Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
Part X
To Infinity and Beyond!
48
Mission Mars: The Mini-Series
“I NEED TO TAKE my family away for a few days. We have business in Japan we need to take care of and as you can all imagine, adding a dozen women to our household puts some strain on our relationships. We need a retreat so we can work out how to handle our emotions and responses,” I said when everyone had gathered in the morning. I’d called Doug and had him bring in our secondary camera crew—not residents of Areola—so I wasn’t leaving any of my women behind. As far as appearances went, however, it was just Peninnah, Liz, Penelope, Dezi, and Laine going with me.
“Bob, I don’t like this. While the cat’s away…” Doug started.
“Part of what I want to know is how the mice play,” I said.
“But you’ll be off-camera. It will create a hole in the project.”
“I’ve arranged for a crew to meet us in Japan. I’ll record everything, but I won’t be showing everything. This needs to be family confidential,” I said. “However, I think we’ll have a surprise for the girls. Please make sure they all have valid passports.”
Doug’s mouth dropped open and he grinned as the implication dawned on him.
“You’re the boss. It makes me nervous to know we’re at the halfway point and only one girl has been eliminated. We promised the first episodes to HCEN in eight weeks and haven’t started cutting together the first one yet.”
“Let’s go ahead and cut together the first episode out of the auditions. There’s some pretty dramatic footage in that and it should set the stage for what’s going to happen in the season. We have to gather the cast before we can start cutting them. And we’ll have a solution for eliminations by the time we finish this trip.”
I headed for the minibus with the family and our driver took us to the airport, where we boarded the private jet Peninnah had acquired for us. No, I couldn’t fly this baby, but I loved streaking across the Pacific in eight hours to Japan. It sure beat my first trip across the Pacific that took four months!
Peninnah dismissed the staff at our penthouse by phone so we wouldn’t be seen arriving and unpacking our family into our home. Most had traveled in the infinity room rather than sitting for eight hours on the plane. As soon as we’d checked the penthouse thoroughly, I sealed the perimeter, much as I had sealed the house in Knossos 4,000 years ago. No one would be coming in uninvited. And then I opened the gateway. Free of the inhibitions imposed by working with the actors, my wives and possessions and several concubines and the camera crew came rushing into the penthouse to enjoy the view, the pool, and the bed.
We spent a day just catching up with our lovers. That included time in the temple on Areola in full demon form with my priestesses. I always left the temple feeling exceptionally good. Something about the lethal women who worshiped me just charged my batteries. Or perhaps it was the rituals they performed. Whatever.
I let the cameras run on everything as we went in and out of Areola. Of course, they had to leave Areola in order to download and store the footage and to charge their batteries.
There was no electricity in Areola.
That didn’t mean we had no electrical appliance equivalents. I had to give a lot of consideration to this by the time we got to the 1950s. Newcomers expected TV, radio, and even telephones. All I could see was miles and miles of wires and antennae, signal towers, and powerplants polluting the air. But Areola is a magic kingdom. I read a lot of books about power sources and discovered all the usual ones. Water, fire, solar, wind. In every case, something that would be described as magic by ninety percent of my citizens happened inside a device that changed the water, fire, sunlight, or wind into electricity. And if all this could be created through magic, then certainly I could create a power source in Areola that was magical.
After I read up on everything, I found a quiet place where I felt I would be undisturbed for a month and went into the infinity room. It took me the entire month to create the power grid for my capital city. It was a network of forces that I laid out under my bedroom first, because that was the easiest place to generate power. The network spread out beneath the ground and simply began to grow. Soon there was ‘power’ throughout the capital city. And it continued to grow.
Then I called a meeting of the top minds of the room, many from the current century. I explained that there was now power and how they could tap into it. It was their responsibility to invent things that ran on that power. If they wanted television, they needed to create a television that would both run on the power in the network and receive the signals from the network. It was the process of learning to use the power grid for various technologies they wanted. The first and foremost was cooking. We’d never been big on fires in the infinity room, but people had learned early on to heat stones with sunlight and cook on them. That had been established about the time I put a sun in our sky.
How did this power get replenished?
Well, what would you expect? Sex! People generate an enormous amount of psychic energy during sex and my power grid simply collected that and spread it through the network. Sex had always been encouraged and was widely participated in throughout Areola. The more people who were having sex, the more power was spread through the grid. That’s why I originated the grid under my bed. I spent most of the month I was working on the magic having sex in my bedroom. We generated a lot of power.
Well, as a result, we had the equivalent of television, computers, and electricity without having any of the pollution of generating the power.
The first thing Peninnah had said when I brought her into Areola the first time had been, “Bob, there’s no cell signal.” Of course there was no cell signal. You could pick up any telephone connection in the infinity room and simply speak to anyone you asked for. What was really missing was contact with the natural world. That’s where cell signals were and we stayed separate from that.
“My beloved wives and possessions—my family, all of you,” I said to them when we’d all finally gathered in the penthouse without my cock in one or another of them. That didn’t stop us from all being naked, though. “I believe we have come to a crisis point with the whole scheme to leave the planet earth behind and seal ourselves in the infinity room. It has to do with the concept of the ‘reality’ show and the women we are testing for a part in our voyage.”
“You can’t bear to let any of them go, can you?” Nimia laughed. “Bob, you’ve always had that problem. How do you think we got three and a half million people in Areola?”
“I admit that is my problem,” I said. “And I hope you know that I love each of you—my wives, possessions, concubines, and many others—beyond life itself. Nimia, you and Ariane first showed me what love and life was all about when I was barely cognizant of the world around me. I fell in love with it just as I fell in love with each of you.”
“Have you fallen in love with the cast so soon?” Penelope asked.
“Yes. But even that is not the source of my worry,” I said. “I’ve become aware that the women we are testing for inclusion are at minimum suspicious of our greater presence. I mean Areola, of course. You may have noticed that Julie has developed a close relationship with our training instructor, Paul. She came to me a few nights ago, certain that I was aware of it and afraid that I would eliminate her from the competition because she wasn’t faithful. I had to think about that for a while. I don’t possess her. I am not married to her. I have no intentions of either one. I have always tried to let my concubines be free to establish other relationships, whether that means my sharing them or having them leave me.”
“As long as you don’t consider sharing your wives and possessions…” Lakshmi started, then added, “or Zhi or your priestesses, we would have no problem with any concubine choosing to enjoy the company of another man. Some of the girls might not even want to be loved by a woman.”
“That is true, but I asked Julie what would happen if she was chosen and we got ready to depart. Would she be able to leave Paul behind and commit herself to our group? After she considered it a while, Julie asked if I didn’t have a place I could put him, like with my other staff people and camera crew. She pointed out that you all come to my room at night, but none of you are there if one of the cast comes to call on me. And then that you magically appear again in the morning.”
“I could slip out and simply eliminate him. Then Julie could mourn and put him behind her,” Zhi said. She reached for her sword, but I held up my hand to forestall her.
“You know how I feel about that,” I said. “It is one thing to eliminate slavers and kidnappers. Paul has simply fallen for one of our girls. That’s a very different matter.”
“One of your girls,” Liz said. “That’s really the problem. You haven’t possessed any of them, but you still think of them as yours.”
“It’s so easy for me to become attached to them. If that was truly all it was, I’d cut her from the cast at the first elimination. No. She brings up a point that is going to be repeated. Others of our camera crew who aren’t citizens of Areola, Doug, other trainers and scientists, perhaps even more librarians!”
They laughed at that because my obsession with libraries was only exceeded by my obsession with my women. But they got the message. There were a lot of people we wanted to take with us who weren’t in the running for the cast.
“We need to start eliminating girls soon or we won’t have a show to broadcast,” Peninnah said. “We have to include the eliminated girls in that group you have just named off. I think we are dreading the day when girls get eliminated.”
“Exactly!” I said. “What if we offered those girls the opportunity to join us in the infinity room. If we need to, we can figure out a way to disguise the reality of it so we can show it on TV and it will look totally fake. Frankly, I think every single one of them will take the opportunity.”
We started talking about it and brainstorming how it could be done. No one questioned whether we should do it. We decided that the more truth we told, the more the television audience would believe it was fake. We even considered having me show up in full demon mode. We’d all come to understand long ago that there was something about my beastly demon mode that triggered incredible desire in women. Perhaps it was pheromones or some other thing in Pinaruti’s imagination that had made me irresistible to women when he summoned me. Perhaps it was his own fantasy to be irresistible that he transferred to me as reality. Several of the women in the room had come so hard the first time they saw me in full demon mode that they’d passed out. We shelved that idea for the time being.
Americans—humanity in general—had reached a point of declaring anything they disagreed with as ‘fake.’ There was no way they would possibly think Areola was real. Even if one of the girls decided she wanted to go back—assuming we hadn’t left earth yet—she could talk about what was on the other side of the portal until she was blue in the face and no one would believe her. At best she would be considered an attention seeker. At worst, she’d end up like Mr. Yakisoba.
We then went to work putting together the scenarios and contests for the girls to have. They decided how to introduce Areola and we recorded a tour of the palace just to have on file. It included a lot of naked concubines, but also some of their husbands and children. We would save introducing the demon until we were safely away from earth.
I called Doug and had him load the girls and the crew onto our airplane and be wheels up in two hours. This was the first test to see if anyone dragged the team back and made them late. We would resume filming at our penthouse in Japan. It had plenty of room for everyone, and we had a huge staff to take care of our needs.
The greeting we got when the girls arrived was enthusiastic. In fact, I’d say we were mobbed with hugs and kisses and chattering girls. Each wanted to tell about what they had done while we were gone. The stories competed with their desire to get naked and go to our pool. They were fascinated with our bath and showers and with the huge bed in the master suite.
“Okay, everyone, get ready for bed and then gather out here for a family meeting.” Josie, of course, had worked on room assignments and then disappeared, leaving Liz to conduct the girls to accommodations. For myself, I also got ready for bed as if I slept in pajamas! I was also gradually changing my shape to be a little more handsome and perhaps just a little bigger.
When everyone came out of their rooms, it looked like a teenage slumber party. All dressed in their nighties and sat on the floor at my feet as if I was a wise old sage telling stories around the campfire. ‘The family’ gathered with them as soon as they’d changed clothes for bedtime. I noticed that even the camerawomen were in nighties and wondered if I was going to be able to concentrate on my announcements. I was willing to bet that as soon as I’d finished, bits of clothing would malfunction and disappear.
“First of all, let me say that we, the family, missed you all terribly while we were gone and thought about you every day. We can hardly bear to think of losing any of you. But as you all know, we have to pare the contestants down to a crew of six, which means half of you can’t join us.”
There were a lot of ‘aws’ and a few tears as some of the girls were certain they would be eliminated. I could think of no reason to eliminate any of them off the top of my head. I’d really grown quite attached to them. I saw a few girls hanging onto each other as well, and Dezi and Laine were holding a couple of others.
“It’s impossible for us to just choose someone and say ‘You’re out.’ So, we will be holding a series of elimination contests. These contests will be held over the course of the next six weeks, and at the end, there will be just six of you left to crew our ship.”
I’d watched several different reality TV shows by now in preparation for our taping and knew I was supposed to pause dramatically while the cameras zoomed in on faces for reactions.
“The first competition will begin on Monday. That will give you this three-day weekend to get to know our Japanese staff, the local area and resources, and… the kitchen.” There were a lot of worried faces looking at each other. “This will be a test of your domestic skills. You know that we’ll be cooped up alone for a long time and we’ll all need to take turns…” Dramatic pause. “…cooking. In the next week, you will each cook a meal to serve to the rest of us. That means you need to cook for eighteen, just as we normally sit for meals at the dining table. Our staff will take care of the camera and production crew. You will each draw a ball from the hat Liz is holding. There are six breakfast balls and six dinner balls. Everyone who eats at that meal will score it. We will score based on flavor, nutrition, presentation, and appropriateness for the meal you are serving. When all the scores have been tabulated, the lowest score at the end of the week will be eliminated.”
I saw Julie’s head drop and could see tears falling. I hurried on to the next phase.
“We have categorized everyone in this challenge and are offering one person, who we consider to be the least likely to succeed in any given challenge, immunity from elimination. That means that no matter what she scores, she will not be eliminated in that challenge. For the first challenge: ‘Feeding the Family,’ we have granted immunity to…” Dramatic pause. “…Julie!”
The poor girl just lost it and cried out her thanks and her hope that everyone did great. Everyone knew Julie was the most inept person in the kitchen of all the girls. It was a great moment that would improve our ratings. Doug slapped his hands together and rubbed them. This was what he wanted to happen.
At the end of the week, there would be a second surprise for one of our contestants.
There was a mad dash to the computers as the girls began looking up recipe ideas and making lists for their assigned meals. Julie came rushing to me and grabbed hold of Pen and Liz as well. She was still sobbing.
“I thought… I thought you were just going to get rid of me first!” she cried. “I don’t want to be eliminated. I don’t ever want to be eliminated. I love you all so much!”
“We are doing everything we can to keep people from being eliminated,” Liz said sternly. “But you need to do something, too.”
“I won’t see Paul again,” Julie said meekly.
“That’s not what we’re asking of you,” I said. She looked up at me with a puzzled expression.
“Your task this week is to observe and help at each meal. You should do your best to learn what the other girls are doing and help each of them to do her very best to not be eliminated,” Liz continued. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, mistress,” Julie said submissively. “I’ll do my best to help each of them succeed and to learn all I can from them.”
“One more thing,” Peninnah said. Julie looked up at her, honestly frightened. I think all the girls were both in awe and a little frightened of my newest wife. She always looked and acted perfectly. When she had Julie’s undivided attention, she said, “Report to our bed tonight. I want to eat your freshly fucked pussy.”
I thought Julie might pass out on the spot.
In fact, later that night, with Peninnah’s face between her legs, she did pass out.
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