Chapter 1

"God I can't believe I slept through 6 again," Lindy exclaimed, awaking in the king sized bed in the smaller bedroom of Snake's suite seeing the sun directly light up the windows instead of the usual diffused, foggy San Francisco dawn. "What time is it?"

"9:30," I reported, glancing past Helena's chaotic black hair at the Bose clock radio on the bedside table. My Greek angel nestled into my left shoulder, her hand stroking across my chest sliding south. My hand slid along her sexy curvy side feeling her soft warm flesh.

"I really have been transformed," Lindy muttered.

Cat, Lindy's gorgeous and cute Japanese angel, kissed her and purred, "You're still you only more so."

Betty, the ultimate blonde bombshell angel, kissed her and her hand travelled across Lindy's soft full breasts and south. "Change is good," she said.

Looking at the two incredibly beautiful and sexy angels, Lindy grinned, "I have no complaints."

Angels' hands met at mortals' genitals. Both Lindy and I moaned from the two lovers on both sides of us caressing us. Naomi tickled my balls while Helena squeezed and pulled my engorging penis. The first time Naomi played at my scrotum had made me nervous. Visions of emasculation she so realistically depicted in her life study drawings and her version of Hell flashed in my brain, but she seemed to have a fetish for the loose skin and the testes within it, both mouth and fingers always gentle there and often there so I got used to it and really enjoyed it.

Caresses encouraging morning sex swiftly ended. Not a beginning of sex but a continuum of late night sex or four days of sex that began in Helena's tub in her and Naomi's and Betty's Tenderloin apartment Friday night only interrupted by sleep and attending the Workshop or dance rehearsal. A familiar old leathery skinned snake like face appeared in the doorway. "Ah, you're up," Nick grinned. "Breakfast and my daughters await you. We must begin my book."

Our angels immediately evacuated the bed, placid faces in place. Lindy and I admired their posteriors as they exited the room.

"That'll never get old," I remarked.

Lindy chuckled and rolled cutely to my side and against it, her thigh lifting over mine and her warm pussy pressing against my hip. She kissed me thoroughly. My cock completed its engorgement. Lindy grinned lasciviously and straddled my hips. Her hand guided my glans to her already moist center. Her deliciously full butt lowered. "Mmm," she murmured, "I needed your hot cock inside me."

We heard Snake's chuckle. His face remained in the doorway. "Make it quick you two," he commanded with a wide grin.

"Yes Nick," we replied together.

He chuckled and abandoned the doorway keeping it open.

"Oh fuck," Lindy and I moaned continuing our duet as my cock completely filled her hot, slick orifice and our pubic bones rubbed. Leaning forward, she captured my lips with hers. I held and squeezed her tit. Her ass lifted and fell independently from the rest of her body beginning the movements of fucking. The tightening and loosening required by the movement caused a most pleasant inner squeezing and releasing around my cock.

After moments of crushing bones together at each completed descent, she began quickening the rises and falls. Our lips sealed the space for our mutual moans. My hips lifted at her pace causing violent and noisy collisions.

Too soon I felt my balls throb and couldn't hold back my ejaculation. But after stilling for the orgasm, I retuned to my upward thrusts until she too found her climax. Her mouth separated from mine. She arched her muscled back while crushing and rubbing my pubic bone with hers. I felt her rippling interior milk my fading erection. Her head bent back as if howling like a bitch wolf to the moon, but instead of the full throated howl she let out a tight throated squeal.

When it ended she relaxed completely and fell, her torso blanketing mine, her lips panting into my ear. "So good," I heard her whisper.

"Beautiful," I whispered back.

And then for no apparent reason we laughed. When my thick stick became a soft worm and escaped her saturated hole, the laugh intensified. She rolled off me onto her back and we laughed some more.

"Ah well," she finally sighed, "we must attend to King Snake's command."

Emerging from the wreckage of the bedroom, Lindy wrapped in a toga made from the king size bed linen and me in underpants and an unbuttoned flannel shirt, we headed for the coffee table filled with breakfast makings: butter infused bagels and carafes of coffee and orange juice and a sterno heated silver container containing scrambled eggs. Our hunger and thirst made us blind to anything else and I bumped into Steve Schwartz, the Jewish nebbish actor whose naked body revealed well honed muscles belying the nebbishness of his face, his flaccid penis shiny from libidinous fluids. The cause of the shine and his own distraction giggled just behind him: identical twin red headed beauties with perfect petite bodies featuring perky pear shaped breasts and asses, the breasts capped by nipples and quarter sized areolas just a little pinker than the angel twins' fiery tresses. Their fingers retreated from his tight little butt having probably just pinched it.

"Sorry," I said.

He grinned a grin that revealed utter contentment and dashed towards the bathroom saying in a rapid rush mirroring his dash, "Looking forward to working with you two."

"Nice bod," said Lindy to the Irish twins.

"And he knows how to use it," said Maggie with a cute wink. Maddy giggled again and her sister joined her. Though identical in almost every way, their differing pattern of freckles enabled me to tell them apart.

"Coffee," muttered Lindy breaking the spell these two adorable naked creatures had cast upon my eyes causing rude staring. I heard them giggle once again as I headed to the banquet/coffee table, my grumbling stomach echoing in emptiness.

"Let's begin," Snake announced from his usual seat in the middle of the couch bookended by gorgeous strangers. "By the way, this is my Siamese delight Chanda," he informed us nodding towards the round faced and round breasted sepia skinned beauty with long wavy black hair sitting to his right. "And this is my Russian Princess Alexandra," he gestured to the voluptuous pale skinned statuesque chestnut haired woman to his left, her broad Slavic face somehow both regal and sweet, her hazel eyes large and mesmerizing. It might have been amusing these Mutt and Jeff women at least a foot different in height if they didn't take my breath away with their beauty. Again.

Nick's angels and we mortals, i.e. Lindy and I, decided that after this Tuesday morning beginning we would work on Nick's stories from then on on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. We dubbed these stories Eternal Serpent's Tales because of his particular amusement with the idea of him being the serpent tempting Eve to eat knowledge which she in turn tempted Adam into eating, Nick having a most snake like visage with his odd drawn back nostrils and nicknamed Snake because of it. Thursday through Sunday constituted much busier times for the angels and us mortals. Angels dealt with their johns or inspiring their geniuses more during those evenings. And the ACT workshop expanded its time to include Thursday through Saturday evenings as well as all day Sunday, modeling the expanded time on the actual performances occurring in three weeks.

The climactic week of the workshop would feature the staging of the five plays of the five winning playwrights of the ACT New Plays workshop, Lindy and I among them, beginning Thursday evening and ending with a matinee and evening performance on Sunday. Only performing the plays once to an audience seemed a shame, but it at least provided a glimpse into the public's reaction to them. The five of us hoped it wouldn't be the only premiere, run and final curtain all happening simultaneously. I don't know about the other playwrights, but for Lindy and I it wouldn't be. But I'm getting way ahead of myself.

"They dug me out of the site and dusted me off like an artifact," Snake began the tale exactly as he had three mornings before.

"Wait," said Lindy after swallowing the coffee in her mouth. She sat in an armchair with Cat naked at her feet. "I need to get my notebook."

"Me too," I said, petting Helena sitting similarly between my feet.

"Alright," Snake grinned, removing a sleek black rectangle of plastic from the breast pocket of his black denim shirt he always seemed to wear, "but I am recording this." He placed the digital recorder on the coffee table.

"We still need to make notes," said Lindy rising and slipping past Cat.

Snake nodded still grinning, "Of course."

When we returned, the loveseat had been vacated and lovers sat on the floor in front of it. I sat behind Helena and Lindy sat behind Cat. Naomi scooted an armless chair near us so we could see the sketch pad she held in her lap that would swiftly fill with lines and shading of her pencil, sketches in which she delighted in depicting the grotesque and the erotic in Nick's tales.

"I was in Japan then working with Miwa to open up the archipelago empire from its hermetically sealed xenophobia," Snake continued.

"Late nineteenth century then," I guessed.

"Exactly," he grinned. "Maybe closer to mid. 1868. That very night while an English trade ship harbored near Osaka demanding negotiations in that imperialistic British arrogance only matched by the Japanese, Cat had burgled her way into the emperor's bed to soften his resistance while hardening his manhood, her cat tongue rasping his glans and those exquisitely hardy lips squeezing his shaft."

Maybe it was the disturbing naturalism or the visceral imagery that Naomi wrought on her drawing pad translating the tale being spun into pictures or just another aspect of Nick's godlike magic, but as Nick spoke it's as if we were there. Miwa took over narration, and I saw her words play out as visions in my mind.

Removing her mouth from the emperor's small narrow penis, no godlike member on this god emperor, her hand taking over the pleasuring, Cat tells the soft bellied middle aged ruler, "I know these gaijin. They consider themselves masters of the world and the rest of us lower creatures."

The emperor chuckles, "I thought you attempted to sway me."

"It makes them weak, this arrogance," Miwa explains before suckling his glans again. She uses the saliva she leaves behind to caress his stiff cock with a fist while continuing her observations, "They will think you a stupid negotiator. But you know our needs as they do not. You know the values of trade items. You will make them the fools."

She crawls her way up the massive bed like a cat until her lithe thighs straddle his groin. Steadying his modest shaft, she sinks down on it. "So tight and hot," he exclaims in a moan.

"They may seem different, Emperor, but their balls are filled with seed just like yours. Their cocks fill cunts just like Japanese men fill their wives' and concubines' cunts."

"And they may fill our females," the Emperor countered, "and not just with their barbaric seed, but with their ridiculous philosophy. We had to destroy that little colony of Christians attempting to infect my empire with their pompous and ridiculous self righteousness."

"But you destroyed it," Cat reminds him while rising and falling gently. "And so few followed it really. Our philosophy is so much more wise, a philosophy both of wisdom and of nature, the interior and exterior reality of being human. Theirs is full of myths and exaggerations, placing a simple teacher with a philosophy of peace and forgiveness amongst a triumvirate of gods by having him supposedly resurrect. And only for a moment at that. And then by his name these Europeans act warlike and unforgiving, threatening eternal banishment and exile from their heaven. They are hypocrites with foolish ideas who think they are smartest and greatest among humans. Let them in, o great emperor of the sun, and take from them their usefulness and give them just enough to sate their greed. Let them in. They are no threat. And they are rich and can offer unique riches to our people. Metaphorically they bring fresh water to our supply which has become too long stagnant trapped within our rigid walls. Besides too much resistance can only lead to them demanding entrance with gunships and bloody battles harming our people unnecessarily."

By her speech's end she bounces vigorously on his shaft, her hand reaching back to fondle his balls. He lifts his hips to meet her descent. Their bodies meet loudly, slapping together like applause. The friction achieves its goal. The emperor arches and shakes in orgasm. Miwa opens herself to the pleasure and groans out her own climax, her tight sheathe caressing and milking seed from his throbbing shaft, sending one celled swimmers into her eggless yet hungry womb.

"You are wise beyond your years," the emperor observes when his breath returns.

Behind her gorgeous grin she thinks, "Not really. I'm quite a lot older than I look. Centuries one would hope to gain wisdom."

"If your skills match you wisdom I will consider it seriously."

"Skills, Emperor?"

"Revive me twice more. I want to live in your sweet cunt tonight my little thief."

Miwa giggles. "As the god emperor commands," she says, letting his flaccid penis slip out of her pussy and turning and lapping the mix of sexual essences as she slowly revives him.

"Such old skin for such new skin, Danjūrō," Miwa remarks with concern, her small delicate hand caressing Snake's leathery skin.

"It's Nicholas Postumus now, my sweet Cat." Nick informs her. "And it's necessary."

When Miwa enters her room at the Geisha House from the predawn darkness which she snuck through after sneaking out of the Emperor's bed and vast castle and grounds, Nick's presence hasn't surprised her. That he changed surprises her a little. That he looks old after the youthful visage of the Kabuki actor Danjūrō which had been his since before her birth in the early seventeenth century surprises her much more.

"I will help you into your Geisha garb and we must head out to the mountain and burn my sloughed skin. Then we wait at the harbor for the English sailors to arrive."

"You think the emperor will allow it so soon?" asks Miwa.

"Of course," Nick grins.

Miwa grins back as she removes her loose fitting robe and pants becoming naked. "You have much faith in your daughters, great grandfather."

"Always."

She giggles. "You look like a great grandfather now. Maybe not mine."

"I'll be someone's father," he says slapping her petite butt.

"A new muse?" she asks beginning to put on her complicated gear. "The mother's going to have to have a thing for geriatric men."

"So cruel," Nick grumbles but with a slight smile. "Of course she won't notice."

"Of course."

Nick helps wrap her up tightly in her broad belt.

"These sailors," Miwa inquires, "they'll be looking to sate their needs with a strange foreign creature." Nick nods. Miwa grins widely. "We get to feed? It's been so long."

"Fifty years since that hypocrite missionary tried to rape you."

Miwa giggles. "You know I seduced him."

"You might have teased him, but..."

"What do you mean feed?" I exclaimed, breaking the spell that placed my mind in 19^th century Japan. Without thinking I drained the glass of wine Salomé handed to me. "I'm going to need that aren't I?" I said to her. She nodded placidly.

"Only wicked, useless men," Cat attempted to placate.

"Are you a wicked man?" Snake grinned.

"Maybe sometimes," I answered sending the angels and Snake into paroxysms of laughter.

"We're all wicked sometimes," said Salomé.

"It's those dedicated to wickedness that serve our needs," said Cat.

"A missionary?"

"He liked young girls," Cat responded. "Very young girls."

"And you ... you were a child?"

"To him I was 10," she said. "Almost too old."

"And he got away with it with other children," Snake added.

"God's will through a holy man's semen," Cat explained.

"Fucker," I grumbled.

"I guess he was," Cat tittered.

"Anyway, my adorable Geisha found Harry Jones," Nick remembered.

"Hairy Harry Jones," Cat giggled. "The man was hirsute."

"She was exactly the game he hunted for," he continued, his voice and Naomi's quick sketch of a leering Englishman lurking in the Japanese port town's alley sending me back into 19^th century Japan.

Nighttime makes the port like any other port, a place for scurrying malevolent creatures hiding in the darkness, both four and two legged. Miwa's mincing steps within her tight Geisha kimono in the dim gaslight streets catches the drunken horny eye of the tall barrel chested sailor. As in any port whores alleviate bottled up libidos of young men who haven't released their seed in months. Not nearly as many as usual, but they're there. But our nasty sailor prefers less obliging women, especially those of alien skin. He collects various racial pussies like wussy aristocrats collect stamps. All muscle, his body is built to subdue, especially tiny weak females such as the seemingly defenseless Geisha.

She lets him capture her in an apparently empty alleyway, his thick hand covering her mouth from behind, the other hand carrying a lengthy well sharpened knife he uses with remarkable quickness to slice through her wide silk belt. The swiftness of the cutting prevents her from struggling until the knife point presses at her throat. "Do not move, you Jap cunt," he growls in his surprisingly highborn London accent. "You cannot escape." He expects her to try anyway and hopes she will. After all she's ignorant of his language.

But she doesn't. Instead she chuckles and her hand grasps his nuts.

"Perhaps you will wish escape if you value your balls," says Cat with a disturbingly evil glint. She feels the sweet pain of his knife point begin to penetrate her throat. She almost cums from it. He doesn't have time to slice through her carotid artery.

Snake grabs him by the wrist and pulls his arm behind him. Cat squishes his balls harder, his scream of pain muffled by Snake's hand over his mouth as his had been over Miwa's. Bending his wrist until it crackles like popping popcorn releases his nasty knife onto the ground with a quiet metallic thud. Miwa kneels in front of him to grab the knife, her hand still full of his balls and her mouth chewing on his hardened member through his britches.

"You want these?" Miwa smiles up at the sailor, the blade tip pressing between balls and asshole. The big frightened man nods, confused by this Japanese bitch spouting the Queen's English as if English born and even more frightened by the strength of the unseen man threatening to rip his arm from his shoulder not to mention the bitch penetrating skin where his scrotum attaches to his perineum. "Then make no sound and follow me," she hisses. Not that he has much choice about following the bitch. She holds his balls in a painful grip as she walks into an open doorway.

After sliding the door shut behind him. Snake silences the whimpering growl of the sailor by sitting on his face. "Should I fart?" he asks Miwa while she eagerly cuts though the crotch of Jones's britches exposing his hirsute manhood.

"Why not?" Miwa giggles. Crueler yet, Snake blinds the sailor from seeing the lithe perfection of Cat as she pulls off her robe becoming naked, a moment of delight denied within the horror he finds himself. She bathes the balls and penis with a wet rag to clean away days of dirt before her hungry mouth takes in his penis and her fingers more carefully bounce his balls.

"Don't suffocate him," Miwa suggests to her great-grandfather between sucking.

"He may not wish to breathe in my stench," Snake grins but leans forward a moment, his legs holding down the barely struggling man at his large biceps.

Despite the terror of his situation and because of Cat's skills at felatio, Jones's thick penis rises to complete height and thickness and hardness. Once accomplished, a delighted Cat straddles the cunt stretching flesh and sinks down. "Ooh, fuck that's good," she murmurs. "What's your name, sailor. I always want to know the names of the men I fuck."

"Harry Jones," the man gasps.

"You should see this, Jones," says Snake to the captured sailor. "Her little breasts dance so prettily when she rides a man. And her expanded lips hold so firmly they appear clutching you as she rises and they slip inside when she falls. And your cock glistens with her wetness. And she's so beautiful when she gets excited. Her amazing almond eyes wide with pleasure shimmer with delight. And her pretty little tongue dances outside her gaping mouth, gaping to pant. You'd love a taste of that delicate organ as your mouths seal together. Too bad you don't deserve it."

Snake laughs when Jones's hips rise automatically against Miwa's falling hips. When the sailor grunts into Snake's covered balls, Snake nods at his Japanese angel. She grabs the sailor's blade, reaches down and pulls up, one motion removing balls and cock from his body. Jones screams into Snake's crotch. Snake immediately stands and slaps the sailor when the scream recedes. "No passing out, you fucker," he says.

Removing the cock from her cumming cunt, Miwa shoves it into her mouth squeezing his balls like they're rubber bulbs sending semen and blood down her swallowing throat. Once she's extracted all the mix available she drops his member into a jar of rice vinegar.

Meanwhile as if deboning a fish, Snake places Jones' blade in the opening Miwa created at the dying sailor's crotch and cuts through bone and flesh and sinew and organs, the man's breastbones hardly a barrier to Snake's incredible strength. Pealing the halves back, lungs and heart fill and empty one last time in full view, the organs steaming in the cool night air. Then Snake and Miwa feast on innards and gulp blood throughout the night, avoiding only the shit stuffed colon in their dining.

"Fuck," I murmured. "Who'd want to see that?"

"Haven't you read any S. Clay Wilson?" Naomi grinned finishing the depiction of Jones's evisceration and Snake's and Miwa's feasting.

"Who's he?" I asked.

"So young," Naomi shook her head with a half smile. "I inspired him back in the early seventies right here in San Francisco. I encouraged his nasty imagination. Pirates cutting off balls and breasts while raping and pillaging. He was afraid at first of being too much. I thought he could go further. But what an artist!"

"Your inspiring geniuses," I asked, "it's in order to change civilization, isn't it? Did his emasculating pirates change anything?"

Naomi shook her head again. "Too much an artist of his time what with the rise and fall of those comics, but a cult still continues. And perhaps republishing him before our novel gets released would encourage better reception."

"So you were ineffective?" I asked.

"I enjoyed him, Joe. A man after my own heart. But beyond that, I affected his importance. Even limited, he opened up a lot of eyes to accepting the most grotesque images, beautiful/ugly fantasies allowed release and acceptance. You see, though supposedly adults only comic books, the audience was mostly horny teenagers getting sick, perverse though potent thrills from these counterculture masters. Those young impressionable youths grew up and became adults in power. And there are more obvious resonances. You've heard of R. Crumb?"

"Sure," I responded.

"He was a colleague of my sick little genius."

"A sick little genius himself," I said.

"Yep," smiled Naomi proudly.

"So you inspired him?" I asked.

"No need. A self-starter. And besides he likes big assed women and Helena hadn't matured yet."

"Fuck you, Naomi," said Helena a little unsettled.

"What's wrong?' I asked my love, pulling her into my lap and wrapping her in my arms.

"I ... I didn't know we could ... do that," she sniffled into my chest. "I could never..."

Snake's voice boomed in the room as if the voice of God filling it, "I told you you're different, Helena. I told you you're special."

"But ... we're monsters," she quivered.

The oldest and wisest of the angels crouched to look eye to eye with Helena. "It's a craving we sate only once every half century." Salomé gently combed through Helena's thick black hair. "It's true we enjoy it. They're peak moments like savoring the most delicious, most succulent, most aesthetically pleasing object, whether visual or musical or tactile or olfactory or actually savory. It's all five in one. It's like a man stranded in the desert being led by his senses to an oasis of fine dining. We need it and thus we participate in it with the lusty consuming of a gourmand."

"Of a glutton," I amplified.

"Yes, Joe, we're great sinners," Snake admitted. "All seven deadly sins have been embraced by us at one time or another. And we bask in it. And we find them not so deadly." He guffawed at the last line.

"And," Salomé smiled sweetly at her sister, "if we're monsters, at least we only dine on monsters. Something about that corrupted flesh that just makes it so much more delicious."

"You said you needed it?" asked Lindy. She looked more uptight than I felt, cringing away from Cat. "Is it like some kind of curse?"

"I don't know, Lindy," said Snake.

"It makes me curious about your origins. About your purpose. You're godlike, perhaps a manifestation of the creator, perhaps his instrument of death or retribution. You obviously have a purpose and have had for ... millennia. Yet you seem to say you don't know what it is or how you came to be. In all those years... ?"

Snake smiled. "You'd think, but I'm afraid I haven't been given that information. People take a lot of their ideas of who they are and their place in the world on faith. They believe their myths. I don't have that luxury. From my first recollections I have had a purpose, a plan if you will. I knew I would conceive angels and that they would do my bidding. I knew they would inspire men and women to fully embrace their genius."

"What's the endgame, Nick?" Lindy asked. "It's a plan you said. A plan has a result intended. And where did this plan come from. Did God or some creature like you tell you to pursue this plan?"

"No. I've always been alone in this, in my mind. It said to encourage and stimulate man's capabilities so I did and I do. The endgame? We've reached it I guess but I'm afraid it's not such a joyous thing."

"Reached it?' asked Lindy.

"Let me show you. Salomé?"

"Yes father?"

"Grab your Smart Phone. Does that SKYPE app work now?"

"Just got to working, Nick," she said grabbing the phone out of her purse.

"Call Mo."

"Who's Mo?" I asked.

"Mohammed Ibrahim," said Betty with a grin. "He's a remarkable businessman changing Africa for the better."

I could see the grinning broad face of a middle aged black man fill the small screen of Salomé's state of the art cell phone. Snake held the phone so the gentleman could see all of the naked Nubian.

"Salomé!" said the man in a sophisticated accent, British and African inflected, "I see you're wearing my favorite outfit."

Salomé chuckled. "Good to see you Mo. How are things?"

"Moving slowly but for the better I think. I could use a snuggle though."

"In a couple weeks I'll pay you a visit if I can track you down."

"I'll be in London in a couple weeks," said Mo.

"And now?"

"Alexandria meeting with factions. Things have gotten busy here."

"I thought you weren't allowed in your alma mater town."

"Like I said, things improve," he grinned. "It was meant to be discreet, but I'm afraid discretion and me aren't bedfellows anymore. And speaking of..."

Salomé interrupted him with a chuckle. "I heard the reference, Mo, my horny old man."

"Hey I stay in almost as good a shape as you my old ever gorgeous friend."

"That's insulting and praising simultaneously my diplomatic rogue."

"No insult, just the truth. Every year you get sexier like the finest spirits ever concocted. You have a reason for disturbing my rest, my princess? Not that I'm complaining."

"Just testing my new SKYPE app. I figured you'd be hip to it as well."

"And seeing you in my screen makes me thankful for the latest technology. You can wake me anytime, preferably in the flesh. It's been too long."

"You're a busy man, Mo."

"Never too busy for you, Princess. London. Two weeks from today."

"Yes Sweet Mo." Her hand caressed her taut pointing nipple. He chuckled and ended the call.

"We've brought the mountain to Mohammed," Snake said.

"Twin peaks," said Rosa, her first words of the day. Everyone enjoyed the pun.

"The point is," Snake explained, "there's no distance between people anymore. The end of Super Sonic Transport I thought was a bump in my plans, but now we're less than a second away from each other visually and sonically."

"The Brotherhood of Man?" Lindy guessed.

"All Men Equal?" I added.

"And women!" shouted Helena causing laughter.

"Breaking vast distances, islands of humanity become of one kind," Snake agreed. "No more xenophobia. No more too proud nations."

"Except..." I began.

Nick nodded sadly. "Just as divisive as ever. Maybe more so. Spying with Droids. Raining death with Droids. Constructive technology always in company with destructive. The internet communicating from terrorist cell to terrorist cell. Training to hate and to kill from one place to another on the other side of the planet. People hating people living amongst them instead of in far distant lands. Racism as strong as ever. Politics a silly childish blame game, a two headed beast blindly devouring the other head without considering the death of the body." Nick sighed. "It's my endgame, my time to end."

"What am I to gestate, father?" asked Helena. "Kali?"

Shaking his head, Nick managed to grin again. "Don't know. Hope not. Where were we?"

"Ingesting the corrupt sailor," said Naomi finishing the horrifying drawing.

"Is this cannibalism necessary?" asked Lindy.

"It invigorates us," Rosa answered. "We become a bit languid after a half century and somehow it restores us."

"Would you die without it?" Lindy inquired.

"I don't know," said Salomé. Everyone else shook their heads. "Never went without. Although I've waited a decade or so too long and I felt perhaps like a junkie needing a fix by the end of that delay."

"Jonesing for Jonesy," Naomi joked.

"And its not cannibalism, Lindy," said Snake.

"Are we cattle compared to you?"

Miwa stood and faced Lindy, her hand sliding through Lindy's dirty blond hair. She leaned down and carefully kissed her new lover, the hand pulling Lindy's head to hers. When lips separated, her hand gently caressed Lindy's face. "We communicate, my sweet woman, with senses and words and that gives us purpose and joy, especially with beautiful souls and bodies and faces such as yours, and especially yours for me. I'm not evil, my love, at least most of the time." Giggles filled the room. "We do like to let our hair down and have some nasty fun from time to time, don't we?"

"And this sailor; was he less of a man?"

"Less than an animal," said Miwa, "a devouring parasitic sinkhole of muck luring the defenseless into its sucking maw. Delicious though," she grinned.

"Once bathed and changed," Nick continued his tale, "greeting the new morning with new vestments, mine a ragged robe of a wandering missionary hiding from the powers that be and Cat in a dark robe appropriate to a thief who also chose hiding as essential to her profession, we took a path that crossed the English captain's."

The emperor's great castle casts its shadow over the market where Captain Taylor and his best friend and the ship's navigator and resident scientist Mr. Dent peruse the oriental curiosities. Oliver Dent becomes fascinated by a vendor selling technological contraptions, toys really that move via intricate and clever devices conceived in the hermetically sealed country and thus utterly unique. They dawdle awaiting invitation to visit the emperor. The tall thin old man obviously not Japanese startles them. His poor robe and humble nature allows his close proximity to the captain without causing the ensign/bodyguard Barry Jones, twin to the dead Harry equally thick and hirsute but with much less predatory eyes, to unsheathe his dagger.

"My name is Nicholas Postumus and I am here to assist you, Captain Taylor," says Snake quietly.

"What is your heritage, old man?" asks the captain.

"Greek sir, but I am of many lands. I am a missionary cast by God out into the wilderness of pagans. I have a gift for languages and can communicate with the natives after a few months study of their language."

The captain smiles, "I have my friend and colleague Mr. Dent as translator."

"Has he dwelled in this land? Is he comfortable with the nuances of the Japanese language?" Nick turns to the handsome blond navigator and spouts Japanese rapidly.

"Not so fast," says Oliver Dent. "We will speak slowly with the emperor."

The diminutive and gorgeous Miwa appears. "Great Grandfather says as Gaijin you will be heard through a vast wall of mistrust with barely a chink to talk through. He says even he with his skills in the language will be mistrusted especially since he is a missionary. He wishes you to let me be of service to your cause. My name is Miwa and I have already caught the emperor's ear." Miwa bows. When she straightens, she catches the navigator's eye with a lusty gaze and pans down to his trousers actively twitching with sudden engorgement.

"Uhm, and how did you catch his ear, young lady?" asks the handsome blond. "Such an ear must be tough to get near."

"I am quite stealthy sir, and I captured it through his penis of course."

The captain and his ensign blanch, but Dent laughs heartily. "How do you speak the Queen's English so well with hardly a foreign accent?" he asks upon recovery.

"Great grandfather taught me of course. He failed to remove the heathen in me, but has become a great friend and confidante. He wishes me to sail away with him from this sinful land and to aid in its opening up. We have been awaiting your arrival for many years."

"Great grandfather?" asks the captain.

"It's a term of endearment, Captain," Nick explains hiding the truth.

"We do not accept women travelers," Barry Jones grumps.

Miwa shoots daggers from her dark eyes at the rapist's brother. "First of all, you have no choice. And second it is easy to appear as a boy. Only you three will know."

"Why don't we have a choice?" asks the captain.

"If you follow me," says Nick, "I will show you."

Behind the toy vendor hides a small theater which is opened to them by a fey man bowing to Nick. Inside the dark space an oil lantern sits at the end of a long ramp thrusting out from a wide proscenium stage. Nick waves for the English gentlemen to sit near the lantern. Miwa hops on the ramp like a cat and removes her leather bag that hangs around a shoulder and across her back. When she removes and unsheathes a dagger, Barry Jones unsheathes his much longer one and moves towards her. Barely a second later he finds himself pinned to the floor with his thick arm pulled painfully back and his throat poked by Miwa's dagger.

"I am no threat unless provoked," Miwa hisses. "Call off your dog, Captain."

Dent chuckles. "It seems you are the one to be called off."

Humiliated, Jones curses most ungentlemanly.

"Enough, Mr. Jones," orders the captain. "You will do her no harm or I'll castrate you myself."

Miwa eases off, keeping her blade ready.

"Cunt," grumbles the large man, but he retreats once able to stand and sheathes his dagger.

"I see you do have your brother's manners," says Miwa with a malevolent grin before hopping onto the ramp again.

"What do you know of my brother?" Jones grumbles.

"Speaking of castration, does this look familiar?" asks Miwa pulling out a glass jar filled with rice vinegar and male genitalia. "Is he identical here?"

Surprisingly the big tough man collapses into a seat as if unstrung. "He's raped his last," he whispers.

"I'd say it was the other way around," Miwa counters. "I quite enjoyed him before I removed his rather impressive member."

"What's going on, Jones?" the captain grumbles commanding response.

"My brother, he collected foreign women. Collected their ... private parts after raping and murdering them. Never more than once in each town to prevent investigation."

"What do you mean private parts, Mister Jones?" asks Dent angrily.

"The ... mound of Venus. He ... scalped them. Attached them to a scrap book with descriptions of the rape and murder."

"And you said nothing!" Dent's voice booms.

"I..."

"Barry's dreams of becoming captain would have been derailed," Captain Taylor realizes.

Barry nods abjectly. "Just association would be enough, but he assured me he would bring me down with him."

"Look at me, Ensign," demands the captain. When Barry's sad and shame filled eyes meet his captain's stern eyes, the captain asks, "And you did nothing to assist his heinous deeds besides hiding them from me?"

"I swear. When he showed me his foul collection, I vomited. He called me weak. You know I've cut many enemies' throats, smelt their death, their blood covering me and never winced, but to scalp a defenseless woman's mound ... I love women, Captain. I am in awe of them and their femininity, most of all my wife who is ... a descendant of Pocahontas."

"Debora, your pale Irish lass has Indian blood?" the captain questioned.

"Aye Captain, but a drop in a sea, but she holds it quite proudly. Says it's why her tresses are black as midnight whilst her fair skin and freckles imply red hair. Not to mention her savage little tongue that questions the deepest rooted opinions of the English."

"Her Irish would be enough," Dent points out.

"Aye, but she claims that much more savagery," says Jones causing the gentlemen to chuckle. "I delight in her feistiness and especially the resolution to our quarrels."

"Spirited in every way then," the captain guesses.

"Quite," replies the big man blushing, his eyes shining with amusement and nostalgia.

Things become serious again. "There'll be punishment, Mr. Jones," the captain says.

"Aye Captain," Barry replies, bowing his head.

The captain glances at the genitals in glass. "Your price for travel with us is keeping silent about the ogre Harry's attempted rape of a native Japanese woman?"

Miwa nods. "It would be counterproductive to negotiation, Captain Taylor."

"Of course."

"Let me transform." She runs up the ramp and onto the stage and disappears.

"I take it Miwa is a girl's name," says Dent watching Miwa's twitching and bewitching ass disappear.

"You shall call the young man Ryo," says Nick.

"He'll be your cabin boy," Captain Taylor commands Jones. "There'll be rumors of pederasty."

"Aye Captain," Barry accepts.

"Good," says Dent. "It will defer suspicion from me."

"Why's that?" asks the captain.

"I wish to have ... er ... him as an intern. I believe he's quite clever. I can teach him..."

"A Japanese navigator? A woman?" Barry responds with surprise.

"Only in the science of it and the other sciences I have been exploring. And she can improve my Japanese."

Nick nods. "And you'll find her quite knowledgeable about Japanese culture and technology. Have her pick a toy at that merchant's place. She'll know the engineering."

"Fascinating," Oliver Dent murmurs as much in regards to the cute and beautiful Japanese woman's surprising mind as her physical presence when she returns to them, her breasts wrapped and her loose tunic and shorts transforming her into a boy. A disturbingly cute boy. Ryo winks at him and smiles seductively.

Led to the plump and youthful looking early middle aged emperor by a couple of serious samurai, the European contingent brings the ruler little joy. It is the Japanese boy that makes him grin.

"You," he chuckles.

Ryo bows deeply. "I am here to translate o great emperor. I am called Ryo."

Surprised he asks the boy he recognizes as his cat burglar young lady, "You are capable of this?"

"Hai, " Miwa bows and smiles at him deliciously.

"I am Oliver Dent o great emperor of the sun," says Dent poorly and slowly as he bows.

The Emperor chuckles. "I see you have need of the boy. Has he taught you our language?"

Ryo helps Dent understand. Dent nods to the disguised beauty who never fails to stir his loins and looks at the emperor and replies slowly, "No. I am teach by person you wish not know."

"Let me guess," frowns the emperor. "An exile perhaps? One infected by your gaijin philosophy?"

Dent needs translation. "We do not wish to..." he asks Ryo for the word, "proselytize. Only to do trade between two great kingdoms."

"I have been informed of such," the emperor winks at Miwa. "Let us begin then to negotiate. It is time my empire opens to the world and freshens stagnancy, is that not right Ryo?"

"If you command it, it is right o wise and powerful emperor," Ryo bows; his/her eyes betraying amusement with a glint matched by the emperor's glinting eyes.

The emperor chuckles. "I wish to meet with you alone after your work with the gaijin," he tells her. "I wish to know more of your remarkable and surprising skills with the strange language."

"Thank you, Emperor," Miwa smiles a smile that increases the size of the god/emperor's smallish manhood.

"Just as the British navigator admitted, I too have learned from the enemy philosophers," Miwa tells the emperor in his chambers. Before her confession she makes sure it would be heard by a most content ear, sucking and fucking him into a state of blissful relaxation. Her lithe body lies naked over the naked man. His cock loosens in her tight and saturated sheath and slips out. He caresses the soft smooth skin that covers petite perfection. Miwa continues, "I call him great-grandfather and he has hidden many years in the mountains. I did not accept his faith, but his kindly nature and wisdom fascinated me since early childhood. He taught me much about life among the gaijin both good and bad along with teaching me English."

"He did not change your faith, our faith to his?" asks the emperor.

"To tell you the truth, great emperor, I am a most stubbornly practical girl. I only believe in what my senses perceive or in what my mind finds sensible."

"I love your honesty and your wit my lovely Cat," says the emperor, "but I find your rather personal morality a little disturbing."

"I am a thief and a burglar great emperor, which you find quite amusing. A rather immoral profession don't you think? Not to mention my love of fucking which you also enjoy."

"You're full of trouble."

"I know," Miwa said sadly. "That's why I will not trouble you anymore. I am leaving with the gaijin when they sail into the rising sun. It is not good to be seen in my presence, especially if I'm to play a boy."

"No more visits from my alley cat?" the emperor asks sadly.

"I'm sorry."

"Me too."

"I hope you are sated because I must leave now."

"It was too brief but understandably so. I will cherish the night I had you all to myself."

"As will I. You are truly a great man."

"I am more than a man," the emperor exclaims pompously.

"Whatever," Miwa smiles and kisses him.

They both laugh, ending sadness for the moment. It returns when he watches her lithe and succulent body disappear beneath a boy's ragged clothes and her presence disappears forever.

"Do you love these men you inspire?" Lindy asked Miwa.

"I guess I have to, and it's really easy," Miwa smiled up at her lover. "We choose impressive and brilliant men. The Emperor was a brief thing though. But even in that short time I found him fascinating and complicated and charming and lovable.

"Intimacy of course plays a major role in our work," she continued, "and to not embrace the man fully and lovingly would become rather obvious. Of course there are those who find intimacy difficult and we bring a more distant love to them, a love they can tolerate."

"You have vast experience?" asked Lindy with a tint of jealousy.

"Sweetheart, I've been at this for centuries. My most famous inspiring occurred nearly four hundred years ago and I practiced on two others before him."

"Who?" I asked having learned much history of Japanese culture.

"Chashingura."

"The Japanese Shakespeare?" I exclaimed.

Miwa nodded. "I encouraged him to transfer his Bunraku puppet plays into Kabuki. And with Great-Grandfather as lead performer they couldn't miss."

I looked at Nick and remembered his Japanese name mentioned by Cat. "Ishikara Danjūrō," I said. He nodded. "Which one?"

"Mostly I through X with a minion interspersed occasionally when necessary."

"Wow," I said, completely impressed. Danjūrō nearly always played the powerful lead in Kabuki and his reincarnations/sons had for centuries.

Nick chuckled. "That's for another tale, my young friend. Let us get back to the Modern one."

"How long were you Japanese?" I asked.

"I left Europe when the Renaissance took flight completely."

"Da Vinci? Michelangelo? Shakespeare?" I asked.

"Young minions for the first two," Nick smiled. "They preferred their muses young and male. And don't forget the great architects."

"What about Dante?" asked Lindy.

"No. Beatrice needed to be a fragile mortal to inspire his obsession."

"We did assist," Betty reminded him fondly. "That horrible lecher that threatened her innocence. He had a particularly tasty liver."

Nick chuckled. "Of course, but again we digress."

"Speaking of digression," I inquired, "didn't this start with the sloughed skin at Troy? What has that to do with Japan?"

"It was when we informed him of its discovery," Maggie explained, "that he transformed into Nick and that sent him to the West."

"Informed him?" I asked.

"Telepathically," said Salomé.

"Oh," I said. "Of course." Everything being impossible, why not telepathy? "Do you angels converse that way between each other or..."

"Only through Snake," Rosa explained. "Like a teleconference."

"So actual teleconferencing... ?" I asked.

Alexandra nodded, "We encouraged it."

"Let's adjourn until this evening," Snake decided. "We'll begin our regular sessions at 7. Starting fresh maybe we can avoid all these digressions."

"But I think they're necessary," Lindy opined. "There's so much basic information to learn before we understand you and your daughters."

"Perhaps for you as my ghostwriters," Snake nodded, "but just like a relationship needing continual mysteries that get solved over time to remain fresh, I'd rather the tales reveal details about us as they play out."

"Or like the nature of conversations, we let the story diverge unpredictably," Lindy suggested. "I mean already we're sort of starting at the end."

"No," Betty explained, "Nick is right. We follow the modern tale as it transpires chronologically. In it is all that came before and sets up the tales that follow in the series. For instance we need to get to the destruction of the ancient sloughed skin before moving on to the second tale ending with Helen and the Trojan War."

Looking skeptical, Lindy shrugged and nodded.