Harem Scare 'Em

by Tripp Greyson

  On top of all that, my bollocks were apparently the cure for infertility among the dimensional traveler clans, and I now had a nice, lengthy tool to inject that cure, if I did say so myself.

  Life was good.

  Chapter 5

  That day, as we approached what was destined to become our new home, I did a lot of thinking, especially about my sons. Although they weren't even a day old yet, I felt like I'd known them all for years, and we all shared an easy familiarity with each other, of the kind that came from longtime companionship. Perhaps it was the fact that they had been born nearly adult, knowing how to speak and interact with other people, with their own distinct personalities. Like the pixie maturity cycle, that was very odd, to the point where it made no biological sense. Or did it? Since Old-Father had been a chemist, I had learned that life was based on chemistry, even our reproduction. I knew that a special molecule determined how a person was built, from fingernails and hair to internal organs and freckles, and that it contained a lot of redundant and junk data that seemed useless, probably leftovers from earlier times in our racial history.

  Had whatever happened on the Day of Ruin made it possible for some of the races to record memories and cultural information in those otherwise useless base pairs? If one considered that special molecule to be something like a computer program, then perhaps it was possible for it to be altered. Maybe it was even possible to code it in such a way as to accelerate normal maturity. All I know is, my boys went from tiny fertilized eggs to near-adult pixies in about a week of frantic feasting. I knew some birds did that in two weeks or so, and I guess some insects did it even faster, but these were sentient beings.

  I was also soon made aware that boy pixies were basically tiny, flying 20-year-olds on hormonal overdrive. Or at least, my nine were, and I found it amusing to watch how it bothered the ladies.

  The boys were barely out of the pig before their sexual proclivities became clear, and it wasn't long before my ladies started to get fed up with their antics. It really got bad the morning after their birthing, once the novelty of actual! boys! being! born! had worn off a little. This occurred around the tenth time one of the boys goosed one of the ladies, used her breasts as trampolines, or flat-out propositioned her. Gration especially had this sleepy-eyed expression he used when he delivered his lines that Montana said was "going to have him hip-deep in pussy" when he finally found some women his size.

  And being naked teenagers in the presence of half-naked, incredibly beautiful women, of course there were obvious physiological reactions that occurred and recurred, and the red-faced Mamas (as the boys called them) began hurriedly sewing little items of clothing from scraps of cloth and hide. Fitted clothes would have to wait until we had time.

  Things got especially bad when the boys discovered the joys of self-comforting. While I was trying to make him a little loincloth, I sent Chaos, who had been doing the pee-pee dance, out into the weeds to relieve himself. My head jerked up when I heard him say breathlessly, "Oh wow, I didn't realize it could do that already! Check it out, guys!"

  You never want to have to ride herd on nine sexually mature young men, who've never even heard of the concept of privacy, when they decide to have a contest to see who can "shoot" the farthest. I assure you, you do not.

  Not long after, Chaos the Instigator heard Undine say to Jenny, "Oh my Goddess, I can't believe I'm saying this, but the boys are driving me nuts! They're like little flying dicks! They're not pixies, they're dick-sies!"

  And the damage was done; the Dixies were christened. They took the name as their own, and after that, there was no getting them to stop using it.

  We finally got moving about mid-morning, heading toward the low stone and wooden buildings I knew sat brooding in the trees in the far distance. Some of the Dixies went ahead to scout the place out; I knew it was dangerous, and that they were too young, but it's not like I could stop the little devils! Half an hour later, Apollo, looking smart in a tiny pair of loose leggings he'd decorated with sticktight seeds and pale purple fleabane flowers, lit on my shoulder and said, "Steady on, Father. It seems we're going to have to fight for our new home."

  I stopped, hand on the Dawn Sword's hilt, and the rest of the crew stopped with me. "The Faire? It's already occupied? That's new."

  Gration, wearing the plain loincloth I'd made for him, landed on my other shoulder, chewing on a blade of grass. He'd smeared red clay on his chest and face, and looked fierce. "Yep. Won't be easy, neither. I got a good look at one, and she was so smokin' hot I just about burst into flames. It was like flying too close to the sun."

  "Alfas!" Jen and Slinky spat in stereo.

  "Those 'pointy-eared bitches' you told me about?" I asked Slinky.

  "Yes!" and she actually growled.

  "We should prob'ly avoid 'em," Bellerophon, who refused to be called Bell, advised in his husky voice. "Otherwise we boys'll get all pointy too, and we'll be pretty much useless."

  "Speak for yourself," Gray said lazily.

  "Brother. I saw the way your loincloth was poking out before you got back to the travois. Mother's seen less obvious fertility idols." Mother was Kait, their true-mother, who had gifted them with a full set of genetic memories. My ladies were their Mamas. Bill, as I was thinking of calling him, continued, "And you could barely fly. They'll sexy us to death if we get too close."

  "But what a way to go," Dion sighed from his nearby perch on the travois.

  About 20 yards ahead of me, Chaos made a megaphone of his hands and shouted into it so lustily that he bent in midair, his shorts drooping. "Yo, Pops, babes in the Faire!" Even at that short distance, his voice was reedy and thin, hard to make out. But I knew he wouldn't come closer right now, and I didn't blame him. Oddly enough, once they'd been clothed, Chaos had actually become modest about his body. Maybe it was because he'd come in last in the "shoot-out" and felt he didn't measure up. I knew that feeling myself.

  "We know," I shouted back. "Thanks, Kay!"

  He shot me a delighted thumbs-up.

  Filotus farted his way forward, and flung an arm dramatically over his eyes. "Oh Dad, I think I'm in love!" he cried.

  "Yes, we can see that, brother dear," Apollo sniped.

  "Like what you see?"

  "No! Yuck!"

  "I do," murmured an androgynous voice behind me that I recognized as Eros.

  "Shut up, Stupid Cupid!" sniped Hermes. They'd taken to calling Eros "Kyoop" or "Cupid" more often than his real name. Eros sounded too much like Eos, Little Magic's given name, and Cupid — the Latin name of the Greek god he'd named himself after — was easier to rhyme in Anglic.

  "Settle down, troops!" S'linkitha snapped. She was all colonel at the moment. "What's important now is how we can get them to vacate the premises."

  "You could ask them to join the cov—" Ava tried.

  "Not in a million years! Now: ideas?"

  "We could have Fil gas them to death," little Icarus piped up.

  "Bite me, pipsqueak! I can't help it if I have a delicate digestive system!"

  To my astonishment, my smallest son muttered, "If we don't find some girls soon, I'm gonna do more than bite you." Oh my Goddess! Were my children pansexual?

  No time for that now. "How many Alfs are there?" I asked.

  "I dunno, ten? I wasn't quite myself when I was scouting," Gray replied. "I do know the buildings are in pretty good shape, and they're not occupying all of them."

  "There's no possibility of sharing with them," Jenna announced, folding her arms and narrowing her eyes. If the foot-tapping started, those Alfas were dead women.

  "No. But I don't think we can beat them by force of arms," Slinky said thoughtfully. "We'll have to use guile. If only we had a little magic to work with...

  Yes? a voice said in my head. How can I help?

  From the way everyone else's heads snapped up and they looked around, I could tell they'd all heard him too. Slinky actually reached for a sidearm that hadn't been there for 24 years. "The fuc
k was that?" she spat.

  "Oh," I said, a little nonplussed, "I, uh, I call him Little Magic. For a while there, I thought he wasn't real."

  For a while there, I thought you were an idiot. I'm still not entirely convinced you aren't. But since you are my father, I suppose I should help you conquer Scarborough Faire.

  Fourteen pairs of eyes turned to look at me, and four of those pairs stared daggers. "Did he say 'father'?" Undine snarled. Of all the ladies, my little seafood buffet was the one I least expected to be jealous.

  "I hadn't even met you yet!" I protested. "Any of you!"

  Don't get your collective panties in a bunch, Little Magic told them. I was his payment to Mother after she fixed him. He paused. Not that he minded working off his debt.

  ❖

  We knew from information provided by Slinky and the Goddess that Scarborough Faire was concentrated on 35 acres of land, with another 130 acres' worth of parking and other associated areas. It was already a nice-sized village, though there wasn't a wall around it now. That would change when it became ours. I didn't want to have to fight anyone else for it, and wasn't even sure that my claim outweighed that of the coven of Alfa witches who had already beaten us to it, if only by a few days.

  I'd heard that Alfas could sear the brain right out of a man's skull, but I'd also heard they were dainty little things that demanded the best in life, which they got, because of the above reason. They were known to pluck the occasional exceptional male servant from his normal job and use him for breeding until they used him up. There was a certain breed of man willing to fight for positions as their servants for that very reason. As little Dion had noted, what a way to go! As you might imagine, those fellows were very loyal and hardworking. While they lasted.

  Slinky and I talked for hours about Alfas. She revealed things I didn't know: like that their gestation period was oddly long, at nearly two new-years as opposed to the year that humans and most of the larger demon clans enjoyed. She also told me Alfs despised the small and the weak, whether animal or human, and had even taken to abandoning their children in villages to be brought up by humans. When I heard that, I thought about some bitchy but attractive girls back in Hamiltown, and wondered if they were changelings. No, I decided; I had never noticed anything all that different about them, and they looked like their mothers... though not always like the men who were raising them. But that was true about a third of the time anyhow.

  More worrisome, Alfas had the ability to kill the small and weak with a single look, with one exception: bugs. Insects were immune to their power, walked right through their wards, and forced them to use physical means to destroy them. Their servants spent a lot of their time doing just that, mixing and spreading poisons and stickum and stomping any insects they saw. Interesting...

  That sparked an idea. If there was anything I knew, it was that human buildings in hot, sticky Tejas were prime habitat for insects, especially a very specific, hardy bug, imported from the Elder World, that the Dawn Sword was an almighty prophylactic against. But how could I use that against them effectively? The weapon might push the cockroaches in one direction, but the witches could just move around them to escape. If I had a bunch of Dawn Swords to arm everyone with, it might be different, but I didn't.

  Little Magic startled me when he spoke in my head. I take back every snarky thing I'll ever say about you, Father. You're a genius. Wait a tick. There was a brief pause, and he continued, There. Mother is having me send some design modifications for the Dawn Sword back to an earlier Her. Won't take long, and then we can handle this.

  "Got it." I had no idea what my Goddess intended, but I knew I could count on her.

  Later, I was sitting on a bundle of supplies, eyes closed as I went over possible attack strategies, when a small voice yelled in my ear. "Daddio!"

  I jumped, and my eyes flew open. "Hermes! Don't do that!"

  "Sorry! I thought you were asleep! And this is important!"

  "What is it?"

  "Kyoop says he can sense a giant lady over the next hill! She's coming this way! He says she has really big boobies! I wanna go see up close! Can I go meet the big-booby lady, pleeeeeeaaaase?"

  Geez, what the hell was this? "Not alone," I barked. "Take one of your brothers."

  A gesture, and he and Bill took off together. Bill was holding a small stone arrowhead he called Perdiz ("the lost" in Spanyol), using it as a knife. He'd found it lying in the backdirt of a fire ant mound, and figured Amerinds had made it hundreds of years ago. If I hadn't been distracted by the upcoming fight, I'd have been really interested to learn more.

  Hermes and Bill were back a tense ten minutes later. "Daddio! The big booby lady's name is Montana! That means mountain in Spanyol! She's carrying an olbytla lady on her shoulders! They're lovers who want kids! They were real excited when we showed them our wangles!"

  I face-palmed, unsure whether I was more bothered by the wangle-dangling or by the fact that we were already drawing hopeful mothers before we'd even run off the Alfas. I was as interested in mountain-climbing as any other red-blooded hyperspermic male, but I didn't have the time right now!

  The boys perched expectantly on various spots on the travois, while I went forward and reported their findings to S'linkitha. To my surprised, she looked a little relieved when I told her about the approaching couple. "What's up?" I asked.

  She smiled and said, "This is good news, Toby. We could really use a ten-foot-tall warrior at the moment, and olbytla are immune to Alfa magics. They're hellacious fighters, too."

  "Those little DTs with the hairy feet? About yay big?" I held my hand about four feet off the ground. I'd long since shortened "dimensional travelers" to DT. "How could they possibly..."

  She chucked me under the chin. "If I recall correctly, the original olbytla clans consisted of Special Forces groups, most genetically modified for strength, toughness, intelligence, and mental resistance. Some were optimized for space warfare, so they're able to survive in rather harsh environments. I have no idea why they arrived pint-sized — probably had to do with their special circumstances. I'll bet you dimes to donut holes that she's the most heavily armed person you've ever seen."

  I had no idea what dimes or donut holes were, but if I recalled correctly from reading one of the Forums, where a young fellow had served his girlfriend donuts on his privy member as a joke, then donuts were small, round pastries something like Young-Father Trent's benyehs. I don't think my member would fit through a donut hole. I had no interest in trying anyway, because there were much more interesting holes around to fill. And, apparently, more to come.

  I put my face in my hands. I had gotten what I had wanted for so long, and I was certainly "up" for it, but was this to be my life now? Was I doomed to live out my days as little more than a set of mobile gonads?

  No, I decided, I was not.

  Chapter 6

  Frieda Counterflick was lightly armored, because she was so heavily armed. She carried a bow and quiver stuffed with luminium arrows fletched with plastic, a pair of gopherwood short swords edged in luminium sheathed crosswise on her back, a bandolier of slim stone throwing knives, a short set of joined flails she called nunchucks, a thick leather collar that unrolled to reveal a garrote, multiple chemical smoke bombs and poisons, and of course, more knives at her waist. The waist knives were made of a beautiful red-and-white flint she called Alibates that came from hundreds of miles to the north, but I learnt about that much later when she took them off for me. Along with everything else.

  Montana Alvarez was over ten feet tall and very well endowed in the chest. Her clothing was limited to a half-shirt and shorts, as apparently it takes a lot of fabric to clothe a giant adequately.

  Sometimes, needs must trump desires, and it wasn't like what the Goddess had called my "primary function" was especially onerous. And in 24 years or so, less for the smaller races and harpies, I would not be alone in my efforts. So I put on a happy face when it came time to take everything else off.

/>   We had retreated back to the eyeway before camping that night, because we didn't dare stay so close to the witches as we had been before. I had no proof, but I was certain that they had detected at least one of the boys; there was a heightened tension around us, just beneath audible, like an enormous guitar string plucked and never quite allowed to cease vibrating.

  Undine, Slinky, Ava, Jenny, and Coulter all felt it, so much so that they decided to forego most of their daily comforting. They spent the afternoon and evening busy preparing for a siege, scrounging whatever weapons they could. Bellerophon had taken them to where he'd found Perdiz earlier, and they had spent hours digging up the ground, looking for more stone tools we could use. Along with a few more arrowpoints, they'd found a cache of chert buried less than a yard down. Some of the cobbles had been chipped into rough blanks that Coulter, revealing a hidden talent, called preforms. She knew how to use a stone hammer, and wooden and antler billets, to make some of them into deadly spearheads.