“He’s got a pulse,” Butters announced a couple minutes later, “He’s responsive, and for all appearances, a healthy, young adult male. I’d need more equipment to get anything more conclusive than that.”
“May I?” Anita asked as she approached, putting a hand up as if to touch his arm.
“Of course,” he said with a lop-sided smile.
“I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” I stammered, my own hand coming up reflexively, real fear furrowing my brow.
She stopped, looked at me, and asked, “Are you sure it’s a bad idea?”
“No,” I said, licking my lips nervously, “but self-restraint isn’t exactly in his nature. He might awaken… himself in you, so unless you’re prepared for a very tightly controlled feeding, things could get out of hand very quickly.”
She frowned at me, then looked back to my creation. “I want to feel out your power,” she explained, “The easiest way for me to do that is through physical contact. I won’t do anything to you, just touch your arm.”
“My Lady is right,” he answered darkly, “You hunger for me. Why tempt yourself only to deny yourself?” The question was equal parts curious and teasing.
Her mouth worked soundlessly for a second or two as she looked up to meet his gaze, then she closed it, her face flushing, and finally said stubbornly, “I’m good. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to see what I can see.”
“Very well,” he allowed, his lop-sided smile returning. “You may touch me.”
She did. She lay her palm flat on his arm, her fingers wrapping around his bicep.
Their eyes closed, and everything was silent and watchful for several tense seconds.
Her head rolled back, her lips parted, and he let out a sigh that was almost a groan.
Just as I was about to call out to him to ask if everything was alright, she pulled her hand away, lowering it to her side.
“He’s alive, alright,” she announced. “Not human, but definitely alive.” She hugged herself and shivered as though suddenly cold. “A living, bottomless pit of need,” she added before going to sit with her people again.
Castiel approached. “I am Castiel, an angel of the Lord,” he said, “I have the ability to assess the condition of a person’s soul. The procedure is extremely painful, and while it leaves little physical damage, the mental toll can be severe. Will you submit to this trial?”
“Yes, cousin,” Ardor said with warmth and determination, “I am not afraid.”
Cass then reached his hand into the chest of my humanoid creation, at the base of the ribcage, reaching up, as if to touch his heart. White light emitted from the point of entry, and Ardor let out a series of pained grunts, his expression twisting into something like a snarl.
I went to him automatically, reaching out to comfort and steady him, my own expression pained and worried.
When it was done and Castiel withdrew his hand, Ardor breathed out a relieved sigh and slumped tiredly. I held onto him, walking him over to a chair and sitting him down, hugging him to me and stroking his hair. He let me comfort him, and seemed to be helped by it. Whether that was related more closely with the quality of my comfort or the proximity of his face to my breasts was unclear.
“There is no soul,” Castiel said to his people, but loudly enough that we could all hear, “He has something more akin to an angel’s grace. Very similar to a cherub, in fact, but more potent. I… don’t think he was mistaken when he called me “cousin,”” he finished gravely, then turned and rejoined his table.
“Is everyone quite satisfied?” Jerry asked.
No one spoke up to say they weren’t. I continued comforting my newborn, fully adult, hypersexed manchild.
The conversation seemed about to move along when Quark came forward, shaking his head and waving a finger. “I’m not convinced,” he said in the tone of a skeptic at a magic show.
I raised an expectant eyebrow.
“Anybody could put on a show like this with enough holo-emitters, or replicators, and a transporter.” He gestured around pointedly before folding his hands with a smug triumph.
I sighed. “Of course.” I grinned with a bit of mischief, releasing Ardor from my arms, cupping his face in my hands for a moment and flashing him a reassuring smile before I turned to give the skeptic my full attention. “What’s the one substance that can’t be replicated that you could also recognize on sight?” I asked with a sly smile.
“You mean…” Greed shone in his eyes and quavered his voice. “Can you really do that?”
I poised my hands over the invisible keyboard again with a flourish, closing my eyes and rolling my shoulders dramatically. Then I held up a ‘wait’ finger and opened my eyes, looking in a general upward direction. “Computer?” I began, trusting I’d get an answer.
The chime sounded.
I grinned. “Where are we right now?”
“Your current location is the dining hall in the Bachelorette Mansion,” Majel Barrett’s voice as the ship’s computer answered.
“Are there any holo-emitters or replicators in the dining hall of the Bachelorette Mansion?” I asked, beaming too widely to roll my eyes or use any grudging irony at being made to use the terminology.
The chime sounded again after a second, this time more of a buzzer, and the computer answered, “Negative. There are no holo-emitters or replicator access terminals in the dining hall of the Bachelorette Mansion.”
“Thank you,” I answered with an exaggerated graciousness and a pointed look at the Ferengi. Then I went back to typing. Anticipatory silence descended before my voice rang out over it again, this time sounding more ironically ceremonious rather than holding any actual gravity.
‘On the third finger of Quark’s right hand appeared a ring. It was no ordinary ring. The band was a circle of dilithium, and in the setting was a perfectly round sphere made entirely of diamond, and hollow. Inside the relatively worthless, but sturdy — and more importantly: clear — stone, there was suspended five milliliters of pure liquid latinum, not summoned from anywhere, but created whole-cloth from base elements and particulate matter.’
I opened my eyes and folded my hands with a smug triumph.
Quark stared at his hand, aghast and utterly delighted. He turned the hand over, and the liquid in the little diamond bulb swirled around. The Ferengi let out a choking gasp of amazement that was nearly sexual, his toothy mouth agape. “Five milliliters…” he breathed.
“That has to be a brick’s worth, at least,” I agreed conversationally, trying my best to emulate that casual tone the wealthy use when talking about extravagances.
“For me?” he asked, tearing his eyes away from the ring and his fingers finally. “I couldn’t possibly.” He slid the ring off and moved to hand it to me.
I moved automatically to take it from him, the self-satisfaction melting into surprised uncertainty. “Well, I don’t —”
“If you insist!” He cut me off, snatching the ring back and clutching it to his chest. “It’s lovely, thank you. I’ll treasure it forever,” he gushed, slipping the gaudy jewelry back on.
I sighed, my outstretched arm and the concern on my face dropping abruptly. “Satisfied?” I asked, raising a knowing eyebrow.
His only reply was a high-pitched, wavering squeak, which seemed to be the limits of his ability to articulate at the moment.
I gave a decisive nod, and he wandered away, examining the gift, likely calculating its worth. After a moment, I bit my lip nervously, addressing Jerry when I spoke. “I don’t understand,” I admitted, shaking my head. “I’m a mortal. A very bland, very run-of-the-mill, very alive, practically useless mortal. How can I possibly be a divine entity?”
He pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment. “Let’s call it a potential, shall we?” he asked by way of answering. “Yours is a very special plane of existence. Lots of deities originate from your universe.”
I tilted my head to the side, blinking, considering this information. “You’re talking about writers,” I realized out loud, “World-builders.”
He smiled wider but said nothing, and that was all the answer I needed.
“Does that mean everything I’ve written down has become real, or that everything I imagine is already real, or does it get spontaneously created when I think it?” I marveled aloud, excited and gesticulating animatedly. “How does it work? Do you know?”
He held his hands up, palms out, forestalling further rambling and babbled questions. “It’s my understanding that the moment you imagine something, it comes into being somewhere, possibly in an entirely new universe, but time being what it is, it could be argued that the realities create your imagination rather than the other way around.” He made a dismissive gesture with both hands, nose wrinkled. “That’s a whole other conversation. It’ll be easier to understand when you’ve ascended,” he added, continuing the reassuring indifference, with the sour face and the nodding.
I narrowed my eyes suddenly. “Why are you telling me this? Why are you doing any of this?” I gestured vaguely at the room around us.
“Because,” he said, affecting nonchalance, “I like to make friends, and I think I can help you reach your full potential much more quickly than you could on your own.”
“This is the part where you promise me power in exchange for something I probably shouldn’t just hand over,” I said suspiciously, coding myself, admittedly with a shameful level of corniness I was fortunate and sincere enough to be unable to experience in the moment.
He laughed, genuinely amused. “No, not at all.” He waved a cavalier hand, clearing the air of the idea like so much mist. “The power is inherent to you, and the rest…” He shrugged, palms open. “Well, let’s say I’m making a gift of it,” he decided, returning to warm, if smarmy, smiles.
I raised an eyebrow, lips pursed, skeptical to say the least.
“The game, the prize,” he listed, “Those are just trappings. The real reason I’ve put all this together is to… motivate you to work toward your ascension.” He apparently chose his words carefully.
“You cannot make a gift of that which you do not own,” I said pointedly, gesturing palm up toward the other guests.
“True,” he admitted too quickly, evidently already prepared with his counter argument. “But, I can give them the chance to be here, to compete for your attention and affection, and I have. Whether they see it through or not is entirely up to them,” he concluded with a helpless shrug and shake of his head.
I looked around nervously, following the invitation of his gesture while I wracked my brain. When I turned to face him again, I’d replaced my patient smile. “This seems to be between the two of us,” I pressed gently, “They needn’t be involved. I assure you, I’m thoroughly motivated without the distraction of…” I chose my words carefully, suppressing a shiver at the prospects of what lay ahead in a multiversal game of The Bachelorette with me at the center as a kind of judge, and in this case, a type of prize. “having my attention competed for or my affection won.”
He laughed. “I thought you might say that.” He kept the gloating subdued, mostly in the smile and decisive nod, and moved right along to his next point, in the tone of a helpful suggestion. “Think of them as your teachers.”
“What am I learning?” I asked, wary but curious all the same.
“Magic, mostly.” He shrugged one shoulder, apparently bored with the answer, or at least blazé about it.
I tried and failed to look uninterested. It must have glittered in my eyes, because he smirked triumphantly even though I felt my own expression change not at all. “What does that have to do with Interdimensional Bachelorette?” I asked pointedly, narrowing an eye and tilting my head in suspicion.
He winced. “It is rather complex, I’ll admit, but I think the added dimension of the game does enough for its potential drama to justify it.”
“Even if I asked for this, which I didn’t,” I interrupted myself emphatically, eyebrows high, warning finger pointing, “it isn’t fair to them. They have lives to get back to.”
“Honestly, Sora, I’m not an amateur,” he chided, mildly offended, and more than mildly smug, “Do you think I’d go to the trouble of pulling a hundred-odd sentient creatures out of their dimensional space without also pulling them out of their dimensional time?”
“That’s not the point,” I protested as he examined his nails indifferently. I sighed, sticking my jaw out, shaking my head at the floor. I thought for a short silence, then picked my head up to ask, “What if no one agrees to play?”
“That won’t be an issue,” Julian assured the both of us.
Jerry raised a triumphant eyebrow at me over the end of his nose.
“You’re not helping, doctor,” I informed him in an irate sing-song through my clenched teeth.
“What?” he demanded, both critical and defensive as he gave a helpless sort of shrug. “I’m not leaving without you,” he added as though heading off an argument and an absurd one at that. He softened into a lop-sided, sort of bashful smile and went on to say, “You’ve had to do worse than play some sort of foliage-based game to rescue me before, so if that’s what it’ll take for me to rescue you this time, that’s what I’ll do.” He shrugged again. “You’d do the same for me,” he assured me like he knew.
I just sort of melted at that for a moment, so deeply touched as to be on the verge of being swept up into the moment and away by it. Luckily, I caught myself and returned to the issue at hand in the form of Lucifer still watching me in smug silence. I pursed my lips disapprovingly, my jaw working as I gave it another moment of thought. I hit on something, and a slow smile quirked one side of my lips up. “You seem to be forgetting a critical detail,” I told him.
“Oh? What’s that?” he asked, egging me on.
“I’m married,” I reminded him. “In fact, very few of those gathered here are what I would call ‘eligible.’ And if you know anything about me, you know I’m not monogamous.”
“That’s three critical details,” he pointed out, petulantly snide.
I leveled him with an expectant look.
“Firstly, you’re not married.”
“Yes,” I interrupted before he could get to “secondly” and held up my left hand, pointing with my right at my ring finger, trusting that my wedding band would be there. It was. The single, sizable diamond glittered in its simple gold band, illustrating my point with an elegant sort of beauty. “I am.” I grinned smugly.
“Not yet you aren’t,” he shot back, smirking all the while.
“I remember the wedding, and I have my ring,” I argued, “I can show you the pictures and the certificate, if you want.”
“What if I told you that hasn’t actually happened?” he asked, sly and self-satisfied.
I touched my nose, my fingers flying up to one side of it practically on reflex. There was no jewelry on my right nostril. “This is a younger body,” I realized out loud with wide eyes.
“Seven years younger,” he said with an exaggerated nod of agreement by way of congratulating me on figuring it out.
I glowered. “First of all,” I started, then cut myself off with a waving head shake. “No, I don’t even want to get into that,” I muttered, then went back to scolding with a pointing finger. “Putting me in a younger body doesn’t change anything.”
He sighed. “Even if it didn’t, I can still solve this little problem,” he patronized, snapping his fingers.
My ring disappeared. I gasped, but that was all the shock I had in me over it. Instead, I went back to glaring. “Fine,” I snapped, putting my hands on my hips. “Wipe my memory, too. The whole ceremony was a formality, anyway. Our commitment is for life and longer.”
“Yes…” he sneered with evident disapproval, even disgust. “You take each other so for granted that it’s, what was it? ‘Not a matter of wanting to spend the rest of my life with you, so much as knowing that I will?’ Something like that, wasn’t it?”
He was teasing me, and it was working. I felt my face getting warm and I squared my jaw. “Something like that,” I agreed, irritated, “Yeah.”
He considered me thoughtfully for a moment over the end of his nose with pursed lips and narrowed eyes before he decided, “I don’t think I’ll tamper with your memories.”
“Good,” I huffed, still too angry and frazzled to be more than a touch relieved or truly grateful at all.
“I won’t need to,” he finished, waggling his eyebrows for emphasis.
He clasped his hands and in a decree tone of voice said, “I hereby dissolve your marriage.”
I squeaked, mouth hanging open, eyebrows smashed together, indignant and incredulous.
“I declare any and all oaths, vows, and promises you’ve previously sworn to be henceforth null and void.”
I squeaked some more, mouth agape, blinking and shocked. “You can’t do that,” I protested when I found I could speak, though I didn’t even sound sure to myself.
“He can,” Morpheus assured me from his seat at our table, sounding all but completely indifferent. “Indeed, he has.”
Jerry hooked his thumbs in his lapels, puffing his chest out, quite proud of himself. “I’m a celestial being, honey,” he gloated cheerily, “Oaths and contracts are my domain. My specialty.” His grin went wolfish and his tone went a shade darker. “All that remains now is your debt to me.” His tone shifted again and he went on more brightly, “Now, for the second problem, that’s none of my business. You’ll have to work out standing relationships with the contestants. As for the third, I know all about your “non-monogamy,”” He used air quotes and a mocking tone, complete with exaggerated eye roll. “and I’ve planned for that. I’d say I was proud of you, but you haven’t had a date in years.” He leveled me with a disapproving look that held a substantial amount of that condescending pity which typically accompanies the variety of shaking his head was doing.
I put a hand to my jutted hip and made my defensively saucy reply. “Hey, I would date if I thought there was a person alive worth the bull—” I caught myself at the last second, then bobbled my head thoughtfully for the next one. “…malarkey,” I self-censored lamely.
“Exactly,” he agreed brightly. “You’re welcome,” he said, hiking his eyebrows and gesturing pointedly around the room.
“Don’t give me that,” I shot back. “You set this whole thing up so I could consolidate power while you keep it all under your roof until I’ve satisfied some nebulous debt to you.”
“Did I?” He feigned surprise, grinning all the while. “How terribly obvious of me.”
“We have a vague notion of the game and the stakes, Mr. Farnsworth,” Marcone interposed himself to say, apparently determined to either ignore or misinterpret my ongoing crisis in favor of continuing to develop it. “What are the rules, if you’d be so kind?”
Jerry’s eyes glittered with self-satisfied anticipation.