Chapter 17 - Fever Cluster
“Hey,” I said the next night into the library. Lila was sprawled out on top of a bookshelf, these no longer filled with lessons of my life. They looked empty without books, but it was now the digital age, and the stories remained on the laptop downstairs.
“Oh, hey,” Lila sat up on the bookshelf, legs hanging off each side. “You’re back like you said. I didn’t expect you to be here the next day.”
“I feel a strange need to apologize to you,” I said.
“But don’t,” she replied, lifted her leg over to join the other and jumped off the height to land gracefully. “I did what I wanted to do.”
“Even without beast rattling around inside me, I took advantage,” I said.
“It’s fine,” she said. “And let me know if you’d even feel like trying it in the female form.” I tried to picture it, rubbing our backs together at random. Then I tried to picture how a human female and Lila could engage in sex, much to confusion. There would be a lot to figure out before it could be pleasurable.
“I was wondering if you could tell me more,” I said.
“About sex?”
“No, I meant,” I replied, then hesitated. “Sure. I’d like to know about your kind’s sexual encounters. For example, are there spots on the Yoni opening that are more sensitive?” Lila, currently in a teen body, blushed red and progressed her age to somebody more mature. I still had no idea what level of maturity she was, but knew for sure she was only playacting a child.
“Let’s start with some basics,” Lila said, waving her hand in the air to bring forth a strange-looking cross-section of a female. The womb was pentagonal. The the opening in the back led a channel into the pentagonal womb, that was supplied by five spheres. I watched as a curved penis entered the channel and something traveled along it, visible under the skin. It made me shiver. When it reached the end, it did not exit, only expanded the tip inside the womb.
The entrance to the womb closed around it, holding the member in place, while the back arched, closing the spinal gap to sever the member. It withdrew, while the yoni spot of skin compressed like a sphincter, but into a V shape instead. Inside the womb, the severed member floated free, positioned correctly for the bottom-most sphere to extend a tendril which entered the piece of foreign flesh traveling all the way to the bulbous tip. From that connection, the other orbs extended tendrils to strip away the pieces of the foreign object until only a bean remained, connected at the belly, just like a human.
“Whoa,” I said. “It looks just like a human in that stage. Other than the lack of genitalia to identify. That grows in, I take it?” Lila waved a hand to vanish the model, and nodded.
“As for the sensitive spots,” Lila said, turning around while lifting her shirt. “You’ll find the corners more sensitive, and one particular spot a bit inside.” Lila flexed her arms to put her hand inside and feel around.
“Wow, your arm is flexible,” I said.
“Here,” she said. “Put your hand where mine is.” I hesitated for a moment, then slipped my hand along hers into her. “The spot is just above the opening in the spine. We call it the Fever Cluster. It helps both involved achieve release. Ok, now move your fingers over it.” Lila withdrew her hand from inside, with mine remaining. I followed her instructions, but the cluster was very slippery inside the already lubricated opening. I could sometimes feel the top of the bone opening in her spine that tore off the male member, a tooth so to speak.
“Is that good?” I asked, after a few moments of moving my fingers. I got no response from Lila, and decided to stop, but she reached back to hold onto my wrist. Her hand felt hot, as if blood was coursing through it faster than safe.
“Don’t… stop…” she said. “Please.” I kept going, just moving my fingers over the slippery bulb. Lila’s breathing became rushed, ragged. I hoped I was not hurting her. Then she stopped breathing altogether, arched wildly while head-butting my face. I fell back to the floor, while she arched more and more. It looked like something from a horror film. Her face was red, getting purple, and her eyes were wide open in a look of terror. “AHHHHHH!” She screamed out very loudly, then collapsed to the floor, whiter than I have ever seen her. She was motionless, and did not seem to be breathing. I rushed to her side and breathed air into what possibly was her lungs. Her mouth was coated in drool or spit, over-abundant maybe because of the fever cluster.
To my relief, she lurched and started coughing.
“What the hell was that?!” I asked, exasperated. “It looked like you almost died! That can’t possibly be how it was meant to go!”
“For just one moment, I was the whole of existence,” she said, coughing again. “It’s not a very common thing, because of the danger it poses. Stimulating the fever cluster is ill-advised, but it just feels so incredible. Many die from that one final point. Usually, because the male was a beginner. Sorry that I didn’t tell you, but you wouldn’t have gone along with it if you knew.”
“Damn right I wouldn’t!” I said. “That’s crazy! Dying just to feel good?!”
“Not to feel good, Jack,” Lila said. “Risking it all to feel like the center of the universe for just one breathless moment.”
“That’s insanity!”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I have to go,” I said.
“Will you come back tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.” I grit my teeth, looked back at her again in anger, and slammed the door to the outside while vanishing from the doorstep into darkness.
break
“Hey,” I said, stepping into the library. Lila was sitting on the stairs, third stair from the ground, in her child form.
“Oh, hey,” she said, stood up, and jumped to the floor from just one step. “Did you fall asleep yesterday?” I grimaced.
“Yeah, sorry,” I replied. “How did it look on your end?”
“You kinda slumped and went silent,” she replied. “Like unresponsive, then slumped on the couch and slowly vanished. I’m glad you were able to get to sleep.”
“I can’t stay long today,” I said. “I’m trying my best to return my sleeping schedule to normal. I just wanted to check in case you were worried about me.” I had been back to her at night, not being able to fall asleep. It was not at the screen, not at the keyboard, unrecorded. Much like with Rebecca, Lila was somewhat connected to my mind. In the time I spent there yesterday, she explained to me that there was no real risk to her in terms of the fever cluster point as her mind could not die in the untethered space.
“It’s been kinda boring lately,” she said. “Except for explaining sex to you. That was fun. Do you have any stories or idea for me to expand on?” I met her hopeful eyes, seeking some entertainment. She could create her own things, stories using her own mind, but I had no idea why she wanted to hear mine. After a few times of expanding the ideas given, I started to worry about her misleading my ideas. This was an issue of trust. She had not told me much truth of her reality. Everything she mentioned could have been a fabrication. Could she be another of the existences trapped outside of everything like the shadowy figure before? It was a chilling thought.
“I got something for you,” I said. “It’s an older story. Maybe you can do something with it that I couldn’t. It’s about Shining Eves (since completed), special flowers blooming in secret to usher in the seasons. Here.” I waved a hand to create a booklet with the summary of what I had so far, and tossed it over.
“Thank you!” Lila exclaimed.
“Just promise me one thing,” I said, having her at attention for my request, “Don’t change their names, ok? The flower names. If you could just keep the flower names the way they are, I’d like that.” She smiled.
“I promise.”
I felt uneasy at her smiles after learning she had been lying to me about a few things. I would have to find out the truth eventually, but for now it was 2am, and I knew I would not be able to fix my sleeping schedule that easily anyway.
“See you later, Lila,” I said. She did not reply, already among the pages of the booklet. I had not read a book in a while. Maybe it was time. I walked out through the door, and turned to twist away into nothing.
break
“Hello,” I said, appearing in a sitting position on the couch a few weeks later. Time was strange to keep track of. Maybe it was just a few days. I never dated my visits. Maybe it was time to start. The library was empty. The shelves filled with nothingness bothered me the most. With a wave of my hand, books from my memory, read and unread filled the shelves. The ones that I knew about yet did not read, were blank. Some of them were well known, and others a passing read of my high school years. Without interacting socially, I had plenty of time on my hands.
“Lila?” I called out, with hands around my lips to amplify my voice. No response. Though I brought this library to life again, I remembered leaving out the garden once more, yet at the end of the open space, two very green doors spotted the wall. I stood up, moving myself to stand in front of them in a blink of an eye. Just like in Tiarto’s story, they had little square windows in the upper half to see into the lush green. I looked through one, but it was not the forest I remembered. There was Lila, crouched beside a patch of grass.
“Why?” I asked, as I pushed through the green barrier.
“Why what?” Lila asked, then turned to look at me. “I wanted to see them up close. It’s fine, they can disappear just like that.” She made a motion to snap her fingers, but I held it open with a motion of invisible ice.
“Don’t,” I said. “I’d like to see them, too. I only dreamed of them once. Ever since, I’ve only had my faint memory of the encounter.”
“Oh, hey, are you back?” She asked after a brief break from writing.
“Yeah, I was just…” I said, but hesitated in telling her about a distant friend. “Looking stuff up online.”
“Online?”
“It’s a… I’m sure your kind has a way to communicate instantly all over the world,” I said. “Being advanced enough to create minimal waste, you’d have to have something connecting everyone, right?” Lila stood up, and put a finger to her lips in thought.
“Ah, well, this,” she said, then motioned to herself. “It’s used to connect people, as well as disconnect people. You can be in vitral paradise, or vitral nothingness.” She paused in a grimace.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think we talked about this before,” Lila said.
“I do have a vague thought of it,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to read the recorded interactions over. The longer this stretches, the harder it is to remember everything, though I’d rather forget a few parts.”
“Like the shadowy guy turning into you?” She asked.
“Among others.”
“Why do you always stop by at nighttime?”
“Huh?”
“You always stop by around the time you’d normally go to bed,” Lila said. “Sometimes even way past the time. Why is that?”
“Maybe I’m trying to dream up what your world looks like, make a connection to it through the Infinity Void.”
“Or you want to avoid me until you feel bad enough to stop by and give me another story you got from the void.”
“I’ve felt this before,” I said, creating a sofa chair as I sat. When my knees were bent enough, the object became tangible to catch me. “With Finn and Rebecca. While to me, the first was a creation I took into my mind, and the second a shell I held trapped close to my mind, Both of them are impossible to grasp by regular humans of my world. I become insane to their eyes, someone to be avoided and ignored. That’s why many creatives find stories that distance them from being seen this way.
“Then there is you. A being from a world similar to mine, with a few differences. The difference is that you are trapped here, while I’m free to come and go as I please. In that way, I never expected you to be your own person, only a figment of me, much like Rebecca. I still know so very little about you, and though I could simply read your mind, I don’t want you to become like her. Equally so, you could read my mind thanks to creationism, but I feel as though you like the mystery.” Lila smiled, then twirled on the spot, vanishing the garden from existence. I reached out for it, but I did not want to bring it to reality for fear of ever having to destroy it.
“I do like a mystery,” she said. “Or maybe I just don’t care what’s in your mind.”
“But you do like the stories, don’t you?”
“Some,” Lila said. “Others are in need of a rewrite to my standards.”
“Like?”
“No point telling you,” she said. “It’s not like you write anymore. You just toss ideas in my direction and keep the outcome of the untethered space autocomplete under my supervision.”
“I really wish I could write again,” I said. “I love the excitement of details that come with a full story bloom. Ideas come to me to die now. I note them down, and release the link. It feels calmer as a river than a torrent.”
“Maybe in the end all you will have left is a drip,” she said. “Only then will you wish the torrent graced you once more.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll be dead before that time.”
“I hope you’re not.”
“I hope that you’ll tell me the truth about why you’re really in here one day,” I said. “For now, I’ll accept any version you deem appropriate.” Lila fell silent, as if she was convinced that I believed everything she told me. I did not wait for her response, only slowly became the fabric of the sofa chair that then vanished slowly.
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