Don't Look Up

by WeebTrashMachine

Every time you dream you risk falling forever into a surreal world of hellish survival. In this world, forced breeding is the only way to overcome the attrition to humanity's numbers caused by the bizarre monsters that feed on us. As a male foreigner you're given a certain deal: 12 underage child brides, 20 years to keep them pregnant, then you're fed to a snake girl. Worth it?

Don't Look Up

It was a sex dream.

It was a dream of conquest.

He held his little prize tightly in his arms as he searched desperately for a place to enjoy it. This was not an unusual dream for him. He would never find a safe place to do the thing he was so desperate to do. He could only wake up, disappointed. Unfulfilled. He realized this and, further, realized that by realizing this, he would soon wake up and the ultimate opportunity would again be lost, forever.

His frustration was so great, his desire so immense, and his lucidity just right, such that he managed to think of something he had never tried before, and did it right there in his last possible moments before awakening. He looked up.

And then, Up looked back.

He had the impression of passing through a metaphysical doorway then enduring an inexplicable transformation. He became unbound, as if from the effects of gravity shutting off, along with other fundamental forces of reality and self that he couldn't begin to identify. He floated through a void the deep, dark blue of a final twilight sky.

He began to encounter soft resistance, as if passing through and being caressed by countless invisible ribbons. One of which seemed to like him more than the others, and he felt it wrap around and slide over every part of his body, finally settling to wrap around the little prize that was somehow still in his arms. He felt the ribbon wrapped around his prize,for as it turned out that was yet another part of his own body.

He and the ribbon saw a glowing amber doorway ahead and willed themselves through it…

He held his breath with the instinct of a newborn as he tumbled violently through dark, warm waters. He was impossibly disoriented, then suddenly, he wasn't. Gentle sunlight on his arms and eyelids beckoned him to open his eyes. He did, and found his chin on cool dirt, looking ahead at his two arms, stopped in the process of clawing into the dirt in front of him. He felt and heard the surprisingly warm river that he appeared to have dragged himself out of, as it burbled and pulled at his legs. He shakily turned his head towards his legs, and saw the lower half dangling and bouncing in the fiercely frothing, strangely pink and body-temperature river.

For a moment, he was consumed with the irrational urge to slip back into the comfortable, womb-like river, and have it deliver him wherever he was meant to go...

*Crunch, crunch.* That thought was lost forever when he turned back towards the source of the noise. Turning back to face forward, he encountered the prettiest little feet he had ever seen. The toes were painted pink with colorful drawings of various flowers on each toenail. The feet appeared to be wrapped in sandals made of bright green vines that wrapped artistically up slender, tan legs up to the lower calves. The bottom of each sandal appeared to be one, large leaf. As his eyes traveled up slim, long legs, he heard, "Don't look up!" and froze, suddenly ashamed to realize that he was about to look up a girl's skirt.

Moot point when the girl squatted down, causing her short green skirt of leaves to hike up and reveal everything underneath.

"Are you from Earth? Good... Morning! I'm Lizzie, what's your name?!" Her skin was paler at the top of her thighs. She wore a pair of pink panties that seemed a little too small, showing off pale skin to either side of the thin strip of cloth.

"Uh..." His mouth felt awkward, as if he had never used it before, "Earth. Morning. Zack."

When she spread her knees further apart, giving him an even better view of her nether region, he finally jerked his head up to her face. She wore a thin strip of leaves across her modest chest, showing much more torso than it covered. She had curly brown hair, hazel eyes, freckles on her nose and cheeks, and a huge, warm, eye-squinting smile on her young face.

"I knew it! Happy Birthday!" She lowered her energetic, fast-talking, bubbly voice conspiratorially, "I saved your life, you know. I pulled you out of the river, you know. I wasn't supposed to. Let's keep it a secret between us, forever, OK?" She never stopped smiling or changed her expression, even when Zack couldn't help but quite obviously glance at the attractive curves created by the tightly fitting leaf stripe compressing her chest and the soft looking pale area between her legs.

"Is it... My birthday?"

"No, silly! It's my birthday! I turned 15 today. That's how I knew you'd be here. We almost never get Imports in Bear Season, but I knew you'd be here." Zack didn't understand the devotion in her eyes and it made him uncomfortable. With one hand, she helped him up with surprising strength. With the other, she pressed a thorny rose with a long stem into his other hand.

"Bear Season? Where.. Am I?" He noticed he had pricked a finger on the rose and that it bled a thick, bright drop of pink blood the color of bubble gum or Pepto Bismol. It didn't hurt.

"Oops!" Lizzie noticed the blood, and briefly stuck his wounded finger into her mouth, wrapping her equally pink, presumably lipstick-covered lips around his finger and both hands around his hand. He noticed that he was a good deal taller than her and his hands much bigger. She had perhaps a plain face, but one expertly decorated with makeup.

"You're on Quilt! But I'm not supposed to say too much, you know? I'm supposed to take you to the Immigration Office first thing!" Her fingernails were similarly decorated to her toes, making her outfit one entirely of pink and green, with flowers of both colors, weaved into long, curly hair. The makeup made her eyes pop out attractively, and along with the floral accessories, painted nails, plant-like outfit, and girly voice and mannerisms, she gave Zack the impression of a hyper-feminine, preppy and peppy girly-girl teenager that was probably extremely fashionable by the standards of another dimension. Her smile never faltered and she never stopped looking directly into his eyes even as his own wandered.

"Thank you for saving me?"

Still holding one of his hands, she put a finger to his lips to shush him and said, "No, no, that's a secret. You crawled out of the Birth Canal all by yourself, remember?" She winked. Zack noticed the dirt under his fingernails and how only the part of his legs that were still in the river were wet right now. It did seem like he had crawled out on his own, and sometime ago.

"Birth Canal?" Lizzie turned back to him from where she had been stealthily spitting out the dirt she had sucked from his finger with quiet "ptooies".

"That's what we call that river since it's red and pink and people come out of it! OK, it's off to the Immigration Office now. You just have to follow the arrows, you know." She held one of his arms against her chest with both of hers and snuggled up against him, dragging him along, causing him to make kind of a limping motion as they went. She continued to look up into his eyes and face the entire time with that same wide smile of adoration. This much attention and touching from a pretty, half-dressed young girl was finally getting to him and he had to blush and look away as she dragged him along. He saw only the rolling hills of an idyllic meadow all around him, no trees in sight. The flesh colored river seemed to bubble violently out of the ground in the medium distance, then fall and disappear into a randomly placed crevasse very close to where he had come ashore. The crevasse was exactlu as wide as the river, which was only a couple dozen feet across, but which raced by so violently as to be entirely a splashing, rough surface. He wasn't sure how anyone, much less himself, could have pulled themselves out of the wildly tumbling "Birth Canal".

On either side of the river, right in the middle of its unnaturally short length, were three signs made out of what appeared to be yellow brick. Each was in the shape of some sort of arrow; one, a shape familiar to Zack, the other two also obviously arrows, but of an alien looking design. On one side of the river only, there appeared to be the remains of a fourth type of arrow, one made out of black bricks. It lay in pieces on the ground, original shape indistinguishable.

They soon found themselves on a sort of rough dirt road where no grass grew, a road pointed to by the yellow bricks. Zack noticed then that Lizzie had never stopped talking.

"-Bear Season. Which is why no one is out here except us, you know? And I knew you'd be here today because today's my last day, you know?" She handed him a tall purple flower that she had seemingly produced out of thin air. It joined the tall rose in his other hand. It was also thorny.

"Yeah, I got an extra year because my level 1 astral is unique." She handed him a tall equally thorny orange flower. Its shape was nothing Zack had ever seen. "So I had a whole extra year to reach level 2, or find a practical use for my flowers." A thorny green flower was next. Zack's hand began to drip with pink blood from the tiny puncture wounds. "Well, I didn't reach level two, obviously, and they couldn't use my flowers because of the thorns..." Her smile suddenly changed in a subtle way and became infinitely sad as she handed Zach one more flower, one that was in the shape of a tulip and appeared to be made of translucent crystal.

"...Do you like my flowers, Zack?" Her smile never wavered, but the vulnerability and hurt he suddenly saw in Lizzie's eyes broke his heart in an instant. In a panic, he grabbed the last, crystal flower from her hand. It's thorns bit into his hand just before it seemed to shatter and disappear in a flash of green light. Lizzie didn't seem to notice and resumed pulling him along, this time staring straight ahead, determined.

"What do you mean, today's your last day?" He followed up on the disturbing point that jumped out at him the most.

"Well yeah, childhood's over, you know. Time to leave the Citadel, go to the Farms, and become a Breeder. Arranged marriage and all that, you know. Unless, of course, I happen to meet a handsome man with a useful skill set or a powerful Astral who insists that he wants to take me along on his free pass to live in the Citadel as his wife..."

Zack wasn't sure of his original impression that Lizzie was merely "plain, with exquisite makeup". The aura she gave off of wanting to give herself to him, to please him, turned him on greatly and instantly. He felt the urge to protect this young girl that needed him so much; further, he wanted to own her and to consume her. Knowing that he could do so made her indescribably beautiful all of a sudden.

She appeared to look for something in his eyes, found it, then lowered her eyes submissively, laying her head against his arm as she held it with both of her own and, for the first time, stopped talking. A few minutes later, her hand found its way to his erection and expertly rubbed it through his pants. They continued that way for a while, neither talking nor looking at each other.

Thirty minutes later, she removed her hand when they crested a particularly large rolling hill in the seemingly endless meadows of soft grass and pretty flowers. In the distance, quite abruptly, a massive structure of rough stone rose out of the meadow; it appeared to be a wall of one solid piece of dark stone, with an uneven top that jutted into the air 40 feet above the ground and taking the shape of sharp teeth made from stalagmites. There was a hint of movement flickering between the teeth, indistinct shadows that couldn't be made out even by the light of the daytime sun…

Sun? Zack looked up and around, unable to find the source of daylight. The sky seemed to be a uniform blue with no star. Lizzie noticed Zack looking at the sky and leapt back five feet away from him in panic.

"What are you doing!? You just got here, don't leave!" In a huff, she grabbed his hand and began stomping off towards the great dark walls of stone, occasionally looking over her shoulder at him with a pout, making sure that he was being good and not looking up. As they approached, Zack made out the great, dark stone structure as something like a gently curving circle perhaps about a mile in diameter. The ground around the walls was well-tread and grassless. Lizzie walked up to the dark, solid-looking walls and scratched her head in thought with her free hand. She dragged him clockwise and back around the great walls, seeming to narrow her search each time.

After a few minutes her face lit up and she went "Ah-hah". She pointed about 10 feet up on the wall, and a fragrant, dusty blue flower sprouted from the ground and bloomed, growing rapidly up the side of the wall to where Lizzie pointed. It seemed to shed a constant aura of something like pollen. Ten seconds later there was a sneeze from a source unknown, then a lean figure in the same dark colors as the wall leapt down from where Lizzie was pointing, landing agilely, without a sound.

"I still have no idea how you do that, Lizzie," came a muffled voice from underneath a helmet. The dark figure shook himself like a dog and a cloud of dark particles came off his body in a cloud, revealing a lithe warrior. He was covered head to toe in shiny, dark green scales, matte-textured like a snake. He had two black spears across his back, each tipped with a dark purple, slightly curved point with the appearance of a fang, about a foot long each. The figure brushed a hand over its head and his helmet peeled back across his face with a slithering sound, revealing a swarthy-skinned young man with dark hair and vertical pupil eyes like a snake.

He spoke, voice no longer muffled, "I'm still convinced that you're something special."

Lizzie gave him a critical squint, "Not special enough to take me as a wife though, I see."

The man raised his hands and pointed at a large number 2 scratched into the front of his armor, faintly, "I can only take two wives and you know it. You'll have to forgive me for not volunteering to head back into zero country during Snake Season just for you."

Still squinting, Lizzie countered, "I suppose I'll have twenty years as a Breeder on the Farms to search my heart for forgiveness."

The man frowned, "If they let me bring the dog-stickers I might even consider it," he turned to Zack and appraised him, then continued talking to Lizzie. "I'd give you the usual speech about how you're both small enough for the Takers to Take and old enough for the Eaters to Eat and shouldn't be wandering outside the Citadel alone, but it looks like you were actually successful with whatever you were trying to do." Lizzie pressed herself against Zack's side possessively, proudly, again wrapping both her arms around one of his and pulling him down a little due to their height difference.

"I'm Jason," the scale-armored, snake-eyed man said in a friendly manner, extending his arm to Zack for a handshake. Zack returned the gesture with his free hand, noticing how Jason's shiny armor seemed to turn from green to blue when his body rotated to grasp his hand.

"I'm Zack, cool armor."

"Thanks! Only had to kill giant monsters as tall as this wall to get it."

"He only had to kill one but he killed two." Lizzie added, with stars in her eyes directed at Jason that made Zack immediately jealous. She continued, "I bet he could have stayed and killed four more, you know?"

"It only takes two to go from Zero country to living in the Citadel, and it was a close call both times. I would have done it, if I knew I'd meet you one day. You know you're the best at what you do, Lizzie." She gave Jason a mischievous look and pushed out one cheek with her tongue.

Noticing the distressed look on Zack's face, Jason cleared his throat and said, "Anyway, we'd better bring the Import to Immigration while he still bleeds pink. Wanna circle around to a gate or just head through the wall?"

"Wall's fine," Lizzie declared without consulting Zack on whatever that meant and dragged him by his hand toward the wall. Jason took her other hand and stepped into the wall at an angle, disappearing. Zack stopped in alarm, halting the train of people. Jason noticed and popped back out of the wall.

"Oh, sorry. It's an optical illusion. There are passages through the wall just barely wide enough for a human to pass through, but you can't see them from the outside and you can't see inside unless you have an eye like mine." He flicked some sort of translucent membrane over his slit-pupiled eyes for emphasis. "Hold hands, close your eyes, and don't make sudden movements with your head or you'll gash it open on a rock. Just take it slow. It was made for you."

Without further explanation, he drew them into the wall. Zack saw that when standing in just the right spot, the entrance was easily visible, but that it was all but invisible until that moment. He held his breath and stepped into the black mess inside the wall, closing his eyes as he was dragged along at a slow pace by Lizzie's little hand. Zack felt claustrophobic when he felt a smooth stone brush against his legs, arms, and side of his face. But he stayed in control and just gripped Lizzie's hand tighter. It was so quiet he could hear a hallucinating buzzing sound. Despite his anxiety at being lost or left behind in the darkness, he began to feel a strange sense of peace and safety, as if he instinctively knew the world was a dangerous place, but also that nothing could find him and get him here in the darkness.

All too soon, he felt light against his eyelids and opened his eyes, just as the group stepped out of the wall on the other side. Zack blinked as his eyes readjusted to the steady daytime light. The first thing he noticed was a sea of Autumn colored leaves, each one large enough to make-up the entirety of a military-style single-person tent. There was a steady ring of these leaf-tents making their way around the circumference of the inside of the great dark wall. Somewhere off in the distance he saw the line of tents end and people working to construct new ones, using large green leaves and some sort of bright red string.

In and around the tents were a multitude of soldiers in various states of dress. Some were dressed in a piecemeal set of black metal and large scales the same color as Jason's, except so huge that one scale, suspended by the same red cord that tied the tents together, was enough to cover a soldier's entire chest or back. They were all armed with spears; some bright wood with a purple fang similar to Jason's, some a solid, matte black spear the same material as some as their pieces of armor, and lastly some simpler looking spears of the same bright wood base but with various sharp rocks mounted on the tip. None of the soldiers had the combination of black metal and purple fang that Jason had, nor his form-fitting armor of relatively tiny scales. Some of the soldiers appeared to be training or sparring, some gambling or playing other games, some chatting with middle-aged women in bright, alien looking fashions. Zack thought he spotted a young teenage girl sneaking from tent to tent.

"Where are we?" Zack asked, taking it all in.

"The outer ring of Citadel, where the Suicide Army lives," Jason replied. "As soon as that ring of tents fills up, there won't be any more room for them in the Citadel. At that point they'll be sent out to cull the Eaters. Then there won't be anymore Suicide Army, and the ring will start over. Unless they fail and the Eaters wipe us out, of course." Jason seemed nonchalant about all this, as if stating rote common sense. He continued, "In the meantime, they do a little farming and a lot of flirting with the old ladies of the Citadel. Sometimes, with sneaky students," he winked at Lizzie, who looked in the other direction and whistled innocently.

"Alright, let's bring you in," Jason let go of Lizzie's hand and led them towards a path that headed towards the center of the city. Most of the men Zack saw wore simple clothes made of woven together leaves under their armor, or by itself if they weren't wearing armor at the time. As they passed the line of tents, Zack noticed a young man in blue jeans and a hoodie who grinned at him and said, "Hope you like potatoes!" before turning back to talk animatedly with a pair of colorfully attired women in their late 30's.

Zack noticed that he was similarly attired in "normal" clothes, except in his case it was sweatpants and a t-shirt with bare feet. He was surprised his feet were bare and he hadn't noticed until now; he supposed it was because the ground was comfortable and the air neither warm nor cold. He suspected he could walk around naked without discomfort, as he saw more than a few soldiers doing.

Jason led them past the tents, past fields of crops he didn't recognize (and some potatoes, presumably), into a crowded city of wood and leaves. All the buildings were no larger than one story and made of the same bright wood. Great leaves acted as walls, ceilings, and floors, draped around a wooden skeleton. Windows were simply gaps in the structure on the walls or ceiling, and everything was tied together by the bright red, ropey material Zack had seen before; up close it looked like tubes of intestine. About halfway to the middle of the city, they passed through a busy marketplace-like plaza full of various kinds of people. More than half were well-dressed women between 35 and 90, wearing clothing of a mishmash of plant, flower, shavings of wood, black carapace pieces of insects, tiny spots of bright red tubing, and the first cloth Zack had seen so far, much of it recognizable as from, originally, some sort of pajamas or underwear of various styles. He noted one old lady in a dinosaur onesie of a design he was certain he had seen somehow recently.

In the marketplace, the women traded clothes, plant based makeup, and served each other various complicated dishes of bird and vegetable. The smell of fried potatoes was ever present and tantalizing. Among the women were the occasional, often huge, cloaked figure, covered by a shroud of mangy fur. For the most part their faces stayed covered as they talked and traded. A pair of furry folk were sitting on chairs made of leaves and drinking clear liquid from oversized peaches and obviously inebriated. Both had the head of their cloak pushed back, revealing large androgynous features with strange aspects; one had eyes that were constantly spinning swirls and a white unicorn's horn on his/her head, and the other had yellow, pupiless eyes and the bloated blue skin of a drowned corpse. Lastly, was the rare younger person of either gender, darting about in a bathrobe.

"A lot of naughty students, today," Jason remarked.

"They're just, like, super bored, you know?" Lizzie replied defensively. No one paid their group too much attention; some glanced at Jason's eye and gave him a little nod, some admired Lizzie's outfit and body approvingly, while Zack was largely ignored.

As they approached the center of the city, the houses became more elaborate, sometimes being made partially of stone, living vines, a type of colorful glass, and other various and colorful components. Many were decorated with a variety of recognizable blankets, pillows, chairs of all kinds, a toilet seat, a car seat, and so on. Despite the presence of so much "junk", this was obviously the wealthy district as every object was both spotlessly clean and tastefully displayed.

There were a couple objects that looked completely alien to Zack; a floating brown orb, slowly rotating over what appeared to be an upright fork, and something that looked like a see-saw on wheels. The people in this area were generally even older, no one under 60. There wasn't a white head to be found, however, as their hair all seemed dyed one vibrant color or another. A kindly looking pink-haired old man waved at the group from his rocking chair on the porch of one house as they passed. A strange looking bird, like a crow with the eyes of a spider, perched casually on the man's shoulder and watched them pass, feigning disinterest.

Beyond the last of the fancy houses was a great gray dome, for all the world looking like a dusty gray geode. Between the geode and rich-junky houses was a huge green field filled with bizarre objects large and small. Each seemed carefully placed a certain distance away from the others on the large, grassy field.

Lizzie announced, "Behold the wonders of humanity! But don't ask me what they do, because I never paid attention in class..."

"And you wonder why you're being sent to the Breeding Farms," Jason quipped. In response Lizzie stuck out her tongue at Jason and his behind Zack.

"I was never going to get in the Citadel that way," Lizzie countered, "The best I can do is make myself unique and pretty with the pieces of flowers I grow, you know?" She gestured at her outfit and makeup.

"Sorry, Liz. I know you did what you could. I hope you got lucky in the end." Jason answered, gesturing to Zack. Zack wasn't sure what they were talking about, but "getting lucky" with Lizzy didn't sound bad at all.

"I'm sure of it!" Lizzie answered, somewhat desperately, Zack thought. "You like me don't you, Zack?" She stared into his eyes and turned the charm on full blast.

"I, o-of course I do," Zack answered in distress, "You're the prettiest girl I've ever held hands with," which was true as far as Zack remembered, as his memories before he woke up outside the Birth Canal were vague and fuzzy. Lizzie nodded in satisfaction and gestured to Jason to lead them on while continuing to cling fiercely to Zack's arm.

Jason took them counterclockwise around the grassy field, keeping a healthy distance from the artifacts they passed, heading towards a well-worn dirt path that connected the outer edge of the grass to the gentle field.

"I didn't go to school since I was born in Zero country, but I do attend classes in the Citadel and absorb what I can. I know what a couple of these things do, but their names are way too hard to remember. This one is everyone's favorite, it heals you and makes you live longer," Jason the tour-guide gestured to a giant floating white orb, around which were picnicking various elderly people and one young man soldier with a wounded arm in a bloody sling who was rapidly eating raw potatoes. As Zack watched, the soldier finished eating the last potato, stood up, removed the sling with his now apparently fully functional arm, and started heading back to the perimeter of the city, twirling his stone-tipped spear idly.

Jason noted Zack's dumbfounded look and grinned smugly, "Don't have those on Earth, do ya? Although every one of us would happily trade it to you guys if you'd also take the Eaters along with it." Lizzie nodded in agreement and shivered.

"Do I want to ask what the Eaters are?" Zack had a hard time imagining anything so terrible that it could be worth trading an object that cured all illness and extended life.

"It'll be explained to you shortly, I'm sure. Ah, here is the fire that burns cold and either makes you crazier or saner as you stare at it. I can't see it at all, because I have two Eater-eyes." Zack examined the tall black candle, three times taller than he was and mounted on a dark metallic base, and the cool blue flame it produced.

"Comforting.." Lizzie murmured. Zack nodded, enjoying a sense of peace as he stared at the flame. Jason prodded them along to keep moving. Next was a tree only about twice the size of a person, with the smiling face of a young child looking out at them. The child's features were made of wood and animated, as it waved its bare brown branches at them when they passed.

"No idea what that one does," Jason whispered, smiling and waving back at the tree as they passed. "I actually remember the name of this one, though, the "Bird Feeder". It's supposed to be the best thing Quilt people have ever made, but I can't remember why." It didn't look nearly as impressive as the ones before it, Zack thought. It was merely a small steel-colored sphere suspended over a fork, similar to one Zack saw in the rich-junk district. Next to it was a large brown wedge of wood, the same shape as one of the alien arrows he had seen before, only with the wider edge "pointing" down. There was a mesmerizing texture carved on this arrow that Zack couldn't help but get lost in... And then suddenly Jason and Lizzie were helping him to his feet, up from where he had spontaneously started sitting.

"Careful, 4th world stuff does that if you look at it too long," Jason admonished.

"Huh? It made me sit? What's the point of-" Zack was interrupted by the sounds of *Quack, quack, splat, quack, quack, splat* One by one a series of pot bellied ducks with a black stripe where eyes should be flew straight down into the ground near the "arrow" missing both it and the metallic sphere. Every time a duck hit the ground their pot-belly exploded, sending water everywhere. Half a dozen soldiers surrounded the artifact in a loose circle; two of them were using a long net of wood and red cord and were rapidly pulling pieces of exploded duck away from the artifact at the extreme end of the long nets as if fishing leaves out of a pool.

"That's how we get protein," commented Jason, "Fat Ducks."

"Are they good?" Asked Zack.

"Totally!" piped in Lizzie, "They taste like chicken!"

"Whatever that is..." Replied Jason, glumly. One of the soldiers let out a cry right before a great wet smacking sound, as a huge, brown, mottled sphere violently crashed into the ground, deforming and bouncing back up to float a couple feet up. It was separated into two halves tightly closed together like a walnut. There were raised gray areas of a rough texture like gravel; the organism started spinning in place and ramming the ground with the gray pads every few seconds, scraping dirt off the ground and into the air. After a minute it seemed to tire and stopped spinning, at which point the surrounding soldiers all speared it at once, transfixing it in place. It wiggled in several directions as if trying to spin but was unable to get any momentum and break free of the half a dozen spears that impaled it. The soldiers dragged it a couple dozen feet away to a wide, huge wooden bowl, and it continued hovering and struggling weakly.

Once it was directly over the bowl, one soldier removed his spear, looked for a certain spot and stabbed it back in. He apparently found what he was looking for on the fourth try, as the huge floating creature gave a great shudder and opened along the seams, revealing two sets of bright, white, shiny square teeth. The creature made a low, bassy "Mwooooop" sound then puked a huge amount of yellow, oily substance, perfectly filling the large wooden bowl. It gave one final shudder and produced a pearl the size of a man's head that dropped into the bowl, causing the oily yellow liquid to splash and overflow the bowl. One soldier grimaced, bent over and picked the beautiful orb out of the bowl, then tossed it carelessly over his shoulder, before licking the yellow gunk off his fingers.

"Gross..." Commented Zack.

Jason and Lizzie looked at Zack in shock and Lizzie asked "Are you crazy?" Before skipping off to the soldier with sticky fingers and asking him questions cutely.

Jason commented, "And that's how we get our fats and make everything delicious. We call that thing a Mwop." The soldiers removed their spears from the Mwop and it began to float and rotate in a random direction, listlessly. One soldier pushed it a few feet away from the others then punted it into the sky, never to be seen again. While this was happening, the soldier with sticky hands finished licking one and seemed to come to an agreement with Lizzie over the other; Lizzie got on her knees, put her hands behind her back, and opened her mouth, then romanced each of the soldier's sticky fingers one by one as he stuck them in her mouth. Zack's jaw dropped at this lewd spectacle, while Jason and the rest of the soldiers chuckled.

Jason noticed Zack's expression and asked, "I wonder what's going through your mind, Earth-guy?"

Zack felt revulsion, jealousy, and arousal in equal parts. "Same," he replied.

"Well, Lizzie's my friend, so I'm not going to say anything right now. Let's keep going, the next artifact is from your world." Lizzie skipped back up to Zack and took his arm again like nothing happened, jumping into the conversation.

"This one is my favorite! It shows you what you and your astral look like!" As she pulled him along after Jason, Zack wondered how he wanted to react to Lizzie right now; he just shrugged and decided to figure it out later. He felt strangely numb to pain and emotion and decided it would be best to just embrace that fact and not worry about things while he was still overwhelmed and unsure what was going on.

The next stop was a long line of pretty and colorful ladies in their late 30's and older, with the occasional young man in soldier garb or young teen girl in a bathrobe. One lady in a furry hat operated a flip phone attached to a column of wood by a red cord, taking people's pictures and turning the phone around to show those whose picture had been taken; they would stare intently for a few seconds as if memorizing what they saw, then thanked the behatted lady and made way for the next in line. Zack noticed that there were a few couples of soldier men of various ages and their ladies that were holding hands in this process.

"Booo, the Takers can Take this long line!" Lizzie grumped.

"Language!" Jason admonished unseriously, with a grin. "Besides, almost everyone here except for you are too old for the Takers."

"What! I'm 15! I'm just short and cute, you know. Fine, then, the Eaters can Eat them!" Lizzie again hid behind Zack and stuck her tongue out at Jason. Zack had the urge to grab it but resisted.

Jason continued, "We'd best keep going, we're almost to the door."

"Wait, we could just use mine..." Zack interjected, digging his phone out of his pocket. Jason and Lizzie watched, fascinated, as Zack popped the back cover and battery out, dabbed the battery contacts with his sweatshirt to make sure it was dry, put the smartphone back together, and turned it on. A few moments later it made a chime to indicate it was turning on and Jason and Lizzie both jumped. "Hah! Can't believe it works. No signal of course," Zack said, going straight to the camera feature and taking a picture of each of them individually, using the front facing camera to take a picture of himself.

"Let's take a look." They all leaned in as Zack flipped through the recent photos. Lizzie had a young boy with green plant skin and white flower petals surrounding his face sitting on her shoulders. He had a sad look on his face.

"Useless..." Lizzie whispered, with an unreadable look on her face. She covered the plant boy with her hand so she couldn't see him then examined her image with a smile, preening. When she was done, Zack went to the next picture, Jason's. Jason looked the same as he normally did, swarthy dark skin, snake-scaled armor and two spears; except his eyes were missing, replaced with black voids.

"Huh," he mused, "I thought my eyes looked cooler than that."

"They do!" Lizzie countered. "They look like a human's except they're up and down in the middle like this." She held up a little hand vertically, trying to communicate what Zack would simply call "snake eyes".

"Wait, how come you don't know what you look like? Don't you have mirrors?"

"A what?" Jason and Lizzie asked in unison.

"A reflection? Shiny metal? Pool of water after it rains? Glass?" The others shrugged. Zack shrugged back and continued to his picture. There was a bright pink tube the color of his blood running from his belly button, through his shirt, and off into the distance off camera. Additionally, there was something like a translucent, giant tapeworm, flat and as wide as his arm, wrapped around his body from head to toe. Zack stared at his own image, wide eyed.

A few moments later, Lizzie said a simple, calm, "Neat."

Jason, equally calm, followed with, "I wonder what that is. Alright, let's go." Zack was shaking in horror a little as he put his phone away and followed the others to the path in the grass that led to a specific spot on the geode, again grateful that he was obviously numb for some reason.

"Here we are," Jason declared, pointing at a spot on the giant geode that connected to a well-worn, grass-less path that appeared to cut a radius of the entire circular city, from the geode in the center to the wall. On both sides of the path, adjacent to the geode, were various tall, decorative bushes.

"Keep watch for a second, Jason." Lizzie said, then changed direction and pulled Zack in between the bushes.

"You're gonna bush him on his first day?" Jason asked, amused.

"Everyday is bushday, you know?" She answered, pulling Zack into a narrow space between the tall bushes and the geode. Before Zack could react, she shoved him against the geode, flipped up her leaf top to reveal her perky little breasts, got on her knees, pulled down his sweatpants and started jerking him off.

"Whoa, whoa, what- ow! Ow ow ow!" Lizzie had opened her mouth and rammed him to the back of her throat a couple times. Instead of feeling good, it was like mashing his dick into a wall.

Lizzie made a dainty little cough and said, "Sorry, I'm dry. Would you spit into my mouth?" She then closed her eyes and opened her mouth, facing up and waiting.

"You want me to do what now?"

"My throat's dry so you're not sliding down it. So spit in my mouth. Use the good spit from the back of your throat; it's slimier, you know?" She answered without opening her eyes, then went back to waiting with her mouth open. Something about this felt wrong to Zack. Maybe it was too easy or maybe some hidden survival instinct was ringing alarm bells. Perhaps he was just grossed out. He fixed his pants and walked back out of the bushes. Jason was waiting with his arms crossed, casually leaning against the geode where the path ended.

"Not interested in ole dirty knees? I knew you were a man of standards," he grinned and slapped the geode. "Give this a slap and we can move on."

Zach followed directions and a doorway simply appeared in front of him. "See a doorway? Take my hand and pull us through." Jason instructed, holding out a scale-covered hand. The role-reversal didn't escape Zack's notice, and he wondered if he made the right choice downgrading from Lizzie's hand to Jason's. He followed directions and pulled them both through the doorway, Jason closing his eyes before impacting what appeared to him as a wall. On the inside was evidence that this was, in fact, a giant geode. However, the purple crystals that should have made the semi-spherical interior were smashed off and into tiny pieces, filling the room like a shiny purple sea. The only solid ground was a dark gray walkway from the entrance to a small circular platform in the middle of the room.

"Don't fall in," Jason admonished, pointing at a huge, skeletal, seven-fingered hand frozen and grasping at nothing, reaching out of the sea of smashed purple crystal. Jason then looked at the ceiling and rolled his head around, making audible popping noises and going "ahhh" in relief as he did so. "Alright, one more door then you're on your own-"

"Zach, where are you going?! I was going to do you a nice favor, you know!?" Jason was interrupted by Lizzie popping in through the wall behind them.

"Lizzie how did you.. You're an import?"

"Well duh. I've been here since I was seven, you know? So I never got to run around and eat tasty bugs like a little kid. Totally not fair."

"You can't complain to me, Lizzie," Jason replied, "I was born in Zero country. All men, very few women. The little kids have to pick up the slack."

"Whatever, Jason. Zack, I'll be waiting for you in the bushes when you finish Immigration and come back with good news, alright?" Lizzie stated more than asked, instantly back to sweetness and smiles between sentences. She turned and walked back to the wall, slapping it then stepping through and disappearing.

"Lizzie, wait, at least let me out... Takers take it." Jason groaned.

"Do you need me to let you out?" Zack offered helpfully.

"You can let me out when you get back. I have to help you through the next door, first. Only Imports can open the first door, only Natives can open the second. Some sort of defense system so things like that get trapped," Jason pointed again at the seven fingered hand.

"What is that hand? How do these doors work? Is it like the big, dark wall surrounding the city?" Zack couldn't hold the questions in any longer.

"I think it's a Taker. This place is called Storage and it was made with 1st world technology. The wall was made with Astral Tech, probably by a 1st worlder. Stop asking me questions, I'm one of the least educated people in Citadel and you're about to meet the most educated. Now come on, take my hand again."

Zach was incredulous. He thought Jason seemed extremely bright, especially compared to Lizzie. Nevertheless, he took Jason's hand again, and was quickly pulled through the floor in the center of the room before he could realize what was happening and object. He came out in a cramped room that was made of the same solid gray stone as the geode. On one side was a stairway going up into what appeared to be a ceiling of the same stone. The other side of the room opened to a very narrow stairway, narrower than Zack's shoulders such that he'd have to turn and walk down them sideways.

"Whoa, can we fit?" Zack asked.

"You can. I'm going back up to find a couple pretty purple rocks to give to the wives," Jason answered.

"Were 1st world people really tiny or something?" Zack asked.

Jason thought for a second, then as he climbed back up and disappeared into the ceiling responded, "Good thought. Maybe, all I can say is that there's no fat people in the Citadel for a reason!"

Left alone, Zach considered the narrow stairway. He figured if he were too fat to pass, he'd be stuck right here in this little room until he either died, lost the weight, or a "Native" decided to guide him out. He shrugged, turned sideways, and started shuffling down the stairs. He expected to be covered in a veil of darkness, underground as he was and without any source of light or fire. But the stairway was merely dim and his eyes could comfortably make out even the grain of the stone walls. Come to think of it, the inside of the geode dome had no lights either and he could see there even better. The ceiling was some distance several feet above his head; Zack supposed that if being fat were not allowed, being tall certainly was. Getting annoyed with the cramped, slow, sideways journey, Zack found he could leap large distances down the stairs and brace himself against the smooth gray walls with his arms and shoulders to control his landing. The movement became instinctual. He closed his eyes and lost himself in the sensations of rushing air and speed.

Until the walls disappeared and he crashed violently on the ground on his hip and elbow. Zack hissed through his teeth and looked at his elbow, where pink blood bled through and stained his sweatshirt. But the pain was already gone; when he pulled away the sleeve and wiped away the blood, there was no wound. Zack swallowed and his ears popped, then his ears were filled with the omnipresent roar of a massive, wide-open space. Zack looked around; there was a massive stalactite coming down from a ceiling so high that he couldn't judge the distance. The stairway he just emerged from came out from the exact center of stalactite which hovered about 10 feet from the ground. Extending down from the exit of stalactite was a continuation of the stairs, but wider and made of the same bright wood he saw on the surface. He could see the ceiling gently curve in the distance then abruptly become straight and become the same dark stone that the walls of the Citadel were made of. Zack looked down; the floor was the same dark stone, and starting under the stairway exit and heading off into the distance was a slightly elevated road of black bricks. Every so often, a black brick was missing and replaced by a yellow one.

Without a better plan, Zack followed the black and yellow brick road. He judged that the diameter of the cave was roughly the same as the city above and reasoned that the teeth-like walls above were merely an extension of the same dark stone that made the walls of the great cave beneath. There were buildings and other structures here and there as well as piles and piles of a variety of objects and material that made up most of the mass in the great space. Zack found a pile of yellow sand and next to it a pile of bricks. He saw many piles of wood organized into various piles of differing lengths and stages of processing with what looked like more than a few trees with their branches shaved off on one end, and neat, perfectly shaped two by fours on the other. There was a similar series of piles for various other materials, such as the red, intestinal looking tubing he had seen several times already, various sizes of the scales he had seen the soldiers wearing, some smaller ones appearing as if they were in the process of being assembled into an armor set like Jason's, piles of intimidating looking black armor that seemed to be sized for children, piles of disassembled armor sets organized in differently shaped pieces, piles of huge leaves in different states of decay, piles of dead insects with shiny black carapaces and pieces of their hides organized into their own piles, a huge pile of the fluffy fur he saw some large people wearing cloaks of in town, large creepy bones the were obviously not from a human and seemed to indicate an alien organization of entrails not from a creature of Earth, piles of material components such as rubber, leather, metal, porcelain, piles of familiar objects similar to what he saw attached to houses in the inner city above, a pile of track phones and a pile of smartphones, a pile of tablets and a pile of socks.

But more than anything else, just a huge amount of empty floor and empty space. He passed a two story building made of a wooden structure with what looked like black carpet draped over it to make a ceiling and walls and a sign that read, "Warning: Pool of Water." Not sure what the warning was about, feeling as if he could handle himself around pools of water, Zack poked at the carpet walls. Finding them as unyielding as iron and seeing no way around them, he gave up and continued down the brick road. The brick road ended after becoming a circle of bricks slightly wider than the road. Zach wisely stepped around it, suspecting another hidden doorway or staircase.

Beyond the brick road was a path bordered on one side by church pews and the other sort of chairs one sits in while waiting on an airport flight. There was one bored looking soldier with an all black spear and large-scales armor reclining across multiple airport chairs. Beyond the waiting area was one of those plastic, fold-up party-tables that contrasted mightily with the huge, ancient-looking textbooks that covered it and the old man with a long, flowing white beard that was flipping through them. It did sort of go with the purple snuggie with yellow stars and moons that he was wearing, as well as the sports bottle he occasionally took sips out of that read "Perfect No Leak! Maximum taste!" and, Zack guessed, the same thing beneath it in Korean.

The old man apparently noticed his presence as he waved a hand at Zach distractedly and, without looking up, said in a British accent, "Have a seat, please. I'll be with you shortly. We're waiting on a–"

"Creeeeeaa!"

There was an unearthly scream that started off like a shrieking cat then quickly turned into a nightmarish sound Zack's brain couldn't comprehend. He froze and goosebumps raised over his entire body. For some reason he was disoriented to the extreme, convinced in turn that he was asleep, dying, dead, and finally waiting to be born. His fight or flight reflex told him to run away from the source of chaotic noise (directly behind him) but his body wouldn't move. The adrenaline rush also let him absorb everything in his field of vision with extreme clarity; the soldier reclining on the airport chairs was startled into falling on the floor and stayed there. The old man jumped, spitting a little liquid on the ancient book in front of him, then quickly blotting it with a sleeve of his snuggie, looking embarrassed. A man with a bald head, grey skin, canted eyes and large ears flattened against the side of his head, speed walked from a large bookshelf parallel to and some ways back from the folding table, reached the table and quickly sat down in a chair next to the bearded man.

"I will never get used to that noise," the old man grumbled moodily, rubbing his temples. Immediately afterward there was the sound of chains sliding against each other and splashing water, then an old woman with deep brown skin, a lean face, and a long straight nose just appeared in another chair on the other side of the white bearded man. There was a flash of Eldritch light, then silence.

The woman commented, also in a British accent, "Aww, he didn't make it." The bearded man in the snuggie (they were all in fact, in snuggies some part of Zack's brain realized) tried to peer past Zack's shoulder and waved at him to move aside and sit down irritably.

The woman suddenly looked alarmed, tapped on beard guy's shoulder, and pointed to Zack still bloody arm, "Pink elbow, pink elbow."

"Terrible luck, young man," the flat eared gray skinned man said in a mushy accent Zack couldn't place.

The long bearded man changed the direction of his gesturing to a come hither motion and said to Zack in a loud whisper, "Get behind me, get behind the table, oops too late," and then in an artificially pleasant voice, "Hey Tony, how'd it go?" Zack walked around the table and stood where the lady was secretly gesturing with a hand behind her back, which was just behind her and to her right. "Tony" was an 11 or 12 year old boy in a pink bathrobe.

He gave an innocent smile and said in a cute voice, "It was so cool! The first thing I saw was-"

"I'm in position," the lady said, interrupting the boy.

The bearded man dropped his smile, stood up, and started speaking very formally with a regal air, "Piece of the Crawling Chaos, Humanity welcomes you." A pause. There was the sound of hydraulics sighing and "Tony" went from looking briefly alarmed to expressionless as a pitch black seam started opening from the top of his head, running down the center of his face and down the exposed part of his chest and into his bathrobe. Zack noticed the large nosed lady's hands were palm down on the desk and tense.

The seam in "Tony '' appeared to be slowly opening, but nothing else, and the old man continued, "There is a barracks to the North on the front lines against our enemies, the Takers. There are several of your kind that live in those barracks and have a pact with my kind. We offer you the same pact. Stay in the barracks or approach the Takers as you will. Slay any that enter your territory; do not let them pass to human lands. In return, we give you the bodies of Takers you slay, and any bodies of Takers that we slay and you discover. No one will fight you for your food. Eat infinitely. There are many more Takers than humans, so you will have much more food as our ally than our enemy. Do we have an accord?" "Tony" nodded, his eyes wandering around in random directions.

He then turned towards Zack and without further ado, charged and attacked.

Several things happened at once; "Tony '' split down the middle to his chest, revealing a hollow inside his body reminiscent of the inside of a mouth, and from that mouth several black and yellow tentacles emerged and whipped towards Zack. The tentacles were entirely composed of a row of sharp yellow teeth, with black eyeballs placed randomly on the tentacle, all looking at Brian. While this happened, the three elders behind the table all raised their hands in different configurations; nose lady made a rectangle with her fingers and peered through like a director framing a shot; a series of translucent rectangles appeared between her hands and the attacking horror, the size of large picture frames and about a foot apart, and accompanied by the sounds of chains sliding against each other. The gray, flat-eared man held one arm straight out, curling the hand into a claw and supporting it with his other arm clutching the elbow. The bearded man raised a hand level with his lips and bent forward while puffing out his cheeks, making as if to blow a kiss. Next: the pair of legs, mouth and tentacles crashed through the sequence of translucent rectangles, each one imploding with a splashing sound, turning into liquid and clinging to the nightmare monster and slowing it down a bit more each time. The black and yellow creature started losing its color, which drained into liquid that flowed through the air, pooling into a slowly rotating orb of color suspended between the fingers of the gray man's clawed hand. The bearded man blew and the colorless, monochrome parts of the monster blew away like dust, leaving only a pair of shoes with legs inside only up to the shins, and three teeth and eyeball stalks that made a slash in Zack's direction but fell short, clattering to the floor, severed.

"Takers, Tony..." The young man in soldier garb on the floor moaned, tears running down his face.

"Were you close?" The big nosed brown woman asked, voice gentle.

"Yeah," the soldier said, standing up and sniffling, "I would have gone to Zero country with him if he had gotten out."

"I'm sorry for your loss," the bearded man said solemnly, "Take his feet and toss them in the Birth Canal. You never know."

The soldier looked skeptical, "Do you really think that's enough for him to move on to another world?"

"I think it's a real possibility," the bearded man answered.

The soldier picked up the gory little feet and turned to walk off saying, "I'll wait upstairs for this guy to let me out," and walked off, "We would have been eaten in a year or two anyway, so who cares?"

Something dripped on Zack's shoe. After watching the soldier walk away, he looked down and saw that he was standing in a puddle of pink blood. He made to cry out in alarm but instead vomited liters of pink blood, collapsing to his knees. He felt the blood coming out of his nose, ears and eyes.

"We're losing a faker and an off-season Astral on the same day? This is exactly why we haven't seen Bahamut in a thousand years, I bet," the lady mourned.

"Don't say that! It's not too late, he can make it. Here;" the bearded man spoke (or so Zack presumed, his eyes covered in pink, as he felt his hand forcibly opened and something slimy squirted into his palm. "Close your hand around this, eat it in a couple minutes." He felt someone close his hand for him.

"Voltaire, would you?"

"Got him," Zach heard the voice and the smushy accent of the gray haired man, as he was picked up around the shoulders and back of the knees.

"Am I dying?" He asked, although it came out as more of a "MWOP" noise through the pink blood pouring from his mouth.

Nevertheless, the gray skinned man answered, while carrying Zach swiftly along, "Dying? Just the opposite, young man. You're giving birth. Well, miscarrying, really." Zach felt more than saw himself being carried down a flight of stairs.

"Mwop?" (What?) "Short version: When you come through the Birth Canal, you're attached to an invisible umbilical cord for approximately three days. During this time, whenever you take physical or mental damage, whatever is on the other end of the cord takes the damage for you and you bleed it's blood instead of your own. After three days, the umbilicord naturally disconnects, leaving you a supply of pink blood that protects you a certain amount for a certain period of time. Tony must have severed your cord when he attacked, causing you to go into labor early."

"Mwop?" (Labor?)

"In your passage to this world, you almost always pick up a passenger. Sometimes two." The gray man kept walking but stopped talking, gasping to catch his breath. After a few dozen seconds, the man continued. Zack judged him to be in excellent physical shape for what appeared to be a middle aged man.

"There are two types of passengers. A parasite that calls itself "a piece of the Crawling Chaos" and a symbiote we call an "Astral Deity". Well, there could be more than two, but we have no record of it. Anyway, one of those two is wrapped around you, feeding off the pink stuff, and consuming it over the course of a couple weeks. When you run out, the passenger leaves, presumably to find a new food source or return where it came from or both. So you're holding a food source for an organism that just entered the world, making you a kind of placenta."

This time the gray man slowed to a walk as he gasped for air. The pink blood seemed to lessen its flow and Zack was able to blink his eyes and see the dark, narrow cave they were passing through one that aimed pretty sharply downward.

He spit out some pink and asked, "So is the passenger my baby?"

"Good guess!" Grey man answered, "The symbiote is the father, your subconscious is the mother, umbilic cords are usually between placenta and baby, not placenta and father, look it's not a perfect metaphor." The gray man put Zack on his feet, took his elbow and kept walking with a look of determination on his face. "I should have started with this part: when the pink blood stops flowing, your passenger will leave, and your baby, a hypothetical construct that you and the symbiote created the moment you joined, will disappear forever after about three minutes. It'll suffocate. You'll never get a chance to make another one."

They reached a large, tall, rectangular prism of brown crystal embedded in the wall at the end of the sloping passage. There was the shape of a pair of footprints in white paint or chalk drawn on the ground three feet in front and slightly to the side of the crystal. Grey man put his middle finger on Zach's bottom eyelid and pulled it down, peering at his eye.

"You're still bleeding. We can talk until your umbilical blood runs dry, then I have to run out of here and give you space so you can birth this baby," The gray man bent over and put his hands on his knees, sweating, and kept talking, "When I leave, eat the glowing gold stuff in your hand, no don't open your hand yet, scrape it off your hand on your bottom teeth and push it under your tongue with your fingers, make sure it's all off your hand, close your mouth, step on the footprints on the ground, face the mirror," he took a deep breath and continued, if you see yellow teeth, black eyes, and hear that horrid scream you heard earlier, you have about two seconds to break eye contact, turn, run, or you'll be killed and Faked."

The man checked Zack's eye again and this time just kept his finger there, staring. "If it's an Astral Reflection, Astral for short, that's the child of your subconscious and the Astral Deity, and 99 times out of a 100 it's going to be that, three minutes is just enough time to meet it, talk to it if it's a talker, decide if you want to bring it out, figure out how to do that, and do it." The gray man let go of his eyelid.

"Time for one question, young man. Get through this then you can ask all you like." Zack swallowed, for the first time tasting the Pepto Bismol flavor of the thick pink blood filling his mouth.

"What... If I messed up? If I don't have a baby?"

"You'll be labeled a "Zero" and exiled to Zero Country. Not always a bad place, but at this point so late in the Cycle it can be a really, really bad place to be. That, and in a few seasons, your body and more will get eaten by giant nigh-invincible beasts. Without an Astral, you have no way to defend yourself in this world. So do you best to bring it out into this world in the time you have. Good luck." With that, the gray man turned and sprinted off, quickly disappearing up the steep slope of the cave. Suddenly, Zack's emotional and physical numbness was gone. Again his adrenaline kicked in and the world appeared to be moving in slow, but this time his mind and vision clouded in full panic. It took less than two seconds to walk over to the footprint on the floor and align himself with them, but from his subjective viewpoint he was making huge, ponderous, moon-walking bounds across the room. He raised the hand with the glowing, lightning-bug-like golden goo and opened it palm up.

*BROW BROW*

There was an odd bassy noise, the brown crystal in front of him started to vibrate and produce light, until he closed his palm in fear. Silence and darkness. He tried gently opening his fingers again.

*BROW BROW*

Same deal. Light, bassy rumbling sound, but now the start of something like music that immediately cut off when he closed his palm again. Zack held perfectly still and stared at the crystal, waiting for something to happen. Nothing. He knew he was running out of time and about to fail something extremely important to his new life in this new world. In out, in out, in out, Zack hyperventilated, building up courage then opened his palm, scraped the goo off on his bottom teeth, as hard and fast as he could, shoving it under his tongue with his fingers then closing his mouth and making sure to suck off any that had been stuck to his fingers.

*BROW BROW*

Bass, drums, a sensual rhythm Zack recognized but couldn't place. "Ooooh Yeeaaah" cooed an impossibly deep voice as light started shining out from the tall brown crystal in thin, rainbow colored beams in random directions. Suddenly, Zack was in a great mood. Euphoric. Light was beautiful, sound magnificent, his body aching in pleasure from the bassy rhythm. His reflection came in view in the crystal in front of him and it was dancing to the music and smiling a big, dopey, stoned smile back at him. He felt great. So great that the darkened, shriveled, severed umbilical cord he saw hanging sickly from the stomach of his reflection, and the arm-wide tape worm that was slowly unraveling itself from around his body, neither bothered him in the slightest. Nor did the large, high-heeled feet that burned into existence from the ground up in front of him, somehow both inside the now mostly transparent crystal and yet standing in front of his own reflection. Painfully tall, black high-heeled shoes, long, pale legs, curvy thighs, and onward up to large, full breasts and a mature, hourglass figure, wrapped in a fetishy outfit of thin black strips of leather, wrapping around breasts, shoulders, top of the thighs and between the legs. The thin line of fire that slowly moved up and seemed to burn the image of the scantily clad woman into existence stopped right at the 9 foot tall limit where the brown crystal met the ceiling, revealing long, pale blond hair and an impishly smiling face with dark eyebrows, full lips, dark eyes, and a devilish beauty.

"Hello, little boy," boomed the same impossibly deep, now considerably more feminine, voice from earlier. Staring up at this monstrously huge woman made Zack feel like a little boy, indeed. There was the sound of a balloon deflating and the unrealistically tall woman began to shrink.

"One moment," boomed the giant lady, "I seem to be calibrating." The background music seemed to lower in volume as the woman shrunk down to becoming a bit slimmer in figure and less voluptuous. Instead of a giant, she now looked like a very tall adult.

"Hello, young man," she boomed in a merely loud voice. Again, the deflating sound.

"Oh, excuse me. Still calibrating, it seems." The mostly naked, leather clad woman shrunk again, this time ending up only a little taller than Zack, still pretty busty, but not nearly as curvy as before. The music was now merely background sound when the woman, now perhaps a "girl", asked in a normal volume, "Little brother?"

The shrinking began again and the music cut off completely and she said, "Guess not!" Now shorter than Zack, she looked up, raised an eyebrow, and declared, "OK. Big brother then."

When she began to shrink again and lose her now modest attributes, she put her hands on her hips and complained in her shrunken voice, "Where exactly are we going with this big guy?" The sound of the deflating balloon went from a whine to a dribble and stopped, leaving the pale, blond-haired girl the height of Zack's belly button and completely prepubescent; her breasts shrunk to nothing, hips, thighs, and butt disappeared, face took on the small-featured, unfinished look of a small child.

The girl looked at her outfit, hanging loosely off her chest and bottom, straps falling down the side of her shoulders and demanded, "Now what is the point of my sexy outfit if I have nothing to show off, hmm?" Then there was the sound of a balloon filling, and the girl underwent some sort of unnatural, second puberty. Without gaining any height, her body became considerably more feminine; her chest and butt filled out, just a little, and her hips and thighs widened, again, just a little. The little tummy of a child sucked in and became the perfect flat of an athletic adult, while her waist actually shrunk. She looked like a tiny, if extremely petite and skinny, adult, and her voice was similarly that of an adult's, but sounding as if it had been electronically reduced and shrunk down to match her reduction in height. The girl ran her hands over her body, examining it, "At least my outfit fits, now. But what am I supposed to be?"

"Beautiful and perfect," Zack answered slowly, grinning, in a stoned voice, "The sexy little girl of my dreams."

"...Oh." The little blond girl said, looking up at him, blushing crimson, "I am what I am supposed to be, then, I suppose."

"I can't believe that you're my child. I'm so lucky," Zack declared in his stoned voice. Several awkward seconds passed as the kinkily-clad little girl and Zack just stared at each other's face in silence. Behind the girl, the tapeworm was nearly finished unraveling itself from Zack's reflection.

"Ahem," the little girl cleared her throat cutely, ending the intimate moment. She affected a confident, smug smile. "You don't realize just how lucky you are... Daddy. You have the privilege of becoming my sex slave, in your dreams, every night... What?" Zack had a hand over his mouth, trying to hide his giggles.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're just so cute!" The little girl crossed her arms and blew out her cheeks in a pout.

She continued, trying to maintain her dignity, "A-anyway, like I was saying at night you will dream of me and enjoy being my plaything. In the day, we will seduce the world and anyone and everyone you desire will become our sex toy, hey stop, stop laughing!" She looked adorably furious and was waving one tiny fist angrily in Zack's directions as he lost composure and burst out laughing, way too stoned for this.

"I'm sorry, hahaha, you sound like you're trying to be serious and badass, and, it's just that, hahaha, it's just that, you're so small and cute that I can't take you seriously!"

The small, mostly naked girl threw a tantrum, stomping her feet and waving her arms in frustration, yelling, "Take me seriously, you clip-clop head!" She panted a few moments then collected herself as Zack continued to smile at her and enjoy the show. The little girl closed her eyes and counted to ten, then returned to a very forced version of her smug and confident smile. She held out a hand and a wide metal collar with a large loop burned into existence, resting on her palm. "As I was saying, sex dreams every night, sexual conquest everyday, all you have to do is put this on and become my slave."

The iron slave's collar made a popping sound and opened up on the side opposite the loop. "Naw," disagreed Zack, as he watched the tapeworm finish unraveling itself from his reflection and swim off through the air and out of sight as if it were underwater. He guessed that he was running out of time.. "Why don't YOU become MY slave? That's more my fetish."

The little girl sputtered in shock, "Wha-wha-wha-what?! I'm the succubus, you stupid head! You become MY slave, then we make everyone else our slaves together," she paused, started panting, struggling to catch her breath. "That's... How it works... You'll like it... You want it... I promise... Why can't I breathe!?" The little girl fell to her hands and knees, gasping for breath. She dropped the slave collar, which clattered across the floor, out of the "mirror" and rested against Zack's feet. She herself was halfway out of the crystal now, knees inside and arms and upper body out, as she faced the floor and wheezed, "Put on the collar on please, please, before I suffocate... Daddy, please!"

*Snick-snap*

"Alright," Zack answered, snapping the slave collar in place around the succubus's neck, loop up, then hauled her out of the mirror by the loop. She fell flat on the floor, collar making a loud noise against the stone floor of the cave, and recovered her breath. A minute later she sat up and felt around her neck in bewilderment.

"What have you done..." She moaned in horror.

"I did what you asked. I put the collar on. Are you ok now?" Zack shrugged.

"Not on ME, you dumb face! ...Huh, I seem OK now. I can breathe, at least."

"Does this mean you're MY slave now? I'm Zack by the way, what's your name?"

"No way, no way," she laughed nervously, "I'm the succubus. That means, that means... My name is []ydia," She clamped both hands over her mouth in horror like she spoke in mistake, "Oh, poopnoodles... I AM your slave. How did you DO that?"

"Lydia? Rydia?" "[]ydia. It's not pronouncible in your language and I did NOT mean to tell you my true name... Uh-oh." The little, freshly enslaved succubus started fading away.

"What's happening?" Asked Zack, suddenly sober again and worried about his disappearing child.

"It's ok, I should be safe from now on, I'm just not strong enough to exist outside of your mind yet. Open your mouth so I can come inside."

"Excuse me?" She started to fade more rapidly.

"Ahh; I can't make you do it because I'm the slave! Kiss me! Open your mouth and kiss me right now or I'll climb in through your ear you big dumdum!" Huge, black leathery wings sprouted from []ydia's back, many times longer than the length of her body, giving one giant, loud flap and sending her up in the air toward's Zack's face. Her feet and hands became long black talons, which she wrapped around Zack's body. Long black ram's horns sprouted from her forehead and slammed into Zack's own as her mouth crushed into his. He fell backwards from the impact, but he was too distracted from the passionate tongue swapping kiss with the little girl-monster in his arms to notice. There was a cracking sound as a powerful tail covered in barbs and razors whipped around from behind the succubus to behind Zack, pressing against the ground and righting them both, preventing the fall. Zack closed his eyes and lost himself in the mind-melting kiss for several minutes. When he opened eyes, the girl was gone.

"Huh? Lydia?" Nothing...

Then a small, weak voice. "I'm here. I was born. We did it... Master. But now I have to rest..." And the voice faded away.

With greater and greater respect for the Gray Man's athletic prowess, Zack finally made his way out of the long, steep, and narrow stone cave, legs, back, and bare feet sore. Someone helped him collapse into an airport chair and handed him a sports bottle of water. "Thanks," Zack said, downing it gratefully.

A voice sung out in a children's rhyme, "Faker, Faker, go eat a Taker. Crawling Chaos, eat a dog in barbeque sauce." Zack looked up in confusion. The three elders were standing behind their folding table in what Zack now recognized as a defensive formation.

"What?" Zack asked.

"Sorry about that," the woman with the long, straight nose and deep brown skin said, warmly smiling. "We were just checking to make sure you weren't a Faker like Tony became. We choose not to let them run around free in our population like the other races do."

"Other races?" Zach asked.

"Takers, Eaters, Podlings and Juggernauts, also known as Beargernauts. Although, there has yet to be a reported instance of a Faker Beargernaut. Doesn't mean they don't exist, of course. There are other races we are aware of, such as the Buzzers, which we believe border the Juggernauts and Takers. However, those races do not border our Patch of Quilt at this time, and so we have virtually no exposure to them," the old man with the long white beard rattled off pedantically, seemingly in his element. He continued, "We'll be happy to answer all your questions to the best of our ability as well as give you a crash course on how our world works. But first we need to ask you some questions and learn about the new astral you just brought into our world," he opened a massive tome with tiny writing, smiling, no longer seeming as grumpy as before. He raised a bushy white eyebrow at Zack, asking, "You DID successfully give birth to an Astral, bringing another one of humanity's greatest allies to our world, didn't you? Doing such is the price of a decent life, here."

*Click-click* "He sure did," the grey man said, frowning in concentration at a cell phone he held in front of his face, presumably having just snapped a picture of Zack and his new Astral Reflection.

"Spoilers, spoilers!" The long nosed woman cried out in distress, covering her ears.

"Voltaire! You can either keep quiet or leave the table. This will probably be the only new Astral we get all Bear Season, don't spoil our fun." The bearded man chastised.

"I won't," promised Voltaire the grey man with a bald head and flattened ears, putting away his phone and putting on a neutral expression.

"Very well, let's continue," the bearded man said, opening up a second book and taking out a cheap looking plastic pen. "You can call me Beard and you can call her Nose. We used to share our real names, but we started to get recognized by adept students of history and things became awkward. This fellow who so impressively carried you has chosen the name Voltaire. He is a human from the 3rd world, Spin, and so his original name is much too hard to pronounce in English." Voltaire, the man from Spin, gave Zack a little nod, keeping his face neutral.

"What's your name?" Nose the woman asked, taking the plastic pen and second tome from Beard, the old guy.

"Zack, nice to meet you. I think the... Birth was successful. She... The Astral? Said so."

"Oh-ho!" The bearded man exclaimed, looking pleased, "A talker, eh?" He closed the massive tome, moved it further down the table and exchanged it for a smaller one.

"Uh, yeah. She talked. She said her name was Lydia."

"It has a name and it told it to you right away? Really?" Beard exchanged the tome again for an even smaller one. He spent a couple minutes flipping through it.

"Lydia? Are you sure? Is that a name you like, perchance?"

"Oh, well, I guess so. Sure. I like the name Lydia. But I'm not sure..." Zack thought. "It could have been Rydia. It was hard to understand. It sounded like it started with an L, R and D all at once."

"Ah-hah!" Beard raised a hand triumphantly, "You DO have a named Astral. It's []ydia, is it not?"

"Yes. That!" Zack answered. "How can I even pronounce that?"

"Don't worry about it," Nose said kindly, "It's name eventually becomes what you choose to call it. Do you have a middle or last name, Zack?"

"Um... Not that I remember."

"Don't worry, that's normal," she assured him, taking notes with her plastic pen. Beard seemed absorbed, flipping through his tome, looking for something.

"8 preexisting []ydia's," Beard confirmed, smiling. "Five Level 1's, two Level 2's, and oooh, one Level 3."

"You think he may have picked up an Astral created by an ancestor of his that immigrated to Quilt?" Voltaire asked.

"Hush," Beard chastised. "You don't get to play... You cheated. But to answer your question anyway, I would estimate that the odds are about even that the boy was found by an Astral of his ancient ancestor, and the case that he created a Brand New Astral that for reasons we don't yet understand decided to share its name immediately. I've only seen both these events happen a couple times in my long lifetime."

"Wait, wait, I think I was alive for one of the latter cases!" Interrupted Nose.

"Yes, you were," Beard agreed, nodding, "Do you remember what it was?"

"It's the tree. The Potty-Tree near the entrance of the Geode."

"Her name is Helen, not 'Potty-Tree'," Beard corrected.

"Right. An Astral that was born and reached level 3 in the same life. She controls the flow of water under Citadel, essentially giving everyone here running water," continued Nose, the last bit aimed at Zack as explanation.

"For the low, low price of the blood of newborns." Voltaire added sardonically.

"Bah, Helen could eat anything. She's just a freak," revealed Beard.

To Zack, "Give her a friendly wave when you walk by but never get too close."

Zack swallowed, "Am I going to end up like that?"

"Almost certainly not," assured Beard, "There's only one Helen. She's as rare as rare gets. Even the other level 3's that turn into trees can still walk around and talk like a human," Beard turned a page and asked what seemed like a completely random question, "Zack, do you like boys or girls? Romantically?"

"Girls," Zack answered without hesitation.

"Down to seven []ydia's," Beard announced, "Is it bigger than a house?"

"No..." Zack answered.

"Six. Is it smaller than a mouse?"

"What? No. She's human sized."

"Shh... No extra information. It ruins the guessing game," Beard chastised, wagging a finger. "Down to four. Is it corpse?"

"Nope. Still warm."

"Takers. That was the level 3 []ydia, wasn't it?" Nose interrupted.

"Must you use the language of the children? And yes, excellent guess." Beard conceded.

"Children? That expletive has been in the common vernacular since I was a twelve year old Breeding Child, you old Dingus!" Nose countered.

"Dingus? Is that a derivative of human waste?" Voltaire asked.

"No idea, maybe," Nose answered, "it's something an Import was saying two seasons ago that just stuck with me."

"Please spare the new guy the 'twelve year old breeding child' stories." Beard countered, rolling his eyes, "Let me guess, you learned the phrase from one of your little soldier boyfriends."

"Whatever you say, you creepy schoolgirl diddling old man," Nose fired back. Turning to Zack, she continued, "When I was a child, we were in desperate times. There were barely enough of us to feed the Eaters, and little we could do to slow down the Takers. If you bled, you bred. Some of the Native girls never even left the farms to get any schooling at the Citadel and became Breeding Children earlier than you would believe. I was lucky I Imported at twelve and not younger. I was unlucky in that I was the favorite of my Father and all his neighbors."

"Must we listen to this story for hundreds of years? All that suffering, yet you invent all these tools to make the lives of Breeding Girls that much harder," complained Beard.

"Proper and effective tools of discipline have greatly reduced their suffering, as proven by the least Juggernaut invasions in history. The real issue is you leaning on your authority to keep the age of marriage up. If we stayed at "If you bleed, you breed", our cycle of progress and extinction would be so much longer. It was good enough for me, it's good enough for everyone. Speaking of which, I think the Fathers are short a couple rods of discipline." With that she went and collected the severed tentacles of bone and slowly blinking eyes that were still sitting in front of the desk. She took a pocket knife out from somewhere in her snuggie and began gouging out the eyes and blunting the teeth.

"There is more to life than mere duration of survival," Beard protested. "...but I will concede you are correct about the Juggernaut invasions. But I still think that you have an unhealthy fixation on punishing young breeding girls."

"Punishment creates discipline. A disciplined animal is a happy animal. Young girls are emotional brats, no better than animals. It's as simple as that. My methods work, thus my worldview is successful. Isn't that right, Voltaire?" The gray man raised his hands and turned his face away in surrender.

He said, "When I was on Spin, it was always "If you bleed, you breed." We were similarly low on the food chain, as in Quilt. Most would agree with your worldview and appreciate your innovations. But we have learned much of the lessons of prosperity from recent Imports from Dirt, and I don't think efficiency needs to be the only value. In any case, I defer to the wisdom of the one thousands of years older than I."

"Cop out," mumbled Nose as she examined a still intact and blinking black eye she had pried off a "discipline rod" and balanced on her knife, before popping it in her mouth and swallowing it whole. When she saw Zack's horrified face she shrugged and explained, "When you're hundreds of years old, you need all the help pooping you can get."

"Weren't we analyzing the young man's New Astral?" Voltaire interceded, trying to get the conversation back on track.

"Ah yes, let's get back on track," agreed Beard turning back to his tome, "Is your Astral on fire, constantly suffering?"

"No..." Zack answered, wide eyed.

"Is it made of delicious bugs?"

"What!?"

"Is it a girl whose teeth are constantly growing in and falling out, complaining about having to pee?"

"What? No. It's just a girl. Well..."

"A mostly naked girl with huge wings?" Beard asked.

"Yes! That's the one. Huge, black, leathery wings like a bat," Zack added.

"Oh. I see," Beard said, sounding disappointed. He closed the book and opened yet another smaller book, asking, "It's a succubus, isn't it? You rode to Quilt on a sex dream." He started flipping through book number 4.

"Yeah, I think so. She called herself a succubus. Is that... Bad?"

"All that running for a succubus..." Voltaire commented, looking grim.

"Yes, it is," Nose answered, looking regretful, "Most Astrals are friends or servants. Succubi and Incubi enslave us, instead. They cause a lot of wasteful chaos in society, and worst of all, they never reach level 2 and help us fight. So we send Imports with those Astrals to Zero country, so that they will eventually get the dangerous Astral eaten by an Eater."

Zack was crestfallen, "Really? My baby and I are useless?"

"You still have a purpose," corrected Nose, "your purpose is to make sure you and your Astral are eaten. In the meantime, your Astral will probably give you some sort of status in Zero country... Probably."

"Until a few seasons pass and I get eaten like Tony would have, right?" Zack asked.

"Correct," agreed Nose, nodding gravely, "If Tony had escaped the Crawling Chaos, he wouldn't have become a Faker, just a Zero. He and perhaps his lover would have gone to Zero country when Tony finished school."

"Some Zeros get to stay in Citadel if they have a useful knowledge set," Voltaire explained, "You look a little young to be a master scholar or engineer, but you never know. I'm going to give a list of things we're looking for, stop me if you have a deep knowledge of any of the following." Voltaire took a breath, "Solar panels. Organic chemistry. Prion disease. Dirt-I mean Earth's natural history. Avian biology. Combustion engines. Hypnotherapy. Extreme stress management. Linguistics or cryptology. Genetics and selective breeding. Experience as an electrician or any sort of engineer. Build a computer or a car from scratch. Nutrition and Human health. Wilderness survival. Medieval era weapons. Weapon-using martial arts. Dye mixing. Cognitive behavior therapy..." The list went on and on.

"Um..." Zack said when Voltaire finally stopped, "I know some math and Physics, I think."

"Useless," Voltaire nodded to the negative. "Sorry young man, but MATH and especially PHYSICS work quite differently in each of the seven known worlds."

"That doesn't make sense," Zack complained, "basic relationships should either be the same, or possibly shifted by new constants that we should be able to determine." Zack wasn't sure how he knew this, but he felt confident about it. Perhaps he used to be a physics major or enthusiast.

"That's what they all say," Beard commented with a dismissive wave of his hands, other hand and his eyes continuing to rapidly scan the relatively small tome in front of him.

"What color is the ceiling, Zack?" Beard asked, still not looking up.

"Gray?" Zack answered, suspicious of a trick question.

"And the floor?"

"It's... D-Dark... Dark." Zack stared at the floor, bewildered. It was dark something. Logic told him it should be black, grey, maybe brown... He was in a cave, right? But he couldn't rule out the possibility that it was dark orange, green, red.

"And the outer wall" Beard persisted.

"Also dark.."

"Dark what?" No answer from Zack. "Also, how can we see without a light source?" Zack thought about it.

"OK, you win. How CAN we see in here?"

"Because Earth aka Dirt aka World 2 aka the World of Shadows is the only world we know of where light is not simply a basic property of all matter." Zack was stunned.

"I know nothing," he wisely decided, "but why is my world called Dirt?"

"Because Earth is a fancy, proper name, and Dirt is a common word in English that means the same thing. Spin and Drip have fancy, proper names as well, but they are entirely unpronounceable in English, so we use a common English word as well. It's only fair. Or, perhaps, politically correct. Most Intakes are from Earth and call it Earth because it's hard to break the habit. So, whatever," Beard turned a page, then changed the subject. "You know, I don't think the boy has a Succubus. Thousands of recorded Succubi, not one has ever been named."

"Well good," Nose said, smiling, "Zack seems like an intelligent guy, it would be a shame to feed him to the snakes." Voltaire crossed his arms and made an obvious effort to show no expression.

"Asks good questions, I agree." Beard said, putting his book down and holding out his hand to Zack. "We can find out the answer to the succubus question instantly. Put your hand on mine please, Zack." Zack knew he had a succubus and was sweating bullets as he put his hand on Beard's.

"Huh. I don't feel uncontrollably aroused. More gently comforted. Warm. Similar to a Goddess of Life, really."Addressing Zack, Beard continued, "Ok, which is it? Were you gently embraced by a huge, round, brown woman? Or collared by a woman or girl you found supernaturally attractive, after which you were, most likely violently, raped?"

"Neither. I, uh... It was a little girl in a sexy outfit and she wanted to collar me. But I collared her instead." After Zack's confession, Beard and Nose were stunned. Voltaire broke into laughter and showed them all the picture he had taken of Zack; it showed Zack with a mostly naked and very asleep little girl clinging to him like a baby koala, slave collar clearly visible and put on backwards, loop hanging from the back of her neck.

Beard extended his hand to shake and said, boisterously and pompously, "Welcome to Quilt! You will be given twelve wives, live sixty years, then get eaten by a snake. Any questions?"

—

Zack asked a lot of questions. It seemed to really make Beard's day. After that, he was escorted by another gray man, Locke, to a classroom in what turned out to be a massive library just behind the desk of the Elders and their favorite bookshelf. Zack learned a tremendous amount in a couple of hours and was told that if he had further questions, he could ask his new wives, provided at least one of them paid attention in class. Zack was told to close his eyes, relax and listen, since he had a "Talker" Astral, it could retrieve any information he heard, even if he couldn't recall it himself; provided he could convince it to do so. The gray man, Locke (aka "a Spinner" from Spin, or "Elves" as some called them due to the unusual ears) spoke as rapidly as machine gun fire, talking as he breathed out, and continuing to talk as he breathed in. He fired off knowledge normally gained in years of schooling and filled Zack's mind to bursting, although only so much stuck out in Zack's immediate, accessible memory; mostly geographical, historical and cosmological facts of the grand, wide sweeping variety. Such as: There were seven known worlds:

World 1, commonly known as "The First World", whose technology is present on all worlds but otherwise little is known about.

World 2, Earth, commonly known as "Dirt", or the "World of Shadows", which is a giant watery sphere that floats in a huge empty space and where light is known to come from a distant star.

World 3, "Spin", the Intakes of which were horribly dizzy on the surface of Quilt and thus lived under the Geode in Storage, helping the Elders organize, refine, and experiment with Humanity's resources and were commonly called "Elves" despite merely being a different ethnicity of human.

World 4, "Drip", the rarest Intake and Humanity's most powerful warriors due to their ability to create, use, and tolerate exposure to Drip technology, who were reportedly red skinned and so gruesome to look at that they were referred to as "Devils" and lived entirely outside the Citadel in their own tiny, little community, tasked with guarding the children and young wives and Fathers of the Breeding Farms from the greedy Takers by patrolling the strip of land between the Citadel and the Juggernaut forest through which Takers would often raid.

World 5, the "Astral Plane", home of Astral Deities and the Crawling Chaos, reached by dreaming and can be used to connect all worlds, 1-4, to Quilt.

World 6, a purely hypothetical world theorized by the elders, was thought to allow conscious travel at least between World 1 and 2 and possibly others.

Lastly World 7, aka World 0 aka "Quilt" which was might be merely an extension of the Astral Plane, depending on who you asked, and is reached (by humans) via World 5, the Astral Plane. It is also reached by an unknown amount of other, competitor races from an unknown amount of worlds by means unknown.

The theory of evolution had become popular in recent years and supported evidence already accumulated on Quilt, leading to the current belief that Humanity everywhere originated on World 2, Earth/Dirt, then spread to Worlds 1, 3, 4, via most likely, Worlds 5,6, or possibly even via Quilt, itself. Quilt was thought to be full of holes, entrances and exits to other worlds; one entrance and two exits were known, although many were theorized. The Birth Canal was both an entrance and an exit; Intakes bubbled up out of the spring at the mouth and were the source of New Humanity, and if they didn't swim out, they were carried underground to a brief passage leading to a door to another, entirely unknown world. It was obvious that the entrance, presumably also deep underground at the mouth of the river, led from the Astral plane, as many people throughout history somehow managed to clearly remember the journey. The other exit came from the sky; the only sort of "weather" on Quilt was the occasional appearance of a godlike entity that snatched up anyone who looked up too long and absolutely terrified anyone who managed to look away in time; thus Quilt's version of the casual greeting "What's up," had become "Don't Look Up". Death was also, perhaps, an exit. But since no one had ever returned or communicated back from any of these exits, there was no way to verify anything at all.

Quilt itself was divided into "Patches", biomes tailored for the existence of a single (sentient?) species. The human path most resembled a greatly simplified and convenient version of World 2, Earth, with abundant food, water, wood, and minerals humanity could use. While it was thought that World 2 was the most logical birthplace of humanity, it was inarguably World 1 from which the first humans (or perhaps shared ancestor of humans) came to Quilt and brought civilization, predating the arrival of World 2, 3, and 4 humans by at least 100,000 years, maybe more. World 2's humanity had a civilization less than 10,000 years old; World 1's civilization and technology were thought to be unfathomably more old and advanced; First World technology created the Geode and Storage, discovered and reached the brown mirror from which Astrals are "born", and combined with Astrals and Astral technology they invented, created the "Jaw Wall", a great dark mouth set to consume Citadel over eons of time, and in the meantime provided a fantastic defense against anything except a Cycle-Ending Horde of Eaters. World 1 also created the black brick road that pointed the way to relative safety, and the mysterious mechanism behind the invisible doors.

As impressive as First Worlders seemed to be, something evidently happened on their home world and they dried up at the source, no longer becoming Imports through the Birth Canal and eventually going extinct on Quilt, leaving behind a tremendous amount of untranslatable books and a suspicious lack of all other artifacts. World 2 picked up where World 1 left off, importing at a trickle that eventually became a large flow. World 3 followed and has only recently started to increase their flow of imports, while World 4 has only just begun to trickle. Humanity had gone through a couple great eras of note; The First Worlders did and built great things, presumably the only reason humanity had a foothold on Quilt at all. After they left, humanity fell on their hardest times, often consumed directly from the Birth Canal by hungry Eaters, being digested, writhing and screaming for weeks until their pink blood ran out, not once even opening their eyes upon their brutal new world. The Eaters would leave for a while, then return when their food source increased to feed at will. This cycle continued relentlessly until the Juggernauts came, pushing their biome/patch and their forest of impossibly tall trees far enough from the West to cut off Eater access to human lands, except via the great sheer cliff just beneath Citadel and the Birth Canal. This increased the time humanity had to prosper each cycle, as the Eaters had to build up greater numbers to assault the great cliff and eventually plunder Citadel and the rest of human lands. Around the same time, the Podlings moved in to the East, expanding their territory as far as humanity knew of to the North and South, along an Eastern line, and utterly checking the Eaters, keeping them from circling around the mountain range of the South East, although that was a rare occurrence, as the Eaters only really seemed to know how to move in straight lines, to and from their patch. There were two more hostile races to the North, The Takers and The Buzzers. The Juggernaut territory continued to expand North and South, encircling (and protecting) what would become humanity's breeding grounds in the West. When its border met with The Takers of the North, The Buzzers of the NorthWest were cut off from humanity's patch and not seen from again.

This led to The Taker's interest in Humanity and the beginning of their raids, stealing Humanity's children, weapons, armor, and anything else not safely behind the Jaw Wall. Humanity hoarded armor and weapons created from the mines to the East, storing a portion in Storage between each Eater Horde, so they would start over stronger each time. Whenever they reached maximum capacity in terms of military strength, humanity attempted an invasion of their neighbors (but never the Juggernauts to the West, since their presence protected humanity from the far more terrible Eaters, Buzzers, and Takers.) Humanity first pushed into the territory of their most hated foes, the Eaters to the South. At great cost, humanity seemed to win and the Eaters seemed to be wiped out. Thus humanity's army explored further into the flat, hot, sandy desert of the Eater's biome. The few survivors who managed to return from that expedition reported encountering the God-Mother of the Eaters, an Eater as wide as the Citadel and taller than the sky, who had wiped out humanity's greatest army with one colossal (perhaps accidental) swipe of its miles long tail. The Eaters started repopulating from scratch the next season and humanity was ill-prepared to handle it. Some time later, humanity got the Eaters under control by discovering the "Just reproduce as fast as we can and feed them until they're full" strategy, and then attacked The Takers, instead.

They pushed all the way up to the Taker's nearest city then became disheartened at what they saw; an advanced and diverse population of millions of Takers and various coexisting species (versus Humanity's mere thousands). Then the Taker's formal army showed up, massive and far better equipped than the usual Taker raiders humanity was used to encountering. Seeing that humanity had not yet abused the civilian Taker population, the army offered to let Humanity go, provided they dropped their weapons and armor and fled back to their patch. Humanity complied, and the raiders were back the next year as if nothing had happened. At this point, Humanity should have focused on controlling their own population growth, containing the Takers and culling the Eaters.

Don't Look Up Part 2

Instead, humanity was pushed by the pressures of overpopulation into launching an attack against the non-hostile Podlings to the East. Humanity took out a single patrol at high cost, then pushed through a patch of sulfurous springs to their first Podling settlement. The Podlings, like the Takers, were not immediately prepared to face their first Human Invasion. The Podling settlement was not millions strong and the little humanoids there were entirely unarmed and largely defenseless Podling young.

This time, humanity decided to pillage, raping and slaughtering and discovering valuable tools to bring back to the Citadel. This time, there were consequences. While the Takers were happy to forgive and forget and maintain the status quo, the Podlings immediately changed it forever. A Podling army swept over human lands, removing all the humans. The human army, some Takers and some Eaters were swept away with minimal losses by a multicolored Podling army of only 300 strong, but one of matchless martial prowess. They then actually somehow managed to push through the Citadel walls (losing half their number with each pass), retrieve the tools humanity had stolen, and bring them all back to the Podling patch.

At the cost of a mere 250 Podlings, who had been sent as a force exactly as large as necessary, Humanity learned the hard way that the East was unassailable. The Takers were endless and relentless, the Eaters mighty and hungry, but only a tiny fraction of the Podlings' strength was enough to end human civilization. From that point onward, the Black Podlings (the only type humanity had seen until the diverse group attacked, and the ones closest to Humanity's border) would patrol the Eastern quadrant of Humanity's patch, cutting off access to humanity's mines, and thus the sole source of metal weapons and armor.

Already, the South quadrant was no longer productive, as it merely received excess humanity to force feed the Eaters and protect the rest of the patch (it was simply far cheaper in human lives to feed them than fight them). And now, the Eastern quadrant was uninhabitable per the will of the Podlings. With the loss of 50% of humanity's territory and the source of metal for weapons, humanity entered a dismal spiral of breeding, being eaten, and having any material progress being taken by the Takers. Then the Eater Horde would come and everything would be reset. This cycle was unfortunately stable for a long time.

Then, around the same time Spinners and Drippers started showing up, Beard ascended to become the first known level 4, and the unofficial immortal leader of humankind on Quilt. He rearranged society to make better use of the resources available, nurturing the growth of useful Astrals, making creative use of Quilt's unique materials and corpses of humanity's enemies, researching and combining the technology of all seven worlds, reducing human suffering so the Juggernauts would quit "rescuing" us so often, and even nurturing a limited form of trade with the previously entirely inscrutable Podlings.

After class was over, Locke wished Zack good luck, saying they would meet again one day as "Omnivore and hamburger". Zack was escorted back to the three wise men and woman, and received a gift from each; Voltaire offered him an acne cream squeeze tube full of "Gold", the drug that put him in such a good mood and allowed him to communicate with his Astral before, and suggested he go ahead and use it right away to get on good terms with his new wives, as he would be able to find more of the stuff in the West if he looked for it. Voltaire also suggested he hold onto his clothes from Dirt for a long time, until he had a clear understanding of their worth, before trading them away to the old ladies of the Citadel.

Nose gave him the three modified franken-sticks of teeth, now cleaned white and blunted, eyes removed, saying one was for him and to give the others to Fathers of the Breeding Farms, but not to attempt to use one until Fathers taught him how. "The fresh ones hurt more," she confided in him, winking.

Beard then took him aside and gave him some advice, "Zack, let's see. I consider you the owner of a high-priority Astral. If we can figure out how to level up Succubi and Incubi, it could go a long way towards bolstering humanity's forces and breaking the stalemate. Or not. They could be useless. The ones that are easier to level up usually are. For example, someone with a Dionysus Astral need only get drunk off peach-wine every day for years to level up their Astral to level 2, but a level 2 Dionysus is only useful for getting itself drunk and stealing everyone's undergarments. Then again, a level 3 Dionysus is a terrifying combatant, able to deeply inebriate anyone they breathe on, even Eaters. However, it takes lifetimes of dedicated alcoholism to create. Now, even a level 2 corpse Astral, a human corpse Astral, that is, is one of humanity's greatest weapons; Takers cannot kill them, only slow them down, and most can survive death multiple times, which is what a corpse Astral must do to eventually level up. But it is an extremely rare and random occurrence that cannot reliably be replicated in a controlled environment without, perhaps, the advanced medical knowledge of World 2, which we hope to acquire one day. But actually surviving death enough times to become a Zombie, a level 3 human corpse Astral, is nearly unheard of; I've only seen one in all my time and watched it immediately get Eaten by an Eater. A mighty shame that was, although it taught us the lesson that some level 3's might not be worth the massive effort required to reach them. My point is, we don't know what a Succubus can even do for us. They've refused to level up. Yours may be different and we may forever learn how to use the many Succubi that wash ashore every year. Your day job is a Father, a male breeder. As such, you succeed by keeping your wives pregnant at all times. You'll learn the details from the Breeder community. Your greater mission, however, is the same as all level 1's; to reach level 2, at which point you will be upgraded from a Father to something else, and on the path to earning your way into an extended, relatively safe lifespan in the Citadel. Since I'm highly interested in the development of Succubi, I'm placing you in a special camp of Breeding farms on the very border of the Juggernaut patch. The further you are from the Brown Mirror, the faster your Astral develops, you see. It does, however, mean that if your wives or children are unhappy, there is a greater chance the Juggernauts will take them away. This means you need to be extra careful to maintain the discipline and contentment of your wives and offspring, since they, as well, may be the owners of useful Astrals one day."

Beard had been walking Zack back to the stairway out of storage while talking nonstop. Now they reached the stairway and stopped; Beard handed Zack a note carved in a thin sheet of wood, then lowered his voice and continued. "Sometimes, for the sake of developing important Astrals, I change the rules a little bit. Normally, you're allowed to lose one wife to the Juggernauts; newbie fathers often can't find the line between discipline and abuse. So, they get one Mulligan, and the other Fathers will step in and help the guy out so it doesn't happen again. It happens twice, and the Father is exiled to Zero country and replaced. But there are valuable Astrals that level up specifically from abuse; in these cases, when it's a Father, I send them to a special camp near the Juggernaut border with wives that have only low priority Astrals; I tried to use Zeros, but then they would figure out that they are disposable, since they are in a high priority Astral camp but have no Astral. The other Fathers of the camp are informed of the situation and that any abuse taking place is productive, but we don't tell the disposable wives so they aren't lost to despair and summon the Juggernauts. Inevitably, the abused wives will get either rescued by Juggernauts, or destroyed by abuse for the sake of leveling up the Father's Astral."

"Do I have an abusive Astral?" Zack asked, eyes wide.

"Perhaps," answered Beard, nodding. "Succubi are selfish rape monsters. I expect rape, or at least selfish sex, may very well level up your Astral. So I'm giving you a special mission: Rape your young wives, often and cruelly. Talk to your Astral and try to determine if you're making progress leveling it up, and what exactly is the catalyst for progress. If you make any definite progress before burning through all four of your wives, I'll see about cycling through new disposable wives to see if we can get you to level 2 as soon as possible. If you make no progress like everyone else with a succubus, I'll pay you back by sneaking you in The Suicide Army, instead of sending you to Zero country like other failures. That way you have a chance to become a snake-slayer, at least, and get to enjoy living in the Citadel in the meantime, as well as extending the possibility that your Astral might just level up. Do we have a deal?"

"What other options do I have?" Zack asked.

"Go straight to Zero country right now," answered Beard, matter of factly.

"Guess I'll take the deal, then."

Patting him on the shoulder and pushing him toward the stairs Beard said, "Good choice. Bring that page to any soldier and they'll deliver it to the school district. It's a special circumstance wife order form. Normally you just get four random wives from the high priority Breeder list, the girls who are oldest and most want to become Breeders. But I'm having the Wife Beaters pick out the ones that want to become Breeders the least, regardless of where they exist on the Breeder list, so long as they have a level 1, low-priority Astral."

"Why those?" Zack asked, from the stairs.

"Can't rape the willing!" Beard said cheerfully as he walked away, waving a dismissive wave over his head as he went. "Can't sort by desire to have sex with you, only by desire to be a Breeding girl." Beard turned back for one last parting shot. "Oh, and if you mess with the little Wild children too much and get one taken away by a Juggernaut, I won't protect you. I refuse to give up the precious few years of innocent childhood that I've worked so hard to give the children of Quilt." With that, he left down the black and yellow brick road to do whatever it is he did to keep the human patch of Quilt together.

—

A while later, Zack finished limping sideways up the stairs, calves burning. He overheard the tail end of a conversation between Jason and the soldier that was the late Tony's friend, as they both waited for him at the top of the stairs in the tiny room just before the mysterious door in the Geode's floor.

"They just let you walk into the school and take whatever wives you want?" Tony's friend was asking.

"Well, yes and no," Jason answered, "Snake-slaying is taken very seriously, since every Eater that dies before the end of the cycle gives a lot of people longer lives and may even extend the cycle," Tony's friend was nodding, star struck.

Jason continued, "Breeding is, of course, also taken very seriously. A single soldier could turn the tide and extend a cycle, especially one with a useful perk like a valuable Astral or the snake eyes that my children might inherit. Further, the incentive of "one wife per dead Eater" might not not be enough to convince someone to stay in the South slaying snakes, but "one wife of your choice per dead Eater," really gets the imagination going, you know? So yeah, I could have walked up to any two zero girls in Citadel and said "mine" and they would either agree or be sent to the South and end up belonging to someone far worse than me living in a world far, far less happy than Citadel."

"Takers, that's a free pass to living in the Citadel. They didn't even have to kill two snakes or pop out 20 babies to earn the privilege. Does anyone ever say no to that? And why doesn't a one-snake-killer even get one wife?"

"The chance of producing offspring with snake eyes improves the more snakes you slay. One-eyes have never produced a snake eye child, so they get to live in the wall. The wall is...nice, though. Peaceful, safe. Truly the opposite of Zero country. And no, as far as I know, no one has said no to being a snake-slayer's wife. But it's not how you're imagining it. Oh, I'm sure every once in a while it's bound to go down that way; big, scary, uncouth Southern warrior, maybe doesn't even speak the current language, walks right into a classroom and takes the two prettiest little girls right out of their desks by the hair." Tony's friend shuttered at this. Rapt with attention, Zack stopped on the stairs, not wanting to interrupt, uncomfortably aroused.

"But that's not how Beard runs things and you know it. He took me, told me that if that's what I wanted to do he'd support me, but said he'd be really grateful to me, personally, if before I did anything, I ate in the school cafeteria with the school children for a week. He's the immortal leader of my new home, of course I said yes to this. It was rather overwhelming being born in Zero country, growing up, then living the dream of becoming a two Snake slayer. Citadel is a Paradise compared to late cycle Zero country. I probably would have done anything the man asked right then. After one day eating with the schoolchildren, I realized I wouldn't be grabbing any little girls and dragging them off by the hair. No need."

"Why not?" Tony's friend asked.

"They were more likely to grab ME by the hair and drag ME off. Girls as young as 9, some bleeding and some only pretending, were all over me and vying for my attention. Probably one third of all schoolgirls in the upper grades were interested enough to be talked into it, and one third of those were ready to fully commit from day 1. I had an insane weeklong harem adventure. The most interesting part was how the girls paired up to come after me together. The two girls that won did so because they had the best teamwork... And because they snuck into my temporary room in the school on day 2 and teased me to insanity all night long."

"Was that a dream or a nightmare?" Tony's friend asked.

"Dream for about a day, then exponentially more stressful after that. Longer than a week and I might have run screaming to hide in the wall, declining the privilege. So yeah, any girl in Citadel that wasn't taken and could bear me children. If you don't mind saying, how did it work for you and.." Jason asked.

"Just the opposite," the Late Tony's friend answered, looking at the gory pieces of Tony's legs he still carried, "as long as it's mutually consensual and doesn't produce offspring, anything goes in Citadel; Suicide Army, Old Ladies, Exempts, and even School Children, as long as they are the ones that seek it out and you keep it out of sight. You might not realize it because you live in the wall, but even Elves get laid. They have a fan club. Not sure if it's the same for the Devils."

"Oh, it is," Jason answered, "I've escorted their fan club there, myself. They sneak out, pretending to visit relatives on the Breeding Farms, because there's still that stigma with the Drippers."

"Eaters, that's dumb," said Tony's friend, angrily, "There are Dripper and Half-Dripper children in every grade. They're human like us, they even have Astrals. They guard the children far better than you or I could."

"No doubt," Jason agreed, nodding.

"Do you like your wives?" Tony's friend asked.

"Oh yeah, they're great. They adore me and they have an evil sense of humor. They let me mess around with other girls and get their hopes up, then they step in and take me away, trying to be as mean about it as possible. And they're really hot! They've been this tall and shaped like this since I met them when they were 12. They looked more like 17 year olds with perfect skin."

"Nice!" Tony's friend answered, "Yeah 12 year olds really are the best."

"Don't look up?" Zack interrupted, giving the Quilt greeting tentatively and for the first time, deciding that listening to any more of this conversation would be hazardous to his mental health.

"Don't look up." Tony's friend responded with a nod. "Actually, the Geode and Storage are good places to stretch your neck safely," Jason answered, looking thoughtfully at the ceiling. Tony's friend looked a bit alarmed and confused at those words.

"So, how'd it go?" Jason asked with a friendly smile.

"Elton here tells me he was walking away when he heard you puke your guts up and saw you get carried downstairs by the old elf."

"My baby was born!" Zack said smiling, feeling really proud and more than a little silly.

"First try? Congrats, man!" Jason said, grasping Zack's hand in an amicable manner, "I've never had the experience myself, but I hear it can take several tries to pull an Astral out of the mirror."

"That's really good," Elton said with a serious expression that had a sobering effect on the other two. "It's as if Tony's death helped create your Astral, even though he couldn't make his own."

After a brief pause, Jason put a hand on Elton's shoulder and said in a serious tone, "Yeah, man. That's exactly right." Elton nodded. Jason added, "So how did you and Tony meet?"

"Tony is also the name of my Astral, that's why we started talking. He was one of those bored school kids that wander off and offer to help soldiers with farming. The kids that do that are always real sweethearts. The Army loves them and is always really kind to them; they remind us why we face the Eaters. Wait... You didn't get a Succubus or Incubus, did you?" Elton added, suspiciously.

"Incubus? No... I got a Succubus, but a special one. They're sending me to a priority breeding camp." Zack offered the thin wood tablet with carved instructions for inspection.

"That's awesome, man!" Jason said, taking the wooden page and squinting at it. "I hear the girls there are really well-behaved. They want to keep that good spot and try to level up their Astral faster... Nope, can't read this. Takers take me, I thought my writing and reading was getting better."

Elton took it from Jason and said, "Don't feel bad, it's not in Dirt. It's in Spin. Weird. I don't get it, but you must be special."

"I only got it because Tony chopped my cord thingy, which made it so that I only try and had to get it right." Zack confirmed.

"Aww, that's real great. Thanks for saying that. It really helps to think Tony's exit from Quilt had some meaning or purpose," Elton said, brightening. "I can take this to the Beaters for you, you can take the path straight out of the Geode and wait there at the wall for them. Do you have any preferences that I should tell the Beaters? Although if you've got a special wife order, I imagine that means you don't really get to choose your own wives or give input. Still couldn't hurt to ask. "

"Preferences?" Zack asked.

"Yeah, you know. Blond, brunette, red-head. Tall, short, younger, older. Maybe a submissive, quiet girl that'll cry if you yell at her, or a loud, angry one that'll put up a fight."

"Put up a fight?" Zach asked, confused.

"Yeah, in the bedroom," Elton clarified, "Some guys like a girl that fights, so he can hit her and hold her down during breeding. Get that feeling of conquest."

"Whoa," replied Zack. "I haven't had a chance to think about this. It all sounds good, really."

"Well, again, you probably won't have much of a choice with these special conditions." Elton clarified, putting the tablet and Tony's gory feet under his clothes and scale armor, "But the Beaters usually try to give you at least one girl you like, or at least one cute one. I'll ask them to try and give you a variety."

"Thanks," responded Zack. He immediately cursed himself for not being brave enough to express his true desires, but figured the odds were good that he would end up with one really young looking girl, anyway.

Walking out of the Geode shortly afterwards, the trio ran into another trio having a standoff. Lizzie stood with her arms crossed, looking defensive, facing down a pair of tall, buxom young women; they were identical twins, conventionally very attractive, except for strange side ponytails, facing outwards, opposite of each other. They were standing casually, holding hands, with identical looks of smug superiority.

"Jason", the twin on the left called out when the three guys stepped out of the mysterious door to the Geode.

The twin on the right followed this up with, "Have you been cheating on us with this little kid?"

"I'm not a little kid!" Lizzie declared, stomping her feet and balling her fists like a little kid throwing a tantrum. "I'm an adult! I'm older than you!"

"Gross," Elton declared, with a look of disgust, "I'm skipping this drama, and heading to the Wife Beaters. Good luck guys." He sprinted off and made a little hop, feet up to his knees turning a shade of deep blue mid-air; he landed with his knees bent, and seemed to slide off at high speed, silently, all the friction between his feet and the ground gone. He altered his direction, picked up speed and slowed down with his hands, and was soon out of sight.

"Wish my Astral could do that," Zack muttered.

"Garbage." The twin on the left declared.

"Not even good enough to become Exempts like us," followed up the twin on the right, "What are you new?" She followed up, full of snobbery.

"He is, he is. Romera, Juliet, what a surprise to see you, my beautiful wives," Jason answered, sounding somewhat rehearsed, as he walked up to the twins and put his hands on their pregnant stomachs. "I guess you caught me. I'm not sure.. What you want me to say?" Jason put a strange emphasis on the last word and raised an eyebrow.

"We want you to say that that little kid's chest is small and sad." Jason looked at Lizzie, an apologetic look on his face for half a second, then played along with his wives' cruel little game to the best of his ability. "It's true, you're right," he agreed, eyeing Lizzie's still exposed, perky little breasts that she seemed to have forgotten to cover up hours ago. He continued, "When I first met her, I thought she was a little boy. Not like you two. I love how they feel full of milk," Jason put one hand on the breast of each of his wives, who pushed into his hands proudly," Lizzie looked embarrassed and finally pulled her top down.

"They're small and cute just like me! That's what you told me!"

"I don't remember saying that," Jason declared, without looking at Lizzie. He just kept his hands on the breasts of his wives and stared off into the middle distance between them as they played their game.

"Then what did you see in her? Is it because she looks like a boy that you wanted to do her in the butt?" Romera asked.

"What butt?" Said Juliet, staring at Lizzie disapprovingly.

"Why would I want to play with that sad little butt when I can use yours whenever I want, Romera?" Jason said, licking his lips and staring at Romera's womanly rear, while she ran a hand over and posed cutely. Lizzie covered her butt over her skirt with her hands defensively, and gave a little sniffle.

"Well, I-I, you know!" She started, but was interrupted by Juliet.

"Is it her mouth? Is it prettier than mine? Does she suck you better than I do, husband?"

"There's no comparison," Jason said, smiling, finally getting into it as he stuck two fingers all the way in Juliet's willing mouth. "She's too rough for me to really enjoy it. She didn't even let me use her butt."

"Pathetic." Romera spat.

"Oooooh," Lizzie moaned, now crying in earnest, hands hugging herself.

"Obviously you felt bad for the child and did it out of pity. It's not nice to lead school girls on, husband," chided Romera.

"I'm sorry, my beautiful wife. How can I make it up to you?"

"Come home and we'll remind you why you don't need to play around with little girls, husband," insisted Juliet. Jason reached up and gave their side ponytails a yank, causing them both to close their eyes and moan in exaggerated pleasure. They looked a little awkward and distressed for a few seconds as he began to walk off and drag them along by their ponytails, but they swiftly recovered their dignity and turned around to walk with him, both putting an arm around his scaly wrist.

At this point Lizzie was sobbing in her hands, saying, "He said... He said..." between sobs. Zack may have started off feeling jealous at this interaction, but now he only felt bad for Lizzie.

"You know," he started hesitatingly, "I think they're small and cute like you. You're really more my type then they are."

"It doesn't matter!" Lizzie declared, looking up at Zack with teary eyes and a wide eyed, forced cheerfulness that was both heartbreaking and creepy, "It never really mattered, you know? I have you now! So where are we going? Do we get to stay in the Citadel? I'm ok with going North or East, you know?"

"Actually..." Zack started, and hesitated when he saw Lizzie's smile start to crack. "Actually, I almost went to Zero country. Turns out I'm going West, to the Breeding Farms to be a Father. But hey, I'm on a high-priority-"

"Noooo!" Lizzie cried out, falling to her knees and dirtying them. "Now I have nothing!" She got up and ran off in the same direction Elton left, bawling and crying out, "Useless, useless!"

—

Zack had followed the path to the edge of the Citadel and now sat with his back against the smooth surface of the great, dark, Jaw Wall, wishing he were still bleeding pink and emotionally numb. He had only just met Lizzie a few hours ago, but she had given him a whirlwind of emotions. He felt disgusted, used, pitious, aroused, protective. He felt mostly like he had failed someone who relied on him, although he didn't really understand how or why. The Elders seemed to think he was doing really well, though. He was glad that, at least, he was leaving the Citadel and wouldn't have to see Lizzie again.

"Boo!" A muffled voice cried into his ear as a scaled hand suddenly reached from the wall and grabbed his shoulder; he flinched, but stayed in the same spot, as that hand was remarkably strong. "Gotcha! You trying to get through the gate, bro?"

"I don't think so... I think I'm supposed to wait here for my new wives."

''You mean those?" The arm that reached out from the wall pointed. Approaching the "gate", or at least where Zack was sitting, where the dirt path met the wall and from which the soldier's leaf tents kept some distance, was a line of people. In the front and back of the line were a pair of oversized men in soldier uniforms who wielded sticks of bright wood that were rounded off at the ends and missing any sort of spear point. Behind the soldier in front were three young teenage girls in bathrobes, then four naked small children no older than 8. Zack started to get up, but the snake hand again held him in place.

"Wait a sec, bro. You're sitting in a blind spot so they can't see you. Just chill here and check them out for a minute. If they're super ugly, you can just run to Zero country and give them to me, heh heh." Zack wasn't sure how he could possibly be hidden, but sure enough he was ignored as the troupe walked up and stopped no more than 15 feet away.

"Damn, bro, they're all hot. They sure look pitiful, though." Zack had to agree. They were very pretty, and he did a double take when he realized the girl in front was a depressed looking Lizzie in a bathrobe. She hugged herself and sobbed quietly, and nearly all her makeup had rinsed off; but instead of looking plain-faced like Zack suspected, she just looked really young without her makeup, especially since she was the shortest of all the teenaged girls. Behind her was a mousy looking girl in glasses, with brown hair, breasts that were large for her age that she crossed her arms in front of protectively, and a nervous look in her eyes that darted back and forth, perhaps looking for Zack himself. Behind her was a cute, but stupid looking girl with messy, childish pigtails, and that stood, staring at the ground with her mouth hanging open. She looked depressed, but resigned to her fate; she was also very pregnant.

"Do you like them hot and sad or something, bro?" The disembodied voice asked from the wall.

"I guess so," Zack agreed, "but I thought there would be four. Or is that little naked girl one of my wives?"

"What? No. She's cute too, but she's way too young to breed... Probably. She and the three little boys are just waiting to get their new robes from your wives. Your fourth wife is probably giving the Beaters trouble. Look, there she is." Zack heard a high-pitched arguing voice, then a shriek. Off in the distance were three more large men with sticks. A really tall, lithe, blond girl was struggling to get past the men, who were holding out their arms and walking forward, corralling her towards the gate. She would run from one side to the other, then scream in fury when a soldier caught her and shoved her back between the soldiers, who continued to walk her towards the gate. When they got close enough to be within earshot, she planted her feet and refused to budge, shoving the soldier in the middle back a ways,

"Don't TOUCH me!" She railed in a furious but intelligent and educated sounding voice, "I'm a SCHOLAR. I'm EXEMPT. I have a sponsor on the faculty, just let me go TALK to him. I'm 16, do you understand? I'm NOT going to the farms to be a breeding child-."

"Boop." The middle soldier said calmly, cracking the tall, beautiful teenage girl on the top of the head with his stick. The girl fell to the grass, clutching her head and screaming in agony. After sobbing in pain for a minute, she got back up and stared down the soldier who hit her, tears streaking her face, expression furious, face red,

"You can't HIT me! You can't DO that! You'll go to Zero country for that!" The soldier raised his stick threateningly and the tall girl covered her head and cowered in fear, quickly backing away toward the gate.

"Takers, girl. I don't think I've ever seen a new breeding child fight back this much," the middle soldier said calmly, without actually looking very impressed.

"I'm not a CHILD and I'm not for BREEDING. I'm a SCHOLAR and I'M EXEMPT, you faking soldier trash-" * Crack* the girl fell to the ground sobbing and clutching her head again.

"Watch your language in front of the little ones, child," the soldier said, still sounding unimpressed, "You seem intelligent so why don't you lay there and listen for a minute while I remind you what's happening." The tall, blond girl immediately stood up, defiant.

"Eaters," commented the man in the wall behind Zack, "She's going to have a lumpy head but she's the most gorgeous one by far." The tall teenager was backing up and getting closer to the wall. Zack wondered how the snake-slayer in the wall could tell that from the back of her head; maybe his snake eyes could see around corners. Zack had to admit that the slender curves of her slim body in her tight bathrobe, her well-taken care of blond hair, and just something intangible about the way she carried herself, communicated the fact that she was extremely attractive and knew it. The soldier continued to wave his stick at her threateningly, causing her to continue to edge closer to the other children, and while doing that lectured her, "Living in the Citadel is a privilege, not a right, except for school children. You got two years more than most; you have no right to complain. Now you need to go do your duty for humanity to earn your way back in, just like everyone else."

"I'm Exempt!" She complained.

"No, you're not. You were given extra years to prove you were useful in a way beyond breeding, but you must have failed because your Citadel pass has been revoked and your name came up for breeding. You don't have to become a Breeder but you have to leave the overcrowded Citadel and make room for a new group of children to live here and go to school. You may become a Breeder, level up your Astral, and escape to the North to fight the Takers. If your Astral doesn't level up in 20 years, then it's back to the Citadel for a long, comfortable retirement. As a member of the Suicide Army, I've only had seven years to level up my Astral, but I probably will be eaten by an Eater next year. New male graduates will die with me in a year or two, but you get 20 years in the peaceful, safe West, then age gracefully for maybe 100 years in the Citadel, just because you were born female. So go get in line, you selfish child." With a growl, he cracked her on the head again, then started rolling her towards the other children with his feet.

As the beautiful girl sobbed and clutched her head in agony, he continued, "I'm not hitting you. I'm just booping you on the head with my stick. I AM allowed to boop and shove you out of the Citadel. It's my job. I'm a Wife Beater. You're a new wife. I'm flushing you out of hiding and towards the farms."

"You touched my chest! You all touched my chest!" The girl complained while being comically rolled to the wall by the feet of all three soldiers.

"Yeah, yeah, that won't work. Have to be gay to be a Beater."

"Fake You!" She screamed from the ground.

*Crack*

"Seriously, there are little kids here. Do you want to explain to them what that word means? Be considerate. Look, just calm down. You don't want to run away to the South, you really don't. They'll eat you alive, and then the Eaters will REALLY eat you. What are they teaching you in school that makes you so afraid of Breeding camps? Some of the Zero girl camps are bad and closer to the border of the Takers, it's true. But you're not a Zero. Just give it a couple seasons and you'll adjust, everyone always does."

The girl backed into the wall and kept backing up along it on her butt while the soldier stalked her until she bumped into Zack. He held perfectly still; the large soldier in charge looked perplexed as he stared at Zack's location (which again, was entirely out in the open as far as Zack could tell. Then quite suddenly and bizarrely, the wife beater's nose grew to massive proportions on his face, occluding all other features. The soldier used his new nose-face to take one massive sniff, then walked up and poked Zack with his stick.

"Nice hiding place!" He complimented with a smile as his face went back to normal. Zack stood up quickly holding out his hands defensively, not wanting to be "booped". The man just took one of those hands and shook it, "I'm Gaston. Yourself?" He was suddenly completely different in demeanor, friendly and welcoming.

"Zack. I was told to wait here?"

"Ah, the New Father." Gaston commented, looking slightly disappointed. He clapped his hands once and changed gears. "Alright, everyone's here. Let's do the ceremony." He put a hand on Zack's shoulder and gently led him to the center of the path. Zack noticed that a small crowd of soldiers and male students had come to watch, a respectful distance off, sitting in the grass. The little children obediently lined up on one side of the path, evidently knowing what to do. The teenage girls lined up on the other, and two soldiers picked the tall blond up by the shoulders and walked her to the end of the line. Each of the girls were looking at Zack with their own expression. Lizzie was stunned, realizing it was Zack only just now. The stupid looking girl with her messy braids and her mouth hanging open looked him up and down in slow curiosity. The busty, mousy girl kept her hands over her chest protectively and looked at him terrified. The tall, slim, (and Zack could see now, beautiful like a model) girl looked at him with an expression of disgust and defiance, struggling free of the guards that held her upper arms and crossing her arms.

"Do you know what to do?" Gaston asked Zack.

"No clue, just Imported and got an Astral today." He answered, shrugging.

"Oh, wow," replied Gaston, taking out the thin wooden tablet Beard had originally given Zack, glancing at it, then putting it back down behind his scale armor when the tall girl snatched for it, "No wonder you're special."

"What does it say?" The tall girl demanded, composure regained, again sounding, intelligent and scholarly.

"Special?" Lizzie asked, staring directly into Zack's eyes with a strange, intense, unreadable expression.

"Just accept their belongings, say 'I do', and hand their stuff to a little kid behind you."

"Easy enough," Zack agreed.

"Easy for you." The tall girl declared, meaninglessly. Gaston looked like he was going to say something, but stopped when the dumb looking girl with the open mouth and messy, childish braids abruptly took off her clothes.

She methodically folded up her student's bathrobe, then held it out to Zack, saying in a somewhat low, dim voice, "My name is Molly. I'm 13 years old and ready for breeding. Do you take me as your wife?" Zack looked her up and down, processing this. Molly was short, looked about 7 or 8 months pregnant, was a little taller than Lizzie with a slightly bigger butt and breasts, although that may only be because they were swollen, ready to feed an infant. On impulse, Zack reached forward and pushed under her chin, closing her mouth, making her appear about 50 IQ points higher and letting Zack realize that she was actually quite cute, in a derpy way. Although shameless in her nudity, she seemed embarrassed by being caught with her mouth open, and gave Zack a sheepish, blushy smile he found extremely charming. He thought when she smiled, her thick eyebrows went from making her look dumb to adorable.

"I do," he said, smiling back as he took her folded up robe and handed it to the little naked boy behind him. The little boy struggled to put the much too large bath robe on, and a soldier waiting behind him kindly helped him out, expertly rolling up the sleeves and bottom of the robe in such a way that the little boy could function. Molly got in line next to Zack, very nude and very pregnant, ready to follow him out of the Citadel, and once again staring at the ground dumbly, but this time with her mouth closed. Gaston made a subtle gesture to Zack and he figured out that meant to take a side step and repeat the scene with the next girl. When he did, Molly took a step with him, a loyal little baby duck. His little duck. Zack felt protectiveness and possessiveness start to blossom towards the slow girl already.

The next girl was the mousy one with glasses. She was a couple inches taller than Molly, but still quite short compared to Zack. She awkwardly took off her bathrobe in such a way that she always had an arm covering her relatively large, full breasts. She was just a little bit curvy, the only one of the girls with a soft looking tummy and any kind of hips, and also had the most butt of the four. Zack preferred smaller, skinnier, younger looking girls, but decided that this girl was plenty small enough compared to a full sized adult, and he was glad at least one of his wives would have decent sized breasts to play with, if he felt so inclined...

If she let him. She kept her breasts covered the best she could with one arm as she handed him her robe and said, "M-my name is O-Olivia. I'm f-fourteen years old and r-ready for b-breathing. I mean b-breeding. Do-do you...? She couldn't finish and looked ready to cry, shaking in fear.

"I do," Zack said, taking her clothes and smiling at her, although it only seemed to frighten her more. Zack wondered if his face and smile told her that he was thinking about pinning her arms with one hand and squeezing her breasts until she cried with the other. He wondered if it was normal to want to hurt her to make her his, but also protect her like she was his own child. Olivia noticed his erection through his sweatpants and paled, giving a little squeak. She squeaked again when Gaston reached between her breasts and plucked out a worn-out stuffed rabbit. She reached for it, briefly exposing herself, before remembering and covering up with both hands.

"If you bring this, the Takers are just going to take it. Be considerate and pass it on," Gaston chided, handing the stuffed animal to Zack. Zack turned and handed the clothes and stuffed animal to the delighted looking naked little girl behind him. She went from nude with nothing to awkwardly clothed in a bunched up bathrobe and happily hugging the soft rabbit with the help of a soldier. Zack thought the tiny red-headed girl was precious and perfect, and that it was funny that he was just as attracted to her as Olivia, the busty 14 year old. He guessed he was just into everything.

Olivia got into line behind Molly, and Zack moved on to stand in front of Lizzie. Lizzie had evidently recovered her composure and had a calculating look on her face as she stripped and handed Zack her bathrobe. She still had the top and bottom of her original outfit underneath, although she had lost the shoes and hair accessories. "My name is Elizabeth. I am 15 years old and ready for breeding. Do you take me as your head wife?" She puffed out her perky little breasts in pride and seemed to stand taller, as if trying to cover the fact that she was the shortest and youngest looking of the wives. The tall girl next to her made a rude noise with her mouth and rolled her eyes. Lizzie ignored her and looked straight at Zack. He grinned at her, feeling proud of her for some reason, and said "I do".

Gaston spoke, "You'll have to take everything off." "I made these and the little boy doesn't need them," she disagreed, without turning around.

"Ask your Father to hold onto them for you, then." Gaston reasonably suggested. Zack took her robe, then her leaf-clothes, and had a new appreciation for the fact that Lizzie obviously cared for her appearance, keeping herself smooth and shaved all over. This fact, and the fact that she was the shortest, enhanced by her now lack of makeup, made her seem the youngest and most nubile, with small breasts and butt only barely touched by puberty. He wasn't sure what "head wife" meant, if anything, but he decided he was beginning to understand and like the passionate, ambitious Lizzie, and wanted to make her happy, almost as much as he wanted to play with her little breasts and tiny nipples.

"Father, could you hold onto those for me?"

"Sure, Lizzie." He answered with a smile, putting the custom-made leaf clothes in a pants pocket and handing the robe to the little boy behind him.

Before he even finished stepping in front of the tall girl, she rattled off in an annoyed, pretentious tone, "My name is Nadia. I am 16 years old and I am NOT ready for breeding. Not with this boy, at least. My sponsor-"

*Crack* Gaston booped her on her head and she fell down screaming and holding it. Him and another soldier wrestled with her and got her robe off, but gave up on trying to get the lacy black panties she was wearing underneath.

"Take it off or I'll keep booping you," he growled, "it belongs to the Citadel you selfish brat." He held up his stick like he was going to cave her head in and she cringed with her arms in front of her, and took off her panties and handed it to Gaston, who handed both them and her robe to Zack.

"My sponsor gave me those-'' she started to whine, tears in her voice.

Gaston cut her off with, "Do me a favor and tell me you're interested in disciplinary anal rape," he said politely to Zack.

"Sure, sounds interesting to me," Zack agreed, shrugging. Nadia stopped struggling and looked at Zack in wide-eyed horror as Gaston picked her back up. Zack looked around and found where he had dropped the three blunted teeth tentacles on the ground. He walked over and picked them up. "Should I use one of these?" He asked innocently.

"Why not both?" Gaston suggested helpfully. The four girls were frozen in fear and quiet. Gaston continued, this time to Nadia, "Now you do me a favor and do this right, please. As soon as you're out of the Citadel, take a left and run to the South for all I care. The guards of the cliff will probably treat you like a runaway breeding child and drag you to camp after camp to find your Father and ask him whether you are or if it's just a disciplinary issue. Or maybe they'll be lazy and leave you in stocks along the main path with a sign that says "Runaway Breeding child. Who do I belong to?" Maybe your Father will feel bad for you and come get you right away. Maybe he won't find you for a couple weeks and you'll get to taste every Father and soldier that comes through. If no one claims you in a season, they'll find a Father who lost a wife to Takers and offer to let you fill the slot. If you refuse again, they'll give up and send you South. Then you'll end up in a similar situation to the stocks, but for the rest of your life, and there won't be little children feeding you tasty bugs or a kind Father cleaning up your waste every once in a while. They won't just use your mouth, either. You'll pop out a baby or two that way, then have your body, and some say your soul, eaten by an Eater. Your last choice is to take a sharper left and jump in the Birth Canal. Some say you'll return to your original world. Since you're a Native, I imagine you'll just drown. Who knows? Any questions?"

An awkward minute later, Nadia spoke, trying to sound normal but obviously shaken from the threats and constant head injury, "My name is Nadia. I am 16 years old and ready for Breeding. Do you take me as your wife? Please say no, so I can go back to where I belong." Zack raised an eyebrow at Gaston.

Gaston explained, "Technically, you get one wife Mulligan. But nobody does that anymore, it's rude."

"I'll forgive it," declared Nadia. "You don't really want a wife that will refuse to breed with you and fight you every day, do you? Send me back and you'll get a younger, more submissive girl that's looking forward to raising children. Please. You'll do both me and you a favor."

"Everyone gets one hot wife," Gaston explained, "This is yours. Send her back and you'll probably get a grumpy potato instead of a grumpy hottie. Your special order doesn't let you get happy, eager to breed girls."

"Let me see that special order," demanded Nadia of Gaston, "I'm sure you Faked it up and that's why I'm here to begin with."

"I do," Zack suddenly declared, then stepped forward and slapped Nadia in the face as hard as he could. The peanut gallery of soldiers and students who had been watching quietly, cheered. As Nadia stared at him stunned with tears in her eyes, Zack shamelessly checked out her body. She was narrow with an even narrower waist, a beautiful face that needed no makeup with an exotic nose, large breasts that were slim and held close to her body, perfectly keeping their shape, and a slim but womanly butt that finished her long-legged, supermodel image. She was nearly as tall as Zack but seemed a lot shorter after he established dominance by hitting her in the face.

Gaston said, "Good man. If anyone asked, I did that. Open the gate, please." The portions of the wall facing the path slowly disappeared to make a 10 foot tall opening. The wall was just as deep as it was tall, and the entire area under the wall was a vertical drop hundreds of feet to a pit of sharp stalagmites which were, of course, clearly visible due to the nature of light in this world. Among the stalagmites were white bones completely picked clean long ago by the same flickering, indistinct shadows that lived among the fang-like protrusions of stone along the top of the wall. A bridge of bright wood lowered like a sideways drawbridge, from the inside of both sides of the passage, making a path.

A snake-slayer with one snake eye dropped silently from the ceiling of the passage to the bridge, reporting in the usual muffled voice, "No Takers spotted today, but we're overdue for a raid. Three of these girls are short enough to get Taken, so I would suggest a quiet, but quick jog until you get to the first camp. Don't look up and good luck." Without waiting for a response, he leapt straight up and disappeared into the ceiling 10 feet above. Zack and the girls were spooked by this announcement and were completely silent as they crossed over the narrow bridge and through the short cave. Zack eyed the seam in the middle, vividly imagining it opening up beneath and dropping him. When they reached the other side, Zack turned back and saw the precious little redhead with the stuffed rabbit waving at him and giving him a precious missing tooth smile. The bridge retracted and the cave disappeared leaving the soldiers, wives and Zack on one side, the newly clothed children and the rest of Citadel on the other.

"Can't I just trade Nadia for the redhead?" Zack whispered to Gaston, more than half-serious.

"Too late now," Gaston whispered back, "But there's a hundred little girls that look exactly like her running around in the Wild child herds around the farms. No one will care if you mess with them, as long as you're gentle about it. It'll prepare them to be messed with by the older boys once they get caught and sent to school in the Citadel, in any case. Alright, let's go."

The group jogged off along the path to the West. Gaston led them around instead of over the gently sloping hills to make them less of a target. At one point he stopped and pointed South, looking at Nadia and giving her the choice to leave for Zero Country or the Birth Canal. She shook her head no and kept going. They passed a couple soldiers quietly jogging in the other direction, each pushing their own wooden wheelbarrow full of glowing gold, dead Scarab beetles. As the soldiers passed, one winked at Gaston and smoothly tossed him a beetle the size of his fist, without slowing down his cart. Gaston slipped it under his scale armor and clothes without saying anything, and continued his jog. The hills abruptly flattened out and Zack could see, much too far, in every direction. In the extreme distance, beyond what Zack's Earth senses could calculate, were forests of trees that rose out of sight into the sky like a mountain range reaching heaven. Zack jogged back to the nearest hill to climb it and look around. The properties of Quilt allowed him to see miles in every direction until objects were simply too small to make out. There were countless impossibly tall trees making a protective bowl several miles in diameter. The protection stopped a little short to his right, leaving a gap a couple miles in length between the trees and the Citadel and what looked like tall sentry towers, the first building Zacks had seen higher than one story.

In the huge, miles wide protective bowl of trees that made up the Breeding Farms and Humanity's territory to the West were many groups of wooden houses set in semi-circles, three on one side of the grass less path crossing between them, three on the other. The paths started as a straight shot to the Citadel, then split off at even intervals, going out left and right, leading to more groups of houses. The groups of houses, or "camps", were evenly spaced apart; there were many of them, but there was still a healthy amount of space in between, making them like little three house neighborhoods. Running around in that space between were herds, perhaps armies, of little Wild kids frolicking and playing. They ranged from toddlers crawling around eating stuff off the ground to those who looked about 6 or 7, with a few 8 year olds the same size as the newly clothed they left behind in the Citadel, running around and leading the armies. There was a constant background roar of children's laughter and play noises that created a sense of peace. About half the children were digging through the dirt for food or just sleeping on the ground. Every single child was dirty and naked. Eventually Zack came back to the group, where Gaston was patiently waiting for him.

"First day, right?" He said in a friendly manner.

"Sorry, I just got curious," Zack explained.

"No worries, soldiers are happy for any excuse to hang out in the Breeding Farms. It gets boring staring at crops and the jaw wall all day. It's peaceful and relaxing here, isn't it?"

Zack nodded and said, "Feels good on the eyes to be able to stare far away."

Gaston turned back towards the hills and pointed to the right, "To the South is the Birth Canal and a steep cliff leading down to the Eaters and Zero country." He pointed to the left, "The Northern woods where level 2's live, harvest wood, and protect us from the Takers. Beyond, to the East," he made a gesture meaning over the Citadel, "Some lucky soldiers do something easy to keep the Podlings happy."

"They make an honor guard," corrected Nadia pedantically.

"Right," agreed Gaston, "and here in the West our Breeders live off the land and try to reproduce faster than the Eaters can Eat us and the Takers can Take us."

"Why do I get to have sex with and discipline pretty young girls while you get to get eaten in a Suicide Army?" Zack asked reasonably.

"You have to actually keep them disciplined and happy or the Beargernauts will come out of the giant forest and snatch them. I bet it's more work than you think keeping four young teenage girls happy and under control while also forcing them to have as many children as possible. Mess up twice and you'll be sent to the South and Eaten before I am. There's really nothing else to do out here but have sex and eat because the Takers Take everything but the houses when they raid. Everyone would much rather be in the Citadel with its games, toys, sports, romance drama, libraries, interesting food and being near the healing orb. Not to mention inside the walls, safe from Takers and Eaters. But, hey, you get to be King of your own little castle for 60 years. Since you're an Intake male, you never really got to learn about what you are missing out on in the Citadel anyway. The Fathers aren't an unhappy bunch. They get to hang out and talk with the other Intakes about what they can remember about Dirt."

"Adult male Intakes tend to fail to fit into Citadel culture and cause problems," Nadia clarified, unable to help herself, "Female Intakes aren't quite as bad, and fit in well after being tamed by 20 years of Breeding alongside Native girls. It is found that humans between 12 and 35, in general, cause the most issues in society, and thus they are placed a safe distance outside and along the perimeter of Citadel. The Suicide Army of level 1 Native males would live outside the Citadel as well if the Podlings would allow it."

"But then the Old Ladies of the Citadel would miss us," said one handsome soldier, grinning.

"Forgive Steve. He's out to please everybody, I have no idea why he's allowed to be a Beater."

"No one can convince the Elders that bisexuality exists," Steve said, shrugging good-naturedly.

"To answer your question more completely, Zack," Nadia continued in her educated voice, pointedly not using honorific "Father", "Society is structured on Quilt first by a doctrine of survival, then by a doctrine of fairness. For survival, those who can Breed must Breed to satiate the Eaters. If you are a level 1 Intake, your direct children have a good chance to be visited by your original Astral Deity and thus create more Astrals, so all Intakes must Breed. Only leveled up Astrals can protect us from the Takers, and so we must create as many as we can. Zero males, those born on Quilt and never receive a visit from an Astral Deity and birth an Astral, are only useful as Eater food and are thus sent to the South to get drunk and party until they are slain and consumed. Zero females can still birth food for Eaters and the occasional Level 1 child with a Level 1 Intake male, and so they are nearly as useful as Intake females, and thus are granted the same privileges. Feeding the Eaters and producing Astrals are key to survival and the doctrine of survival. All natives are granted the privilege of growing up in the peaceful West and then the school in the Citadel, until they reach the marriage age, which is determined by the numbers of our population and the current size of the Eater Horde. That is, unless you have a useful knowledge or ability and thus get to be Exempt from Breeding and allowed to live in the Citadel. War heroes, such as those with level 3 Astrals and Snake Slayers, get to live in the Citadel automatically since they are too valuable to risk. The Doctrine of Fairness on the other hand is what guarantees a peaceful, safe life for children and prevents females from being sent to Zero country except as punishment for committing crime. It also guarantees that children are never sent to Zero country, Breeding girls get to retire to and enjoy the Citadel after 20 hard years of work, and Breeding males are allowed 60 years to enjoy their wives before they further serve by feeding the Eaters. Did I miss anything?" She looked around.

Steve raised a hand and added, "Us level 1 Native males get to enjoy the Citadel for a little while before we are sent to cull the Eaters. If we didn't go to them, they'd come to us, so we're not really bitter about it."

"So I'll get Eaten by a snake no matter what?" Zack asked.

"Unless Humanity can get enough strength to expand its territory, or somehow better deal with the Takers, Podlings, or Eaters, there's just no room for you in the overcrowded Citadel. There will also be 12 or possibly more women there who perhaps spent their entire young adulthood being raped by you and they don't want to see you there. You've got it better than all the Zero males, just enjoy your Breeding Children and stop complaining." She seemed to realize this applied to her and stopped talking, going red in the face.

"What counts as crime on Quilt?" Zack asked.

"If you have to ask, I'm worried," Gaston joked. "No touching other people's belongings or bodies without their permission."

"What else?" Zack asked in disbelief when it became clear Gaston had nothing more to add. "No way that's all. It can't be that simple."

"It can be when the only punishment for crime is exile to the South. Natives can handle this rule. Intakes, males from Dirt especially, cannot. That's why you're all sent to the West," added Nadia, with a smug expression.

"It's like she forgot that she was sent to the West, too," Gaston commented, stealing the wind from Nadia's sails.

During this conversation, one soldier was kneeling in the grass, making a glowing light with one of his fingers, attracting nearby insects. The other soldiers and Molly were showing Lizzie and Olivia how to catch them and eat them. Lizzie was brave and learned quickly, nervous Olivia kept panicking and letting the bugs escape. Catching Zack looking at her, she smiled at him, bug parts in her teeth and still completely nude, then walked over and grabbed Zack's arm, pressing it against her little breasts, "See something you like, Father? I'm ready to go to our house and take my place as your head wife, now."

"You bounce back quickly." Noted Zack, smiling at her, again appreciating her spirit (and body).

"You're special. That means you have a high-priority Astral, you know? That means we're going to a special camp as far as possible away from the Brown Mirror so that our Astrals level up faster, because we all have high-priority Astrals. One of us will level up and take our favorite mate with us to the North. You saved me after all, Father. This is just the beginning of our journey together, you know." she declared with the same stars in her eyes that she had when they first met.

Zack looked to Gaston who nodded and confirmed, "It can happen. Happens all the time, or we wouldn't have level 2's. You're going to the camp area where it happens the most. I like that one," Gaston indicated, pointing at Lizzie, "It makes me feel better about leaving you with this one," he added, indicating Nadia.

Nadia looked like she swallowed something bad and added, "Sometimes you can take more than one mate with you to the North."

The group eventually continued West, stopping at the first camp, the "Caretaker Camp", which straddled the main road at the first intersection. Zack saw that in front of each house was a matching cage and stocks made of bright wood. There was a bored and miserable looking girl in each of the stocks, all facing the street except one facing the opposite way. Most of them looked really young and weren't pregnant, although they were all very naked and filthy. Written on their back in some sort of black ink was a message that identified them and some responses. The back of the closest girl, a short, hispanic-looking girl with black hair whose face and hair, like all the others, was covered in dried semen, and who kept nodding off, choking herself on the stocks, and waking up again, had written on her back, "Runaway: Who do I belong to?" Beneath that, "I think camp 7," and beneath that, "Marisa from camp 7."

The soldiers smiled in satisfaction as Nadia and the rest of the girls looked on at the pitiful young girls on display in horror. Except for Lizzie, who had just turned up her nose, still clinging to Zack's arm, and commented, "Well, they shouldn't have run away. I don't mind if you come down here to do your job and help punish them, Father, but when you do I want to watch."

Zack shrugged, ruffling her hair with his free hand, and replied, "If you're a good girl, I don't see why not."

Some very small children were going between the captive young girls feeding them handfuls of bugs and dirt, or trying to. When they reached the last girl on the left, the backwards one, an extremely skinny and malnourished looking black girl, they held a brief little kid conference then started putting bugs in her semen slick butt, one by one. Gaston ran forward and stopped them, guiding them around to the other side and explaining to the little kids what they did wrong. Steve got up close to the young girl's skinny butt, spread it, and reached in to dig out the bugs with a finger. The girl lay limp, not reacting to any of this, as if dead. On her back was written "Extended Punishment" and in several scratch wounds ``Thank You!"'s beneath that. Steve then licked 3 of his fingers, and began pushing them in and out of the catatonic young girl's butt.

"Still good," he commented. "Gaston, can I..."

"Steve, you're a terrible Wife Beater. Isn't the unit that I let you tag along with visiting next week?" Gaston commented, exasperated.

"She might not still be here or still be backwards next week," Steve complained.

Gaston replied, "This girl isn't going anywhere for a long time, I bet." He picked her unconscious face and looked into it, "I don't mind if you linger behind and enjoy yourself on the way back. But see if you can wake her up and get her to eat and drink first. I'm worried about her. You'll probably enjoy it more if she's awake anyway."

"Naw," Steve denied while focusing intently on the fingers he was pushing as far as he could into the skinny girl's little butt, "I don't care if she's asleep. I'll try, but I'm sure the caretakers have it handled."

"Where are the caretakers? Must be on a picnic or a meeting. Alright, let's keep going."

"Yes, sir," answered Steve, pulling his fingers out of the young girl's bum with an audible pop, then walking across the road to the girl opposite who was stuck staring at the skinny black girl's semen covered butt all day. "Clean, please," Steve asked, putting his fingers one by one into the captive girl's mouth. She looked up at him with a baleful glare, but otherwise cooperated.

"Wipe it out of my eyes, please," she asked in a small exhausted voice.

"Sure," Steve answered, then licked his thumbs and carefully wiped the crusty semen out of the girl's eyes, "All better?" He asked.

"Yes, thank you," she answered. He then tweaked her nose and walked off with everyone else.

The group soon found the "caretakers" sitting in a circle in the grass, chatting, wearing some sort of giant leaf tunics, while their various wives goofed off and played with their children in the grass nearby. Almost every wife was disabled in some way; missing an arm, a leg, blind, deaf, horribly scarred from burns. A few of the wives were a little older and helped the others move around and communicate. Every girl, no matter how disabled, was both naked and pregnant.

"The handicapped girls and some really well-behaved Zeros get to live here, closest to support from the Citadel. They're not all able to run away from the Takers, obviously, but this is the spot most likely to be reached by soldier reinforcements the fastest." Gaston explained. All of the disabled girls looked extremely happy and their Fathers were kindly-looking older men.

"Not sure if Quilt is a nice place or horrible," Zack commented.

"The Elders do things the way they do them for a reason," Nadia judged, and the soldiers nodded along faithfully, "they've had thousands of years to figure out how to maximize the human experience in this world."

"Don't feel bad for the runaways," Gaston added, "What they're trying to run away to is worse. They might be as happy as the gimpy girls if they learn discipline."

The next camp they walked by had a horrifying, oppressive air.

"...Or they might not. Some Zero camps are like this." There was only one girl in the stocks, but all the cages were full of moaning and crying wives and little children. One fat middle aged man was sitting in a chair watching his four wive dig furiously in the ground, retrieve bugs, and sort them into piles of different body parts. The girls looked to be in their mid-twenties and moved rapidly, focused on their task. They seemed healthy, except for torn and bloody fingernails and horrific bruises on their sadly sagging breasts. The man sat in his chair, pleasuring himself, then called a girl over. She walked over quickly, head down, then began gagging herself on his dick like her life depended on it. While she did this, the fat man roughly pinched and pulled on her disfigured and swollen breasts and nipples.

"I'm going to be sick," Steve the soldier said with a rough swallow, "I think I'll go straight home today after all."

"It's almost impressive," Gaston said grimacing, "How many bugs do you have to eat to be that fat on Quilt?"

"Is it still worse in the South?" Zack asked, eyes wide. Olivia and Molly clung to each other, Lizzie clung to Zack, Nadia looked faint.

"I can only guess it's about the same," Gaston admitted, "the big difference is that if these girls and children are truly miserable, the Beargernauts will save them," Gaston said, sounding a little uncertain. In another house the group heard screaming, arguing, and beating sounds of flesh on flesh. Looking out the window of another were a pair of twins somewhat reminiscent of Romera and Juliet, except as they smiled and waved at the people passing by, it was obvious they were missing both some teeth and the ring finger on their left hand. The stocks at the end of the row of houses held the most disturbing sight so far; a teenage girl covered in scars and livid red and purple lines from head to toe, gasping, writhing, and sweating as a discipline rod that was wrapped her chest and midriff was wiggling back and forth, bluntly chewing on her, and blood occasionally dripped from her nipples to the ground. Gaston approached her and looked at her face then jumped back when her eyes snapped open and looked at him sightlessly, white and cloudy, and she greeted him in a raspy voice, "Don't look up."

The group as a whole ran to the next camp. As they stopped and caught their breath, Gaston panted out, "I knew that camp was switched out to that location to scare new girls straight, but Faker Fake me, that's too much," he took out the thin wooden tablet and handed it to Steve, "Steve, since you're no longer in a hurry to get back, you finish the trip. I'm going to take Biggs and Wedge with me and go talk to that Father before that Breeding Child dies or something. The Father better have an excellent story for me, or I'm taking that child straight to the Elder and then the healing orb." With that, Gaston and all the soldiers except Steve and the one that attracted bugs with the light from his finger left back the way they came.

"I can't tell if that made me more or less gay," Steve commented, still looking shell-shocked. Taller than him, Nadia plucked the wooden tablet from Steve's hand from behind and held it up out of his reach while she read it. "It's in Second Spin for some reason. Why would anyone use Second Spin instead of First Spin, ever?" Steve was comically failing to get the tablet back as the tall girl held him back with one long arm and hand on the face.

"I can read it just fine, but it doesn't make a lot of sense, like it's in code or something." The second soldier was smirking at Steve instead of trying to help. Nadia suddenly smiled and seemed to relax, "I can understand one part for sure, though. Congrats, girls. We ALL have valuable Astrals. We're not being punished today, we're being recognized." Molly and Olivia also sighed in relief, but Lizzie just rolled her eyes; her faith in her own specialness meant this was not a big surprise.

"W-w-we're not going to end up like, like..." Unable to say it, the nervous and bespectacled Olivia, pointed back the way they came.

"No way," answered Nadia, suddenly confident again. "Those Breeding Children must be criminals or something. I'm sure the soldiers will fix it. In any case, they're useless Zero girls and we're, apparently, the owner of valuable Astrals. They get the worst of the West, we get the absolute best." Olivia and Molly glanced at each other doubtfully.

"I know what you're thinking," Nadia continued. "But we must have been misclassified originally. Or else the Elders discovered new, unforseen uses for our Astrals. Look, we'll be on the Beargernaut border. Our Astrals will level up and we can get high on gold all day. The bugs are actually way better tasting than I remembered. In any case, our valuable Astrals will probably level up out here, making us smarter, stronger and longer lived. We'll move to the North and get back to the Citadel in maybe 15 years, and be some of the youngest and prettiest women there," Nadia nodded while she spoke, seeming to be speaking to convince herself as much as anyone else.

"S-so, that's not going to happen to us?" Olivia asked, adjusting her glasses and peeking fearfully from them to Zack.

"Not if you're a good girl that makes Father happy like me!" With that, Lizzie hugged Zack, not trying to hide the fact that she was gripping and stroking Zack's member through his sweatpants, freshly aroused as it was from hearing Lizzie's pretend little girl voice.

"I can be a good girl too," Molly promised in her slow, dim voice, with a needy look on her face when she watched Zack give Lizzie a good-girl-kiss on the top of her head. Zack extended his other arm, and she came to his other side, mirroring Lizzie the best she could, despite having to bend over a bit to accommodate her very pregnant stomach. Molly then clumsily attempted to imitate the way Lizzie was pleasuring Zack, and Lizzie magnanimously started teaching her how to do it. Zack gave Molly a good-girl-kiss on the head as well and was rewarded with a precious, if derpy smile aimed in his direction. Her teeth were just a little crooked and uneven and Zack thought it added to her dumb puppy appeal.

"Stop... come on... there's no need..." Nadia turned around, frustrated, refusing to watch the display of servile affection. Instead, she turned to Olivia, who was wishing she could join in but was too afraid to do so, and continued talking, as much to herself as to Olivia.

"Anyway, what we saw was clearly torture and I'm sure the soldiers will fix it shortly. The Fathers are obviously not allowed to torture the Breeding Children, they're only allowed to... They just... You know, make sure we're always pregnant. I'm not even entirely certain that rape is the only way to get pregnant. I'm not sure, my sponsor told me not to look that stuff up, he said he wanted it to be a surprise, when... Anyway." (she glanced at Zack then quickly looked away) "The only thing this boy can do to us is perform disciplinary rape to make sure we're pregnant at all times. But we have no problem with being pregnant, right? So, no disciplinary problems, no need for punishment." Olivia was nodding fervently to this, arms still covering her chest as always. Zack had one arm each around both Lizzie and Molly, one hand grabbing one of their breasts each. He was taking turns nuzzling their noses with his, and ignoring Nadia as he bonded with the two smallest members of his harem. Nadia cleared her throat and spoke to Zack while not looking at him.

"Um... Father, I am sorry if I lost my head a little and acted in a way which you might be thinking requires disciplinary action to correct. Let me reassure you that I've adjusted now, so that will not be necessary. I am ready to take my position as head wife and become pregnant without... Without a struggle. I'll just get high first and not even notice..." Nadia mumbled the last part to herself. Lizzie was just about to win an upgrade from a nose nuzzle to a kiss when she heard Nadia's declaration of status and abruptly objected.

"No, I'm head wife."

"I'm the oldest and the most mature, obviously I'm the head wife. Alright everybody, let's keep going." She turned to walk away, handing the tablet to Light-Hands.

"No, Lizzie's head wife," Zack agreed, and was rewarded with a squeezing hug from Lizzie that Molly imitated to the best of her ability.

"Whatever, we'll fix it later," Nadia decided with a dismissive wave of her hand. Olivia saw the hands of Zack's that were casually gripping Molly and Lizzie's little breasts. She was surprised to see that the girls didn't mind or even really notice.

The next several camps the group passed did a lot to raise the girls' spirits. The first camps made failure seem terrifying, but the next ones showed the rewards of good behavior. There was an even distribution of Fathers in their first, second, and third scores of duty. The young Fathers, often the same age as their wives, would energetically work with their wives to gather bugs and play with the children, kiss them and touch them affectionately, constantly, and make love with them out in the open fields as their children watched curiously. Occasionally they would argue passionately with their wives, and some wives, almost always the youngest and not yet pregnant ones, would sport a wild and bloody smattering of cane marks on their backs and butts. Those girls were subdued and polite, walking slowly because of the pain, and didn't seem likely to push their Fathers to lose their temper again any time soon. All in all, everyone, from children to wives to Fathers, seemed to range from content to glowing and happy. There was only one semen-covered young wife on the stocks, but she looked properly ashamed of herself like she knew what she did was wrong and that she deserved to be there. She also looked like she had been there less than a day, as opposed to the earlier girls who had stupefied from standing in stocks for weeks.

From one of these camps came a squealing stocky Asian girl (as if that nationality held any meaning here). She hopped up and down as she locked arms with Molly excitedly, evidently an old friend from school. "You naughty girl" she said in a thick accent, "I never guess Molly get pregnant and drop out!"

"No, Yun. It was some old guy."

"Some old guy?" Yun asked, confused. Then, respectfully, to Zack, "We're the same age and went to school together, Sir."

"That's fine," he allowed.

"Except I get pregnant real young, drop out. But Molly too! Get permission to visit sometime, ok?"

"Does it hurt?" Molly asked, pointing to the fresh, raised welts on Yun's bare butt. Yun started petting Molly's hair as if to comfort her, saying slowly, as if to reassure a pet or small child.

"Yes, it hurt, Molly. But is ok. Yun was bad, she stole Gold, get high. Yun Father give di-si-pu-reen because good Father. He young and good in bed, make Yun scream!" She looked serious all of a sudden, "Molly, you no still Zero, yes?" Molly looked confused for a second then figured it out and smiled derpily.

"Level 1!" Molly announced. Yun gave her a relieved hug.

"Good, good. Molly, be good girl, no make Father mad. Have sex, make beautiful children, only sometimes steal gold. I see you one day in Citadel, we old ladies together."

"Yeah, yeah, let's do that, Yun." Molly said slowly, smiling.

"Yun, it's time, sweetheart!" Called a kind-looking young man from the door of his house.

Yun's eyes lit up with excitement, "Uh-oh, time do what Father wants and be good girl again, he he. Love you, Molly! With that, Yun ran off, and Molly returned to Zack's side, stoked. She seemed unable to find the words she needed. Instead, Molly put Zack's arm back around her and made sure his hand was again squeezing her small, but pregnant-firm breast.

The medium age Fathers' camps looked a little different. They were in the 35 to 55 range, while their wives were, of course, still somewhere between 12 and 35. They were like a Father to both of their children and wives, often carrying them around equally. Most of these camps had at least one really young teenage girl that the Father spoiled and touched a lot, even if the other wives were older. It was a common sight to see the Father sitting in a circle with his wives and children, telling stories about his previous life on Dirt. Although there were some beatings, this time even on the little children, the marks were minimal, calmly delivered, controlled. All the wives were calmer, but spent more time in the stocks, ashamed looking young and not so young wives languishing in the stocks with crusty faces and whipped bottoms, next to cages holding grumpy and bored looking children. But fewer wives were beaten bloody in a passionate fit of rage.

"This is the proper age of a Father," Nadia announced, liking the calmer, more peaceful and mature environment she saw, perhaps reminded of the age of her "sponsor" and donor of fancy panties.

The group of older Fathers, 55 to 75, were different yet again. While the young Fathers would embrace and fuck their Breeding Children in the grass, and the middle-aged Fathers would do stealthy things with their younger wives as they sat in his lap, the older Fathers weren't overtly sexual or affectionate. Their daughters and wives might as well be the same age to them and were treated the same. The main difference was that the wives were taller and wore leaf-clothes, hiding any possible evidence of physical discipline. No one was in cages or stocks, and the grandpas seemed to take pride in not showing the signs of needing to discipline their wards. If the young Father camps were passionate, and the medium Father camps were calm and orderly, then the older Father camps were polite and sleepy. All the wives and most of the children were perfectly well behaved, and the wives did all the busy work to take care of, teach, and clean the children, as well as collect bugs, water, or other resources when it was their camp's turn to send stuff to Citadel. Everyone seemed happy if not ecstatic, except for perhaps the wives who weren't currently pregnant but really should be, who looked a little distracted or anxious.

"This, I'm ok with this." Olivia said to herself, her hands, for once, resting comfortably at her sides.

The final category of camps the group encountered (they were aware of the 'Zero-girl' camps that were the first line of defense of low value targets bordering the Takers, but everyone had lost all appetite for touring these camps) was the row of high-priority camps that bordered the impossibly tall forest of the Beargernauts. So close to the giant forest, this group easily maintained their dignity by clothing every Father, wife, and small child completely in the giant leaves the forest occasionally shed. While the earlier wives ranged from wild and immature to calm and obedient, every one of these wives were positively servile and seemed quite happy to be there; they were very aware that they were members of the highest quality camps and enjoying privileges of enhanced dignity as well as a greater chance to cut their breeding service years down significantly. Thus each and every wife was either determined to keep that privilege, or kicked out to a normal camp long ago at the sole discretion of their unsatisfied Fathers. If any wives were stressed, they didn't show it. If any were not visibly pregnant, they must be hiding in their houses until they are. Not every wife was a natural beauty, but they were all taking great care of their appearance and making sure to look and act their best in a way that Zack found very attractive. Some of them seemed as good as or better than Lizzie at makeup.

"It's me, Father," said Lizzie, squeezing Zack's arm, "I'm the good girl head wife that follows you around everywhere."

Sure enough, there were Fathers of all ages talking to each other, their wives, and their neighbor's wives. Every Father had a wife that followed behind him dutifully, standing when he sat, kneeling when he stood, arms behind her back, eyes submissively downcast, ready to instantly do whatever was asked of them, whether retrieving food or drink for the chatting Fathers, or moaning in pleasure as they were passed around between the Fathers like a flask of wine. A common sight across all such camps were two Fathers standing and talking with each other, having switched wives and receiving fellatio or irrumatio, with hands on the serving girl's head. When the girls finished, they opened their mouths to show the contents, then awaited further commands to spit or swallow, or perhaps being left alone intentionally to sit there with their mouths open to taste it for a while.

"I'd do that for you, Father, I'd suck off anyone you told me to like a good girl," claimed Lizzie.

Molly looked a little scared, but also interested in the submissive lifestyle she was seeing. Nadia just looked like she was going to puke.

"No, no, no. Look, no I can't do this. This isn't me." Nadia gestured with one hand as she lectured with her intelligent, educated-sounding voice. With her other arm, she covers her breasts. She seemed one of the least shy to be nude, even proud and comfortable of her impressive young body. But now, standing in front of four unknown men with shameless eyes she seemed to rediscover her modesty.

Zack and his four teenage brides finally stood in front of their new modestly-sized wooden house and across from them on the path were four fathers and their four wives each, presumably other residents of the six house camp to which Zack had been assigned. One man had an additional girl sitting on his lap with a thumb in her mouth and drool running down her chin, a girl who seemed too old to be one of the herds of wild children running around, but too young to be a wife; she was however, just as pregnant as any of the wives. The rest of the other men's wives kneeled submissively behind the chairs brought out for the Fathers to sit in. They bowed their heads demurely, but carefully peeked up to check out the newcomers in their home out of curiosity. A few wives held nursing infants, and a few random naked children from neighboring camps watched while eating bugs from a safe distance away.

Zack's 13, 14, and 15 year old wives hid shyly behind him, unconsciously touching him for comfort. While the 16 year old one, Nadia, stood impudently in front of them, taller than anyone around except for Zack, just barely. Lizzie whispered something to Molly, who nodded. They both then knelt down behind Zack, clumsily imitating the well-practiced wives of the other Fathers. Olivia looked nervously between Nadia and everyone else then belatedly decided to do the same. Lizzie reached over and grabbed her arm, pulling her into a position next to herself and Molly. And thus, everyone appeared to be on board for some sort of traditional ceremony, except for Nadia who stood awkwardly out of place.

Turning towards Molly whom she must have felt was most on her side up to this point she said, sputtering, "You don't... You don't have to do that. I don't have to do that. Breeding children just have to stay pregnant and maintain a disciplined household. They don't have to act like SLAVES and SEX TOYS."

This was followed up by boos and hisses from the kneeling wives and bemused looks from the other Fathers. One of the Fathers waved a lazy, non-committal hand without turning around, and the jeering wives instantly quieted. Zack felt a little hand pulling on his pant leg, turned and saw Lizzie waiting, kneeling with her head down. After a couple awkward seconds he guessed that she was waiting for permission to speak.

"What is it, Lizzie?" He asked, feeling conscious of all the people watching.

"I'll act like anything you want me to... My love..." Zack could feel the effort it took to replace her usual "you know" speech mannerism.

"Aww... Thank you, Lizzie," Zack responded, somewhat moved, and gave her hazel-colored, wavy head of hair some affectionate scratches. There were "awww"'s from the wives sneaking peaks, the Fathers clapped, and Molly stared at Lizzie with her mouth open as if impressed. Nadia looked around, red-faced, seemingly unsure of just exactly what she was most offended by.

"Excuse me," she spouted, "I was talking."

"Looks like one really good wife right out of the Citadel gate and one that's going to take a ton of work," one of the Fathers claimed, looking at Lizzie fondly, who was again pushing out her chest and small, perky breasts proudly. Zack put a hand on Nadia's hip and politely pushed her out of the way.

"Thank you. That's why she's going to be a head wife. I'm Zack by the way, nice to meet you."

"It's nice to meet you, young Father," Zack noticed that the man talking and two others were middle aged, and that the last one was relatively ancient and decrepit.

"I'm Al, this is Brian, this is Caleb and the old skeleton is Doug."

"Who's old? This old man still gets all four of his wives pregnant!" The old man said and cackled. A couple of his wives rolled their eyes and the others shot a significant glance at Al, the meaning of which even the newly arrived Zack could guess at.

"Besides," the old man continued in his leathery voice, "I know the secret to staying potent is drinking what comes out from between a young lass's legs!" The old man's youngest wife cringed and grimaced, hanging her head even lower. She looked about 17, and the wife that reached over and gave her a comforting squeeze looked around 30. The old man continued, "Why don't you trade that wild child for my Emily, here?" Doug said, putting a leathery hand on the 30 year old's head.

"A lot of Fathers trade a wife. It staggers their ages so you have one older girl taking care of the younger ones, and then she gets replaced with a ripe young thing while your first wives are starting to age and the swap-out ages out," Al explained. "But Doug, you know it's too early for something like that. Don't take advantage of a young Father by trying to swap for his hot wife on day one."

"I dun care, I only got two more years before I get eated, anyway!" More old man cackle.

"You'll level up soon, Doug," said Brian, the man with the 9 or 10 year old in his lap. He was bouncing her up and down on his knee like a fussy infant and stroking her chest. Without looking at him, still drooling and sucking on her thumb, she grabbed one of his large fingers and pushed it under her pregnant belly and between her legs, then started clumsily grinding against it and making loud, wordless moans, "aaaa, aaaa, aaaa."

The man holding her took his finger back, saying, "Not now, honey." She started to fuss until he put the same finger in her mouth, calming her.

"I sure do hope so, I do. I'mma lookin' forward to the fresh set of teeth ya got at level 2!" He grinned and showed a toothless, gummy smile. His youngest wife with the vitality potion between her legs started shuddering.

"EXCUSE me," Nadia cut in, arms crossed over her chest, "Like I was saying, I'm not cut out for this. I can't act like a brainless plaything. You'll have to change how you do things to accommodate me." The Fathers looked nonplussed.

Al asked Zack, "May I have permission to speak with your wife? I don't mean privately, I mean publicly, right now. It's the custom of our camp, as it is in a lot of camps, to ask permission to speak to another's wife."

"Sure, go for it," Zack answered. "Doesn't bother me at all. I have no clue how to talk to her, myself."

"I don't need someone's permission to talk to someone. You don't need to ask someone's permission to talk to me. And Zack, you don't need to talk to me, you just need to listen. I've been telling you from the start that I'm Exempt and not supposed to be here. If I choose to stay here, you need to realize how lucky you are and learn to listen carefully when I talk."

A couple of the wives made outrage noises and there was an angry twittering. A sample of their whispering: (...disciplinary anal rape ... talks like a virgin ...no respect ...knees aren't even bruised ...selfish brat ...miss know-it-all ...does she even pelvic lift?)

Nadia addressed one of the older wives who was looking at her down her nose with a judgemental, disapproving look, "Why are you looking at me like that?" Nadia demanded, "And why do you let the Fathers treat you like this?" She waited for a response for a couple seconds, and when none was forthcoming she continued, "Some of the camps I saw on the way here weren't nearly this bad. Isn't this supposed to be one of the best?"

Al finally spoke to her, "They're not going to talk to you without permission. They're all very good girls. Also, this IS the best camp, camp number 1." Several wives gave a curt nod of approval and made a "hmph!" noise. "To answer one of your questions, part of the reason the Breeding Children ``let" the Fathers treat them like Breeding Children are these wonderful tools of discipline that one of our Elders invented, three of which are in your Father's hand. Zack, may I have two of those? You keep one, one is missing from this camp, and I'll figure out where the third one goes later; probably one of the Zero girl camps on the Eastern border. I'll show you how to use yours in a bit."

"Sure thing," Zack agreed, walking up and handing Al two of the altered tentacles from a piece of the "Crawling Chaos". Every girl's eyes followed this symbol of their gender's subjugation with trepidation.

"It's a shame my name doesn't start with an E. We'd have five letters in a row," Zack observed. "If English were like Second Spin, our names would still be adjacent," Al observed, and Zack thought he sounded clever and educated, similar to Nadia, if a good deal less emotional.

"How on Quilt would you know Second Spin? You're obviously an Intake," Nadia observed, looking alarmed.

"So?" Al asked, raising an eyebrow, "I could have immigrated young enough to go through school on Quilt."

"Oh…True." Nadia conceded, looking sheepish.

"In truth," Al continued, "I was a student of language on Dirt and one of my first set of wives after I came to Quilt and became a Breeding Stud was, also, a student of language, and one who was a natural at First, Second, and Third Spin. She taught me some in our ten years together before leveling up and leaving for the North. I do miss Alice, sometimes. She was a lot of firsts for me." He smiled in nostalgia.

"Wait, why the Fake was she sent to the Breeding Farms if she was such an incredibly gifted scholar?" Nadia asked in dismay, "Are scholarly Exemptions a lie? Are all females only useful as Breeding Children on Quilt?" She looked crestfallen.

"She was offered an Exemption, of course. She declined it. She was so smart, hardworking and noble-spirited. She knew the most certain way she could contribute to the survival of humanity and the prolonging of the cycle was to do an all-important score as a Breeding Child. She understood the math of feeding the Eaters, you see. She also felt guilty about doing nothing to deserve the Astral Deity that visited her when she was so young, gifting her with a rare super intelligence, a better place in society, and the 50% longer lifespan of a Level 1 person versus a Level 0 person. She gave up 20 years but had gained 20 to 40 already, so she figured it was the logical, fair option. She asked for the best camp and got it, hoping to level up and accomplish even greater things with an even longer lifespan. What a special young girl..." Al sighed. "But so naive, and so very, very young. Too young to grasp what disciplinary rape really meant. That child hated anal sex more than anything else in life. I got to take my time and listen to her beg and cry, at least three times a day, every day, for ten years. She was the Miyazaki to my Genji. She knew so much about everything but I was lucky enough to get to teach her about so much more, pain, helplessness, humiliation, the intimacy of rape, the inevitability of submission, the beautiful codependence of an abusive relationship. She was my first love..."

"I fell in love with him when he told me that story," said one of his wives, a petite blond that had stars in her eyes and her hair in a long, single braid, "I just wish I were smarter and the age of marriage younger so I could give him the same experience."

"You're younger than she is now and thus more valuable. Your Astral that makes your whole body more sensitive is more fun for me than hers that gave her super intelligence; hers makes her a worse, unsatisfied wife, your's makes you a better wife, more happy and loyal," Al claimed, and his petite young wife couldn't help herself, standing up and running a hand through his hair. Zach noticed that the ring finger on that hand was covered with half a dozen diamond rings of various sizes, matching the same hand of Al's, holding his own various rings.

"Don't forget the most important part, Husband. When you raped her, it made her love you less. Every time you rape me, it only makes me love you more."

Al squeezed her ring covered hand with his own, saying, "I'm so glad I accepted your proposal of love and became your husband." He was absorbed in the moment, then seemed to become aware all at once of the scene he was causing in front of his entire little world and gave a blush that was inappropriate for a 50+ year old man. He cleared his throat and tried to change the subject.

"Now if only Brian would accept the proposal of love from one of his four devoted wives. They've been so smitten with him ever since he saved Judith from that Taker."

"He killed it with his bare hands..." One of Brian's wives, probably Judith, said with her hands together like a prayer in front of her. All of Brian's wives blushed cutely as if to confirm Al's words.

"I scared it away by wrapping my discipline rod around its head. I can only hope it died afterward. No one can kill a Taker with their bare hands." He was rocking the little pregnant girl in his lap to sleep as she drooled all over him. "Besides, I don't think I'm the second marriage type. I'm more comfortable with the professionalism of arranged marriages."

"You're just afraid of commitment, Brian," teased Caleb. Caleb toyed with a cat-o-nine-tails made of the bright red intestinal tubing used as rope and cord (which Brian had learned came from the inside of a dead Eater during his brief school lesson with Locke.) Caleb had fine lines and curves of a tribal-looking scarification tattoo going up and down his arms and his wives had similar markings, which Brian had originally thought was makeup at a glance, covering their faces. However he might have felt about branding Breeding Children with marks of ownership in such a way that they would be settled in as permanent scars, unhealable by the healing orb, he had to admit that the markings were beautiful. "Or perhaps you're too busy playing with that drooling potato to even notice. Are you ever going to let that child go to school?" Calen asked.

Brian responded, "Go to school? My Drooly? She's as dumb as a brick, she would only go straight to caretaker camps then wander back up here. Besides, my wives adore her. She's like the family pet."

"Why does she do that, I wonder?" Caleb mused, "Any little girls I mess with always wander off the next day."

"It started off as the usual story," Brian explained, "A curious child chases a beetle a little too close to your house. You lure them with a shiny gold bug. Put a little gold on a finger, then a little gold on your dick; bam, friends for a day. But somehow or another, we developed a romance over time." Drooley started patting, looking intently at, (and drooling on) Brian's crotch through his leaf clothes, "Not now, honey," Brian again chided, but didn't try to dodge it this time. He continued, "I was so surprised when she got pregnant the first time. She's retarded in the mind but precocious in the body. Really didn't think she'd survive that first birth. I had to carry her to the healing orb at a run. She seemed to think it was me that fixed her, not the orb. Ever since that day, she's stuck to me like glue." Zack could tell that several of the wives wished they could ask what "glue" was.

"You're too nice," Caleb decided, "If you don't want your wives mooning over you all day, you should torture them more. A little torture everyday for a few months is all it takes to get that perfect professional distance in most cases."

"It's true," Al agreed, "There are exceptions, of course," he affectionately yanked on his love-bride's long blond braid, who smiled happily at the acknowledgement.

"Torture, bah," Brian declared, "I prefer the carrot to the stick and rewarding my Breeding Children with orgasms and pleasure for getting pregnant. I could never stomach torture and disciplinary rape. Whenever I tried it I always regretted it. That's why I sent my girls over once a week to confess whatever they did wrong and receive discipline from you, Caleb, although I guess that I don't need to anymore now that I have another discipline rod." Brian's wives deflated and sighed in relief, as one.

"No problem friend!" Caleb cheerfully claimed, stroking his cat-o-nine-tails. "Your girls are so soft mentally and cry so fast that it was a lot of fun. I'd be up for helping out again any time."

"Thanks Caleb, I really appreciate it! Actually, ever since we started that arrangement, my girls have been on the best behavior I've ever seen. Perhaps I'll send them over sometimes if that effect ever wears off," Brian said appreciatively.

"That's because they know if they do anything wrong at all, no matter how small, I'll get it out of them," Caleb claimed proudly. "Torture really does work. It's healthy for the female mind, I truly believe that. That's not saying there aren't other ways of doing things, your methods of discipline are obviously just as effective or you wouldn't be my peer here in camp #1. In fact, I think torture and disciplinary rape are easy and anyone can do it with practice. Your methods of kindness, pleasure, and consensual sex are so rare on the Farms that I think you're the guy with the more unique, valuable skills as a Father, Brian."

"Aww, Caleb. You're always such a nice guy," Brian said, beaming.

"Pffsst," Doug declared. Distracted as he was fiddling with the nipples of his youngest wife, he still paid enough attention to blow his lips at that comment, spraying the face of that face of that wife with spittle. She didn't dare shudder with him watching, although her hands held behind her back shook a little. She was disciplined enough not to flinch, instead affecting a look of serene, eye-closed pleasure.

Al laughed and said, "Brian, you're the one that's too nice. Caleb's not nice at all. He just seems nice to you because he likes boys. Do you realize how many little teaser boys he burns through a year? My house is next to his, so I can hear the poor little things screaming in his bedroom all the time."

"Hey now, they're just Zero boys, they would have been thrown away to the South anyway. Besides, you know how fragile Zero kids are. Pull on their arm and there's an even chance it'll come right out it's socket."

"All little kids start off as Zeros, you brute," Brian teased, hugging the pregnant little girl in his lap protectively, "Using them without breaking them is part of the fun. But hey, it's true that the Zero boys would just end up as Eater food. I'm glad that they get a chance to serve humanity as teaser boys and contribute to your breeding."

"Oh, they really do help. I use them for breeding practice everyday. Keeps me sharp. More time spent with my boys means less time needed on disciplinary rape with my girls. I know they appreciate that freedom. They're more like well-behaved daughters than Breeding Children to me, sometimes. You call me a brute, but my girls often tell me how grateful they are for a life relatively free of disciplinary rape. They're appreciative and work hard for me to make sure that some light torture once a week is all I need to do." Caleb looked proud of his harem, despite not being sexually attracted to them.

"Please punish me later for my misbehavior, Father, but I feel I must speak on behalf of my sisters and I and express in front of our entire camp now deeply grateful we are for the life of dignity, free of penetration that you are so kind to give us all. Also, we treasure both our scars of ownership and the weekly torture session that you give us to clear our minds of stress and worry. We will continue to work as hard as we can to earn the privilege of living without disciplinary rape in this wonderful camp." The girl and her sisters put their scarred faces to the ground in worship.

"Both you and Brian keep your Breeding Children pregnant without disciplinary rape," Al said shaking his head, "I can't even imagine. You gentlemen are truly advanced. I know that I have to practice everyday, multiple times a day, to make sure I don't lose my breeding efficiency." The wives who were originally Intakes from Earth took on a glassy, dead-eyed stare in response to this line, but were well aware that bringing up "radical Dirt ideas" such as that "males did not need to have sex every time they were aroused or they would lose potency," or perhaps that "rape was wrong or harmful to a female" were widely held as signs of a critical need of discipline. Of course such wild ideas from Dirt were not taught to aspiring Breeding children in school on Quilt, which is why Nadia felt she needed to ask, "Wait, won't- are you saying that some Fathers don't use disciplinary rape?" She and the rest of Zack's party had been cowed by the Father's conversation of casually accepted rape and abuse, and now she was grasping at anything that would make this fate seem less necessary.

"Well, no, young lady," Al responded, "There's no law that says a Father must use any specific form of discipline, such as rape, the rod, the stocks, the cage, etc. It's entirely up to the discretion of the Father, himself. It is the privilege of the Father to decide on his own what is necessary in his household to make sure Breeding is successful. It's part of the Doctrine of Fairness; Breeding Children must breed for 20 years or 20 babies, and in return get 100 years in the Citadel. Fathers get 60 years in the West to be in charge of their household and 12 wives, but then get fed to the Eaters. It's entirely possible that rape, or any form of discipline will be found unnecessary by the Father. That's the business of you and your Father and absolutely no one else. If he fails, the Beargernauts will let us know."

"So I just need to talk to Zack about it and that's it. That simple?" Nadia asked.

"Yes, you just need to talk to your Father." Al agreed, putting emphasis on the term of respect that Nadia had been completely missing.

She gave Zack a critical look, up and down, and said, "Can I switch with one of Brian's wives? He's more my type than Zack." There were chuckles among the Fathers and wives, taken off guard and not sure how to react to the absurd request. Zack had to agree that Brian was the most attractive option of the other Fathers; he was kind, brave, handsome, and gave orgasms instead of rape. He didn't think the other Fathers were bad options, though. It's true that Doug might gum you between your legs and drink your pee. Al was obviously a big fan of disciplinary anal rape. Caleb cut your face and routinely utilized "light torture". But the wives had reasons to be quite happy with their Fathers, anyway; Caleb focused his attentions on his teaser boys, so his wives led an easy, rape-free life. Al focused on his favorite wife, who actually enjoyed the attention and all of Doug's wives were largely ignored by the old man, except the unlucky young girl that was the sacrifice to his perverted thirst.

Answering Nadia, Al said, "Well, yes. If Father Brian, Father Zach, yourself, and one of Brian's wives all agree to it, it would be done just like that. But it's usually not the kind of thing a new Breeding Child initiates. It's understood to, generally, be a decision left to the wisdom and needs of the Fathers involved, the need of which is then explained by the Fathers to their good, cooperative Breeding Children," Al sighed, finally out of patience. "Look, Brian's wives are completely smitten with him. All four have proposed a marriage of love to replace their arranged marriage, they're just waiting for his decision right now. So they're not going to switch. I know for a fact that Caleb's wives are likewise extremely satisfied with their Father and he with them. I'm not going to let Doug or myself take advantage of the young Father and switch today."

"Bah, she looks too old anyway," Doug teased.

Continuing, Al declared, "You have two choices right now. Walk through the threshold of Father Zack's house, thus accepting the Father and Breeding Child contract, then you no longer have to worry about the business of choices and decisions for a long time, or, leave this camp and figure it out on your own."

Nadia glared at Al as Zack asked, "What's wrong with me?"

"I haven't forgotten that you struck me in the face during the clothing swap ceremony," Nadia accused. There were little gasps from the other Fathers wives. Zach felt worried suddenly that he would lose the respect of his new neighbors.

Lizzie to the rescue, standing up and speaking rapidly, suddenly, "Um, Zaa, I mean, Father, um, please punish me for talking, um, you know, he, my Father, only hit Nadia because she was hitting the Wifebeaters and saying the F-word over and over in front of little kids, newly-robed, you know." The response of the other wives were now boo's at Nadia and daw's at Lizzie. There were some murmurs about, "head wife", "good girl", "second marriage material". Emboldened by this, Lizzie went for round 2, "So yeah, you know, I accept the contract, so yeah, going in the house to take the head wife's room now, you knooooooow~" With that, Lizzie dodged out of Nadia's reach and darted into the house. The slam of a door was heard. Nadia's eyes were wild and she looked furious.

She pointed a finger at Zack's chest declaring more than asking, "We will talk before doing anything, ok, Father?"

Zack raised his hands in surrender. "I like talking," he offered Nadia, who then stomped off into the wooden house. Everyone gave a little sigh of relief, then tensed up again when they heard Lizzie and Nadia arguing loudly, followed by another slam of a door.

"Now what?" Zack asked into the silence. "Invite your new children into your new home, then we'll have a little Father-only talk to bring you up to speed." Turning to the anxious Olivia and Molly, Zack tries to be sweet and bends over, offering his cheek and saying, "Price of admittance is one kiss on Father's cheek, each." After a stunned instant, Olivia, Molly, and several others broke into smiles at this. Both teens blushed as they kissed Zack's cheek, then hurried into the house.

Zack then sat in a circle in the grass a little ways away from the camp for privacy, having chased away the nearby, vagrant small children. Al, Brian, Caleb, Doug, Danielle (a woman in her 50's that was Doug's love-bride and head wife) a different Danielle (the 18 year old with the long blond ponytail with the same name who was likewise Al's love-bride, but not his head wife) and Zack had been introduced to the love-brides, and it had been explained to him that they were no longer Breeding Children, but Breeding Women, who had made a proposal to their Father-now-husband and had it accepted. It was essentially a formal choice to stay in the West with her partner instead of accepting the pass to live in the Citadel that she had earned, and an informal promise to choose to take him with her to the North, should she level up (and vice versa.) This choice was rare, but happened somewhat more frequently in the priority camps. This choice was made for several reasons; genuine love, puppy love mistaken for genuine love, a dependency created from decades of abuse, a practical decision to try to level up by staying further away from the brown mirror where experience points passively accumulated faster over time, and at times it was made for the wife by a Father that would rather keep her than replace her with a new breeding child. The wife of course realized that he had the means to make her life miserable until she agreed to it, and such a very, very long time to use them (unless the Beargernauts came to take her away by force, of course).

Danielle and Al were obviously in one kind of love or another as they were intense, intimate, affectionate. Danielle and Doug were more of a mystery; she was kind and affectionate to him, he was respectful and appreciative to her, but it was hard not to think of her as an "xp digger". Zack originally thought older Danielle was in her 30's due to her strangely clear, glowing complexion. It turned out that when someone leveled up from a level 1 to a level 2 Astral slowly (such as from passive xp gain) they would often see the life span increasing benefits a little bit early before they actually physically give birth to their Astral companion as they reach level 2. When Doug made another self-deprecating comment about his age and impending death, his Danielle reassured him with, "You don't have anything to worry about, husband. I'm about to level up and take you with me to North Country. Up there, you can drink all the little Zero girls you want for the rest of your years." She affectionately rubbed her hand through the old man's sparse hair as she said this.

"I hope that's true, dearest, I do. But even if it ain't, you've given me 30 kids and more than I deserve, besides. I wish ya all the happiness ya future deserves." Doug took her deceptively young looking hand in his reverently as he said this.

"There are Zero girls up North, too?" Zack asked, trying to absorb it all and grateful to take a break from his new harem.

"That's right! Time to share the secrets of the Fathers," Al said, bringing his hands together in a contemplative gesture. Zack glanced at the two females present. Drooley had almost stuck around as well, but had passed out at the last minute and was carried back to Brian's house by a wife. Drooley wouldn't be telling anyone anything, she couldn't speak more than monosyllabic words. The love-brides, those who married for love, not obligation, were you given special privileges and treated like adults; thus they were allowed to attend the "Fathers only" gathering, speak out of turn, and if they didn't also happen to also be head-wife, which in Al's case he was waiting to award to his love-bride after she got a little older and some of his other wives aged out or ascended, then they weren't really expected to defer to the head-wife's authority over communal tasks such as bug-gathering and child-cleaning.

The Fathers then handed down an oral legacy of facts. These facts, while there wasn't any official rule against sharing them with their wives, were generally kept secret so it wouldn't lower wife morale. Facts such as: Four out of five schoolchildren born of two level 1 parents were visited by one of their Intake parent's Astral Deities, but only one out of one hundred children born of a level 1 Father and a Zero Breeding Child were visited; thus they were all branded with a circle and used as a disposable resource. Before those little children could hit puberty and turn the West into an uncontrolled mess, the girls were sent North and the boys were sent South (at the same age and for the same reason the rest of the herd was sent to school at around 6 or 7 years old, sometimes 8 if they were hard to catch.) The girls became Comfort Kids; concubines of a communal harem used by the entire force of level 2 men and women tasked with guarding the Northern border against the raids of the Takers. The Comfort Kids were also positioned to be a tempting target to the Takers, so their presence reduced the overall number of Takers that would break through, encounter the Drippers, then at last pillage the fertile West. A couple of the prettier Zero boys were sent North to satisfy the Level 2's that preferred them, but the vast majority were sent South to eventually feed the Eaters, as well as presumably serve a similar concubinal role for the nearly male-only population of the South. Just as a few Zero boys made it to North, a few Zero girls trickled to the South, usually part of a trade for the alcoholic fruit that grew exclusively in that region, or sometimes for pieces of the previous Suicide Army's equipment or parts of slain Eaters that were secreted away before they could be retrieved by the Citadel's level 3's tasked with that responsibility.

Another secret- the Juggernauts aka Beargernauts. During "Bear Season" they would come "rescue" wives, children, even the occasional Father that was miserable to the point of suicidal. It was believed that the primary trigger for their arrival was hopelessness. To combat this hopelessness, the Breeding Girls were guaranteed 100 years of comfortable retirement life in the paradise of the Citadel that they went to school in as a reward for their long service as Breeding Children. This way there was something to hope for to keep the Beargernauts away. The girls knew that the one thing the Fathers couldn't do was take that promised future away from their wives; murder was punishable by exile to the South and all wounds would be healed by the healing crystal one day (although not all scars, mental or physical, would ever ever truly fade).

And thus, with a bright future in the Citadel and the rescue by Juggernauts if things got too rough (or, perhaps threat of rescue if they allowed themselves to dwell too much on their misery) along with 5-10 years of grooming in school to accept their fate, the females of Quilt cooperated and let themselves be bred and treated as sex slaves. Something the Fathers knew but the girls of the Zero camps didn't; the Juggernauts had no interest in "rescuing" anyone who was without an Astral and destined to never be visited. The Zero girl camps were rough places because the Fathers knew they could get away with treating their wives however they like, while the wives firmly believed that either their suffering must not yet be great enough to be rescued, or that surely they would get rescued the very next Bear season. Their children often escaped the same abuse because the Father could never know for sure which were the one out of a hundred that would summon a Beargernaut rescue if tormented too much, getting the offending Father exiled to the South.

When Zack asked what "disciplinary rape" was, he was told it was "made-up nonsense that nevertheless kept the West together," and Al promised to teach him how to do it by using his petite little Danielle as an example when they were done talking. Zack was informed that if he were only attracted to boys or prepubescent girls, he was allowed to request a couple little kids with the Zero brand that would live in his bedroom as "teasers" and help him get it up when it was time to conceive with his wives. He was reminded that he was a level 1 so he was roughly 50% smarter, stronger, faster and longer lived than a Zero; so he should be very careful if he plays with the little children; if he breaks a wild child he's in big trouble, if he breaks one of his teaser kids he won't he getting a new one for awhile. He can, however, do what Caleb does and bribe a soldier to sneak one out in a covered cart to the healing orb to put the misused little kid back together. As a successful Father of a high-priority camp who had raised several Breeding Children to ascend in level, Caleb had a special allotment of extra Zero boys each year.

Zack said he wished his girls were 9, 10, 11, 12 instead of 13, 14, 15, 16. He was told if he wanted to get his hands on school girls those ages, he'd need to level up; he'd find them as Comfort Kids in the North, where Zero girls went instead of school. More motivation to level up!

The Fathers also shared some basic Quilt knowledge that someone not from Dirt wouldn't know that they needed to explain: It was always daytime, even indoors. There was no Sun, Moon, or anything worth looking at in the sky; in fact, never look at the sky. Looking at the sky was dangerous. There was no wind nor rain, no seasons, no curve to the world that would prevent viewing from an infinite distance, no change in temperature, even indoors or underground. Because of this, especially the lack of rain and freezing, wooden structures lasted a really, really long time, which is why everything was made of wood and houses had no need for windows; they either had holes in the walls, or were completely solid. Walls still muffled sounds, though, which is why their houses had no windows in the bedrooms, in order to give neighbors a degree of privacy.

"Why use roofs then, instead of opening your house to the sky if there's no weather?" Zack asked. Al explained that weather was a "bad word" on Quilt, along with Take, Eat, and especially Fake. Telling someone to kill themselves and was never spoken in any circumstances, even in jest. This made "Don't Look Up," the standard greeting, the equivalent of "take care of yourself" along with "hello" and "what's up?". If one slipped up and asked "What's up?" a local would laugh awkwardly and assume the speaker was trying to make a terrible joke in bad taste. No one spoke about Up; it was taboo. Zack recalled that even his explanation of it in the Citadel had been strangely brief.

There was only one thing resembling weather on Quilt, and it came instantly and without warning. Zack was told that it was hard to explain but that he would know it when it happened. If he were indoors or could dash indoors over the next couple of seconds, he would be safe. Otherwise the correct course of action was to lay as flat as possible on the ground and crawl towards the lowest elevation around. Most importantly, of course, was that he remembered, "Don't Look Up". Those who were originally born on Quilt, Natives, had a natural instinct to do this and could sense the need to hit the deck a couple seconds before an Intake would. So if he saw a herd of children suddenly collapse to the ground, face down, and stop moving, he should go ahead and follow suit.

There were no mirrors, standing pools of water, and no one slept on their back on Quilt, because no one wanted to accidentally look up. If Zack was thirsty, which didn't happen as often on Quilt as it did on Dirt, he could find water anywhere just under the Bug-Layer, by digging with his hands about a foot and a half into the soft dirt. He would then cup the water in hands and bring it to his mouth, without risking looking down into the groundwater that could be reflecting the sky above (another skill that came naturally to those born on Quilt, along with the ability to crawl around and find bugs to eat from as early as one year of age).

If Zack needed to "go number 2", which also happened more rarely on Quilt than Dirt for some reason, he needed only dig down to the water layer then cover it back up, and the mess was disposed of. No one cared if you peed anywhere at any time, though, (unless you were Doug's youngest wife, in which case you were given very specific instructions of when, where, and how you were allowed to pee, which was generally when Doug was thirsty and at no other time.)

"Quilt sure is convenient," Zack commented.

"Unnaturally so," Al agreed, "according to the "nature" of Earth's universe, at least. Whatever Quilt is, it is certainly not a planet floating in space somewhere in our former universe; it's not even round, unless it is so much larger than Earth that it is impossible to see its curvature."

It was explained to Zack how exact numbers of camps and wives were calculated so that they could reproduce full-power without over-harvesting the bug population. How it was generally safe to wander into the Beargernaut forest to look for leaves as long as you were careful not to get lost; there was no food or water appropriate to humans in there. How there was a rare gold bug that looked like a golden scarab beetle mixed with a firefly, that would get you high and make your eyes produce gold light, and that the Fathers hoarded these to themselves and threw any child, Breeding or otherwise, into a cage when they were caught with glowing gold eyes. How one could trade these drug bugs for a huge variety of little things from the Citadel. Zack mentioned the two wheelbarrows full of gold bugs he saw on the way carted to town and was told that someone probably saved that up for a good while to buy an entirely new wife.

"You can have more than four?" Zack asked. "Only if you keep the extras in the bedroom room like a Teaser," he was told.

Except for the weather, the Takers were the scariest thing that happened. They would avoid crossing the Juggernaut forest unless they were crazy, and even in that case they would only cross it one-way (The Juggernauts would come and wipe them out if they lingered.) They looked somewhat like bipedal, 9 foot tall furry dogs with four arms and seven fingers on each hand/foot. Their bodies resembled seven fingered hands, and their hands looked a lot like a Taker itself, making them strangely fractal. They would run through the West at high speed wielding a large bone club thought to be made from the leg bone of another Taker. At level 1 unarmed humans stood zero chance against one in a fight, so the best move was to hide your wives and any nearby little kids you could grab in your house, stacking whatever junk you could in the entrance way of the house to tempt them to take that instead. The Takers wouldn't swing their bone at you unless you attacked them first, and as long as you were tall enough they would leave you alone, instead focusing on stealing stuff and escaping before the Suicide Army arrived in numbers that would guarantee victory (the snake slayers living in the wall would often tag along even though they weren't supposed to).

The level 3's that lived in Citadel weren't worth risking against the initial assault when the number of Takers were at the highest, but would come out at all at once, together, to clean up any foolish Takers that overtook, hanging around too long and carrying too much to run at full speeds. Nothing an unarmed level 1 human could do would be worthy of being called an attack against a Taker, so if they didn't want to Take you, they would, at most, roughly shove you aside. They would nab a few little kids, maybe one of the youngest, still-not-yet-adult-height teenage wives, then attempt to run the gauntlet of human defenses once more to return with their four arms full of prizes.

Crying children, Breeding or otherwise, would be found roaming the grounds and looking for their home camps over the next couple days, if they were rescued by Drippers or Level 2's before the Takers could escape back. The only move available to the Fathers was to attempt to wrap their discipline rod around a Taker's limb, like Brian did. This was, however, an excellent way to get killed from a single swat of their bone club, making Brian's action notable both in its success and bravery.

The conversation of Astrals came up; every member of the priority camp had something effective and useful. Doug had a corpse Astral, which meant he aspired to become a combat-worthy Zombie one day, and this was also why he looked older than his age. The effects of having that astral (coincidentally) combined with the lifespan increase from being level 1 and merely made him look his proper age in his 70's.

Caleb clearly remembered dreaming of his job as a tattoo artist when he came over, and so his Astral made him something of a Master Artist, thus the amazing scarification tattoos. Since his Astral took the form of something that deeply inspired him, it was put in the category of "Muse" Astrals, which had the potential to be incredibly useful one way or another. Those with "Muse" Astrals were the ones that created almost all of the technology that humanity couldn't readily replicate, such as the amazing objects that ringed the Geode. As a result of having such a valuable Astral, he would head to the Citadel instead of to the North or South, as a rare exception to the rule, probably to live in Storage and assist the Elves.

Brian didn't remember coming over to Quilt at all, but he must have had a dream about his teeth falling out, since his ability was the well-known and somewhat common one to regrow his teeth on demand. Pretty useless at first, but a reliable ranged warrior Astral at the higher levels. He made it to the priority camp not because this was a singularly useful Astral, but because it was a fairly good one and he was also distinguished as a high-quality Father with an extremely satisfied first crop of wives that bragged of a super rare 100% ascension rate. (The standard ascension rate was far less and generally replaced the fallen Level 2's of the North at a rate just higher than the rate at which they fell in battle to the Takers.)

Big Danielle's Astral was a Holy Knight, the Astral of one who came to Quilt on a dream about protecting their children. This was overall the best, most well-balanced warrior Astra currently knownl, the one who could fight the Takers most efficiently. (All Astrals of level 2 were useful, though, as long as they possessed any sort of physicality, since they were virtually unkillable.) The Holy Knight Astral was not only one of those Astrals that could talk, but possessed a human level intelligence and coordinated the actions of those around them.

Little Danielle's Astral wasn't somehow remarkable at level 2, but at level 1 possessed the highly sought after ability of making her body highly sensitive and turning anything into pleasure, an ability that would guarantee any Breeding Child a happy life on the Farms and would keep the Juggernauts away. If enough people with that Astral could be bred into existence, it might help humanity survive simply because it increased the birth rate and survival of those living in the Breeding Farms.

The subject then turned to Zack's Astral. "It's... Well..." Zack struggled to find the best way to explain that his Astral was a rape-monster, and in deciding whether or not to admit it at all.

"Hm..." Caleb said thoughtfully with his hand on his chin and a grin, "It wouldn't happen to be an Astral that would cause suffering to your poor, innocent, young wives, would it?" Zack began to sweat a little.

"Yeah... something like that, maybe?"

"I thought Caleb was nice to guys," Brian commented, "stop teasing the new guy, you'll make him think he's a bad person. Zack, we know you're a Grinder. There's more than enough clues."

"A what?" Asked the wary Zack. Al took out the thin wooden tablet that led the Wife Beaters to bring him to this camp.

"A Grinder," he declared, "Someone who levels up by wearing out a series of low-priority wives. This here says to grab you wives that don't want to be Breeding Children. You're obviously going to make them suffer, somehow. That's why they gave you this Grind house next to Evan's, with more soundproofing and a little more distance from the rest of us. There's no flooring so that your wives can dig up just enough bugs to survive should they need to be locked inside and it's also the only house with locks on the outside of the bedroom doors." Al had gestured at the house across from Zack's, a silent, forbidding affair with deep, dark, ancient-looking stains on the stocks and cage.

"So what do you have?" Al continued. "A stalker? Torturer? Tear-drinker?"

"It's..." Zack attempted to explain, "Something like a Succubus, but different. A rape-monster, but not the kind that collars me and controls me like a Succubus usually does."

The Fathers looked impressed, "So, you're like me," Al concluded. "An unclassified Astral that's being speed leveled just to figure out what it is. A rape-monster, eh. No way to know ahead of time, but I'd be willing to bet it would Fake up some Takers real good."

"I wonder if it levels up from rape," Caleb mused, "That's one of those things that are real easy to find in the West. It might be as easy to level up as a Lawnmower or Fly-Trap."

"Hopefully, it's more useful than either," Brian added, "Well don't think we're going to judge you. I may be kind to my wives, but I won't think less of you for tormenting yours. I wonder if he even needs to keep his wives hidden, if all he's going to do to them is rape them? Rape and sex are synonymous in Quilt, especially in the West."

"Says one of the only exceptions to the rule," Al said grinning, "Well, the girls will be disappointed if the new wives are never seen from again. I'm quite certain that my Helga wants to bully your Nadia and the rest want to watch. Acting like you're better than the slave lifestyle is the last thing you want to do to make friends among proud, elite, hardworking slaves."

"I hope that at least Zack can come out to play and not hole himself up all day like Evan does," Caleb said, putting a hand on Zack's knee in a friendly manner. "It would be nice to have a younger guy to talk to and hear updates about Earth. There aren't any first-time Fathers in the priority camps that aren't Grinders, which is how we spotted you as one right away. Also that bratty girl; never seen a Breeding Child that fought being assigned to a priority camp before. What a bitch." The other Fathers agreed with this and talked about what they would do if Nadia was their own disobedient Breeding Child.

"I'd pleasure her once, but only once, and force her to watch every time I pleasured my other wives," Brian claimed.

"I'd tear up the bottoms of her feet and that mess between her legs so she would think about what she did wrong every time she walked or peed," was Caleb's contribution.

"I'm a Traditionalist," was Al's version, "Disciplinary Anal Rape three times a day, always at the same time each day. After about the third day onwards they start to lose their mind, always anxious, always anticipating it. You'll have to do whatever works for you, of course Zack. Especially with your unique Astral." This led to a conversation about the need to do disciplinary rape correctly and the wisdom of how and why to be a "Father".

"It taps into the natural dominance between Father and child. Native children run around wild and don't get real parenting so parts of them really want it, deep down inside. Intake girls probably had parents, so you're really just having them relearn something they knew once. The key is to think of yourself as the Father; an adult, mature, wise, always correct. Think of and treat your wives like children; talk down to them, be condescending and explain things slowly, using simple words, treat them like they're too stupid to understand what's best for them, and convince them that they are overly emotional and that their emotions aren't valid. Gas-lighting, if you've heard the Earth term. Once they start talking to you in a "little" voice, you know you've won."

"Wait a second," Zack interrupted, "I'm sure that you've been here way too long to know that term."

"I could have learned it from a recent Import," Al disagreed, "but the truth is that time isn't one to one between Earth and Quilt. One year on Earth is a long time on Quilt, depending on the current season. Not something you can understand unless you're very good in school, here."

"Yikes," Zack agreed.

"Anyway," Al continued, "If you mess up disciplinary rape the first time, it can take a long, annoying amount of time to fix things. It's about setting expectations. If you declare that it's time for sex, or rape, same thing, you must not, under any circumstances take "No" for an answer. It doesn't matter if the child is asleep, using the toilet, giving birth, or super sore and bloody. If you let them talk you out of it even once, you could be fighting them about it for years because they think resistance might not be a complete waste of time. I don't care if you're too tired, if it's rape time, stick something in the girl and act like it was the plan all along, even if it's just your big toe in their ear. Penetration on demand is ownership and it's the key to a happy, harmonious family. Here's two things to keep in mind, wisdom passed down for thousands of years, at least: The first is about physical resistance to rape. Be prepared to escalate things to the maximum every time. Never, ever let them successfully fight you off for any reason. If you can hold them down and take it while they struggle the entire time, and you like that, great. If they're too strong, too violent, too dangerous, too annoying for you to successfully finish a rape, then be prepared to beat them. Black eyes and broken teeth are great, so is a calm, controlled caning from the disciplinary rod. There is no wrong answer as long as you win, just don't kill them, and if you think they MIGHT die, you better carry them all the way to the healing orb if they can't walk by themselves. An example of a bad place to hit is the neck. An example of a good place to hit is the ribs; even a punctured lung, impaled by a rib, is fine; you'll be able to force them on a miserable walk to the healing orb, as opposed to carrying a paralyzed vegetable there yourself. The healing orb cures everything, even comas. But it won't help you carry a wounded wife to it."

"You guys are awful," Brian accused, eyes closed in consternation.

Ignoring him, Al continued, "if the wife is fighting back, or she won't submit to taking a position for cane beating, drag her by the hair into the stocks and deliver both the beating and the rape there. That's the important part; no matter her reaction and what you need to do in response, the rape always happens anyway. A "Successful Breeding" to speak in Quiltian terms."

"Don't make up words, Al," Brian chastised, "They just call themselves humans, here."

"If you really have trouble," Caleb added, "There's no shame in asking us for help. We'll drag her out and hold her down for you, and let you do the actual discipline. It'll be fun."

"Don't let her get your eyes," Al contributed, "Anyway, the second piece of ancient wisdom is how to respond to verbal resistance to rape. First, you always have an answer ready for anything, acting like it's obvious. Then, after a point, you act like you've lost patience with her immaturity and insult her. No more need for talking after that point, unless you're just into that. Here, I'm going to give you an example of this with Danielle right now."

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Note: This is as far as the "book" version of the story has been written so far. It was originally written to be the plot of a visual novel and have your choices lead you to different parts of the wide, weird world. This version is planned to be a story that mixes several of those paths so that you can meet all the monsters and characters in one read.