“I mean,” Lysandra said. “I thought you might be. You’re so damn sexy, almost perfect, really. And your body, well, having all the parts would come in handy for a seductress. I worried I was being controlled somehow, but of course it’s one of those things where you don’t necessarily know. Anyway, you being a necromancer explains all the zombies around here.”
“Um,” I said. I was feeling eloquent.
“May I ask a question?” Lysandra asked.
“Sure. Always. Even without asking if you can ask a question first.”
“Why is everyone staring at me?”
“Because Abby –” started Xyla.
“This one is for Abby to explain,” Gren interrupted.
“I have two classes,” I said.
“Oh?” said Lysandra, surprised. “I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
“And the other one is seductress.”
“I knew it!” Lysandra said. She looked over at Valeria. “So she’s been seduced? Wow. Points for pulling a pally. You go!”
“I have not been seduced,” Valeria said. “Well, not magically. I’m here of my own free will.” She paused, and looked at me. “Aren’t I, Abby?”
“You are,” I told her. “Look, I would never mind control any of you. Unless you were trying to attack me. Or maybe unless I needed you to understand we needed to have sex in front of the Archfiend right then and there, and we didn’t have time for a lot of explanation.”
“Oh, so I’m mind controlled.” Lysandra was remarkably matter of fact.
“No, I dropped that spell almost right away. You are totally under your own free will.” I paused. Damn honesty, “Although I do have a passive ability that makes me more attractive to anyone of the opposite sex.”
“Is that women, because you’re a guy originally? Or men, because you’re all, um –”
“Well, it’s, um, as far as I can tell, it’s everyone.”
“Yeah. It’s everyone,” Talos said.
“Because even though she’s a woman, she has an enormous –” Gren started, and stopped. Then she looked at me. “You always interrupt me before I can finish.”
“I’ve already experienced,” Lysandra said. “Wow! I didn’t realize size mattered so much!”
“I’m not sure it does,” I said. “But I also have a passive that makes sex fifty percent better.”
“I thought it was thirty,” said Gren.
“That was before I leveled.”
“Oh. You mean it’s even better now? Twenty percent better?”
“Well, technically, only a little over, uh, fifteen percent better than it was before, because it was already – anyway, I don’t even know what that means.”
“Oh,” said Lysandra. “We know what it means, don’t we, ladies?” She winked.
“Fantastic fucking,” Gren said.
“Wait,” Xyla said. “If it was thirty percent better, and now it’s fifty percent better, how is that not twenty percent better than before? Fifty minus thirty equals twenty.”
“But one-fifty over one-thirty is just -- no. Rabbit hole. Keeping on topic. I’m not mind controlling anyone, I am a necromancer, I do have some mind control related powers but I’m not using them.”
“And I can still tell if she’s evil or lying, and she’s not.”
“Oh, and about that,” I said. “New power. You can’t, actually. It’s a little unclear. But if the lie or evil somehow involves sex, it’s undetectable.”
“I can still tell,” Valeria said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“No one would make up a story of how they were a necromancer inhabited by the horribly evil Enash, if they wanted to lie to everyone. So, go ahead and tell us about your new powers already.”
I looked at Lysandra. “Are we good?”
I didn’t rush her. I could tell Gren was fidgety, but that could wait.
Lysandra seemed to think it over. “I guess there’s no way of knowing whether I’m mind controlled, is there? I mean, short of taking me to a wizard and having them check.”
“Actually, my charm abilities are undetectable now. That’s new, but it’s true.”
“So there’s no way to know.”
“No. I assure you that you aren’t, but there’s no way to know. Actually, I hate to say it, but there’s no way for me to know that I’m not, either. I seem to have free will, and I expect the rest of you feel like you have free will, as well. But you can’t know. Maybe you’ve been fooled into thinking you have free will, and none of us do. Maybe you’re the only real person and the rest of us are just figments of your imagination. You’ll never absolutely know, Lysandra; all I can do is tell you that you’re not, and that I won’t do stuff to you without your consent, unless – a life is at stake, I suppose.”
“Or the fate of the worlds,” Xyla said.
“You can mind control me if you want, Abby,” Kendala offered.
Lysandra said, “Lives were at stake, though, weren’t they? And aren’t they?”
I nodded. “You still have all your free will.”
Finally, she shrugged. “Maybe I do, at that. I seem to be staying. So now tell everyone else what they want to know… we’ll talk later, right?”
I explained my new powers. I made sure to explain how Subtlety worked because holding that back from Valeria would be wrong. And I explained Sexual Empathy, too, and that if any of my partners wanted me to use it I would, but that I wouldn’t use it unless I had consent.
“You can use it on me any time, Abby,” Kendala said.
“Um, I was talking to –”
“I know, Abby. But if you used it on me, wouldn’t you be able to tell if I was freely offering what I’ve offered? Doesn’t it solve your so-called ethical dilemma?” She walked forward, and put herself in front of me. “Do it, Abby. Look into my soul, and know.”
I hesitated. But there was no way I could tell myself that I’d ordered this, or that she was required somehow by her servitude to offer it. I touched her bare shoulder.
And I knew. She wanted me to take her from behind. She wanted to get down on my knees and worship me with her tongue. Especially, she wanted to lick my pussy. As she stared at me I started to get graphic images of her moving back and forth between my cock and my pussy, baring her breasts as she looked up at me, wanting me to be able at any moment to pull her by the hair and move her into position and fuck her hard and fast, or push my pussy into her face so she couldn’t breathe until she made me cum, or –
I pulled back, because the flood of sexual feelings startled me, and because I’d gotten a hard-on. Also, I realized something else. Kendala had a fetish for submitting, and for people in power. It was natural for her to fall for her boss, in a way.
“Want to free that monster from those shorts, Abby?” Xyla asked. Suddenly, everyone was staring at my crotch. Including, awkwardly, Talos.
“Don’t do it,” Gren said. “Not until she finishes telling us about her new abilities.”
“I’m glad you liked what you saw,” Kendala said, with a big smile. She sat back down.
“So. What else is there?” Gren said impatiently.
“Well, I have this strange ability called Polymorph for some reason, that lets me change myself into whatever someone else desires. Or at least look like that.”
“So only they see it?”
“No. Everyone sees it. It’s weird.”
Death of the party. That one still cracks me up.
“Try it,” Valeria said. “Not on me.”
“Alright, anyone volunteer?”
“I’d love to be your experimental test subject,” Kendala said. “But I think I’d see exactly the same thing I’m seeing now. Maybe with fewer clothes.”
“Aw, that’s sweet,” I said.
But then everyone else said, “Me, too.”
I don’t know why, but that brought tears to my eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Gren asked.
“Shhh,” Lysandra said. “I think this is what we call noble tears.”
I blamed the estrogen that presumably coursed through my body as Abby. I shook myself out of it the best way I knew how. “Okay. I got Death Touch.”
“That sounds ominous,” Lysandra said.
“Basically, I can touch someone and they die, if they are lower level than me.”
“Like all of us, at this point,” Gren pointed out.
“Maybe not Kathy,” Talos said. “But we’re not really worried about that, are we?”
“Of course not,” Lysandra said. “Why would she kill us when she can mind control us?”
Gren rolled her eyes. “Also, she has ethics. She’s got it bad, too.”
“Careful,” Lesseth said. “It can be contagious. Valeria caught it from her.”
“I what?” Valeria asked.
“No,” Gren corrected. “I think they caught it independently. There are different strains. Abby has utilitarianism, and Valeria has deontology.”
“I don’t think of myself that way,” I said. “But maybe, a little. I don’t think anyone has all the answers as far as ethics goes. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of folks who’ve had insights over the years. I think whenever they try to make a system out of it they go to some extreme, and pretty soon it gets all warped.”
“Well,” Gren said. “Whatever it is, I think it’s cute.”
Totes adorable. Like a little bunny.
I was surprised at Enash. I mean, adorable was a weird way to describe ethics, but maybe it was progress.
Like a bunny just before it gets run over by a bus.
Ah, some things never change.
Of course, you’d probably raise the bunny and be out of mana for the day.
“Wait, I can do that?”
Sure. Why not? Well, there’s a lot of reasons why not, starting with it’s just a rabbit. Can’t turn it into a vampire though, even if it’s fourth level.
“Rabbit vampires drink the juice out of vegetables,” I told him. Bunnicula had been one of my favorite books as a kid.
“Abby? Amaranth to Abby?” Gren was looking at me patiently, but Lysandra looked honestly worried.
“Sorry. Enash was jabbering. Moving right along, I have a better animate spell, so I can make things that aren’t just zombies, and potentially, some of them can help order the zombies around.”
Can’t have a zombie army without a chain of command. And everyone wants a zombie army, except for pervy rabbit lovers.
“So you can upgrade some of them?” Lysandra asked, pointing at the zombies, who stood twenty yards or so away in neat little lines.
“No. And I need, well, higher level corpses. Y’know what, I hope I never get a chance to use it.”
“Even if it would create a net increase in happiness?” Gren asked.
“I’m good with no more battles,” I told her, looking to Valeria for backup.
Valeria shrugged. “Evil exists to be fought. The struggle is part of what gives life meaning. That is why L’shan allows there to be evil in the world.”
“I can lure travelers into the forest,” Xyla said. “Because I’m super cute. You wouldn’t have to do the killing yourself, just do clean up after.”
“Clearly, we need to find some evil to fight,” Gren said, more to Valeria than me.
“I’d suggest going after demons, but that’s out now that Abby is the Uber Archfiend,” Valeria said.
“Well, because demons are – well, there are exceptions, I suppose.” Valeria sighed. “Sorry Lesseth.”
“And after I turned myself into rubber for you.”
“Let’s just enjoy peace while we have it,” I said. “There’s no guarantee that it will last, anyway. And if it lasts, then we’re fine the way we are, without vampires or anything like that.”
“Alright,” said Gren. “Maybe. Is that it?”
I hesitated. Raise Dead was actually the best spell I’d gotten for a while. But I didn’t want anyone taking risks, thinking that I could bring them back. What if two of them died, and I could only raise one? It was the sort of question people asked when they insisted there’s no such thing as poly without hierarchy. “That’s all I’m going to talk about.”
“Meaning there’s more, and you won’t tell us.”
“Yes. Because I think it’s better that way, and it’s nothing that affects any decision you’d make about me. It’s not something you need to know.”
“Secretive seductress,” Gren said.
Lysandra looked thoughtful.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yep. Just figuring it all out.”
Kathy arrived with hamburgers and fries, and that saved me, I think, from having to answer more questions.