Harem Scare 'Em

by Tripp Greyson

  Harem Scare 'Em

  The First Book of Fell Tobias

  Being the True and Accurate Story of the Exile of Fell Tobias, and How He Overcame Adversity and Triumphed Over Evil to Become the Founding Father of a New Nation;

  as documented by

  his scribe,

  Tripp Greyson

  Copyright © 2019 Tripp Greyson (a.k.a. Floyd Largent)

  This is a work of fiction. While alternate versions of some locales mentioned herein do exist, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, existing businesses, or events is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written consent from the above is strictly prohibited.

  Special note: per Commonwealth Edict 12X1a-Subsection c, the All-Father Fell Tobias and his scribe, Tripp Greyson, are immune to any and all libel and defamation suits, especially in regard to truthful historical narratives. So suck it, cobbers!

  Dedicated to the Hero of Scarborough Faire, the smallest but greatest of us all

  Table of Contents

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Prelude

  She really should have known better. She'd ended up in this desolate stretch of the alt-Nether because She hadn't paid enough attention in Divinity School, and had finished near the bottom of Her class. She was brilliant, but had always suffered from attention deficit issues, right from Ascendance. She just couldn't focus on boring things, and ultimately, that had been Her undoing.

  She'd even been late for the Job Fair. It wasn't like She had slept late, because She never slept. Certain People had suggested that was the problem with Her, but They were wrong. It was all because of the starhoops. She had been busy fiddling with them in the Goldilocks Zone of a red dwarf deep in the Secondary Quantum Bands, and they had been giving Her. So. Much. Trouble! She knew the M-class primary wasn't the best for this kind of thing, being metal-poor and dim, but it was the only real estate She could afford after what seemed like eons of Substitute Divinity while She earned Her advanced degree. Despite all the tinkering, the little ringworlds were having problems retaining decent biobands.

  After asking around and studying all the guidebooks She could find, She finally decided Her best bet for workable ecologies were the Unkillables. As grubby as they were, they were cheap. After long thought, She reluctantly spent the last of Her disposable Quint for as many basic humanish packages as She could afford. Realizing they would only stretch so far, She carefully sprinkled the biobands of Her starhoops with spores that would engender a variety of ecologies: sea-monkeys here, land-apes there, several nicely proportioned mixes, a few sky-simmies and dig-homs. The only viable alternative was cockroach ecologies, and She hated cockroaches—because ugh, bugs.

  By the time She had struggled out of the Secondaries back to the Transcendent, all that remained at the Job Fair was barrel-scrapings. She had chosen the best-paying job She could find in terms of Quint, though this reach of the alt-Nether was even deeper in the Secondaries than Her project, right on the verge of the Obtuse!

  Luckily, She wasn't bored. She got tight-burst transmissions from Her starhoops every few local decades, and emitted an occasional cosmic squee! when She learned one of Her project species had achieved sentience, invented gunpowder, popped off an A-bomb, or accurately deduced Her existence. And not one had died out yet! Two had even spread to some of the primate-free 'hoops She had left lying around for that very purpose!

  And Her job wasn't as bad as She had feared. She was supposed to keep an eye on the progress of a cloud of humanish worldlines generated by a water world, a kind of hobby garden seeded well before Her birth by an Elder God who had recently retired. Most of the worldlines were peaceful and trouble-free, but there was one that was militant, high-tech, and tightly controlled by a powerful organization called the Union of Nations that liked to colonize other worldlines. She could even take action if She needed to, but that was strongly contraindicated. The U.N. worldline had recently skewed toward godhead due to its scientific prowess, such that its peoples were expected to fuse into Ascendance any day now. One result was that its time-rate had slowed somewhat, putting it out of sync with its Local Cloud.

  But nothing even the slightest bit interesting ever happened there, so She just submitted the same report every year: No significant change.

  When the skewline finally did start changing, She didn't notice at first. The skewline had, in its race toward Divinity, invented something called Sudoku that fascinated Her. She spent most of Her time focused on numeric grid puzzles of the Infernal variety, and it pleased Her when She was able to solve one without error. Sometimes it took hours.

  During one of those sessions, the skewline began glowing brightly, and whipped suddenly toward its nearest companion in the Local Cloud. When the two worldlines met, they merged abruptly and disastrously in a sudden flare of celestial energy; and it was then that She noticed what had happened. Panicked, She stretched out a Divine hand, hoping to mitigate the worse effects before Someone noticed and She got fired.

  It was too late. In fact, it was so too late that even a Dominion or a Supremity would have been unable to reverse the merger. But She was able to contain its effects well enough that the other local worldlines suffered only the occasional shower of meteors and births of two-headed calves, and the odd messiah or two. In the end, She did Her job well, but She paid for it: She spent all but a tiny fraction of Her Quintessence to contain the flare, and was so weakened that She was sucked into the weirdness that resulted.

  Chapter 1

  I woke snuggled up to S'linkitha for the third time that day. I rolled over and groaned, loving this new virility my Goddess had bestowed upon me. So far, my privy member was an even better weapon than the Dawn Sword! My darling Slinky giggled next to me, clearly impressed, which I found a bit embarrassing. She had already confided in me that it was difficult to impress a succubus, given that they feed off male energies and can reproduce only with the seed of an extraordinary male. I still wasn't so sure about the extraordinary part, but I do have to admit that she loved to feed. And I loved it when she did.

  Prior to her capturing me, I had thought that comforting a woman was about more than wrestling, biting, slapping, licking, thrusting, ramming, and pulling hair. But succubi were not of this Earth, and I had to admit that this sex thing was exciting and enjoyable thus far, strange though it was.

  ❖

  Seventy-two hours earlier I had been a virgin, formerly the laughingstock of my town, through no fault of my own. I was intelligent and agreeable, and not bad-looking, or so I had been told by girls and young women of my acquaintance. But at the age of 25, I had yet to reach manhood. Though fairly tall at five-nine by old measure, my body was smooth and hairless, my genitals still those of a child, my voice as high and pure as that of the castrati of the fabled Salzburg Boys' Choir. Women were a mystery to me, and why I was supposed to be attracted to them even more of a mystery. I had yet to put away childish things.

  No longer. I rubbed the unfamiliar stubble on my chin, and then the itchy, fine fuzz on my groin. The Goddess had awakened my lost manhood, and I owed her my life. My next hundred lives, if this was what comforting was always like!

  I looked into Slinky's orange eyes, which were somehow perfect for her chalk-white face and hair, but contrasted sharply with the purple stripes on her shoulders and breasts. Otherwise she looked perfectly human until you got down to her ankles, which flared not into feet, but into large, cloven hooves. Oh, and there were the vestigial bat-wings s
prouting from her shoulder blades, which she kept polished and decorated with glitter paint. Knowing I was sticking my foot in it yet again, but unable to stop my curiosity, I asked her something that had been bothering me: "Why are demons all female? Don't you have any males? The Goddess tried to explain, but I didn't really understand."

  Slinky scowled and slapped me lightly. "You're lucky I like parts of you," she said, showing her sharp teeth. "We aren't demons, Tobias. I told you, there's no such thing as demons. All that supernatural stuff is bullshit. We're as human as you are."

  "You don't look it." When she glared at me, I was quick to say, "I'm sorry. I've always been a Truth Teller. It's one of the things that got me exiled."

  She snorted. "Yeah, I noticed your lack of tact. Here's the deal: my sisters and I, and the rest of the other races… we Stepped Through from another quantum reality on a colonization expedition 24 new-years ago. For reasons none of us understand, even a little, the Caul between our worlds somehow filtered out every single Y-chromosome from every single one of our men, and changed us to be as we are now. I used to have normal feet. Blonde hair and blue eyes, too."

  "Were you a man as well?" I asked.

  "Half of us were, but no, I was female already."

  "Good! I like you as you are," I said, gallantly and truthfully. "But I have no idea what a quantum or a why-chromosome is. Although the Goddess did say my 'brothers' and I had all the whys now. Is that what she meant—why-chromosomes? It all sounds like magic to me."

  She sighed. "Not magic. Just super-science and biology." She glanced at me. "Okay, maybe a little magic." After a long pause she continued, "We're not really monsters, you know."

  "You're not," I agreed, but I wouldn't go any farther than that. I thought about the pebble-skinned troll that had eaten my horse, Flicka.

  "I used to be a physicist," Slinky wailed suddenly. "And even I have no idea what went wrong that day!"

  "What's a fizzy-cyst?" I asked, propping myself up on an elbow. This sounded interesting.

  She sighed. "We study how the universe is put together, especially at the most basic level… all the little parts you can't see."

  "Atoms, electrons, protons," I said.

  She looked at me, startled. "Yes! How they work to build all things, living and non-living. How the smallest particles are born and decay and combine, why a rock falls when you drop it, things like that." I knew she was simplifying everything to a very basic level — not because I was stupid, but because I lacked the education to understand anything more advanced.

  A thought struck me. "Oh! Then is the Dawn Goddess a fizzy-cyst?"

  My paramour sighed, and when she looked at me, her eyes were both kind and shiny with tears. "No. As far as we can tell, she's the fusion of one of our mission leaders with a full-function medical android. She hoarded all our medical equipment and autodocs for herself for some reason." She reached out and grasped the new part of me, and a shiver of delight went through both of us. "That's how she was able to give you this."

  We kissed for a while after that, but it went no farther for the moment. After a moment of silence, I got up and climbed into my clothes, then went to the river to haul in a bucket of clean water. I began to make dinner, a process that was not unfamiliar to me, as I was my family's best cook. Mother had enough work to do taking in washing and seeing to two growing boys.

  I had managed to kill a rabbit with my sling earlier in the afternoon, so I built a little file and set the water on to boil in my kettle, then went to skin the rabbit while the water raised to a boil. I was surprised to find that S'linkitha had already skinned it with a finely-chipped flint knife, and she looked very wholesome now in her short skirt and what she called her halter top. I had never seen such a beautiful woman, and it amazed me that a queen such as she would ever stoop to manual labor.

  As she scraped the rabbit hide and staked it out to dry in the sun, I chopped vegetables for the stew on a lapboard brought along for just that purpose. After a while she asked, "How did you know about atoms? You said you were one of the Plain People. And you survivors have fallen pretty far."

  I looked up and told her, "Yes, I was born Misha. But I know about atoms and suchlike because my Old-Father Trent used to be a kemytht. He taught me about them."

  "Chemist," she corrected automatically. I nodded. "He combined different elements to make new compounds, right?"

  "Yes, that's it!" I said, and tried not to become excited by the jiggling of her full breasts as she chuckled. "But then, suddenly, things stopped working right. Petroleum products stopped burning. Gunpowder stopped exploding. Uranium stopped emitting radiation. He said he was pretty much useless after that, except for making babies." I went to check the water; it was steaming, so I had time to slice some wrinklies.

  "That's hardly useless," she said, as I went back to my cutting. "We were left with no men of our own. We can't even produce boy children! Why do you think we steal your men whenever we can? It's the only way we can reproduce."

  "Well, I don't mind being stolen." She grinned at me, her orange eyes merry. "But I still don't understand why the world changed so much." The water was boiling now, so I poured the lapboard full of cut vegetables into the pot. It subsided a bit as I reached for the rabbit and cut it up with my gopherwood knife. Luckily, rabbits come apart easily. Jackalopes, now…

  I knew I had hit on a sore subject with her, again, and froze. I was still new to this sex slave business and didn't know how far I could go without being clouted. I turned to see that her face had gone bleak again. "It may have been our fault," she finally said in a low voice. "You have to understand, we had no idea this reality hosted an advanced civilization, or we would have left it alone. You see, the time differential between our worldlines was skewed. When we first studied your world, you had no high technology at all, and that was just a few years before colonization for us. When we Stepped Through, something went wrong. Our electronics interacted disastrously with your technosphere. There was this enormous EMP and a subspace energy pulse that killed all electronics and subtly changed some laws of physics, at least for this Earth."

  E-M-P? Emp? I knew that an emp was a kind of minor demon, which kind of went against what she had said before, about demons just being twisted-up ladies; and I didn't want to think about having to face any enormous ones. But maybe that was what had caused the Day of Ruin after all. Could an Enormous Emp have sped up the Earth on its race around the Sun?

  "The years, too," I said thoughtfully, as I tossed the cut-up rabbit in the pot. "Your people did that? Wait. Wait, I need to wash my hands." So did she, so we both went to the edge of a quiet pool, scrubbing our hands and knives with sand, then washing them clean. I thought about the changes after the Ruin. The elders said that years used to be an incredible 365 days long, and even longer on something they called "leap years." Imagine waiting that long for your next birthday and Hanukah and Christmas to roll around! Now the year was 272 days long. "You know," I said as we shook off the water and went back to camp, scaring up hoppers in the grass, "a lot of our elders hate it when we call them 'new-years.' They say it reminds them of a holiday they used to enjoy."

  Slinky snorted. "Yeah, New Year's Eve. We had that too. People sure do love excuses to booze it up, don't they? I wish alcohol still worked for me. I miss it," she moaned. "And I miss video games, and movies, and neon, and cities whose brightness challenged the very stars at night!"

  "We could rebuild all that!" I said optimistically. When you're capable of comforting a woman five or six times a day, and you're getting to, you feel like you can conquer the world.

  "Don't be stupid, kid," she said bitterly, as we reached camp, and I deflated a little. I went to check on the stew. It was boiling away and reducing nicely; I stirred it a bit and flaked in some salt and flour. Behind me, Slinky sighed and said, "Sorry, Toby. Your Earth no longer allows high energy reactions, and at least one nano-bomb got loose and ate everything made of refined metal and most inks. Why do you think
almost all tools and buildings are stone and wood now? We knocked you back down to the Stone Age; no cars, airplanes, robots, even cities. No rescue for us."

  "I don't miss it, if that helps," I told her. "I was a baby. I don't remember it, and Mother says it's not so bad now."

  "And you were Amish anyway."

  "Misha," I corrected.

  "Same thing," she sighed, and I decided to end this line of discussion.

  I turned to her and, drawing her attention downward, I said, "Hey! I have something here that will cheer you up!"

  Her face broke into a happy grin. "So you do! The Goddess does good work. I could use a stiff drink right about now."

  And she went downward on me. That's what they called it in the magazine cache I found in a sealed plastic bag when I was 20. The funny-looking books with their images of naked ladies and cartoons and articles had faded to illegibility after a month's exposure to the air, but Old-Father was able to stabilize most of the "Forum" parts with lacquer before the ink was eaten. I found them fascinating back then, but only because of what they revealed about life before the Day of Ruin. Now I understood why people might read them for other reasons. So far, being exiled wasn't so bad.