by David Burke
During one of the weekly visits by D’varn he had tried to broach the subject. The little red alien wouldn’t discuss it. Sometimes he would not answer questions, many times in fact. Sometimes he would say that knowledge was too dangerous for them to have yet. But when it came to discussions about temporal manipulation, he had only one reaction, a stark fear. He simply refused to even discuss it and the last time Jay asked, had threatened to break off their haphazard alliance.
No matter how much Jay wanted answers he couldn’t risk that. The knowledge, as sparing as it was that D’varn doled out, was of great assistance to the tech department. More than that, it helped Jay gain an appreciation for the scope of the threat presented by the Forlorn.
As if shouldering the future of his fellow test subjects hadn’t been bad enough, Jay first found himself feeling responsible for saving the remnants of the human race. Then he began to feel as though he was responsible for saving the entire universe. It was frankly too much for him to take in.
It led to arguments between Jay and D’varn. But all that Jay was willing to take on now was responsibility for his cluster. Maybe at some point they would find a way to rescue the dwindling number of humans in the other clusters. For now though, Jay only shrugged and said that one man could only do so much.
The other argument was about why D’varn couldn’t just turn off the dangerous parts of the experiment. He insisted that after the Forlorn attack most of the ship's systems were running on auto and couldn’t be altered. Jay always got the feeling though that D’varn didn’t want the forced evolutions to stop. He was clearly impassioned about the results demonstrated by Jay and his cluster, at least as much as his flat affect would allow.
The other part of it turned out that there were two A’snkarnt left who were splitting control of the experiment and neither was able to override the other. D’varn wouldn’t say much about this S’vanth. Clearly there was no love lost between them but he wouldn’t go into what the motivations were for this other alien.
As Jay sat up on the bed, he placed his hand on the small table that served as a night stand. He felt a metallic ring that was smooth to his touch. There was no need to look at it to know what it was, the Crown of Adaptation. It was proof of his victory over the Bal’gi, but hadn’t done much for him yet.
He had tried to leave it with the tech division to study. Even Ava’s ability to innately understand most technology was stifled by the object. They had figured out some aspects of it, enough for it to be at least partially identified but D’varn said that one of the reasons the A’snkarnt had locked the Bal’gi away was because of this strange technology that defied much of what they understood about science.
Jay had his suspicions about the A’snkarnt’s true intentions towards the Bal’gi but never voiced them. To him it was easier just to think of the crown as a magical item. It was made of some golden metal, although Nalani assured him it wasn’t gold. Their scans revealed that within the outer casing there was a network of fine filaments which carried energy, much like a nervous system.
The problem was that the item would not respond to any of the women unless he was touching it. So he had to be there for any testing that they wanted to do on it and his days were already quite packed not to mention how full his dance card had become at night.
For probably the thousandth time, Jay looked at the crown. He took note of the twelve tiny blue crystals embedded in its outer casing. They matched the crystals that were on the staves carried by the Bal’gi Ward Workers. Tech division was quite excited by those and felt they had some similar properties to the PSI crystals that Mia could make.
Activating Evolved Assessment, Jay scanned the item again. He didn’t really know what he hoped to learn from it that was different from the other 999 times he had scanned it.
Crown of Adaptation
Inactive Mode:
Enhances the physical stats of the wearer by 20%
Enhances the charismatic appeal of the wearer by 20%
Only affects members of the opposite sex
Permits the wearer to survive in almost any environment
Active Mode:
Creates a circuit for the sole benefit of the wearer
Boosts in power commensurate with the other parts of the circuit
It had become a bone of contention between Jay and both his wives and his advisors. Lately it even was an issue with the rest of the cluster. Jay seemed to be the only one who could wear it. Any woman that touched it got a painful shock that grew in intensity the longer that she held onto it. He couldn’t even hand it to Miguel without triggering a mandatory fight to the death.
Now they expected him to wear it everywhere. The gamer in him said it was too good to pass up. That 20% boost to physical stats was crazy good. But unlike a game where you might be able to equip a piece of gear and then get a new skin that covered it if you didn’t like the way it looked, he was stuck walking around with a crown on his head.
At least it wasn’t too ostentatious but it was still a crown. The other thing that never came up in video games was the fact that he didn’t like the way that it felt. Jay had never been a hat guy. The way that it lay on his head just bothered him. Amelia told him he was being a baby, and in this she was probably right. You didn’t take off something this valuable because it felt funny.
It was just one of the arguments that he had lost over the past four months since meeting D’varn. Jay liked to think that he had become an expert at recognizing which fights were worth going to the mat for and which ones he just needed to give in on. The reality was that apart from being trapped inside of an alien experiment with another even more hostile alien race wanting to obliterate all of them, he was pretty much living the life.
No TV, cell phones, or video games but the shop produced better food for them now than anything he had eaten on Earth. Telepathic communication, to say nothing of his bonds and fusions, had produced a far greater ease of communication than even cell phones. If he wanted a video game all he had to do was go dungeon diving on the fourth floor and he could live it for real.
And TV, well the main thing he had watched wasn’t on the TV, but he no longer had a need for that as his life was now more of that than he knew what to do with. It was simply something which he had no need for now. By his math, Jay had slept with four girls in total and fooled around with a few others prior to being taken by the A’snkarnt.
Since then he had been deep inside of fifty-nine pussies, half that many mouths and even the backsides of a couple girls who shared similar interests with Ava. The rest of the cluster was part of Team Miguel, other than Trina who was steadfastly holding out for some type of special treatment from Jay.
He was sure that those were rookie numbers for some rock stars and such, but he thought he was blessed beyond measure for a guy living in a life and death struggle. He had truly worried, once each of the pods had expanded to ten, that he was not gonna have the stamina to keep up, but time turned out to be the only true constraining factor.
At one point he had started to count how many encounters he had. You know for the sake of science. He gave up after seven days resulted in one hundred and thirty-seven discrete encounters although there were obviously multiples in many of the sessions. It still meant that some of the girls were only with him once in a week and others twice.
His wives were the most frequent flyers as was only appropriate and even they couldn’t seem to find time with him more than four times in a week. Almost all the girls had settled into groups of two or three that were most comfortable with each other although there was a group of six that thought they might get more time if they all pooled their allotments together.
Those sessions pushed Jay in more ways than he thought possible. Sensual projection made it so that all the girls could experience multiple orgasms everyday but the more accustomed they got to that the more they seemed to want. Specifically it made them demand more actual physical contact as though the other wasn’t good enough as an
ything other than a tide me over.
Multi-tasking took on a new meaning for him with his moresome. He learned how to satisfy multiple women at once as they rotated around between straddling his face, cock, fingers, or just plain tribbing on his legs. He knew that they didn’t love him like his wives did, but it was still impossible to hate the experience and four months later he had not yet found out how many licks it took to get to the center of a tootsie pop.
Just thinking about it had him ready to go for a walk around the camp. The sun wasn’t up yet but so far they had been safe on the third floor but the girls all insisted that he wear the crown for extra safety. A part of him thought they actually liked however the charisma effect worked, because they got all worked up whenever he was wearing it.
After placing it on his head he opened up his Status Sheet. It wasn’t that the daily changes were that big. He rarely gained a level now despite the fact that he trained hard each day and spent hours helping to refine every one of the girls. He had even done one pass through all of Team Miguel to get them strengthened.
M1789
Level: 101
Awareness: 142
Precognition: 41 - 43%
Evolved Assessment: 131 - 97%
Iron Will: 100 - 15%
Telepathy: 78 - 41%
Evolved Projected Bond: 122 - 16%
Durability: 145 (174-crown)
Evolved Strength Forged Body: 122 - 65%
Phase Burst: 42 - 83%
Kinesis: 130
Evolved Kinetic Manipulation: 79 - 64%
Metabolism: 147 (176-crown)
Evolved Adaptive Speed: 129 - 12%
Formation: 157
Body Modification: 149 - 30%
Psionic Construct: 95 - 11%
Temporal Manipulation: 98 - 0%
PSI Pts: 10,815 (11,685-crown)
In fact looking at his sheet again, Jay realized that he had actually been neglecting his own training. Sure his stats were by far still the highest. Sure they had shot up but most of that was the twenty points in each stat that he gained from his future infusion as he liked to call it.
In terms of skills he had progressed in a few but mostly only the ones that had either been significantly underpowered or which he was using incessantly to refine the others. Body Modification had actually become his greatest skill even if he didn’t use it for much of anything beyond the refining process. Well that and some bedroom shenanigans.
The other skills that had improved the most were his Evolved Assessment and Telepathy. He was constantly scanning for threats and used the power all the time in the refining process. Telepathy improved because he used it with the babies and to communicate all over their homestead without having to go and actually meet with people.
Beyond that he had only gained thirteen levels in just over four months. That was by far the slowest progress he had made since arriving here. A part of him screamed that he needed to level more, but training only went so far. He had as of yet been afraid to push his refining too far for fear he would alter his fundamental humanity.
That was also why he had not tried to refine his brain so far. It was simply too risky in his estimation. At least for now. That of course didn’t really explain why he had so far refused to fuse with any of the other wives. He cited what had happened when he fused with Amelia, but they all saw through that.
In the end, he was just scared of what it might do to them and felt some nebulous fear about turning into a monster. The way that the Bal’gi king, Rantark, had spoken about gaining power from his harem put Jay off. As did the way that the monster had killed all of his elite Ward Workers by absorbing their strength into himself.
Jay swore to himself that power would never be so important that he would risk the safety of the ones he loved to gain it. He knew that in order to level up he needed to either carve out some time for himself to do more intensive refining of his body, go dungeon diving and experience actual combat versus simple training, or fuse with more of his wives.
Having ruled out draining power from his wives that left refining. There were two main problems with that. First off, this wasn’t like some cultivation novel where everyone in the society knew the stages of development. He didn’t know when he would hit one step too far and not be able to come back.
More than that, refining was a very time-consuming process. Even with his improved skill he still spent a solid eight or ten hours a day improving the girls on Team Jay. That took two months to get through the entire group though.
He knew that he had a cheat for time. But the combination of D’varn’s warning and the way he had felt after using the Tempus Fugit fields back to back for over one hundred days of time distortion in less than a twenty-four hour period had made him unwilling to use the skill again. It was another bone of contention but at least the girls were split on it. Some of them took D’varn’s warning more seriously than others.
As for the leveling issue, he knew what the secret fear with that issue was. Five more levels and he would pass the next threshold and none of the birth control they had would work. D’varn had upped the rewards they gained for farming the slime ruins and hunting monsters on the fourth floor. That along with huge credit boosts for capturing the staves and crown had meant that the cost of birth control was not an issue.
Even D’varn couldn’t make the current terminals provide access to higher levels of birth control. In fact the little alien seemed to hint that if the leveling progression began that there might be a point at which no chemical compound would be capable of blocking their hyper fertility. That was going to present a whole new level problem.
Jay didn’t for one second believe that he could get the girls to agree to forgo sex, and as long as he wasn’t kidding himself, he knew that he wouldn’t want to either, even if the stimulant didn’t affect him as powerfully as it affected the girls. He already had thirteen children now and had decided that was enough for a while until those children grew up a bit.
They were growing at just over double the normal rate, so some were crawling now. Both Jaxon and Michelle, the two oldest, were close to walking. It was all a lot to take in and yet another example of why time was the most valuable commodity that he possessed. Even spending an hour each day in the nursery cut into his time.
Yet it killed him to leave each time as he received plaintive telepathic cries for more of his time. Who would have ever guessed that he would love being a father so much? If protecting his wives and the cluster had been a motivation before, the need to protect his children only threw things into overdrive.
It also resulted in more than one conversation where he had to be reassured that he was a good father even if he couldn’t spend as much time with the kids as he would have liked to. More to the point he needed to be reminded that he was nothing like his father.
Thinking of his children automatically brought to mind their mothers. For the most part he was beyond being worried about the fact that he slept with multiple women. It was just the reality here. That didn’t mean that it wasn’t odd to him that only three of his thirteen children were with one of his wives.
The wives had all agreed though that no one in any of their pods were allowed to have babies with Jay until after the wife had. That decision had helped to make it easier for Jay to put a stop on having more children for the time being.
Not all the women even wanted to have babies, but Jay had to admit he was surprised that the vast majority of them did. Even ones like Meikiyo or Charlotte who were more interested in fighting by his side had both as much as said that they wanted his babies. In Char’s case, she also wanted a ring to go along with it.
For now, more of his children came from Amelia’s pod than any other. That included Martina, Madison, Grace, and Harper. From Jessie’s pod there were girls like Hanna that didn’t want babies yet as they wanted to fight still. But surprisingly both Oma and Rosa who really didn’t have any emotional feelings for Jay had wanted babies and got Jessie to get them permi
ssion.
Then also from Jessie’s pod was the one and only unauthorized pregnancy. Jay had started to take for granted that all of the girls were using what was provided to them. Then Simone turned up pregnant. In the end they worked it out and were now on speaking terms but some of the other girls who had been denied were still fairly bristly with her.
After Huong got pregnant that opened the doorway for others in her pod. Once again it proved to Jay that he didn’t understand women. Nalani and Sofia, he understood somewhat, but when Huong told him that the super shy technopath, Veronica, wanted a baby, he had been shocked.
The relationships that Jay formed with the mothers of his children were deep but also unique from his relationships with his wives. There was something about sitting there with the mother of one of his children while she cradled his child and talked about their dreams for their child.
Lost in thought, Jay wandered around the village and almost didn’t notice when Jessie came up behind him. “Hey honey, penny for your thoughts?”
Jay smiled at her. “I’m just taking stock of life here. How are you doing this morning? And how is our little man?”
She smiled. “You know how he is. At least he is sleeping through the night now. Which reminds me, tonight is with my pod, you know.”