Chapter 96

"You know," I said, tilting my head a little. "I wasn't expecting you to find a way to get back at me, but... I think you've managed, at least a little bit."

"Wait, really?" Akane asked, lifting her head up. "Sorry, I didn't know you'd be upset, I just..."

"I mean, I'm mostly not?" I said. "Like, to be honest, I really don't care. However, the most cogent description of what's clearly just happened is 'my girlfriend slept with my ex-wife in my own bed, the day after the divorce papers were signed.' Which is a fundamentally ridiculous thing to have happened to me, and feels like it should be a source of drama... but, well, it isn't. Penelope's my ex-wife, but I think it's reasonable to say that we're still girlfriends, right?"

Penelope popped Akane's tit out of her mouth. "I'd say so, yes. I mean, you did have sex with me somewhere in the neighborhood of... what, a hundred times?"

"I didn't count, but... that does sound reasonable," I said. "At any rate, to me, the real sticking point for a girlfriend is whether or not she can integrate with the rest of the polycule- even if I'm fucking a girl semi-regularly, if she's not fucking anyone else within the polycule, then, well, she basically isn't in it. With you, though, we double-penetrated Nicky's ass together weeks before my dick ever went inside you."

Penelope simply nodded, having already gone back to sucking on Akane's tit.

"By the way, you're progressing very nicely," I remarked.

"I know, right?" Penelope said, after un-sucking Akane's boob once more. "Honestly, I'm starting to think what actually happened is that you somehow transformed me into an exemplar, and my body is just catching up to the hormonal changes."

"It'd explain why you have a knot," Akane added.

"That may very well be what I did," I admitted. "Probably after I knocked you up, though; I don't remember giving you the exemplar gene, so I was probably drunk."

"Well, I'm hardly complaining," Penelope said. "I'm neutral on the subject of my boobs, but having a bigger dick is quite nice."

"Understandable," I said, nodding. "Anyhow, originally, I came in here to tell you I was leaving at the end of the week, and that we should start saying our goodbyes."

"Ahh, I see. Well, fair enough."

"Do you think we should get married?" Akane asked.

"Uh... depends on what you mean with that," I said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Akane asked, frowning.

"Well, as it so happens, there are, like, seven other women in our polycule- or at least, the part that's going back to Carmine," I said. "If what you meant was specifically you and I get married, without them, then... well, that'd be rude at best to all the others, wouldn't it?"

"You married Penelope without me," Akane said, before huffing.

I reached an arm around her shoulder, and pulled her in close.

"Penelope was a very temporary political marriage," I said, "with a woman who, even now, I only like, rather than love. I'm hesitant to make a commitment to marry you, Akane, because I do love you. You are important to me, in more ways than just being my fat girlfriend with tits the size of her head- you're also a very close friend, who's done so much to help pull me out of my shell. And while, now that I am out of my shell, I've started pursuing a bunch of other people too... ultimately, Akane, I think you are the one I most vividly intend to spend my life with."

"Then... why hesitate about marrying me?"

"Because we're immortal, Akane," I said. "We're going to live forever. And... marriage is a big step, a big change, and... fuck, I guess the elfish conservatism is already setting in, isn't it? Heh. I'm afraid of change, because unless I die by violence, then I'll have to live with the consequences forever... but, well. That's true of every choice, including inaction, isn't it?" I squeezed her a bit tighter for a moment. Were the moment a bit lighter, I might've paid more attention to the sensual feeling of her lusciously-padded body being pressed against mine (although, now that I was thinking about it, I was wondering, has she gained weight since she graduated? She'd never been skinny, as far as I recalled, but I could've sworn she wasn't quite this plush a few months ago...), but right now, I felt more the comforting warmth of Akane, my best friend, sitting beside me on the couch and leaning into me.

"So... you will marry me?" Akane asked.

"I will have a number of serious conversations with you, as well as everyone else in the polycule-"

"Might be that 'adventuring party' is the better term, at this point, considering how many lovers we've got who kinda but don't really count," Akane pointed out.

"Fair. I will talk about it seriously with you and everyone else in the party, but right now... I'm not quite ready to make any big commitments. We're in our early twenties, when we're gonna live forever. I think we should have a little patience," I said, before chuckling a little. "Heh. Y'know, not too long ago, Rebecca herself called me impatient. I probably am, though; for a more reasonable person, building a stable colonial outpost on the coast of the Glass Desert would've been the work of ten years, but I was... well, impatient, and so I pulled a lot of tricks to make it grow insanely fast, so that I could walk away from it earlier."

"I mean, that's fair," Akane said, nodding. "Just because it's been renamed to Purpleheart doesn't make this place not a desert made of glass. God, it's so hot here, and it never rains..."

"Yeah, welcome to the Horse Latitudes," I said dryly. "Especially on the east coast, where the winters are dryer."

"Horse Latitudes?" Akane asked, tilting her head.

"On Earth, at least, the lowest layer of the atmosphere was divided into three pairs of circulatory bands, called Hadley Cells," I began. "The two tropical Hadley Cells had their overall prevailing winds blow from the edge furthest from the equator to the equator, where they'd rise up, then blow back across far colder and drier upper altitudes, before falling back down at the edge of the tropical Hadley Cells; meanwhile, the mid-latitude Hadley Cells had dry air falling down at about the same point, then blowing away from the equator. The end result is that, in the general area of the boundary between those Hadley Cells- about 30 degrees north and south of the equator, which is where we are- the winds are calm, the skies are clear, and the rain is infrequent at best."

"Huh."

"However, that's a big, planet-wide trend. On a more local scale, we also have to deal with the ocean. Water has a really high thermal mass, and so the temperature of the ocean doesn't change that much with the seasons; in summer, when the land is hot, the air rises to create low pressure zones, whereas the ocean is comparatively cool and thus a high pressure zone, which causes moist sea breezes spinning up from the warmer and wetter tropics up along the east coast... but also, drier and more depleted sea breezes spinning down from poleward along the west coast." I shrugged. "So, uh. Yeah. Purpleheart is gonna have dry winters and wet summers."

"You're a Wizard," Akane whined. "Make it rainy and cool over all of Purpleheart, for me."

"You're also a Wizard, darling," I said. "...Also, if you're just sick of the heat, the solution to that is magical air conditioning, as long as you don't mind being indoors. Although I bet I could do magical personal cooling that'd even work outdoors, too..."

"Ooooor you could ruin the local climate for me, like you would if you really loved me," Akane said.

"Lisa's a bad influence on you," I declared.

"Excuse you, but I was always a brat. If anything, I'm a bad influence on her."

"Well, fair enough," I said. "But hey, look on the bright side: soon enough, we're gonna be moving back to the Red Forest, which is a lot farther north, and will be much, much colder at this time of year! You'll have a new thing to complain about!"

"At least the cold can be solved by putting on my sexy sweater and snuggling up with a few someones under the covers," Akane said, pouting.

"That sexy sweater has a tit window, and tits are a major source of body heat. It's gonna be more comfortable than a warm-weather tank top, but you're gonna want a real jacket, not a sexy sweater, once there's snow on the ground."

Akane simply huffed. "I'm going to wear what I wear, and if I decide I need you to warm up my cleavage with your face, then I expect you to do it."

"Yes, dear," I said, in a very put-upon tone of voice.

"Now... hrm. Now I kinda want to try and design a Wizard spell that'd create a rainstorm..." Akane muttered.

"Could be a fun intellectual exercise," I said. "Sure beats rereading this same book in the hopes I find something useful to do with Incubus. The freaky sex is pretty fun, but I do have other stuff going on, too."

"Let's see... We usually measure rainstorms in terms of 'inches of water,' so that's one variable, and if the other variable is how big an area the storm covers, then we can define how much rain's going to fall, and therefore how much water we need to conjure."

"Yeah, but there's water in the air already, usually- it might be worth designing the spell to first condense all the humidity in the air above the target into raindrops, then start creating new water. Also, it would probably be a bad idea to summon all that water as one big blob, so it'd be better to conjure the water in the form of a cloud that's about to rain."

"True, but now it seems like I should first learn about how rainclouds work, and that's..."

"A time consuming research endeavor that'll give you something to do outside of ever-more bizarre and high concept sexual escapades."

"...Well now I'm gonna make you do it, so you stop fucking my dad."

"You know what? That's fair."