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Veilfall Book One: A Rousing Rebirth
Veilfall Book One: A Rousing Rebirth
Veilfall Book One: A Rousing Rebirth
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Veilfall Book One: A Rousing Rebirth

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Cameron wasn't expecting to be a magical girl. She wasn't expecting to be any kind of girl. Wielding magical shields and unparalleled healing abilities as the Erocentric Avenger Rousing Salve, she leaps at the chance to become the implacable foe of all supernatural threats to human sexuality and an ardent defender of sexual freedom.

Eelesia was a clever girl with a big heart and a talent for seeing deeper than most, until the mysterious Beacon acquired her talents for itself. Wielding power over the fabric of the Veil as the Gentle Psion Eternal Solace, she must use her perceptive and empathic abilities to safeguard those she cares about from the machinations of her foes.

When a chance meeting entwines their lives, it entwines their troubles as well. Hunting for the guiding hand behind the fey that assault lonely men in her city puts Cameron on a collision course with a greater enemy which even Eelesia is unprepared to face, while Eelesia, on a personal quest to right a simple wrong committed after her home life is suddenly and unexpectedly shattered by the arrest of her father, eventually entangles Cameron in a mystery with earth-shaking implications.

(Disclaimer: This novel is unapologetically graphic and not for the faint of heart nor the sexually squeamish.)

LanguageEnglish
PublisherKairiel Ephe
Release dateSep 22, 2018
ISBN9780463052945
Veilfall Book One: A Rousing Rebirth

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    Veilfall Book One - Kairiel Ephe

    CAMERON

    Chapter One

    April 17th, 2027

    Berkeley, California

    Aphron Residence

    The morning air was brisk, a counterpoint to the baking sun slanting in from the east and beating on the back of my neck while I braced myself at the top of the big folding ladder, and waited for my dad to feed me the end of the power cord we were trying to run out of the attic of our house.

    Below me, inside the garage, I heard a car start. The culprit could only be my younger sister, Andreya, who'd just gotten her license.

    I leaned back to look down, and shouted in exasperation, Dreya! You can't get out right now!

    The engine revved, and I had a split second of horrified realization followed by a split second visual of the back of our car slamming into the legs of the ladder. The ladder folded with a crunch of twisting metal. I tried to jump clear, but I barely had time to move before the ladder pivoted against the ground and the plastic top with the warning labels on it caught me in the gut and flung me down the driveway.

    I didn't remember hitting the ground. The next thing I was aware of was that weird taste in my sinuses that told me I had a concussion, and a great deal of excruciating pain.

    At the bottom of my field of vision, I could see a thing on my chest. A thing that was pointy, brownish red, and wet. It was located at about where a feeling of stabbing agony was pulsing through me over and over.

    I tried to scream. All that came out of my mouth was a rush of blood, which splashed back all over my face. Distantly, I was aware of raised voices, shouting. I couldn't understand what they were saying.

    My dad appeared in my field of vision, phone pressed to his ear. Everything was going kind of grey. Just. Hold. On. Hold on. Ambulance is coming. Please, Cameron! Please! Just hold on!

    It belatedly occurred to me that I still wasn't breathing. But there wasn't any air. There was only blood. My vision was going dark around the edges. I was really, actually dying. Worse, I was dying a virgin. That was just fundamentally intolerable on every level. It should have been funny, that that was the thought that drifted to the forefront of my mind, but it really, really wasn't.

    And then there was a bright white plushy rabbit in a top hat. It hopped casually up onto my chest to peer at my face, the only thing that wasn't grayed out in my field of vision. I frowned in consternation. Of all the things I could hallucinate in my dying moments, I was profoundly disappointed that this was all I got.

    What a surprising misfortune, puu! the hallucination said in a chirpy cutesy voice. This certainly looks like a fatal wound. Chuu! Oh well.

    Even the pain was starting to slip away into the darkness that crept over my eyes, which was a relief. It was also probably a bad sign. I was having trouble remembering how to stay awake.

    Suddenly the stuffed rabbit met my eyes and reared back. Oh! You can see me. It's eyes glowed gold. Puu?! What's this? You already have a soul! And not just any soul either! A fifth generation reinforcement model! Where in the world could you have gotten one of those from, puu?

    Not. Funny. Stupid dying brain.

    A mystery for now, puu! But lucky for you. I suppose I should reset it for you so it doesn't go to waste... there! Now remember, this part is important, chuu, when you wake up, you'll need to...

    Darkness.

    October 3rd, 2026

    Berkeley, California

    Maybeck Highschool

    Alright, who can tell me what this is?

    Mr. Kana tapped the wall screen behind him, and an image appeared. The photo he'd chosen for this was actually pretty famous. It was set in a yellowish sky full of dramatic clouds, and the subject of the photo bore some small resemblance to a collection of lilypads tangled together by their roots as they floated in a pocket of clear air. If one looked really close, the details of the image betrayed its deceptive sense of scale. Each of those lilypads were a mile across or more.

    A few of my classmates put their hands up, and Mr. Kana called on a girl in the front row. It's the Cloud Forest. The Cytherian capitol on Venus.

    Mr. Kana nodded. "Yes. I'm sure most of you have seen this. For those of you who haven't. This is the iconic photo taken by the Venera Thirteen probe in the year nineteen-eighty-two. Who can tell me why this shocked the scientific community of the time?"

    I put my hand up, but didn't get called on. Mr. Kana pointed at a boy in a band t-shirt.

    Like, because we don't have any giant floating plants on Earth? the boy said.

    Mr. Kana nodded kindly, but I already knew he was going to disagree. "That certainly contributed. Finding plant-life in the upper atmosphere of Venus was unexpected, but that alone wouldn't have been shocking. Anyone else?"

    I put my hand up again, and this time I got called on. It was shocking because there were radio signals coming from it. In English.

    Mr. Kana smiled. Precisely. It may seem obvious today, but all of us grew up in a world where this mystery is normal, but back then... Mr. Kana shook his head. The fronds of the Cloud Forests are hollow, with breathable air and a habitable ecosystem inside, which has allowed a starting population of humans approximating six-hundred-thousand to survive and develop there for nearly a century. Cytherian history doesn't go back any further than that, but they don't know how they got there either.

    I thought Mr. Kana was kind of underselling it. It was pretty well agreed that the original Cytherian population was taken to Venus from the southern United States at some point during the 1930s. A handful of those people were even still alive. And yet, there were no accounts of the trip, no writing, no recordings, no memories.

    Over the following years, Mr. Kana said, pockets of humanity were discovered one by one all over the solar system. The Venusian Cloud Forests. The underground Martian Wombwalls. The Grid of Ganymede. The Inferno Domes on Titan. To this day, we still don't have an explanation.

    Someone at the back put his hand up and Mr. Kana called on him. You say we don't know, but... it had to be aliens, right? Extrasolar aliens, I mean, not the acugons.

    There are certainly those who think so, Mr. Kana said. Unfortunately, all we have is supposition. There simply isn't any evidence.

    April 18th, 2027

    Berkeley, California

    Aphron Residence

    I came awake all at once. It was almost disorienting, how much it wasn't disorienting. There was no sense of effort, or of resistance, to suddenly being aware and oriented.

    There wasn't any sensation at all, actually. The world was grayscale, and there weren't any shadows, but otherwise I could see my house just fine, and I could hear the usual sounds of my neighborhood.

    I just couldn't feel my body.

    I looked down at myself, and saw a pair of very large breasts. By which I mean I saw my own naked chest, which had breasts attached to it, and my torso itself was definitely a different shape than what I was used to. This, naturally, completely distracted me from the mystery of my missing senses.

    Stunned, I tried to touch one of them, but my hand went right through, clipping like a cheaply animated game model. I felt nothing but a phantom tingle of expectation. It wasn't just my chest either. My stomach was tight and lean, showing a hint of abs, and all my body hair was completely gone. Further down, I had a prominent soft-looking cleft where my male organs used to be. My legs, too, were missing their hair and shaped different and I definitely didn't used to have that much of a gap between my thighs.

    Oh, and my feet weren't touching the ground.

    The last thing I remembered was dying, impaled through my chest.

    It might have been a while before I managed to string another two thoughts together.

    The word 'dead' was kind of weird, when you thought about the way it was often used. Even when it is said that someone or something is dead, the only clear meaning is that they had, at some point in the past, died. It established nothing about their ongoing state.

    I decided that wondering if I was really dead was not a useful question. Labeling my state of being as dead or not dead wouldn't actually give me any new information. It would just be a waste of time.

    I continued to exist. I could see, and I could hear. I found I could move, if I focused on wanting to move. I was still me. I even had a... an image of a body. Even if this body image definitely wasn't based at all on my real body. I very much wanted to know where it came from.

    Because I'd always thought being a female soul trapped in a male body was just a figure of speech.

    The whole thing where suddenly I was somehow a ghost was objectively a much bigger deal, I knew, but I was really kind of stuck on the part where my ghostly self looked like a buxom girl.

    Really. This explained a lot.

    It wasn't something I'd thought about in concrete terms, before. I'd always felt detached and vaguely resentful about my body, but I'd never really asked myself the question, if I could have any body, if I could choose my form out of the whole of human possibility, what would I choose? I looked down at myself, and I couldn't help but feel like I'd been preemptively presented with my own perfect answer.

    It suddenly struck me that it was horribly unfair to have this revelation now, when I might never get to know what it felt like to live in a body that looked like this. This body image was taunting me with such a truth of self, too late to matter.

    Okay, I tried to say, but of course, my body was just an image. It couldn't make sound.

    Okay. I couldn't feel or touch anything. I couldn't talk. What could I do? I could move. I had a position in space and the ability to see and hear. I could float towards my house, pass through the front door, and look for my dad.

    I found him in his home office, sitting back from his desk with his head in his hands. The website for a cemetery was open on his screen.

    Dad! I tried to shout. DAAAAD!

    Of course, I hadn't suddenly gained the ability to make sound, so that didn't work. Next I tried waving a hand through him, and through his keyboard. I tried it a bunch of different ways, visualizing my emotions channeled into a force, direct zen willpower, believing really hard that I was actually solid, and everything else I could think of.

    None of it worked.

    Our house has two floors, but it's built on a hill so the garage and the front door and the street all connect to the upper floor, while the lower floor opens on the back yard. The ground floor was all mine, set up like a small one-room apartment, but it was amazingly boring when I couldn't actually touch my computer, or my console, or anything else.

    I didn't even reflect in the mirror. I really wanted to know what I actually looked like now.

    For the umpteenth time, I floated up through the ceiling to check on my dad, for lack of anything better to do. This time my dad had finally, finally fallen asleep, and I could try out the last obvious cliche.

    I tried to dive into my dad's dreams.

    Of course, all I accomplished was ending up under his bed. I tried a few more times, with the same result. I allowed myself to thrash around in abject frustration for a few minutes. This had no more effect than anything else I did, and it wasn't even very satisfying when I couldn't feel my limbs.

    Fuck, I moaned silently to myself. "I don't know what to do. There's got to be a way to do something. This doesn't make sense."

    It really didn't make sense. I didn't seem to be fading away, or getting tired, and I didn't feel drawn anywhere in particular. If this was just what happened to people who died, I should've seen another ghost by now, but I hadn't.

    I was down in my room again, I don't know how much later, when a new awareness flared into my mind all at once. It was like I'd had one figurative eye closed this whole time and there, lurking in my blindspot, was this pattern of concepts, this novel structure of memories that weren't memories, all interconnected and layered.

    Then it rushed through me, emanating from the apexal nexus of the second conceptual layer and radiating down into my virtual body. Mana. It was the first thing I'd actually felt since I died, and the sensation was an exquisite rush.

    Finally, I had a sign that I might not be trapped in this numb existence forever. It had only been a day, but I'd had literally no way of interacting with anything. Now I did. With this new thing in my head came an intuitive understanding that it was meant to be used, actively.

    That didn't mean I automatically understood how. Of course not. That would be too easy.

    There was a core to it, sort of, an underpinning of ten elemental primitives, and they were related to each other in ways that made me feel like if I understood one or two of them, I'd be able to guess at the rest. Spellshards.

    Separately, on a higher conceptual layer, I found only one node, but nested within that node I found something I could only describe as a flowchart of those primitives. Innate Spell. And like a limb I'd forgotten I had, it was instantly obvious that I should've been able to fold that layer to bring that node into alignment with my mana nexus using my body and senses as a conduit.

    Only I couldn't, because I didn't have a body. With that, I had to conclude that it was a separate thing unrelated to being a ghost... wait.

    ...Mana. Spellshard. Innate Spell, I silently blurted. I did not make up these terms and also holy fuck I have magic powers.

    Magic was a thing! And I had it! Apparently!

    Well, obviously. I was a disembodied spirit. I should've realized the implications the moment I woke up separately from my brain.

    ...fuck, what if that rabbit thing wasn't a hallucination? I wondered. What did it say? Damn it, I can't remember.

    I shut my eyes and tried, but I just couldn't recall the living plushy's words. But, I was pretty sure the thing hadn't said anything about perpetual ghostliness.

    What if there was a way to return to life?

    I had one spell, called Planar Shield. I couldn't cast it, but I knew what it did, vaguely. Maybe that would be enough to figure out how to make a new one. It felt like two of the spellshards in particular, which weren't anywhere in Planar Shield, and were also related like so to two other spellshards which weren't in Planar Shield, were also related but differently to one particular spellshard which was in the same class as one which actually was part of Planar Shield.

    It barely made sense to me, but I was sure I was on to something.

    I had an intuitive sense for ways in which spellshards had things in common, and I had an intuitive sense of what each spellshard needed me to put in before it would put anything out. From that starting point, I started experimenting.

    I don't know how long it took me. I think the sun rose and set at least four times. I didn't get tired. I didn't get thirsty or hungry or sleepy.

    I kept at it, hour after hour, because I was reasonably sure one of my spellshards in particular literally conjured living flesh. I played with that one exclusively until, with a surge of my mana, a one-inch sphere of homogeneous muscle tissue appeared behind my eyes and fell into the bathroom sink under me.

    Fuck. Yes. This was going to be easier than I thought.

    It still took me days of trying just to begin to understand how to link spellshards into a valid spell, though. Even then, my moment of triumph when a new spell clicked together for the first time was short lived, because casting it would've taken an order of magnitude more mana than I had available.

    I did figure out why I couldn't cast Planar Shield, though. Several of its component spellshards took inertial values from the caster's body as inputs. Since I didn't have any physical properties, I couldn't use any of those spellshards, or a spell that depended on them.

    I kept working, slowly getting a better sense of how my spellshards worked and interacted. Several times I thought I'd solved it, only to discover I didn't have enough mana to complete the spell. One of my failed attempts actually managed to turn me solid, like a glass statue made of force fields, but the moment I so much as twitched the spell's mana consumption tried to shoot up by several orders of magnitude beyond my capacity, and it shattered.

    Ow.

    I didn't want to try that again, but if all else failed maybe I could use it to get my dad's attention.

    My next interesting failure actually began to generate flesh I could feel! It hurt like hell, and then my half-complete brain and spine fell out of the air as soon as it started forming. I went splat on the floor and woke up three hours later as a spirit again.

    April 25th, 2027

    Berkeley, California

    Aphron Residence

    I'd solved it.

    It was the middle of the night, and I floated in front of my bathroom mirror, psyching myself up. The spell was long, but it was elegantly recursive, which made it extremely mana efficient. And it didn't have the problem of needing to channel mana through a body I didn't have. That had turned out to be the greatest constraint by a huge margin.

    It took fifteen seconds to align the spell with my mana, and then I mouthed the incantation.

    "Perfect Incarnation!" is what my spell had named itself.

    Brain tissue and skull formed in mid air, and I had an instant to revel in my success before the pain erupted across my every nerve. I was expecting it, but the creeping agony still consumed my whole existence for the long seconds it took my body to grow itself into being from the inside out.

    When it was over, I let out an explosive agonized gasp as I started breathing again, and collapsed against the countertop. It worked. It actually worked.

    Yeah, I giggled breathlessly. My voice definitely belonged to a girl, now. I'm immortal.

    As the pain faded, other sensations rose to the forefront of my awareness. All the little bits of awareness a body continually reported, which had been silent for days. Warmth, cold, breathing, air on my skin, gravity.

    And then there were the things that were entirely new or different, like the weight of soft jiggly flesh anchored to my chest and the way that weight shifted and wobbled according to an inscrutable configuration of internal connective tissue. I was intensely aware of my up-thrust nipples in a way I'd never been before, as the rest of my breast-mass almost seemed to fulcrum around those sensitive points.

    Likewise, I really wasn't used to feeling air on my entire nether region even with my legs closed tight. My inner thighs curved away from each other to meet my flared hips, leaving my crotch open and accessible.

    A small part of me hadn't been able to shake the worry that once I could actually feel my new body, something would twig after all, some sense of wrongness or loss. But there was nothing like that, or if there was, it was completely overwhelmed by the gleeful rush of being alive. I sucked in a slightly unsteady breath and finally pushed myself up, away from the sink, and looked at my reflection for the first time.

    Oh.

    Oh, wow.

    The naked girl in the mirror was simultaneously alien and achingly familiar. Alien, because what I saw bore little to no resemblance to what I saw the last time I looked in a mirror, but at the same time, achingly right.

    That was my face. Never mind that I'd never seen it before this moment. That was me. Me as I was meant to be. I touched my face, my full cute lips, then my luscious breasts, my tight toned stomach, the flare of my hips, and then inward to trace the pliable lips of my silky smooth vulva.

    It was all real, and it was all me. Whatever doubts I might've had, that I was supposed to be a girl, evaporated.

    I took another step back and examined my reflection more objectively. Even disheveled, I was gorgeous. Maybe a little on the broader, husky side as builds went, but ridiculously fit, with ideal proportions and even more ideal curves. My hair looked black, but it shaded to green of all things where it caught the light just right, and it's short length was messy in a way that almost looked deliberate. I was flushed and sweaty from being in so much pain, earlier, but my creamy skin had no imperfections of any kind.

    Maybe that should've been especially disheveled, I was... hot. Sexy. Extremely, achingly fuckable. My body was a walking wet dream.

    Given that my senses were already running on overdrive, compensating for weeks of numbness, what I did next was entirely predictable and entirely inevitable.

    All the theoretical knowledge in the world couldn't begin to substitute for the first-hand experience of how much better masturbating was as a girl.

    Firstly, wet. There were no words that could describe how slippery girl juice actually was, or how much better the liquid gliding friction felt than dry pressure. Also, relative size. I could create sensations on my clit with a pair of wet fingers that no combination of even two hands could replicate on the head of a penis. Around hour three in to learning my new body, when my pussy finally gave way to my knuckles and swallowed my hand to the wrist, I could only think that there was no way to get anything like that feeling by squeezing a cock.

    The biggest difference, and the one that surprised me more than I'd liked to admit, was how much more pleasure I felt in the lead-up to cumming. As a boy, there hadn't been much pleasure at all until right before the point of no return. As a girl, I had to start biting back moans whole minutes before I climaxed.

    I didn't know how much of that was being a girl, and how much was just my new body being more responsive and just generally better. It was the same kind of pleasure, just distributed over a shallower curve.

    The best part, by a wide margin, was my vagina's ability to not pack up, go home, and refuse to play after each orgasm. If I didn't quit, neither did it. I knew that wasn't universal even for girls, but I certainly hadn't had it as a boy.

    Hour after hour slipped by as I explored the topology of my new form, the responses of my new flesh, and got familiar with the superhuman limits of my new body. With every orgasm I learned something more about being the girl I had become, until I was sure I knew my body well enough to know exactly how much of a gift I had been given.

    As the sun rose, I thought about what I needed to do next. My dad would be awake soon, and he needed to know I was alive. I was less sure of how I was going to prove I was Cameron.

    Oh. Hey. My name's gender neutral. That's convenient.

    Before long, I heard movement upstairs. I rolled to my feet and went into the bathroom to clean up. Weirdly, as far as I could tell, my sex juices had dried without leaving anything but clean skin, but I was at least going to wash my hands for form's sake if nothing else.

    The sight of my reflection stopped me in my tracks. My hair looked the same as before, still a little wild, but no more tangled or mushed than it was hours ago. I looked clean. Groomed, even, compared to what I expected to look like after my all-night solo pleasure marathon.

    Sniff. I smelled clean.

    What the fuck.

    This has to be another magic thing, right? I asked my reflection.

    And that was when I abruptly realized that it was weird that I even had any hair on my scalp. My body was only a few hours old. It was difficult enough to get Perfect Incarnation to include bones. I hadn't even tried to include hair.

    Clearly, something else was going on.

    Before I could contemplate the mystery any more than that, I heard more movement from upstairs. My dad was definitely awake. I owed it to him not to put off telling him I was alive, no matter how awkward it was going to be.

    I went to my dresser and quickly dug out my largest t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. As was my habit, I kicked the drawer closed. A second too late, I realized what I'd done and tried to catch it, but I wasn't fast enough. It slammed in, loudly.

    The sounds from upstairs stopped, and then I heard footsteps on the stairs down to my room. Wincing, I stepped into the boxers and pulled the t-shirt over my head. My door burst open and my dad staggered inside, looking like eight rings of hell. He saw me and blinked, confused.

    Excuse me, but what the hell are you doing in my son's room? he wondered.

    I flinched. Dad, it's me, Cameron.

    Silence.

    "That is not funny," he snarled, suddenly angry.

    "Dad, I came back to life. I look different but it's me. I'm Cameron, I insisted. I died when Dreya knocked the ladder over and I fell, and then I was like this. I don't know what..."

    Don't, don't you... how did you know... we didn't tell anyone she... He abruptly shut his eyes and twitched, like he had a sudden headache, then he glared at me. "Listen young lady, I don't care what game you think you're playing. My son. Is dead. And you, you insensitive bitch, are going to explain yourself right now or I'm going to call the police."

    I felt myself slipping into the cold ruthlessness I used to deal with assholes at school and forced myself to remember that this wasn't my dad's fault. The way he was behaving was completely reasonable, from his perspective. Treating him like an enemy was not going to help.

    I can prove I'm Cameron, I said levelly. Ask me anything.

    In the next moment my dad grabbed my arm and was hauling me towards the back window. He flung the curtain aside, hauled open the sliding glass door, and shoved me out into the back yard.

    Enough! Enough of this sick excuse for a joke! he shouted at me.

    I stumbled, cold grass prickling my bare feet, and backed away a little. This was ridiculous. He had to let me at least try to convince him, but no, he just rejected the premise out of hand.

    Dad! Listen! I know it's impossible, okay? I didn't think this could happen in real life either! But it did! I can prove it if you'll just give me a fucking chance! My voice broke a little. I wasn't crying, but I kind of wanted to. Cameron Aphron's life wasn't much but it was mine.

    My dad stood on the patio step, breathing hard. What the hell do you think could possibly convince me?

    I can prove magic exists, I blurted, relieved, and began the fifteen-second process of aligning a spell. "If I demonstrate credible magic, you have to at least listen. I came back from the dead and I can show you how I did it."

    You're insane, my dad said hollowly, turning away.

    No, I disagreed, and aimed my spell at the space in front of him. "Planar Shield."

    The shield formed at a point in front of my dad and unfurled to a diameter of three feet in less than an eyeblink. Like shimmering glass or a vivid hologram, a rippling false-motion of faintly glowing concentric hexagons hung vertical in the air and blocked the way inside. It made a nearly silent and nearly subsonic hum. My dad walked into it and bounced backwards, and I felt only the tiniest pull on my mana.

    He turned around, breathing hard. What the hell do you think could possibly convince me?

    Wait, what? I felt a chill go down my spine.

    I pointed at the hexagonal shield. That! The magic shield you just walked right into!

    My dad turned to look, saw the floating hexagon, and twitched. He looked at me again, same as the first time. What the hell do you think could possibly convince me?

    That chill was now a full case of creeping horrors. He'd repeated himself exactly, down to the last inflection, and I had no idea what the fuck was wrong with him or what to do about it except repeat myself again.

    My spell finished aligning again, and I cast a second, "Planar Shield, horizontally two feet above the ground. I stepped up onto it, using it as a hovering platform. I. Am. Cameron. I have magic and used it to resurrect myself."

    My dad's eyes glazed over and his face went slack. For a moment, I had hope that it'd finally sunk in, but then he started twitching. His eyes rolled up, the twitching turned into an actual seizure, and he started foaming. He collapsed before I even understood what I was seeing.

    My shields evaporated and I dropped to the grass. Dad!

    He stopped shaking. I threw myself down and turned him onto his side, barely noticing how light he felt, but he wasn't moving anymore. He wasn't even twitching. I stared at him, numb, as he lay there.

    A girlish scream startled me out of my fugue. Oh my god what the shit who are you did you kill my dad oh my god!

    I looked up to see Andreya fleeing back up the stairs, phone in hand. Great, first my sister kills me, then she accuses me of murder. I looked down again. My dad still wasn't moving.

    I got one of those horrible sinking feelings as I aligned a spell. I wasn't going to be able to explain this. I wasn't going to be able to get anyone to believe me. If someone like me had magic, then magic had to be pretty common. If magic was pretty common, then there had to be a reason no one knew about it. I'd tried to tell my dad, and he'd started acting weird and then he'd had a seizure.

    I couldn't help but see the connection.

    Fifteen seconds passed, and I cast, "Perfect Incarnation," on my dad. I didn't know if it'd help with a seizure, but I was pretty sure it couldn't make things worse. The spell was obviously doing something. I watched as decades of aging melted off of him, and hoped he didn't have another seizure when he looked in the mirror and remembered that we were too poor to afford rejuvenation therapy.

    I stopped, breaking the spell. Fuck. That could actually happen, couldn't it.

    My sister was probably calling the police. I literally couldn't tell them the truth, and I didn't have a plausible lie. That sinking feeling hit bottom, and I knew what had to happen next.

    I got up and dashed back inside. I snatched up my backpack and stuffed a change of clothes into the main pouch along with my tablet. I also unplugged all of my portable drives and stuck them in the side pouch with my wallet.

    My shoes didn't fit anymore. Neither did any of my pants. Fuck.

    The sound of a siren echoed faintly in the distance. Gritting my teeth, I swung my backpack on and ran outside in just my socks. I scrambled up the hill into the front yard and kept running, my feet slapping on the concrete.

    April 26th, 2027

    San Francisco, California

    Portsmouth Square Plaza

    I was in San Francisco. I had no idea how that happened.

    I'd made it out of my neighborhood and onto busier streets where I'd had to slow down and walk, but after that I'd been at a loss for what to do next.

    So I kept walking.

    After a few hours I had to use Perfect Incarnation to turn the balls of pain at the ends of my legs back into feet, but that worked fine. If I kept the spell going it fixed general tiredness too.

    I still got sleepy, but even walking all night in a daze, I was pretty sure I wasn't even going in the right direction to end up in San Francisco the next morning. And yet.

    And then, as I crossed in front of a park, I almost bumped into a girl in a school uniform who had transparent flesh, like like green jello. She caught me staring, and before I could react she let out a tiny scream and bolted at a dead run. There were lots of people around, but no one else seemed to notice anything odd about her.

    What.

    It had to be the thing that struck down my dad. That was the only thing that made sense. Magic hid itself. Like a selective weirdness censor pressing down on the minds of the entire human race.

    It stole my home from me and it might have killed my dad.

    I found an out-of-the-way bench and sat down under a shady tree, holding my backpack on my lap. I'd gotten some weird looks for being a lone girl dressed in nothing but a loose t-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks, so it was probably a bad idea to stay in one spot too long, but I... needed a moment.

    Or maybe, like, several hours. No one bothered me, anyway.

    After a while, I wondered if it would be a horrible idea to use an ATM, assuming my debit card still worked. On paper, I was dead, not to mention male. It wasn't possible for me to abide by the law, but I could still aim for uninteresting to the law, relatively speaking.

    My body ached from sitting on a hard surface for most of the morning. I healed away the aches again, but a few minutes later I got up anyway. I sipped from a nearby drinking fountain, picked a direction at random, and walked.

    Several blocks away, I was waiting for the walk light on a street corner when I happened to glance up and catch sight of a flying figure in the distance. There was a girl in a red evening gown flying gracefully between skyscrapers, not even trying to hide. How cool was that. It made me feel better, weirdly. The magicals were hidden, but they weren't hiding.

    While I was thinking about that, these two guys snuck up on me. Hey, gorgeous. Are you doing alright?

    I flinched, startled. Forcing down the unwarranted surge of adrenaline, I took a breath and glanced over the guy who'd spoken. Black hair, blue eyes, clean shaven. Tall, but kind of scrawny, and dressed in jeans with a leather jacket. His friend was a little shorter, relatively swarthy and muscular, with a thin chin-strap beard, and dressed a little more colorfully in tan pants and a button shirt with flames on it.

    Both of them openly checked me out, roaming over my protruding bust and bare legs with their gaze. The sun was behind me. They could probably see the outline of my body through the fabric of my shirt. The tall pretty dude actually looked kind of concerned, but there was nothing subtle about the excited way their eyes raked over my form.

    At first, my brain simply failed to produce a reaction. This kind of attention was so far outside my usual experience that I simply didn't have a stored response. It felt... good, though. My body seemed to like it. I felt my nipples harden against the fabric of my shirt and a flush spread out over my skin from between my legs.

    Yeah, what's your hurry, gorgeous? You got somewhere to be? Flame shirt gestured at my shoeless feet.

    Sheesh, Darrek, you sound like a back-alley thug, the first guy said, rolling his eyes. You're gonna scare her off.

    Wait what? Scare me off? I snorted. Then, I laughed outright. Random horny dudes were, realistically, the last thing that would scare me off. After everything that I'd lost, it was actually a relief to encounter something so mundane and straightforwardly harmless.

    Bwuh? What's she...? What're you laughing at? tall pretty dude wondered, sounding confused.

    I shook my head. "Sorry, but you would not believe the week I've had, and you guys, just being all... I waved a hand. Thank you."

    The so-called Darrek shrugged. You're welcome? Y'know, you've got a smile that lights up that whore face of yours. Anybody ever tell you that?

    I stared for a moment, wondering if I'd misheard, before descending back into helpless laughter, ...no? I'm pretty sure I'd remember a comment like that!

    Judging by the way tall pretty dude smacked his forehead into his hand, I hadn't misheard. Darrek, why do I even let you talk.

    ...whole, Darrek said to me. I definitely meant to say 'whole'. I'm so sorry.

    I giggled, shoulders shaking. It was hard to pin down exactly why I found that so delightfully funny, but I did. The light changed. I waited to see if they were going to cross. They stayed put, so I did too.

    Yeah. Sorry about him, tall pretty dude said.

    I shrugged.

    Anyway, my name's Martin Grey, tall pretty dude introduced himself. This is Darrek Estan. Maybe we can help you out.

    There we were, Darrek said, making a dramatic sweeping gesture, "when we saw this knockout babe walking around with no shoes, dressed in rags, looking ever so tragically adrift. And we thought, a girl like you might appreciate it if along came a new opportunity."

    What kind of opportunity? I asked neutrally, a little wary now that it sounded like this was more complicated than just these two guys hitting on me.

    A totally legal one, Martin put in helpfully. Which was less of a selling point than I might have liked, given my circumstances. Assuming you're over eighteen?

    ...nineteen this august, I told them.

    Right, Darrek agreed. "We make an honest living, and I bet a girl with your attributes could be making bank with us, you work it right."

    Um.

    I'm sorry, I know we're coming out of nowhere with this, Martin broke in seamlessly. You're obviously having a rough time, you're probably hungry. Tell you what, there's a nice little outdoor bistro just down the way there. Let's go buy you some dinner, sound good? All you have to do is promise to hear us out and keep an open mind, and you can have anything off the menu you want. Deal?

    I glanced in the indicated direction. You pay, I listen, that's all you want?

    That's all, Martin agreed. Promise.

    Then sure, let's go, I said. And thanks.

    Pleasure's ours! Darrek asserted.

    The restaurant was right where Martin said. It was a tiny place with round metal tables and chairs out front in a little fenced and covered area, with the majority of its interior space occupied by kitchen. I ordered a chicken sandwich.

    Seated at one of the little round tables with my meal in front of me and the two guys across from me, I took a bite and moaned rapturously. My healing spell made up for a lot, but it didn't change the fact that my body had never eaten before.

    Martin and Darrek stared at me like DPSers at an orange loot drop. I carefully chewed my next bite without any moaning, swallowed, and raised an expectant eyebrow.

    So! Darrek leaned forward and rubbed his hands together. Tell me. What're your feelings on porn?

    I stopped. Oh. Oh... That made sense.

    It... is often unfairly singled out? I offered. I mean, it's porn. Rule thirty-four. My feelings on porn are mostly positive.

    Good to hear, Martin said, nodding. Unfairly singled out?

    Uh, I said. "Yeah, it's like, there's this divide. Legitimate media can be as sexually explicit as it wants to be so long as it doesn't actually try to arouse you. But then when the point is to get your viewers off, its like your value is still only measured along every axis except how effective you are at making your audience cum. And that is just unfair."

    Good answer, Martin laughed. Like, really good, actually. That was deep.

    What he said. I like you, babe, Darrek said, grinning. "So me and Martin, we run a small site called Lewd & Clued 'cause we're clued in on the best ways to get lewd, get it?"

    Cute, I opined. I don't think I've heard of you, though. Sorry.

    Darrek sighed. Our marketing kind of sucks. And that's my fault. Shouldn't've been lazy about the watermark.

    But we do operate out of our own studio and everything, Martin told me. "It's a clean set, and we always stay up on the industry standards for keeping it that way. It's safer than dating, really."

    "A girl built like you, y'know, all the right curves, fantastic ass, and natural tits big enough to kill a man? Throw in the thoroughly promising attitude and you could enjoy some very comfortable job security, Darrek said. I'll ballpark four hundred dollars a shoot, and that's just for vanilla sex. If you'll do anal, group sex, or girl-on-girl, you could make as much as twice that."

    What if I prefer girls? I asked impishly.

    Darrek blinked. You're gay?

    I shook my head. Pan. I'm pretty sure I'm pansexual. But.

    "Well that's a lucky break if ever there was one, Darrek declared happily. I tell ya, it must've been fate, running into you."

    We dabble in some kinky stuff too, Martin added. Usually just the more elaborate forms of bondage or the occasional fetish-fantasy role-play, but it depends on what and who we've got to work with. Some of those pay just as much even for solo scenes, but, you can always say no to anything you're not comfortable with.

    I took another bite of my sandwich and swallowed it before I brought up my primary concern. Um, you know I don't have any, like, ID, or documents, or like, anything to prove legally that I exist? Everything I had is gone...

    Martin looked to Darrek. Darrek stroked his chin.

    That's potentially a problem, Darrek admitted. We are gonna need a proof-of-age of some kind for our records, but the work itself is paid as freelance. As long as you can get us something with a birthdate on it, we're good to go on our end. All you need to worry about is deciding if this is an opportunity you're interested in seizing.

    I ate another bite of my chicken sandwich and thought about it. In a way, it was perfect. Me, in front of the camera instead of behind it, but I'd be having sex in clearly defined, controlled circumstances, with people who would necessarily have pragmatic and sensible views about sexual

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