1: 36-YO-Male, Nicholas Turner, Ann-Arbor, Michigan, USA. (POV Male-lead.) 2: Polytheism; Sjofn & Ba'laat Gebal. 2a: also appearing prominently; his formerly-mortal wife Audrie Bex Turner (33YO), and their mutual girlfriend Nadasia Destiny Johnson (19YO).

I woke to the sound of the fanfare of trumpets, in a bed that I swiftly realized wasn't my own, with a pair of women lying beside me who also weren't my wife, although she was there too, nor our mutual girlfriend, who was also; and I wasn't sure what the hell was going on, but I was more alarmed by the fact that one of these women had two pairs of wings sprouting from her back at the trailing edge of where her shoulder blades would be if she were human, one with stark-white leathery-and-bat-like flesh the other covered in pale and faintly glowing angelic feathers while above her head floated a halo made of two interlaced squares of polished bronze, rotated to make an eight pointed star the points of which would've formed an equal-sided octagon if you drew lines between them.

I sat up, rubed sleep from my eyes, and pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. Nope, it hurt, so not dreaming, though I pinched a few other places just to be sure, since while it IS possible to feel pain in dreams, that can only happen if you are also feeling pain OUTSIDE the dream too, so five random places pinched convinced me that if I was hurting that much outside the dream, I didn't want to wake up right now, TBH.

The two strangers stired as I had moved around pinching myself and the more-human-looking of the two, with long ashen-blonde hair and a robust Nordic-woman's physique sat up and looked me straight in the eye, "Morning, hubby, welcome to the royal palace of Thalinakria, your new home." she said without pre-amble.

"Uh, who are you and what am I doing here...?" I asked, confused.

"Ah, yes, I had thought that the memory-transfer-info-dump might not have 'taken' in your case. I'm Sjofn, the Norse goddess of romantic and enduring love, and the other woman who you don't know already, the one with the wings, halo, and middle-eastern appearance; is Ba'laat Gebal, patron goddess of the city of Byblos on your own world, (and several others throughout the multiverse /our segment of the Omniverse), and ex-wife to El, notorious divine con-artist which your former culture simply called/currently-calls "God", (as though he were the only one that exists). You and your other two pre-existing partners have, just like yourself, been elevated to the status of "Minor Deities in Training" so that you can commute between here in this "comfort" of our GodsWorld™ 'Methevas-Meta-Earth' and your particular version of Earth to do your training and hopefully break-up the 'monotheistic' religious-crimes syndicates which have gained a dominant position on your planet after its first incarnation was founded by Ba'laat Gebal's ex a few thousand years ago." Sjofn explained, in a way that TBH resulted in more questions being raised than were answered in the process, as my other three: Lovers* began to stir and wake also.

*("Maybe?" in two cases. We all were certainly sleeping in the "Emperor"-size bed together; but what did that really prove, at that point in time? Who can truly fathom the ways of deities that hasn't already been one for a while, you know? I'm sure there have been some examples in the multiverse somewhere, but I wasn't one of them.)

"Morning, lover-boy," Ba'laat Gebal said in a sultry Arabic accent, and I felt a little bit weak in the knees at her way of saying it, which had a hint of, something, just-far-enough below the surface that I couldn't quite be certain what it was, but could still tell that it was there.

As all five of us woke we were introduced around and got to know each other briefly. Obviously there were a lot of questions, but we were all surprisingly calm about the situation; and I've learned since that there is an aura of calm projected into the bed-chambers when mortals like us are newly-elevated to be minor deities as standard practice; just in case we were, for example, to develop into new-minted "Gods of Rage" or similar. The two pre-existing deities besides myself you already know from the previous page, so we can mostly skip them, for the moment, but my other two lovers, and other two members of our new-minted pantheon, need somewhat more explaining.

My first wife, Audrie Turner, one of the two who was once mortal, isn't really my "sister", not literally even in the eyes of the law; but both sets of our parents were friends with each-other that were/still-are closer than kin, and they raised the two of us together with our other siblings so much that we saw each-other as brothers and sisters, more than we did friends. That is until were about 13 and 16, her and I, when our close bond, changed. We'd pretended to be husband-and-wife / mother-and-father to her dolls and my G.I. Joe when we were younger, ("G.I. Joe" was our eldest son "Joseph Turner" who was home on leave from service in Iraq or wherever the United States Military was fighting at the time: we didn't consider that it was weird to have both an adult child and babies in the house simultaneously back then: we were kids, what the heck did we know about fertility issues?), but one day she asked me to come out to the treehouse her dad built in the old maple on the corner of their property. That year, the year she turned 13 and I was 16 was a leap year, and it was the 29th of February she was very serious about it all and I didn't know why until, with the two of us alone, she got down on one knee and pulled a ring-box out of her pocket. I bet you think she's about to propose marriage, I know I did, and she DID, but not directly and not exactly either. "Nicholas Henry James-Turner, will you accept this ring of betrothal?", she asked.

Now, very few people in modern times on our origin world will fully understand what a "Betrothal" is, so I'll explain. Betrothal is a contract, between the parents of two children rather than the children themselves, typically, at least it was back when such things were common, agreeing that WHEN the children become adults, they will be married. It wasn't ever terribly common in most areas, except amongst members of the aristocracy or similar, but all levels of society have engaged in the practice at one point or another during history in most areas of the world, with, of course, numerous regional variations, even the early United States of America, although it was never common here nor considered legally binding for very long after the nation was founded in its modern form, if at all. (Not clear on those details as they've honestly never impacted my personal life, in any meaningful way. I knew them once, when I was first betrothed, but long-since forgot what the answers were.)

I knew based on her behavior that she thought this was dead serious, but when you are 13 and 16 a gulf of 3 years is much vaster a chasm than it will be even a mere five years later, and I thought this was something she would forget about in like a week, so, good-naturedly, I agreed, took the plastic "Gold" ring that she presented me, and put it on my right pinky finger, the only one it fit. She didn't forget in a week, or a month, or year, and by then the idea of having my marriage, (which I'd always known I wanted to have since as young as I can remember thinking about it at all), already sorted-out-and-decided had grown on me. It helped that as my sexuality developed I'd come to have a fetish for consensual ****, and, this wasn't that, not exactly, but it was as close to it as was both genetically safe and, (as a consequence), possible in our society without ending up in prison. As my "Betrothed", (she would introduce us as such to new people until she was 18, at which point she switched to "Fiancé/Fiancée" between then and when we finally had our wedding exactly three months after she turned 21, as was the plan we had discussed for many years prior), we hung out a lot and talked endlessly about every aspect of how we wanted our lives to go on every imaginable level. I deliberately showed her all of the worst parts of my own personality during the years between the proposal and her turning 18 as, not a test, exactly, but to make sure that if she was dead-set on this plan, she would go into it with eyes wide open and fully awake, not in some somnambulant dreaming-doze, unaware of the true risks involved. Unexpectedly, each new revelation was acknowledged, accepted, and openly-embraced between the two of us, much of the time. She in-turn showed me her own darkness, those parts she hid from others, and I-too embraced her hidden self than no-one else got to see, and we both marveled how much the two fit together like and elaborate pair of puzzle pieces with hundreds of possible points of divergence where the borders "wouldn't be right" between such items under normal circumstances, but in our case, they fit as though "tailor made" to match one another.

As just one example, the night we met for me to show her the "Sex Dungeon" I'd dug into the side of a hill in a local forest which no-specific-person officially "Owned" in the area over the summer when she was 18 and I was almost-21 during her last year of high-school, she had asked to meet in a park nearby already. I showed up to find her sitting there in a trench coat, fedora hat that didn't fit, and mirrored sun-glasses like a stereotype of a spy. She'd said she had gifts for me, of which the hat was one, but the other was a dog-collar and leash, plus the amount of clothes that she WASN'T wearing under the trench-coat, if you get what I mean... I meant to teach her about the fact that I was a dominant in the bedroom, instead, she taught ME what that really meant, and how to do it more than just in the bedroom, but throughout our relationship.

Flash-forward twenty years from the day she proposed our betrothal, zipping past the discovery that she was barren in the process, and she brought-home a somewhat-similar gift for me. In the intervening span of time we had moved from a small town in up-state New Hampshire to Ann-Arbor Michigan following a job-offer, after first moving to Pennsylvania in order to attend university at the only Ivy-League school that accepted my application, and my then relentlessly lobbying the various key-stake-holders in the administration to accept my fiancée as well when she applied, including organizing a letter-writing campaign from both Alumni and students. I'm also NOT saying that any **** was involved in the process; but if Professor Hristopoulos wants the photos from that party to STAY buried he's going to start evangelizing our pantheon to his students in a few years, not Islam, after quietly 'drifting away' from The Faith for a while. (Those girls were definitely of legal age Professor, I don't dispute that, but as one of the instructors you should have known that doing those things with students wasn't OK, even if they weren't YOUR students, specifically...) But back to the point in time a few weeks before the start of the main story at the beginning of the chapiter when she brought me a 'present'...

It was February 29th again, "Leap Day", and my wife brought home a young co-ed from the local university, University of Michigan, who was apparently matriculating after winter-break, having taken not an entire "gap-year" after high school, but just one semester to backpack across the nation in order to "Find Herself" before attending uni. What Nadasia Destiny Johnson, (as she told us her name was over coffee after our first little romp), ultimately discovered is that she was a hardcore submissive sexually, much like my wife. Unlike my wife though, she isn't the kind that in public too, instead she is all "Girl Boss" and submits sexually "to help her unwind" from that mode of living after she returns home or maybe in the middle of the day during lunch if she's really stressing-out. This was why she'd been willing to come home with my wife wearing nothing but a trench-coat and high-heels, and collar-with-leash-on under that. While my wife and I aren't rich by any stretch of the imagination, we've been fairly lucky in that we found a distressed property to work on in Ypsilanti, bought it for a song during a big dip in the housing market (not that huge crash, we were too young for that to be a possibility at the time, but a major dip, later, and the building WAS "distressed", so it went fairly cheap anyway), and through seven years of hard work and occasionally navigating through the rooms by walking across the bare floor-joists turned it into a palatial show-piece of a residence, with a total of seven bedrooms, massive kitchen, fully-finished basement 'Playroom', and more. Normally we rented out all the bedrooms other than the master-suite to students each semester, but at that time we had no current tenants, (everyone having found other lodgings for the coming semester for various reasons [there was a BAD personality clash among the previous semester's tenants , the details of which I'm not going to get into other than to say: "Marty Vinburnine and Lucy Bartland? You two can go STRAIGHT to hell! You both would belong there, and 'fit right in' with the locals."] or graduated at the end of the previous semester,) so we decided to try something we'd talked about for a long time, turning the house into a semi-permanent but fully voluntary BDSM-commune-cult type of thing with myself as the "cult leader" and Dom for all of the submissive female 'cultists' we would acquire.

Now at this point I should mention that my pre-existing wife and I are Caucasians*, but Nadasia is NOT. Nadiasia is half Southeastern-Indian (As in "India"), and half African-American, taking after her mother in her hair-and-nails and so on, (her hair being worn in an "Afro" half a foot from her head, and things like that), but her father in terms of "overall-racial-markers" or however you would describe that; the combine effect looking very-much like the child of two radically different ethnic backgrounds that she actually is. As an additional example, for formal occasions she would wear African batuques cloth, but drape the entire length of a small bolt around herself in the fashion of an Indian "Sari"; proclaiming for all with wit to look that she rejects the idea she must chose one heritage over the other instead of combining both sources of which she is a perfectly legitimate heiress into a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts. In the bedroom, though, she would absolutely break her mothers heart by wholly embracing and even reveling in the idea of being a white-mans "bed ****", and reverentially calling me "Massa", as-if she were one of the mythical "happy slaves" of the antebellum South which never† actually existed at the time. (Instead of the more normal "Master" that is traditionally used in a BDSM context.) For her pretending that she's somehow as literal **** with a white owner is part of the sexual fantasy, but so is knowing that she can "turn it off" when she leaves the bedroom or other 'play space', at least mostly. She remains 'my submissive' all-day-long, but in terms of professional life and public life in general made it very clear at the outset that this side of her must remain an absolute secret from "anyone outside the polycule" as she put it, nor would she obey any order that risked that aspect becoming generally known, and would resent that such a thing was even asked in-the-first-place. Even today, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about these facts, although I obviously don't feel uncomfortable enough to reject her offer of service. "It takes all kinds to make up this world", as they say, especially in terms of sexual kinks.

*(My first-wife is a green-eyed/red-haired Nordic/Irish type, heavyset with both muscle and bone in addition to fat; where I am darker-haired and of a mix of various Brythonic derivations plus the addition of a few First Nations North-American ancestors a ways back during the colonial era, and one much more recently that have all inflected my bone-structure strongly, but not my skin-tone, [meaning that I "can pass for 'White'"], who his co-workers often say is skinny [Some will say 'emaciated' when they think I can't hear, and I've never seen the need to disabuse them of that misconception], but when they have rarely seen me shirtless and in shorts instead re-evaluate with descriptions like "whipcord-and-steel" to define my physique. I'm not skinny in the conventional sense, I've got a fair bit of middle-age paunch around the mid-section, but I've never had the urge to eat for eating's sake; food is fuel for living life, nothing more. Even if some of it is quite delicious fuel, that's all it is, fuel which is less irritating to have to consume for survival due to good flavor.)

†(Almost certainly never existed, anyway, and definitely both were-and-are exaggerated in terms of numbers and percentage compared to the totals of any vanishingly small handfuls of the archetype that did really exist.)

All of this leads into the next thing that happened after some very basic introductions and explanation of backstories were out of the way for the five of us. The two goddesses had given us roughly the same run-down of the "Goddess to a Mortal" service you saw in the previous chapter so when Sjofn asked: "So, Nicholas, have you ever given BDSM a chance?"

You all will understand fully why the only logical response in that situation was: "Why, yes, Sjofn, I have tried BDSM, and as you are doubtless aware because of the website, I'm a Dom, which means you're obviously interested in being both a Sub, and Poly with the existing spice and Ba'laat here." I purred, looking from one to the other of my new 'spice' who sat across the table from myself and 'catacorner' with the existing two*.

*(It had been made quite clear by our hosts that polygamy and polyandry definitely weren't "normal" in their world, but distinctly ALSO weren't forbidden or illegal, either; and deities were rarely quite as judgmental as average mortals about this sort of thing. Therefore, since federal law was all that had stood between Nadasia marrying both my wife and myself as a fully legally/spiritually unified "Throuple" marriage before this even happened, there was nothing left that would prevent the wedding going forward now, even though it hadn't happened yet at the time. We all already knew without saying anything that we saw each other as husband-and-wife and "double-wife" already; the ceremony would be a mere formalization of the bond that already existed amongst us.)