Tess and Fay and the Hungry Ghosts

"Enter FOOL at stage left," you mutter.

You dive in nose-first to join the orgy of Tess and her thought-form doubles, a beast with near a dozen backs and a score of jiggling buttocks. It's like dreams you've had, rolling amid lovely, yielding, fragrant flesh, your world enwrapped in heat and desire, your ears full with a rolling chorus of every possible sound from lips and fingers and tongue and breath and voice and skin.

In Beavertail's secret apartment, with its seams leaking in creatures from the dreamworld in which it's tucked away, you're half in dreamland already.

When you raise your head, wet from nose to chin, you see Tess's face in multiple, in a spectrum from CRAVING to GORGING to GLOWING to ECSTATIC, with her voices alongside, whimpering, grunting, moaning, crying out in pleasure. Tess's thought-forms have shifted a bit, no longer all focused upon Tess herself. As they fill with energy from her aura, from their intimate connection with her, they start loving on each other, sharing their fullness back and forth with pleasure. With a laugh, you move around the edges of the happy throng, catching prismatic flashes off their glasses.

Tess herself is up off her back, and the only way to tell her apart from the other Tess-forms is that her glasses are edged with a flame-patterned frame while each of her duplicates is different. One pair of heavy black square frames, another pair, huge owl-eye circles, another pair with mirrored lenses in the image of the sun and moon, a pair of cat-eye reading glasses on a chain, and on, and on. When you first saw them, they were indistinct, near-alike, with a hint of glasses, a double glint and the outline of rims and earpieces. Now each doppelgänger had particularized, crystallized, manifested her own frame to her gaze.

Gazing at the happy pile of Tess and Tess and Tess, you're caught, yourself, between the judgy feeling What a perv, Fay!, the rebelling feeling A perv, and I own it! and the wonderment of Tess, you astounding being! With your own little soul-suckers off in a corner for now, you can't help but wonder what Morgan would look like, a pile of bony jackstraws with flyaway black hair, or Golondrina. Would her own half-scorned soul fragments take dragon form?

You realize, in the glow of all the Tess-gasms manifesting at arm's length, that, one: You did not cast a circle or a ward, and two: You already know that this in-between space is leaky and therefore, three: in using CHARM to turn the hungry ghosts into lusty orgiasts, you've amplified the signal that brought them here in the first place.

You push yourself to your feet, wiping your mouth on the back of your hand to little avail - though, will dream girl cunt-musk persist, once you return to reality? - anyway, SOMEONE has to be the grown-up here, and nobody else is volunteering. With a sigh, you take up your wand and trace a magic circle round the perimeter, three times three, anchoring it with watchtowers four around, two above and below, and one at the balance point of all.

Looks good. It'll hold. You hope.

Tess and all her bad selves - the Tessies? - continue their orgy. Being slightly dream-stuff, and having Tess the Transformer as their original, well, ah. You blink to see a boyish Tessie, copper-haired, eyeglassed, but with simpler, smoother curves except for his long, pale, veined prong. "Terence" perhaps? He's gripping another Tessie by the bum and laying into her from behind, but as he reaches his climax, his partner turns round and fixes his gaze. She beckons. He collapses forward onto her back. As their lips meet, he fades, goes indistinct, and she absorbs him into herself. That's Tess, then. She claimed him, whoever he was, some regret, some resentment, she filled him up and welcomed him back.

It's working.

Tess picks out three more of her thought-forms, one by one. She wrings a climax out of the one with owl-eyed glasses, fisting her deeply up the cunt until she's flopping on Tess's forearm like a hooked fish in the throes of orgasm. Tess welcomes her back to herself. The thought-form with chained reading glasses, Tess leaps upon, straddling her ginger-bushed crotch, and lifting one pale thigh so she they can grind together, Tess and Library Girl, that's who she must be, young and sad and hungry and lonely, grind into each other until they both find ecstasy together. Tess puts her hands down, holding herself up, until she can catch Library Girl's eyes. Tess lifts Library Girl's hand to touch her forehead, and presses her finger to Library Girl's brow, above her cat-eye glasses. There they stay, poised, sharing, until Library Girl nods, takes a deep breath, and fades into Tess again. Tess clears her throat and sniffles. She does a thing with her glasses and they're clear again, her eyes without tears. The next one, a trembling, attenuated Tessie, glasses half-hidden behind overgrown red bangs, Tess embraces her, comforts her, lets the sad ghost-girl sob into Tess's shoulder, then brings her head up to meet gazes, to kiss, and to fade away into Tess's aura.

Tess needs your help with the next one. The Tessie with the sun and moon glasses is angry, angry, angry, and though Tess fills the thought-form's hunger, she doesn't accept this piece of her soul back.

"Love her, forgive her, let her go", you whisper to Tess. "She tried her best." Could you do that to a piece of yourself? You'll know soon.

Filled with enough Tess to sate its hunger, you open a door in the magic circle as Tess compels her angry fragment to depart, carried by the thought-form.

Principle of Contagion, you fret. Well, at least no one is likely to find it and use it against Tess. "You'll want to keep up your banishing and your aura work," you advise. But Tess is on to another Tessie, and as you try to finish your thought, "Your aura work, because...ah!"

Soft fingers grip your shoulder and spin you about. Your knuckles whiten on your wand. You leave Tess to her last few Tessies, while you face your Faylings, thought-forms curdled round your fears, angers, hurts, and wants. Not so many as Tess, at least.

Time to make fast work of things. "Fay, lovey," you address your image. She cringes at the careless endearment. Oh. She carries your hurt from your mother, and your mother's mother. "Come close, it's all right, she'll never hurt you like that again. Never again. Come kiss me." Her lips are cold. She trembles against you, breaking out into shivers. You stand in embrace, swaying back and forth, an awkward dance. Better to love her and forgive her, young Fay. Without her you'll have a missing piece, that curious girl who gazed and gazed into the mirror. "I love you," you whisper into her ear. "Be part of me."

She tilts her head back. "I'm scared," she rasps, her voice wavering.

"We're bigger than that. We're better than that. We're at Boarbristle Academy and we have such friends," you tell her. "See." You touch her brow with a fingertip. She cautiously raises hers, touches.

"Fucking BEAVERTAIL?" she scoffs. "We were MINERVAL!"

You stare angrily and compose yourself. "Fay. See who we are now." You push the vision of your welcoming morning through your link.

She weeps. "They love y-y-you. Me. They love me!"

"Come be me again," you say.

You stagger, off balance, in a moment of vertigo. You're weeping now, and your arms clutch empty air. Mum. Gram. They'd left their marks. But here you were. Here you are. And here are more Faylings.

What skeletons were they dragging out of your closet?

One steps up, a snide expression on her face. Oh fuck, no. Your temples clench. Fay, the Mean Girl, the bully.

She advances on you and grabs you by the hair. "Bitch," she says. "This is all you deserve." She intones AD NAUSEAM, but without a wand, and with only the strength she's stolen from you, all she gets out of you is a headache and a couple of retches.

You slap her across the face, a stinging blow you feel as sharply as she does. Half-blinded by pain, you drop to your knees. Idiot. Who was just carrying on about Contagion? Similarity, even?. But she's let go of your hair and is shrieking something incoherent. And you, at least, have a wand, and Sad Girl Fay is with you and won't stand for this ****. You stare dumbly at your wand. Well, shitfire, what...ah! You call on the Binding Vines, which whirl up and around from the floor and immobilize your unruly sub-self, the Mean Girl.

"Stew," you tell her. She fumes and struggles, but that's all she can do. Her face goes blotchy pink and she curses you out. But it's not quite connected.

There's another Fay, who brings the recollection of being curled in a tight ball of fear and confusion, too frightened to reach out, too out of her element at Boarbristle to even know what to do. They let me lie there, you recall. You fill her with love and forgiveness, as full as you can, and compel her to depart with your blessing. What happens to banished thought-forms? You have no idea. But there's a little vacancy inside you, a hollow in your head like a missing tooth.

Not all of your past does well shaping your future. But you actually need the Mean Girl. You don't have that shining well of love inside, like Morgan. Morgan. You don't have that bowstring-taut impulse to contend, like Leontes' Warden, Barbara Torch. You need Tough Girl Fay on your side for when you have to act. To keep a sharp eye on those ridiculous first-year Beavertails.

Calling power into your aura with a sigil and an intonation, you advance on Mean Girl Fay. Grasping her platinum-blond bangs, gripping hard, pressing the heel of your hand into her forehead, you take the initiative, and you take her apart. Gently.

"Viper," you hiss. "Bitch. What did cruelty ever give you?"

Mean Girl Fay resists. But each time, you press her with the memory of how bitter the taste of cruelty was, how much it spoilt the sweetness of power.

"You are power," you tell her. "Ferocity. But we know what love is, now." Morgan, you impossible soppy broomstick girl.

"We know what love is," she echoes you.

"Bring your power to protect our love," you say.

She relaxes in the clutches of the vines. With a word, you dismiss them. She falls into your arms. "You impossible bitch," you say. When your lips meet hers, she whips her arms round you again, and it's a love battle, a wrestling match for who will dominate, love or ferocity, until suddenly your foreheads meet with a stunning smack! and you fall down in a heap together.

Someone starts giggling. Maybe it's you. Soon it is you, and Mean Girl Fay, and you're both laughing so hard you're like to piss yourselves, and you close your eyes and calm yourself, steadying your breathing, while she goes on laughing and laughing and laughing until you open your eyes to find it's just you, with a laugh in the back of your throat and a throbbing knot on your forehead.

There are only two Faylings left. One has the strangest expression, a frown on the edge of crying, a curl in her lip on the edge of a kiss or a snarl. A thunderhead of a face that could melt into gentle rain or seize into a lightning squall. You know the feeling in that face. I hate how much I love you. You'd said those very words to Morgan so many times.

Did you really hate how much you loved her? Is that why one of the Hungry Ghosts had wrapped itself around your love? Because it was as much dread, as much fear, as much a barbed hook buried in your heart as it was a sweet devotion.

Your brow furrows to match the Fayling. But there's another approaching, shouldering your dreadful love aside.

This one, well, this one is Princess Fay, that's all you could say in a word or two, a face beautiful as the full moon, white-blonde hair like frost on golden thread, her mouth poised to grin or to toss a spear of wit, her eyes swiveling from side to side, looking for someone to satisfy her whim, her hunger of a moment. All shall love me, and despair.

Looking for you. Your tummy takes a flip-flop, seeing the diamond-tipped desire in her eyes. What could she be bringing? Was this Mum and Gram's dream, long set aside, and suddenly brought to life in this half-world?

They both approach at once, jostling each other. You knit fingers with Dreadful Love as she steps up, holding her at a slight distance. The demon you know, at least. But who was Princess Fay?

She sidles close and lays a hand upon your cheek. Who?

So close that you can see yourself reflected in her eyes, a round-faced girl with an expression of doubt and an enormous pair of glasses.

She's not a Fayling, she's a Tessie.

"Stop her, Fay!" Dreadful Love calls out. She pulls on your arm, trying to capture you away from Princess Fay.

"I'll never let you go again," Princess Fay says. "Dear Tess, now that I see you loved me all along."

I'm not Tess!

"Don't let her!" Dreadful Love says. "I'm your fucking LIFE, Fay, kick that bitch OUT!"

You're not making it easy, Dreadful Love.

"I'm the girl you really want," Princess Fay says. "Everyone wants to have me. Everyone wants to be me. I'm your best self, Tess. Fay."

It's like Princess can't really tell the difference. That's reassuring.

"Be me," Princess Fay says insistently, pressing closer. "Be me."

"FUCK, NO!" Dreadful Love cries. She twists her hand free of yours and leaps upon Princess Fay, and now it's the two of them struggling on the ground, screeching and spitting, two of yourself in seeming, fighting hard to become your future.

"What do I fucking do now?" you mumble. "Oh right. Pretend you're the grown-up. Pretty fucking tired of that."

It's come down to who do you want to be. Now that you know your demons a little better, confronting them face to face, it's time to make some choices.

Before Dreadful Love and Princess Fay tear each other apart.

Fuck.

You have Ambition +2, Bravery -1, Cunning +2, Diligence +0; XP: 2
FRIEND: Morgan, who also owes you a FAVOR.
You have a date to HAVE SEX with Cook, who walks about in a mouthwatering scent cloud of cinnamon apple tart.

Suggestions for resolving GET OUT OF DANGER:

• I want it all. Absorb Princess Fay and Dreadful Love Fay. Regain MIND MELD, get Tess as your HANGER-ON because you have a piece of her soul. Also gain +1 XP, get a CONSEQUENCE. You now have 3 XP.
• I hate how much I love you. Absorb Dreadful Love Fay and banish Princess Fay. Gain +1 XP, get a CONSEQUENCE. You now have 3 XP.
• Sharing the cake. Absorb Dreadful Love Fay and share Princess Fay with Tess. Regain MIND MELD, and get a CURSE related to a mental link to Tess, getting magically lost, transformation, or recurrent disruptions by thought-forms. Also gain +1 XP, get a CONSEQUENCE. You now have 3 XP.
• My best self. Absorb Princess Fay and banish Dreadful Love Fay. Lose Morgan as a FRIEND. Gain Tess as your FRIEND. Regain MIND MELD.
• Strong enough to walk alone. Banish Princess Fay and banish Dreadful Love Fay. Gain +1 XP. Lose Morgan as a FRIEND.

For a CONSEQUENCE, choose something related to confusion, or to your ambiguous feelings for Morgan.

When you return from the secret apartment, if you chose HANGER-ON, then DEAL WITH YOUR HANGER-ON: Roll +AMBITION(0) (-1 CONSEQUENCE, -1 HANGER-ON) as Tess lays claim to you; otherwise ENCOUNTER Morgan.

Resolve GET OUT OF DANGER and describe how you return to House Beavertail.