Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
• Recollections of an Alternate Past •

Book Two

The Twofold Invasion
OR
Penetration and Destruction
OR
How To Make Love With Twins

A Novel by
Teel McClanahan III

Modern Evil Press

Phoenix

ISBN: 978-1-934516-44-7

eBook Edition

Copyright © 2005 by Teel McClanahan III

Some Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by Modern Evil Press, Phoenix, AZ

ISBN: 978-1-934516-44-7 (E-Book)

• for love, lost •

“I’d somehow managed to go this long without once thinking about what it would be like to kiss you.” A fireball crackled with searing heat as it flew within inches of Trevor’s head, his robe’s hood down, his hair blowing back with the warming wind of the passing danger.

“What?” Nirgal was so distracted by Trevor’s strange comment that he nearly failed to burst a lightning ball that would have converted their best player to the other side.

“Nothing. Sorry.” Trevor had an idea forming as he ran over to help Jode get a scarantula off the back of his robes without either of them being hit by incoming projectiles. He shouted back to Nirgal who was redirecting a series of fast-moving visionballs away from their right-side cluster of fireball throwers, their Burners, “I was just thinking about a girl from my old school.”

“Is that such a good idea?” One of the visionballs got past him, and a Burner was down. Nirgal had been hit with enough visionballs to know what his teammate was seeing, and that what he was not seeing was more important – until the visionball dispelled, Nirgal was the only person keeping Saeto from being hit by every single thing the other side decided to throw their way. “We are in the middle of a championship dodgeball game. What would Kay and Elle think if you lost the big game because you were thinking about someone else?” Nirgal suddenly jumped away from the cluster of Burners, ducking and rolling along the ground to miss a very close freezeball that would have slowed him down significantly. “Maybe you could daydream later? AFTER we win?”

“No, no, but it gave me an idea. I’m going to need some help.” Everyone who heard Trevor say he’d had an idea looked his way, at least for a moment. His own teammates had learned to just trust him and hope for the best. Eight times out of ten his ideas won the game for them, and the other times… well, they hadn’t ever gone so wrong as to cause a total match loss. The other team tried to prepare for the worst, word spreading fast among them to get ready to try to distract Trevor or lose big – only one team had ever been able to break his concentration, and they had disqualified themselves in the process. And the crowd, the crowd roared louder and louder in excitement, then hushed to a startling silence in anticipation of something unexpected. “Everyone aim at different players… just … figure it out, okay? We want every one to hit.”

They all got projectiles ready to loose, and then Trevor seemed to disappear. And then their projectiles all seemed to disappear. And then Trevor reappeared, holding nothing in his back-cocked arm, and shouted, “Now!” Everyone threw nothing. Nothing flew across the courts at the other team. Some of them tried to block nothing, a few of them tried to move or leap out of the way of nothing, the guards tried blasting nothing out of the air. “Get ready for another set of shots!” Trevor already had a fireball blazing just off his hand as he said this, and it seemed to be enough to get his teammates to stop just watching to see what was happening on the other side and get them back into play.

What happened was, excepting one player whose leaping had got him just out of the way of the invisible mudball Nirgal had thrown at him and one player who had never been kissed, all the players on the other team got hit by invisible balls and then just stood there with their eyes closed and smiles drawing across their faces.

The other team’s coach was at the edge of the court, screaming at the referees, “He’s playing with their minds! He can’t do that! They ruled against Mentalism in the playoffs and you know it! What kind of a referee are you? That monster is in there flagrantly breaking the rules and you’re just going to let him do it? How far up your ass has your head got to be not to see what he’s doing out there to my boys?” He went on and on, saliva spraying on the referee’s face as he screamed and turned red and tried to get the referee to make a call in his team’s favor. The constant barrage of hits raining down on his players did nothing to distract them from whatever was going on in their heads, some of them literally being knocked to the ground by lightning balls or multiple hard hits, and there were fewer and fewer of them smiling happily as they lost the game.

“What did you do, Trev?” Harrison, the team’s captain, threw marble ball after marble ball at the remaining players as he implored Trevor for an answer. “You know you’re not allowed to use Mentalism in the playoffs. Are we going to be disqualified?”

“I don’t think so.” Trevor always felt like a weakling when he tried to heave balls of solid marble twelve inches in diameter across the court, so stuck to fast fireballs as he also continued playing. “I read the ruling pretty carefully, and it only says I can’t communicate or otherwise directly interact with the minds of the players on either team. So I modified everyone’s balls to do it for me.”

“What did you put in their heads, exactly? They seem pretty happy to be losing, maybe you could do the rest of us after the match.” Harrison grinned, hoping it was something troublingly erotic.

“Oh, nothing special. I just triggered a looping memory of their most emotionally significant kiss. Pretty easy, if you know how to create mental loops.”

“Is that because of the emotional content?” Their conversation was fairly relaxed, since no one on the other team was trying to hit them with anything. “I’m studying to get into Mentalism 1 next year, and I think I read something about emotional memories being the easiest to get people to replay.”

“That’s a pretty good way to put it. I think we’re about done here.”

“But we’ve still got to wait for the end of the game. Could you do me?”

“After the game, Harry.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to do the cascading balls trick again, while we wait?”

“Yeah.” Harrison began grinning a conniving grin.

“Tell the others; I’ll get ready.”

Harrison gathered all the players who weren’t trapped in reverie together at the center of the court in three concentric circles around where Trevor was sitting cross-legged and floating just above the floor. Everyone, even the players that had been converted from the other side, got into the energy of it as the three rings started moving in alternating directions around Trevor; the smallest and largest circles moving clockwise and the other circle moving counter-clockwise, all of them facing in. A sphere of distortion, like a three-dimensional rippling of waves in the fabric of reality radiating outward, was already large enough to encompass Trevor and was growing and growing to take in the other players. As soon as the entire inner circle was inside the distortion, the players within appeared to turn into a blur of motion around and around and around Trevor, who sat perfectly still in the center, windblown. The sphere of rippling distortion expanded and expanded until eventually all the players and a big chunk of the floor below them and air above them were contained within it, and then it maintained its size and rippled slower and slower until its surface was like the perfect clear surface of a crystal ball.

Within this strange sphere, the three rings of players were spinning in a blur around Trevor, who could just be seen through their partially transparent vagueness. Then Trevor opened his eyes and seemed to turn into a blur himself as a constant stream of light began pouring out of the air in front of him and cascaded up into the air above them all until very quickly there was a half-sphere of white light curving out like water from a fountain, flowing from Trevor to the inner circle of players. And then a second burst flowered out of that one, a yellow fountaining of light and energy reaching the second circle of players, but less visible so that the light from the white, inner sphere was still visible to the crowd. Finally a third fountain of multicolored light flowed forth from Trevor to the outer circle of players, a constantly shifting rainbow of continuous color forming a half-sphere of light with the multilayered backlighting of the inner half-spheres within it. This gorgeous display of light continued for a few moments, and then the crystal-like sphere around all of them suddenly exploded outward to encompass the entire stadium and everyone inside it as the last few seconds ticked down on the clock for the third game of the match that would decide the national dodgeball championship. As soon as the clock was inside the sphere it seemed to stop altogether, and as soon as the nearly silent audience was inside the sphere, they gasped and cheered to see what was really going on.

The players were still slowly circling Trevor in alternating directions, but now everyone could see that the solid half-spheres of light they had seen above the blurs of players had actually been various dodgeballs being passed back and forth between the players in a complex pattern that could not have been achieved by anyone without a fairly high level of skill. Different colors of visionballs were moving across the highest arcs between the players of the third circle. Fireballs were burning their way back and forth in careful arcs between the players in the second circle, and lightning balls sped still blindingly fast between the inner circle of players, the best of the lightning-ball casters from both teams showing off their skill and dexterity. The crowd ooh-ed and ah-ed and cheered and clapped as the players’ circles slowly expanded. The outer circle took two steps back, carefully maintaining the constant motion of dozens of visionballs, the second circle took one step back without losing a single fireball, and then all three circles began taking simultaneous steps outward until the outermost players were heaving visionballs across the entire width of the court to reach the players on the other side.

Trevor was now standing, and as soon as they reached the edge he shouted out, “Ready?”

The entire team shouted back in unison, “Ready,” and the balls began flying faster.

Trevor raised his arms into the air and shouted “Set” as he whipped his arms back to his sides. The nearly forgotten crystal-like sphere of distortion came rushing back in on him in an instant, time speeding back up to normal with three seconds left on the clock. Everyone caught the balls in the air and held them floating in front of themselves as they turned to face the audience. When they had all turned with held balls, they shouted back to him, “Set.”

The clock ticked down to one second and Trevor shouted “Go!” – Each player heaved his ball towards the crowd in long, slow arcs through the air, a rain of fire, lightning, and color streaming towards the thousands of onlookers who all leaned back in their seats, even the ones who had seen this same show at earlier games, as the danger approached. The clock hit zero before a single ball reached the audience, and as the buzzer rang out through the air every single projectile still in motion disappeared at once and the audience let out a communal breath of relief and joy. The cheering and clapping and whistling and roaring of the crowd rose to an unbelievable level and players and families and fans rushed onto the court to congratulate the obviously winning team, raising the players onto shoulders and backs above the crowd and carrying them around in celebration. They all knew the final display was a bit of showboating, but since it didn’t elevate any one player above the others and emphasized teamwork and skill above grandstanding, even including players converted from opposing teams, the referees had been more than glad to allow Trevor to show off a little when there was time left on the clock. Though he was loath to admit it, Trevor found he liked playing dodgeball after all.

At the same time that Trevor was trying, as politely as he could, to get the three strangers who were carrying him around like a trophy to set him down, two young women were weaving their way through the crowd trying to reach him. The two women and Trevor met their goals at almost exactly the same time, so that he seemed to fall out of the sky to stand directly before them just as they were coming to a stop.

Kay smiled her proudest smile at Trevor, said “Good game, Trev,” then leaned up and forward and kissed him gently on the lips.

Elle smiled her identical smile at Trevor, leaned forward and up and kissed him gently on the lips before saying, “What did you do to those guys at the end? It all went so fast, and then they stopped playing!”

“Thank you,” he nodded to Elle. “Thank you,” he nodded to Kay, took them one to a side, arm in arm, and began working their way out of the still-raucous crowd. “Nothing that would seem too fancy to you two. I slowed down my personal time so I could turn everyone’s balls invisible and then give each ball a single mental command to transmit to whoever they hit without running down the clock.”

“Invisible so the other team couldn’t block them,” Elle began.

Kay finished, “but what was the mental command?” Both girls smiled their mischievous smiles at him as they continued their slow way through the crowd, and he knew they wanted the same thing Harrison had.

“Are you sure?” They nodded synchronously. “Okay, I’ll give it to you in a minute.” Their smiles drooped a bit. “It’ll take you two a few minutes to recover, I’m sure. I’ll give it to you when we part ways at the locker room.” They nodded in grudging acceptance. “Are you two gonna stick around for the co-ed game?”

“Of course we are!”

“We want to be sure you treat those girls right.”

“No funny business.” She reached out to poke his side, tickling him.

“But don’t throw the game, either.”

“Of course not, Kay. You know I would never mistreat anyone, whether they happened to be the national champions of all high-school level women’s teams or not. Though I can’t actually promise ‘no funny business.’ You remember how the quarter-finals went, Elle.”

All three of them laughed at the thought of the way the court had looked at the end of the quarter-finals, with banana cream pies splattered across every player on both sides, the floor, the walls, and most of the audience. It had been a close game, decided without a clear Condorcet winner at first, but in Trevor’s team’s favor after all, despite no points or conversions being scored for either side after his area-effect spell had begun to work. Before the three of them had really caught their breath from the memory of Trevor’s “funny business,” they reached the locker room entrance, and Trevor unhooked his arms from those of the young women on either side of him.

“Well, I guess I’ve got to change my robes before the co-ed game, and Mr. Klaw will probably want to talk strategy with everybody, even though we’re already the champions. Your seats up front should still be reserved, but be sure you’re in them before the game starts, or they’ll give them to someone else. Now, I’m going to give you the mental command, and I don’t know how long it’ll last, exactly, but I have a feeling you’ll want it to last longer, so… Well, here goes, I’ll see you later.” He held out his hand and generated a red ball of light, imbuing it with the same mental command he had used earlier. He held it up to his face and kissed it and then, as though blowing the kiss to them, blew the energy ball out of his hand in their direction. It split into two glowing balls as it lazily crossed the distance between them, and before the balls landed gently on each girl’s smooth cheek, transferring the mental commands to them, he turned around and went into the locker room, leaving them standing there just outside the door reliving their most emotionally significant kisses over and over again.

It is perhaps an unfortunate thing that he did not stay to look at the expressions on their faces or to look into their minds to experience what they were remembering in such vivid detail, for it might have changed the entire course of future events for dozens, perhaps billions of people. For most people, their most emotionally significant kiss would be a pleasant memory, where the emotion had been happiness, joy, love, or some other warm and fuzzy feeling that one would want to experience again and again and again in a loop of true experiential realism. In the case of Kay and Elle, the primary emotion of their most emotionally significant kiss was identically different from what most people would have expected, and as the remaining players filed into the locker room they passed quickly by twin faces of frozen terror.

“What did you do to Kay and Elle, Trev?”

“Nothing they didn’t ask for.” Trevor smiled, thinking what he’d done had been quite pleasant for them, and didn’t see his teammates’ puzzled reactions because he was pulling his undershirt off over his head to freshen up between games. “Do you want the same?”

“N-no. No.” Everyone who had seen the girls was shaking his head, fervently imploring Trevor not to put him through whatever had put that expression on their faces. Some turned their backs on Trevor, facing their lockers, and others just busied themselves with changing their robes or looking though their playbooks, but no one wanted to make eye contact with him. They knew he didn’t need eye contact to get into their heads, but there was something psychological about looking someone in the eyes that seemed like an open door to mental manipulation.

“What about you, Harry?”

“What?” Harrison was caught off guard by Trevor singling him out; he thought they had been on good terms at the end of the game. “No, err… No.”

“Whatever.” Trevor didn’t understand the sudden cold shoulder everyone was giving him. They usually liked to goof around after a game. He began to wonder if he’d done something or said something that had upset them, but Trevor had been pretty sure he’d made winning the game a team effort, and he certainly hadn’t intended to or felt he had received any more praise than anyone else on the team after the game. He pulled off his short pants and then pulled them right back on as soon as the CleanGuard enchantment had done its work of returning him to the state of cleanliness he had been in at the start of the game.

Trevor remained silent, trying to work out why everyone else was so quiet, as he changed into his new robes for the final game. Instead of the school colors, these robes were the traditional dark brown of proper magicians’ monk-like robes, with the symbol of the national championship winners proudly emblazoned across their backs. It was supposed to be a secret, but these one-time-use overrobes were also supposed to enhance reflexes and act as power multipliers for any magic they used as they played – fireballs would burn hotter, lightning balls would shock more intensely and convert players faster, and all magically propelled balls would fly faster and hit harder. It didn’t give them a real advantage, since the young women’s team would be wearing equivalent robes, but it made the last game a real blast. Literally. Mr. Klaw finally came into the locker room to give the team some guidance for the final official dodgeball game of the school year.

* * *

“None of the prophecies have been fulfilled yet; how can you still be thinking he’s the one?” Feagan was clearly beginning to doubt that the tall, lanky man with coke-bottle-like glasses standing before him. “He’s powerful, yes, and the stars are coming into alignment, but nothing else seems to fit.”

“Forget the prophecies! They were lies when my predecessors wrote them, and they’re still lies! That doesn’t mean he’s not the one they were warning us about.” The dark stranger spoke with a burning intensity that literally showed in his eyes, tiny flames licking up across his irises towards his pupils as he roared back at Feagan. “He’s a danger to all of us, and if we don’t do something to stop him soon … you know what could happen.”

“I’m not sure I believe that part either. Why would he do something that would destroy Earth as we know it? He’s not exactly suicidal or quote-unquote evil.” Feagan made finger quote-marks in the air as he emphasized the word “evil” verbally. The lanky man rolled his eyes in response, but Feagan continued, “So he can read and control minds with an unprecedented level of skill, so what? So he’s got a copy of Sunshine’s entire life history to draw on, and who knows who else has let him into their minds by now to add to that, there’s nothing he could learn from someone that could make him any more of a threat than the person he learned it from already represented to us.”

Sqrat, who had been standing so meekly to the side that he seemed hardly to have been noticed by the other two, spoke up. “I’ve watched every single dodgeball game he’s ever played, written down every play and studied what he’s done – he uses magic no one has ever used before in almost every game, developing strategies and complex spells spur-of-the-moment to suit his moods. When he does use traditional magic, he rarely uses it the way everyone else has been using it for eons. I heard Echelar & Spink has been planting a man in the audience at our games and have already begun to update their texts with as many of his plays as they can before the new school year.”

The tall man’s glare focused through his giant glasses and seemed intensified like the sun’s light would have been intensified through the lenses to rapidly create a fire, and would have been burning a hole right between Sqrat’s eyes if it were more than just a glare. “What does that childish game have to do with anything, Sqrat?” As the lanky leader said “anything,” Sqrat’s bushy, connected eyebrows actually did catch fire, and he quickly reached up to slap at his own face to try to put out the tiny blaze.

“Aaahh! Aaa-aahh.. ahh… Ow.” Sqrat calmed down when his face was no longer on fire and tried to answer, “if he… if he’s that powerful just playing a .. a... childish game, imagine what he could do in a … a… a ..b-b-b-b… b-b- b-b b-b …”

“A battle?”

Sqrat let out a huge breath in relaxation. “Yes. A real battle. I’m on your side, sir.” Sqrat reached over and put his hand on the scar where his bone had broken through his arm and remembered the day he had first introduced Trevor to their world.

“Good thing, Sqrat.” He turned back to Feagan and continued to try to quell his mutiny, “what do you say to that, Trask?”

“I’ve seen him play, too, and if he’s using the full extent of his abilities in the game, they’re impressive, but he wouldn’t beat you on your worst day in a proper duel.” The tall one seemed nonplussed about having his ego rubbed by Mr. Trask, but didn’t interrupt again. “Just because he’s powerful and can do things no one has ever seen before doesn’t make him the one talked about in the prophecy. If he wins the championship tonight, it almost means the opposite, since the one in the prophecy isn’t ever supposed to achieve notoriety before the end has already begun.”

“You’re not listening. I told you the prophecy isn’t the point anymore. Stopping the boy is.”

“You’ve been telling us from the beginning that the prophecy was all that mattered. All the work we’ve done has revolved around the prophecy, and now you say it’s all a lie, it doesn’t matter, that the prophecy is not the point? If the prophecy isn’t real, why am I talking to you at all?”

“Because you know I’m right.” The tall man’s voice was becoming more even.

“You got me to believe in the prophecy for nothing, then?”

“Do you still believe I’m right about the boy?” His face was becoming more relaxed.

“He’s not the one in the prophecy.”

“Do you believe me about the boy?” The formerly imposing figure now seemed forgiving, imploring rather than demanding.

“…I…” Feagan Trask was no longer looking at an angry face, a menacing beast defending himself, and if the tall man was so calm and assured about it … Feagan wasn’t sure what to think. “We should keep watching him.”

“We should stop him.” The lanky figure was determined, but not oppressive.

“Stop him from doing what? If the prophecy can’t be trusted, what exactly do you think he’s going to be doing?”

“Just because we don’t know the path he takes to get there doesn’t mean he’s not going to destroy life on Earth as we know it.”

“It doesn’t mean he is, either.”

“He is. You’ve seen the look in his eye. You’ve touched the surface of his mind. You know he’s not like us.”

“You’re such a xenophobe. You’re worse than the native shamans were.”

“And if he’s the advance scout of a colonization effort of thousands or millions more like him, like we were when we arrived on these shores? Do you want to be the one that welcomed him and his people to take over our planet?”

“Is that what you think is going to happen?”

“You know we can’t know the future with that much detail. All we can do is speculate and calculate and observe him until we see the moment to stop him.”

“But if he’s not the risk you claim, what sort of ethical charge do we get for stopping him?”

“You’re worried about ethical charge? You. That’s a joke, right?” The thin face’s composure finally broke into thundering laughter.

“Stop laughing at me.” He simply laughed louder. “You don’t know what I’ve gone through to get back to a balanced charge after what we’ve done already. Sunshine does random charge sweeps of her entire staff, and I’m not about to be singled out or lose my position there because of your … experiments.”

The tall man couldn’t seem to stop laughing, apparently thinking about the sheer scale of community service and positive social work Feagan must have done to make up for their dark activities of the last decade. He laughed so hard he nearly fell to the floor, shaking and bending over and clutching his skinny belly in pain from convulsions. He laughed and laughed and laughed and the other two men didn’t try to speak or leave, they just watched and waited. Sqrat chuckled a little, but more for the tall man’s benefit than his believing Feagan’s actions had been funny. Sqrat had done quite a bit of work to balance his own ethical charge; he just didn’t consider bringing it up to be a wise idea. Finally, the lanky man began to catch his breath, and spoke again.

“How many little old ladies do you have to help across the street to make up for murdering a room full of children, exactly?”

“You know that wasn’t my fault! I never meant for them to die! What about your sacrifices? How many hungry mouths do you have to feed, how many lives do you have to lift out of poverty, how much human suffering do you have to erase from the world to make up for just one of your human sacrifices?” He barely paused to see if the tall man would try to defend himself, “Oh yeah, that’s right! You can’t! Ever! Bring back a human sacrifice! You can’t ever balance it. At least I have the opportunity to try.”

“You know you’re asking for trouble, right?” The lanky man’s voice was calm and even, and his face once again had no readable expression. “You’re not the only one who can do the Devil’s Arithmetic. A tweak here, a tiny change in your instructions there, and next time the balance of the charge will land on your shoulders.”

“There won’t be a next time. You think I’d work with you again on something like … that?”

“You’ll do precisely what I say you will. My runestones have a record of every effect they’ve ever played a part in, and can be source-routed back to everyone who had a hand in their use. If the right stone were somehow misplaced and ended up in the hands of The Board, you know it wouldn’t take them long to detect one massacre or another lingering on it.”

“You’d never allow that. You’d be sourced, the same as me. They’d know what you’ve been doing, and I could tell them I only acted under duress.”

“Are you sure they could source it back to me? Do I need to remind you of my true name?”

Feagan’s lack of a reaction beyond silence told the bespectacled man that he had reasserted his power sufficiently, and the mutinous thoughts of his colleague were at an end. He returned to his appropriately tall seat at the head of the table, waited for the other two men to take their more humble seats, and began again.

“The real reason we’re meeting today should be obvious. You haven’t found the girl yet. You haven’t found out who took her or who wanted to take her. All you’ve proven is who didn’t take her, who didn’t want to take her, and that doesn’t actually help us. She’s less than a month from natural birth, assuming a standard gestation, and we need to find her before The Board does and before she gives birth. Whoever took her will probably just discard her when they have what they want from her, and her dead body doesn’t do us any good at all. So. What news do you have for me?”

* * *

The final buzzer for the final game went off, and the crowd sat in stunned silence, staring at the scoreboard, staring at the teams, trying to decide whether to cheer or boo or just go home. Down on the court, the players were tired and sore and the players from both teams, when they had caught their breath after the final buzzer, walked to the center of the court and shook each other’s hands almost silently. The sounds of their boots on the floor of the court and the shuffling of the crowd in the stands echoed in the empty air; no one even coughed to fill the silence.

The game had been a perfect tie.

There would be no way of knowing which team would have won if Trevor had not been playing, or had not been allowed to use his Mentalism, but the way it played out gave the appearance that the young men’s national champions were exactly matched with the young women’s national champions. Every player on both teams had exactly the same number of hits against them as they hadmade against another player. Every player that had been converted from one side to the other was converted back again. Every block was matched with a block on the other side. Every single thing that was tracked about every single player and action in each of the three games was precisely matched between the two teams. There was no way that either team, based on the match they had just completed, could be said to be the winner over the other team.

Trevor remembered what Mr. Klaw had told them before the game; it had been brief. He had said that the young women’s team was significantly better than they were, more talented, more skilled, and based on scoring for the entire season, if they played according to the same rules that had been used for the playoffs, Mr. Klaw assured them all they would lose two or three to one in every scoring category. Women are simply more naturally magically inclined, and had better intuition and teamwork, he’d said. And then he’d addressed Trevor directly, saying that the women’s team, the judging officials, and the league president had all agreed to allow Trevor to use his mental powers during the match, and that Mr. Klaw wanted him to go “all out.”

And that had been it. He’d had what had felt like a really long time by himself to think about what he could do or should do during the game. He could have not used his mental powers at all, and his team would probably have been severely beaten, even if he did pull off a big play at the end of the game, because of wins in a majority of statistics. He could have used his mental powers to lead his team to an overwhelming victory, even just by standing in the background and giving his teammates instructions about when to dodge and block and dip and when to throw or not to throw and who to throw at, giving them an excellent advantage in timing and precision and a relatively easy win. It was something he’d always avoided, so that the team’s winning was about their own skills generally, rather than his playing the entire game for the entire team as though it were merely a mental exercise. It was something he still didn’t want to do.

In considering it, Trevor also considered the implications of many possible outcomes. If he was allowed to use his Mentalism and didn’t, his teammates would hate him and the crowd would just watch them get smashed. If he led the team to a stunning victory, the other team would hate him and all the work he’d done during the season to make the team the focus instead of himself would be lost in a little over an hour; it would be pretty clear to everyone playing and watching that Trevor’s Mentalism was the difference between winning and losing for the young men. Trevor wasn’t sure where the idea came to him from, but he decided to attempt to create an outcome that required an intense show of his mental prowess, his team’s physical skill and mental dexterity in every player, and that wouldn’t take away from the fact that the young women’s team was an amazing set of players. He decided to try to craft a match that would not leave any individual player’s ego hurt, that would give every player equal time, and that would hopefully create balance and unity.

Whether it created balance and unity would be a matter of contentious discussion for a long time to come. No completed match had ever been exactly tied before, in the entire history of dodgeball. Even in matches where not a single hit had been made by either team, one team had always had more active blocks than the other and had been named the winner for superior defense. Plenty of games had had the same number of hits and conversions and blocks for each side, the primary statistics for scoring, but in each of those games, players had been converted faster from one side to the other, or converted players had played worse for the other side than they did their native side, or some other small statistical differences had existed between the teams or across the three games of a match which had created a reasonably clear winner. None of those things had happened in this unprecedented game.

Taking himself to the limits and pressing hard against the limits of what was morally acceptable with regard to taking action in the minds of others, Trevor had tuned into the thoughts of every player on both teams and actively suggested – and in some cases almost directly taken control of – actions for the players on his own side to take. Defensive actions to stay out of the way of just the right number of balls or to actively block just the right number of attacks to match what the young women’s team’s actual performance turned out to be, from play to play. Guidance about how to use different offensive moves, so that just the right number of strikes of the right types would hit or miss the female players, just the right number would be potentially blockable or potentially dodgeable. Mental guidance combined with actual physical guidance for lightning balls to hit the right players at the right times and miss in exactly the correct proportions to match what had been done by the other side. All of these mental commands and more were broadcasting while Trevor very carefully danced through the appropriate motions with his own body to play his own role in the game, dodging, blocking, casting, throwing, and otherwise doing his part to not be a better or worse player than any other person in any of the ways that any of them played the games.

Through this complex series of events, the young men’s national champions had actually managed to play at the level of the young women’s national champions, and because Trevor had not sent a single message, command, or suggestion to any of the players on the young women’s side – converted or not – it had been somewhat fair. But as the players shuffled off the court and the crowd began filing calmly row by row out of the stands, the low murmuring that was hardly above the audible level of the noise of thousands of feet making their way to the doors was certainly a harsh contrast to the literal cacophony that had filled the entire building just two hours earlier. Trevor, exhausted, had simply stood still at the sound of the buzzer.

When the crowd finally cleared and the rest of the players had retreated to their locker rooms, Trevor was still standing there in his formal brown robes, head hung down, arms at his sides, shoulders slung low, breathing slow and deep and long as he tried to recover from a game that was supposed to have been lighthearted and fun. He waited and relaxed and breathed with his head down and his eyes closed until his mind cleared and his thoughts’ velocity tapered off and his pulse returned to normal and he began to reach a calm, neutral state. Finally, after what may have been a genuinely long time or may have only been several minutes, Trevor lifted his head slowly upright and opened his eyes at the culmination of a refreshing inhalation of air. Present before him were the identical faces of his girlfriends, with big doe eyes and equal looks of concern broadcasting a reassuring warmth across his own less-than-radiant expression.

“You were amazing,” her tone was soft and reassuring, like the gentle purring of a newborn kitten held close and gentle against the skin. She stepped forward and pressed her whole body up against him, reaching around inside his overrobe in a very pleasant hug of his left side.

“That was perfect,” the other one was just as reassuring, just as soothing, and perhaps a bit of worshipfulness came across in her throaty but brief statement as she also stepped towards him, reached around his other side inside his overrobe and pressed the whole length of her body against him from the sides of their feet meeting slightly, her bare calf and thighs pressing through his underrobe, underskirt, and short pants against his own leg, and like her sister had done on the other side, pressing her torso against his and turning and tilting and resting the side of her head against his chest and shoulder, nuzzling up against his neck.

Then as they held themselves and each other tight against him and his own arms closed around them and his head came down to gently meet theirs, the three of them whispered softly in unison, “I love you.”

+ + +

“He’s ours.”

“It’s not over yet.”

“But our plan is working.”

“And if it does, –”

“He’s ours.”

+ + +

Their embrace lasted at least as long as his relaxing and emptying had before it, and none of them said another word before he was the first to move.

“Why don’t you come over to our place tonight, Trev?”

None of them had moved farther than to wrap themselves closer around each other, nor had Kay and Elle opened their eyes. They simply stood in his hot embrace, smiling, as he openned his eyes to consider the two of them. Trevor had never felt this way about anyone before, himself. Sunshine had felt a similar but also almost entirely different and unique way about her husband, and Trevor could remember it and compare it to this, but he knew that no two loves could really be related properly to each other, so didn’t spend long on that point of his/her memories. Here he was, feeling love – what he knew was genuine, everlasting, unconditional love – for these two people. Two people who not only loved him in return, but loved each other and loved their shared loves for each other.

Even without once reading a single thought or memory from either of them, he knew their love was genuine. He could feel it. It was like an unconscious broadcast they both made to him all the time, whether he was near or far, on their minds or not, and without ever consciously or intentionally looking into their thoughts and feelings he knew unmistakably that their love was genuine. He had known before they had told him, and though he had resisted, doubted, second-guessed and fought with himself about it, he had known for some time that he reciprocated that love. And as though speaking three tiny words had broken down a wall and transformed the world, things were different on the other side of that brief phrase. Like the final words of a long incantation or the first syllables of a new story, something had been created and something destroyed in the instance of that utterance.

Trevor caught even himself by surprise when he responded, saying “I think I will,” and the three of them disappeared, and the court on which one of the strangest dodgeball matches in history had just been played was finally left alone to contemplate the meaning of what had just transpired.

Meanwhile Trevor, Kay, and Elle appeared in the girls’ shared bedroom, still standing in each other’s embrace. Slowly the girls drew themselves away from Trevor’s sides and while one moved around the room lighting candles with tiny flicks of her wrist the other did a bit of subtle tidying. Trevor just watched them, thinking carefully about the situation he was about to find himself in, and though he didn’t question his decision to enter into it, he thought about exactly how he should proceed. He suspected that there was a line he’d have to cross if he wanted this experience to reach the full expression of potential for pleasure and fulfillment for all three of them that he suspected was possible. Yet he didn’t know whether it was one he ought to cross.

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask,” one of the young women said.

“Ask what?” Trevor thought perhaps he had missed some clue or sign about what she was talking about; he knew women sometimes expected men to know what they were thinking without their ever saying it, but that was the line he had never crossed with them, out of courtesy and propriety.

“You know. Permission. So you could feel it was proper,” the other young woman said as she finished lighting the candles and moved back to stand before Trevor.

“Proper and courteous,” the first young woman said as she finished straightening the duvet and pillows on the second of two beds before turning to face Trevor from where she stood, “as though you hadn’t already done it with countless others before us.”

Trevor was torn, and fighting with himself mentally to determine what, precisely, they were talking about. Considering the situation and environment they were in, and the implied actions to come, they could be talking about sex or some sex act or permission for some other related thing. The way they had implicated that he’d “already done it with countless others” before them could be a statement about their perception of sexual prowess and experience in him, and if that was the case, he may be in for some trouble when they learned he had never really been with anyone sexually before. Trevor certainly couldn’t think of a proper and courteous way to ask two women permission to make love to them.

On the other hand, their statements had almost frighteningly echoed words and thoughts from his own mind, as though they had been reading his mind and responding to his thoughts. In which case, they knew exactly what he was worried about, and it wasn’t exactly the sex, but something much more broadly reaching in their relationship. And whether it was frightening or relieving had something to do with whether they had already actually been reading his thoughts – he had not detected even a gentle touch of his mind by another since the end of the dodgeball match, even with all the techniques, skill and experience of Sunshine added to his own natural talent for Mentalism. If they could read Trevor’s highly attuned and sensitive mind without his slightest notice, what else could they do that he didn’t know about?

“You can’t find out if you don’t ask.” Both of them smiled warmly, invitingly, at Trevor, waiting for him to ask a question he wasn’t sure he knew how to ask.

“May I…” he tried to begin, but wasn’t so sure he wanted the answer to the question he most wanted to ask.

“What?”

“May I…” On one hand, if he asked about reading their minds and they were expecting him to ask about sex, the conversation that would inevitably ensue might put them out of the mood, and his hormones wanted no part of that.

“What?” The one of them standing nearer to Trevor walked slowly backwards to one of the beds and sat down, waiting for his question.

“I mean…” On the other hand, if he asked about sex and they were expecting him to ask about reading their minds, they would already know everything he’d been thinking, and it wouldn’t be long before they got to that same long conversation after all, which in addition to a faux pax about his asking might almost necessarily put them out of the mood.

The one that was still standing sat down on her own bed, her body facing her sister, her head still facing Trevor. “What?”

“May I…” On another hand, if they had the conversation about reading minds and he found out they had definitely been reading his mind the whole time, and who knows for how long before that, and that he had been avoiding it unnecessarily – not to mention the fact that if their level of skill was so much higher than his that he could only ever know what they wanted him to know without his injuring them – he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to go down that road at all. And now he was confusing himself with his own thoughts of how to figure it all out.

“Yes… ?”

He decided to try thinking a question, the result of which would tell him much, and thought quite clearly “Are you two reading my mind?” A response in thought came back to him, like the harmonization of two voices as ripples on the surface of his own jumbling thoughts, “Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“Soon.” Both girls giggled after speaking in synchronous response.

“I don’t know about that. I mean…”

“We know what you mean,” the twin on the left said.

The twin on the right continued, “and if you weren’t so polite and careful, you’d know what we meant, too.”

“But I thought… I couldn’t tell you were… “ Trevor was fighting becoming flabbergasted, but triumphed over their coy smiles and upper hand long enough to ask them forcefully, “Why can’t I tell when you’re reading my mind?”

“We’re twins.”

“Haven’t you ever studied twins?”

“Not … well, not really.”

“We know.”

“We’ll explain.”

“You’ve probably heard that some twins believe they can tell when the other is in danger,”

“And that some, well outside of any knowledge of the science of Mentalism, believe they can read each other’s thoughts,”

“And finish each other’s sentences.”

“Like you two are doing now.”

“Right. Like we’re doing now. But we had an advantage over all those other twins, because we…”

“Were raised by parents who were experts in the science of Mentalism…”

“Wait, your parents are the same Jay and Emma who literally wrote the book on modern Mentalism!? I thought their names were a coincidence! Are they downstairs right now? I’d love to meet them.”

“We know you would, and yes, they’re the same Jay and Emma who documented the techniques of Maheu’le before his unfortunate death.”

“Exactly! I remember working with Maheu’le… It would be nice to remember that with someone who can really understand.”

“We’re getting off topic here,”

“You wanted to know about our Mentalism. Jay and Em are out of town for the next week or two anyway, you can meet them another time.”

“Okay, okay, right. So. Twins have a natural affinity to Mentalism, and you were raised in it by experts.”

“That’s almost right. Identical twins have a natural affinity to having easy contact with their twin’s mind, not necessarily with anyone else’s.”

“But more right than you know, because it was expert guidance that allowed us to move beyond just reading each other’s minds,”

“To reading other people’s minds,”

“And then to communicating with other minds.” This was the harmonic double-voice flowing across the surface of his mind again. Trevor shivered.

They switched back to normal speech, the twin on the right saying “all before we were old enough for pre-school.”

“Which posed a problem. Most people don’t learn Mentalism as a first language, and as you know,”

“Contacting the minds of the unready or untrained can be very dangerous.”

“Even deadly. And we were only a few years old – our judgment wasn’t exactly the most sound.”

“So our parents kept us out of school for a while, training us further, sharing memories and experiences, and working with us until we could practice Mentalism gently.”

“Very gently.”

“So gently that all but the most sensitive mind would not notice us at all, and the chance of a reactionary injury dropped almost to zero. Which was what our parents had been working towards,”

“So we could go to school with other children without endangering them.”

“Or our teachers.”

“I see.”

“So that with practice,”

“And experience,”

“We learned to be very gentle indeed.” Trevor felt a sensation like something warm and soft running backwards across the top of his head and down and down and down his back, like being petted by some large invisible hand, and the girls giggled again.

“And you’ve been reading my mind for how long, exactly?”

“Since we first saw you.”

“We liked you right away, and wanted to know if you liked us too,”

“Before we tried to approach you,”

“So we read your first impression of us and knew you liked us too.”

“And you never stopped…” Trevor was beginning to grasp what they were telling him.

“Well, we knew how you felt about not reading our minds,”

“It’s cute how you don’t want to risk somehow upsetting us or betraying us or controlling us or whatever it is you think reading our minds might do,”

“But it’s just silly, really. You know enough about Mentalism to know that there’s a huge difference between monitoring surface thoughts or even accessing standard memories and actually issuing commands, directing thoughts, and anything that can cause real damage or influence us directly or indirectly.”

“We also know that you’ve never really been in a relationship with anyone,”

“Let alone two people at once,”

“And that you’re just working from cultural and absorbed memories to try to behave reasonably with us.”

“We think it’s very admirable, how polite and genteel you’ve been. We do appreciate it,”

“But from now on, we expect you to know what we’re thinking.”

“You have a big advantage over most men, you know. Their women expect them to read their minds even without Mentalism.” Both girls giggled again.

Trevor was taken somewhat aback, but tried to roll with it and not seem caught off guard. His hormones were still trying to get him to get past this psychological nonsense and get into bed with these willing young women, but his sense of ethics and propriety kept trying to force him to work out more of the details of what they wanted from him and how he should respond. He still felt it was an invasion to go into their minds like that. He still regretted all the time he’d spent unknowingly invading real people’s lives and thoughts before he’d learned what he had been doing, though, on a subtle level, Trevor was beginning to see that this reaction to his own past wrongdoing had perhaps moved him too far to see the truth about what might be right or reasonable.

“Why don’t you just take a peek to start? It’s okay.”

“We want you to.”

Trevor closed his eyes. He didn’t want to be looking at them when he started this, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be doing this at all. Trevor also knew that for this to go well, he’d have to take this first step. He relaxed his mind and opened his thoughts as Sunshine had been trained to do by Maheu’le. And there their thoughts were, very near to him, very clear. There was something altogether strange to him about their thoughts, something unexpected, something beautiful.

Instead of two distinct sets of thoughts coming from their two minds, instead of a disconnected jumble of thoughts and worries and memories all streaming out almost without direction and usually unfocused, instead of a single mental semi-conscious voiceover coming from each of them in their own voices, there was a single harmonious dual voice coming from what seemed to be neither one of them and both of them with perfect overlap and no echo or apparent mental back-and-forth of thoughts to reach agreement. They seemed both to think the same thoughts at the same time, and their thoughts were uncannily ordered and complete, which was a thing of such unexpected beauty to Trevor that he didn’t realize how unnatural such a thing must be. It was as though there was a single mind controlling their two bodies, and like their two distinct minds were in perfect harmony at the same time. Trevor was so in awe of the context that their mind or minds created that he was deaf to the content at first.

“Trev? Trev… Trev.” Finally his name, projected to him in their private thoughts, got his attention. He responded in thought, “Love.”

“See, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re here with you,” and with his eyes still closed, Trevor felt a small hand on each of his arms as their thoughts continued addressing him. He hadn’t noticed them thinking about getting up and coming over to him, but was completely enraptured by the strange beauty of their thoughts. “Come sit down, relax,” and the hands were pulling him forward, walking slowly towards their beds. He didn’t have to open his eyes to cross that short distance, or to allow himself to be turned around and pushed backwards onto the bed by two gentle hands on his chest, and he certainly didn’t have to open his eyes to realize that the beds had moved or changed since he’d closed his eyes. “We pushed them together,” their thoughts came to him in response, “so we’d have more room to be together.”

Trevor liked the idea of that, and having their two soft, warm bodies laying down alongside him, both left and right, and having their hands begin to explore slowly the surface of his body certainly pushed worries about reading their minds from his focus. He was still worried on some level about their literal mental prowess somehow posing a danger to him, but the strain of intuition that had put two and two together, that they had been keeping their expert Mentalism and their connection to the leading experts on the subject a secret which might be the tip of a very dark iceberg of secrets, was silenced by the blood flowing less through his brain and more into his growing arousal.

“That’s the idea, Trev. Relax.” Their thoughts were becoming like a familiar blanket to him rather than the foreign work of art they had first appeared, surrounding his own thoughts, he began to feel his mind harmonizing with their synchronicity. “Good. Now, would you like to see what you’ve been missing?”

“Missing? What have I been missing?” Trevor thought, increasingly excited and half asleep at once.

“This,” and then instead of the steady stream of thoughts interspersed with conscious communication from their minds, Trevor was experiencing their memories from their own point of view. It began with the first time they saw him, and already it was disorienting to him. Instead of serially reliving one of their memories and then the other and then reconciling them as he had done with other people’s memories of single events to experience them multiply, he was simultaneously seeing through four eyes, hearing though four ears, feeling with two bodies the same moment in memory. Layered on top of this was something complex and subtle in its elegance, as each of their minds while experiencing its own perceptions was experiencing the other’s slightly different perceptions on top of and through her own mind’s eye, and on top of that was part of a single consciousness that encompassed both of their thoughts as the singular whole he had first experienced when opening up to them. Making the whole thing more intense was the fact that on top of the perfect realization of three simultaneous layers of the twin’s perceptions, emotions, and thoughts, he was experiencing with his own body their four hands slowly and carefully beginning to undress him, reaching into his overrobe and unbuttoning his underrobe, then gently pulling his arms one at a time out of both robes’ sleeves at once while he lay on his back on their bed, on the robes, knowing what it was like when they’d first seen him across a crowded school hallway.

In the memory, as soon as Trevor made eye contact with one, then the other of them, then back and forth and back and forth between them as though trying to give equal time to each of them as he bared his soul to them in a single glance, they had each and both felt a surge of what he now, and they at the time, had immediately recognized as love at first sight, and with almost no time between that surge and their gentle reaching out to his mind, he experienced the oddness that was experiencing his own mind through the Mentalism of another for the first time as they searched to find out if his reaction to them could possibly equate to their reaction to him. It had.

That memory was just the beginning. Trevor soon found himself swimming in a sea of every time they had seen him or thought of him or been near him, singly or doubly, and every thought and feeling they had had at the time, layer upon layer. Hour after hour, day after day, month after month, flooding and rushing through and into his mind with nearly the speed he had absorbed Sunshine’s entire history, their lives since he had entered the scene came to him in a new way. The flow of information Trevor was experiencing that was their past soon became enough to drown out what was happening to his physical body in the present, so that by the time their flow of memories caught up with what was going on and he experienced their undressing him from their perspective, it was the first time he realized they had got him down to his undershirt and short pants, the rest of his uniform tossed casually to the floor beside their joined beds. He opened his eyes.

Two soft, round faces he only imagined he could tell one from the other were above his, smiling. One of them crossed to meet him, growing to fill Trevor’s perception before connecting with him lips on lips in a deep and passionate kiss he could feel four different ways as through his own body’s sensitized nerves, those of the young woman kissing him, through the eyes of the other twin leaning over the two of them watching the kiss and experiencing it as well, and through the duality of consciousness that was the twins’ two minds’ harmony. There was no parallel in his experience to that kiss, even in the experiences he had absorbed from their memories of kissing him in the past, as there were still only three layers in each of those unreconciled memories while all four were present and active within his experience in this moment. Trevor felt as though he should be overwhelmed, but was somehow not only able to cope with all this, but before that first kiss broke off in panting breath and a stirring in three sets of loins, he had already become somewhat accustomed to it all.

Except then the other twin took the first’s place at his lips and the experience was very similar in its complexity but also subtly different enough that it was wholly new while still recognizable – he knew briefly that the one whose tongue was tangling tantalizingly with his was Elle’s by the differences in the way they kissed – a kiss that built on the former as though by the same person while starting from a new basis because it was by a different person. Then, instead of just experiencing Kay watching the two of them kissing, Trevor, while kissing Elle and while through her mind experienci