Renfaire Fantasy: Harem Life pt 3

    Brian didn’t talk too much in the mornings, because he was afraid of giving himself away—he couldn’t slip up and reveal how horribly his head was pounding. The splitting headache throbbed with relentless pressure, but Brian tried to focus on what he was tasting and appreciate Christine’s hard work. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t allow the pain to show on his face, but all of the blood vessels in his brain had become a constricting claw that squeezed painfully tight in time with his heartbeat by the time he arrived back at the apartment. Mana migraines—he refused to call them ‘mananemia’—were an excruciating experience, but one he was learning to live with every day.

    They’re not even THAT big of a deal, Brian thought as he sighed and emptied his pockets onto the counter, mini flashlight and keys clattering down. Thanks to the girls. Whenever we uhh, have a little intimate exchange, it’s not just me filling their magical batteries. They bring me back to full, too.

    The charm magic allowed them to draw power from intimacy—and it also gave that intimacy a fair degree of power over them. This meant their libidos were constantly setting each other off, and they spent an abnormal amount of time all over each other, fondling and kissing and cuddling and being affectionate; totally infatuated with one another. It was the early relationship puppy love phase, magnified by magic. It wasn’t even all good or pleasant—being this in love with each other all the time meant that Stephanie not being there with them fucking hurt. Despite all the sex and time Brian, Emily, and Kelly spent adoring each other, there was that persistent hollow sense of loss that nothing else could quite fill, simply because they all missed Stephanie.

    Christine was another problem—Christine was deeply conflicted on how she fit into everything, and there were no easy answers there. Brian wanted to give her space and respect her choices, but so far Christine had chosen to suppress everything she felt—about anything—as much as possible and serve out a life of penance for Chloe’s sins. While Brian wouldn’t say he’d forgiven or forgotten any of it, he had put all of that a long ways behind him and wanted to move on past it.

    I guess… I want her to want us? Or, to let herself be with us, Brian tried his best not to sigh. But, what she does has to be her decision. If she wants to remain at the periphery of all of this stuff relationship-wise, I’m gonna respect that. I do want her to let herself get closer, to be a bigger part of all of this. But, that’s up to her.

    The pair of girls were entrancingly beautiful and the incredible sight of Christine and Kelly waiting for him at the long apartment counter every morning was always very welcome, but today this skull-scrambling headache kept him from really appreciating anything as much as they deserved. Brian had been practicing magic a lot more than he let the girls know about.

    It was hard not to feel the pressure. His unique charm ability ‘refresh’ was convenient but also trivial, of such limited utility that there was no realistic way for him to use it to protect the girls from all of the unknowns out there. Incredibly acute headaches were a small price to pay for making daily leaps and strides forwards with his ‘basic’ magic progress, and he felt the need to keep most of his work secret so as not to worry the girls—or have them start pushing themselves to his extremes.

    So, just about every time Brian had some semblance of privacy, he practiced.

    When he was out doing his morning run, he sustained light along two of his fingertips for as long as he could, with his little pocket flashlight held in that hand on the off chance any passerby cast a glance his way. In the early hours when the sun was just coming up, it wasn’t too crazy to see an early-hours jogger going around with a little flashlight in hand. He held the flashlight carefully and kept it clicked on so that anyone would think the magic visible at his fingers was just from them overlapping the front of his flashlight.

    When he was at work, lunch or any break was spent with his phone in his lap absently scrolling through things—no one had ever noticed that his other hand was cupped around a hair tie that was floating as if possessed. There the little black band of fabric and elastic spun and twirled, it twisted over itself and formed into pretzels, it tumbled end over end across his palm and across the cage of his fingers but never slipped through the gaps. This was the learning to levitate tiny objects mana-shaping exercise Kelly had described to them, and he was now quite a bit further than where Kelly’s own progress was. Manipulating the hair tie into the different motions he wanted was many, many times more challenging than just having it rise up into the air, but he was really starting to get the hang of it.

    When he was at home in the evenings, his final practice for the day was spent with the girls, where with them he conjured light to a single fingertip and focused on pushing it out into a clear beam that could project out against a surface with enough effort. Together during their little training sessions they each created little spots of light that danced back and forth across the wall and ceiling of the bedroom—in privacy on his own, Brian could already concentrate the beam into something like a laser pointer. Not a strong laser pointer perhaps, but definitely on par with something like a cheap cat toy one. Creating a lot of light was many magnitudes more difficult, and basically served to immediately empty his reserves of magic.

    Guess I could either tease a cat for ten to fifteen minutes, or it can be like I’ve turned on a small lamp in a dark room for like, two or three seconds? Brian evaluated. When I’m running in the mornings it’s like a very flashlight that’s real low on battery, maybe?

    He felt like he was making the most progress with the advanced exercise. The hair tie he’d borrowed in secret weighed only half a gram, so he could magic it up to drift around without weight for twice as long as the one-gram paperclip he’d initially been working with. Logic would normally dictate that he should be able to levitate a dime—the tiny ten-cent coin which weighed in at two grams—for roughly half as long as he could manage the paperclip, but as it turned out that just wasn’t possible at all yet. He couldn’t get a dime the whole way up and have it completely break skin contact with his palm. Brian could, with great difficulty, flip the coin in his hand using only his magic, but he couldn’t quite lift it up out into the air to do a proper levitation exercise.

    Not yet, anyways.

    The extremely small scale of these magic effects was always humbling, but then again Brian continued to tell himself that this was probably pretty great for only one month of working away at it. He was much farther along with the apparent progress of the girls with the possible exception of Emily—Brian was sure that she was likewise practicing a lot in secret, even if as of yet his little Latina hadn’t revealed much of anything special in their group practices.

    I’m completely, one hundred percent positive she’s practicing on the sly, though, Brian thought as he cut off a corner of french toast with the edge of his fork and then skewered it with the tines to bring to his mouth. There’ll come a day where we’re in some little contest of magical might, and she’ll be all MUAHAHA THAT WASN’T EVEN MY REAL POWER LEVEL and pull out some crazy advanced shit. But, I’ll be ready. I’ll be able to counter her with OH, THIS WASN’T EVEN MY FINAL FORM.

    With their current stage of magic amounting to nothing much more than parlor tricks, it was easier to motivate himself with competitive—if a little immature—potential one-ups-manship with Emily than it was to try to compare himself to the hidden dangers of magic users outside their little group. Week by week his magic capacity was slowly improving, and all he could do for now was grind away at things… and deal with the constant brain-scouring migraines.

    We’re all still basically stuck in the ‘level zero’ stuff, too, Brian thought as he chewed. With ‘level one’ being like, half a year off. Or, more? Maybe more.

    At the moment, that qualitative difference was a nigh-impossible mountain to overcome. The next stage up from where they were at would see them forming sparks or tiny flames with their fingertip instead of just light—that definitely still felt like a long way off. Instead of useless things like floating feathers and paperclips, they would be working up to very minor cantrips, which seemed to have endless potential. In theory, they would be able to ‘imprint’ intent into telekinesis, so long as they were imprinting something very simple they already had ‘muscle memory’ for; the examples Kelly gave were to flick lightswitches from a distance with a gesture, or button or unbutton a garment simply by pointing at each button.

    Which sounds cool as FUCK, Brian inwardly lamented how many months off that still was. Endless potential there, feel like we would all immediately just play around with cantrips ALL THE TIME. Unclasping a bra using only the power of my mind? Or, maybe Kelly and Emily unzipping my pants while their actual hands are all over each other elsewhere? Holy shit.

    Creating flames instead of just light is gonna be amazing, too. Be awesome to be able to light a candle by pinching the wick with your fingers. Romantic. Badass. I’ll have to buy a bunch more scented candles so we can do that all the time. On the one hand, it’s amazing being able to look forward to doing all that stuff, but then on the other hand it’s SO FRUSTRATING muddling through where we are right now for weeks and weeks with headaches.

    “You alright, babe?” Kelly nudged him with her elbow. “More coffee?”

    “Uh,” Brian blinked. “Sure. Yeah.”

    Despite being their only ‘teacher,’ Kelly was the least enthusiastic about all of the magic stuff, practicing little and endlessly exasperated by the thousands of questions they had for her which she had no clue how to answer. Their bodacious redhead insisted that it was a waste of time, and that if they were really serious about things they would focus on their unique charm abilities, rather than practicing basic magic.

    Which, I mean, Brian wore a bitter smile. Easy for you to say, you’re like, a seer or an oracle or something, you get messages from the future. My special thing is that we wake up clean and refreshed and with a good amount of energy—yeah sure that’s nice to have, but outside of that, it’s pretty worthless.

    “Christine?” Kelly said. “Probably should get your magic practice in now, if you want to get it in today.”

    “Yes,” Christine said without inflection. “I’ll… I’ll start.”

/// Man. Bad writing day maybe or I'm just starting to want to scrap all of the Harem Life teasers so far and start from scratch or something. This one was just hemorrhaging paragraphs when I went through it in edit today, seems like just about every other one I didn't like and cut... and then I'd read through it all again and not like what was left over, either. I don't know. Maybe I should just distill some of the sentiments in these I do like but express them in a different way, have a different kind of RF start?