The sun was just swinging around toward sunset direction, what I thought of as west, as Cinzy and I left the meeting with the elders. She seemed reluctant to let go of my hand, and I suddenly remembered that I had a power specific to this circumstance.

  She really was a touchy-feely person, and I had zero compints.

  “I couldn’t believe you figured out they were all reted like that,” she said.

  I should have known by the coloration and the simirities in the images, and started to get on myself about it, but Cinzy hadn’t figured it out either, and had just stood there, naked and afraid, and clutching my hand.

  “I couldn’t either.”

  “You’re like a genius, Fletcher!”

  I had really just applied the abilities I had, and thankfully the knowledge had helped me overcome the creepy scene we’d found ourselves in.

  Now we stood on a ptform in the full light of day, fully nude, with the team several ptforms away. The Marshins were ready to escort us back to the team, but I asked for a moment, and led her over to the far side of the building.

  Over here, first off, we were out of sight of the rest of the team. Second, the vista we found ourselves overlooking was breathtaking. The marsh stretched out for miles this way, eventually turning into a ribbon of a stream. A thicker forest with taller vegetation grew up on either bank, but the sky… it was absolutely fucking enormous. People in cities don’t seem to realize, or even suburban dwellers, they don’t seem to get that buildings drain the awe of nature out by confining the sky, putting walls on it, so you can really only see it overhead. Like this, the sky was so vast and sweeping as to make me feel childlike wonder again.

  She got real quiet and still, and bit her lip. The moment became charged, full of a vibrant energy. I started to get hard again, and squashed it by thinking about brick walls and huge, thick coins that dissolved into streamers of rainbow-colored glitter.

  “I really want to kiss you,” I told her. “I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”

  It did, but not for the reason I thought.

  “I really want to kiss you too,” she said, and continued staring at my lips. “Fairy Poppins isn’t around to badger us for being interested in one another.”

  ‘Interested in one another’ was a wild way of saying this top tier beauty who was way out of my league had a dearth of choices, but for some reason set her eyes on me. We were very close together now, and I was definitely getting a hard on. But with her this close to me, she couldn’t just look down at my junk without telegraphing exactly what she was doing.

  She was close enough for me to smell her perfume, or her shampoo. It was lovely. She was so beautiful.

  “Fletcher we can’t just… we can’t like this.” She gestured down at her body and ughed. “We can’t do a retionship naked. That would just be sex. I don’t know anything about you.”

  I opened up Blissense and took another quick look over the ability’s text.

  Blissense

  (Special Ability, Rare, Active)

  By touching a target and spending an Ingenuity Token, you gain insight into their deepest desires, kinks and passions. Your target also gains bits of insight into you.

  “What if you could? Know about me, I mean,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have a special ability that lets us get to know each other.” Very intimately.

  She furrowed her brow. “That’s… shouldn’t that be my thing?”

  “It’s kind of a gift… from a god.”

  “Whoa.”

  I had to be sure I really wanted to do this. Hell, I had to be sure she really wanted to do this.

  “But it might be kind of… revealing,” I said.

  She snorted a ugh. “Like how revealing?”

  I could tell she was covering up her discomfort over the idea, and gathering up her courage to do something she maybe didn’t know if she was capable of doing. Her bravery was impressive.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet.”

  “Let’s do it!” she said.

  Yeah, I really did want to use it. I wanted to know what was going though that sexy mind behind that sexy face and under that sexy head of color-shifting hair.

  I was only slightly worried that she was going to see something that freaked her out. I say slightly because in continuing to think it over, if she found something she didn’t like, and we didn’t get together, no problem. Regina and I were sex buddies by now. Tara wasn’t gone forever. Isabelle… whatever the hell had happened there was going to resolve itself somehow, eventually. I didn’t think it was going to fizzle out and die.

  In fact, I was being a little greedy here, but if Cinzy saw with my power into my sex life and she didn’t like it, she could take a hike. She could shack up with Drat if she wanted. If she didn’t mind it, great.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked.

  “Curious about what you’re going to see from my end, and whether or not it’ll scare you away,” I said truthfully. Fletcher the sex freak. Four partners in as many weeks.

  “Trust me,” she said quietly, squeezing my hands, “whatever you’ve got going on that I’ll see, it can’t be that bad. It can’t be as, um… it can’t be worse than mine.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you’re having second thoughts,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I trust you. You chose to be a Healer, you sacrificed your safety to help others, and I’ve heard about your people back home. Now, go on.”

  Considering what she’d said, and considering her high spirits after our weird yet productive meeting, I spent the Ingenuity Token and used the special ability.

  The very first thing that happened was that I saw her passions.

  She was passionate about pushing her boundaries and experiencing new things. Crazy passionate about it. She’d gone on road trips and used public transportation around New York City despite her parents’ insistence that it was dangerous and that she shouldn’t. She booked trains when she should’ve been at school, going up and down the East Coast.

  She was passionate about being the best version of herself she could be. Cinzia, whose name hadn’t been that back on earth, absolutely loved the way her body felt whenever she went to work out. She loved the stares she got while out and the men turning to watch her butt jiggle on the walk by. Mostly, she loved how it got her out of the house and away from the parents.

  The fracking parents.

  Cinzy do this. Cinzy why aren’t you doing that? Cinzy, you’re not wearing that to school, surely. No respectable daughter of mine is going to wear that. Cinzy have you finished your university application to Brown? Cinzy if you’re going to be a wyer or a doctor one day, why can’t you just…? Cinzy you have to buckle down and…

  No conversations. No consideration for who she was. She was nothing more than a game piece on a board for her parents on their quest toward a perfect life. Otherwise they could give a shift about her, her personality, her ambitions, her hopes and dreams.

  She wanted attention, and she got it. She got it in the gym, out of the gym, but none of it was attention she really respected. Her circle of best friends was dissolving, with university coming on and all of them heading to the best universities in the country, or out to study abroad. And while the friendship fulfilled her, it didn’t fill a need she had. She was passionate for connection, real connection.

  She had a desire for freedom, for recognition, and for someone to come along who was worthy of her.

  See, her parents hadn’t stopped with pnning out her professional life. She had been courted by numerous young men: tech bros at start ups, hedge fund bros at the ickiest kinds of firms, w bros who seemed more at home in a sewer than the swanky gas.

  Cinzia’s desire for connection and boundary pushing ran deep, and it had been twisted. It had twisted itself into a kink of sorts.

  I wasn’t sure how I knew it was a kink, except that the stream of information, the rapid-fire images and sound bites took on a different tenor. Like I was getting deeper into the core of her.

  I shift you not, that inner core was into anal. I saw Cinzia through a Cinzia-tinted lens, as she saw herself. I saw her stripping off her clothes in the mirror and pying with herself on her bed, watching porn, and in fleeting glimpses I saw that porn become more and more brutal: women being pushed around, and the stories getting darker. I saw those fantasies on the screen, with the girl being brought to ecstasy before being used harshly.

  Then I saw those fantasies as she experienced them.

  This included her bent all the way down, ass up, and a huge penis slowly shoving aside whatever defenses she might have, stretching out her ass to a frightening degree.

  This included her pushing rger and rger objects into it while rubbing furiously at her clit.

  This included walking around the house with anal beads inserted, and drawing them back out of herself with agonizing slowness before reinserting them even slower. This included inserting a plug up there, one with a cute glittery jewel-like flower made of pstic at the base. So if she decided to show anyone, they would know exactly what it was.

  Also it was cute.

  These mental images of Cinzy included her chained up with handcuffs to a set of bedposts, and forced to be penetrated in both holes: one man beneath her buried in her ass, the other slowly working himself in and out of her pussy while she absolutely lost her mind.

  She had a mental image of herself walking around town on earth, hand in hand with a man who had put a vibrator inside her and was controlling it with an app, slowly lowering the sensation as she grew closer and closer to orgasm. She wanted that person to suddenly and inexplicably make her cum while she was ordering coffee. She’d be hunched over, elbows on the counter, apologizing because she wasn’t feeling well. Then she would take that man’s cock, fit it into her ass, and slowly lower herself down on it in the coffee shop bathroom as a thank you.

  All of these mental images were accompanied by mental sound clips: the panting, the grunting and groaning, the quiet encouragement for her to rex, and the praise when she finally received the full tool all the way up inside, and her butt finally rested against the man vioting her as she so desperately needed.

  She wanted someone to strum her clit repeatedly while cpping a hand over her mouth so the people in other dressing rooms couldn’t hear her building toward a crushing climax.

  She wanted to be face down on the couch with her ass in the air, and a man drilling down into her very core, driving her within inches of unconsciousness from the overwhelming pleasure.

  She wanted someone to tell her she wasn’t allowed to cum until he said so.

  She wanted someone, at her deepest core, to dominate her.

  All of these mental images and their fantasy noises she’d created came with phantom sensations, and real sensations. Cinzia had started toying with herself, and knew what some of these things felt like. She had a small army of toys that she’d had to put in storage when she left earth. She had only been able to bring a tiny array of her toys, and all of them were in her gear. So she knew, when she imagined a man inserting the anal beads, what it would feel like to have them go up into her, and for her asshole to slowly accept rger and rger toys.

  Mere nanoseconds passed as all this information flooded into my brain. I had no time to wonder what it was Cinzia was seeing at the same time. It was just one thing after another, after another, after another. Pure sensation flooding me.

  On their heels were some even deeper passions. She wanted someone to come on to her, strongly. She wanted someone to tell her what to do. She was in a position of having every man acting totally subservient to her. She was hot, and she knew that, but that was because she worked hard on her body. It meant no man had ever dared to approach her with any confidence. They wanted to spend money on her, and give her complete control over the retionship. She wasn’t some queen to be doted on, she was an explorer who didn’t know the way.

  She wanted that man to appear, and she was getting desperate to find him. That man would tell her what they were doing that day, tell her where they were going, take charge of situations, and then he would drive her wild before using her body for his own satisfaction.

  In a way, the anal was just an extension of that. She could, and would, get off the hardest of her life knowing that she was going beyond what she’d ever tried, while having her partner confidently please her, while pleasing himself.

  This tidal wave of knowledge and moans and gasps and begging and pressure and demanding fingers and cocks hit me simultaneously. This was the very first thing that happened.

  The second thing that happened was I got an instant erection. How could I not? I’d just been in the deepest recesses of kink in the mind of the most mind-bogglingly gorgeous woman I’d ever met, standing before her, both of us nude, and she’d basically confessed to being an anal freak.

  I came back to myself with Cinzy’s hands in mine, her mouth sck and a blissed out expression on her face. Like she didn’t have a single care in the world. Her eyelids fluttered, and she emitted a soft sigh.

  Her nipples were hard, pointed things, nearly brushing my chest, and my rampant erection was perhaps two inches away from touching the cleft between her legs.

  And Fairy Poppins was coming.

  “Oh forking fork,” I muttered.

  I’d spotted her over Cinzy’s shoulder. The tiny glowing fairy had just zipped up in the air, clearly trying to find her companion, and locked on us. The trail of fairy dust told me she was flying directly toward us.

  I scrambled for some way to save myself.

  Would you like to spend an Ingenuity Token for instant assistance? The UI asked.

  I spent the Token without even realizing it, so thick was my need. Once more the huge coin appeared in the air, spinning to reveal the embossed Ingenuity symbol: a figure with a finger raised up in the air, and a lightbulb hovering over their head.

  The mental image supplied by the UI was exactly what I needed, and I immediately colpsed to my knees and curled up into a ball. I let out a tortured groan that I very much felt.

  “Fletcher?”

  “Ow ow ow,” I moaned.

  “What happened? Oh jiminy crickets, you’re not supposed to get injured. You’re the fracking Healer, you dolt!”

  I id there, clutching my foot and other ankle, studiously keeping my erection totally covered.

  The girl who wanted to be anally intruded upon peered down at my face, putting a hand over mine. “What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?” she repeated in a panic.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her shakily.

  Fairy Poppins arrived, and went flitting about trying to figure out if I was dying or not. Concern flooded through me that the little Nakamamon was going to figure out my game.

  Slowly, I purged the mental images from my mind and felt myself begin to get back to normal. It wasn’t a quick process, not with the very attractive and equally as naked Cinzy practically showing her dy parts to me, including the one she wanted to have some lucky man take control of. Bending down like this was the upskirt shot of my dreams, and I squeezed my eyes closed against the knowledge that she had neatly trimmed down there, shaving the lips.

  “What is it? Is it the growth pte injuries?” She asked in a panic. “The scoliosis?

  I tched onto the lifeline she’d thrown. The Blissense must have shown her my injuries. “I think the character sheet and Physicality attribute is changing my body.” None of this was a lie. It was affecting my body somehow. I didn’t know if it would ever completely fix my body, but I had better muscles now than ever in my life. I had almost gotten myself back to pre-injury levels of stamina and fitness. The only lie was the inference that the changes were painful. So far they weren’t.

  “You scared the shirt out of me, Fletcher… are you okay?”

  “Right now? No.” Again, not a lie. I was not okay.

  “You poor thing. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I’ll be okay. I just need time.” I repeated. “It’s just… sometimes it’s like this.”

  She rubbed her hand up and down my back, and I tried to fix my mind on cms with kids in them, the brackish water of the marsh, and mountains reassembling themselves for shifts and giggles. Anything to make it so I didn’t have a boner.

  Miracle of miracles, it eventually worked.

  “We can talk about your special ability ter,” she said.

  This is possibly the weirdest day of Christopher’s life.