Amity Series #7 - Cataclysm
Kris Me
Amity Series:
#7 - Cataclysm
By: Kris Me
Introduction:
Storm was in a quandary, as he couldn't decide how to remove the last of the devil wizards. He had also heard other strange rumours concerning them. He felt a cataclysm was coming that could tear his new world asunder.
He also wanted to know what had happened to his other children from Earth and why they had all disappeared. He didn't believe that they were dead. Raina had found her way to him, and he could only hope they did too.
Storm felt they needed to come home soon.
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Copyright:
Copyright © 2016 Kris Me - All rights are reserved
This story is the work of Kris Me. You must contact me before you copy more than one page or ten percent of the content, as per the Copyright Act 1968, Australia.
First Published by Storiesonline World Literature Company as the last two parts of the book Amity 5. Cataclysm - 13/05/2016.
Last Updated 25/11/2021.
The book cover was designed in Microsoft Paint 3D using art that is my own, copyright-free or covered by creative commons license for commercial use from https://pixabay.com/
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Declaration:
~~ Adult Themes ~~
This book is part of an erotica science fiction series. It is NOT recommended for people under the legal age to access such stories, depending on the reader's country of origin.
The books may contain what some people consider vulgar language, references to religious icons, violence, coercion, murder, and-or rape scenes.
Some scenes may describe intimate heterosexual, bisexual, gay and-or group sexual activities. If you are homophobic, you may find some scenes in this series of books distasteful. In most cases, these scenes are integral parts of the story.
Some of the books include imaginary races capable of changing their gender and/or form into other animals. Copulation, while the characters are in their alternate animal forms, may be described.
This book DOES NOT contain descriptions of bestiality or coitus between humans who are closely related by blood.
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Editing:
If you find any of my assumptions fabricated, I would like to remind you this is a fictional story, and I have probably taken liberties with reality, as you know it. The humanoids in this story are not based on anyone I know or have read about.
Australian based dictionaries were used for reference, and Grammarly was used as part of the editing suite. The story was written in Microsoft Word.
If you find grammatical or spelling errors, they are not the fault of my editor or proofreaders who did try to fix my work. However, I do tend to fiddle around after the fact, so all errors are my own.
If my Australian colloquialisms or terms need clarification, or you just wish to correspond, I'm more than happy to answer your emails. You can send them to: kris.me2@inorbit.com
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The Wiki:
https://keltria.fandom.com/wiki/
The Wiki contains information about the Keltrian people, wizards, magical items, colloquialisms and adapted words that have been created for this universe. Maps, character lists and other information that may relate to this book could be found.
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This is the seventh book:
This version was Part D: Storm - chapters 27 to 35 and Part E: The Queens - chapters 36 to 46 of the original book - Amity: 5. Cataclysm as posted on Sol.
Cataclysm has been modified into the two books Amity: #6 - Calamity and Amity: #7 - Cataclysm to create more modest-sized books.
It is best to read the books in this series in sequence. Some references to events or information about a character place or event might not be explained fully if introduced in a previous book.
The Amity Series is part of the Keltrian Universe. Chronologically, this story starts before Delta but finishes around the same time. It can be read as a separate entity to the Delta series since it centres around a different planet and solar system.
However, there are links to events and characters who first appear in Delta. If you have read those books, you will have better foreknowledge if some information isn't repeated in this book.
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Acknowledgements:
Special thanks to Anna Dapter, PapaKilo14, Town Car and Johnny Sinclair, who did try to decipher my dyslexic scribbles in the original posting.
Thanks to all of the readers who have pointed out I do make mistakes and have helped me fix them. And extra thanks go to Lazeez for his support.
I hope you enjoy the story.
Kris Me
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List of books:
Amity: #1 - Storm
Amity: #2 - Coercion
Amity: #3 - Tempest
Amity: #4 - Herders
Amity: #5 - The Herd
Amity: #6 - Calamity
Amity: #7 - Cataclysm
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Chapter 1
~~ Storm - Earth year: Dec 2099 ~~
I've decided to update my journal of my life to the present.
I've taken a bit of author's licence and collected the narratives from others to help put the last two years in context. In some cases, these accounts will be in their own words.
This first chapter is a summary of my first year on the planet called Amity. It was covered more in-depth in my previous journals. The rest is about the second year in my new home. Since we will soon start a new year, it seems a good time to do it.
Much of what has happened to me since I arrived on Amity has revolved around trying to complete the prophecy below:
To make the five lands one
So, the people can again be one
Five feats must be done
The devil wizards must be defeated for one.
The Starman must defeat the cursed one
The healer must cleanse the children of the sun
The man of light must declare his love of one
The dark man must not turn and run.
When the storm is done
The people will again be one
Their King to come
The Gods will, will be done.
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~~ Storm - Earth year: 2099 ~~
In the beginning…
The first eleven months of my life in Amity time has been anything but ordinary. I'm trying to get it into perspective, so I can see my way forward. For those reading my story afresh:
I was named Grey Green at birth. I was born in Brisbane, Australia and on the planet called Earth in its year 2001. I'm known as Lord Wizard Storm here or just Storm, to my friends. Storm was a nickname I earned early in life due to my eyes being shades of green to grey depending on my mood.
I keep my hair short, and it is a reddish nutmeg colour. I am 190cm tall and have a solid but not bulky build for my height. My complexion is what I call a light olive. I tan darker rather than burn and don't have any freckles. I am of a mixed heritage of many nations on Earth but simply call myself an Australian.
In the year 2036, Earth time, I went on holiday to Mt Mulu in Malaysia. At the time, I was thirty-five and working as a Trade Trainer. I specialised in several building trades, including Electrical, Construction and Boilermaking.
Before I left Brisbane to go on holiday, I found a strange metal box buried at the bottom of a box of books I had bought at a market stall from the estate of a deceased lady. Inside the metal box were four items, a diadem, a ring, a medallion on a platinum chain and what I thought was a baton made of metal.
The baton was a tube about 25cm long and had a large, round-cut gem in one end. It was 25mm thick at its thickest end and narrower at the other end to 16mm and then rounded over. When activated, it extended into a stave that was 1.8m in length. It can be used at any length in between.
The bling or jewellery, if you prefer, was different in that it had four different gems on the diadem and the ring. A large, light-green-yellow crystal was in the middle of both items. I've since learned it's called a Quaz energy crystal. An emerald and an opal were mounted on one side of this crystal. A ruby and an amethyst were on the other side.
The medallion had four symbols etched on it. There was a hill on the top, a leaf on one side, and a flaming torch on the other and what looked like a cloud on the bottom. On the back was an inscription that read, 'I learn to serve'. I interpreted the word underneath this quote as 'Builder'.
The information wasn't written in a language I'd ever seen before, yet, I could read and comprehend it when I held the medallion. Once I had put the bling on, I knew that it affected me, as I felt very different. I felt a new energy inside of me that I didn't understand.
Among the books in the cardboard book-box, I also found a special book written in two languages that I could now read. I was shocked to learn that I had put on the items that belonged to a magical entity called a Builder Mage.
I had become a wielder of magic, like in the myths and legends of old. The baton was, in fact, my wand and the book, my spellbook.
In the months just before I left Earth, I managed to impregnate four women. I'd had casual relationships with them while on holiday. This was an achievement in itself. Before putting on the bling, I had been classified as having a sperm count so low that I had little hope of siring children.
In the year 2032, we had two devastating viruses that swept the world. They were even worse than the flu-type virus in 2019 as they were infectious for longer before they let themselves be known.
One was a flu-type virus, similar to Covid-19. The second, which was attached to the first virus, affected human fertility. Many of us didn't even realise we had contracted the second, as it was released by the first virus becoming active.
The flu infected roughly 98% of the population over the next three years. A third of the people over sixty died, mostly males. That was over 340 million people. About 1% of the other age groups also died, accounting for another 80 million people.
The second virus's legacy left most men with less than 20% of the previous average for male fertility; thus, very low sperm counts. Added to this, the female fertility cycle was also altered, and most women now only ovulated between two to four times a year.
People had to start planning to have children, and accidental pregnancies caused by males fucking anything with a cunnie were much rarer unless the woman was in season. Women also developed a special scent when they were ovulating, which many males could detect.
A secondary side effect after the virus was that in the four years before I left Earth, Births rates also changed so that four out of seven children were born female. In some countries, this rate was even higher, with two females to every male.
I believed that I had left two sons and two daughters behind, one to each of four women. I knew the women were in season, and that I had indeed left them pregnant. In each case, I got the impression from the women that they desperately desired to have a child.
I still wished I'd not left my children behind without them ever knowing me. I'd not believed that I could be a father for so long that when I realised that they were pregnant, I had planned to try to spend some time in my children's lives even though I didn't love their mothers.
Good intentions or not, I didn't deliberately leave Earth.
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My undoing was from having a run-in with a couple of thugs while caving at Mt Mulu.
In my attempt to avoid them, I accidentally activated a transportation ring or portal. It was in a cavern I had found when trying to escape the men.
The portal dropped me onto a new planet that I later learnt was called Amity. The people in Amity were at a similar technological development as Earth was in the late Iron Age to early Industrial Era.
The people on the continent I landed on were just starting to develop heavy machinery and complex electrical systems. Oddly, they didn't have a form of car and still used carts and horses or rather lankys, as they call the beasts here.
Not long after my arrival, I learnt that a Mage Davin had been stuck on this planet for a hundred years. He had been trying to help the people on the continent Galina regain their lost civilisation. His specialities were Nature and Energy, and he had improved farming techniques where he could.
The people of Amity had apparently been more advanced in technology before a war they had nearly three thousand years earlier. Some of the old technology did still exist. They were often noticeable to me, mostly by the lack of other technologies that I had accepted as common on Earth.
The use of magic by many people on Amity also gave a warped perspective of their advancements in some fields but little to none in others.
The war had broken out between corrupted wizards and good wizards that oversaw the development and health of the people. The ancestors of the wizards and most of the people, who lived here, had come to this planet many tens of thousands of years before.
No one was sure exactly when, and in my first year here, I've not quite worked it out as a fact. The records I'd obtained were very sketchy in this regard. Mage Davin believed that people like him might have come here as far back as seventy thousand years before. Since Sarah, one of my wives, agrees, I'll consider it a fact.
I have learnt that the people here have developed to different levels of technology several times. They would regress when their populations dropped, and the technology was lost. This was due to wars, times with no wizards to guide them and natural disasters.
Davin believed the same people that he was descended from had brought magic to this planet. Davin's diaries indicated that the collective races of a planetary system called Keltria had colonised Amity and Earth at about the same time.
He was under the impression that their home solar system had been in trouble and the Keltrians had to flee. The Keltrians had, in his opinion, based on calculations and strange trips between different planets in his lifetime, travelled far in the galaxy looking for suitable worlds.
They had terraformed when required as they went, so the people from the Keltrian planets could move to new worlds. Amity and Earth were but two such worlds. Davin's diaries indicated that he had ended up on Amity when trying to get back to a planet he called Utopia after the last time he had been on Earth.
Apparently, the wizards and magical people on Earth were being persecuted, and they had moved to Utopia in around about 300AD in my Earth timescale. He mentioned that the wizards of his decad had broken a contract with the other magical races.
As punishment, they had been stripped of their wizard's bling and sent back to Earth. He had managed to locate a mage box he had hidden on Earth before he left. It was like the one I had found but with fewer gems.
The mage boxes were classed as lesser boxes magically. They were more tolerant of errors than a full wizard's box like the one that Davin had previously had. If a wizard is stripped of, or takes off their bling, they tend to go mad unless they can find another magical item to accept them.
Ever since Davin's eviction from Utopia, he had been trying to go back there to atone for his sins. When David James came here from Earth, with his Grandteli wife, Kelli, and their delectable daughter, Sarah, they confirmed that Davin's story was true.
I was amazed to learn that Kelli had, in fact, been born on Earth more than seventy thousand years before my birth. Her parents had been part of one of the original exploration teams that left Keltria on what they call a wheelship to find new worlds.
David said that he came from thirty-six years into my future on Earth. In the year 2072, he had been on a mission to build a settlement on Mars. While attempting to avoid a meteor shower when he was orbiting Mars, he had inadvertently created a wormhole.
He had been sent back into Earth's past, where Kelli, her family and the wheelship Zara had been at the time. He and Kelli had some interesting adventures before they finally made it to Amity.
They are also different types of wizards to me.
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Chapter 2
~~ Storm - Earth year: 2099 ~~
A little about magic
While investigating where I was and how I could get home, I found the wizard's box that Davin had mentioned, and it had opened for me. It was a special box in that the person it claimed was called a Lord Wizard. Davin hadn't been able to claim the box.
Its book box had been hidden in a secret cavern near the room in which the transportation ring was located. Davin hadn't been able to locate the room due to the spells that protected it. Only the claimant of the Lord's box could.
The boxes which hold the items that can claim people to be their wizards are a bit strange. You can put a lot more in them than you should be able to, for one thing. The book box held the spellbooks and diaries of past wizards who had previously worn the magical items as well as other junk they had dropped in them.
The magical items also have an entity attached to them. It guides the wizard to do good deeds. A Wizard is supposed to help the people that he or she serves to better their lives. A Wizard can't talk with an entity, yet, you can communicate with your thoughts. The spirit can impress its feelings onto the wizard or magician.
As the Lord Wizard of a decad (ten wizards), I could have four full wizards, and we five wizards could then each claim an apprentice to complete the set. Under us were the mages or druids. Then under them, we had novices or trainees, depending on which planet you were on.
The number of and the different types of gems and symbols on the bling denotes the kind of magic the wearer wields best and their strengths. A Lord or a Duke, as they are known in some places, like me, have all six gems on their diadems and rings and all six power symbols on their medallions.
The Keltrian races, the Genteli and Grandteli, preferred the decad type of wizard's structure. A Pix's set of wizards are called a sextet. Most sets have five gems and the corresponding symbols on their bling.
Their wizards are paired to form three couples. Each partner in a couple has the gem that the other person is missing. They are called High Wizards or Marquess Wizards. These wizards can be very effective when they work together.
The odd few sextet sets have all six disciplines. However, the wizard is still known by discipline associated with the topmost gem on their medallions. It is considered their strongest discipline. The lower gem is their weakest.
I've since learnt there are also Queen and Empress Wizards. They have all six gems for the different disciplines. Some have one or two special gems added to their items, Empresses in particular.
A full Wizard or Earl in a decad has five gems and symbols similar to a High Wizard. However, their gems are smaller, or they don't have gems on their medallions, like me. The apprentices or Viscounts have four gems and their symbols.
A High Mage or Viscounts can also have four jewels, and they sit just under apprentices in terms of strength. Many cities and small nations on Amity are controlled by these individuals.
High Mages have a greater chance of being selected by a higher-level magical box if the owner of the box dies. Mages or druids have three gems and are the next most common set. Many officials are called Barons if they oversaw small city-states, and magic teachers have at least a mage set.
Novices or trainees have only one or two gems on their bling. All magical users had the unique Quaz crystals on their bling, as they were repositories for storing magical energy. I later learnt that the special crystals in the bling did a lot more than this.
The crystals also make great batteries, as they can store a large amount of electrical energy. They could also be used for lighting as they were able to emit excess energy in this form. They will also sustain a spell for as long as they have access to an external heat or an energy source.
I also learnt that on Amity, where I now live, the magicians who were called druids and trainees didn't have a full set of magical items. Trainees only had one main item, a ring or a medallion with only one or two gems.
Druids more often than not needed to have both items and at least three jewels in both, but not necessarily the same ones. In many places, those few with many items and three gems were considered High Druids.
I later learnt that was erroneous on their part as there were still four-gem High Mage sets in existence on Amity. Many of the medallions here on Galena also had the gems added with the symbols of power to strengthen them because they didn't have the diadems.
Magical finger-rings were the most common items. The lower order magicians here were not very powerful as I believed people with full magical boxes like the mage box I had when I came to Amity.
Interestingly, the wand was an item that many magical people didn't have. Diadems were also rare on the continents, Galina where I was based, Saran to the east and Palatine in the southern hemisphere. It is between Galina and Saran.
Diadems were more common on the continents, Orient to my west and Federation, which is between Galina and Orion in the southern hemisphere. The race called Shifters, who were an offshoot of the Genteli, particularly liked diadems.
It was after David joined me on Amity that I learnt that the race from Keltria, called the Pix, formed a different combination of wizards. They formed a sextet, and as mentioned, they were called High Wizards.
The Pix were considered the oldest magical race. Prols, who were the other ancient race, didn't seem inclined to wear magic items, although they tended to have innate Earth and Nature magic like the Faeries.
Many months after I got here, I learned the pairings in a Pix set weren't always the same two disciplines in a sextet. Even so, all six primary disciplines were represented. A sextet of wizards can take down a Lord Wizard or even their Queen if they need to.
Apparently, I needed my full decad to take a bad Queen out of play. Sarah said it was very rare in Keltrian history, which spanned several million years, for a Queen Wizard to go awry.
In my decad, we seemed more hodgepodge in this respect since there were ten of us. Different decads had some traits with higher representations than others did. It depended on who made the set of magical boxes and put them together.
Magic users have traits that link to six main disciplines. Each trait has a corresponding gem and a symbol, and certain professions tend to prefer some disciplines over others. Many professions are better served by having a combination of at least two traits.
Decad wizards may also have different metals assigned to them. Platinum is often associated with the Lord Wizard. Other prime metals such as gold, silver, iron, copper, zinc, tin, cobalt and aluminium, and their various alloys are commonly used.
I was learning that being a wizard or a magician could be a complicated business.
(Note: The primary characteristics and other data about wizards are on the Wiki, https://keltria.fandom.com/wiki/ If you have read the previous books, you will know what they are.)
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My Family
After my arrival on Amity, I established myself in the town of Iron Hills.
The town is about 40km inland from Trenton, which is currently the largest city on the east coast of Galina. Iron Hills exists on the hillside outside the cavern that holds the portal ring I was transported to.
The caverns can even be accessed from my house if you can find the secret entrance. Once I had my home base set up, I went looking for the missing members of my decad of wizards and their missing magical boxes. I felt compelled to do this and have had quite a few adventures on the way, as I described in my earlier journals.
I now have a daughter, Sky, Kim is my husband, and our two wives are Lindell and Sarah. I met and married Kim and Lindell in Iron Hills. Sky is my daughter with Lindell. My beautiful Lindell is a Psychic Mage and my anchor. Wherever Lindell is, is home.
Kim is my apprentice wizard. Kim's traits are dominantly, Lore and Physics. You may think it's strange for a man who has never been interested in men as sexual partners to have a husband. To be honest, to date, I still don't wish to be with any other man, only Kim. I think the entities have a lot to do with it.
Kim is an essential part of my life, and I love him and need him as much as I do my two wonderful wives. I've learnt that having partners of both sexes is common for people who wear wizard's bling, especially for full wizards and Lord Wizards.
I can't say I understand why, but I just know that Kim holds a part of my soul, and I'd not be complete without him. Being sexually intimate with Kim has its own rewards. I enjoy making love to, cuddling, and just being with him.
Our second wife, Sarah, is unusual. She wasn't gestated and born in the ordinary sense of human birth. She was created by a being called a Controller, who was named Zara. Zara controls a Keltrian wheelship or a spaceship to me.
A wheelship has a huge toroidal habitat ring that rotates around a central axis of an 'H' shaped frame that holds the main engines. The habitat can split into sixteen sections if the ship is damaged.
The sections of the ship can travel at sub-light speeds and can even jump through space to another system if another ship has established a portal or space-gate in a system for them to lock onto. This is how the Keltrian spaceships advanced through the galaxy to our side of it.
Zara had used sperm, eggs and DNA from David and Kelli and included some of her own DNA to form Sarah. Zara's addition gives Sarah the ability to store everything she learns and collects from her senses as data within the fabric of her bones and her brain.
She uses her bones like computer hard drives and can recall anything she knows. It can be a bit intimidating at times to a mere mortal and even this Lord Wizard to contemplate just what she does know.
You may consider Sarah as my partner, more so than Kim and Lindell, as these days, she is the one most often seen with me. Kim and Lindell are homebodies and Sarah, and I have a need to go solve other people's problems. Sarah has a medallion and a ring, and she is the repository of knowledge of our outfit.
We, however, both consider Lindell and Kim as part of us, and they are both very much needed by us.
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Chapter 3
~~ Storm - Earth year: 2099 ~~
My search
During my search for my fellow wizards, Lindell, Kim, and the Druids Guild in Trenton helped me rescue a prince called Ulu and some of his people. They had been captured by slavers to be sold as pleasure slaves. I realised Ulu was one of my missing wizards when I touched him.
He is a touch shorter than I am, and he reminded me of people we call Africans on Earth having similar features. As Davin had indicated, many of Ulu's people had darker skin tones and broader features.
The Galinians were more Anglo-Saxon, Palatinians were more Eastern Europe and Orientals more Asian. There were plenty of variations in between due to the original inhabitants mixing with the Keltrian races.
We took Ulu and his people back to his continent called Saran after we rescued Kim's box from a corrupt wizard in Trenton. I had become aware that some of the magical bling in Trenton worn by some people had been corrupted.
I'd hoped that once we had dispatched Lord Gazan, who had Kim's apprentice's box, that would be the end of them, but it wasn't.
After arriving in Saran, we'd found that Ulu's people had an issue with some of the people from Palatine, the continent to Saran's southwest. They had established an outpost on Saran on the southern point that was called Spur. They were taking Ulu's people to use as slaves.
Prime Bishop Richard of Palatine had corrupted one of the other apprentice wizard's boxes. He was using a form of coercion to control the magical people of Palatine, similar to the way Lord Gazan had been operating in Trenton.
If a male with magical abilities didn't join him and become one of his priests, he had them executed. Richard hated women with magical abilities. He enjoyed degrading and killing them. He was using his priests to control the population and was a really nasty piece of work.
Richard believed there were magical boxes in Saran, and he had sent some of his people to destroy them. One of the men he had coerced to do this was Prince Alexus. After we stopped the Palatines from killing Ulu's people, Druid Penny Gold, who had accompanied us from Trenton, took a fancy to Alexus.
I was delighted to find that I'd identified my third set of wizards. For some reason, Penny's magical boxes were in Golden City with Ulu's and his apprentice, Selene's. We believed Richard had Alexus's box. Later on, I sent Selene's sister, Selwyn, and a very special young man called Kale to help Penny and Alexus retrieve it.
The trip to Saran didn't end up as well as I had hoped. Ulu's wife at the time, Yalla, became jealous of one of the Shifters we met in Golden City. Ulu realised just after he met Selene that she was to be his apprentice wizard.
Shifters, by the way, are one of the youngest Keltrian races. A lot of them had been on the sections of a damaged wheelship called Torus that had landed here about a hundred years after the Wizard's War.
Selene and her family were guarding an ancient city called Golden City. They were waiting for me or any of the other wizards to turn up. They had been sent to the city by Domo Leslie, who was located in Federation.
Yalla knew that Selene would be very important to Ulu and felt that she was no longer good enough for him and that he wouldn't love her anymore. Ulu did not intend to give Yalla up, as he did love her. Yalla worked this out too late.
The spirit that was once the Wizard Seneca, who had started the big war, convinced Yalla to free and then wear the medallion in which his soul was trapped. He planned to take over the body of the child she carried so he could be reborn.
The bloke was, if anything, persistent.
However, intervention by Ulu, Sarah and David destroyed the medallion and dispersed his spirit, but not before the wizard took its revenge and hastened the death of Yalla and the baby that she carried. Sarah believes the baby's soul now resides in Selene's newborn son, Yallan.
David, Kelli and Sarah had turned up in Golden City just before Yalla tried to free Seneca. They had found a Shuttle on the planet called Hades that had a device that could destroy a magical item. Seneca had planned to borrow their shuttle before we intervened. Bad move on his part.
David was the Earth High Wizard and Kelli the Psychic High Wizard of their sextet, then claimed Selene's twin sister, Selwyn, as their High Wizard of Nature and Kale as the High Wizard of Physics.
By the end of those adventures, David only had one pair of his wizards left to find, and I still had two pairs.
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The next thing to happen was that Selwyn and Kale, along with Penny and Alexus, took my sailing ship to Justini, the capital of Palatine, to sort out their plague.
They also took care of Bishop Richard when he escaped Justini to the ancient city located southwest of Justini. It was called Tinble City. Kale had been a bit upset at how they achieved their objective, but I wasn't sorry to hear that they had managed to kill the Bishop and the other bad wizards.
David and Kelli then took Selwyn and her other sisters, Keven and Levine, to Federation, to tell their grandmother, Domo Leslie, that the wizards were back. They also found the ancient city called Nickel City and decided Federation would be their home.
Selwyn and Kale were to join them later.
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My next stop was the continent of Orient.
In Orient, we met a lovely young lady called Princess Olivia. She was to become my third wizard. Sarah went with me to enjoy the Summer Season at their court, but Kim with Lindell, who was pregnant with Sky at the time, decided to stay at home in Iron Hills.
When David and Kelli went to Federation, they took one of Ulu's shuttles. Sarah and her spaceship stayed with me. We equipped David's old Earth built spacecraft with a new SAI, or rather, a Controller, as they called them here. We called her JJ.
JJ took on the role of our orbital space station. She monitored space anomalies and the satellites that David had released around Amity before coming to meet me when I was in Golden City.
We got some more unexpected visitors while in the Orient, visiting an ancient city called Silver City. Patina, the Controller for Silver City, was as surprised as we were when JJ relayed to her that we had a spaceship wishing to land.
These people were also looking for me. It is nice to be popular.
On board was Raina Walsh, my daughter. Her mother was Annette Ubobo, whom I'd only know of as Anne and had met in Darwin before I flew to Mt Mulu. With Raina were three of her Special Forces team, Ben Vella, Darren Topple (DT) and Kori Jackson (KJ).
Raina also had three other people on board. She had collected them when she visited Wizard Queen Lee Watson before coming here to me. Lee lived on the planet Harmony in the Delta Pavonis system.
Raina had another surprise for us, as their ship's pilot, Zarka, was Sarah's sister and was also created by Zara. Raina's team had been on a mission in Russia looking for UFO artefacts and had found Zarka and her ship in an underground bunker.
Zara had sent Zarka to Earth over a hundred and fifty years before Raina and her team found her in 2057. Only someone with specific magical criteria could access the ship Zarka controlled. The Russians had been trying since they found the ship before the start of the Second World War on Earth.
Zarka's mission after she had collected Raina's team was to go to Harmony. She had no idea why her mother wished her to go there. When they arrived, they learned that they had to collect Payton Ahurn, a Faerie Shifter, and Ashley Mac Janus, a Grandteli. They were then to take them to another planet called Amity.
They had turned up in Harmony in the Earth year 2098. That was mindboggling since I'd left in '36, sixty-two years before. I had to chuckle as that meant I was now a dirty-old-man at ninety-seven years old.
Anyway, a recorded message by Zara told them they were to take Raina to her father and Zarka to her parents, David and Kelli. Zara, however, didn't tell them why they had to bring the two people from Harmony with her.
When they went to leave Harmony, they found they had gained a third passenger. He was a mage called Daniel Connors. He insisted that he had to go with them, and since Queen Lee and Lord Wizard Trixy (My great-granddaughter) agreed, the team took him too.
I later learnt that Harmony and her twin planet Utopia, boasted the makings of two decads of wizards and Lee Watson from my old stomping ground of Brisbane, Australia, had become the Jade Queen Wizard of their solar system. She had been born some sixty-eight years after me in 2069.
My life was getting weirder and weirder.
Lee's husband, Sean Watson, also from Australia, was a Lord Wizard and the grandson of Andy Watson, the woman I'd met in Mt Isa. Andy had also been the mother of my son Andrew who was Sean Watson's uncle.
I was devastated to learn that both my sons, Philip, my Malaysian girlfriend Eca's son and Andrew, had died in a space accident in 2061.
I also learnt that Raina and Ben had a daughter called Dana. She had only been three when they had disappeared from Earth in 2057. When they met up with Dana in Harmony, Raina leant she had become a grandmother.
Trixy, Dana's daughter with David James before he vanished from Earth, was then twenty-nine. Trixy had become Harmony's second Lord Wizard. David was pretty stoked when he learnt about his daughter.
David and I were delighted that Raina and Ben completed his sextet. Raina was the Energy High Wizard and Ben the Lore High Wizard. They left with him and Kelli to go back to Federation, after I contacted him to come and meet them.
I'm not really sure how he felt about Zara creating another hybrid daughter from hers, his and Kelli's DNA. It was also a bit intimidating to find out Zarka was a hundred and fifty years old, even if she barely looked twenty-two.
Zarka had claimed Raina's teammates, DT and KJ, as her companions. The three of them seemed very happy together. They stuck around with me and the others in Orient for a month while we tried to determine if Ashley or Daniel was to be Olivia's apprentice.
I suspected one of the boys would also become my other wizard.
------
Things came to a head when Daniel got cranky with Olivia's inability to pick between him and Ashley.
She had come into season and was driving us blokes' nuts. She had a strong psychic ability, and because she was a wizard, it seemed to make it worse for us blokes with strong magical powers.
Daniel decided to step out of the competition with Ashley for Olivia's affections. So, Sarah and I offered to take him home to Iron Hills with us. Payton asked if she could come with us. At the time, we still didn't know where she would fit into the scheme of things.
On the way home, I got a mental call from Lindell that she was in labour. I upset Sarah when I blinked (teleported) the shuttle to Iron Hills. At least I made it in time and finally got to see one of my children being born.
I'm not sure who was the more besotted father, Kim or me. Kim had connected to Sky while she was still in Lindell's womb. As far as he and I were concerned, she was our daughter.
Sarah and Lindell said we were both soppy and that Sky had us boys wrapped around her little fingers already. Kim and I didn't care as we thought she was gorgeous.
I was supposed to drop some cargo off to King Augustus (Augé), Alexus' dad. Sarah, Daniel and Payton decided that they'd had enough of babies and agreed to make the trip for me. The upshot of the trip was that Augé took one look at Payton and fell in love.
It turns out that the Justinian's had an old legend that a Faerie Queen would bring prosperity and Harmony to Palatine. When the people learned that Payton could shapeshift into a Faerie, they were just as excited as Augé was when she agreed to marry him.
Things were looking up for the Palatinians.
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Chapter 4
~~ Storm - Earth year: 2099 ~~
My search continued.
Around this time, David and his sextet were settling into Federation.
They learnt that four sections of the wheelship Torus had landed in Federation just after the Wizard's War. More than half of the people who had been aboard were of the Shifter race.
In case you can't remember or didn't read my other journals, if a wheelship is damaged, it can break into sixteen sections that can operate independently with their own Al's and act as lifeboats. David had found three of the sections on the planet Hades that he renamed Torus.
The Shifters on Federation had ended up forming two cities called Greco and Garson on either side of a massive land split on the eastern side of the continent. A long bridge joined the two cities over the dividing tidal river, which they called the Slit.
Domo Ethan ruled Garson on the south side, and he wasn't a popular ruler. Domo Leslie ruled Greco. When David had dropped Keven and Levine off in Greco, they learnt that they had each inherited Duchies from their mothers, who had stayed with Ulu.
Note on Shifters -- Nearly all Shifters are born in female form. They can change gender at will and have at least two but more commonly four animal forms. While most tended to stay in female for most of the time, about a quarter preferred to be in male form for daily living. It's a brain chemistry thing as far as I can work out.
A Shifter being born as a male is uncommon, but it does happen. A Shifter's birth form is their dominant form when not conscious. Most of these males can't shift gender or to their animal forms. They also tend to produce more male children like themselves rather than female Shifters.
Male born Shifters who can change form or at least gender are very rare. My fourth wizard, Daniel, had this rare ability.
Most Shifters also don't differentiate between genders with their names as humans and some of the other races do. When you can change to either gender on a whim, it seems odd to them that we think someone called Gary, for example, can only be male.
David's High Wizards weren't happy to learn that Federation also had a lot of magicians wearing tainted bling. Slavery and general poverty were also significant issues, particularly in Ethan's region.
They set about getting the ancient city, Nickel City, back up and running while they worked on many different problems plaguing the population of Federation.
Keven had a run-in with some slavers who were stealing her people to be used as slaves for Domo Ethan. As a result, she learnt that one of the local orphans, Pip, whom she had hired, had some strange abilities and a loss of memories after coming through a portal.
When Kale touched Pip, he told her she had to come and visit me. When she turned up, I agreed with Kale that she was special. Pip was not what she seemed. I just had to work out how to get the prickly young woman to accept us.
Ulu had informed me the northern half of his continent was called Aurum. They had separated themselves from his half, which was still called Saran, many centuries before I got there. From some of the memories, Kale was able to help Pip recover; she recalled that she used to live on the northeast coast of Aurum.
I dropped Pip and Daniel off in the area where JJ believed the portal Pip had used was located. It was their job to find it and each other. I thought getting Olivia and Ashley together was hard work, but these two had some serious commitment issues to work out.
I decided some alone together time might be more beneficial as they needed to learn to trust each other. I was to learn that Daniel was one canny operator. He and Pip did find the transportal.
Someone had used it since Pip had been there six years before and left them a present. It was a portal coordinates book. This book is amazing. It could connect to any other portal in our galaxy that also had a book, as well as many that didn't.
You could even talk to it and find out where other portals were located. It gave you information on the people, the weather, the general planetary and political conditions, but only if the planet had satellites or a place had a City Controller with which it could connect.
It could even show you maps and where other portals were located on the planet in question if it knew of them. Queen Lee had apparently been looking for a book like this one for some time. Knowing this, Daniel activated the portal.
When he jumped, he had the book propagate a new book at Lee's transportation ring on Watson Island, Harmony. We now had a link to the Earth colonies on Harmony. Lee then propagated the book to a portal that she had established on Earth. It linked back to Daniel's, and all three updated.
At the moment the portals connected, it was the 20th of September in Earth year of 2099.
The Portal Book had told Daniel our three-star systems were now locked in the same moment in time and space. Lee now hoped that the strange space-time jumps the portals on my planet and Earth had been experiencing should stop happening with the three-star systems re-triangulated.
I was delighted with this as I had every intention to go visit Earth in the future and Lee's two planets, too. I especially wished to meet her and learn more about how to be a better Lord Wizard.
In the meantime, I had to get Amity sorted out. This is mostly what this recollection is covering.
Daniel and Pip finally got together after they found the ancient city called Titan City on the east coast of Aurum. To our surprise, they also found their wizard's boxes back in the ancient city called Platinum that was on the southern end of Galina.
They also started sorting out the local issues in Aurum. They had come across people with corrupted bling when fixing the city and had to rescue some of the local population.
My decad was now complete.
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Chapter 5
~~ Storm - Earth year: 2099 ~~
As to the prophecy
We believe Daniel and Pip completed the line in the prophecy, 'The dark man must not turn and run.'
Since both of them were Shifters, and they were afraid others would find out, they had to overcome their commitment issues. It couldn't have been easy for them. The fact that they both had dark pasts and darkish skin and hair could be attributed to the 'dark' part as far as we were concerned.
We attribute the line, 'The man of light must declare his love of one,' to Olivia with her snow-white hair. Although she had not been able to do this until Daniel walked away.
The Oracle in Bagada, a small town north of Justini, had said that Bishop Richard had altered the prophecy and changed the gender of people mentioned to male. Since many of our people are Shifters, it makes it hard to tell what gender they were supposed to be anyway.
For 'The healer must cleanse the children of the sun,' we point to Kale when he healed the sick in Justini for Alexus and his father, King Augé.
For 'The Starman must defeat the cursed one,' we think this line belongs to Sarah and David. Their mission and actions allowed us to dissipate the soul of the cursed wizard and stopped him from coming back to give us more grief.
We are still working on the line, 'Five feats must be done,' since we haven't completed, 'The devil wizards must be defeated for one.'
We know we have defeated some of the bad wizards, but we haven't got them all. That is our project this year.
The lines that bother me the most are, 'When the storm is done, the people will again be one.'
If I'm supposed to be 'the Storm', I've yet to work out how to eliminate all of the corrupted bling or how to bring the people back together.
If we encounter any corrupt bling, we strip it from the person who had it and fix it. However, I don't think this is enough. We need to find who has learnt Seneca's tricks and methods of corrupting the items in the first place.
My decad and David's sextet agrees with me.
------
Things have been quiet for the three months since my decad was completed.
I've been allowing the other wizards to get their cities and people back to some semblance of normality. With several of my wizards and David's being pregnant, we were holding off a bit from any drastic action.
Selene has delivered her twins, Yallan and Ullina. Payton, being a Faerie Shifter, is due to present Augé with twins in about three weeks, the same time my next grandchild is due. Ben is stoked, but Raina is just counting minutes.
Olivia is expected to drop her baby in about a month, and Kelli is due around the same time.
We haven't been idle with our quests, but we are looking for needles in a haystack as big as a planet. We were intelligence gathering, as Ben puts it. We were trying to narrow down where the main culprits were. JJ has been a big help in this regard.
Sarah, Kim, Lindell and I had been busily relocating the old Platinum City Controller, Trina, her androids and most of the city's machinery to Iron Hills as Daniel recommended. I had to do a bit of grovelling, as Trina wasn't happy with my tardiness in finding her.
Controllers and androids get lonely and feel unfulfilled if they don't have people to look after. I guess that after three thousand years of being alone, she had a right to be testy. She was more than happy to shift if it meant she was with people again.
I'd have to do a bit of terraforming if I was ever to reopen the old city of Platinum for a large population to live there. I'll have to think of a special use for the place.
We decided to put Trina in a new cavern that I built in the mountain that housed the portal and the room of Quaz crystals. It was easier to get her access to the power she required. We had also started fixing the town's power systems thanks to Sean and his solar panels and the wonderful crystal blocks he calls EC-cells.
I installed one of the smaller replicators in my house. I love those things. I then built a replicator in one of the big warehouses that belonged to Lindell. It was for the people of the city to access.
One of the androids, whom I had named Beryl, manages the city replicator. She has hired mages to run the shop for me, and we don't charge a lot for what she sells.
Citron, another android, looks after the new city sweepers and general fixing and cleaning of the streets. She, too, hires locals under the city's new budget, to help and do building maintenance on my properties that are now owned and run by the city.
It's a lot less work for Kim so he can spend his time learning to be my apprentice, helping me and playing with Sky. Lindell oversees everything in Iron Hills and is the new Mayor. She is in her element. She only brings significant issues to me since I have my fingers in a lot of other pies.
The locals were amused when the androids adopted the names that I gave them and dressed in what looked like coloured lab-technician smocks from Earth, with their names on them, to make it easier for everyone to identify them.
We were beginning to believe these androids were smarter than the average dumb machine. They seemed to have very distinct personalities. The android, Granny Smith, took over the mansion, and she can be a lot of fun. We all love Granny.
Pammy happily handed over the responsibilities as she and her daughter Suella are Lindell's go-to girls. Walter and his son Wally are busy setting up the trade training school and hiring staff.
My little family, as I called my staff, are all still living at the mansion. They and my loves are perfectly happy with this setup.
David and his people are still trying to infiltrate Domo Ethan's city, Garson. Things are getting tense in Federation between the north and the south. It's a powder keg just waiting to blow. I'm going to have to do something soon.
The sextet hasn't put the towers up yet. They don't really want to make Greco and Garson protected cities in this manner. After all, not everyone can be perfect all the time. The odd person that has left Nickel City has found they had trouble getting back in if they played up when away from home.
Alexus and Ague' are having issues with roving bands of outlaws and pirates that are using magic to rob and kill merchants and sailors. We have all found this very disturbing. We need to find a better way to protect his ships and convince the pirates that they need a new line of work.
Olivia has rooted out some of the corrupt elements in her neighbourhood. However, she is still having problems with her smaller kingdoms. Infighting is affecting her abilities to bring them all together.
She is worried about civil war. The southern factions are the ones she is having the most problems with. The North had settled down a lot since she opened up Silver City, and they support her since their new trade agreements have kicked in.
Daniel is also having problems. He has found Aurum is a land of extremes. His half of the Saran continent has an immense inland desert, effectively splitting it into east and west with the nomadic desert people in between.
While not as extreme, Ulu's half was effectively cut off from Daniel's side by a vast mountain range and with a smaller desert on his side. It made it more difficult for his people to help Daniel's except along the Western coast. We believe his east coast was sparsely populated, a lot like Orient and Galina's west coasts.
Oddly, Ulu seemed to have the least problems with magical items being corrupted. His main issue is getting his people to upgrade their technologies. They are centuries behind the rest of Amity. However, they are also the most integrated and for all intent and purpose, the Saran nation considerer's itself, One People.
JJ has done a lot more extensive mapping of the planet. She has recently pointed out an anomaly on a large island that lies between Federation and Palatine. The old maps we had given her said that it was called Topaz Island.
She had determined that it has a large ancient city in a huge bay on the northern side of the island and it is moderately well populated. The anomaly was a working shield.
JJ had been tracking shipping to the port and noted the ships disappeared and then reappeared days or weeks later. The spells on the shield were not the same as the ones she knew of, which was why she was having difficulty seeing what it was hiding and finding out if it had a Controller.
JJ has also found other ancient cities on each of the continents in poorly inhabited regions and on many islands. Several towns had tiny shields that would only be protecting the citadels and small areas of land as she could see the outer buildings that were no longer protected.
Other cities were in ruins and being reclaimed by nature. We now believe there was once twenty-odd Ancient Cities and that most of them had been run by High Mages appointed by the wizards.
One of the other anomalies that interested JJ was on Pearl Island. It is south of Galina, she said its shield was very odd, but she couldn't explain why. She'd seen very little shipping around the island during the daytime.
She had identified a third enormous shield that was on the east coast of Federation. It had regular ships going to several ports on a sizeable well-established island called Green Island.
She then informed me that Green Island had the fifth section of Torus on it. If it had a live Controller, she couldn't contact it, either.
She also noted that the ships going to Green Island did regular runs to a city-state called Weston. It was on the west coast of Galina, and the ships went to an island called Lime Isle that was southwest of Weston. These four communities seemed to have well established and busy trade routes.
She suspected that a High Mage was responsible for uniting these four communities. The towns and primary cities, especially on Green Island, were all powered. The shields she had identified over the ship's section on Green Island and the city on Federation were strong.
Many of the ships also moved a lot faster than standard sailing ships. They also travelled frequently between these ports. As far as she was concerned, these communities were all more advanced than those on the other continents were.
With all the unrest and these unknowns, I'd decided it was time for Sarah, Kim and me to go and visit the neighbours. The four-nation trade set-up intrigued me. Plus, winter in Iron Hills can be bloody cold.
Time to go south, I decided.
I wanted to look at the Torus section that had a Controller and a shield, as that fascinated Sarah and me. I'm sure David would also be interested in what I find.
So started my second year on Amity.
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Chapter 6
~~ Mikal - Earth year: Unknown ~~
It is hard to think that I'm now fifty-seven.
It has been twenty-five years since the first volcano erupted. The first twenty years were not as bad as Tory had predicted. While the planet has cooled several degrees on average, it hasn't caused us any real stress.
We still get the occasional quake, but Tory hadn't found any reason to be alarmed by them until recently. With the addition of the Keltrian refugees, the mermaids and their offspring, we expanded further south to the warmer regions.
Coral and Shelly, the two surviving mermaids, have recovered and have proved to be a great asset, vastly increasing our knowledge of the sea and its creatures.
Many couples from our original groups have split and reformed into new relationships with the latest arrivals or added one of them to form a triad. Triads are as common as couples. The additions to our gene pool have only strengthened us.
Tory has only produced two more sets of six children since the others joined us. She is looking at producing older children to populate the new regions and assist the Zoetics.
The expanded gene pool is also a boon to her project, especially since she got over a hundred new Shifters. She believes she can gestate the new kids faster and to the ages of about fifteen years in physical development.
With the accumulated knowledge of human development that she now has, she believes the new Paragons will be stable and functioning beings. We all agree that they will need a couple of years to adapt, specialise their talents and grow a little in a traditional society before producing children of their own.
She produced one set of six children fifteen years ago and aged them to ten years of age before birth after only six months from conception. The second set she produced ten years ago, and they were fifteen at birth.
Torus has been waiting for more of our children to mature while she researched the project's viability. So far, these twelve children have had little trouble adapting to our society. Many of them have already found partners and are producing their own children.
I didn't want inbreeding to become a problem in the future, so Tory's new plan should also assist us with this. The newcomers and older children also support the project and have also donated genetic material to her project.
Many of our people were willing to move with the Zoetic parents to help build the new communities and educate the teenagers.
While I have been limiting the number being born to me, I now have forty children to my credit. If a woman has had a child by me, it seems I can stop her being impregnated by me again if she is in season and we copulate.
This is a relief to me. At least I no longer have a third of the population being my children. Nearly all of my children have reddish tones to their hair like me. Some have even bested my final growth height of 212cm. Green-grey eyes seem common for them.
As girls, they tend to be slimmer, but they are all nicely proportioned. They are all very strong like me and display a decent breadth to their shoulders when they change to male.
I've been told they all are capable of producing an above average cock (compared to the new people and their kids), and none, to my knowledge, have had performance issues or any trouble finding bedmates.
As females, they all seem to support a great set of tits and are pleasing, if not outright gorgeous, to look at. They also have no trouble with childbirth. What can I say? Tory did provide me with good genes.
Coral and Shelly have each given me a child. It was against my better judgement at the time, but they hit me up one Saturday night, and both ended up pregnant. It was an interesting and enjoyable experience for me, being with two women who were fifty years older than me, even though they didn't look like it.
They became my new Tuesday night stopover. I still visit my other girls on their assigned nights, and it is an excellent way to keep in touch with them. Thursday is still kids' night, Saturday is still open, and Sunday is always my night off. I seem to like my creature comforts.
My children, however, seem to have no compunction in passing on my genes. I've lost count of how many grandchildren I have, as they don't always inform me who they have mated with. Fortunately, Tory knows. I even have ten great-grandchildren that I'm aware of.
We went ahead with the planting of the new ecosystems in Rusha and Europa. These systems are thriving, and Tory believes they are helping with even higher oxygen levels in our atmosphere and removing volcanic ash. That's why she wants to send people to them.
The rainfall has even increased across Torus. The vast deserts are shrinking and creating more arable lands that we can use. From the collected data the Controllers have of Earth and the home worlds of our Keltrians, Torus is thriving and much more agreeable to the new people.
The Keltrians took some time adjusting to our heavier gravity, but I've not heard of any complaints from them for some time. Those of the Grandteli race seem happy.
Many of the children they have had with my race have all grown taller than their parents and their children taller again. Even the offspring from the Pix and Genteli bred with my people are taller and more muscular.
The addition of one hundred and thirty-two people to our one hundred eighteen at the time they arrived has been a boon. In the last twenty-five years, our population has increased to six hundred and fifty people. We still have close to half our people under the age of sixteen.
The new people have been more than happy to help us produce more children. I have been able to boost those children born of the visitors and the mermaids that are not genetically linked to us. Unlike us, they can't store data in all of their bones, only their skulls like the mermaids.
I've added a limiting factor. If they live for centuries, they may have to write over old data just as normal humans do. I decided that this was better than the people having thick skulls and their brains overheating.
Tory and I are not sure why I can adapt her DNA in this fashion in them, the same as our other children. As we have watched these children grow, we decided it wasn't that important as they functioned as well as ours. Only time will tell.
Not all of the children have magical abilities. Except for the first group of girls, Able, Effie, Gale, Hail, Isa and Jina, at least a quarter of the other paragons were non-magical. This has increased to about a third with the new offspring.
However, this still gives us a lot of magical people. I have, over the years, doled out many of the magic boxes from the ship and many others that I've also made. The ones I make tend to like going to the teenagers when they hit about fifteen or sixteen.
Most of them don't upgrade to a novice's box until they reach twenty or even later. Interestingly, it's mostly males without the active shapeshifting genes who take the longest to upgrade. Males also tended to make up the higher portion of non-magical people.
We have noticed that most novices that can upgrade to a mage's box don't do so until closer to twenty-five and some even older. Tory believes this is a Genteli anomaly.
Only a small percentage upgrade sooner, and most of them are related to my sister/daughter Kathy, my six girls, or me. The other Controllers, Tory and I, are still curious as to why this is so.
I guess we are just that little bit different.
------
The last five years have been more worrying.
Tory had indicated that there is another major volcanic event brewing in Europa. It has moved away from Rusha in the previous twenty years. Europa has been putting increasing pressure on the southern tectonic plate, which hasn't moved.
When the volcano erupted, it created a new fault in Europa's plate. The fault has expanded and lengthened more significantly over the last couple of years. Tory believes Europa is splitting into two plates like Rusha and our continent did.
Each year since the new volcano blew, I've taken my ship, Mia, to the area to monitor its development. When Tory indicated more significant seismic activity than average, I decided to bring my trip forward and go earlier this year.
Bella, my nineteen-year-old daughter to Coral, and Mel, a seventeen-year-old daughter to one of the Keltrian shifters called Ana, have decided they wanted to come with me on this trip.
Mel had a bluish tone to her skin like her mother but managed a paler shade of my red hair and green eyes. Bella has her mother's dark green hair and large purple eyes, and she is shorter than Mel's 185cm by 5cm. Bella is a four-gem Physics mage, and Mel is a four-gem Nature mage.
Nile, Kathy and Toby's twenty-one-year-old son, also wished to tag along. He is only the child to be born male so far that he can shapeshift like me. He is a four-gem Earth mage. He has even topped me in height, and he is now 220cm tall. We have always had a close bond.
Nile has very dark, emerald eyes, and his hair is more light brown with copper highlights in it. He is as handsome as his uncle is, and I know he is no stranger to the ladies since he brought one with him. Kathy said he has been active since he was seventeen.
The identical twins, Angel and Kerri, were twenty-five. They were the last set of twins that Tory had gestated being a split embryo. They have a dark apricot tinge to their skin, blue, almost black hair and sky-blue eyes.
Oddly, they are the only children she has produced with this colouring. They rock in at 190cm tall and were currently Nile and Bella's bed buddies, but I'm exactly sure who's. Even I have trouble telling them apart unless I look closely at their auras. Angela was a four gem Energy mage, and Kerri was a four gem Psychic mage.
Interestingly they are both happy go lucky types. Kerri had a dryer sense of humour and will more often than not be in male form. But they are just as likely to swap and like to wear identical clothing just so they can confuse you as to who is who.
Our people still tend to wear our shorts with lots of pockets and short-sleeved shirts that David's people called T-shirts. We do wear longer clothes in the colder months. Some of the people who mostly prefer being in female form occasionally wear skirts or dresses.
The twins have a lanky body shape and can outrun a frightened camla. They like to call themselves the Dragon Ladies, and scarily, they can fly damn fast too. They also do mermaid and several other forms and change forms so quickly that they amaze even me.
Cookie and Cheffy, two of my favourite Zoetics, also decided to have a holiday and come with us. At least the food would be good this trip. They still do a lot of counselling with their cooking. However, since Tory stopped making as many paragon children as possible, they have been a little adrift of late, so I decided they were more than welcome.
For my amusement, Val, who was Able's youngest daughter to Isa and twenty-three, decided to come as my bed buddy. She was a four-gem Lore mage like her mother. She had her mother's large dark green eyes, pale green hair, green-grey skin and posed a slim elegance.
Fortunately, she has Isa's more easy-going temperament. She also has Isa's bigger tits to go with her long legs, and she is as tall as Mel. She was a gorgeous young woman and hard to say no to. Val also has a lot of staying power.
With my requirements, that just makes her more desirable, and she knows it. While she is a lot younger than my fifty-seven, you do need to remember that I still look and feel as young as she does. With us being wizards, then our age becomes immaterial to us as time goes by.
We also don't seem to have the hang-up about age as David's people did. I certainly don't feel my age in years. As far as I'm concerned, I'm still growing up. Val also has an ulterior motive; she wants me to impregnate her.
Val has two kids that she has fathered to two other Shifters but wishes me to father her child. I've managed not to sire any kids for eight years, and I am quite happy to keep the status quo. I have more than enough kids now, thank you very much.
Sometimes it's tough being a Regent Wizard.
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Chapter 7---
~~ Mikal - Earth year: 2100 ~~
The trip to Europa took about ten hours.
I spent a third of that time in bed with Val. I did let her get some sleep. Since she tends to pass out after an hour of sex, it was inevitable. None of my lovers can handle much more than an hour of me at a time unless they are sharing the job of getting me to come with someone else.
The damn bling can make it bloody hard for them and me. It had been bad enough when I was a mage. Now it took a lot more effort on their part. The fact I could ejaculate and come several times yet not go down in between was not something new lovers were used to.
To fully recharge my magic, if I'd been using a lot of it, often took three or four discharges on my behalf. It helped if I had them coming with me. This didn't seem to be a problem for them, unless they fainted first from sexual and magical overload.
It amuses me that my lovers say that my cock felt like it was tingling in them when I fucked them. For me, the euphoria of coming was a lot less intense the first time, and it took a while to get me to wind up.
It wasn't until the third or fourth time that I got more out of the act. For the girls, it seemed the opposite. I kinda miss the times when the girls used to get me off hard and fast. Then I could really enjoy the next couple of times, taking my time to build them up.
These days they were exhausted by the time I was actually starting to enjoy myself.
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My duties seemed a lot more sporadic these days too.
Our five townships were well run by my girls. I spent a lot of my time tripping between them, solving dumb problems I'm sure they invented just to keep me busy, and studying magic when at home. The rest of my time was spent setting up outposts and maintaining them.
The latest little drama at least piqued my interest. Each time I'd gone to investigate the fault, it was broader and had extended further. While Mia travelled along the fault line, we compared it to an overlay map of the last twenty-five years of movement. This time, we did find a significant change.
"Wow, it's got to be at least ten meters wider at our checkpoint, and it is twice as long, Mia," I said.
"Yes, that's a lot of movement. This is a strange planet. Things here seem to happen on a faster time scale than our data says is normal for most planets," Mia replied.
"Tory says it's the Hyrodenzer," I replied as I studied the changes in the fault. "She thinks the increased oxygenation of the atmosphere is also reacting to the Hyrodenzer. I've never been able to work out how that affects the rest of the planet, though."
"The ash coming back down, and temperature changes have increased rainfall. The deserts may be smaller, but the centres are also hotter after it rains," Mia said.
"What?" I replied.
Mia replied, "The Hyrodenzer is combining with the oxygen to form supercharged water molecules. Benny, the Zoetic at the station we are stopping at, says he is finding the molecules in the deep, water tables."
"His findings indicate that when the new molecules interact with the magma, it creates chain reactions causing it to become more volatile. He has noticed a lot more seismic activity in the areas about two months after a major wet weather event."
"Hum. That could explain why the planet has become more active of late. Do us a favour and go up. Let's grab a new sample from the upper atmosphere. I'm curious to find out if the concentrations of Hyrodenzer have decreased since we last checked," I asked Mia.
Mia agreed and changed her forward motion to arc up into the stratosphere. Inside of Mia, you did not feel inertial forces and only noticed the change if you looked out of the viewing windows, as I was.
This wasn't our first time into space, but we hadn't been out of the lower orbits for at least five years. After the first big quake, we were making a trip every year. After the first five years, we had noticed a perceivable difference, but it wasn't a lot.
For the last fifteen, we have been going up about every five years and were due again. We had noticed a moderate percentage drop each time, but it hadn't been as much as we would have liked.
The last five years had been a lot wetter, and we had noted an increased level of ash in the rain. The skies hadn't been a lot different, and we still got plenty of light and heat from our sun. We had put the ash down to the last volcanic action on the other side of the planet.
I loved watching the colour of the atmosphere change as we zoomed to the stratosphere. Mia slowed when we hit the 10km mark, and she started taking samples at one klick intervals until we hit the 40km mark. We hadn't detected the Hyrodenzer above this level on previous trips.
As Mia blasted past the last sample point, she increased speed. When she hit 120km from the surface, she rolled over, flashed her belly at the sun and followed the planet's curvature for a distance of 1,000km.
She'd cut her rear engines at the 900km mark and engaged the underside fore thruster to slow us at the thousand. She then dropped her nose into a long arc until she was spearing towards the planet.
She had just engaged the rest of the thrusters and started lifting her nose when all hell broke loose. I found myself flying backwards into the rear of the helm as the gravitation compensators shuddered.
I slammed into the wall as if I'd been swatted by a mountain. I distinctly heard several ribs crack, and then I lost conscious thought as my skull tried to play ping-pong with my brain after it smashed against the bulkhead.
My last thought was, "What the Fuck?"
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It was the smell, which brought me to consciousness.
Coffee. I loved coffee. Dark roasted with lots of milk. Then the next smell hit me. Oats. Not just any oats but oats that had been mixed with butter and golden syrup (treacle), and ..., yes, my favourite Macadamia nuts and then baked.
Someone had cooked Anzac biscuits.
I blinked as the level of light in the room increased. I squinted at the small woman carrying the tray.
'Damn, they are huge tits,' I thought.
I blinked again, and the rest of her came into better focus. The rest of her was slim but curvaceous enough to entice any sane Paragon wishing to breed. She had pale skin and a pinkness to her long blonde hair. It contrasted with her big purple eyes. Her nose was slim, and the slightly receding chin was challenged by her lovely smile.
"Greetings, Regent Mikal. How are you feeling?" she asked as she placed the tray beside the bed.
I had to stop and think about how I was doing as I watched her eyes trail down my body and then back to my face. She looked at me with expectancy. I suddenly got the impression that while she liked what she saw, she wasn't interested in me sexually.
That was a first for me. It was unusual enough to cause me to raise my eyebrows. I then felt a twinge in my left side as I tried to sit up.
Cautiously, I slide back to the headboard, pushing the pillows with me. Once seated in my new position, I rubbed my ribs. They were still tender, but the pain was only annoying if I moved suddenly.
"Not too bad," I replied.
"I see that your ribs have healed well. That was one nasty concussion, but your medallion shield protected you enough to limit the damage. Even Wizards have a hard time protecting themselves from going from zero to ten gees in a heartbeat," she said as she straightened the sheet over my lap.
"Thirsty?" she added as she straightened to her 150cm height.
She held the tray over my lap and let it go. I gasped. Expecting the tray to drop onto my lap, but it held steady.
I glanced at her. "A magician?" I enquired.
She chuckled softly, "Of course."
I smiled at her and lifted the coffee to my nose. I inhaled the delightful aroma and took a tentative sip to test for its temperature. It was still on the hot side, but that was how I liked my coffee, so I happily took a longer slurp.
Sitting back, I looked at the woman, "Where are my children?" I asked.
She smiled, "Nile is in the training room with my boys, Glen and Brad and our other visitors, Phil and Ant. Bella and Mel are with my girls Rose and Jess. Val and the twins, Angel and Kerri, are closeted with Cyan and Celadon."
I sighed with relief. They were all okay.
"I'm Penny," she said as she patted my thigh. "My husband Davin has been anxious to meet you. When Zara displayed your unusual skeleton, he became fascinated with you and your children. He thought only Zara knew how to make your kind."
I looked at her in shock. "Is David here?"
"No, Regent Mikal. However, we are going to where he is. David and several other people need your help," a disembodied voice replied.
"Zara!" I said in awe. "Tory is going to spit her chips that I got to meet you first, Great Mother."
"Great Mother?" Zara replied.
"My race wouldn't exist if it wasn't for you sending David and his ship to Torus," I replied.
"No, I suppose it wouldn't," Zara replied. "Penny and her sisters, Cyan and Celadon, are also of your race, as you say. What have you called yourselves?"
"Torus-16 and her daughter, Troy, who David helped to make, called us the Paragons. What about my friends, Cookie and Cheffy, we call them Zoetics?"
"Now they are a wonderful addition. They have taken over the kitchen and are more than welcome to stay," Penny piped in with a big grin.
"Ah, that explains the coffee and biscuits," I said and happily sipped my wonderful beverage.
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Chapter 8
~~ Mikal - Earth year: 2100 ~~
Zara chuckled.
"Torus-16 and Tory excelled themselves with those children. Cookie said you had a lot to do with their development as well."
"The Zoetics are marvellous people and became that way despite my interference," I replied.