“Let go!” John demanded, fighting with Velka over the remote. The problem was less overpowering the Magryph than doing so in a way that didn’t tear a button off the surface. Not only did John hate buying new things unnecessarily, making the avoidable destruction of the remote a sin, but it was also a horrible dietary choice for Velka.

They continued to tug at the piece of plastic for a little while longer, until John finally resigned himself to a workaround. Using Interface, he sent a tiny spark of himself into the remote and searched around for the volume control. Since his early days, his use of the low-level technomancy had improved considerably, especially in the speed department. It only took him about fifteen seconds to send the signal out to the wall-mounted flatscreen and turn the music down to a more agreeable level.

After he let go of the remote, Velka stumbled back one step and confoundedly stared. That he no longer wanted it caused her to think the same. Uncaring, she placed the remote on the coffee table and tapped away. She only stopped once to see if he wasn’t going for it again. Warbling, she walked away.

“Why is she so mad at me?” John wanted to know.

“You made Eliana cry,” Nia answered immediately.

“All of us made her cry, so why do I get picked on?” the Gamer complained. There was no real answer to that. Velka was smart enough to have spotted the originator of the whole situation. Despite that, the real reason why John was getting bullied by his pet likely had more to do with the fact that he and his birdcat had this sort of relationship from the start. Most of his women were either too strict to risk annoying or too nice to risk the treats. Understanding that, John sighed. “Are you at least happy now, Eliana?”

The answer came as a throaty, high-pitched cry. Eliana was folded into a tight bundle and laid across John’s lap. He was using her as additional support to the rests of the armchair while he was reading. A second, longer vocalization confirmed that the two dildos in her pussy and asshole were doing their work. The ring gag in her mouth allowed John to easily hook a finger behind her cheek and pull her face so she looked at him.

“That’s the face of a good girl,” John complimented her, putting his book down on her back to give her butt a jiggle-inducing smack. That was also when he decided that his current lull in horniness was over. Moving his lap-warmer was one option. One he decided against. It would be more fun to fuck Eliana after she got desperate from watching and toy use for an hour. He looked across the room to see who was available.

Aclysia could be called on, but she was over in the open kitchen segment of the bus, preparing today’s dinner. Since he was not only horny but also hungry, that was a bad call to make. Rave, Lee, Nathalia and Gnome were playing Mario Kart on a different TV in the gaming room. Momo and Scarlett were working on something. Nia was making out with Sylph, the smaller woman sitting in the lap of the blonde, so that was a potential avenue. Watching them was hot though and he liked leaving his girls to deepen their physical connection without him sometimes.

Undine had retreated with Metra and Salamander to the bedroom. Bored, the two tomboys had declared they wanted to see how close they could get to holding a note. Whether they were still doing that was up for debate. The door was closed and the soundproofing fantastic. John had spared no penny on the quality of the environment. Not on the inside of walls, covered in fake wood, not on the bolted, plastic-metal furniture, and not on the LED’s that illuminated everything.

Beatrice was driving, so she was out as well. Stirwin and Copernicus were down there with her. The two animal-shaped elementals preferred the lower floor of the bus because it was quieter and they could snooze the time away there

That left Siena. The shadow spirit was, like John, sitting in an armchair and reading. Noticing his stare, she raised her eyes. Her dark lips twisted into a smile. “What do you need, darling?” Her sultry voice sent shivers down his spine and the fluid way she closed the e-reader, put it aside, and unfolded her legs only emphasized the sensation. “Are you aching, perhaps? Yearning for…” She paused, stopping in front of his chair. She leaned forwards, put one hand on the backrest and reached down to his cock with the other. “…me?”

“Oh God, yes,” John gasped, when her index finger trailed over the length of his shaft.

“Move the toy aside,” Siena whispered, her sharp fangs centimetres away from his ear. “You need to see what I’ll do to you.”

“Sorry, Eliana, you heard the lady,” John hummed and placed the submissive on the nearby couch. Deliberately, he placed her in the perfect watching position.

Once he was back in the chair, Siena bowed over him and kissed her way down his body. She took her time with it, teasing his skin bit by bit while her left hand carefully rolled his balls in her palm. By the time she reached his hairless groin, precum was running down all the way to the base of his cock. Siena kneeled down in front of him, wrapped her monstrous tongue around his shaft, and ‘licked’ upwards, keeping the ring fantastically tight.

At the top, she pulled her tongue back in and gave his glans a kiss, lapping up all his precum. “Delicious,” she sighed, the honest attraction in her dark and sultry voice turning John’s erection into figurative iron. A wet blowjob followed. Sloppy by design, she covered his length in the slippery mixture of her spit and precum. Her mouth, notably but not unpleasantly colder than a normal person’s, enveloped him while her inhuman tongue reached around in massaging coils. When his cock was practically drenched in lubrication, she pulled back up. “Do you want more?”

“Always,” John groaned. His heart fluttered, hearing the pleased chuckle of his beloved shadow spirit. Back straight, she leaned forwards. The softness of her firm, dark-blueish, grey tits spilled on his groin, burying much of his respectably sized cock under them. Starlight eyes sparked with amusement, while she wiggled her breasts against him. The mixture smeared all over her tits, until his dick managed to slip in the valley of her cleavage.

“You’re so endearing to please,” Siena softly spoke, while cupping her own breasts and adding pressure to the surrounding softness. All of her was smooth. Her skin, her movements, her silky black hair, her curves, even the tail that wrapped around John’s leg as the tit job kept going. The cock that kept poking out between her decently large breasts was crude compared to her elegance. Yet, when he was about to cum, she so frantically switched back to sucking him off.

At an intense pace, she went up and down, her lips forming a tight seal, while the inside of her inhuman throat surrounded him with numerous massaging bumps and tendrils. Had he not known better, he would have mistaken her body for that of a succubus, with how effectively and downright hellishly it was able to pleasure him.

John clawed at the edge of his armrests, while his cum pumped down the eagerly sucking midnight elemental’s throat. “Phew,” he let out a relieved sound at the end of it.

“Rrrrrr,” Siena purred, after letting his cock pop out of her mouth. The seed-fuelled orgasm she had received had clearly done nothing but further inflame her desires.

“No show for me?” John asked, lamenting the lack of presentation for the cum swallowing.

“I desired it too much to wait,” Siena said and got up. “Now claim me.”

John didn’t need to be told that more than once and shot out of his seat. Grabbing the midnight elemental by the arm, he tossed her towards the couch and bent her over Eliana. Immediately, he penetrated her cunt and started fucking the fat assed, deeply sexual elemental. Her tail again wrapped around him, his arm this time, with clingy approval.

__________________________________________________________________________

The two-day journey went by like this with absolutely no trouble. There were no unexpected obstacles, no Natural Barriers they ran into, not even a report from back home that something was going horribly wrong. The last item on that list caused John to send a semi-distressed call home to find out if anyone was hiding something from him. Anything that went right without his influence had him doubt the validity of the proceedings.

The someone that was hiding something from him threw exactly that observation in his face. It was Momo and she had been taking care of all the work that was entering his emergency folder for him. While she did have that capacity in her role as chancellor, John still was not used to his office getting such intense support. Aclysia had been barred from many decisions of the emergency variety due to her either immediately contacting John to get the solution of his choice, defeating the purpose of her trying to solve it in his stead, or because she exploded at the person reporting the issue.

Momo never looked as happy as Aclysia did when she was cooking, but she sure brought the same morale to the office as the weaponized maid did to the kitchen.

John was in the bedroom of the bus. This was not for any of the usual two reasons, sleeping and fucking, but solely because the bedroom was one of the outer rooms of the dimensionally expanded upper floor of the bus. As such, one of the walls was a row of windows. By necessity of the size of the harem, the bedroom was already wider than the bus should conceivably be. Consequently, the windows had been treated, mundanely and magically, to be impossible to see into the bus through. These treatments tinted the windows moderately dark the other way as well, giving the outside world a dark shade despite the time of day.

It was noon of the third day of the drive and they would arrive soon. The journey had taken about forty-eight hours, as they had expected. That they had a tireless driver helped with getting to their destination on time. They had taken a two-hour barbeque break out in the steppes, just to stretch their legs a bit and enjoy casual outdoor sex on the plains. The sense of freedom between fucking out in the woods and fucking where one could look kilometres into every direction unobstructed was quite different. Regardless, inside the barrier there was no risk of getting caught. Not that anyone in the harem got anything out of that anyway.

The reason why John was now staring out of the window was the terrain becoming familiar. Not extremely so, particularly because of his lifestyle previous to leaving the city they were about to arrive at. John had never been one to travel much around his own neighbourhood, let alone the outskirts of his city. If it wasn’t between him and wherever he wanted to go to buy something video game related, it might as well not have existed in his perception.

Still, he recognized some vague or overt pieces of the surroundings. There was the forest in which he had his original grinding sessions, a piece of unusually dense vegetation made possible by the sizable river that cut through these plains and fed the landscape with water. Fields covered much of the plains. He recognized some of the barns, particularly the old-timey ruins that had been left behind when some of the local farmers had made the switch to (or had been bought up by) factory farms. Gradually, the density of the farms grew larger, certain spots more familiar.

A hill, the largest around the city (and thoroughly unimpressive despite that fact), topped with a little restaurant reminded John of a trip he had taken there with his high school class. It was the first landmark around that triggered a distinct memory. Sourly, John recalled those hours. It had been organized by their biology teacher. They were meant to learn about the local fauna. Gather some leaves to catalogue, sketch some interesting flowers, describe what animals they ran into in a report, the many things a teacher tasked a class with in the hopes they would learn about seeking knowledge.

Like practically all exercises of this nature, John found that he not only hated them for wasting his time even more than regular school did, but that any time outside the observation of the teacher was time he uselessly spent trying to isolate himself from the rest of class. He may have actually gone after the tasks given out of sheer boredom, had Vanessa and her cronies not followed him. He had already learned by that time that running away from them was futile, so he just kept walking while they pelted him with verbal abuse. When they got sick of that, Frank had dragged him off the beaten path and shoved him into thistles. Not the kind of exposure to nature the teacher had intended. Entirely the one John had expected.

The thistle marks had healed, but the memory still created a distant sting on his hands. He rubbed them and forced his eyes to wander elsewhere. Of course, the majority of memories that would well up while he was in this city would be unpleasant. That was the summary of what life in this place had been like: unpleasant, depressing, and inescapable.

‘All the better that I come back here,’ John thought. He was better now than he was then. Stronger physically, for sure, but also mentally. While the prickling memories remained, they did not dominate his thoughts and invoked no emotions he could not digest. Returning to this place summoned an unwanted past. It also gave him a chance to close with this past properly. What gave him nightmares, what made him isolate himself in his room, what repressed any inkling at social connections for so long, he could once more see all the places where those events had happened and realize that they were not houses of horror, but just places.