Sex and Magic

“Why do our little fights always end up like this?”

“Because we’re perverts.”

The two women lay cuddled together in a warm bundle of erotic afterglow. Cyl was curled up against Shady’s form, resting her head on the other’s shoulder, one arm over her stomach, one leg crossed over her thigh. Shady’s one arm curled around Cyl’s back, and with other, she idly traced her fingertips over the smooth skin of Cyl’s arm. The two sat upon an enormous bed, in the middle of a wide courtyard of sorts, the only structure on a small island floating in an endless blue sky.

Shady stared up at the world’s silvery sun thoughtfully. Cyl kept her gaze on Shady’s chest. She wasn’t sure what to say after that week-long quickie.

Shady saved her the trouble. “So. You reconsidered yet? Or do I need to give you a thousand more orgasms?”

Cyl let out a little sigh, then said. “I’m still saying no.”

Shady rolled her eyes and slid up on the bed. Cyl pulled away, crossing her legs and clasping her hands over calves. Shady pulled her legs up, hooking her arms around them to rest her chin on her knees. She gave Cyl an exasperated look.

“What’s the harm?”

Cyl frowned. “You know what happens to most of them.”

“That’s because they were accidents. Unlike that stupid pixie, we can perfectly control how everything works. No cults, no Cascade Events, no Pandora mutants, no Living Dimensions trying to kill everything, no supervillains showing up to take advantage, no men getting the power and then nuking everything.”

Cyl scowled. “That only happened in one timeline, and they had their fingers on the launch buttons already.”

“I still say if Sex Magic had showed up there earlier, things would have gone different.” Shady shrugged, then uncurled herself and stretched out to lie on her side. “At least Temael didn’t get them.”

Cyl’s jaw clenched for a moment, but she made herself relax. Shady frowned, and put one hand on the other woman’s crossed ones. “Sorry. I shouldn’t say the T-word.”

Cyl shook her head. “It’s not like I can hide from it.” For a moment, her left eye flickered from gold to crimson, the pupil creasing into a slit. But just as quickly, it seemed to go back to normal.

“You can’t hide the mark from us. I can still see it.”

“Let me pretend to have some vanity, okay?”

The two chuckled softly, and set together for another minute in silence.

Shady gave Cyl’s hands a squeeze. “Come on, pleeeeeease!”

Cyl sighed again, and pushed her hand away. “You’re just not going to give up on this, are you?”

“I guess I just don’t see what the big deal is. We empower mortal women all the time.”

“Small powers. Powers with general utility that happen to also be useful for sex.”

“And also cock-control powers.”

Cyl frowned. “Sometimes. Temporarily.”

Shady rolled her eyes. “Whitney and Lettie give girls penis powers in their worlds all the time.”

“Right. In their worlds. They lose them when they leave.”

Shady smirked, and glanced to the side. “Not all of them.”

Cyl blinked. With a thought, she scanned the whole of planet Earth, a dimension away, for the offending presence of anything remotely resembling Sex Magic. She found no less than one hundred women with varying degrees of the power. Admittedly very weak variations, but still…

Cyl’s jaw tightened again.

Shady rolled her eyes again. “You could have checked for that at any time. But nothing’s come of it, okay? It can’t be passed around like the original power. It’s severely restricted in use, both in distance and multi-targeting. It—”

“I’m going to remove them,” said Cyl.

Shady sat up. “Don’t. The women who have it have earned it.”

Cyl suddenly lunged forward, pinned Shady down. Her eyes glowed a brilliant gold as she pushed her lips against hers. Shady didn’t fight her. After a moment that subjectively took hours for the two, Cyl broke the kiss and glared down at her.

“If this is just going to lead to another fight until we fuck, let’s just skip the fight part. I’m not budging on this.”

Shady grinned. “No arguments from me on the first part, but when we’re done, I’m still going to nag you about it.”

Cyl slowly pulled off her. “I’ll let those women keep their powers. But I will not allow any of you to unleash Sex Magic on Earth. I don’t care how limited you make it. It will ruin their civilization. We keep our Blessings hidden for a reason.”

“It’s not exactly a peaches and rainbows society down there as it is,” said Shady.

Cyl shook her head. “We can vet every woman, and man, we chose to bless. We can ensure those we create are responsible. But if we just give 4 billion women that kind of unbreakable control over men, even without the out-of-control nature of the Magic in other timelines, that is too much chaos.”

Shady put her hands on her hips as she floated to her feet. “We can easily vet every single human in a blink. So, we don’t empower every woman. Fine. We can empower most of them. We can even tweak the power to give fewer incentives to be abusive.”

Cyl elevated herself up as well. In their default forms, she was a head taller than Shady, and looked down on her with a hard glare.  “It’s still going to be abused eventually. Power corrupts, after all.”

Shady laughed, not at all intimidated. “We know that first hand, don’t we?”

Cyl stood firm, crossing her arms. “Yes. We do. Which is why I can’t fathom why any of you want it to run rampant on yet another world.”

Shady shrugged again. “It’s not like we couldn’t fix things if it got out of hand.”

“The best way to avoiding needing to fix it would be to not even cause the problem in the first place. Most people can’t handle the Blessing. One glance at the planet would tell you that.” She shook her head. “Again, why? You know better, but you still pester me about it.”

Shady sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s just… fun, okay? It’s nostalgic. Thinking back to those days, before everything went to shit, it was nice, you know? Once the first few rough years were done, the Magic just opened everything up for people. Men got laid all the time, women were fully liberated, everyone was healthy and fit, and I don’t know about your timeline, but in mine, the psychic power aspect actually made people regulate themselves. Yeah, there were some psychos out there, some Mages still got carried away from time to time, but by and large, once women started understanding how men really worked mentally, and started sharing their own minds with their lovers, there was this stability that started to take place.”

She gazed off into the distant clouds, glancing over the other floating islands. In this world of Cyl’s creation, winged men and women spent their days in peaceful harmony. Shady watched them musing over art, singing ballads, making love in the sky. It was a little too squeaky-clean for her taste, but she couldn’t fault the theme. “If the Surges hadn’t happened, who knows? Things might have worked out, and my Earth might have settled into a hippie lover orgy commune, like you got going here.”

“Even the stable ones never become fully peaceful like that.” Cyl was silent for a time, resting her chin against her hand thoughtfully. “Okay. Tell you what. You can use Replicant Worlds.”

Shady turned back to her, cocking an eyebrow. “Beg pardon?”

Cyl looked up. “You can duplicate the Earth and throw the Magic at it there. Test run it. I still don’t want this timeline’s Earth to undergo that kind of alteration, but if you just want to see what would happen, if you’re just feeling nostalgic, run a duplicate for a few years.”

Shady sighed. “Aw, it’s no fun just using our Created. That’s like masturbating versus sex. You know what your Created will do, even if you try to not look ahead. Giving the power to a stranger, you don’t know what they’ll do with it!” She winked. “And that’s what makes it fun!”

Cyl closed her eyes, took a breath, then opened them again. She placed her hands on Shady’s shoulders. “Shadia. I want one. Just one. A world where we get to see what humanity would become without any cosmic entities or weird magic or aliens or whatever else fucking them over before they got to be who they were supposed to be.”

Shady cocked an eyebrow at her. “And you’re going to do this by… letting us go down and fuck everyone’s brains out, and giving some of them magic powers, and bringing them to our worlds, and—”

“And keeping that stuff so far under the radar that it doesn’t make a difference. Look, we settled on this world, because it was one of the least-interfered with.”

“There’s a million just like it, without even us to interfere. I’m just saying, us just deciding to lay even a few of these mortals and not immediately wiping their memories, we’ve already had an impact. How many kids aren’t going to be born, because we stepped into these people’s lives and took them on impossible sexcapades instead of letting them hook up with other mortals the normal way?”

“You don’t care about kids.”

“I’m talking about lives and the butterfly effect. How many mortals aren’t going to exist anymore because of us? I fucked a guy who was about to go get drunk and try to have sex with his ex-girlfriend, and she was going to let him, and he was going to get her pregnant, and they would have stayed together for the kid’s sake, and it would have been a miserable time, but that shitty childhood would have motivated that kid to grow up and start a tech company that was going to sponsor the development of a more efficient rechargeable battery that would have added an extra quarter-step to technological progress.

“Well, guess what? I went down, and caught that guy before he left his house, and I sucked him into my Chain Link Void, and tickled his cock until he went insane, and then fucked his brains out until he came so much, he couldn’t get a boner again for a year.”

Shady shrugged. “That made him clean up his act. He’s a model employee with a high-paying job, and he’s marrying some other woman now. No kids yet. His ex got hitched to a lawyer and has two other kids. And it’ll be an extra twenty years longer before that battery even gets its first prototype, and that chain of delays is going to set things back another hundred years when it comes to developing space travel.”

Cyl didn’t let go of her. “I know you already set things in motion to make sure that battery gets made on schedule.”

Shady pushed her hands away. “Okay! Then, see? Problem fixed. I irrevocably changed the course of human history by fucking a specific guy, but I was able to reset the butterfly effect that followed. So, what’s the problem with testing Sex Magic on this Earth, under our watchful eye?”

Cyl shook her head and sighed. “That is completely different! You’re talking about upending the entire paradigm of all civilization through 8 billion vectors! What you changed with the battery was a subtle thing no one would have noticed anyway. You’re talking about giving the entire world a power that will radically upend cultures, change their technological advancement, change their religions, everything! The only fix to that is a total reset of the timeline, which would just make the whole thing pointless!”

Cyl gave her a firm look. “Make a world. Take people there if you must make it as authentic as possible. If you absolutely must, go to another clean timeline and shake things up there. But don’t do it to this one. We agreed we wouldn’t ruin this place, and we won’t.”

Shady scowled. “What are you really afraid of? We can fix anything we break, and no one has to suffer for it. So why?”

Cyl sighed again, glaring at her. “Because it isn’t just the mortals I worry about. If we let Sex Magic run rampant down there, I…” she paused, then shook her head. “There’s no nice way to say it. I’m afraid we’ll get caught up in it. We’ll lose ourselves in the revelry. And then we’ll just be like Domina.”

Shady had been about to retort, but shut her mouth as she let that thought stew. Finally, she said, “Yeah. Okay. Point.”

Cyl reached out for her again. This time, Shady reached back and they clasped their hands. “I’m sorry. I know you all think I’m a pain in the ass when I don’t let you just have your fun. But I do it for a reason.”

Shady nodded. “I mean, I get it. I’m halfway there as it is.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No. I get it.”

They were silent for a time. Then Shady pressed herself against Cyl, giving her a deep kiss. “This is why you’re the leader. You look further ahead than the rest of us.”

Cyl kissed her back and the two shared no more words as they made love for another few weeks.