"No. If you do that, you die"

The sheer abruptness of it made me erupt in laughter. I did not expect this magic lady to have such comedic chops! Yet, when I got myself back together and looked at Regina, she wasn't laughing. Instead, she had the expression of someone who had just realized that they almost fucked up severely due to forgetting something of vital importance. And that took some humor away from the situation, honestly. “What do you mean I would die?”

She scratched her neck. “Well, I can't say for sure that you would die there. But odds are that you would blow up into many little pieces. That thing you got there, it's like an extra muscle. You need to train it in order to become strong with it. Wishing for multiple's people genuine affection with no prior experience using the ring would be like you trying to lift up a boulder.” She mimicked picking up a large rock in front of her and struggling to get it over her head. “The big difference is that, with the boulder, you'd have no chance of even putting your life in danger because you couldn't get it off the ground. The ring isn't like that; it will let you try anything, even if your body is not ready for it” She pretended to get crushed.

I took a moment to process that, but something seemed really weird about what she just told me. If that was something that could happen, and she knew if beforehand, why was I just learning it now? I asked her, and it didn't exactly reassure me that her eyes immediately started searching for any place they could look at other than my own.

“I kinda forgot to mention that, because it wasn't in the cards.” She was speaking at a speed far greater than what my car can do in a good day. “And I might or might not have been neglecting putting it in the cards in case whoever the next ringmaster is turns out to be an asshole.” She gulped heavily. “Which, for the record, you don't seem to be. That's why I'm letting you know.”

I wanted to say something about that. Yet, as indignant as I was that I could have turned into chunks of Michael meat, she did warn me before I could do anything stupid. And I could figure myself doing the same thing in her place. “You know what, fair enough. There are a lot of jerks in the world, I wouldn't want to serve them either.” Regina sighed in relief at my reaction. “So, how do I train this thing?”

"You do that my causing changes with your wishes. For classification purposes, there are four categories of wishes, and they vary in how much power they require. Any wish you’re not fully ready for, but that you can do without significant problems, you’ll be warned about by the ring heating up” She beat her fingers against the table as she searched for an analogy. “The heat depends on how much it wants you to know you shouldn’t be doing that. At the minimum level, it won’t really heat up more than if you had your finger inside someone’s mouth.”

“Like yours?” I asked as I reached over to wedge my finger inside there. If she knew I was teasing her, she countered me like a champion, quickly turning it into a finger blowjob that I had to abandon before I died of laughter.

“Correct. And in the opposite scenario, it will feel as if you’re touching the sun. Or more accurately, it will feel like that for a single second before you pass out from the pain. If it ever gets that hot, expect to wake up with a few extra appendages. If you do wake up, that is.” She contemplated something. “Would you like to know in which places I’ve seen boobs sprout?”

“No thanks” I dismissed that the very second she proposed it. Maybe a part of me was a little curious, but I had eaten recently enough that I didn’t want to risk vomiting. “You mentioned something about categories a minute ago, right?”

“The categories are based on the changes that they make. They are: of conduct, of appearance, of personality, and of history. And that’s also the order in terms of how hard they are.” She thought of something, and grinned. “By hard, I mean difficulty, not the state of your dick afterwards.” I giggled before asking her to go on.

“Anyways, the cheapest thing you can do is to make someone commit an action that's physically possible for them to do. But it costs more if they offer some resistance to it, or if you alter their mind in conjunction. You could, for example, make any woman flash her tits for you" She flashed me as a demonstration, which was pretty easy for her. She just had to move her chains by an inch to show her nipples. "But if you want her to not realize that she did it, or convince her it was her idea, you enter into the personality realm. And now you need to mess with that too.”

“Makes sense, I guess. But that seems to mean that the cheapest thing is also pretty situational, and there would only be a few where I can really use if for anything worth doing.” I scratched my chin. “Are personality and appearance what they sound like?”

She nodded “Right on the money. Personality changes are any modifications to the mind, and appearance changes are the same for the body. The latter is cheaper than the former, but most things you can do there are a lot costlier than just telling someone to do something.”

Understanding, I tried to think of an example to give myself. “So, making you give me a blowjob is cheaper than give you bigger lips with which to do that, and that is cheaper than making you love giving me blowjobs?” I might have pulled some inspiration from what happened with the finger a moment ago.

She brushed her hair. “I mean, I already personally love giving blowjobs along with any other sexual conduct. And if the resistance could dip into the negatives I wouldn’t want to imagine what ordering to give you one would do. But for your seven ladies, that would probably be the case.”

This new lecture on how the ring worked really felt as if Regina was putting her all into letting me know the ins and outs. I supposed it was to compensate for the ‘wishes can kill you if you're not ready for them’ omission she made earlier. Still, there was one type of change left, and I wasn't quite sure how it was even possible for it to work. “What about the last one, Historical? I thought the ring only changed the reality of women, how would that work if that's true?”

She clapped her hands, trying to get the two of us to concentrate on what she would say. “Like this. People are their present along with the past. Never seen someone mess with the future directly, and I wouldn't recommend being the first to try it. You can change a specific person's personal history, in order to change what decisions they've made in life, their close relationships, and so on. The ring basically pulls a retcon, and will create a new timeline that supplants and replaces the one it's based on, with only the ringmaster aware of any changes.” She then pinched an invisible grain of sand and held it in front of me. “Even the smallest change of this kind drains a fuckton, so don't even think of doing one any time soon.” She stared deep into my soul as she finished, hoping to instill the fear of God in me so I wouldn't do something catastrophically stupid.

“If I had a literal mom fetish, instead of a MILF one, this is the part where I would be bummed that I can't turn into their actual son until I get more powerful. Of course, it'd be a little hard to plan how I would have been born to multiple different women, but I'd like to believe that version of me could have made it work.” As we laughed, I started wondering how the fuck was I going to train myself in the art of the ring.