It takes a week to build a routine (and a moment to shatter it)

For the first time since I put the reality ring in my finger, I found a sense of normalcy in my life again. It's not the same normal as before, and I was probably never going to get that one back after all that’s happened. But now today and tomorrow are starting to seem more similar than they are different, and I probably would have never expected to feel so happy over that being the case.

The first thing I do in the morning is update my blog. I explained my short absence as being the result of a health scare I would rather not divulge information about publicly but that I am no longer concerned by. What excuse was I going to use when someone close to me inevitably asks what that’s about? No idea, but I was leaning towards telling them that I felt too embarrassed to admit to taking a vacation. Didn’t paint me in the best light, but it sounded in my head like it was convincing.

Writing about myself felt weird. I debated with myself over if Ringmaster was prominent enough to warrant a mention or if I could skip it for now. Considering that she was publicly confirmed to have at least two different powers, that she had already saved people in the double digits, and that the Exploiter’s escape made the entire event get prominent coverage; that wasn’t really an option available to me. There was a brief consideration on my part of clarifying that the Ringmaster’s true debut happened days earlier against a trashy catboy, but I didn’t have any way to plausibly explain how that could be the case when the heroine that day lacked a name and had a slightly different face. True be told, I felt significant relief over keeping my far less successful first rodeo a secret.

Covering all the happenings I missed during my first day back was quite a challenge, and I couldn’t help but to feel my heart hurt as I finished the paragraph dedicated to Friendly Paw’s sudden disappearance with the call to action of begging anyone with a lead to contact the line that had already been established. Every amateur journalist bone in my body cracked over having to keep what I knew to myself, especially when I knew that hundreds of thousands must be fearing the worst in regards to their idol. But the world keeps spinning, and if I wanted to do Felicia justice, I needed to shut up for her sake.

Thankfully, making new entries got easier after that. Speaking of things getting easier, I was stunned to learn that we’re now meal nudists. I came fresh out of the shower with the dry tears perfectly cleaned out of my face to see the opposite scene of the previous night. Regina had arranged so that everyone but me was nude at the table. Not wanting to be the odd woman out two consecutive times, I stripped before joining them. And that was that. We now all ate breakfast and dinner completely in the nude, and since lunch happened during the middle of training we were naked for that too.

We broke attempt number 100 on the ‘Civilian Rescue Course’ on the fifth day of running it. We still had way too many attempts after that benchmark. The constant repetition, with slight variations that kept increasing the difficulty, didn’t stop until I could succeed ten times in a row. Blessed be Regina for making me develop all the necessary instincts a true hero would need for crisis situations like that one. But also damn her for the aching she caused my body.

Because, of course, it was not just running the course itself while avoiding the shots of unfairly competent marksmen. It was also getting fucked like a slab of meat every time I got tagged by those cock-sucking snipers. They had sex with me so many times that I could tell probably be blinded (and **** so I couldn’t differentiate Mark’s penis from a plastic equivalent) and I would be able to tell who was in my ass just from their personal style.

Rose, the absolute fucking saint, was the gentlest dom out of all of them. I had a sneaking suspicion that this was due to inexperience and perhaps apathy towards taking charge during sex. Considering the way she reacted when Regina made a casual comment during one dinner about her being ‘submissive and breedable’, I was probably correct. But I was not about to let anyone but me know that I had learned this, because I needed her to still take turns being the dom so that my body could properly rest.

Shayna, to put it bluntly, was a mean bitch. The opposite of Rose in a way that seemed almost comical when one of them fucked me right after the other, she was the one most likely to spank me, pull my hair, or spit on me. All of which she tended to do multiple times in the same session. To her credit, I couldn’t deny that it had its appeal. Same with how roughly she rammed into me. I could do with it being more of a weekly thing rather than something that might happen twice in one day, but it wasn’t unfun.

Mark was a total show-off when it came to his power and stamina. I knew Regina had him beat in regards to the second category and she might secretly be powerful enough to punch the moon out of orbit, but she wisely knew that there was more to sex than just that and didn’t normally use much of either with me. Mark, on the contrary, had realized that the full-nelson position worked to his strengths and decided his time would be better invested in perfecting it rather than trying out anything else. To his credit, I couldn’t disagree with the results. Mark was certainly my certified best male sexual partner at this point, a position he might keep for life.

Regina, to my complete lack of surprise, was the most competent of all my partners. Not like anything else should be expected of a strange being who loved having sex and has been at it since before the Common Era began. She treated me significantly gentler than S&M, but she certainly had far more of a presence when topping me than Rose did. Almost like she’s done this enough times to have an endless library on what to do to appeal to different kinds of folk, and that she must have been able to find the profile that matches me perfectly after just a few tries.

Getting my holes plugged and unplugged more often that the average electrical socket wasn’t what finally ended the endless repetition of that exercise. Instead, I just happened to notice something during one of our lunch breaks. And by ‘I noticed’, I of course meant that someone had to essentially punch me in the face with something that didn’t make sense and only then did I register it.

“You said it yourself. Hera was just as bad when she was still sucking after you nutted. So just admit already that I’m not a demon.” Hera was rolling her eyes at Mark. I was too busy eating to join either conversation, but I had been admittedly paying more attention to Rose and Shayna, so I didn’t know what brought that out. Regardless, those words activated something in my brain.
“Wait! Wait, wait, wait. Wait just a minute there!” I stood up in a rush, almost knocking over my drink if it wasn’t for Rose saving it. “How did I even do that?”
“With yer magic ring?” Mark asked, confused as to why I was making such a scene. Shayna and Rose seemed to share his confusion, and Regina was trying to think hard about what I meant.
“The reality ring is not meant to work on men.” I pointed a finger at Regina. “One of the very first things she told me is that it only works on women! But if that’s the case, how did I use it on Mark too?”
The weight of all of our stares seemingly didn’t affect Regina, who simply smiled and clapped her hands together. “Welcome to the small group of ringmasters who have figured out the loophole Hera. You’ve broken the record for the fastest induction.”

As it turned out, there was a way to ‘trick’ the ring into working on men, albeit in a very limited manner. When I made that change at Granny’s, the emphasis was on me. Limited copies of me would be be created for a predetermined time based on how long it took me to complete an activity. The ring therefore, took me as the main subject to take notice of. The four people to be subjected, including Mark, were recognized as secondary subjects. And apparently, the ring had no gender restrictions on who could be a secondary.

Logically, I had some questions for Regina. The main one at that moment was why I wasn’t informed that this was something I could do from the get go. Her very sensible answer was that for primary and secondary subjects to be at play then whatever change was going to be done with the ring had to be of advanced complexity, and as such it likely also dealt with reality alteration. Which was extremely taxing for a new Ringmaster, and it could very well kill them. Because of this, Regina prefers to keep quiet about it, and simply lets her masters to figure it out on their own. According to her, the snowball effect of power increment and increasing attraction to women meant that most people who have worn the ring (and didn’t die immediately) eventually got to a point where using it to control or modify men was simply seen as unnecessary.

Considering that exactly none of the previous wielders of the ring had dealt with a world full of superpowered being of questionable morality across the gender spectrum, I could see her point about it normally not being something worth bothering about. But taking into account that I might have been able to use the ring against the Exploiter, I was still miffed over not being told about that possibility earlier. Regina did offer a good counter argument that I might not have been strong enough at that point to do something like that without something seriously messed up happening to my body as a consequence, but that didn’t change much about how I felt.

Regardless, we didn’t really have much time to dwell on the past. The big benefit of learning about the loophole was that it finally allowed me to train something different. The very next day in the training area was spent with Mark and Regina exclusively, using him as my lab rat to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

Turns out, as long as I put the emphasis on myself and never directly addressed him, I was golden. For example: I could create a clone of myself that would exist for as long as I remained topless, and whose kisses would make any dude bald. But if I said that a different clone should make Mark specifically grow hair on his head, I was unable to create said copy of myself.

We didn’t actually go out to train for a few days after that. My body actually needed some proper rest, and after exercising it and my mind so intensely, it was way overdue for my ‘magic muscle’ to receive some love. What this meant in practice was doing the same small changes over and over again thousands upon thousands of times in order for me to not just feel the burn, but for the burn to not even happen in the first place. While Regina did warn me that doing a far smaller number of substantial changes was a quicker way to achieve a true mastery of the ring, the small steps approach was the safest path that also required the least amount of effort.

Turning the hair of three ladies into an RGB display was initially amusing but it also got tedious on the very first day. I would have loved to at least do that with Felicia while we talked and I got to know her better, but sadly it was Faux who was in control at that time. While I knew that there were ways to bring Felicia out temporarily, I felt insecure over if I should keep giving her small glimpses of light knowing she will get dragged back to the cage. Should I wait until I could set her free for good? I didn’t know the answer, but it was enough to convince me that I shouldn’t just seek her out to deal with my boredom.

Today we were finally going back to the training grounds, and I felt pumped over it. Shayna and Mark had used the break to build themselves some rudimentary exo-suits, a modification of an old design of their according to Rose, that would be good enough to survive the lessons of hand to hand combat I was going to receive.

Truly, it was a shame that we were just getting prepared to start a day’s work when a felt a hand around my ankle.

“Found you!”