Archive of Our Own ^beta

IV. Climax on Two Earths

Through a hole in the roof of the shuttered Big Stuff, through which we can hear a good amount of noise, Kelly drops down onto a rafter. “I see them that way,” she says, indicating to the far end of the gutted store. Getting inside the building as far from Jackie and her drones as possible will be a big advantage. Alice follows her, and I follow after. “Give me eyes,” Alice says, and I pass her the binoculars. “Fuck,” she says, “I know who these kids are.” They’re wearing white, and no two of their outfits are quite the same, but given they’re in the thrall of the Red Queen, I know exactly why Alice reacted that way.

“She’s been collecting my Freekies,” Alice says. “I never knew any of their names, I never even knew what fucking neighborhood they came from. I only ever saw them when they were meeting up somewhere else with some other band. Not to fight, even, just to hang out, smash some bottles, smoke weed, talk shit, fuck each other under a bridge. They hardly ever hurt anybody or even did anything illegal, they just thought I was cool. I’d give them the occasional appearance, take a hit off a joint so they could tell all their friends about it. Flashed them my tits every now and then, they went nuts for that. They didn’t just throw my name and my costume around for clout, or because everybody else was doing it, they really liked me.”

Alice went quiet, and after a second she handed me back the binoculars. “I’m gonna fucking kill her this time.”

Jacqueline Ripert was a detective for the NLPD. She was an absolute genius. Alice had just figured out my identity, and once she had gotten over being furious that I’d been lying to her by omission, she insisted I introduced her to everybody I knew. I’d known Jackie for a long time by then, one of my few friends in the department other than Pru. I was forced to bring her in on my secret identity when Esther was running around as Outfox, so she was one of the people Alice met through me. They hit it off very quickly. Alice and her started their kinky mock-superhero thing, but one day Jackie decided to make her supervillain fantasy a little more “real.” She swiped a mind control device from the evidence locker that had been taken off a crew from the Mad Monster Party, probably at least partly scavenged alien tech, and had used it to kidnap Carla back in her almost-but-not-quite-reformed days. Alice came to their rendezvous point and saw a brainwashed Carla that Jackie thought Alice would be okay with using as a prop in their game on that basis that “she really wanted to do it,” regardless of the fact that she was pumping that desire into Carla’s brain herself. Alice let her go, and the two didn’t speak again until Alice, now White Rabbit for real, busted up the similarly no-longer-fictitious Red Queen’s operation. She had been enslaving people with copies of her mind control device she was mass-producing, ramping up production even more as she took on more slaves.

We carefully walk back toward the corner a few yards to drop down as quietly as possible onto a tall stack of crates, then make our way down to the floor. I approach the massed puppet Freekies from one side while Alice and Kelly swoop around the other way. Jackie is sitting in a cheap prop throne with her feet propped up, as she loves so much to do, on a slave who sits before her on all fours. A handful of other slave drones put more mind control devices through the last stages of assembly before packing them gently into crates stuffed with wads of newspaper. Jackie’s focus, though, is on three Freekies copulating vigorously in front of her. One lies on the floor on her back, a second riding her, while a third occupies her other opening from behind. given how Freekies are with each other, it’s a bit less disgusting to see her reveling in watching them with each other than it would have been to see her using one of these poor women herself, but we know she does. She tells herself the desire they have for her is real, even if she sculpted those desires herself and forced them into their heads with stolen supertech.

I spy the main control device for the neural nodes on a table next to the Queen’s throne. I see Alice has noticed it as well, and the look in her eyes tells me we’re about to have some serious trouble. Alice rushes the table, grabbing the device and smashing it on the ground. In the split second they see her before the device is destroyed, the brainwashed Freekies dash toward Alice, which I was trying to prevent. A few of them were quite close to the Queen and her throne, so this could have gone a lot differently.

Typically, dispatching the Red Queen is simultaneously quite simple and quite difficult. The device that controls the neural nodes renders them inert if destroyed, and once her slaves are freed, we typically go from hopelessly outnumbered to possessing an army compared to the lone Queen. Those slaves, though, put up a hell of a fight keeping us from the machine when they’re still plugged into it. Lots of villains have goons, but the secret to being a superhero is that they typically don’t pay them all that well. A thug will only take so much punishment before they just fuck off. Jackie’s enslaved subjects don’t go down unless you put them down, and we always have great difficulty taking them out of the fight without hurting innocent people.

The mad dash toward the central node is an appealing strategy, but it’s usually not an option. Jackie keeps a wide, even distribution of goons on purpose, and this time she had more than she usually does. Alice got lucky, and it could have given us a serious problem. The patented Outfox technique is to quietly work the periphery and go inward. One the goons even know somebody is taking them out one by one, there are too few of them to put up a fight. I do it singlehandedly on a regular basis. With three of us, this would have been long, painful work, but it would have been foolproof. I underestimated my fool.

This would be the point where the Freekies turn on their master, which is at least the advantageous part of the Ender’s Game the-enemy-gate-is-down end run strategy, but this time they don’t. The freed slaves appear stunned, which is typical, and then they stay stunned. They stop what they’re doing and just sit on the floor, despondent and moaning.

“They have been with me for a very long time,” Jackie says, seemingly uninterested in getting out of her throne to either attack or flee us. Jackie isn’t much of a fighter, so she typically knows when she’s busted and doesn’t belabor the process. Alice rips her out of the seat, tosses her to the ground, drops her full weight on her and shackles her hands behind her before turning to do the same to her ankles. “Where the fuck is she?” Alice bellows.

“If you had ever gotten this rough with me when w-“ Jackie tries to mockingly say before Alice flips Jackie onto her back. Looming over her face, Alice says, with a calm more frightening than her rage, “Where is she?”

“She who?” Jackie asks. Thinking that taking some control of this interrogation might stay Alice’s hand from doing anything rash, I say, “We know you’ve been shacked up with Foxcatcher, we know you’ve been using your community college, cargo cult fucking engineering skills to help her cobble together that machine she’s trying to build, just tell us where she is.”

“They’re fighting,” one of the Freekies groans. “Why are they fighting?” another asks. “They love each other,” a third adds, “why are they fighting?”

“What the hell did you do to these girls?” Kelly yells. Kelly isn’t the biggest fan of young people barely of age already throwing their lives away on weirdo turf wars and hollow excess, but she has always been popular among the Freekies. They largely consider Sparrow a single entity, despite knowing there have been at least two, picking up pretty quickly on at least the Charlie/Kelly transition when Sparrow was suddenly black. Consequently, Sparrow Freekies are very common, each one styling their costume primarily after one or another, but generally seeing themselves as one big family. The Freekie phenomenon has grown over time, though, so Kelly is the Sparrow who’s had the most dealings with them. She’s seen as an adorable nerd, always encouraging her fans to stay on the straight and narrow, but they love her for it. She’s grown very protective of these kids, at least the ones who fly the flags of heroes instead of villains.

“The same thing I always do,” Jackie says apathetically. “Most of my subjects just don’t stay here very long, thanks to you clowns. If I get to live in their little heads long enough, though, I stay there forever. It becomes real to them, they forget what’s program and what’s themselves. They truly love Big Sister now.”

Cutting off Alice before she can say enough to rile herself up again, I ask, “What do we have to do to fix this?” “I’m sure they will readjust in time,” Jackie says, “but who knows? There aren’t exactly peer-reviewed journal articles about this.”

“Look, Queen of Hearts,” I say, “all we ne-“

“I am not. The fucking. Queen. Of Hearts. You ignorant fucks,” Jackie howls. “They are two. Different. Fucking. Characters. I’m not some fucking mall-goth cliché who’s obsessed with Alice in Wonderland, which isn’t even the name of the goddamn book. It’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the vastly fucking superior sequel is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. That, that book, is my shit, up and down. It’s fuckin’ Grace Slick over here who only ever read the first one, and barely.”

Alice clamps her hand on Jackie’s throat.

“The idea of you trying to recapture some fucked-up version of what I wish we’d never had with fucking Foxcatcher, of all people, makes me want to jump in front of a subway every time I think about it, until I remember I can just throw you in front of it instead,” Alice hisses directly in her face. “If you don’t tell us where to find that seething, malicious cunt of a mistake of reality, I’m going to drag you around behind my car until I find her myself, and I’m going to fucking feed you to her.”

“Alice!” I shout. “That’s more than enough”

“You think I give a shit about Foxcatcher?” Jackie spits, “She’s never even fucking here. She used me to get her most of the way to her pet project and she vanished. She was barely even around when she was pretending to care. I put up with her bullshit for so goddamn long, because I just couldn’t say no. I couldn’t say no to that face. She’d throw me some pussy every time I got antsy, she’d even do the roleplay. I dressed her up like you a few times, that was fun while it lasted. You know what she is. She’s pure fucking evil, like all of them are. I might use people to get what I want, but she does it because what she wants is to use people. I hope she rots in Hell. She’s going to set up her shit at Bronte Lake. It’s going to happen soon, real soon. Any night now. She says there’s something about that place, like it’s a fucking border between worlds. I don’t know how the fuck she’d even know that, but she knows a lot of things she shouldn’t know.”

“That’s her only power,” I say. “Knowing things she shouldn’t.” That’s not a metaphor. Before she got separated from her friends, she used to take a drug that enhanced her latent psychic powers to the point that she became telepathic. She lacked finesse, though. She couldn’t focus on anything with all the thoughts that race through people’s heads. She could only pinpoint a certain idea if it was “big,” if it took up a lot of space in the mind, but she found something she could always exploit: skill. Great skill, skill so honed over so long it bent the whole shape of your mind to make room, skill that sat in your brain like a boulder. She could latch onto that, and she developed a method of essentially “copying” those lifelong skills into her own brain. She stole the martial arts training of the world’s greatest fighters, the aptitudes of great scientists, she even took in a few concerts of the London Philharmonic and taught herself several instruments. Now that she’s away from her supply, though, her powers have left her, and she has only the skills she’d already acquired. This has been a problem for her, as she never anticipated the specific information she would need to get out of her current predicament.

One of the liberated Freekies who has been crawling across the floor lays her hand on Jackie’s arm. “I love you,” she says. “I love you, I love you…” She repeats this endlessly, trailing off into silence.

Careful not to accidentally show any appreciation, or even relief, Alice backs off of Jackie, stands up, looks straight ahead with almost shellshocked focus, and simply says, “She was fucking Stranger the entire time, you fucking moron.” Walking away, she suddenly stops. “I never cheated on you, though. No matter how consumed you got by your latest fixation, I was there. I didn’t give up on you until you showed me you were this. And I never had anybody but you unless we did it together. Not even when you told me I could, for our first anniversary. That story about the ballerina I met in Crown, the one I spent two nights with who didn’t speak a word of English, we just looked at each other and went totally weak? And we went absolutely mad together, crawled over each other’s bodies like a milk bath, then we just held each other all night, and she told me without saying a word that she wanted me to come back home with her, but I managed to slap together just enough German to tell her my heart didn’t have room for even one more night like those nights, and she left me a note that said she could see in my eyes that I was truly in love, and she only let me go because she couldn’t bear to come between us? I can’t believe you bought all that for a second. There wasn’t any fucking ballerina, Jackie. Happy anniversary.”

For the next three days, there are two of us staking out Bronte Lake at any given moment from two well-hidden vantage points, from sundown until dawn. Another one or two patrols the rest of Hobb’s End and the surrounding area for other crime so there will be backup nearby if we find Foxcatcher. We’re prepared to do this for about a week before going to a lighter rotation, still unsure if any of the information Jackie gave us is even accurate. Four days in, we have her. Alice and Kelly are watching the spot, and I get the call on my comms to approach the lake from a third angle. Foxcatcher is standing by the edge of the lake, messing with a four-foot stack of absolute madness. I see parts that look like computers, parts that look like a car engine, maybe parts that look like kitchen equipment. For extra Doc Brown appeal, the whole thing is plugged into a running diesel generator, and a dazzling array of lights all over the beast blink in a chaotic pattern that cannot possibly mean anything.

The three of us make our perfectly choreographed advance. The only hitch is that Foxcatcher, without even looking, fires a debilitating dart from a Tazer-like stun pistol directly behind her, sending a convulsing White Rabbit to the ground.

“Aww,” Foxcatcher says nonchalantly, “you brought your Alice. That’s so sweet, I haven’t seen her pretty face in ages, seems like.”

“Do you really think that pile of circuit boards and zip ties is going to do something?” Kelly asks. Foxcatcher turns, opening me up for a flying kick to her other side. She dodges with minimal effort at exactly the last second, and I barely land on both feet. “It doesn’t have to look as nice as you, Kelly,” Foxcatcher purrs, “it just has to get me home.”

I land a punch to Foxcatcher’s jaw by bobbing slightly in the direction she’s expecting before quickly pivoting the other way. Even with this, she rolls with the hit pretty well. Her capabilities might be stolen, but they’re no less real. Kelly tries to seize on her attention being turned toward me to get in a hit herself, but the only reason we lay a hand on her is Alice springing up earlier than expected to grab her by the waist, tackling her to the ground. Foxcatcher flips onto her back, Alice’s shocked muscles having lost a good amount of their strength. She relishes having Alice under her, tongue poking into her lip a bit as she rocks her ass a little against Alice’s crotch. “Ever wonder what it would be like?” she taunts Alice, “This is how it feels to grind on that exquisite ass.”

Kelly gets to her first, dropping onto her lap and pulling Foxcatcher’s leg into a usually painful hold that seems not to faze the villain. “Oof,” she says, “what did I do to deserve Sparrow’s famous little butt practically scissoring me like this? All while I get humped from below by THE Alice Miller?” She’s not too distracted to sense my approach from behind and jab her elbow out at just the right moment, sending a staggering thud into even my well-armored balls. “Those big, swinging dicks all you superheroines seem to have,” Foxcatcher gloats, “they’re a damned liability is what they are.”

Noises begin to pop and fizz around us. Those stray sounds that we don’t notice until they begin to get louder and more constant coalesce into a crackling hum that continues to grow in intensity. “It’s my timing that always does the trick,” Foxcatcher says.

Kelly groans with great strain but also a hint of arousal as she tries to maneuver into a more advantageous hold on Foxcatcher. The villainess repays her efforts with a slap to Sparrow’s ass, grabbing it firmly when she lands. “How much do I owe you for this varsity wrestling fantasy?” she says. “We’ve got another cell ready for you right next to where we’re keeping Stranger,” Kelly grunts, getting both of Foxcatcher’s legs in a tight hold. “Don’t expect any conjugal visits, if you want to get fucked, you’ll have to wait until I’m on guard duty and ask real nice.” Where the hell did that come from?

Blackness swirls together over the lake as I get back to my feet, staggering toward Foxcatcher and throwing my arm around her neck for a chokehold, the other two doing little at this point but amusing her. “What?” Foxcatcher asks through strained breaths. “No kiss for your darling sister? You’re really nothing like my Zora.”

Intermission           Go Ask Alice

I am not White Rabbit. Before the portal I just opened summons the Zora Miller of a universe of tiger people, or whatever ridiculous goddamn thing is about to happen, I should get some facts straight. My name is Alice Miller. You might know I’ve been a multibillionaire since my parents and my sister were murdered twenty-three years ago, but you probably aren’t aware I’m also the sensational Foxcatcher, she who brought New London under her loving bootheel and kept it there until she was dragged into this universe. You will never hear me call myself a superhero, because I’m under no illusions that I am the bad guy of my story. I take enormous pride in who I am, I have no problem being called amoral or sadistic. “Superhero” means something very different where I come from. Singularity is not a superhero. Mercurial is not a superhero. You might think you know them as “Hyperspace” and “Saturnine,” but they’re hardly pulling cats out of trees or cutting the ribbon at a new mall.

The simplistic version is that I’m from a parallel universe where “heroes are villains and villains are heroes.” The truth is, our do-gooder versions of your worst of the worst are about as effective at stopping the United Villains and all our other badass “bad guys” as your villains are at actually seeing their own evil plans through. In any world, we win. We’re just not winning at making the world “a better place,” whatever the fuck that even means. We’re winning at winning.

Do your alleged superheroes actually make anything better anyway? The way I see it, your “bad guys” are the ones trying to change things, trying to disrupt the status quo, and your “heroes” are trying to stop them. Why? The status quo on your world fucking sucks actually, doesn’t it?

Granted, I have my own problems with the world I come from. In our world, my sister Zora died with our parents. I never got over losing her. She was always just as fucked up and awesome as I was, when we were kids. Then the United Villains found this shitty world, and lo and behold, this world’s “Outfox” isn’t Alice Miller. My opposite number still likes to run around in leather and kick scumbags, but the real anti-Foxcatcher is my Zora. Well, not my Zora, but who’s counting?

When the Villains invaded your world, they got beat bad. Fucking pussies. I’d gotten separated from them, and honor being what it is among thieves, they left me behind. I’m only so angry about that. I would have done the same thing to that stuck-up cunt Albion, or any of them. I’m trying to get back. That’s all I want! Zora is afraid that because my stolen talents are, let’s say, limited in the area of poking holes in spacetime, a skill I never really thought I would need, I might tear one or more universes a new black hole. Trust me, I would love to do this right. I would love to go down on some virgin scientist while I carbon-copy her degree in theoretical physics into my meat computer and fuck off back to my reality, but that’s not an option. I made the admittedly stupid mistake of never teaching myself how to make that mind-expanding serum that’s a dime a dozen on my world. The only reason everybody else doesn’t have my skill-skimming talent is that I had a natural latent telepathy that this shit opened up. For all we know, this Alice has it too, she’ll just never know about it. The stuff doesn’t exist on this side, so I’m stuck with the shit I already know, and that’s made it hard to build this hideous fucking mess of wires I’m using to open my portal.

What these “good girls” don’t know, though, is that I’m not trying to get home tonight. I’m not there yet. I need to calibrate my device first. But more importantly, I need to find out what makes my beloved Zora tick. I don’t want to go back to a world with no Zora Miller, as much as it disgusts me to see what this Zora has turned into. I’m going to bring her back with me, and either on this side, or with the help of the more relaxed attitudes of society on the other side, I’m going to make her my Zora. I’m going to show her the pleasures of being bad. And if we happen to find some other fun things to do that are less frowned-upon on my world, well, it’s not like we’re really sisters. We’re not even from the same universe! Getting with Esther was fun, but she’s not the real thing. I might bring this Alice back, too. I’ve always thought I was pretty hot, if I do say so myself.

I won’t let them near each other, though, even if that’s a little less taboo in my neck of the woods, and they might get the itch if I truly induct them in the ways of badass wickedness. That would be wrong. Pinky swear.

End Intermission    Foxcatcher Out, Cocksuckers!

“You are absolutely disgusting,” I spit at this warped reflection of my sister. The noise behind me grows in intensity, but I worry that letting Alt-Alice slip away now would be a mistake. If she really has opened a portal to another world, letting her through it, as much as I’d love her to be her diseased reality’s problem, could be disastrous. The tech the United Villains used to come here was a lot more advanced, and this Alice has a grotesquely inflated sense of her own swindled capabilities. Cutting clumsy gashes into the fabric of reality isn’t child’s play, and she clearly doesn’t know the risks, or more likely doesn’t care.

The slow, heavy crackle suddenly becomes ear-splittingly loud, like rolling thunder in reverse. I feel something hit my back violently, and the three of us plus our attempted captive are thrown forward and scattered. When I regain my senses, I look up and see us all scattered at the side of the lake.

All five of us.

“Zora!” I hear, and look up. The voice sounded like Kelly, but different.

…British, maybe?

The source of the cry is indeed a short, skinny black girl in big, round glasses. She indeed looks a good deal like Kelly, except she’s wearing a short buttoned-up green jacket, showing a hint of some sort of red leather bustier under it, form-fitting white tights that only go down to her knees, chunky red knee-high boots with huge collars, a red domino mask and a tiny green hat.

She scrambles away from a tall, muscular black woman in black leather boots with similar pirate collars, tight black leather pants, a black leather vest, a black leather jacket, black leather gloves, you can imagine the rest. Un-Kelly appears to have landed on her as they came out, and seems to be uncomfortable with that close proximity. Only one woman in any world could pull off this much black leather, and I get the sinking feeling she’s the genuine article.

“Polly!” the sextuple-leather-clad amazon shouts. “I don’t understand, you were…”

“Polly,” I guess she’s called, is wearing gloves as well, but one has fallen off in the chaos. She cautiously reaches her ungloved hand out and just barely presses a finger to some of the small amount of flesh her partner has that’s not wrapped in black leather. She seems oddly thrilled when, to my eyes, literally nothing happens.

“It’s gone,” Polly says. “It’s gone.” She sounds near tears. Un-Zora sits up and embraces Polly, and she holds onto her like a drowning woman to the side of a boat.

The noise of the passage Other Alice opened has gone entirely, but I only notice this when I hear another, more familiar noise, the excruciatingly loud whir of what are evidently highly impractical rotor engines. Fuck.

I look up, and there she is. The goddamn Skyfox. Or at least it used to be. I have no idea what Honey Badger started calling it after she stole my goddamn plane and painted it her patented hangover-piss yellow. Foxcatcher must have called in her ride from Esther’s other kept woman. By the time I look down to see the anti-Alice, she’s already clipped to the retracting cable and being pulled into the air, middle fingers childishly aimed at everybody on the ground below. I turn to see if she’s somehow recovered her makeshift machine, and it’s still there, but it’s already on every kind of fire there is. Given she didn’t account for it in her bug-out plan, I’m guessing she knew it was likely to go up like flash paper even if it worked. I’m sure she’d rather use a less slapdash model for more serious experiments anyway, so this appears to have been a win for her.

“It’s us,” Kelly says, coming out of a stunned state. “She pulled them here from…elsewhere, whatever that even means.”

“She just happened to pull a Zora and a Kelly from out of nowhere?” I say, “Can’t be coincidence.”

“She was just calibrating the thing,” Alice moans through serious muscle aches. “She probably keyed it to a sample of her DNA somehow, or maybe some she had of yours.”

“She’s fucking collecting Zoras,” I say. “She had to shake ass out of here before she could get away with her new toy, but she’ll just do it again.”

“My heart goes out to the Zoras Miller of the multiverse,” Kelly says. “Speaking of which, our friends here seem a bit disoriented.”

Alice turns to the side, finally getting a good look at the pair who came through the portal as they gawk at the New London skyline, which is damn impressive from the hills around Bronte Lake. Alice, the real Alice, beams when she sees their outfits. “Pirate world!” she shouts through a mile-wide grin. “Oh my God! Pirate world!”

I tap the talk button on my earpiece. “Silver, we need emergency to the lake. Alice is hurt, not terribly but I’d like her to be seen to. Medivac to the Burrow, please.” The Skyfox was almost as much an impractical monstrosity as this smoldering portal device, a VTOL air transport with helicopter rotors in the wings that I’m amazed Honey Badger can pilot without killing herself and whatever poor souls are in her vicinity when she tries to fly it any way but perfectly level. We still need air transport on occasion, especially for serious injuries, but Rooster 1 and Rooster 2 are basically just state-of-the-art choppers. People who lament that our lives aren’t what we were promised the 21^st century would be like in jet-age pulps should try piloting a “flying car” sometime. There’s a reason we don’t have those.

“Bring a Rooster, Silver,” Alice says into her own comms, “but prep for pursuit, not for medical. I’m fine. We’re going after Foxcatcher.”

“I’ve been in the air for nine minutes, darlings,” Catherine says, “and I’m prepped for medical, but we can sort all that when I’ve arrived.”

Kelly fields what I imagine is a flood of fascinating questions from our displaced colleagues while I see Alice off at the chopper, once Catherine lands Rooster 2 in a clearing. “You’re weak,” I say, “and they’ve got a hell of a head start already.” “Their heading was dead straight before they left our radar range,” Alice says, “and this thing is a lot faster than the Spruce Fox. Let me go after her. I’m going to anyway, but I’d like you to acknowledge that I’m going to. You know Cathy isn’t going to take me a single goddamn place I don’t ask her to. We’re wasting enough time talking.”

I try to say something, but can’t think of anything she’d find convincing. “It’s her, Zora,” Alice says. “I can’t let her go. She’s my Esther, she’s out there with my face.” Seeing my incredulous look at the prospect of her catching her counterpart, she says, “It doesn’t matter when I get her. I will get her, eventually. What matters is the chase. You never give up the chase. Maybe it won’t be tonight. But they can’t run forever if you do.”

“All the world will be your enemy, White Rabbit,” I say as she closes the door to the Rooster. “And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you.”

It’s what she does. She does what she does best, just like I do. The Fox schemes. The Rabbit runs.

V. I Am Zora Miller

Challenger Manor, where Fantome took me and my former Sparrows a month or so ago, is right near the lake. Still abandoned, it’s a perfect place to duck into with Kelly’s and my nautically-inclined pals so we can talk without drawing attention. It’s pretty late, and Bronte Lake is pretty far from civilization by New London standards, but with two different aircraft flying in and out of the vicinity, Outfox and Sparrow are definitely going to draw attention at some point, and the two of us talking to another Outfox and Sparrow who are unaccountably dressed in vaguely pirate-themed outfits is certainly an unusual sight even around here.

“So I don’t want to make any assumptions based on your…attire,” I say once we’re inside, “but you two looked like you were unaccustomed to skyscrapers.”

“Only the Navy uses skyscrapers,” Polly says, “those wee ships aren’t fit for a proper lot of privateers or plunderers.”

“What?” Kelly blurts. “I think we’re separated by a common language here,” I say, “which happens when you cross the pond, and also universes.”

“Is this Britain?” the other Zora asks. “I thought your Polly told me we were in Columbia.”

“People in…Columbia?” I respond, “People in what we call America, here, don’t sound as Cockney as you two, typically.” “We don’t sound anything like the bloody Limeys,” Polly says to her Zora. “We sound as Columbian as pumpkin pie.”

“Right,” Kelly says, “let’s start from scratch. I’m Kelly, Kelly Gander, and I go by Sparrow, at least as a superhero. Which now that I say it out loud might not be a term people use on your side.”

“Superhero!” other-Zora says mockingly. “That’s a proper laugh. A bit panto, isn’t it? Is that really what rogues and rascals like us call themselves here?”

“We…oppose crime, typically,” Kelly says cautiously, “but I do admit I’ve always found pirates sort of romantic.”

“We’re hardly brutes,” Polly says, “we just don’t fancy the Royal Navy owning every inch of sea and sky under God’s eye.”

“Sky?” I ask. “So you have aircraft of some kind over there.” Their clothes look modern, as far as manufacturing techniques go, or at least more modern than the age of sail.

“Skyships,” Polly says. “Classic wooden hulls backed with thin sheets of iron. Well, not iron for skyships. Cavorite, or at least iron with some cavorite in it. Screens out gravity waves.”

“There were scientists in the early 20^th century who had ideas like that,” I say, “but Cavor’s experiments never worked because that’s just not what gravity is.” “It’s not here,” Kelly says, “but maybe other universes can have their own…laws of physics?”

“All that modern science business is fine,” Zora says, “those boffins with their beakers have some nice parlor tricks, but magic got us where we are and it’s not failed us yet.”

“Oh,” I say, “we are definitely talking about two different worlds.”

“Magic exists here,” Kelly says, “sort of, but it’s difficult and dangerous. People who don’t have a natural affinity for it very rarely bother with it, and the ones who do rarely get far.”

“Magic’s plain as the back of your hand where we come from,” Polly says. “We use it for near everything, always have.”

“Temporal displacement can happen between universes,” I posit. “What year is it for you two?”

“When we left it was still A.D. two-thousand and eighteen,” Zora says. “Have we come also to the future, on top of all else?”

“Sort of,” I say. “Yeah, that explains it,” Kelly says, “remember in 2018 when there was that big pirate craze?”

“I’m Kelly too, by the by,” Polly says, standing to shake Kelly’s hand. “Kelly Gander. But most my mates call me Polly. Zora here is the notorious Black Fox, captain of the Capistrano, who has singlehandedly kept the skies over Nova Londinium free of the damnable Royal Navy, and who has outmaneuvered the Flying Dutchman herself.”

“Barely,” Zora says, standing alongside Polly, “the Red Phantom got us eventually. She cursed us with some dark sorcery so we couldn’t touch each other without burning like hellfire.” Zora puts her arm around Polly, their bare skin touching. “Seems this magically-deprived realm we’ve landed in is free of the curse we’ve been afflicted with.”

Polly turns to clutch Zora from the side, grabbing her tight around the waist. “We’ve been so starved for each other’s touch. We’ve had our fun with the crew and any lassies we come across on the ground, but we’ve always preferred each other.” “It’s been a tense few months,” Zora says with a saucy laugh, “and it’s been exhausting for the crew, if ye take m’ meaning.”

“Is that really what my ass looks like?” Kelly whispers. Those tights Polly wears certainly are flattering for her thighs and butt. “No wonder everybody seems to want to hit that.”

“Are we going to say what we’re all thinking, at long last?” my counterpart asks. “I was wondering when we’d get to that,” Polly says, “would be a shame to waste the opportunity.”

I glance toward Kelly, who looks considerably less than scandalized by the idea. “She’s as sexy as any Zora Miller,” Kelly says into my ear, “and I don’t believe for a second you don’t want to give Polly a spin. She’s fucking perfect. If you don’t tap that ass, I’m tempted myself.”

Polly drops her jacket onto the dusty old couch they’d been seated on and starts undoing the tarty leather number under it. “We usually leave the masks on,” Polly says, “and sometimes the boots or the gloves.” Black Fox sheds half a ton of leather, nude now except elbow-length gloves and her mask. “I don’t suppose these two proper ladies go in for that sort of strumpety business,” Zora says.

Kelly responds by reaching down and undoing the snaps in the crotch of her suit. “I’ve actually found it’s fun when you find a way to leave the whole thing on,” she says, “but I think you two old salts might appreciate seeing what you look like naked.”

I don’t have any intention of taking things too far with…myself, but Kelly and I both take a second to look over, then lightly feel over, our own counterparts. I didn’t think the feel of my own body would surprise me, but I suppose I’ve never touched myself the way you touch a lover. This Zora is in about the same shape I am, and she’s so soft and so firm all at once, a womanly layer of plush flesh stretched out over rock-hard muscle. Her breasts hang higher than they should for their size, her butt bearing the powerful shape of sinew and strength but with the size and curve of fat. I try to avoid paying much attention to her most noticeable asset, but it certainly looks larger when it’s on somebody else. I’m actually kind of a fucking snack, aren’t I? I’ve made the heroes in this town, and more than a few of the villains, very lucky women indeed. Well, I’m no Carla.

“I’m not averse to continuing our alone time,” Polly says, “but I did think we were going to swap, unless we’re having linguistic difficulties again.” Polly sticks her hand out, barely brushing my abdomen, but giving me a stir that it seems was visible. “Doesn’t take us much to hoist sails, does it old sport?” Zora asks with a sleazy wink.

My counterpart reclines on the couch, Kelly crawling on top of her, blazing a trail ahead of her body with a series of hard, puckered kisses from her pubis up her stomach, over one breast, and up to her neck. She’s done that with me before, but not in a while. Polly keels before me as I watch them intently. She seems to be deliberately avoiding my cock, one hand doing the two-to-the-spot, thumb-to-the-clit pinching motion Kelly has always used on my pussy while her other, rather than gently holding my dick the way Kelly does, jostles my balls with even more care. I’ve never concentrated on those as an erogenous zone in themselves, honestly, but her motions give me a tingle not quite like any other stimulation. I get hard quite rapidly with almost no direct contact. For every detail that’s eerily similar, there’s another that’s a wonderful surprise.

Kelly gives her usual college try to fit my cock, I mean the other Zora’s cock, into her mouth. She gets a bit more than halfway, but gives the usual spasming cough she lapses into when she overexerts herself. She’s always overeager with new partners, and I can only imagine how excited she is to please somebody who’s at once a pretty stranger and the love of her life. “I forgot how fun it is to feel that twitch of a novice throat reaching a bit past its grasp,” Zora chuckles, “my Polly is the resident fellatrix of our crew and has, if I may say, no such issues handling me, with apologies to present companionship. And when I say our crew, I do mean every inch of each of them, and with frequency.”

I look down at Polly, and she does indeed have the smirk of a girl who’s about to pull out one hell of a surprise on somebody. With strict, deliberate eye contact, she begins to slip me into her mouth, then she keeps slipping. At a speed I’m sure from her confidence and easy progress is not the best she can manage, she continues until she reaches the base, with nothing but a brief, quiet gulp when my tip passes into the start of her throat. She’s doing this slowly on purpose, to draw out the tension. She knows how stunned I am to see what appears to be Kelly accomplish this feat after she saw my own Kelly struggle to get even half this far. Once she’s completed her descent, rather than immediately beginning a stroke back upward, she holds me in her depths fully and purses her lips, applying the most suction she can muster. I’ve only experienced this combination once, with a certain woman who believes she is, and if legend is to be believed very much sucks cock like, Cleopatra herself. Even women who can take a beast like this mostly settle for stimulating it with tongue and lip motion, which is difficult enough. Applying this kind of vacuum seal with this much meat in your throat must be utterly exhausting.

My own personal Kelly is continuing to reach out and touch faith herself, resigned to only applying her otherwise expert service to the first four or five inches of my doppelganger. I’m uncertain if the face she’s making is how I look right now, but it’s interesting to get that sort of glimpse. After another minute or so of her attentions, Zora gently touches Kelly’s face, signaling her to pause. “This is delightful,” she says, “but it’s a better way to start than to finish, don’t you think?” Kelly looks up at what is but also isn’t my face and quietly says, “I want it. I want you.”

Without disrupting Polly’s delicate work, I lift my suit off the floor with my foot and kick it over to Kelly a bit. Kelly rifles through the contents of my belt of useful and amusing items until she finds a bottle of lube. The Un-Zora seems confused until Kelly applies a good amount to both hands, getting a full cover like a gymnast chalking up. She rubs the substance onto Zora, who quickly understands its purpose. Polly must be a talented girl indeed to handle this Zora’s intrusions with whatever they use for lubrication in their world.

With almost businesslike precision, Kelly bends over the side of the couch, palms flat on the cushion, legs close enough together that the taller Zora can find passage without squatting too low. When I met Kelly, she didn’t even want to kiss me until Carla told her it was alright in person. She told me I was the second person she’d ever had inside her. This ended up being only mostly true. The first was her high school girlfriend, who had used a strap-on with her exactly once. After our first time, she was quite sore, having pushed through more discomfort than she had let on to avoid disappointing me. I told her she should try it again with somebody less substantial, and she made a date with a Sparrow Freekie she had taken a liking to. Even then, she made sure the girl was alright with my watching them, because she wanted me to be involved. That girl was more than happy to have Outfox herself watch her fuck the girl she called “the cutest Sparrow, including that other girl who filled in for a while.” They had a few more “sessions,” including two without me, before her “sparring partner” left the gang, deciding that her Sparrow addiction made it unhealthy for them to be an item. They still see each other occasionally, but only platonically. I even let her divulge her real identity to her so she wouldn’t have to be around Kelly in her costume.

Now, Kelly is rapidly becoming a master of carnal indulgence. I didn’t corrupt her, I didn’t create something here, but I did definitely unleash it. If anything, I’ve tried to slow down to accommodate her relative inexperience, but she pushes me to give her everything. And she has awakened as much in me as I have in her, I’m starting to think.

The “Black Fox” enters Kelly with significantly more caution than is necessary. It’s possible this woman has never penetrated somebody anally with proper preparation, which is a bit sad, but it’s fun to see her experience this for the first time. As is frequently the case lately, Kelly makes no expressions of discomfort or concern as she accepts her partner. It’s sheer pleasure on her face from start to finish.

“What do you want to do with this Kelly Gander…Outfox, was it?” Polly says as she looks adoringly up at me, punctuating her query with a small but devastatingly sexy lick up my underside from halfway down all the way to my tip. “I like this just fine,” I say, “finish me off and I’ll show you what we’re going to do next.” She takes to this gentle but direct command like a true Kelly Gander, diving back into her mouth work with a purposeful intensity that confirms my earlier suspicions that she can work at a much greater speed.

On the subject of greater speed, my counterpart quickly becomes accustomed to the pace that proper lubrication can facilitate and begins giving Kelly the uninhibited pounding she has come to love so dearly. Kelly makes a series of noises that are moans or gasps less than they’re laughs. Sometimes the joy of being given exactly what she likes is too much for her, and she lapses into heavy-breathing giggles as the feeling becomes too much to contain. The first time, I thought something I was doing was tickling her, or that she was amused by something odd I was doing without realizing it. My counterpart is too distracted by her own unbridled joy to second-guess this impulse, evidently.

Knowing I wish to be carried all the way to the end like this, Polly has been accelerating her attention. She slips her hand back inside me, using the same middle-index-thumb technique to stimulate both my most direct routes to the finish while she works other magic with her mouth. I feel the climax building, and what tips it is the moment I look down, and see exactly the expectant look my own Kelly gives me when she’s doing anything she does solely for my pleasure, a task she greatly enjoys in any form. That mix of new and familiar as not-my-Kelly gives me the same silent plea for my release my beloved Sparrow does pushes me over the edge hard. I pity Polly’s stomach as she tries to make way for the full batch of warm approval I use her throat to ease myself of, but she’s at least as accomplished a receptacle as the woman I love so dearly.

Perhaps set off by the overwhelmed moans I don’t remember unleashing, but likely did, my own Kelly lets out her own squirts of relief. I don’t often get to see it from this angle, but her prostate orgasms have that same steady trickle pace Esther’s do, as I was reminded recently, less like she’s shooting and more like she’s spilling. When Kelly cums with her dick, she lets fly with surprising force. This climax oozes out of her like a dropped carton of milk.

“You said something about the next step?” Polly asks eagerly. She’s barely done gulping down the last bits of my load still clinging to the inside of her mouth, and she’s already asking to move on to the main course. She’s an honorary Sparrow, this one. I lie on the floor on my back. “I want to see how you fuck,” I say. “My Kelly is adorably shy and unsteady, she humps away like a virgin, but a virgin who makes you bust twice before she does. I want to see what you’re like.” The Kelly I’m referring to blushes a bit, and her knees get a little wobbly. “I’m glad to hear you like my shy virgin humping,” Kelly squeaks. The other Zora is still riding her like a rodeo bull, and I commend her stamina.

Polly doesn’t hesitate.

Polly pries my legs even further apart than I was holding them to lure her into fucking me, but I guess I didn’t need my lure anyway. Her cock has been hard this entire time, so I suppose it’s no shock she’s eager to finally get it up me. It is shocking, though, because it’s Kelly. This is a side I’ve never seen in my devoted bottom Kelly, who only defaults to penetrating her lovers when they lack any natural instrument with which to do it to her. Sierra has told me she’s actually quite an eager stud in their own sex life, although her description of Kelly’s bunny rabbit jackhammering, trembling body and perpetually blushing face makes it sound like she doesn’t do it much differently. Polly doesn’t prefer being penetrated to doing it herself, I think. I think what she likes is to be used. She wants to give you what you want, that’s what she wants herself. With somebody who is a bottom, or even a submissive, she could not only top, but dominate. What she wants is to fit you, to be what you need. That’s why I appreciate our kinky little game from the other night so much. I made her feel like it was my idea, but I was giving her what she wanted. I hope it will open her up, in the future, to being more frank with me about her own needs. Though I should also ask Sierra if she owns a good strap-on, just to cover our bases.

Polly enters me with total alacrity, but once she’s thrusting into me I see those shades of girlish Sparrow quivering. She seems to have a great desire for this, but when Kelly pants and shakes with demure overexcitement, it is in large part physical, not emotional. She is very sensitive, although at the risk of bragging I do also expect I’m quite a stimulating sensation. Polly might be unflappable in her heart, but her other parts easily become downright cattle-prodded with arousal.

“I’m sorry,” Polly says for reasons that are unclear. “I’m sorry, I need to.”

Polly slowly withdraws herself. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Zora,” she says, almost stuttering, “may I?” “May you what?” I ask. “You already were, I’m pretty sure.”

“May I please try you…the other way?”

“You can ask me anything,” I tell her, “just say what you want.”

“She wants to sodomize you,” my counterpart moans through panting breaths. “She has an absolutely ravenous hunger to get it up a girl’s bum. If you give her the option, she takes it nine times in ten.”

“Of course you can,” I coo seductively. I roll my hips back a little to give her easier access. “You have that same little upturned prick my Kelly does. It’s like a divining rod for my prostate. I’d be honored to have your cock rammed up my tight ass.” I don’t know why I’m vamping so hard to seduce her, she seems to have seduced herself pretty thoroughly already. I think I’m just too horny to live right now, and the filter that makes me not beg for cock like a lonely housewife greeting the pizza girl in her underwear was shamed clean through the second she took her dick out of me.

Polly is quite slick, and not terribly large, so the slow, gentle approach she takes is unnecessary. I manage not to debase myself further by telling her not to go easy on me, but I do slide myself forward a bit to make sure she advances with a less measured speed. Her second stroke is a bolt of lightning next to the glacial pace of the first, and from that point forward she’s the same anxious, quaking hummingbird any Kelly in the whole of being is bound to be once she gets it in you.

The difference is that, as much as I enjoy Kelly’s indelicate use of nature’s g-spot probe, my prostate has a hair trigger even in comparison to my almost painfully tender g-spot. Within seconds, I am absolutely howling. Kelly has always told me she actually prefers the feeling of my pussy, and it’s made it difficult to break it to her exactly how much it absolutely annihilates me when she fucks my ass. When she does do it, she can clearly see how I react, but I’ve always played off my histrionic fish-flopping as not an excess of pleasure, but the overwhelming mix of pleasure and discomfort. Not pain, which would make her stop immediately if I even hinted it were present, but that tense feeling of resistance. Let’s be honest: Kelly could double in size overnight and put it in me dry while I was doing pelvic floor clenches, and I still wouldn’t feel any sensation of struggle accommodating her. It’s not that she’s tiny, or I’m some cavernous trollop, but I am greatly experienced in this art. She lets herself believe this, though. It’s likely that what I should do is simply tell her what it does to me, and trust that her natural inclination to pleasure me to the best of her ability will allow her to derive the satisfaction from it that I do.

Polly has no such compunctions. She is, I could have discerned without being told, an absolute slave to the ass. If she was overwhelmed with rapture before, she’s damn near zen now. The sound of her breathing makes it seem she’s struggling through a lump in her chest. I’ve never seen my ass, wondrous though it may be, reduce a woman to full-on sobbing, but she seems to be on her way. The feeling on my end is too good to rush, but for the sake of Polly’s sanity I focus on trying to let her organic prostate stimulator prod me to the fastest climax possible. If she isn’t propped at the very edge of orgasm herself, and she can actually keep going once I’ve finished, I can just ride this wave to a second for myself. If she makes it more than five seconds past my first, I doubt I’ll have trouble making it happen.

I shoot, and let loose a chain of animalistic yelps that make me glad this abandoned mansion is the only residence for some distance. Polly seems no less determined, and I silently ask myself how long she could possibly hold out going at the pace she’s going with that famous Kelly Gander stamina. If Polly is a version of Kelly that lacks that one limitation, she could be outright dangerous to let inside me. Kelly’s oft-exaggerated but not entirely fabricated tendency to both give and receive climax with great speed is the only thing keeping her from fucking half the women in this town near death. A solid half-hour of Kelly’s Bonneville Flats speed and focus would turn your goddamn hair white.

Even sooner than I expected, I start to feel my second orgasm building. It’s early stages, but distinctly present. I find myself making more bimbo-in-heat squeaks and squeals, and this seems to be the last straw for my pirate buddy. Against all odds, we finish simultaneously, Polly doing me the favor of drowning out my quite indelicate and undignified cries with her own guttural bellows, sounds that convey excruciating pain I can’t even fathom more than they convey sexual ecstasy. I’ve never heard those noises come out of a mammal, let alone a human.

Polly collapses onto my torso, head nestled between my breasts in a beautifully familiar way. This allows me to see the other Zora as she continues to push with great vigor into Kelly, who has long since passed the boundary at which arousal and climax blend into a single mind-erasing glow with no beginning or ending. She’s just happy meat at this point, and won’t be able to form coherent ideas until a bit after Zora finishes, which is imminent. I’m sure Polly’s orgasmic wailing is at least the bulk of what tipped her balance. I get to revel in the schadenfreude of the other Zora making noises just as whorish and overblown as mine as she surely dumps a load that should have been four into the transcendent Kelly.

For one blissful minute, we are all too shot through with the ringing aftershock of post-orgasmic reverberation to even speak.

Polly, finally stirring from her almost paralytic afterglow, whispers in my ear, “I do think you should sample your own brand, since you have the opportunity. I know I’m going to.”

“It’s a bit weird, isn’t it?” I ask, as if anybody anywhere has practical experience with this subject and could give me real advice. “The woman who brought you here, she’s a parallel version of my sister, and I’m pretty sure her interest in me is…not strictly familial.”

“Oh,” Polly says. “I just feel,” I say, struggling to articulate my thoughts on a truly strange opportunity, “like it’s sort of the same thing, isn’t it? It’s actually worse, on a purely physical level, right?”

“Well,” she says, “you should try to avoid getting each other pregnant, but apart from that, you’re both free adult women, and she wants you so badly.”

“Foxcatcher and I are both consenting adults too,” I say, “that doesn’t mean it’s okay. It wouldn’t be okay if the real Alice and I were ‘consenting adults’ together.”

“Zora,” she says earnestly, “you know there’s nobody who has an answer for you here. And if you don’t have anything solid in the negative column, ask yourself this: do you want to do anything with this Foxcatcher woman? Or your real sister?”

“Of course not,” I say. “Of course not,” she repeats, “because it’s wrong, and you know it down to your bones. She looked like a lovely lady, if you didn’t have that little voice in your heart I’m sure you’d think she was quite fit.” “Don’t push it,” I caution. “But do you want the other Zora? Do you feel anything but desire, apart from all this second-guessing and overthinking?” I’m silent for a bit as I truly ask myself.

“Kelly,” Polly says, getting onto her feet. “I don’t think I’m going to get my cock up for about a week, but if you think you can manage, I think it’s time you got to take your world-famous bum for a spin, eh?”

Zora finally pulls out of Kelly’s thoroughly used entry, accompanied with a small flood of her seed. I doubt her hole is in any better state to be used right now than Polly’s cock is anyway. Zora lies down on the floor, legs spread, mimicking the position I was in before I got up, obviously waiting on me to make a move.

Polly positions herself on her hands and knees with the same dutiful ruler-perfect posture Kelly employed over the arm of the couch. She assumes a place on the floor that allows her head to hang directly over her Zora’s, so they can gaze into each other’s eyes as they get fucked. How romantic. More importantly for myself and for Kelly, this positions us facing each other as well when we mount our counterparts. Kelly, having been waiting for this moment all night, takes the plunge first. She drops to her knees, sees the notorious Kelly Gander ass in front of her, and is almost transfixed. “I’m pretty fucking cute,” she says lasciviously, then begins sliding herself inside. Polly does all the work, though, her evidently accomplished hole pulling Kelly inside. When Kelly is really relaxed and thoroughly aroused, she does the same thing.

“Holy fuck,” Kelly says with unusual clarity, “is this what it’s like? Now I get why nobody in this whole fucking city wants to do anything but pound my ass. This is indescribable.”

Lowering myself onto my fellow Zora Miller, I take in the sight of my own body once more and the decision is more than made. “I would love to see what my pussy feels like,” I tell myself, “but I doubt they have the pill on your Earth, so I guess Kelly and I both get to see why Carla uses our asses like tube socks.” “You have a Carla too?” Zora asks. “She sounds just like mine. We’ll have to find a way to bring her here safely, she would very much like this brave new world, with such people to be in.”

“Shit,” I say, “I’m going to need lube.” “Well,” Zora says, “I won’t tell if you don’t.” She tilts her hips to show off her sopping, dangerously tempting cunt. “Just get yourself greased up for a second, it couldn’t hurt.”

The feeling that I’m crossing some sort of line only makes what happens next feel better. I slide gently into the one vagina I would have been dead certain this morning I’d never experience, even if Foxcatcher dosed me with enough pink persuasion powder to get me to give her the interdimensional family reunion she wants so badly. Thinking about Foxcatcher claiming her twisted prize, though, is probably the last thing I should be doing right now.

I allow myself a few slow thrusts, then defy every fiber of my being and pull myself out of the sweet slit I now fully intend to sample more thoroughly once we can get my parallel universe self on birth control of some sort, a sentence I legitimately can’t fully process even as I say it. I know the only way to distract myself from what I just passed up is to get inside Zora’s ass as soon as possible, and as she is surely practiced in these endeavors I don’t try to be overly gentle. Judging by the satisfied sound of the exhale Zora lets out once I’m halfway inside, this was the correct choice for both of us. Now that I’m fully in the game, I look up and see Kelly’s face as she mounts her own flawless ass.

I start thrusting, finally taking in the full scope of this sight, the impossible fantasy of me and one of the women I cherish the most experiencing the delights of our own asses with the help of our alternate selves. Wearing the perversity of this act like a warm, familiar coat, I say to Kelly, “That little Sparrow is a cute one, isn’t she? Everybody wants that ass. Is it as nice as all the villains say it is? She’s had all of them up there, and they say it’s just heaven.”

Kelly starts out wearing her usual strained face of sensory overload, but adopts a wry grin as I feed her the little imagined depravities I know she wants. “Fuck her harder,” I say, “give it to that little bitch good, Parker.”

Kelly shudders and licks her lips. “She doesn’t know she wants it yet, but I can see her face, and she’s enjoying this,” I moan. “Every time you had her in your grasp she just about came in her spandex, I bet. You saw the way she looked at you. She tried to hide it, but she was begging for it with those eyes. Give her what she always wanted.”

“She’s too tight for my big fat dick,” Kelly grunts. “I like to make them feel it, but she’s about to snap my cock off.”

“More?” I ask. “Do it,” she says. “How much more?” I push. “Say it,” she says. She knows.

“She’s a real freak in bed,” I say. “She wants to be fucked inside out. She even talked about you, the little perv. She wanted it. She just wanted you to take it. She fucks like a jackrabbit, and I really like seeing her squirm while somebody pounds the living hell out of her. You should see her face right now, it’s adorable. Come on, tear her up, mom. I’ve always wanted to see you give her what she deserves.”

Kelly slows her thrusting, and abruptly stops talking or even moaning. For a second, I’m terrified I took it too far.

“You’re a naughty girl, Sierra,” she says. “When I tied you up so you could see this, I didn’t think you’d like it this much. You like watching mommy fuck your girlfriend, baby? I’m gonna wreck this bitch until she starts moaning your name, baby. Would you like that?”

“Give it to her until she begs you to stop, mommy,” I say, seeing in Kelly’s eyes that she’s reaching the point of no return. “I want to see you cum in her broken ass. Cum for me, mommy. Dump your big load in her ass right now. Cum for me.”

“Christ,” Polly says to Zora, “these two really go for it, don’t they?”

Kelly positively roars as she unleashes into Polly. I’ve been so focused on Kelly’s fantasy that I barely noticed my own climax creeping up on me. Seconds after Kelly lets fly, I follow suit. Zora begins working her own cock, now rock hard, with both hands, quickly wringing an orgasm out of herself. Polly has no need to finish herself off, having already left a sizeable puddle on the floor that has probably been collecting this entire time.

We fall to the floor, exhausted, each clinging to our own counterpart. Cuddling yourself is certainly an interesting experience. As usual, Kelly and Kelly are at the forefront of self-love, passionately kissing as they embrace. We merely run our hands along each other’s bodies, until I turn onto my side and feel what it’s like to be spooned by Zora Miller. “She loves you,” Zora says. “She loves you as madly as the grass loves the first rain of spring.”

“You two have that,” I say. “We love each other completely,” she says, “but she looks at you, like…” “Like she’s hungry,” I say. “Like it’s a basic human need.”

“I love Polly as much as one has ever loved another, and she me,” Zora says, “but I’ve never seen somebody look at another person the way she looks at you.”

“Between the two of us, we’ve traveled two worlds,” I say, “and neither of us has seen that look. And yet, somehow, I’m not surprised. I knew she was special. I always knew.”

Eventually, the four of us put our suits back on. Nothing left to add to the realm of sexual adventure, we finally have a conversation that isn’t confused semantic tricks.

“This place is marvelous,” Polly says. “How long has it been abandoned?”

“Decades,” I say. “It’s got all these bizarre haunted house stories built up over the years. Nobody wants it. It’s gorgeous, but the repairs alone are too much for most people.”

“While we’re on the subject,” Zora says, “I am quite afraid we will need a place to stay.”

“Yeah,” Kelly says, “you guys are welcome at our place until we find a way to get you back safely.”

“Well,” Zora says, “funny you should say.” “We have little reason to go back,” Polly says, “and it doesn’t seem the means to make that journey are forthcoming in either case, does it?”

“You have your crew,” I say, “you have other people who need you. Isn’t there a Carla of your own out there? You have each other, but you left a whole world behind.”

“We leave our whole world behind just about three times a year,” Polly says. “Our crew is always shifting, our allies have their own ships and their own destinies, rarely intertwining. Leaving the comfort of home to explore new worlds is what we do. We’ll be back someday.”

“And when we do return, we’ll have the curse to reckon with,” Zora says. “I’d rather be where I can hold my Polly than atop a mountain of gold.”

“That’s actually beautiful,” Kelly says. “You know,” I say, “if you need a more permanent home, there is one person who could absolutely afford to buy this place and fix it up. I’ve always loved this creepy old place. And if Bronte Lake is really some thin place in the veil between worlds or whatever goddamn thing, it would be good to have you nearby.”

“If you’re saying you want to buy us a haunted mansion,” Zora says, “in a strange world of science run amok, protected by our parallel selves, so we can guard the nexus between universes, and occasionally make bizarre, passionate love to strange alternative versions of ourselves and each other, and sit in reserve as auxiliary ‘super-heroes’ fighting an eternal crusade against evil, then I can scarcely conceive why you think we might decline.”

“We are eternally grateful,” Polly says. “And I do mean for everything.”

“You should still come with us tonight,” Kelly says, “for a place to stay.”

“Absolutely not,” Polly says, “but thank you kindly once again.” “You just told us this house was a den of monsters and enigmas,” Zora says, “you don’t think we’re going to spend our first night here turning over its every stone? This is a place of grand adventure, and so it shall always be.”

Kelly and I say our goodbyes for the night and depart. I signal Catherine to bring a car for us. She tells me Alice is fine, and they have some leads on possible places Foxcatcher could have gone, but failed to catch up to her. We sit on the steps of Challenger Manor, holding each other tenderly and gazing at the night sky.

“You love having an excuse to buy this place and fix it up,” Kelly says. “You’ve talked about it before, and I never understood why you didn’t.” “We didn’t need it,” I reply, “it would have just been another vanity purchase for a bored billionaire.”

“You never do anything you want unless you find it a way to make it for somebody else,” she says. “You need to enjoy things. You need to enjoy them just for the sake of enjoying them, just for yourself.” “I fall asleep between you and Carla every night, if not even more beautiful women,” I say, “I’m doing quite well in the getting-everything-I-want department.”

“I think you need our permission,” she says. “It’s not just about being selfless. You probably thought buying this place was a terrible idea. Then you found somebody to tell you it was a good one.” “It became a good idea because things happened,” I say.

“You just don’t want to admit you trust anybody else over yourself,” Kelly laughs. “You still want to be that brooding, domineering loner.” “That tough, domineering persona seems to be something you really enjoy from time to time,” I say.

“You know it’s an act, though,” Kelly prods. “Of course I do,” I admit, “I feel like that’s what I need to be. I know that I need all you guys in my life, and I’m not fooling myself about how happy you all make me. There are plenty of reasons I surround myself with people. I do trust your input, I do need somebody to pry me out of my shell sometimes, I do need to add voices to the echo chamber my head naturally wants to be.”

“You do literally do all you serious thinking in a big, echoey chamber,” Kelly says.

“And, you know, I’m also madly in love with all of you,” I say. “And we’re, like, insanely hot,” Kelly says, “and we’re amazing in bed.”

Hobb’s End isn’t actually that far from New London, but the Manor is so remote there are still far more stars visible in the sky. Late at night, the grounds of the Manor are a kind of dark we rarely see around here. We had to throw down some emergency lights we carry inside the house and out here on the steps just to see each other. The sky is breathtaking out here.

“It feels incredible to see another Zora and another Kelly who are as in love as we are,” Kelly says. “They want to leave their whole world behind, even if they could go back, just to be together.”

“I’m not surprised,” I say. “I think you complement me on a really fundamental level. I think you would have to change both of us completely for us not to be in love. I felt something with you almost as soon as we met.”

“Don’t you complement me too?” Kelly asks. “God no,” I say, “I have no idea what you get out of this relationship. You are way more stable than me. I guess I have a great body, though, and a pretty big dick.”

“I love my big dumb pile of sexy muscle,” Kelly says. “You and Carla,” I say, “both of you, in totally different ways, you just make me feel…I don’t even know the word. You make me feel utterly, utterly un-alone. Whatever the opposite of alone is.”

“You un-alone me too,” Kelly says. She inhales and exhales in a way that suggests this pregnant pause is a gap where something she wants to say isn’t being said.

“I want to marry you,” Kelly says. I don’t pause. “I am nothing but glad that you said that. I wanted you to say it first, but for the last couple months, I’ve been tempted to say it anyway. I can’t fathom a day where I wouldn’t want you by my side.”

“I’ve wanted to say that for a while now,” Kelly says. “I just…do you ever want something so badly that no matter how sure you are that it couldn’t possibly disappoint you, part of you is still terrified of it?”

We see headlights as Catherine pulls up in the car. In the silence between us, not awkward but tranquil, lived-in, we hear another Zora and another Kelly laugh like mad in some dark chamber of their happy haunted home. The sky above us is nothing but stars, and the darkness around us holds no horrors.

“Kelly,” I whisper to her, “there is nothing in the world that scares me if I always have you with me.” Kelly, overcome, sinks into my embrace, and as always, I catch her

End of Season One

Coming in Season Two: Ritual sex magic! A gangbang in an alley! The Temple and the Garden! The Wild Hunt! A mother reconnects with her estranged daughter, and not, I cannot stress this enough, in a sexual way! The story of Fantome and Ingenue! A slightly kinky wedding! The absurdly detailed cosmology you guys haven’t even heard about yet! A gang of monster girls! A big climactic villain crossover! Outfox endures a milking machine! And much more!