Part V - 6: Winding Up Another School Year

During the next two months, things started to come together at school, and at home. My mother and I spent the weekends at my father's north mansion, but we stayed at our house during the week. My mother said it was easier for her to live there while she worked, and she wasn't about to quit her job.

Joey and Suzi were unable to be with me during the weekends since their place was to be with their parents, not with me. And it would have been a bit suspicious for Suzi to spend all her weekends with Joey and I. We weren't happy about the situation, but we spent enough time together during the week that it somewhat made up for it.

The twins were still too drained from the night before to go shopping with us like we had hoped. My father promised if they wished to go shopping, we would arrange it. But the twins and I didn't want to go without Suzi, so we waited.

I became more and more familiar with the north mansion. I even started exploring the south wing. My father was right about the south wing being nearly identical to the north wing, and he never did explain why he had the south one added to my mother's original mansion like that.

The south wing housed a good two thirds of the servants. He insisted that the slaves have just as pleasant and elegant rooms as he had in the north wing, minus a few things such as the crystal dining hall and the like. This concern over the living conditions of his slaves didn't seem to fit in his personality. I suspected it was one of my mother's effects on him during his own slavery.

There were other... differences in the south wing that made me conclude the south wing was from a darker side of my father's personality. From the minds of a few of the slaves I learned of how some people enjoy the sexual torture of themselves and others. Apart from a few common devices found at any adult goods store, the north wing did not contain any torture equipment of any kind. The south wing's guest quarters were filled with them.

I didn't venture to the south wing very often.

I became a little more comfortable around my mother's nudity, as she did of mine. My father became less of a monster to me and more of a... friend I suppose. I didn't trust his judgment when it concerned people, but he did know considerable amount about business, and he even taught me a few things about my own capabilities.

My father's abilities were limited compared to my mother's and my own. But he had obtained somewhat of a name for himself within a circle of other Masters and Mistresses. Any one of them could have enslaved my father for their own purposes. But he had developed the method of storing more than one person's memories and personalities within a mind, thus creating a niche for himself that made him too important to allow any single Master to control.

Because my father wasn't threat to those who requested his services, he was simply allowed to live as he wished, and later became very respected for his business sense. By the time I met him, he was rarely ever called upon for his memory storage services. My father had become a very powerful man in the world of finance, and was frequently called upon to cover up other's mistakes in that respect.

The twins and I became very close. I was even beginning to understand their mode of communication at their level. And they even started to teach me more about my own empathic talents. I could never be as powerful as they were since they had developed their skills over their entire lives. And plus the fact that there were two of them.

My mother mentioned to my father in front of the twins and I that we were like brother and sisters in many ways. That got the twins really excited, and they wanted to have sex that instant. I cooled their jets when I explained that if we were really brother and sisters, I could never have sex with them again. But my mother's words never left me, and from then on, I did look at them as being somewhat my sisters. I was certainly very protective of them like they were.

Without Joey and Suzi on the weekends, the twins and I did play around in the sex department, but I certainly didn't want to have intercourse. Even though I trusted their motives, I didn't trust my own. It could quickly become... addicting.

I had got caught up in my school work immediately following that first weekend at the north mansion. One of the things I learned from my father was how to copy specific knowledge from a person without necessarily copying the experiences that had shaped that knowledge. Within one day, I was able to copy the knowledge from my classmates into my own mind, which allowed me to do the homework with ease.

It wasn't really cheating since I still had to do the work. It was just incredibly easy to do the work. And the math test was like taking one meant for a second grader. I quickly learned whose minds to scan in each of my classes to get the most out of my scanning efforts.

When I explained all of this to Higgs, he clearly felt it wasn't fair to the other students. They had done the work in learning, and I was taking an unfair shortcut at their expense. This troubled me a little. I still didn't feel I was cheating, but I was taking something without paying for it. I asked Higgs if there was a way I could make it up to the people I scanned, and this started a whole new enterprise of my skills.

Instead of taking the knowledge of the students who were doing well in each of my classes, I became somewhat of a tutor for those who were not doing so well. Once a week I and the five students with the lowest grades in each of my classes would go up to the "advanced tutorial classroom" on the third floor.

The during the first month, I actually did do some tutoring while I scanned their minds, copied the knowledge for myself, and then shared that with the rest. But I was basically having to learn everything for myself anyway. The knowledge I obtained from the scans was never totally accurate or complete. This resulted in having to share more of what I already knew than what I was receiving. In other words, I was doing a lot more work than ever before.

And most of my classmates who I tutored were rather rough characters to begin with. Not all, but most. My teachers had strong doubts that I would be able to help any of them, but Higgs convinced them all to try it for a few weeks. My own difficulties were mostly maintaining order during the tutor sessions and keeping the appearance that what we were doing in those tutor sessions was actually responsible for their improvement.

After the third week, both the teachers and the classmates I was tutoring truly believed I was helping them. But by the fifth week, I was tired of doing all of the work. I decided it was time to start using my talents to get back to the original purpose of my efforts: making my life easier.

I first made each of my tutorees unable to reveal anything concerning my abilities to anyone. Once I had done that, I leveled with them. I explained that I was tired of keeping up the sham tutoring lessons, and it would be a lot easier on everyone if I gave everyone of them the... motivation as I called it, to learn the materials, and as a reward they could goof off during the time we were supposedly tutoring. Included in the deal was my own free access to any of the knowledge they obtained.

The first five thought I had gone bonkers after telling them this, but I convinced them. I asked them whether any of them could recite in alphabetical order all fifty states and their capitals. It had been a game my mother had played with me when I was little. Since none of them could, I explained I was about to give them the knowledge, and did so. All five at the same time recited it back to me, and then they all agreed.

For the rest of my tutorees, I first did the fifty state demonstration before I explained the deal. Everyone agreed. Higgs later told me that that the tutor sessions would have to be every other week, since every week was too much class time for those students to miss.

We worked out a compromise which worked better for me anyway. I still got out of class once a week, but alternated five students every week. So instead of five students in each class to scan, I had ten, and this way I always got whatever was covered on the day I wasn't in class.

After two more weeks with this arrangement, I found myself still having to play baby-sitter too much, so I gave them all an ultimatum. Either use the time as a study hall and later help me and Joey in our drawing stuff, or they would be back in the regular class with no memory of anything but tutoring. They would still be motivated to keep their grades up, they just wouldn't get any shared knowledge. I still retained the right to scan them no matter what. Less than half of them went back to class.

The next stage was getting Joey out of class at the same times as I was. We had made a second storeroom the tutoring room just as planned. Higgs, Joey, and I decided to make Joey another supposed tutor, and set up a third storeroom for that purpose. With my two to four students per class being up in the tutor room with me, we decided to work Joey's the exact same way, minus the month of bogus tutoring.

Just as Joey and I were beginning to work out the bugs in our joint linking for drawing the symbols, school politics threw a kink in the works.

Our tutoring program worked too well. Teachers, and even a few parents, demanded that there be a tutoring program available for each class, and not just limited to the freshmen classes. Higgs, Joey and I spent nearly two weeks before figuring out some kind of solution, during which our drawing project was put on hold.

All six storerooms were converted to tutoring sessions. Joey, Suzi, and I were upset about losing our private room, especially since we had just got it all fixed up. We left the carpeting in, but our new sofa and refrigerator had to be taken to my father's south mansion. We had been so busy getting things ready, the three of us hadn't even used the pullout bed.