Catch All The Girlfriends!

by K J Harlow

  Yoshi stuck a hand out. “It’s nice to meet you.” If it wasn’t bad enough that he left a bad first impression with one girlfriend’s mom, he had to do it with another – and both within hours of each other. She stared unsmilingly at him and he slowly lowered his unshaken hand.

  “Sooo, does she want me to release you back to your colony?”

  Yoshi heard a muffled sigh – presumably Suzy’s – behind him.

  Starry shook her head. “No. I was telling her that I couldn’t remember what had happened to me the last time I was in the Celeste Caverns.”

  “So any luck?”

  Starry turned back and began talking quietly to each other again.

  “What language are they speaking?” Yoshi asked.

  “Celeste-Starrish,” Suzy said. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the ethereal star empress. “It’s a local dialect. I hear that each cave has its own.”

  “Do Suzies have their own language?”

  Suzy shook her head. “It’s hard enough to communicate as it is in Normspeak as a cave bat. Could you imagine what it would be like if we had our own language?” The cave bat gestured at the interstellar-types. Starry and Novaria both had somber expressions on their faces.

  “Mother Empress said that the Grand Stone has been slowly destroyed over the last month by men wearing white.”

  “Team Boom,” Yoshi growled. So Ziva wasn’t lying. “Besides the fact that the Grand Stone came from space, what’s so special about it?”

  Starry quickly interpreted, nodding while Novaria spoke. “It is – was – our final connection with space, where we originated.” Starry herself seemed surprised by this.

  Unlo wi cen herniss thior rew puwir. Yuar piupli du sumithong tu ot end unli thin cen ierth gorlfroinds asi ot.

  Novaria’s expression was calm as her daughter translated.

  “She says that only we can harness the Grand Stone’s raw power. She says that men process it in some way, enabling Earth girlfriends to use it.”

  “Raw power?” Yoshi said. That would make sense why Team Boom was after it. “And what about you? Any luck remembering what happened?”

  Starry took a deep, shuddering breath. “Novaria told me everything, but…” The tall star empress placed a comforting hand on Starry’s shoulder. “Everything I’m about to say is what Mother Empress witnessed. I… still can’t remember anything.”

  She squared her shoulders and began. “Most people who came by just wanted to have a look at or touch the Grand Stone. They believe it grants them good fortune. In the months leading up to the purge, more and more men in white came.”

  “Purge?” Yoshi asked. Novaria raised a hand and he fell silent.

  “We were happy to share the Grand Stone with them, but when they started raising their pickaxes to it, we became angry.”

  “We tried to fight back against Team Boom. They didn’t even use girlfriends. They had… some sort of weapon. It fired blue beams. Anytime it struck one of the girlfriends, she would… disappear, without a trace. In under a month, the entire community of star-kin had been purged.”

  Novaria kept up her narrative, her voice melodic and flowing. Everyone stared at her, spellbound, as Starry continued interpreting. “We of the Star are a peaceful people. In the last three centuries, I have only had to raise my hand to create, cultivate or at worst, defend.”

  Novaria looked downcast. “I have slain dozens of the men in white with my powers, just to protect what little of the Grand Stone is left.”

  From the folds of her robes, Novaria produced a small, gray stone. She pressed it into Starlotte’s hands and closed her fingers around it.

  Mo deaghtir. Kiip thos woth yua end lit ot prutict yua.

  It was perfectly cut into a 3-dimensional diamond and dark gray, like lead. Holding it on the top and bottom points, it began rotating slowly. Starry took her hands away and it rotated in the air in front of her face.

  “May I see it?” Yoshi asked.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the elder interstellar-type nodded. It was weightless. The only way Yoshi knew he was holding it was because of its angular shape in his hand.

  You have found Grand Stone Shard!

  “Ah… ah… ah-choo!”

  Yoshi and his girlfriends looked back at the cold, naked, prostrate man on the tablet, his doodle now soft and wrinkled. They were so immersed in Novaria’s story that they had completely forgot about him.

  “Who’s he?” Yoshi asked.

  Novaria flushed pink. She explained to Starry in hushed tones, who promptly also became pink. Yoshi’s girlfriend looked at her mother, horrified. The star empress gave her a mischievous look, dark eyes sparkling. Yoshi watched the exchange with amusement. Given the circumstances, he had an inkling what the Novaria was up to before Suzy barged in.

  “Mother Empress, she… she found the man after she had taken care of a Team Boom squad. He was passed out and she decided to take him back to her chamber to… start repopulating the cave.”

  Yoshi burst out laughing and Starry turned an even deeper shade of red.

  In a flash, Novaria was back in the islet in the middle of her chamber. She stroked his face, whispering sweet nothings to him.

  “Mi eri yua fonoshid woth?” the man said in the same melodic dialect as the powerful girlfriend.

  Starry gasped in surprise. “He can speak Celeste-Starrish!”

  The star empress sighed, running a hand through his hair lovingly. She raised a hand, as if to karate chop down on his face. Instead, she slashed horizontally. Invisible bindings on the man’s hands and feet came free and he sat up.

  “Mother of Frank…” he said shakily. Yoshi and his girlfriends splashed across the small moat and joined the lovers. “If you guys hadn’t had come, it really could have been death by snoo snoo.”

  “Dude cover up your junk, no one needs to see that.” Yoshi swung his backpack down. Hope Tozuck wouldn’t mind his coat being used this way.

  “Uh, my clothes are here somewhere. Clutheis?” he said, gesturing to Novaria. She disappeared again, presumably to retrieve his clothes from her walk-in wardrobe.

  “Here you go, put this on for now,” Yoshi said, throwing the white, crumpled-up garment to him.

  “Oh cool, my lab coat. Where did you find it?”

  “Wait what? Your lab coat?” Yoshi said, staring at the man as he threw the white garment over his shoulders. “You’re Ivan Tozuck?”

  30

  Ivan Tozuck

  Mother of Frank…

  Yoshi couldn’t tear his eyes away. “These are all yours?”

  Tozuck stood with hands on hips, feet shoulder width apart. “Someone had to do it.”

  The chamber resembled a theatre, except instead of chairs, there were shallow bowl nests. They were easily 100 rows deep and 50 wide, the rows of nests curving in a semi-circle. In 80% of the nests was a football-sized egg. The eggs were a shade between blue and gray, glittering softly. Most were still, but 40 or 50 were gently moving about.

  Novaria was gliding up and down, stroking an egg here, righting one there that had fallen to its side. She whipped her head around, teleporting from one end of the incubating theatre to the other. One of the eggs had started rising in the air.

  “It’s hatching!” Starry said breathlessly.

  With every crack that formed, more and more light shone through. With one final push from inside, the rather thick pieces of the shell fell to the nest. Novaria crooned to the bawling newborn, promptly wrapping her up with a large piece of cloth. That’s when Yoshi noticed all the clothes neatly folded in the nest.

  “Where do the clothes come from?”

  “What were you doing in training school, dude?” Soph sneered. He had released her and Crystal to witness the unique experience. “Frank blesses every girlfriend with clothing and surplus energy. Why do you think he’s called the Almighty Papi?”

  “Who calls him that?” Yoshi scoffed.

  “Even the engineers who created the first ve
rsion of the GF rings modelled the built-in wardrobes on Frank’s ability to create clothes for all the girlfriends we see in the wild,” Tozuck said softly. “The only thing they couldn’t replicate was food. At level 5 when they hit full maturity, wild girlfriends’ built-in surplus energy storage runs out and they have to find food for themselves, whether it’s through trainers or searching in the wild.”

  He was a weird guy. One moment, he would be outgoing and friendly, the next he’d withdraw and look like he was thinking about something dark and disturbing, like right now. Novaria had teleported up to the top of the birthing chamber, handing him his first newborn child.

  She opened her big, blue eyes, staring curiously at her daddy before fixing her gaze on Yoshi. Basic stats appeared:

  Name:Starlotte

  Level: 1

  HP: 5/5

  “Oh my gosh, she’s so pretteh!” Sophie shoved her giant beak in baby Starlotte’s face and she started bawling.

  “Stop it, she thinks you’re going to eat her,” Flick said, dragging the flying-type back by the shoulder.

  “May I hold her?” Starry asked. Tozuck didn’t hesitate giving his baby to her.

  “How does one mother handle so many children?”

  “Wild girlfriends adapt very quickly. Most girlfriends don’t have parents. We’re born knowing the basics of survival and will start fighting for ourselves from Day 1.” Yoshi turned around in surprise at the new voice. This came from Crystal in the back.

  “She’s right.” Flick said. “I hatched, swam around for a while, waiting for my body to mature. Once it did, I got dressed then was on my way.”

  Yoshi looked up at Tozuck. He was watching the proceedings around him with hooded eyes. Guess if I was captured by an OP space queen girlfriend, fucked for two weeks without rest then made to father several thousand daughters, I’d be feeling pretty overwhelmed too. “Hey Ivan, I’ve got something from Poke.”

  The shadows around his eyes lifted. “The Professor?” He pushed off the wall and went over to Yoshi. He rummaged through it, first putting the broken gun to one side, then pulling out the shiny, metal box.

  Tozuck eyed the weapon. “Where did you find this?”

  “What? Oh this?” Yoshi nudged the handle. “We found it early on in the Caverns.”

  Tozuck grabbed it and stuffed it into his bag. “Don’t let Novaria see it, that’s one of the guns that Team Boom used to…” He trailed off. Novaria had come back up and was looking down, eyes full of love at her new daughter, still in Starry’s arms.

  “Oh of course, you would have been in here while they went on a rampage killing off the Starlottes. Talk about wrong place at the wrong time,” Yoshi said.

  Ivan was too busy digging around in his bag to respond. He eventually pulled out a black box and set it in front of him. “Can you pass that digital toolkit over?”

  Yoshi shuffled over to his side, looking at the unassuming piece of equipment. “What’s this?”

  “Just a recorder, nothing special.” Tozuck shrugged. “Got damaged by those Team Boom assholes. Hopefully the hard drive isn’t fried.” His fingers skipped between the two pieces of equipment, connecting wires up, unscrewing panels, replacing batteries. Seconds later, the box was humming gently, the red and green LED on the corner pulsing comfortingly.

  “So Professor Poke’s studying girlfriend speech then, is he?”

  Tozuck nodded. “With an emphasis on caves. He started close to home. Suzies, Macies, Bridgets… got them all. But Starlottes were rarer, not to mention their unique dialect.” He clipped it to his hip, the lights continuing to alternate red and white. Yoshi eyed the rings on his trainer’s belt.

  “Oh, you have girlfriends too.”

  “Course I do. Wouldn’t be able to leave the lab otherwise. Still, I didn’t count on seeing a level 71 wild girlfriend, so mine didn’t really stand a chance. It was just lucky that Novaria found me and not a bloodthirsty Ziva or something. Speaking of which…”

  He turned back to his bag. After a second, he pulled out a bunch of familiar-looking bottles and pushed them towards Yoshi.

  You have received 6x Super Potions!

  “I didn’t bring any Revives, only these. Since you’re going to be the one getting us out of here, you should use them.”

  Yoshi stared down at the dark bottles, stunned. “Th-thank you…”

  “No, pleasure’s all mine.” He leaned in and raised the back of his hand to his mouth. “You’d think that having endless sex with a star empress girlfriend would be a dream come true. Take my word for it: it’s not, especially after she’s sucked you dry.”

  Yoshi grinned. When he was laidback, Tozuck wasn’t all that bad.

  “Alright, I’m going to bring this box to Novaria and get her to talk into it for a while. Be right back.”

  Yoshi watched him take the steps down two at a time.

  “Yoink!”

  “Hey! Your HP’s not even that low!”

  Soph snatched one of the Super Potions out of his arms, unscrewed it and downed the drink without stopping. “Aaah!” Her HP went back up to full capacity.

  “You’re welcome.” Yoshi said, eyeing her pointedly.

  “Did you hear me say thank you? Give me those.” She grabbed four more, the bottles clinking in her hands as she went back over to the other girlfriends. Novaria had brought three more newborns up, palming them off to Crystal, Felicity and Suzy.

  As a kid, he would spend hours imagining the sorts of girlfriends he would have on his team. His would have one of each of the main elements, he’d have a flying-type to help him conveniently get from A to B. He’d have a legendary girlfriend and appear on the front page of the Ohno Times after waging an epic battle to capture her.

  Basically, everything that his current team wasn’t. Flick was a water-type, so that was one out of four, Soph was a flying-type, yes, but she couldn’t fly yet. One girlfriend had just expressed that she wanted out and another was on loan. Still, he couldn’t help but smile. Whatever happened, he’d built this team and was happy with who they were right now.

  He conjured up their basic stats:

  Name: Starlotte (Starry)

  Level: 17

  HP: 59/59

  Name: Sophie (Soph)

  Level: 16

  HP: 62/62

  Name: Felicity (Flick)

  Level: 21

  HP: 80/80

  Name: Crystal

  Level: 8

  HP: 33/33

  Name: Chippie

  Level: 9

  HP: 0/35

  Name: Suzy (Suze)

  Level: 11

  HP: 36/36

  “Hey,” Yoshi said, jogging over to his girlfriends. “How are we feeling? All babied out yet?”

  Crystal and Flick nodded while Starry and Suzy shook their heads.

  “Alright, I’ve gotten what I need.” Tozuck said, racing back up the steps. More babies were popping open around him and Novaria was teleporting around the room so quickly that the moment you looked at her, she was already somewhere else.

  “You sure you don’t need to stick around for a while? You know, be a dad and all?”

  “Strong, independent girlfriends like Novaria don’t need no man to help them raise 3,000 babies,” Sophie said, sassily clicking her fingers.

  “Nah,” he said dismissively. “I’ve asked and she’s says she’s all good.”

  “This is the same girlfriend who chained you to her bed for several weeks, right?” Flick asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “She did hold me against my will, but if I said it was torture, I’d be a liar.”

  Yoshi laughed but quickly snuffed it out, seeing the withering looks he got from all of his girlfriends. “I don’t know, I can’t help but feel a little bad for leaving her like this…” Yoshi waved an arm vaguely over the room, which was getting noisier and noisier by the minute.

  “Did you ever study Foundations of Wild Girlfriend Behavior in college?” Seeing Yoshi’s blank look, he charge
d on. “Your Crystal’s right. Wild girlfriends are fiercely independent. They fend for themselves pretty well. Novaria won’t have to do much actual mothering; they’ll practically raise themselves. By the end of this week, they’ll have reached adulthood and be wandering through the Caverns.”

  “That quick?” Yoshi spluttered.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Find the Grand Stone? Check. Find the science guy? Check,” Suzy said, ticking off an imaginary list.

  “We didn’t find the Grand Stone. We were given a Shard. And his name is Ivan Tozuck,” Yoshi said levelly.

  “We got there in the end,” Suzy said, oblivious to the corrections.

  After they had bid their teary farewells, Novaria directed them to another tunnel that branched off from the nursery. She explained that it was currently the only way to get back up to the highest level. The mining activity from the men in white had caused other paths to cave in or be dangerously unstable. Her recommended path was windy and longer, but it would allow them to get back on track sooner.

  Yoshi pulled his cell phone out. No bars. He glanced at Tozuck’s still blinking recording device. “Will Poke have received the recordings you sent him?”

  The lab assistant shook his head. “Nope. I’m… we’re in too deep.” He cleared his throat and started again. “We’re too deep in the caverns and need to get back to the surface before the data can be synced to the lab cloud.”

  Suzy had wandered forward a little, getting her bearings straight. Flick was watching the exchange between Tozuck and Yoshi, and the rest of his girlfriends had been withdrawn.

  “Sorry to be a pain in the ass. I’d do my share of the fighting, but all my girlfriends have fainted.”

  “Nah, nah, that’s cool. I’m just glad to have found you. My mission is officially complete. I can get Poke off my back and…” Yoshi stopped himself before he said, ‘return Starry to Poke’, but Tozuck read the thought in his eyes.