoulders and finally given up, dropping above her head, her mouth hung open, loud cries that could be mistaken for groans of pain were pushed out of her throat with each thrust. Her mind had dissolved into a blur of light and color.

"Uuugh... Uuugh... Uuugh." With each one of her grunts, my eyes chose somewhere else to look. Her bountiful chest was rippling and bouncing with each thrust, both mounds topped with diamond hard nipples, surrounded by engorged and ridged areola, the perfect size for sucking. My eyes followed them as they jumped up her chest, only to fall back into place to await the next powerful thrust of my hips. Or her hands, clenching and falling limp every few seconds, her eyes, glazed over and vacant, looking at me but, somehow, through me as well. Or her mind, a spiralling kaleidoscope of swirling colors, flashing lights and ringing bells. Her entire being was being consumed by the overwhelming assault of pleasure. Neither thought, nor muscle was capable of conscious control.

The further forward I leaned, the more her body folded under me, her hips rolling and opening left my cock able to angle itself however I wanted it. Shifting my hips down slightly and slamming forward, I drove hard into her g spot. A loud gasp was the only sound she was capable of making as her mind shattered. Her second orgasm - only a few minutes behind the first, a feat she had always believed was a myth - hit her like a freight train, coming out of nowhere and crashing through her body with a series of convulsive thrashes and incoherent moans, but her pussy clamped down on me like a vice. There was no way on Earth that any normal man could overcome the powerful, milking contractions that rippled up and down her inner walls. She had reached her limit and I eased off the relentless barrage of strokes, just pressing deep inside her and holding, letting her orgasm crawl its way back and forth along my shaft as I waited for it to subside.

I watched her face as much as her mind. There were fireworks going off behind her eyes and the vortex of color and light was pulsing and throbbing in perfect timing with the contractions of her sex. Her face was a mask of exquisite agony, she had given up trying to control her breathing, given up trying to control her limbs, all she could do was ride out the wave of mind-altering pleasure as the rush of endorphins made her numb to all else. Her perception of existence had condensed down solely to the feeling of contact between us and the euphoria it was inducing.

Eventually, her eyes fluttered back to the moment, blinking rapidly a few times before focusing on mine. "Wow...." She whispered, a look usually reserved for biblical figures painted across her face.

"More?"

"Oh God, yes!"

I slowly pulled out of her, pulling her up to her knees and pressing my lips into her, my tongue snaking into her mouth to find and dance with hers as my hands wandered up and down my back. She pressed hers into my chest, her nails scratching into me softly as she grasped and clawed at my skin. I broke the kiss, shifting out of her way and slowly bending her forward. "Wait," she said as she dropped onto all fours, looking up at me with an impish smile. "I seem to have made a mess."

It took longer than I care to admit to work out what she was referring to, but her inhaling my whole length into her mouth, sucking hard and dragging her tongue up the underside of my shaft explained it to me. She bobbed her head a few times, popped me out of her mouth and dipped down to lap her tongue against my wet balls and the base of my cock; both of which were covered in copious amounts of her juices.

"We taste good together." She smirked, beaming a smile up at me.

"I'm glad you like it." I replied through a throaty chuckle. "Nice and clean now?"

She nodded her head slowly, her sultry eyes never leaving mine before that smile broke through again. "You may continue." she said with a smirk, wiggling her ass playfully. Sliding around behind her, I kept my eyes locked on hers, watching as she craned her neck to look seductively back over her shoulder at me. Lined up and slowly, but steadily sank back into her.

Compared to normal Becky, her mind was nowhere near anything that could be called clear and coherent, but compared to the Becky of a few minutes ago, the one lost in the throes of her spectacular orgasm, she was a picture of clarity. What's more, as I started sawing in and out of her in increasingly deep and powerful strokes, our eyes never parting, she managed to keep hold of those faculties, apparently growing more accustomed to the indescribably pleasure of our coupling.

This time, the grunts were coming from both of us, even if hers were moulded around her sultry words of encouragement. "That's it, baby... take that pussy... Make it yours... fuuuck, good dick! Good dick!..." The dominant part of my brain, the part that I had borrowed from Becky, was singing under the praise, each utterance stroking my ego and urging me to claim her properly. To fill her, to make her mine, to really take possession of what was being offered. It was only my iron tight resolve - and prowess related abilities - that was holding my orgasm back. I was under no illusions that I would have emptied my balls into this vixen a couple of times already if it wasn't for them.

Holding onto her hips, my fingers digging in so tightly that I was sure there would be bruises in the morning, I pulled her back onto me in time with every pistoning swing of my hips. Each stroke pressing deeply into her core as she held her knees together on the bed, forcing her thighs and pussy to tighten even more around my shaft and increasing the sensation for both of us. Her eyes began to lose focus again before falling closed, her grunts devolving into deep, throaty groans as I picked up my pace and she focused on trying to hold her weight up on the bed. The combined power of my thrusts into her and my pulling her back onto me made these feel deeper and harder despite the drop in effort needed, the new effect was not lost on Becky.

I reared a hand back, bringing it down on her ass with a smack that echoed around the room. Becky's eyes shot open, her yelp of surprise drawing out into a moan as I evened her out with a smack to the other cheek, two rose handprints blossoming on her skin and the spanks spurring her on to back into me harder and more energetically. There had been a few occasions over the past month of random, anonymous sex when I had just held myself still and let the nameless girl ride herself back onto me, something deeply satisfying about their need to feel me inside of them, even if I was not the one doing the work, but Becky was different. She had already had two life-altering orgasms, and countless smaller highs that, by now, had almost blended into a single prolonged throb of pleasure, but it wasn't enough. I wanted her to tingle when she thought back to this night, I wanted her to wake up in the morning, still feeling sore and used, I wanted her to think of this when she thought of me. Moreover, I still didn't quite feel like I had kept my promise...

Becky was far too lost in the throes of pleasure to notice my jeans sliding across the floor, entirely of their own volition. Her eyes, if not closed, could barely focus on anything other than the bedsheets in front of her face as she gave up trying to look back at me and let the sensation overwhelm her, but they missed the movement on the floor. With my mind pulling them closer, without letting the new distraction alter my rhythm, a small envelope of folded satin floated out of one of the pockets and onto the bed next to me. With one hand staying on her hips, the other moved down to unfold the gift that I had kept in my pants all evening, the real promise I had made her. I left it on the bed next to my knees.

I know it was time, I hammered my hips into her as hard as my muscles would allow, burying myself to the hilt inside her well-fucked pussy over and over as my balls tightened for the second time that night. My cock started to swell, my toes curled beneath me and my fingers dug hard into her hips. My cock exploded into her. The first rope splashing against her cervix was enough to crash another orgasm into her body; Her eyes widened, then her pussy clamped around me as she came... Hard. "Oh fuuuuuuuuck!" she drawled, her hips jerking and bucking back against me as she thrashed through her third massive orgasm.

My own climax was so powerful that my mind had trouble latching on to anything more than the vice like contractions and the splash of warm juices on my cock. I could barely maintain even the most basic of rhythms to keep fucking her through her high, I could only arch my back, hold myself as deep inside her as I could reach, and hold on for dear life. I couldn't even guess how long we stayed in that state of mutual explosive bliss, but when I came round, I was flat on my back on the bed, Becky purring as she curled herself up against me, her blonde hair matted to her sweaty skin and a look of unabashed sexual satisfaction etched onto her gorgeous features.

Searching with my hand, I found Becky's gift and held it out between us, letting it swing in front of her head as I ran my fingers through her hair. It took a few moments for her to open her eyes, notice the movement in front of her and realise what she was looking at.

Between my fingers, swinging in the air before the glowing beauty, was a delicate, black lace collar. I had taken my time choosing it; there had been plenty of options, most of them involving PVC or leather, but somehow, they didn't seem to fit. Neither did the ones with leash hooks, or gaudy fake diamonds. The intricate pattern of gossamer threads demonstrated an intimacy to her collaring, the softer side of her submission and, despite the pummelling I had given her body over the last hour, the affection I held for her. For reasons I can only attribute to the lessons I was learning from her mind, the fact that I gently wrapped it around her neck shortly after she had wailed out her climax gave me no small amount of satisfaction. It was a memory to make her blush every time her fingers would instinctively move to touch it whenever she thought of me in the future.

She turned to look up at me as I leaned down and pressed my lips to hers, holding her as I returned her adoring gaze. I could feel her mind scrambling for words, struggling to find anything even approaching relevance. I smiled down at her, ran a finger over the fine threads of her collar and onto her hand, giving it a soft squeeze and speaking in an affectionate whisper, "Mine."

Her smile could have shamed the most vibrant, star-filled sky as she nodded and rested her head on my chest.

"Yours."

* * * * * * * * * *

Yeah, yeah... It was a long one. I had an idea in my head of where I wanted to make the break for the next chapter without really realising how much I needed to fit in that space. I would love to be able to say that future chapters will be shorter, but that's probably a lie.

We are coming to the end of what can be described as Book 1 of the NewU series. The characters are in play, the plot is being revealed and the narrative is about to take off. We have maybe 2 more chapters left until we get into the thick of it. Some will love the direction the story takes, others won't, but as usual, all views are valued.

Thank you so much for your patience and your kind words. I have some of the best readers on lit and all of you are awesome. See you in the next chapter (which hopefully wont take as long to write)

Nova