Chapter 254: The Aquatic Center; The Group Gathers

Monday, June 20, 2005 (Continued)

When Savannah was sufficiently far away, Carol giggled, then added, "You can't resist doing some silly things."

"You're mostly right, sweetie, but there is a serious aspect to it. Julia and her parents want me to learn about the manipulative tricks girls can use. Savannah is terrible at them, because she's far too busy being arrogant to think about things from her intended victim's perspective, but there are other girls who're much deadlier. There's one called Adriana who was in 11th grade. I knew for a fact that she thought very poorly of me, but when she found out I was rich she was all over me. The scary thing was that she was TOTALLY convincing. I was looking at her very, very closely, and I couldn't see anything wrong with her act at all. I consider myself pretty good at spotting things in people, but she would've had me fooled if I hadn't known her feelings in advance. I'd very much like to learn how to spot girls and women who're trying to manipulate me, and I'd like to learn how to out-manipulate them. I'm starting with Savannah because she's easy. She's a lying, scheming, uncaring, greedy, selfish girl. She's trying to use me for her own purposes with no regard to what's good for me at all. As she's bringing that game to me, I'll play it with her."

"I already don't like her then. What do you want me to do with her?"

"What she heard me say: get her to serve you in little ways. You don't have to be shy about it. Don't worry about anyone else overhearing, etc. Just tell Savannah what you want her to do. Ideally don't even say 'please', although that's a mighty hard habit to get out of. If she misbehaves at all, don't make a scene, just threaten to tell me. If she still misbehaves, tell me and I'll take it from there. My main point is about sex. I want a complete absence of sex..."

"I thought you wanted me to be a lesbian?"

"Not for three months. You did very well with your focus on Julia when you were showing ... AND I CAN'T BELIEVE I forgot to mention your new bikini! You look HOT, bunny!"

"{Giggle}. Thank you. I thought you'd like it."

"To hell with LIKING IT! I have NEVER, EVER seen you look better in any clothes than you do now." Not this precise Carol. "I am VERY impressed by how beautiful and how sexy you are, and by your bravery in wearing an outfit that's so small it can't even be called 'clothing'. You've gained an impressive amount of confidence."

"No I haven't. I got it for you, but I'm as nervous as anything."

"Every other girl in the Center should be nervous; not you. You're SPECTACULARLY gorgeous, and I'm very, very lucky."

We were sitting with our backs to our crowd (which was safe, as my six-foot proximity sense would detect any of them approaching us), and far enough apart from most of the other pool visitors that we had a small modicum of privacy. To show my appreciation for Carol's purchase, I created several NP-fingertips, said, "You've got NO IDEA how much I'd like to make wild bunny sex with you now... ,"

"{Giggle}."

" ... but the best I can do is this." I stroked her cheek with one NP-fingertip to alert her, then quickly slid it down to her breast. I put several more on her breasts, while one of them carried on down to her pussy. In a couple of seconds I had several fingertips running over her breast, squeezing her nipples, rubbing up and down her pussy.

"Ohhhh. That's good. Harder down below please."

Carol was getting excited, but sadly, it wasn't safe to let that build any further. I canceled the fingertips, saying, "I'm sorry. We can't do any more here. I just want you to know that I love you more every day."

"{Giggle}, so it's a good bikini then? Haha."

"VERY good. As is the wonderful person inside it. Although I must admit that most of you isn't actually 'inside' anything..."

"{Giggle}. Yeah, it does show a lot, doesn't it?"

"Yes. Thank you for that. You made a very lucky guess that I'd like that suit."

"Haha. Yeah, it was a very difficult guess."

"Thank you very much for it, and for being so nice to me, but we should get back to the safe topic of discussing Savannah now."

"Okay."

"I was saying that I don't want anything sexual to happen to her. The only uses she's got are sexual and to teach me about manipulation. I'm going to try to trick her by keeping her totally away from anything sexual, but by letting her know that lots of sex goes on that she's not invited to. If she doesn't get so annoying that she's red-carded, then she'll eventually get very frustrated about being kept away from all the action and she'll push herself forward. She's using sex as bait, so I'm going to try to turn it against her."

"I think I understand."

"Good. I don't expect her to try to get sexual with you, because she's obviously got her sights set on my money, but if she does try something, just firmly tell her to stop it and to behave herself. Something like, 'I don't want you touching me sexually, ' would be good to say, because it doesn't harm the lesbian thing later."

"Okay."

"One thing she easily could do is try to find out whether you and I misbehave together. From a comment I overheard her make a while ago, I know she finds brother-sister sex exciting, and she'd love to have a threesome with us. She's FAR too untrustworthy for us to ever think about that. She might ask questions or make comments about it, to see how you react. Obviously we take the moral high ground. Indignantly tell her off for having her mind in the sewer. Tell her to grow up, etc. You know what I mean, don't you?"

"Sure. That's easy."

"Good. That's about it. Don't give her too much of a hard time, as she needs to get used to following orders. It'd probably be best to ignore her most of the time, except when telling her to do something. Thanks for doing this for me, Carol."

"It's fine. I don't like her, so it'll be easy to boss her around."

I was tempted to keep talking about it, to find out why Carol didn't like her and other topics, but I'd spent too long on the Savannah issue already.

"Thanks again anyway. Let's rejoin the others."

We stood up and took the few steps back to the others. I announced, "Let's move our gear closer to the main pool so any other people who're looking for us will be able to find us easier."

Everyone started getting up. I held Carol back from getting her gear, whispering, "Wait to see if Savannah gets it."

"Oh yeah. Good idea. I bet she doesn't."

"I agree."

Sure enough, everyone stood up carrying their own gear, leaving Carol's and mine on the ground. I called out, "Savannah, bring Carol's and my gear." I stood there, looking at her. Savannah was seriously not happy, especially for her lowly status to be made clear in front of everyone else. She stood still, with a pissed off expression on her face.

^-- "Like I told you before, Savannah, you have far too much pride. Five, four, three, two... ,"

"OK! I'll do it." She REALLY wanted to follow it with a grumble, but she was already at 97%. I was quite happy that I'd accidentally stumbled on that incremental warning approach. The red card was too all-or-nothing, but the 95 to 100% count worked well.

#3: <Keep within proximity range of Savannah. I don't trust her not to help herself to our wallet.>

#6: <Good point. She was certainly reluctant to hand over that receipt, so I can imagine that the contents of our wallet are in her mind.>

#8 : <I hope she tries to, so we can catch her at it red-handed. Threatening to call the cops would give us another source of power over her.>

We waited for Savannah to gather up the Anderson gear, then we moved to a more central location. I made Savannah walk last, behind Carol and me, but even from that advantageous position, she never thought about moving a hand into my bag.

Once Savannah had spread Carol's and my towels for us, and we'd all settled, I announced, "Savannah's going to the snack bar for drinks or ice creams. My treat. Savannah, take everyone's order then I'll give you the money for it."

Everyone started ordering. I was surprised, until I figured out that they were probably doing it to be mean to Savannah. Soon Savannah complained, "There are too many to remember or carry."

I answered, "I'm a genius so sometimes things seem very simple to me, but the idea of making two trips isn't that complicated, is it?" Sometimes I can't resist being a smart-ass.

Savannah didn't enjoy being laughed at, but she swallowed it. I think the laughter killed her idea of asking for help. I gave her some money, and she left to make her first trip.

As soon as she was far enough away, I got bombarded with questions which basically all meant, "What are you doing with Savannah?"

I answered, "She has repeatedly tried to convince me to be her boyfriend. Her methods leave much to be desired. She struts past, sticks out her chest, and thinks guys should worship the ground she floats over. And if they could buy her some expensive presents while worshipping the ground, that'd be good too. Her attitude is somewhat unrealistic. With me, anyway; it might work with other guys."

That caused a variety of responses. Some denigrating Savannah, such as Alexis declaring, "She thinks her shit don't stink." Some joking about boys: "It DOES work on other guys. If any girl sticks her chest out, guys fall all over themselves to chase after her." And some praising me: "She's got NO chance of fooling you, Mark".

When I could, I continued, "It might do her some good to get a lesson or two in humility. Honesty too, because she's also pretty lousy in that area. A large part of my motivation is Carol though. Carol is starting to socialize much more with me, Julia and Ava, but she's somewhat intimidated by older high-school girls. I've got a very high opinion of Carol's character, and I want her to learn that she's actually a much nicer and more mature person than many of the girls she's intimidated by."

"She's mature all right!" exclaimed Alexis enviously.

"Umm, yeah. We Andersons must be easily intimidated, because that aspect of Carol intimidates me. As far as I knew, last week Carol didn't have a body, and now it's excessively obvious that she does. That's not exactly an easy transformation for a big brother to adapt to. I wish Carol had taken it in nice, easy stages, ideally spread over several years. Putting that my little sister isn't so little to one side, I suggest you resist the temptation to be harsh to Savannah. Some of you - Alexis springs to mind - might have trouble resisting that."

"Haha. That's for damned sure!" agreed Alexis.

"It won't work, Alexis. Savannah is willing to swallow her pride a little to prove to me that she can be good company and a good girlfriend, which gives me a LITTLE power over her. Not much though, because Savannah has a lot of pride. To the extent that I can, I've transferred my authority to Carol and Savannah understands that Carol is standing in for me, but no one else has any power over her. If one of you told her to carry your bag, she'd have every right to tell you to shove it. I'd even be inclined to back her up, because being deliberately nasty to her isn't acceptable behavior. In other words, just because you see Carol and me carefully pushing Savannah's boundaries, that doesn't mean it's open season for ridiculing her, okay?"

Most of the girls were apologetic; Alexis was just disappointed. If Savannah lasted long enough for us to need to pretend to have group sex all over the place, then I'd make Alexis' day by telling her the real plan. I couldn't hint of it now, as there'd be too much chance of it getting back to Savannah, and the other girls wouldn't like me for it either.

On Savannah's return, nearly all the girls treated her better, thanking her for bring their order.

Savannah noticed the change, so I explained to her, "I explained that they should be supporting you in your learning to be less prideful. We'd all enjoy your company better if that happened. They know it's not easy and it's taking courage for you to attempt it, so the nice girls should actually give you some encouragement, now that they understand."

The nice girls took the hint, and several of them made supportive comments to Savannah. Alexis didn't though, looking at me instead. I gave her a wink with the eye that Savannah couldn't see. Alexis immediately smiled happily, and even added some enthusiastic supporting comments of her own to Savannah, while no doubt eagerly looking forward to finding out whatever it was that I had in mind.

Savannah loved the support, sticking out her chest in pride. I should be able to write, "Savannah took pride in her attempt to be less prideful." The statement is true, but it looks wrong. Pride in attempting a difficult task is deserved. Pride which is vanity-based and used to look down on other people, is not deserved. English needs some more words.

[For the rest of the day, Savannah was much easier to manage. Neither Carol nor I had any significant trouble. She wasn't happy, but she wasn't trouble either, the latter being considerably more important. Sometimes Savannah was so unhappy she spoke up, for example, when I ordered her to guard all our gear while the rest of us had a swim. She said, "But I wanted to have a swim too." I couldn't resist answering, "No doubt you had several swims with your friends before we arrived. Now it's our turn." After that dig, she wisely decided it was too risky to say anything more.]

Julia quietly told me, "You're getting very good at managing people."

"Not really. I took too much time talking to her about it, I didn't do it very powerfully, and I didn't realize that I should've enlisted the other girls' help from the beginning, because their support is making Savannah much happier about her new position. But half the reason I'm doing it at all is just for practice, so it's good to learn when there's nothing at stake."

"Good boy!"

My food order to Savannah had been an ice-cream and a drink. Halfway through the drink, #3: <I remember 3B saying that they measured the size of their NP-fingertips in a glass of milk, and that they canceled when they got too deep. Right?>

#5: <Yes, that's right.>

#3: <Why would they cancel? They should've been inside your proximity range.>

#7: <Good point. Let's repeat the experiment inside our drink now.>

#3: <That's what I was thinking.>

The fingertips couldn't be created inside the liquid, but they could easily be created just above it and then submerged. They didn't cancel. Using a 3A or 3B mind made no difference.

#7: <We definitely had them cancel on us half a second after they submerged in the milk. We've got better, or they've got better, or something.>

#3: <I guess it's probably an expectation issue. You expected them to cancel when they submerged, so they did. Since then you've learned in other ways about the proximity range, so you no longer expect them to cancel.>

#7: <I expect you're right. The expectation constraint is a bit of a pain. We have to have some expectation of something working to even try it in the first place, or to make it work, like what happened when we discovered light blobs. And that light blobs can become heat blobs was another expectation. But too much expectation might be limiting our ability, like the proximity range being measured from our center. I can imagine some Aikido master saying, "Free your mind from expectations," only it doesn't work like that.>

#1: <No. Expectations which match reality are good and essential. But expectations which limit us are a pain. Unfortunately we don't know enough about our ki abilities to have accurate expectations, so we can't tell good expectations from bad ones.>

#2: <We have to keep our eyes open and our wits about us. Fortunately we've got eight wits. We can't tell, but I think we do pretty well with our abilities. I doubt there are many expectations that are limiting us.>

#All: <Agreed.>

^

[[Not even close! We badly underestimated the role that expectations played. Take NP-fingertips. My subconscious(es) understood normal fingertips. They knew how they moved, how to poke with them to get a desired result, knew how to grip with them, how to stroke gently, etc. There were probably hundreds of mental algorithms already learned for real fingertips that could easily be applied to NP-fingertips. That was great, as it meant I didn't have to learn how to use NP-fingertips from scratch (a small pun that tickled me). Learning from scratch might've been harder, but it also might've been impossible, as it was with trying to create a sound blob. So very strong, well-understood and practiced expectations were very useful.

They were also limiting. For example, it never occurred to me that I could change the coefficient of friction of my NP-fingertips. It was within my capabilities, as I was already giving NP-fingertips the same friction as ordinary fingers (the result of an expectation). NP-fingertips are pure ki, so don't have any electromagnetic component and are therefore naturally frictionless. My expectation for friction created the effect for me. In effect, I subconsciously put a fiction covering - an electromagnetic emission - over the NP-fingertips when I created them, dialed to the same coefficient as my real fingertips. If I'd been more aware of what expectations I had operating, I might've worked through them, testing each in turn, and perhaps discovering that NP-fingertip friction was quite easily tunable.

That would have been very useful and important. Lack of friction was sometimes quite a nuisance, especially before the latest merge when my total NP force was so limited. I often flew things around by gripping them between opposing fingertips, then having other fingertips push the gripping ones. The trouble was that the gripping fingertips quite often slid across the object because they didn't have enough friction, which necessitated using additional fingertips to grip with, reducing the number available to push.

When I was being kidnapped and had woken up in the back of the van, I hadn't been able to undo the straps on my hood because the gripping fingertips kept sliding, or when they were gripping hard enough, I didn't have enough force left to push effectively. Had I been able to make two gripping fingertips with very high friction, all my other fingertips might have been enough to push the strap back into the buckle to undo it. I might've been able to free myself and taken the two baddies down before Prof and I were chained into the chairs, saving Prof's and my life in 3B-land, and our 3B families their anguish. We died and they grieved because I expected, without question, that NP-fingertips behaved like real ones.

My inability to get "Sound Blobs" to work was also partly due to not having an expectation of how to make it work. Sight blobs were easy, because how they functioned was very similar to how real eyes functioned, so the information could be sent to the correct part of my visual processing system and it did the rest of the work. (Correction: That was what I originally assumed. I later learned that the information was sent into my brain at a location after much of the initial processing should've been done, which meant the sight blob/Universe's Consciousness was doing it for me.)

Remote hearing was too mechanical. Sight and sound are both analog, of course, but sound undergoes considerably more mechanical transformation, making it much harder to reproduce remotely. There were three relatively easy solutions to the Sound Blob Problem. All three were pushing or beyond the limits of my ki powers, but if I'd thought of them and worked on the easiest one enough, I might've got a crude 'sound blob' working. The main trouble was that I didn't think of them, as I was too busy being led in the directions my expectations sent me.]]

^

From the moment I'd taken off my shirt, and especially once we'd relocated to be near the main pool and therefore among many people, I'd received a great deal of attention. To be more precise, my body had received a great deal of attention. I'd like to blame the bright yellow Speedos, but it was my body's fault. It has developed, adapted, or whatever else it's done, so far that it has crossed over into 'freaky'.

My torso is by far the freakiest part to look at (my ass being merely "cute"). My torso is shaped like a triangle: VERY wide shoulders and matching chest, narrowing down to a VERY narrow waist. People are so used to seeing bodies within normal bounds, that when they see one which is extremely different it exerts an irresistible fascination. Try being in a room with a guy who is seven feet tall, and look at how everybody is fascinated by him. They can't stop looking (mostly upward).

I had shoulders that were freakishly wide. I also had a waist that was even more freakishly narrow. Put one on top of the other (preferably the shoulders being on top), and I had a body shape that people NOTICED, and then STARED at. If they were females, they often drooled at, frequently at both ends.

To make it even worse, my muscles were considerably more noticeable than they'd been even a couple of months ago. NOTHING like the Mr. Universe guys I've seen on TV, thank God, as they're beyond gross [[which is why it hadn't happened. My waist hadn't narrowed any more either, because Julia and I had become concerned about that. I'd stopped growing taller too, because I'd started feeling uncomfortable about my tallness making me stand out too much.]]

My muscles weren't large, but they were everywhere. My whole body rippled. Even standing still, I didn't have flat areas of skin, but bulge after bulge from the muscles beneath the surface. I was repeatedly told that my body looked as good as it was possible for a body to look. "Good" was an imprecise description, because what looked "good" for a professional jockey wasn't the same for a football defender, but I did look EXTREMELY fit, impressively strong, and freakishly tapered.

^

[[There are mixed blessings in becoming a god, as among all the knowledge that I am absorbing, I have learned that "football defender" is not an expression Americans use. It's written above because that's what I thought at the time; my then ignorance of normal football terminology being deliberately as total as I could make it.

Becoming more muscular was one of the subconscious responses to my kidnapping. I'd been in mortal danger over a prolonged period, and that sort of thing tends to 'do a number' on your subconscious. It'd done a number on all eight of mine, which had responded with their recently redoubled degree of body control, by:

• Widening my shoulders even farther (shoulder width increases the ability to perform many feats of strength, as it's like lengthening a lever, only more so).

• Strengthening my muscles considerably.

• Thickening my bones. Having several of them broken had sent a very unambiguous message about that.

• Several other internal tuning changes. Nothing dramatic, just tuning my body's existing abilities in some areas, an obvious one being to increase water retention.

I was now 5'11" tall (180 cm) and weighed 200 pounds (91 kg). My torso had lost an inch of height since just before the kidnapping, while my legs had gained a couple of inches. I'd noticed that I was taller, but hadn't noticed the torso loss. My poolside spectators noticed though; not specifically, but it gave me a sleek look that they admired.