Chapter 36: Cleaning

-- Storm - Amity - Earth time: 2102 --

We were in a right pickle.

Daniel and Pip stayed a couple of extra days to help with the clean-up and burying of the dead. Even my other wizards turned up in Nickel City and then teleported to us to help. Ulu even brought Carline and Sharon with him.

Carline was Leslie’s only living daughter, and Sharon was Anne’s daughter to a different shifter, called Trip. They were both pretty upset about their mothers dying like they had, as one would expect. Since Laci was busy in Garson, Carine and Sharon agreed to help him out in Greco.

Many assumed Carline would be their new Domo, but she was adamant that she had given up this right and declared that she supported Laci’s claim and believed the two cities should be ruled together under one Domo and one set of laws, my laws. She declared herself the Temporary Deputy-Mayor until a new one was voted in.

The Law Book had turned up here after the ‘Cleansing’ as people were calling my little oops. The book had caused a right stir. Sable and Laci saying they supported the laws also caused some consternation in a few quarters.

Laci also said she was delighted to accept Carline as her Temporary Deputy-Mayor since she had the support of her people. They also declared immediate elections in both cities for the councillor’s positions and Deputies. They would be run in the same fashion as they were in Weston, Lime Island, Green Island and Ochre City.

My people on the east coast of Galina were still in this process themselves after I had dropped copies of in both cities. Olivia and Ashley planned to go to Green Island next to talk to Bron. I told them to find themselves a pretty little shifter while they were there and to upgrade. This earned me some chuckles, my tummy getting some rubs and my cleavage being looked down.

Kim changed for Ulu and got himself a wolf-whistle and his arse being patted, and a wink and a promise. I suspected Kim just might for old times’ sake. He and Ulu were not strangers to getting naked and horizontal or in some other positions together.

Selene didn’t help when she changed form and give Kim a big kiss and a rub that he happily returned. My boy was still a tart at heart. Sable touched Ulu as he had with Kim and Ulu changed. Kim changed back to male, and Ulu was the one being accosted.

Selene oohed with delight, and I knew where Kim would be that night. Sarah, thought it was funny, but she promised to keep me happy. This she was very good at and I had no problems with an intimate night with Sarah. The new recharge method also meant she could do it for a lot longer. I was getting a handle on being a chick.

Crystal was amused by my spouses, and to bring some sanity back to the table, she indicated that her laws weren’t a lot different. She then made her consorts on Topaz aware of the changes with the help of her new Mad, JJ and her controller.

They didn’t see too many problems and just wanted to know when she was coming home. She said not yet, but she did tell them she was well and they were much relieved by this news. They were a little sad to hear that we couldn’t fix her wizard’s box, but Crystal told them she wasn’t worried as at least she could function now.

The fact that my people had already been adopting the laws and Sable’s City of Ochre had too didn’t give the locals a lot of leeway. Selwyn’s sisters, Keven and Levine, also said their towns were adopting them. Since a lot of commerce came from those two duchies, the merchants and Landed Gentry in Greco weren’t game to buck the system too hard.

The people in Garson came on board even quicker. Quite a few younger sons and daughters had suddenly found themselves in unexpected management positions, as Landed Gentry and rulers of towns. So having a stable government and a decent of Laws was a good thing as far as many of them were concerned.

The fact they could once again trade outside Garson was also a huge incentive. Some weren’t so happy to give up their slaves, but the rules were the rules. They had so few workers in the south that to be honest paying the minimum wages to keep them wasn’t that big of a change in the scheme of things.

Where our problems or more precisely mine lay, were with the pieces of the damn wheelship. The other wizards couldn’t get within cooee of them. While I could when I was male, I can’t now because I’m bloody pregnant. We had determined that the two least contaminated ships were in Greco.

Bron had told me what was required to clean them, but we only had the one small machine, and the closest recycler was in Nickel City. He had a bigger machine on his sailing ship, but it was on its way to Topaz Island, and it could be a month before they could get here.

He also didn’t have a scan of the item as the androids that had built it were on the ship. They had altered Toffee’s original design through trial and error but hadn’t uploaded it into her system. He couldn’t help this time. I thanked him anyway.

David and Kelli popped over to Fire City. They could access the hidden chambers in the citadel but said there were no wizard’s boxes there. Although they did find some mage items, they left them for now. Raina and Ben also reported back empty handed from Amber City. Neither city had a working controller, but they both still had small shields over their citadels.

Kale and Selwyn went and checked Di’s Estate, and while they recovered dead magical item’s, there weren’t any wizard’s boxes. They couldn’t find the book boxes either. Our search of the palace in Garson didn’t turn then up, so we were still missing three Pix Wizard’s boxes.

Nanna Grace said they must be in the ships. It would explain why Di had been trying to get into them. It was either that or someone else had found them. That thought worried me greatly. Ethan had been an arrogant shit and hadn’t had his long. However, other Pix wizards could possibly counter my spell, especially if they were together.

While we were brainstorming, Daniel suggested I send my hydrazine machine to Sean in Harmony. He had a scanner that could alter the size. I didn’t have my scanner built yet, and this was the best short-term solution that we could come up with.

To be honest, Sean had given me so many new items in his data that I hadn’t felt a need to build mine. I hadn’t told too many people about the Jelly Snakes I’d found and wondered who else on Harmony had this petty little fetish of mine. Hum, Jelly Snakes ... Sorry.

So that is what we did. The spaceships would just have to wait until I had the means to access them. Daniel and Pip were more than happy to visit Lee and Sean for me. I would have to put off my trip because Crystal had informed us of the ‘no-portal jumping while pregnant’ rule.

I was starting to find being pregnant very frustrating. Who knew tits got in the way of everything? And why can’t chicks scratch their crotches? Sarah even presented me with a bra, the cheeky cow. My tits didn’t sag, thank you very much. And there was no way I was going to wear that contraption. Be free I say.

I didn’t get any sympathy from the women either. Most of the shifters just chuckled and said ‘welcome to their world’. Apparently, I was going to have to pay a lot more attention to being in season in future. At least it shouldn’t happen for another five years or so.

I totally agreed with Bron and Andy, once would probably see me through the rest of my lifetime. At least I got some sympathy from them and Laci who was in the same boat as me. He wasn’t used to having tits in his way either, and he wasn’t having a bar of a bra. It was us against the world.

Crystal and Raina thought it was cute that I was pregnant, damn importunate kids. Raina was due to drop her twins any day so it would nice that my kids will grow up with hers. Fuck, I was happy to have my two girls back though. Just to rub the salt in, Sarah popped home and got her ship. She brought our other girls back with her.

Lindell looked me up and down, and then tutted. She rubbed my belly and said, poor baby. She and Bonny then changed form, carted me off to bed and took great delight in fucking me stupid. Bloody shifters taking advantage of a poor pregnant woman.

All right, all right, it was just the bloody hormones, I’ll stop bitching and moaning.

So anyway, we are still not sure if my ‘Storm’ spell has come back or even if it’s still going. The damn crystals are now embedded in the walls, and when I touched one, I knew the shield spell was active, but I couldn’t tell if the other spell was. Either it has cancelled as it should have or it has become part of the shield spell created to spread it.

When the other wizards went to visit the other cities, they had used the portal rings and propagated the books while they were at it, so they didn’t notice if the shield went that far. Kale said it had gone past Di’s property and she was 250km from the city. Oh, crap! Well, Sable won’t be buying me lunch.

As the first week I spent in Federation marched on, we got more and more reports of odd happenings from even further away. When Laci heard that his old master and many of the guards had died, he wasn’t terribly upset. He did tell me that he lived 350km from here. I was getting to think Kales 600km radius was closer to the mark.

I then worried about just how high the shield would go. Sarah had said that she didn’t feel that she was going through a shield when she left or came back but she only went as high as 8km. JJ said she hadn’t been bothered when she moved her orbit to look for me, and she was 400km up.

She said she couldn’t see a shield and that Federation looked just like normal. I stopped worrying. It was only meant to be a magical shield and not a weather one, so it shouldn’t be a bother how high it went, I hope.

Mind you, I didn’t give the curvature of the planet much thought at the time either. I had bugger-all knowledge of how that type of shield would work over long distances or if it did have enough energy to surround the planet.

Surely it couldn’t do that, could it?

Two days later, Daniel turned up with Lord Sean Watson in tow.

I was delighted to finally meet him. He gave me a curious look and then started chuckling. “Oops,” he said, and I had to laugh too. He was fascinated with Sarah’s ship and said that it was very different to his. Sarah fascinated him as well, and he said that she had to come and visit Lee, as she loved little mysteries.

I told him to get his own shifter. He chuckled and produced his wings, saying that he had. That got him a lot of attention. The next morning we had faeries everywhere, and they wanted to see his wings. They have a lot of them here, I learnt.

I told them the Faerie Queen was in Palatine and married to King Augustus, and she was due to have her twins any day, like Raina. Kelli had delivered her daughter the week before, to David’s delight.

My announcement caused an even bigger uproar amongst the faeries, and somehow Sarah got shanghaied into taking a heap of them to visit Payton. We did warn her they were coming and she just laughed and said she would make room for the delegation.

Sean apologised for making such a scene, and I just shrugged it off. Around me, little scenes seemed to happen. We did finally get down to business. Sean said Lee had sent him to investigate the little problem we had, since he was an engineer. They believed the hydrazine as we called it, was an exotic material.

Lee was fascinated to learn that it could kill wizards, good or bad. So he got sent to find out what it was. I told him about the attachment we had for Sarah’s ship that was used for terraforming. It was packed away on the ship, as we didn’t want it activated accidentally.

Sean, of course, wanted to examine it, and I said it would fit in a transportation ring if he wanted to borrow it. He beamed from ear to ear. I was glad we had something to share with them for a change. He was also happy to have a copy of Bron’s machine now. He gave me a data cube and Raina took it to get another one copied.

He said it was a very handy machine for cleaning up all sorts of contamination especially radiation leaks. They were getting copies made for Earth as we spoke. I was delighted, as we had made a lot of fuckups with nuclear power on Earth.

He said that he was able to make a couple of rough alterations as he unpacked a crate. ‘A couple?’ I thought when I saw it. He had mounted it on a set of wheels, and it had a strange canister on top. He said that if it became full, we could just pop it off and put a new one on.

It has a special valve on it that sealed automatically when the machine stopped. They’d had a bit of fun finding a material to use to make it, but Lee had had an idea, and it worked so we had a working machine. He said Lee came up with amazing solutions. It also had some very strong spells on it that Lee had done.

He seemed very proud of his wife, and from what I have seen of Lee, when talking to her, I’m not surprised. She was one fascinating lady. I knew that Daniel idolised her and after meeting Sean, I suspected that a lot of other people did too.

He handed me a small flat rectangular box and said it was a sort of remote. It gave us a readout, and we could direct the machine by speaking at it. I had fun driving the machine as we took it over to the first piece of Torus. Kale, David, Kim and Sable came with us, as they were as fascinated I was. Crystal had joked, “Boys with toys.”

Sean pointed out the system had two detectors. One in the control box so you could stand a safe distance away and the second for the machine. We stopped when the controller said to, and let the machine approach the ship. Sean said to turn it on as soon as we got a reading.

The machine had a mobile sucker for close work, and several inlets that sucked in any airborne contaminants around itself. The machine happily sucked away, and we watched as the needle flicked back and forth.

I got told they had stuck with the analogue meter as the movement gave a good indication that people could read and assimilated faster than flicking numbers. David and I could relate to that, being older Earthlings compared to the timeline Sean came from.

We were happily playing when I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned to find Bron behind me. I happily hugged him and then introduced him. He stepped back and looked me up and down and said with a big grin, “Hubba, hubba, ain’t you a hotty.”

David and I both grinned at him, and then David said, “Where did you get that expression?”

Bron frowned, “No idea, but then I don’t know half of what I have stored in my bones. Toffee says that my father passed on a lot of information. As I get older, bits and pieces of odd information come up in different situations.”

“Like what happens with Sarah?” Sean asked.

“Yep, but Kale here says my father was made by a different controller from the one who made Sarah,” Bron said.

“And Pip’s. Yes, that was what bugging me. Sable was like Pip, but Pip’s is a little different again as if the controller got it right in one of her parents. Bron, may I touch you?” Kale asked.

Bron happily let Kale touch him. Kale stayed in contact longer than he normally does for a medical assessment. He looked at Bron, “Hum, very interesting. I’ll be back in a bit,” he said, and then he disappeared.

“What was that about?” Bron asked.

We all shrugged and went back to looking at the read-out. “That’s not as bad as mine was,” Bron said. “I bet I even know what’s wrong. Get the outside cleaned up and I’ll see if I can get Magenta to jump here, using the portals.”

He called JJ, “Hey, JJ, my eye in the sky, can you lock onto the portal in this piece of the ship?” he said into his Mad.

JJ answered back that she could. She said if there was a controller, she couldn’t raise her. Bron gave us a grin and called home. Magenta knew what he wanted and told him to give her an hour. Sean said we could just leave the machine running as the canister could hold a lot, and the controller would beep if it needed changing.

We decided it was ‘beer o’clock’ except I wasn’t allowed one, which made me grumble and the other blokes laugh. As we walked back, just because we could, David suddenly said, “I remember where I heard that expression last, it was in one of those old World War II movies I have in my library. It was a Yankee expression.”

Sean grinned at David, “You have old movies?”

“Oh yeah, tonnes of them. I was a bit of a sci-fi freak back in my day. I have a lot of really old computer games too, from my grandfather, Dusty James. He would have been born about your time Storm. He was a mad keen collector and every time the media changed, he spent months copying the games and movies into to the latest formats.”

“I have his complete movie collection from 1950 up to about 2060 plus whatever I added in the ten years after that. My special server is still hooked up to JJ, as well as what is in our ship’s library. They were to keep us entertained when we went to Mars. She just beamed it all down to Nicky our controller for us,” David said happily.

“Dusty James? Did he live the Valley in Brisbane by any chance?” I asked.

“Yes, why?” David asked.

“And did he have an Aunt Haley James who married a Paul Green?” I then asked.

“You’re kidding right?”

“Nope, your Granddaddy and I were cousins. I probably helped him record half those movies until we were about twenty-two when he and his family moved to Cairns,” I told him.

“Does Lee know this?” Sean asked.

“Probably, I didn’t look too hard at the genealogy charts she gave me other than to find out what my kids were named. Looks like my grandfather Anton James maybe the link for our magical abilities. Although my grandmother, who was Darla Brown, said her father Davin was a bit odd too. He liked to do magic tricks for kids.”

“Both her husband and her father weren’t around long. Davin and Anton didn’t come back from the Vietnam War. Davin was some government liaison and went missing early in the war, and Anton was a flyboy who didn’t come back near the end.”

I frowned and looked at Sean, “Now isn’t that odd, the wizard who was here before me, he said his name was Davin and that he had been back and forth to Earth many times in different time periods, I wonder what the odds are?”

“Davin? As in Wizard Davin whose kids often have a crescent shaped birthmark,” Sean said.

I stopped and looked at him. “Where?”

“Hum, normally under an arm I think, or on their butt, some are on the back of the head like squares,” Sean replied.

“So what about a square shape?” I replied.

“Wizard Antali is the square, why?” he asked.

“What is the bet that Anton was Antali?” I said with a grin.

Sean looked at me, and I turned around so he could see the back of my head. “Shit,” said David and he turned around for us, and we started laughing.

“Brother Wizard’s by blood, huh. No wonder we both ended up here David,” I said.

“Do you know if there were wizards who had a diamond or a triangle shaped birthmark?” Sable asked.

“There were five wizards who original went from Earth to Utopia. The other three were Wizard Que who had diamonds, Wizard Jahn was triangles and Wizard was Rah was circles. Who has those shapes?” Sean asked with interest.

“Crystal, under her arm. Actually, she might have that shape like you two on the back of her head, but it is fainter,” Sable said thoughtfully.

“She is related to four of the old Earth wizards,” Sean said in astonishment.

“Probably explains why she could survive as much shit as she has been through,” I said.

“Lee is going to be wrapped when I tell her,” Sean said happily. “She is right into this genealogy thing. Que was supposed to have died. He is the designer of the shifters on Utopia, he took all the shifters he could find from Earth and put them on an island to help fix some genetic issues they had developed. If Crystal has a diamond, then he did get back to Earth at some stage.”

I was glad to make Sean’s day. We went and had a leisurely lunch that was a bit longer than an hour due to lots of gossip, and then we went back to check on the machine. We were surprised that it was almost at zero on the scale.

Bron called Magenta again, and she said she was ready, so she transported into the piece of the ship. She called Bron and said JJ had confirmed she was on the ship near him and the spells didn’t block her. She’d call us back shortly.

Sean went to approach the ship, and I stopped him by asking if he remembered his back up crystals. He grinned at us, “Yes, and thank you, Bron. Lee said she would find you a suitable gift. She can now get to Earth without using the portals at all.”

I think we all stood there stunned at that bit of news. We watched him place his hands on the ship. The ship seemed to shimmer for a bit and then looked normal. He came back to us. “They weren’t that bad, but one did need a Wizard or higher to remove. It bound the rest.”