Magic Under Construction: TOMU V2 #2

[alexandraerin]

Started: 11:00 a.m., 4/7/2011
Status: In Progress.
Last updated: 5:30
Word Count: ~5200
Hours Writing: 3.5




[3.5 hours]

The sky was just losing the last of the set sun's glow when Ian arrived. Steff came out with me meet him at the carriage park. She'd slipped her knife belt on, which made me realize that she hadn't been wearing it before.

University rules required students to be armed with an enchanted weapon any time they went outside. I had an exemption. Technically it was because as a half-demon I was a living weapon all by myself. The actual reason I availed myself of it was that I was more likely to hurt myself than anything else... magic weapons were one of the things I was vulnerable to. Eventually I planned on being able to shrink my blank-enchanted staff down to something I could safely and comfortably carry, but I needed a lot more practice at size-altering before I could do something like that multiple times a day every day.

The permanently enchanted staff I was planning would have size changing as a feature, of course. Or even conjuring and abjuring. Possibly both, so I didn't have to keep track of the tiny staff and I didn't have to have room to summon it in its full-sized form. Even better if I was able to use it as a wand while it was shrunk...

"What are you thinking about?" Steff asked.

"Enchantment stuff," I said.

"School hasn't even begun yet."

"It never ended, for me," I said. "I'm excited... I've got a lot of the preliminary stuff out of the way and now I'm going to be learn the really useful stuff."

"Ah, sophomores," Steff said. "Was I ever so young?"

"Yes," I said. "A year ago... and if you're not careful, I'm going to graduate before you."

"Probably will," Steff said. "I'm finding myself sliding onto the de facto five year plan. I spent too much of my first two years taking classes that sounded fun and now I'm going to have to haul ass to finish my major. I mean, somehow I'm five semesters into my undergraduate degree and I haven't managed to find time for any of the required courses on necroethics."

"I'm surprised they don't make you take those first," I said.

"Oh, you don't need them to do necromancy," she said. "Just to be a licensed necromancer... given that I'm not planning on living or working in the Imperium, I really think I should be able to opt out."

"By the same token, is your degree really going to do any good for you out in the ogre badlands?" I asked. I really wasn't trying to advocate for her to skip the ethics classes and drop out of school as soon as she knew enough about spirit-binding and zombie-raising to be dangerous, but it seemed so obvious and logical that I couldn't help blurting it out.

"You'd be surprised," Steff said. "Ogres are big believers in trophies. You don't come back from a hunt without something to hang on the wall. That's why so many ogre lords are keen on signing treaties with the Imperium. They all want the biggest, most impressive one so they can show their underlings and neighbors how important they are."

"Huh," I said. I could feel my face twisting into the same expression Marcel had worn when he'd been debating whether he could dismiss Steff's tale or not.

"I'm not pulling your leg, Mack," she said. "Honestly. Look at it like this: they're a scarce resource. The ogres can't produce fancy bits of paper themselves. That makes them valuable."

"I suppose," I said. "Thanks for coming with me. I wouldn't expect you to do it for Ian."

"I'm not doing it for Ian," she said. "Well, I guess in a sense I did it for all of us, because if you got yourself killed wandering around campus at night we'd all lose out... well, I wouldn't necessarily lose out, especially if I could get you to sign a release form, but I think Amy would be devastated."

"Thank you for caring," I said. "But you told me last year that they keep the monsters away during the first week."

"Yeah, well, we both know those wards don't work on all kinds of monsters, don't we?" she said. "Anyway, I'll slip away when Ian gets here so he can get some alone time in."

"You don't have to do that," I said. "I mean, it's not like you and I have..."

"I know," she said. "But I've got someone else I can go back to. Ian doesn't, and I don't think he's as naturally polyamorous as you or I are. He'd probably appreciate a night of having you to himself before he has to start sharing again. Still not doing it for him, though... you benefit from having a happy and secure boyfriend."

"I don't think I'm naturally polyamorous."

"I'd wonder how you managed to fall into it so easily, but I think I just answered my own question," Steff said. "You're not naturally polyamorous, you're just really good at falling."

"Have I fallen on my face since you got here?" I asked. For once, the laws of cosmic/comic cause-and-effect didn't provide me with an immediate rebuttal.

"Dunno," Steff said. "To be honest, Mack, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to your face."

I stopped walking. The quick-searing blush that spread over my face and made me want to bury it in my hands might very well have made me stumble if I hadn't.

"Ah, I missed that," Steff said. "See, I don't have to fuck you to have fun with you... and here comes your boy, so I'll leave you alone."

Elven speed plus elven senses meant that by the time I registered that I couldn't see Ian yet, Steff was nowhere to be seen, either. A little ways down the path, the school coach was just pulling up to the curb. I could just see a blob in one of the windows that was probably a face, but in the absence of Steff's word I wouldn't have even ventured a guess as to the identity.

Sure enough, though, when the coach stopped and the door opened, Ian stepped out. His brownish-blondish hair was longer and scruffier-looking than I'd ever seen, and he had his lute strapped to his back and a sword... a new and fairly impressive-looking gladius... on his belt. The t-shirt and shorts he was wearing showed off the corded muscles he'd earned grappling as a gladiator in the ring.

All in all, he was very much the picture of a warrior bard.

He saw me and held up a hand to stop me just as I was starting to break into a run. He probably had a point. I was excited to see him, but that seemed like a good way to break my almost unprecedented streak of continuous verticality.

Or maybe he just wanted to come to me.

He turned around and got a duffel bag and a suitcase out of the coach then walked up the path towards me slowly. A couple of girls he'd been sharing the coach with walked past him. Their obvious hurry to get out of the open didn't stop them from checking him out as they passed. I couldn't blame them. I kind of wanted to, but I really couldn't... not when I had two other lovers and Ian, as far as I knew, was monogamous. Before the end of the year I'd agreed that he was free to take other lovers as long as he was honest with them about his relationship status. It had been his idea that he wouldn't have to tell me unless something was getting serious. I didn't mind that at all.

If I was honest with myself, I had a harder time with the idea of sharing Ian than I did Amaranth or Steff, who definitely fit the box labeled "naturally polyamorous" better than Ian did. If I was even more honest... well, it turned me on. Even if Ian never took advantage of it... even though I'd never necessarily know if he did... the knowledge that any time he wasn't with me, he could be with some other girl and I could do nothing about it, I had no say over it... it was hot.

The idea of sharing Ian with other girls made my stomach want to twist itself around and tie itself up in knots. The idea of me being shared by him with Steff and Amaranth? It kind of did the same thing, but a bit lower than my stomach and in a good way. A year ago that sort of thing would have completely scandalized me to admit. Now I understood that it was just how I was. If I tried to repress or deny it, I'd feel all the same things but I'd experience them as shame.

Since Ian had motioned for me to wait, I also waited for him to speak before I said anything. He came right up to me, set his bags down, and just stood there looking down into my eyes. It was getting on full dark by that point. The glow from the enchanted path suffused the air around us, letting me see his face in better lighting than anywhere or any time else. I couldn't have asked for a better reintroduction. His hazel eyes looked almost amber in that light.

"Hey, pretty girl," he said finally. "Did you miss me?"

"Yessss." The word slid out of my throat like a sigh, like his words had been a barbed hook that went right through me and pulled out my reply inch by inch.

"Good," he said with a smirk. He didn't say if he'd missed me. His time in the arena had done a lot for his confidence. It showed in this easy stride and his cocky words. He picked up the duffel bag and hitched the strap over his right shoulder. "Take that," he said, pointing to his suitcase. When I picked it up with my right hand, he said, "Other hand."

I colored slightly as I transferred it to my left hand. I wasn't surprised when he took my free hand.

"I'm on the seventh floor," he said. "You're on five, right?"

"Yes, Ian," I said.

"Fifth floor girl, through and through," he said. "The more things change..."

I smiled.

"At least we have lifts this year," I said.

"Khersis be praised," he said. "Well, not literally, obviously. Sorry if that..."

"Idle mentions don't affect me," I reminded him. "Technically, taking his name in vain is a sin, not a prayer."

"How do you know it was in vain? I could have been sincere," he said.

"You'd have burned my hand."

"But you'd have held on," he said, giving it a squeeze.

"If you wanted me to," I said. "I'd try, anyway."

"On second thought, I'm not sure it's a good idea to invoke divine power for kinky sex," Ian said. "They'd probably have to invent some kind of superdamnation for me."

"You could always convert to Khaeleanism," I said. "Amaranth's mother still hasn't made up her mind about us, but she doesn't seem to be opposed on principle."

"To sex with demonbloods, or divine kinkiness?"

"Take your pick," I said.

"Oh, I'll take a good deal more than that."

"What does that even mean?"

"I don't even know," he admitted. "Is it doing anything for you?"

"No," I said.

"Oh."

"Sorry."

"It's okay," I said.

"Well, if all else fails I can just call you a cunt," he said, giving my hand another, harder squeeze. It wasn't a friendly squeeze, any more than it was a friendly word. I could have destroyed every bone in Ian's hand if I'd returned the favor, but he had some muscles and even if he couldn't inflict any harm I still felt the pain. The combination of that and the accompany burst of arousal and pleasure nearly brought me to my knees.

To be specific, it would have brought me to my knees if I hadn't swooned and fallen over completely.

Ian almost fell over with me... he kept hold of my hand and knelt down with me.

"Fuck! Mackenzie!" he said. "Are you okay?"

"You should be careful," I said. "You ought to know this whole 'walking' thing is a work in progress with me."

He laughed and helped me to my feet.

"I guess I should save it for the bedroom, huh?" he said.

"Don't hold back on my account."

Ian and I spent the night together in my room. It was intense, to come together like that after months of celibacy and isolation... it was the first time I'd had sex since before the end of my freshman year.

It was also kind of a learning experience for both of us. In particular, we learned that even though the beds in Gilcrease were only a little bit narrower than the ones in Harlowe and Weyland, the lost inches made a lot of difference to the comfort level of multiple people sharing it.

This didn't get in the way of the sex all that much. Much of what we did together was done standing up... or rather, with Ian standing and me kneeling towards or bent over away from him. The long months of being left on my own had been good for me, but it was good to be in someone else's hands again.

I let Ian slip the ring of protection on my finger. There is of course a whole school of somewhat dated innuendos about men giving women rings in this fashion, but that's not what it symbolized to me. It wasn't like a marriage, except maybe in a fairly archaic sense. Ian was claiming me. He was binding me. It was a tiny little bond, but it gave me a tiny little thrill.

With the ring on, we were double-covered against pregnancy... I'd started taking anti-fertility potions the year before to suppress one of the inconvenient side-effects of my demonic nature. It seemed that the scent and taste of fertile female half-demon was highly attractive to predators.

It probably was responsible for the fact that there weren't any free-breeding populations of demonbloods running around, though... even other half-demons found the taste and scent of us appealing. I didn't know exactly why this was... there wasn't a lot of information available on the subject. One book I'd browsed through in the library over the summer had described the frequently violent death of female half-demons at the hands of males as being a matter of dominance and strength, as if we didn't all have supernatural strength that made the difference between the raw muscle power of a male body and a female one into a drop in the bucket. Other sources had missed out on the fate of female half-demons completely and attributed the lack of half-demon clans or families to the idea that demons are inherently asocial.

My scent wasn't completely irresistible. It wasn't even something that everyone with predatory tendencies noticed right away. But once someone got a taste, it seemed to linger in their minds... and even if it can be resisted, not everyone when faced with something so appetizing would choose to resist. Given that the school admitted students from some of the more "monstrous" races of the world, damping my scent seemed like a necessary safety measure.

That aside, it was very freeing to know that I couldn't get pregnant. I'd managed to get past a lot of the negative shame aspects associated with sex, but the fear of getting knocked up was a big thing. Okay, there were options there, but I wasn't sure I'd spent enough time living the life of an enlightened liberal college student to overcome nine years of my grandmother's influence in that area.

After a couple hours I was pretty sure that Ian hadn't found another girl while he was away for the summer. If he'd had another outlet during those months and was still so happy to see me, I didn't have any reason to feel jealous. We didn't actually, you know, fuck for several hours in a row. Ian had learned quite a bit from Amaranth and... though neither of them would be likely to admit it... Steff over the course of the previous year. Our sex wasn't just sex. It was him being... Him, and me being His.

Steff had called Ian my security and she was right, and never did I feel more secure than when he put me very firmly in my place.

He could make me crawl, he could make me beg. He could slap me around. He could absolutely cut loose on me without any chance of injury or leaving a mark, without any fear of condemnation or recrimination. I needed what he gave me. It didn't even particularly matter what it was. The fact that he gave and I took was all that mattered.

When he was done, we were both absolutely spent. It was a good thing, too... exhaustion made sleeping together in the narrow bed a little easier.

[][][][][][][[]][]

"Maybe you can, you know, de-bunk them and put them side by side?" he suggested the next morning, after waking up with a crick in his neck an arm that was still lost somewhere in slumberland. "You'd lose some floor space, but you'd double your bed space."

"These beds don't come apart," I said. "It's one piece."

"Oh, that sucks," he said. "And that means I'm stuck sleeping in a bunk bed in my own room, too. It's bad enough that I have to get used to sharing a room with another guy again without us literally sleeping on top of each other."

"Sleep over here, then," I said.

"I'll still be sleeping in a bunk bed."

"Yes, but you won't be sharing a room with a guy," I said.

"That will get crowded really fast," he said.

"There's always going to be an empty bunk," I said. "I mean, I can sleep just fine with Amaranth literally-literally right on top of me so there's no reason we'd ever use the top bunk."

"Sleeping in the same room as you and Amaranth but in a different bed is supposed to be a good thing?"

"Well, you'll have quick and easy access," I said. "I guess we'll just have to use the floor when we want to all get... intricate... with each other."

"Have you noticed? There isn't as much floor in here as there was in Harlowe."

"Yeah," I said.

The rooms in Gilcrease were oddly shaped, being narrow at the front up by the door and wider at the back. The door to the bathroom was on the lefthand side of my room as you came in. The bathroom was just big enough to have a sink and toilet along one wall and a bathtub along the other. The bathroom took up a big chunk of what would have been the front of the two rooms it connected. The bunk bed was set back in the little alcove that resulted from this. It could be moved, but there wasn't really any better place to put it.

The alcove and the fact that there were shelves and cabinets build into the walls meant there really was more space than it looked like there was, but it was a bit like living in a cramped hallway. Harlowe's blocky institutional style meant there was enough space for people to sit in a circle. Even if we could fit a whole group of people in the Gilcrease rooms, it wouldn't feel as sociable.

"We're going to have to find a new place to hang out, aren't we?" Ian said.

"I hate to say it, but yeah, I think so," I said. "I mean, I like the room. It's cozy. But it's not exactly a party space."

"You know what some of the guys on my floor were doing? Stretching a portable hole across the wall between their rooms. Back where the beds are, I mean. They turned their beds sideways and now they have this big shared space."

"That's got to be against residence hall rules," I said. "Which means Two would never go for it. And I'm not sure I would, either... we'd gain space but lose privacy. Plus, a portable hole that big wouldn't be cheap."

"Is that your way of saying you didn't learn how to make one over summer vacation?"

"No," I said. "And I'm not likely to. Messing about with extraplanar stuff takes really specialized knowledge. I could make something bigger on the inside, but its insides would still be inside it. If I were to extend the depth of the alcove, we'd have a bigger alcove but it wouldn't connect through to Two and Dee's room. The outside wall would still be in the same place, on the outside."

"Well, that's even better. Could you do that?"

"No," I said. "With a lot of practice and study I could make the inside of a cabinet bigger, but the room... it would take more energy than I have to make any change you'd notice, and it wouldn't last."

"Oh," Ian said. "Well, it was a thought."

"I don't think it'll be so bad here once we get settled in. Amaranth is supposed to be bringing carpet and stuff. She was on the mirror with me all week, having me measure and re-measure things. She didn't trust my measurement spells... she made me get a tape measure."

"In fairness to her, you did just learn how to do that."

"Yeah, but I aced that class," I said.

The one credit hour workshop DIV 117, Measuring With Magic, had been one of the high points of my summer. It turned out I'd had a knack for that sort of thing without knowing it. One of the first bits of magic I'd ever learned how to do was detecting magic and reading enchantments. It turned out that picking up the physical properties of objects was really similar. It was a useful skill to have, because I didn't really have a head for things like sizes and distances. An enchanter who wanted to be more than one small part of an assembly line needed to either have enough money to pay for an assembly line or to be something of a crafter.

"What time is Amaranth getting in?" Ian asked.

"Elevenish," I said.

"Is she coming in on the school coach or are we meeting her in Enwich, or what?"

"Her overland coach stops here, actually," I said.

"Oh. So, you want me to come down with you to meet here, or do you want to go alone?"

"She wants me to wait here for her," I said.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Why?"

"She likes the idea of me waiting for her," I said. "She says it'll be like coming home to me."

"Oh. That's sweet, I guess," Ian said.

I thought it was sweet, too, but it appealed to me on other levels as well... like when Ian had bade me to wait for him to come to me.

Steff, Ian, and Amaranth shared me, but Amaranth had been my first lover and if anyone in the whole arrangement was my "true love", it was her. I'd kept in touch with her the most during the summer, but by the same token

I'd spent almost four months on my own, with only occasional mirror conversations or a-mails from Amaranth, the woman that I loved and called my Owner. At some point in the last year my mind had started capitalizing that word. It just felt right.

[][][][][][][][]

"Were you good while I was away?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. I ducked my head a little as I said it. It was a small motion, purely voluntary. I did it because it felt right. I could look up into Amaranth's eyes forever, but it also felt nice to not look up at her. As body language went, averting my eyes felt a bit like kissing her on the cheek.

"And were you good for Ian last night?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, and what had been small and voluntary became automatic and all-encompassing. Heat flared up in my cheeks. My body wanted to pull into itself.

"Good girl," she said. She gave me a little pat on the butt... not a spanking, not anything like a spanking, but the closest thing I'd had in over a hundred days. "Now help me in with my bags."

She passed her hands behind her back and bent her knees slightly like she was setting things down and just like that, there was a large duffel bag, a suitcase, two flat-topped traveling chests, a hat box, and a backpack piled up behind her.

When I'd first met Amaranth, I had wondered at her ability to pull things out of nowhere or tuck them out of sight when she didn't seem to have anywhere to put them, obvious anatomically-inspired jokes aside. It had turned out that she was literally putting them nowhere, a process she called putting things "away". I suspected the process had something in common with the kind of extradimensional space used by a bag of holding or a portable hole.

She could have just as easily retrieved them when she was in the room. The fact that she hadn't meant that she wanted me to carry them in for the sake of having me do something. The first direct orders of the semester. It probably shouldn't have been as exciting as it was.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. The weight wouldn't be a problem for me. I did have to be careful, though, handling Amaranth's things, so I decided to carry them one at a time, starting with the bigger ones.

While I squatted down to lift the first of the chests, she headed on into the room and greeted Ian. I heard the inside door opening.

"Hi, Amaranth!" Two called out.

"Hello, Two, dear," Amaranth said. "Your sister is bringing my things in. You may help her if you would like to."

"Okay," Two said.

"Let her carry the trunks," Amaranth said as I stumbled sideways through the door with the first one, banging and scraping my knuckles on the door frame in the process. As an invulnerable half-demon, I didn't have worry about cracking bones or abrading skin. I just got all the fun feeling associated with it. "They're full of books. Oh, and so is the suitcase. And my backpack's a little bit full, it has all of my schoolbooks in it at the moment... I don't want you to strain yourself."

"You shouldn't offer things to people if you don't mean it," Two said.

"You can carry the hatbox?" Amaranth suggested.

This was how far we'd come in the year since coming to MU. Two the living golem, who had been barely able to function without orders when she first arrived, was now being offered tasks as a treat. I did what I was told, and I liked it.

"Where would you like this, Amaranth?" I asked.

"Just stack them along the wall there," Amaranth said, pointing opposite the bunk beds. "I have three more for you to carry in when you've got those. I didn't want to block up the hallway."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You can shelve them later," Amaranth said. "And you're free to use whatever shelves are left."

It seemed like Amaranth had spent the summer cultivating a sort of easy, imperious authority. I couldn't say that I didn't like it.

[]

"You all might want to look away for a moment," she said. "I've been told that this can get disorienting to watch."

"What can?" Ian asked.

"I'm going to put the beds away," she said. She looked at the desks. "Actually, on second thought, if everyone will leave for a minute I think I'll be able to get the carpet in place fairly easily."

"Okay," Two said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. It might have been gratuitous, but I'd missed saying it.

Ian and Dee said nothing, but we all stepped out... Ian and I into the hallway, Dee and Two through the bathroom.

"You know you're going to have the cleanest bathroom on campus," Ian said after a few moments.

"How do you figure?"

"Because it's Two's," he said.

"We should probably make up like a chart or something for cleaning it," I said.

"And then Two will clean it anyway," Ian said.

"Probably," I conceded. I didn't like the thought of sticking her with that task, but it wouldn't be any great hardship from her point of view. It was just something to do.

There had been hardly any sound from inside the room, but the door opened.

"Okay," Amaranth said. "I'm not exactly done, but I've got everything more or less in place."

The bare tile floor... which had felt cold at night even in the lingering summer-like weather of mid-Astera... was now covered in a thick, soft carpet that had clearly been picked out by someone who fully intended to have sex on it. At first glance it looked like Amaranth had managed to acquire a single piece perfectly cut to fit the irregularly-shaped room, but then I spotted the place where two pieces had been joined. There was a trapezoidal-shaped piece that stopped just before the alcove, and an even more oddly shaped piece just beyond it.

One of the desks was gone. The bunk bed was gone. In its place was a queen-sized bed, the head stuck in the recess. It took up a lot of the room's real estate, but somehow the place felt more open.

There was a pile of pillows and cushions on the floor, and some curtains and stuff on the bed.

Even knowing in the abstract that she was capable of this sort of thing, I was amazed at the extent to which she'd carried it.


[3 hours]

The sky was just losing the last of the set sun's glow when Ian arrived. Steff came out with me meet him at the carriage park. She'd slipped her knife belt on, which made me realize that she hadn't been wearing it before.

University rules required students to be armed with an enchanted weapon any time they went outside. I had an exemption. Technically it was because as a half-demon I was a living weapon all by myself. The actual reason I availed myself of it was that I was more likely to hurt myself than anything else... magic weapons were one of the things I was vulnerable to. Eventually I planned on being able to shrink my blank-enchanted staff down to something I could safely and comfortably carry, but I needed a lot more practice at size-altering before I could do something like that multiple times a day every day.

The permanently enchanted staff I was planning would have size changing as a feature, of course. Or even conjuring and abjuring. Possibly both, so I didn't have to keep track of the tiny staff and I didn't have to have room to summon it in its full-sized form. Even better if I was able to use it as a wand while it was shrunk...

"What are you thinking about?" Steff asked.

"Enchantment stuff," I said.

"School hasn't even begun yet."

"It never ended, for me," I said. "I'm excited... I've got a lot of the preliminary stuff out of the way and now I'm going to be learn the really useful stuff."

"Ah, sophomores," Steff said. "Was I ever so young?"

"Yes," I said. "A year ago... and if you're not careful, I'm going to graduate before you."

"Probably will," Steff said. "I'm finding myself sliding onto the de facto five year plan. I spent too much of my first two years taking classes that sounded fun and now I'm going to have to haul ass to finish my major. I mean, somehow I'm five semesters into my undergraduate degree and I haven't managed to find time for any of the required courses on necroethics."

"I'm surprised they don't make you take those first," I said.

"Oh, you don't need them to do necromancy," she said. "Just to be a licensed necromancer... given that I'm not planning on living or working in the Imperium, I really think I should be able to opt out."

"By the same token, is your degree really going to do any good for you out in the ogre badlands?" I asked. I really wasn't trying to advocate for her to skip the ethics classes and drop out of school as soon as she knew enough about spirit-binding and zombie-raising to be dangerous, but it seemed so obvious and logical that I couldn't help blurting it out.

"You'd be surprised," Steff said. "Ogres are big believers in trophies. You don't come back from a hunt without something to hang on the wall. That's why so many ogre lords are keen on signing treaties with the Imperium. They all want the biggest, most impressive one so they can show their underlings and neighbors how important they are."

"Huh," I said. I could feel my face twisting into the same expression Marcel had worn when he'd been debating whether he could dismiss Steff's tale or not.

"I'm not pulling your leg, Mack," she said. "Honestly. Look at it like this: they're a scarce resource. The ogres can't produce fancy bits of paper themselves. That makes them valuable."

"I suppose," I said. "Thanks for coming with me. I wouldn't expect you to do it for Ian."

"I'm not doing it for Ian," she said. "Well, I guess in a sense I did it for all of us, because if you got yourself killed wandering around campus at night we'd all lose out... well, I wouldn't necessarily lose out, especially if I could get you to sign a release form, but I think Amy would be devastated."

"Thank you for caring," I said. "But you told me last year that they keep the monsters away during the first week."

"Yeah, well, we both know those wards don't work on all kinds of monsters, don't we?" she said. "Anyway, I'll slip away when Ian gets here so he can get some alone time in."

"You don't have to do that," I said. "I mean, it's not like you and I have..."

"I know," she said. "But I've got someone else I can go back to. Ian doesn't, and I don't think he's as naturally polyamorous as you or I are. He'd probably appreciate a night of having you to himself before he has to start sharing again. Still not doing it for him, though... you benefit from having a happy and secure boyfriend."

"I don't think I'm naturally polyamorous."

"I'd wonder how you managed to fall into it so easily, but I think I just answered my own question," Steff said. "You're not naturally polyamorous, you're just really good at falling."

"Have I fallen on my face since you got here?" I asked. For once, the laws of cosmic/comic cause-and-effect didn't provide me with an immediate rebuttal.

"Dunno," Steff said. "To be honest, Mack, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to your face."

I stopped walking. The quick-searing blush that spread over my face and made me want to bury it in my hands might very well have made me stumble if I hadn't.

"Ah, I missed that," Steff said. "See, I don't have to fuck you to have fun with you... and here comes your boy, so I'll leave you alone."

Elven speed plus elven senses meant that by the time I registered that I couldn't see Ian yet, Steff was nowhere to be seen, either. A little ways down the path, the school coach was just pulling up to the curb. I could just see a blob in one of the windows that was probably a face, but in the absence of Steff's word I wouldn't have even ventured a guess as to the identity.

Sure enough, though, when the coach stopped and the door opened, Ian stepped out. His brownish-blondish hair was longer and scruffier-looking than I'd ever seen, and he had his lute strapped to his back and a sword... a new and fairly impressive-looking gladius... on his belt. The t-shirt and shorts he was wearing showed off the corded muscles he'd earned grappling as a gladiator in the ring.

All in all, he was very much the picture of a warrior bard.

He saw me and held up a hand to stop me just as I was starting to break into a run. He probably had a point. I was excited to see him, but that seemed like a good way to break my almost unprecedented streak of continuous verticality.

Or maybe he just wanted to come to me.

He turned around and got a duffel bag and a suitcase out of the coach then walked up the path towards me slowly. A couple of girls he'd been sharing the coach with walked past him. Their obvious hurry to get out of the open didn't stop them from checking him out as they passed. I couldn't blame them. I kind of wanted to, but I really couldn't... not when I had two other lovers and Ian, as far as I knew, was monogamous. Before the end of the year I'd agreed that he was free to take other lovers as long as he was honest with them about his relationship status. It had been his idea that he wouldn't have to tell me unless something was getting serious. I didn't mind that at all.

If I was honest with myself, I had a harder time with the idea of sharing Ian than I did Amaranth or Steff, who definitely fit the box labeled "naturally polyamorous" better than Ian did. If I was even more honest... well, it turned me on. Even if Ian never took advantage of it... even though I'd never necessarily know if he did... the knowledge that any time he wasn't with me, he could be with some other girl and I could do nothing about it, I had no say over it... it was hot.

The idea of sharing Ian with other girls made my stomach want to twist itself around and tie itself up in knots. The idea of me being shared by him with Steff and Amaranth? It kind of did the same thing, but a bit lower than my stomach and in a good way. A year ago that sort of thing would have completely scandalized me to admit. Now I understood that it was just how I was. If I tried to repress or deny it, I'd feel all the same things but I'd experience them as shame.

Since Ian had motioned for me to wait, I also waited for him to speak before I said anything. He came right up to me, set his bags down, and just stood there looking down into my eyes. It was getting on full dark by that point. The glow from the enchanted path suffused the air around us, letting me see his face in better lighting than anywhere or any time else. I couldn't have asked for a better reintroduction. His hazel eyes looked almost amber in that light.

[]

Ian and I spent the night together in my room. It was intense, to come together after months of celibacy and isolation... it was the first time I'd had sex since before the end of my freshman year. Steff had come in the night before, but

It was also kind of a learning experience for both of us. To be specific, we learned that even though the beds in Gilcrease were only a little bit narrower than the ones in Harlowe and Weyland, the lost inches made a lot of difference to the comfort level of multiple people sharing it.

This didn't get in the way of the sex all that much. Much of what we did together was done standing up... or rather, with Ian standing and me kneeling towards or bent over away from him. The long months of being left on my own had been good for me, but it was good to be in someone else's hands again.

I let Ian slip the ring of protection on my finger. There is of course a whole school of somewhat dated innuendos about men giving women rings in this fashion, but that's not what it symbolized to me. It wasn't like a marriage, except maybe in a fairly archaic sense. Ian was claiming me. He was binding me. It was a tiny little bond, but it gave me a tiny little thrill.

With the ring on, we were double-covered against preganncy... I'd started taking anti-fertility potions the year before to suppress one of the inconvenient side-effects of my demonic nature. It seemed that the scent and taste of fertile female half-demon was highly attractive to predators.

It probably was responsible for the fact that there weren't any free-breeding populations of demonbloods running around, though... even other half-demons found the taste and scent of us appealing. I didn't know exactly why this was... there wasn't a lot of information available on the subject. One book I'd browsed through in the library over the summer had described the frequently violent death of female half-demons at the hands of males as being a matter of dominance and strength, as if we didn't all have supernatural strength that made the difference between the raw muscle power of a male body and a female one into a drop in the bucket. Other sources had missed out on the fate of female half-demons completely and attributed the lack of half-demon clans or families to the idea that demons are inherently asocial.

My scent wasn't completely irresistible. It wasn't even something that everyone with predatory tendencies noticed right away. But once someone got a taste, it seemed to linger in their minds... and even if it can be resisted, not everyone when faced with something so appetizing would choose to resist. Given that the school admitted students from some of the more "monstrous" races of the world, damping my scent seemed like a necessary safety measure.

That aside, it was very freeing to know that I couldn't get pregnant. I'd managed to get past a lot of the negative shame aspects associated with sex, but the fear of getting knocked up was a big thing. Okay, there were options there, but I wasn't sure I'd spent enough time living the life of an enlightened liberal college student to overcome nine years of my grandmother's influence.

[]

"Maybe you can, you know, de-bunk them and put them side by side?" he suggested the next morning, after waking up with a crick in his neck an arm that was still lost somewhere in slumberland. "You'd lose some floor space, but you'd double your bed space."

"These beds don't come apart," I said. "It's one piece."

"Oh, that sucks," he said. "And that means I'm stuck sleeping in a bunk bed in my own room, too. It's bad enough that I have to get used to sharing a room with another guy again without us literally sleeping on top of each other."

"Sleep over here, then," I said.

"I'll still be sleeping in a bunk bed."

"Yes, but you won't be sharing a room with a guy," I said.

"That will get crowded really fast," he said.

"There's always going to be an empty bunk," I said. "I mean, I can sleep just fine with Amaranth literally-literally right on top of me so there's no reason we'd ever use the top bunk."

"Sleeping in the same room as you and Amaranth but in a different bed is supposed to be a good thing?"

"Well, you'll have quick and easy access," I said. "I guess we'll just have to use the floor when we want to all get... intricate... with each other."

"Have you noticed? There isn't as much floor in here as there was in Harlowe."

"Yeah," I said.

The rooms in Gilcrease were oddly shaped, being narrow at the front up by the door and wider at the back. The door to the bathroom was on the lefthand side of my room as you came in. The bathroom was just big enough to have a sink and toilet along one wall and a bathtub along the other. The bathroom took up a big chunk of what would have been the front of the two rooms it connected. The bunk bed was set back in the little alcove that resulted from this. It could be moved, but there wasn't really any better place to put it.

The alcove and the fact that there were shelves and cabinets build into the walls meant there really was more space than it looked like there was, but it was a bit like living in a cramped hallway. Harlowe's blocky institutional style meant there was enough space for people to sit in a circle. Even if we could fit a whole group of people in the Gilcrease rooms, it wouldn't feel as sociable.

"We're going to have to find a new place to hang out, aren't we?" Ian said.

"I hate to say it, but yeah, I think so," I said. "I mean, I like the room. It's cozy. But it's not exactly a party space."

"You know what some of the guys on my floor were doing? Stretching a portable hole across the wall between their rooms. Back where the beds are, I mean. They turned their beds sideways and now they have this big shared space."

"That's got to be against residence hall rules," I said. "Which means Two would never go for it. And I'm not sure I would, either... we'd gain space but lose privacy. Plus, a portable hole that big wouldn't be cheap."

"Is that your way of saying you didn't learn how to make one over summer vacation?"

"No," I said. "And I'm not likely to. Messing about with extraplanar stuff takes really specialized knowledge. I could make something bigger on the inside, but its insides would still be inside it. If I were to extend the depth of the alcove, we'd have a bigger alcove but it wouldn't connect through to Two and Dee's room. The outside wall would still be in the same place, on the outside."

"Well, that's even better. Could you do that?"

"No," I said. "With a lot of practice and study I could make the inside of a cabinet bigger, but the room... it would take more energy than I have to make any change you'd notice, and it wouldn't last."

"Oh," Ian said. "Well, it was a thought."

"I don't think it'll be so bad here once we get settled in. Amaranth is supposed to be bringing carpet and stuff. She was on the mirror with me all week, having me measure and re-measure things. She didn't trust my measurement spells... she made me get a tape measure."

"In fairness to her, you did just learn how to do that."

"Yeah, but I aced that class," I said.

The one credit hour workshop DIV 117, Measuring With Magic, had been one of the high points of my summer. It turned out I'd had a knack for that sort of thing without knowing it. One of the first bits of magic I'd ever learned how to do was detecting magic and reading enchantments. It turned out that picking up the physical properties of objects was really similar. It was a useful skill to have, because I didn't really have a head for things like sizes and distances. An enchanter who wanted to be more than one small part of an assembly line needed to either have enough money to pay for an assembly line or to be something of a crafter.

"What time is Amaranth getting in?" Ian asked.

"Elevenish," I said.

"Is she coming here or are we meeting her in Enwich or something?"

"The coach stops here," I said.

"You want me to come down with you to meet here, or do you want to go alone?"

"She wants me to wait here for her," I said.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Why?"

"She likes the idea of me waiting for her," I said. "She says it'll be like coming home to me."

"Oh. That's sweet, I guess," Ian said.

I thought it was sweet, too, but it appealed to me on other levels as well. I'd spent almost four months on my own, with only occasional mirror conversations or a-mails from Amaranth, the woman that I loved and called my Owner. At some point in the last year my mind had started capitalizing that word. It just felt right.

[][][][][][][][]

"Were you good while I was away?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. I ducked my head a little as I said it. It was a small motion, purely voluntary. I did it because it felt right. I could look up into Amaranth's eyes forever, but it also felt nice to not look up at her. As body language went, averting my eyes felt a bit like kissing her on the cheek.

"And were you good for Ian last night?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, and what had been small and voluntary became automatic and all-encompassing. Heat flared up in my cheeks. My body wanted to pull into itself.

"Good girl," she said. She gave me a little pat on the butt... not a spanking, not anything like a spanking, but the closest thing I'd had in over a hundred days. "Now help me in with my bags."

She passed her hands behind her back and bent her knees slightly like she was setting things down and just like that, there was a large duffel bag, a suitcase, two flat-topped traveling chests, a hat box, and a backpack piled up behind her.

When I'd first met Amaranth, I had wondered at her ability to pull things out of nowhere or tuck them out of sight when she didn't seem to have anywhere to put them, obvious anatomically-inspired jokes aside. It had turned out that she was literally putting them nowhere, a process she called putting things "away". I suspected the process had something in common with the kind of extradimensional space used by a bag of holding or a portable hole.

She could have just as easily retrieved them when she was in the room. The fact that she hadn't meant that she wanted me to carry them in for the sake of having me do something. The first direct orders of the semester. It probably shouldn't have been as exciting as it was.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. The weight wouldn't be a problem for me. I did have to be careful, though, handling Amaranth's things, so I decided to carry them one at a time, starting with the bigger ones.

While I squatted down to lift the first of the chests, she headed on into the room and greeted Ian. I heard the inside door opening.

"Hi, Amaranth!" Two called out.

"Hello, Two, dear," Amaranth said. "Your sister is bringing my things in. You may help her if you would like to."

"Okay," Two said.

"Let her carry the trunks," Amaranth said as I stumbled sideways through the door with the first one, banging and scraping my knuckles on the door frame in the process. As an invulnerable half-demon, I didn't have worry about cracking bones or abrading skin. I just got all the fun feeling associated with it. "They're full of books. Oh, and so is the suitcase. And my backpack's a little bit full, it has all of my schoolbooks in it at the moment... I don't want you to strain yourself."

"You shouldn't offer things to people if you don't mean it," Two said.

"You can carry the hatbox?" Amaranth suggested.

This was how far we'd come in the year since coming to MU. Two the living golem, who had been barely able to function without orders when she first arrived, was now being offered tasks as a treat. I did what I was told, and I liked it.

"Where would you like this, Amaranth?" I asked.

"Just stack them along the wall there," Amaranth said, pointing opposite the bunk beds. "I have three more for you to carry in when you've got those. I didn't want to block up the hallway."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You can shelve them later," Amaranth said. "And you're free to use whatever shelves are left."

It seemed like Amaranth had spent the summer cultivating a sort of easy, imperious authority. I couldn't say that I didn't like it.

[]

"You all might want to look away for a moment," she said. "I've been told that this can get disorienting to watch."

"What can?" Ian asked.

"I'm going to put the beds away," she said. She looked at the desks. "Actually, on second thought, if everyone will leave for a minute I think I'll be able to get the carpet in place fairly easily."

"Okay," Two said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. It might have been gratuitous, but I'd missed saying it.

Ian and Dee said nothing, but we all stepped out... Ian and I into the hallway, Dee and Two through the bathroom.

"You know you're going to have the cleanest bathroom on campus," Ian said after a few moments.

"How do you figure?"

"Because it's Two's," he said.

"We should probably make up like a chart or something for cleaning it," I said.

"And then Two will clean it anyway," Ian said.

"Probably," I conceded. I didn't like the thought of sticking her with that task, but it wouldn't be any great hardship from her point of view. It was just something to do.

There had been hardly any sound from inside the room, but the door opened.

"Okay," Amaranth said. "I'm not exactly done, but I've got everything more or less in place."

The bare tile floor... which had felt cold at night even in the lingering summer-like weather of mid-Astera... was now covered in a thick, soft carpet that had clearly been picked out by someone who fully intended to have sex on it. At first glance it looked like Amaranth had managed to acquire a single piece perfectly cut to fit the irregularly-shaped room, but then I spotted the place where two pieces had been joined. There was a trapezoidal-shaped piece that stopped just before the alcove, and an even more oddly shaped piece just beyond it.

One of the desks was gone. The bunk bed was gone. In its place was a queen-sized bed, the head stuck in the recess. It took up a lot of the room's real estate, but somehow the place felt more open.

There was a pile of pillows and cushions on the floor, and some curtains and stuff on the bed.

Even knowing in the abstract that she was capable of this sort of thing, I was amazed at the extent to which she'd carried it.


[2.5 hours]

The sky was just losing the last of the set sun's glow when Ian arrived. Steff came out with me meet him at the carriage park. She'd slipped her knife belt on, which made me realize that she hadn't been wearing it before.

University rules required students to be armed with an enchanted weapon any time they went outside. I had an exemption. Technically it was because as a half-demon I was a living weapon all by myself. The actual reason I availed myself of it was that I was more likely to hurt myself than anything else... magic weapons were one of the things I was vulnerable to. Eventually I planned on being able to shrink my blank-enchanted staff down to something I could safely and comfortably carry, but I needed a lot more practice at size-altering before I could do something like that multiple times a day every day.

The permanently enchanted staff I was planning would have size changing as a feature, of course. Or even conjuring and abjuring. Possibly both, so I didn't have to keep track of the tiny staff and I didn't have to have room to summon it in its full-sized form. Even better if I was able to use it as a wand while it was shrunk...

"What are you thinking about?" Steff asked.

"Enchantment stuff," I said.

"School hasn't even begun yet."

"It never ended, for me," I said. "I'm excited... I've got a lot of the preliminary stuff out of the way and now I'm going to be learn the really useful stuff."

"Ah, sophomores," Steff said. "Was I ever so young?"

"Yes," I said. "A year ago... and if you're not careful, I'm going to graduate before you."

"Probably will," Steff said. "I'm finding myself sliding onto the de facto five year plan. I spent too much of my first two years taking classes that sounded fun and now I'm going to have to haul ass to finish my major. I mean, somehow I'm five semesters into my undergraduate degree and I haven't managed to find time for any of the required courses on necroethics."

"I'm surprised they don't make you take those first," I said.

"Oh, you don't need them to do necromancy," she said. "Just to be a licensed necromancer... given that I'm not planning on living or working in the Imperium, I really think I should be able to opt out."

"By the same token, is your degree really going to do any good for you out in the ogre badlands?" I asked. I really wasn't trying to advocate for her to skip the ethics classes and drop out of school as soon as she knew enough about spirit-binding and zombie-raising to be dangerous, but it seemed so obvious and logical that I couldn't help blurting it out.

"You'd be surprised," Steff said. "Ogres are big believers in trophies. You don't come back from a hunt without something to hang on the wall. That's why so many ogre lords are keen on signing treaties with the Imperium. They all want the biggest, most impressive one so they can show their underlings and neighbors how important they are."

"Huh," I said. I could feel my face twisting into the same expression Marcel had worn when he'd been debating whether he could dismiss Steff's tale or not.

"I'm not pulling your leg, Mack," she said. "Honestly. Look at it like this: they're a scarce resource. The ogres can't produce fancy bits of paper themselves. That makes them valuable."

"I suppose," I said. "Thanks for coming with me. I wouldn't expect you to do it for Ian."

"I'm not doing it for Ian," she said. "Well, I guess in a sense I did it for all of us, because if you got yourself killed wandering around campus at night we'd all lose out... well, I wouldn't necessarily lose out, especially if I could get you to sign a release form, but I think Amy would be devastated."

"Thank you for caring," I said. "But you told me last year that they keep the monsters away during the first week."

"Yeah, well, we both know those wards don't work on all kinds of monsters, don't we?" she said. "Anyway, I'll slip away when Ian gets here so he can get some alone time in."

"You don't have to do that," I said. "I mean, it's not like you and I have..."

"I know," she said. "But I've got someone else I can go back to. Ian doesn't, and I don't think he's as naturally polyamorous as you or I are. He'd probably appreciate a night of having you to himself before he has to start sharing again. Still not doing it for him, though... you benefit from having a happy and secure boyfriend."

"I don't think I'm naturally polyamorous."

"I'd wonder how you managed to fall into it so easily, but I think I just answered my own question," Steff said. "You're not naturally polyamorous, you're just good at falling."

"Have I fallen on my face since you got here?" I asked. For once, the laws of cosmic/comic cause-and-effect didn't provide me with an immediate rebuttal.

"Dunno," Steff said. "To be honest, Mack, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to your face."

I stopped walking. The quick-searing blush that spread over my face and made me want to bury it in my hands might very well have made me stumble if I hadn't.

"Ah, I missed that," Steff said. "See, I don't have to fuck you to have fun with you... and here comes your boy, so I'll leave you alone."

Elven speed plus elven senses meant that by the time I registered that I couldn't see Ian yet, Steff was nowhere to be seen, either. A little ways down the path, the school coach was just pulling up to the curb.

[]


Ian and I spent the night together in my room. It was intense, to come together after months of celibacy and isolation... it was the first time I'd had sex since before the end of my freshman year. Steff had come in the night before, but

It was also kind of a learning experience for both of us. To be specific, we learned that even though the beds in Gilcrease were only a little bit narrower than the ones in Harlowe and Weyland, the lost inches made a lot of difference to the comfort level of multiple people sharing it.

This didn't get in the way of the sex all that much. Much of what we did together was done standing up... or rather, with Ian standing and me kneeling towards or bent over away from him. The long months of being left on my own had been good for me, but it was good to be in someone else's hands again.

I let Ian slip the ring of protection on my finger. There is of course a whole school of somewhat dated innuendos about men giving women rings in this fashion, but that's not what it symbolized to me. It wasn't like a marriage, except maybe in a fairly archaic sense. Ian was claiming me. He was binding me. It was a tiny little bond, but it gave me a tiny little thrill.

With the ring on, we were double-covered against preganncy... I'd started taking anti-fertility potions the year before to suppress one of the inconvenient side-effects of my demonic nature. It seemed that the scent and taste of fertile female half-demon was highly attractive to predators.

It probably was responsible for the fact that there weren't any free-breeding populations of demonbloods running around, though... even other half-demons found the taste and scent of us appealing. I didn't know exactly why this was... there wasn't a lot of information available on the subject. One book I'd browsed through in the library over the summer had described the frequently violent death of female half-demons at the hands of males as being a matter of dominance and strength, as if we didn't all have supernatural strength that made the difference between the raw muscle power of a male body and a female one into a drop in the bucket. Other sources had missed out on the fate of female half-demons completely and attributed the lack of half-demon clans or families to the idea that demons are inherently asocial.

My scent wasn't completely irresistible. It wasn't even something that everyone with predatory tendencies noticed right away. But once someone got a taste, it seemed to linger in their minds... and even if it can be resisted, not everyone when faced with something so appetizing would choose to resist. Given that the school admitted students from some of the more "monstrous" races of the world, damping my scent seemed like a necessary safety measure.

That aside, it was very freeing to know that I couldn't get pregnant. I'd managed to get past a lot of the negative shame aspects associated with sex, but the fear of getting knocked up was a big thing. Okay, there were options there, but I wasn't sure I'd spent enough time living the life of an enlightened liberal college student to overcome nine years of my grandmother's influence.

[]

"Maybe you can, you know, de-bunk them and put them side by side?" he suggested the next morning, after waking up with a crick in his neck an arm that was still lost somewhere in slumberland. "You'd lose some floor space, but you'd double your bed space."

"These beds don't come apart," I said. "It's one piece."

"Oh, that sucks," he said. "And that means I'm stuck sleeping in a bunk bed in my own room, too. It's bad enough that I have to get used to sharing a room with another guy again without us literally sleeping on top of each other."

"Sleep over here, then," I said.

"I'll still be sleeping in a bunk bed."

"Yes, but you won't be sharing a room with a guy," I said.

"That will get crowded really fast," he said.

"There's always going to be an empty bunk," I said. "I mean, I can sleep just fine with Amaranth literally-literally right on top of me so there's no reason we'd ever use the top bunk."

"Sleeping in the same room as you and Amaranth but in a different bed is supposed to be a good thing?"

"Well, you'll have quick and easy access," I said. "I guess we'll just have to use the floor when we want to all get... intricate... with each other."

"Have you noticed? There isn't as much floor in here as there was in Harlowe."

"Yeah," I said.

The rooms in Gilcrease were oddly shaped, being narrow at the front up by the door and wider at the back. The door to the bathroom was on the lefthand side of my room as you came in. The bathroom was just big enough to have a sink and toilet along one wall and a bathtub along the other. The bathroom took up a big chunk of what would have been the front of the two rooms it connected. The bunk bed was set back in the little alcove that resulted from this. It could be moved, but there wasn't really any better place to put it.

The alcove and the fact that there were shelves and cabinets build into the walls meant there really was more space than it looked like there was, but it was a bit like living in a cramped hallway. Harlowe's blocky institutional style meant there was enough space for people to sit in a circle. Even if we could fit a whole group of people in the Gilcrease rooms, it wouldn't feel as sociable.

"We're going to have to find a new place to hang out, aren't we?" Ian said.

"I hate to say it, but yeah, I think so," I said. "I mean, I like the room. It's cozy. But it's not exactly a party space."

"You know what some of the guys on my floor were doing? Stretching a portable hole across the wall between their rooms. Back where the beds are, I mean. They turned their beds sideways and now they have this big shared space."

"That's got to be against residence hall rules," I said. "Which means Two would never go for it. And I'm not sure I would, either... we'd gain space but lose privacy. Plus, a portable hole that big wouldn't be cheap."

"Is that your way of saying you didn't learn how to make one over summer vacation?"

"No," I said. "And I'm not likely to. Messing about with extraplanar stuff takes really specialized knowledge. I could make something bigger on the inside, but its insides would still be inside it. If I were to extend the depth of the alcove, we'd have a bigger alcove but it wouldn't connect through to Two and Dee's room. The outside wall would still be in the same place, on the outside."

"Well, that's even better. Could you do that?"

"No," I said. "With a lot of practice and study I could make the inside of a cabinet bigger, but the room... it would take more energy than I have to make any change you'd notice, and it wouldn't last."

"Oh," Ian said. "Well, it was a thought."

"I don't think it'll be so bad here once we get settled in. Amaranth is supposed to be bringing carpet and stuff. She was on the mirror with me all week, having me measure and re-measure things. She didn't trust my measurement spells... she made me get a tape measure."

"In fairness to her, you did just learn how to do that."

"Yeah, but I aced that class," I said.

The one credit hour workshop DIV 117, Measuring With Magic, had been one of the high points of my summer. It turned out I'd had a knack for that sort of thing without knowing it. One of the first bits of magic I'd ever learned how to do was detecting magic and reading enchantments. It turned out that picking up the physical properties of objects was really similar. It was a useful skill to have, because I didn't really have a head for things like sizes and distances. An enchanter who wanted to be more than one small part of an assembly line needed to either have enough money to pay for an assembly line or to be something of a crafter.

"What time is Amaranth getting in?" Ian asked.

"Elevenish," I said.

"Is she coming here or are we meeting her in Enwich or something?"

"The coach stops here," I said.

"You want me to come down with you to meet here, or do you want to go alone?"

"She wants me to wait here for her," I said.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Why?"

"She likes the idea of me waiting for her," I said. "She says it'll be like coming home to me."

"Oh. That's sweet, I guess," Ian said.

I thought it was sweet, too, but it appealed to me on other levels as well. I'd spent almost four months on my own, with only occasional mirror conversations or a-mails from Amaranth, the woman that I loved and called my Owner. At some point in the last year my mind had started capitalizing that word. It just felt right.

[][][][][][][][]

"Were you good while I was away?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. I ducked my head a little as I said it. It was a small motion, purely voluntary. I did it because it felt right. I could look up into Amaranth's eyes forever, but it also felt nice to not look up at her. As body language went, averting my eyes felt a bit like kissing her on the cheek.

"And were you good for Ian last night?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, and what had been small and voluntary became automatic and all-encompassing. Heat flared up in my cheeks. My body wanted to pull into itself.

"Good girl," she said. She gave me a little pat on the butt... not a spanking, not anything like a spanking, but the closest thing I'd had in over a hundred days. "Now help me in with my bags."

She passed her hands behind her back and bent her knees slightly like she was setting things down and just like that, there was a large duffel bag, a suitcase, two flat-topped traveling chests, a hat box, and a backpack piled up behind her.

When I'd first met Amaranth, I had wondered at her ability to pull things out of nowhere or tuck them out of sight when she didn't seem to have anywhere to put them, obvious anatomically-inspired jokes aside. It had turned out that she was literally putting them nowhere, a process she called putting things "away". I suspected the process had something in common with the kind of extradimensional space used by a bag of holding or a portable hole.

She could have just as easily retrieved them when she was in the room. The fact that she hadn't meant that she wanted me to carry them in for the sake of having me do something. The first direct orders of the semester. It probably shouldn't have been as exciting as it was.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. The weight wouldn't be a problem for me. I did have to be careful, though, handling Amaranth's things, so I decided to carry them one at a time, starting with the bigger ones.

While I squatted down to lift the first of the chests, she headed on into the room and greeted Ian. I heard the inside door opening.

"Hi, Amaranth!" Two called out.

"Hello, Two, dear," Amaranth said. "Your sister is bringing my things in. You may help her if you would like to."

"Okay," Two said.

"Let her carry the trunks," Amaranth said as I stumbled sideways through the door with the first one, banging and scraping my knuckles on the door frame in the process. As an invulnerable half-demon, I didn't have worry about cracking bones or abrading skin. I just got all the fun feeling associated with it. "They're full of books. Oh, and so is the suitcase. And my backpack's a little bit full, it has all of my schoolbooks in it at the moment... I don't want you to strain yourself."

"You shouldn't offer things to people if you don't mean it," Two said.

"You can carry the hatbox?" Amaranth suggested.

This was how far we'd come in the year since coming to MU. Two the living golem, who had been barely able to function without orders when she first arrived, was now being offered tasks as a treat. I did what I was told, and I liked it.

"Where would you like this, Amaranth?" I asked.

"Just stack them along the wall there," Amaranth said, pointing opposite the bunk beds. "I have three more for you to carry in when you've got those. I didn't want to block up the hallway."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You can shelve them later," Amaranth said. "And you're free to use whatever shelves are left."

It seemed like Amaranth had spent the summer cultivating a sort of easy, imperious authority. I couldn't say that I didn't like it.

[]

"You all might want to look away for a moment," she said. "I've been told that this can get disorienting to watch."

"What can?" Ian asked.

"I'm going to put the beds away," she said. She looked at the desks. "Actually, on second thought, if everyone will leave for a minute I think I'll be able to get the carpet in place fairly easily."

"Okay," Two said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. It might have been gratuitous, but I'd missed saying it.

Ian and Dee said nothing, but we all stepped out... Ian and I into the hallway, Dee and Two through the bathroom.

"You know you're going to have the cleanest bathroom on campus," Ian said after a few moments.

"How do you figure?"

"Because it's Two's," he said.

"We should probably make up like a chart or something for cleaning it," I said.

"And then Two will clean it anyway," Ian said.

"Probably," I conceded. I didn't like the thought of sticking her with that task, but it wouldn't be any great hardship from her point of view. It was just something to do.

There had been hardly any sound from inside the room, but the door opened.

"Okay," Amaranth said. "I'm not exactly done, but I've got everything more or less in place."

The bare tile floor... which had felt cold at night even in the lingering summer-like weather of mid-Astera... was now covered in a thick, soft carpet that had clearly been picked out by someone who fully intended to have sex on it. At first glance it looked like Amaranth had managed to acquire a single piece perfectly cut to fit the irregularly-shaped room, but then I spotted the place where two pieces had been joined. There was a trapezoidal-shaped piece that stopped just before the alcove, and an even more oddly shaped piece just beyond it.

One of the desks was gone. The bunk bed was gone. In its place was a queen-sized bed, the head stuck in the recess. It took up a lot of the room's real estate, but somehow the place felt more open.

There was a pile of pillows and cushions on the floor, and some curtains and stuff on the bed.

Even knowing in the abstract that she was capable of this sort of thing, I was amazed at the extent to which she'd carried it.


[2 hours.]

Ian and I spent the night together in my room. It was intense, to come together after months of celibacy and isolation... it was the first time I'd had sex since before the end of my freshman year.

It was also kind of a learning experience for both of us. To be specific, we learned that even though the beds in Gilcrease were only a little bit narrower than the ones in Harlowe and Weyland, the lost inches made a lot of difference to the comfort level of multiple people sharing it.

This didn't get in the way of the sex all that much. Much of what we did together was done standing up... or rather, with Ian standing and me kneeling towards or bent over away from him. The long months of being left on my own had been good for me, but it was good to be in someone else's hands again.

I let Ian slip the ring of protection on my finger. There is of course a whole school of somewhat dated innuendos about men giving women rings in this fashion, but that's not what it symbolized to me. It wasn't like a marriage, except maybe in a fairly archaic sense. Ian was claiming me. He was binding me. It was a tiny little bond, but it gave me a tiny little thrill.

With the ring on, we were double-covered against preganncy... I'd started taking anti-fertility potions the year before to suppress one of the inconvenient side-effects of my demonic nature. It seemed that the scent and taste of fertile female half-demon was highly attractive to predators.

It probably was responsible for the fact that there weren't any free-breeding populations of demonbloods running around, though... even other half-demons found the taste and scent of us appealing. I didn't know exactly why this was... there wasn't a lot of information available on the subject. One book I'd browsed through in the library over the summer had described the frequently violent death of female half-demons at the hands of males as being a matter of dominance and strength, as if we didn't all have supernatural strength that made the difference between the raw muscle power of a male body and a female one into a drop in the bucket. Other sources had missed out on the fate of female half-demons completely and attributed the lack of half-demon clans or families to the idea that demons are inherently asocial.

My scent wasn't completely irresistible. It wasn't even something that everyone with predatory tendencies noticed right away. But once someone got a taste, it seemed to linger in their minds... and even if it can be resisted, not everyone when faced with something so appetizing would choose to resist. Given that the school admitted students from some of the more "monstrous" races of the world, damping my scent seemed like a necessary safety measure.

That aside, it was very freeing to know that I couldn't get pregnant. I'd managed to get past a lot of the negative shame aspects associated with sex, but the fear of getting knocked up was a big thing. Okay, there were options there, but I wasn't sure I'd spent enough time living the life of an enlightened liberal college student to overcome nine years of my grandmother's influence.

[]

"Maybe you can, you know, de-bunk them and put them side by side?" he suggested the next morning, after waking up with a crick in his neck an arm that was still lost somewhere in slumberland. "You'd lose some floor space, but you'd double your bed space."

"These beds don't come apart," I said. "It's one piece."

"Oh, that sucks," he said. "And that means I'm stuck sleeping in a bunk bed in my own room, too. It's bad enough that I have to get used to sharing a room with another guy again without us literally sleeping on top of each other."

"Sleep over here, then," I said.

"I'll still be sleeping in a bunk bed."

"Yes, but you won't be sharing a room with a guy," I said.

"That will get crowded really fast," he said.

"There's always going to be an empty bunk," I said. "I mean, I can sleep just fine with Amaranth literally-literally right on top of me so there's no reason we'd ever use the top bunk."

"Sleeping in the same room as you and Amaranth but in a different bed is supposed to be a good thing?"

"Well, you'll have quick and easy access," I said. "I guess we'll just have to use the floor when we want to all get... intricate... with each other."

"Have you noticed? There isn't as much floor in here as there was in Harlowe."

"Yeah," I said.

The rooms in Gilcrease were oddly shaped, being narrow at the front up by the door and wider at the back. The door to the bathroom was on the lefthand side of my room as you came in. The bathroom was just big enough to have a sink and toilet along one wall and a bathtub along the other. The bathroom took up a big chunk of what would have been the front of the two rooms it connected. The bunk bed was set back in the little alcove that resulted from this. It could be moved, but there wasn't really any better place to put it.

The alcove and the fact that there were shelves and cabinets build into the walls meant there really was more space than it looked like there was, but it was a bit like living in a cramped hallway. Harlowe's blocky institutional style meant there was enough space for people to sit in a circle. Even if we could fit a whole group of people in the Gilcrease rooms, it wouldn't feel as sociable.

"We're going to have to find a new place to hang out, aren't we?" Ian said.

"I hate to say it, but yeah, I think so," I said. "I mean, I like the room. It's cozy. But it's not exactly a party space."

"You know what some of the guys on my floor were doing? Stretching a portable hole across the wall between their rooms. Back where the beds are, I mean. They turned their beds sideways and now they have this big shared space."

"That's got to be against residence hall rules," I said. "Which means Two would never go for it. And I'm not sure I would, either... we'd gain space but lose privacy. Plus, a portable hole that big wouldn't be cheap."

"Is that your way of saying you didn't learn how to make one over summer vacation?"

"No," I said. "And I'm not likely to. Messing about with extraplanar stuff takes really specialized knowledge. I could make something bigger on the inside, but its insides would still be inside it. If I were to extend the depth of the alcove, we'd have a bigger alcove but it wouldn't connect through to Two and Dee's room. The outside wall would still be in the same place, on the outside."

"Well, that's even better. Could you do that?"

"No," I said. "With a lot of practice and study I could make the inside of a cabinet bigger, but the room... it would take more energy than I have to make any change you'd notice, and it wouldn't last."

"Oh," Ian said. "Well, it was a thought."

"I don't think it'll be so bad here once we get settled in. Amaranth is supposed to be bringing carpet and stuff. She was on the mirror with me all week, having me measure and re-measure things. She didn't trust my measurement spells... she made me get a tape measure."

"In fairness to her, you did just learn how to do that."

"Yeah, but I aced that class," I said.

The one credit hour workshop DIV 117, Measuring With Magic, had been one of the high points of my summer. It turned out I'd had a knack for that sort of thing without knowing it. One of the first bits of magic I'd ever learned how to do was detecting magic and reading enchantments. It turned out that picking up the physical properties of objects was really similar. It was a useful skill to have, because I didn't really have a head for things like sizes and distances. An enchanter who wanted to be more than one small part of an assembly line needed to either have enough money to pay for an assembly line or to be something of a crafter.

"What time is Amaranth getting in?" Ian asked.

"Elevenish," I said.

"Is she coming here or are we meeting her in Enwich or something?"

"The coach stops here," I said.

"You want me to come down with you to meet here, or do you want to go alone?"

"She wants me to wait here for her," I said.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Why?"

"She likes the idea of me waiting for her," I said. "She says it'll be like coming home to me."

"Oh. That's sweet, I guess," Ian said.

I thought it was sweet, too, but it appealed to me on other levels as well. I'd spent almost four months on my own, with only occasional mirror conversations or a-mails from Amaranth, the woman that I loved and called my Owner. At some point in the last year my mind had started capitalizing that word. It just felt right.

[][][][][][][][]

"Were you good while I was away?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. I ducked my head a little as I said it. It was a small motion, purely voluntary. I did it because it felt right. I could look up into Amaranth's eyes forever, but it also felt nice to not look up at her. As body language went, averting my eyes felt a bit like kissing her on the cheek.

"And were you good for Ian last night?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, and what had been small and voluntary became automatic and all-encompassing. Heat flared up in my cheeks. My body wanted to pull into itself.

"Good girl," she said. She gave me a little pat on the butt... not a spanking, not anything like a spanking, but the closest thing I'd had in over a hundred days. "Now help me in with my bags."

She passed her hands behind her back and bent her knees slightly like she was setting things down and just like that, there was a large duffel bag, a suitcase, two flat-topped traveling chests, a hat box, and a backpack piled up behind her.

When I'd first met Amaranth, I had wondered at her ability to pull things out of nowhere or tuck them out of sight when she didn't seem to have anywhere to put them, obvious anatomically-inspired jokes aside. It had turned out that she was literally putting them nowhere, a process she called putting things "away". I suspected the process had something in common with the kind of extradimensional space used by a bag of holding or a portable hole.

She could have just as easily retrieved them when she was in the room. The fact that she hadn't meant that she wanted me to carry them in for the sake of having me do something. The first direct orders of the semester. It probably shouldn't have been as exciting as it was.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. The weight wouldn't be a problem for me. I did have to be careful, though, handling Amaranth's things, so I decided to carry them one at a time, starting with the bigger ones.

While I squatted down to lift the first of the chests, she headed on into the room and greeted Ian. I heard the inside door opening.

"Hi, Amaranth!" Two called out.

"Hello, Two, dear," Amaranth said. "Your sister is bringing my things in. You may help her if you would like to."

"Okay," Two said.

"Let her carry the trunks," Amaranth said as I stumbled sideways through the door with the first one, banging and scraping my knuckles on the door frame in the process. As an invulnerable half-demon, I didn't have worry about cracking bones or abrading skin. I just got all the fun feeling associated with it. "They're full of books. Oh, and so is the suitcase. And my backpack's a little bit full, it has all of my schoolbooks in it at the moment... I don't want you to strain yourself."

"You shouldn't offer things to people if you don't mean it," Two said.

"You can carry the hatbox?" Amaranth suggested.

This was how far we'd come in the year since coming to MU. Two the living golem, who had been barely able to function without orders when she first arrived, was now being offered tasks as a treat. I did what I was told, and I liked it.

"Where would you like this, Amaranth?" I asked.

"Just stack them along the wall there," Amaranth said, pointing opposite the bunk beds. "I have three more for you to carry in when you've got those. I didn't want to block up the hallway."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You can shelve them later," Amaranth said. "And you're free to use whatever shelves are left."

It seemed like Amaranth had spent the summer cultivating a sort of easy, imperious authority. I couldn't say that I didn't like it.

[]

"You all might want to look away for a moment," she said. "I've been told that this can get disorienting to watch."

"What can?" Ian asked.

"I'm going to put the beds away," she said. She looked at the desks. "Actually, on second thought, if everyone will leave for a minute I think I'll be able to get the carpet in place fairly easily."

"Okay," Two said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. It might have been gratuitous, but I'd missed saying it.

Ian and Dee said nothing, but we all stepped out... Ian and I into the hallway, Dee and Two through the bathroom.

"You know you're going to have the cleanest bathroom on campus," Ian said after a few moments.

"How do you figure?"

"Because it's Two's," he said.

"We should probably make up like a chart or something for cleaning it," I said.

"And then Two will clean it anyway," Ian said.

"Probably," I conceded. I didn't like the thought of sticking her with that task, but it wouldn't be any great hardship from her point of view. It was just something to do.

There had been hardly any sound from inside the room, but the door opened.

"Okay," Amaranth said. "I'm not exactly done, but I've got everything more or less in place."

The bare tile floor... which had felt cold at night even in the lingering summer-like weather of mid-Astera... was now covered in a thick, soft carpet that had clearly been picked out by someone who fully intended to have sex on it. At first glance it looked like Amaranth had managed to acquire a single piece perfectly cut to fit the irregularly-shaped room, but then I spotted the place where two pieces had been joined. There was a trapezoidal-shaped piece that stopped just before the alcove, and an even more oddly shaped piece just beyond it.

One of the desks was gone. The bunk bed was gone. In its place was a queen-sized bed, the head stuck in the recess. It took up a lot of the room's real estate, but somehow the place felt more open.

There was a pile of pillows and cushions on the floor, and some curtains and stuff on the bed.

Even knowing in the abstract that she was capable of this sort of thing, I was amazed at the extent to which she'd carried it.


[1.5 hours in.]

Ian and I spent the night together in my room. It was intense, to come together after months of celibacy and isolation... it was the first time I'd had sex since before the end of my freshman year.

It was also kind of a learning experience for both of us. To be specific, we learned that even though the beds in Gilcrease were only a little bit narrower than the ones in Harlowe and Weyland, the lost inches made a lot of difference to the comfort level of multiple people sharing it.

This didn't get in the way of the sex all that much. Much of what we did together was done standing up... or rather, with Ian standing and me kneeling towards or bent over away from him. The long months of being left on my own had been good for me, but it was good to be in someone else's hands again.

I let Ian slip the ring of protection on my finger. There is of course a whole school of somewhat dated innuendos about men giving women rings in this fashion, but that's not what it symbolized to me. It wasn't like a marriage, except maybe in a fairly archaic sense. Ian was claiming me. He was binding me. It was a tiny little bond, but it gave me a tiny little thrill.

With the ring on, we were double-covered against preganncy... I'd started taking anti-fertility potions the year before to suppress one of the inconvenient side-effects of my demonic nature. It seemed that the scent and taste of fertile female half-demon was highly attractive to predators.

It probably was responsible for the fact that there weren't any free-breeding populations of demonbloods running around, though... even other half-demons found the taste and scent of us appealing. I didn't know exactly why this was... there wasn't a lot of information available on the subject. One book I'd browsed through in the library over the summer had described the frequently violent death of female half-demons at the hands of males as being a matter of dominance and strength, as if we didn't all have supernatural strength that made the difference between the raw muscle power of a male body and a female one into a drop in the bucket. Other sources had missed out on the fate of female half-demons completely and attributed the lack of half-demon clans or families to the idea that demons are inherently asocial.

My scent wasn't completely irresistible. It wasn't even something that everyone with predatory tendencies noticed right away. But once someone got a taste, it seemed to linger in their minds... and even if it can be resisted, not everyone when faced with something so appetizing would choose to resist. Given that the school admitted students from some of the more "monstrous" races of the world, damping my scent seemed like a necessary safety measure.

That aside, it was very freeing to know that I couldn't get pregnant. I'd managed to get past a lot of the negative shame aspects associated with sex, but the fear of getting knocked up was a big thing. Okay, there were options there, but I wasn't sure I'd spent enough time living the life of an enlightened liberal college student to overcome nine years of my grandmother's influence.

[]

"Maybe you can, you know, de-bunk them and put them side by side?" he suggested the next morning, after waking up with a crick in his neck an arm that was still lost somewhere in slumberland. "You'd lose some floor space, but you'd double your bed space."

"These beds don't come apart," I said. "It's one piece."

"Oh, that sucks," he said. "And that means I'm stuck sleeping in a bunk bed in my own room, too. It's bad enough that I have to get used to sharing a room with another guy again without us literally sleeping on top of each other."

"Sleep over here, then," I said.

"I'll still be sleeping in a bunk bed."

"Yes, but you won't be sharing a room with a guy," I said.

"That will get crowded really fast," he said.

"There's always going to be an empty bunk," I said. "I mean, I can sleep just fine with Amaranth literally-literally right on top of me so there's no reason we'd ever use the top bunk."

"Sleeping in the same room as you and Amaranth but in a different bed is supposed to be a good thing?"

"Well, you'll have quick and easy access," I said. "I guess we'll just have to use the floor when we want to all get... intricate... with each other."

"Have you noticed? There isn't as much floor in here as there was in Harlowe."

"Yeah," I said.

The rooms in Gilcrease were oddly shaped, being narrow at the front up by the door and wider at the back. The door to the bathroom was on the lefthand side of my room as you came in. The bathroom was just big enough to have a sink and toilet along one wall and a bathtub along the other. The bathroom took up a big chunk of what would have been the front of the two rooms it connected. The bunk bed was set back in the little alcove that resulted from this. It could be moved, but there wasn't really any better place to put it.

The alcove and the fact that there were shelves and cabinets build into the walls meant there really was more space than it looked like there was, but it was a bit like living in a cramped hallway. Harlowe's blocky institutional style meant there was enough space for people to sit in a circle. Even if we could fit a whole group of people in the Gilcrease rooms, it wouldn't feel as sociable.

"We're going to have to find a new place to hang out, aren't we?" Ian said.

"I hate to say it, but yeah, I think so," I said. "I mean, I like the room. It's cozy. But it's not exactly a party space."

"You know what some of the guys on my floor were doing? Stretching a portable hole across the wall between their rooms. Back where the beds are, I mean. They turned their beds sideways and now they have this big shared space."

"That's got to be against residence hall rules," I said. "Which means Two would never go for it. And I'm not sure I would, either... we'd gain space but lose privacy. Plus, a portable hole that big wouldn't be cheap."

"Is that your way of saying you didn't learn how to make one over summer vacation?"

"No," I said. "And I'm not likely to. Messing about with extraplanar stuff takes really specialized knowledge. I could make something bigger on the inside, but its insides would still be inside it. If I were to extend the depth of the alcove, we'd have a bigger alcove but it wouldn't connect through to Two and Dee's room. The outside wall would still be in the same place, on the outside."

"Well, that's even better. Could you do that?"

"No," I said. "With a lot of practice and study I could make the inside of a cabinet bigger, but the room... it would take more energy than I have to make any change you'd notice, and it wouldn't last."

"Oh," Ian said. "Well, it was a thought."

"I don't think it'll be so bad here once we get settled in. Amaranth is supposed to be bringing carpet and stuff. She was on the mirror with me all week, having me measure and re-measure things. She didn't trust my measurement spells... she made me get a tape measure."

"In fairness to her, you did just learn how to do that."

"Yeah, but I aced that class," I said.

The one credit hour workshop DIV 117, Measuring With Magic, had been one of the high points of my summer. It turned out I'd had a knack for that sort of thing without knowing it. One of the first bits of magic I'd ever learned how to do was detecting magic and reading enchantments. It turned out that picking up the physical properties of objects was really similar. It was a useful skill to have, because I didn't really have a head for things like sizes and distances. An enchanter who wanted to be more than one small part of an assembly line needed to either have enough money to pay for an assembly line or to be something of a crafter.

"What time is Amaranth getting in?" Ian asked.

"Elevenish," I said.

"Is she coming here or are we meeting her in Enwich or something?"

"The coach stops here," I said.

"You want me to come down with you to meet here, or do you want to go alone?"

"She wants me to wait here for her," I said.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Why?"

"She likes the idea of me waiting for her," I said. "She says it'll be like coming home to me."

"Oh. That's sweet, I guess," Ian said.

I thought it was sweet, too, but it appealed to me on other levels as well. I'd spent almost four months on my own, with only occasional mirror conversations or a-mails from Amaranth, the woman that I loved and called my Owner. At some point in the last year my mind had started capitalizing that word. It just felt right.

[][][][][][][][]




"You all might want to look away for a moment," she said. "I've been told that this can get disorienting to watch."

"What can?" Ian asked.

"I'm going to put the beds away," she said. She looked at the desks. "Actually, on second thought, if everyone will leave for a minute I think I'll be able to get the carpet in place fairly easily."

"Okay," Two said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. It might have been gratuitous, but I'd missed saying it.

Ian and Dee said nothing, but we all stepped out... Ian and I into the hallway, Dee and Two through the bathroom.

"You know you're going to have the cleanest bathroom on campus," Ian said after a few moments.

"How do you figure?"

"Because it's Two's," he said.

"We should probably make up like a chart or something for cleaning it," I said.

"And then Two will clean it anyway," Ian said.

"Probably," I conceded. I didn't like the thought of sticking her with that task, but it wouldn't be any great hardship from her point of view. It was just something to do.

There had been hardly any sound from inside the room, but the door opened.

"Okay," Amaranth said. "I'm not exactly done, but I've got everything more or less in place."

The bare tile floor... which had felt cold at night even in the lingering summer-like weather of mid-Astera... was now covered in a thick, soft carpet that had clearly been picked out by someone who fully intended to have sex on it. At first glance it looked like Amaranth had managed to acquire a single piece perfectly cut to fit the irregularly-shaped room, but then I spotted the place where two pieces had been joined. There was a trapezoidal-shaped piece that stopped just before the alcove, and an even more oddly shaped piece just beyond it.

One of the desks was gone. The bunk bed was gone. In its place was a queen-sized bed, the head stuck in the recess. It took up a lot of the room's real estate, but somehow the place felt more open.

There was a pile of pillows and cushions on the floor, and some curtains and stuff on the bed.

Even knowing in the abstract that she was capable of this sort of thing, I was amazed at the extent to which she'd carried it.

When I'd first met Amaranth, I had wondered at her ability to pull things out of nowhere or tuck them out of sight when she didn't seem to have anywhere to put them, obvious anatomically-inspired jokes aside. It had turned out that she was literally putting them nowhere, a process she called putting things "away". I suspected the process had something in common with the kind of extradimensional space used by a bag of holding or a portable hole.



[1 hour of writing.]

Ian and I spent the night together in my room. It was kind of a learning experience. To be specific, we learned that even though the beds in Gilcrease were only a little bit narrower than the ones in Harlowe and Weyland, the lost inches made a lot of difference to the comfort level of multiple people sharing it.

"Maybe you can, you know, de-bunk them and put them side by side?" he suggested the next morning, after waking up with a crick in his neck an arm that was still lost somewhere in slumberland. "You'd lose some floor space, but you'd double your bed space."

"These beds don't come apart," I said. "It's one piece."

"Oh, that sucks," he said. "And that means I'm stuck sleeping in a bunk bed in my own room, too. It's bad enough that I have to get used to sharing a room with another guy again without us literally sleeping on top of each other."

"Sleep over here, then," I said.

"I'll still be sleeping in a bunk bed."

"Yes, but you won't be sharing a room with a guy," I said.

"That will get crowded really fast," he said.

"There's always going to be an empty bunk," I said. "I mean, I can sleep just fine with Amaranth literally-literally right on top of me so there's no reason we'd ever use the top bunk."

"Sleeping in the same room as you and Amaranth but in a different bed is supposed to be a good thing?"

"Well, you'll have quick and easy access," I said. "I guess we'll just have to use the floor when we want to all get... intricate... with each other."

"Have you noticed? There isn't as much floor in here as there was in Harlowe."

"Yeah," I said.

The rooms in Gilcrease were oddly shaped, being narrow at the front up by the door and wider at the back. The door to the bathroom was on the lefthand side of my room as you came in. The bathroom was just big enough to have a sink and toilet along one wall and a bathtub along the other. The bathroom took up a big chunk of what would have been the front of the two rooms it connected. The bunk bed was set back in the little alcove that resulted from this. It could be moved, but there wasn't really any better place to put it.

The alcove and the fact that there were shelves and cabinets build into the walls meant there really was more space than it looked like there was, but it was a bit like living in a cramped hallway. Harlowe's blocky institutional style meant there was enough space for people to sit in a circle. Even if we could fit a whole group of people in the Gilcrease rooms, it wouldn't feel as sociable.

"We're going to have to find a new place to hang out, aren't we?" Ian said.

"I hate to say it, but yeah, I think so," I said. "I mean, I like the room. It's cozy. But it's not exactly a party space."

"You know what some of the guys on my floor were doing? Stretching a portable hole across the wall between their rooms. Back where the beds are, I mean. They turned their beds sideways and now they have this big shared space."

"That's got to be against residence hall rules," I said. "Which means Two would never go for it. And I'm not sure I would, either... we'd gain space but lose privacy. Plus, a portable hole that big wouldn't be cheap."

"Is that your way of saying you didn't learn how to make one over summer vacation?"

"No," I said. "And I'm not likely to. Messing about with extraplanar stuff takes really specialized knowledge. I could make something bigger on the inside, but its insides would still be inside it. If I were to extend the depth of the alcove, we'd have a bigger alcove but it wouldn't connect through to Two and Dee's room. The outside wall would still be in the same place, on the outside."

"Well, that's even better. Could you do that?"

"No," I said. "With a lot of practice and study I could make the inside of a cabinet bigger, but the room... it would take more energy than I have to make any change you'd notice, and it wouldn't last."

"Oh," Ian said. "Well, it was a thought."

"I don't think it'll be so bad here once we get settled in. Amaranth is supposed to be bringing carpet and stuff. She was on the mirror with me all week, having me measure and re-measure things. She didn't trust my measurement spells... she made me get a tape measure."

"In fairness to her, you did just learn how to do that."

"Yeah, but I aced that class," I said.

The one credit hour workshop DIV 117, Measuring With Magic, had been one of the high points of my summer. It turned out I'd had a knack for that sort of thing without knowing it. One of the first bits of magic I'd ever learned how to do was detecting magic and reading enchantments. It turned out that picking up the physical properties of objects was really similar. It was a useful skill to have, because I didn't really have a head for things like sizes and distances. An enchanter who wanted to be more than one small part of an assembly line needed to either have enough money to pay for an assembly line or to be something of a crafter.

"What time is Amaranth getting in?" Ian asked.

"Elevenish," I said.

"Is she coming here or are we meeting her in Enwich or something?"

"The coach stops here," I said.

"You want me to come down with you to meet here, or do you want to go alone?"

"She wants me to wait here for her," I said.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Why?"

"She likes the idea of me waiting for her," I said. "She says it'll be like coming home to me."

"Oh. That's sweet, I guess," Ian said.

I thought it was sweet, too, but it appealed to me on other levels as well. I'd spent almost four months on my own, with only occasional mirror conversations or a-mails from Amaranth, the woman that I loved and called my Owner. At some point in the last year my mind had started capitalizing that word. It just felt right.

[][][][][][][][]




"You all might want to look away for a moment," she said. "I've been told that this can get disorienting to watch."

"What can?" Ian asked.

"I'm going to put the beds away," she said. She looked at the desks. "Actually, on second thought, if everyone will leave for a minute I think I'll be able to get the carpet in place fairly easily."

"Okay," Two said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. It might have been gratuitous, but I'd missed saying it.

Ian and Dee said nothing, but we all stepped out... Ian and I into the hallway, Dee and Two through the bathroom.

"You know you're going to have the cleanest bathroom on campus," Ian said after a few moments.

"How do you figure?"

"Because it's Two's," he said.

"We should probably make up like a chart or something for cleaning it," I said.

"And then Two will clean it anyway," Ian said.

"Probably," I conceded. I didn't like the thought of sticking her with that task, but it wouldn't be any great hardship from her point of view. It was just something to do.

There had been hardly any sound from inside the room, but the door opened.

"Okay," Amaranth said. "I'm not exactly done, but I've got everything more or less in place."

The bare tile floor... which had felt cold at night even in the lingering summer-like weather of mid-Astera... was now covered in a thick, soft carpet that had clearly been picked out by someone who fully intended to have sex on it. At first glance it looked like Amaranth had managed to acquire a single piece perfectly cut to fit the irregularly-shaped room, but then I spotted the place where two pieces had been joined. There was a trapezoidal-shaped piece that stopped just before the alcove, and an even more oddly shaped piece just beyond it.

One of the desks was gone. The bunk bed was gone. In its place was a queen-sized bed, the head stuck in the recess. It took up a lot of the room's real estate, but somehow the place felt more open.

There was a pile of pillows and cushions on the floor, and some curtains and stuff on the bed.

Even knowing in the abstract that she was capable of this sort of thing, I was amazed at the extent to which she'd carried it.

When I'd first met Amaranth, I had wondered at her ability to pull things out of nowhere or tuck them out of sight when she didn't seem to have anywhere to put them, obvious anatomically-inspired jokes aside. It had turned out that she was literally putting them nowhere, a process she called putting things "away". I suspected the process had something in common with the kind of extradimensional space used by a bag of holding or a portable hole.




[Half an hour in. Well-begun, not half done.]

Ian and I spent the night together in my room. It was kind of a learning experience. To be specific, we learned that even though the beds in Gilcrease were only a little bit narrower than the ones in Harlowe and Weyland, the lost inches made a lot of difference to the comfort level of multiple people sharing it.

"Maybe you can, you know, de-bunk them and put them side by side?" he suggested the next morning, after waking up with a crick in his neck an arm that was still lost somewhere in slumberland. "You'd lose some floor space, but you'd double your bed space."

"These beds don't come apart," I said. "It's one piece."

"Oh, that sucks," he said. "And that means I'm stuck sleeping in a bunk bed in my own room, too. It's bad enough that I have to get used to sharing a room with another guy again without us literally sleeping on top of each other."

"Sleep over here, then," I said.

"I'll still be sleeping in a bunk bed."

"Yes, but you won't be sharing a room with a guy," I said.

"That will get crowded really fast," he said.

"There's always going to be an empty bunk," I said. "I mean, I can sleep just fine with Amaranth literally-literally right on top of me so there's no reason we'd ever use the top bunk."

"Sleeping in the same room as you and Amaranth but in a different bed is supposed to be a good thing?"

"Well, you'll have quick and easy access," I said. "I guess we'll just have to use the floor when we want to all get... intricate... with each other."

"Have you noticed? There isn't as much floor in here as there was in Harlowe."

"Yeah," I said.

The rooms in Gilcrease were oddly shaped, being narrow at the front up by the door and wider at the back. The door to the bathroom was on the lefthand side of my room as you came in. The bathroom was just big enough to have a sink and toilet along one wall and a bathtub along the other. The bathroom took up a big chunk of what would have been the front of the two rooms it connected. The bunk bed was set back in the little alcove that resulted from this. It could be moved, but there wasn't really any better place to put it.

The alcove and the fact that there were shelves and cabinets build into the walls meant there really was more space than it looked like there was, but it was a bit like living in a cramped hallway. Harlowe's blocky institutional style meant there was enough space for people to sit in a circle. Even if we could fit a whole group of people in the Gilcrease rooms, it wouldn't feel as sociable.

"We're going to have to find a new place to hang out, aren't we?" Ian said.

"I hate to say it, but yeah, I think so," I said. "I mean, I like the room. It's cozy. But it's not exactly a party space."

"You know what some of the guys on my floor were doing? Stretching a portable hole across the wall between their rooms. Back where the beds are, I mean. They turned their beds sideways and now they have this big shared space."

"That's got to be against residence hall rules," I said. "Which means Two would never go for it. And I'm not sure I would, either... we'd gain space but lose privacy. Plus, a portable hole that big wouldn't be cheap."

"Is that your way of saying you didn't learn how to make one over summer vacation?"

"No," I said. "And I'm not likely to. Messing about with extraplanar stuff takes really specialized knowledge. I could make something bigger on the inside, but its insides would still be inside it. If I were to extend the depth of the alcove, we'd have a bigger alcove but it wouldn't connect through to Two and Dee's room. The outside wall would still be in the same place, on the outside."

"Well, that's even better. Could you do that?"

"No," I said. "With a lot of practice and study I could make the inside of a cabinet bigger, but the room... it would take more energy than I have to make any change you'd notice, and it wouldn't last."

"Oh," Ian said. "Well, it was a thought."

"I don't think it'll be so bad. Amaranth is supposed to be bringing carpet and stuff. She was on the mirror with me all week, having me measure and re-measure things. She didn't trust my measurement spells... she made me get a tape measure."

"In fairness to her, you did just learn how to do that."

"Yeah, but I aced that class," I said.

The one credit hour workshop DIV 117, Measuring With Magic, had been one of the high points of my summer. It turned out I'd had a knack for that sort of thing without knowing it. One of the first bits of magic I'd ever learned how to do was detecting magic and reading enchantments. It turned out that picking up the physical properties of objects was really similar. It was a useful skill to have, because I didn't really have a head for things like sizes and distances. An enchanter who wanted to be more than one small part of an assembly line needed to either have enough money to pay for an assembly line or to be something of a crafter.