Questions and Concerns, With a Root Arbiteress

As most people did upon consciousness, I opened my eyes. It was strange, though. I couldn't exactly remember if I closed them or not, or even when I did, or for how long I'd kept them closed. It felt like I was in a time beyond time. All white; all empty. All endless.

Actually sounded like Alaska.

Maybe this was heaven? I could've thought so hard to myself I died. Happened to the grandpa of a friend I knew. Never got to taste his special meatloaf recipe.

"Hey!"

A voice resounded behind me. If I was holding a stack of books or something I would've dropped it, but luckily, I only flinched like a jumpy pipsqueak.

Then I stopped. The voice. It was here!

Wait a sec. No thanks to my 20/20 vision but I'll thank it anyway, I furrowed a brow. That hadn't sounded like the disembodied, somewhat androgynous faceless apparition from earlier. Still, it was something, and it was here because of me. So, breathing in, I turned, expecting some unimaginable creature or disgruntled pixie in a red minidress. What I saw instead was a slightly disgruntled girl -- she looked barely as old as me, equipped, however, with a stare that seemed predisposed to condescend, any one, any time. She folded her arms, her homely un-remarkable, thin body covered in a shaggy hoodie.

"What makes you think you can bother anyone ya want, shrimp?!"

"Shrimp?" I echoed.

Mm, I thought. Shrimp.

"Yeah," she hissed through surprisingly even teeth. "That's what we call the expendables like you. Shrimps."

"But--"

"Get to the point already!"

I'd barely said anything, but didn't contest it. I summoned the lessons from that yoga class I took a month earlier with my sis. Ooomm shanti shant shanti...

"Look," I started, giving her a straight look, "I know you're busy people and all. But I just wanted to ask a few questions about this whole 'Arbiter' situation and was wondering whether you--"

"The Seed-Mother. Yes, you've been made the latest one." She made a gesture that looked as dismissive as it did sympathetic, somehow, and I wasn't sure if I should have felt companionship or worthless. "You know it just happened to fall on you 'cause my dad was being lazy. It wasn't like six nights of toil, five mornings of grueling contemplation. More like 'whoops, oh hey, look, the genus threads weaved with his spirit node, I guess that's it, haha, have fun'. "

"Huh?"

The girl sighed. As if she couldn't shrink further into that bargain bin hoodie already. "Never mind, you don't know anything I'm talking about."

"Yes," I agreed, "exactly! Which is why I want to, now."

"Do ya?" A weird air surrounded her, and the grin on her. For a while she just looked at me, and I looked at her back, until she smirked and stepped forward. and suddenly I felt my stomach lurch.

There was a momentary friction sensation, and then, a whirl of color and ****.

"Wh-where are we?!" I tried to re-orient myself as the whiteness was whipped away. Looking around, I realized it was the kitchen again, from way before. A nose crinkled. Or was it only a couple minutes ago?

"The Gift of the Seed-Mother -- or Grow-Father, Dirego, Arbiter, whatever -- was created by accident, from shavings off the greater cosmic entity known as -- " The girl curled a lip. "Never mind, you don't need to know that part. Basically, there are many pocket dimensions, worlds, multiverses all coddled out there in the finite trappings of infinite space, and hypothetically the one that holds the 'DNA' to it all belongs to a line of entities called 'Inheritors'. The one holding the 'DNA' is the all-powerful jackass, without them, nothing will exist. Arbiters are different from Inheritors in mostly just one way, which is that they can basically do whatever the shit they want with the DNA of the world, split it, rearrange it, clone it, whereas we can modify it but only indirectly. Outside of that, though, you honestly wouldn't be able to tell the difference; to the average schmuck, our powers are pretty much equally unquestionable."

I nodded. "I see." But I didn't, at least, not until my brain caught up with me. Instead I was wondering how she was sitting down on nothing but air in the middle of my kitchen, where currently my own sister sat across from me in the table eating breakfast not saying a thing about what we were talking about or the fact that a stranger was in our home and levitating like Barbara effing Eden. My heart skipped. Speaking of which, her shirt was still off. My sister's, that was. Her breasts rising up and down with the full benefits of the gravitational pu--

"That's right, it is. You wanna see more?"

My eyes darted to the girl's grin-accompanied glare. How she pulled that off was even more of a mystery than her magic trick, and I meant her grin.

"Hey," I warned as convincingly as I could, "don't... do that!"

"Do what?" she feigned the act of feigning innocence. Yes, how you read it.

"Read my mind!" Shifting towards her in my chair, I pointed, "And how'd you do that, anyway? I wasn't able to read my sister's thoughts." I paused. "Then again, I only focused on planting thoughts in her and nothing else..."

The girl scoffed, giving me the look of an exasperated babysitter. "Are you an idiot? How long have you had the mark for already anyway?"

Shrugging, I did some calculations. "I think... 36 minutes?" I brought a hand to my forehead. "It feels so... hazy still, though. Like I've been in numerous stages of my life at once or something..."

"Oh yeah, I forgot about the whole temporal plane discrepancies." Floating-Girl gritted her teeth and recalibrated. "Still... if it's true about that 36 minute thing... that means in your first few instances of consciousness post-branding, you were already able to channel a root conduit and come into the Arbiter Realm. You might be more than just a shrimp after all."

We idled in silence for a bit, myself unsure of what to say. I still hadn't processed the previous information she'd given to me, and I was starting to wonder what I had walked myself into, because what the hell was it.

My sis laughed at some picture on her phone, and it wasn't until then that I remembered she was still there in the room with us. On a whim, I sent a hand towards the window and pulled back a curtain. Well, at least the sky looked real... and the birds, too. And the next-door neighbor watering the copse.

"You're in your home, Daniel." The girl looked at me with ambiguous eyes as I fell back into my chair. "Your real home. And," she snapped her fingers with another insidious grin, "with your real sister."

I blushed when I realized I was caught looking at Abigail's breasts but didn't get the chance to plead my case. Instead, my jaw dropped, mute-rendering. Why, you might have asked were you another me looking at original me looking on in amazement?

Well, because in front of my very own pupils, I watched Abigail's breasts expand and grow until they were nearly big enough to host two birds' nests and a Whoville party. How big were they now, exactly?

"Does it matter?" Floating-Girl hovered over to my ear. "Though if you're curious, why don't you ask her yourself."

I was actually going to tell her yeah right, but instead I turned my head to face Abigail and blurted out, "Those tits are amazing, sis, how big are they?"

I was mortified to hear the words come out of my mouth so blatantly, as honestly from the heart as they were.

Looking up from her plate, Abigail only smiled and, lifting one hand from her fork, cupped a breast and jiggled it. "Thanks for noticing, bro. They're about H cups on some scales; get as much of an eyeful as you need, just tell me if you think you should, like, put your hands on them or whatever."

I did a a double-take as she returned to her food. Grinning next to me, Floating-Girl spoke up, but this time directly to her.

"Abigail."

She looked to the stranger she had never seen before with casual amiability, even glancing at her crossed legs that sat on nothing whatsoever then letting them glide back up to her face. "Yeah?"

"You like sucking on your nipples, don't ya, ya pervert?"

Abigail didn't look the least bit offended by the slur as she looked down and shrugged, as if she just had pointed out the time. "Ever since I first started experimenting in middle school."

I let my jaw stay unlocked, Floating-Girl electing to nefariously continue with a held back snicker. "But don't you love sucking on your brother's penis, too?"

A new look lit up in Abigail's eyes, and she smiled. "Oh, yeah. I'm really into the whole **** thing, at least if my brother Daniel's involved."

"Don't play dumb, Ab, I know you totally fuck your Dad, too."

"You caught me," Abigail giggled.

Floating-Girl prattled on, "You like it even more when your Mom's watching, don't you?"

"Ugh, looove it," sing-songed my totally unfazed sister. "She's so helpless when I tease Dad that it turns me on, too." Giggle. "Honestly," she added quickly, "I wouldn't mind lapping up that tight pussy of hers too, eventually. But she's gonna have to earn it if she wants it."

Okay, I mentally inhaled, my knee accidentally banging against the table, okay!

"Okay, stop!" With my hands held up in the air, Floating-Girl turned to me while Abigail fondled her breasts and tried to slip one out of her bra in order to suck on. "Just... we're... going a bit too fast..." Stumbling over my words, I continued, "I don't even know your name! Or what exactly our--our relationship is! How you even know me, or if other Arbiters even exist!"

The look in Floating-Girl's face was neither one of sympathy or amusement; it was more a hybrid, doused in insidiousness and yet clear thinking murmur.

"My name is Barbara." She grinned. "But you don't want to call me that, do you, Danny boy?"

"I -- " My initial response dissipated when I realized she was right, in fact. I didn't. Looking her over, I came to the conclusion that she was better suited for a more fitting title. "How 'bout Eternal Mistress?" I offered helpfully.

Then realizing what just came out of my mouth, I gasped.

"You..!" She only burst out laughing, wiping a tear from an eye. "You just compelled me into saying that, didn't you?!"

I glanced across the table as Abigail fitted a nipple into her own mouth. In the meantime, Eternal Mistress -- I mean, Barbara, smiled and raised a hand, but not out of surrender. "You have three options, Daniel." She looked up at me and a glistening eye seemed to penetrate through me, but not unpleasantly. A shudder took over. Somehow, it felt very... bold. Arousing. Sexy.

I shook my head. She went on, with a whirling hand, "You can accompany me, and I'll show you the true power of an Arbiter rooted. If you can withstand my influence on you in the same time, however, and can emerge unscathed and no different from before, I will grant you Root Arbiter status. You won't need to develop your skills over time like normal shrimps; you'll be at your most powerful with just a snap of my finger." Then she lifted her chin, another inscrutable expression on her face. "But if you falter and succumb to me," she smiled, "you become my eternal **** -- and I your eternal mistress. For real."

This had to be a joke. A dream. I just stared at her, then scrunched a brow in puzzlement. "What's the third option?"

"The third option is neither." A sizzling mark suddenly appeared on her fingers and she raised them up for me to see. "You can walk away and return to your humdrum little life in your cookie-cutter house with your big-boobed sister. But if you do, your mark will be erased. You'll be humdrum again, too." Smoke wisped through the air as she curled her fingers back into her hand. "Ordinary little Daniel. Maybe it's not so bad, after all, the life of a bottom-feeder. Less of a weight on your conscience."

I sat back in my chair, unable to believe my luck. Running a hand through my hair, I felt the room fade away in my mind as I frantically assessed the situation. Then spluttered back to my senses.

"You're crazy," I finally said.

"And you wanted answers." O Wonderful Mistress -- er, I mean, Barbara, folded her arms and looked at me. "This is how you get them. And they don't come for free. Besides," she stretched the corner of her lip, "if you play your cards right you'll even get something decent out of it. Not everyone who gets the Arbiter's Mark gets to be a Root Arbiter, you know. Some die or go into standstill or lose their minds." She made a tired gesture. "I'm practically doing you a favor."

A favor!? Making me choose between my freedom and potential -- potential -- power that I wasn't even sure she could be telling the truth about? And my sister -- was my family even going to go back to normal if I chose to be?

Screw me. Screw me now, in every orifice available.

Maybe, I figured, this was too good to be true, after all. Absentmindedly, my gaze drifted to her fingers. Could she really erase this mark? Undo this impossible turn of events? I let out an internal groan. But I just got the thing!

It's like my twice-removed cousin always said; act first, ask questions way effing later. I was curious, I was fresh; meeting an impractically powerful maniac was my yield.

Whatever. It was too late now. Sighing, I looked at Barbara and her hooded face, and came to a decision.