Outsiders Pt. 06

The rest of the guys were also disappointments. Micah had already accepted magic as real, convinced by the Philadelphia incident, and he'd feel very special to be around it, but he'd never have the guts to fight and kill, despite confidently saying the opposite out loud. Ben wasn't surprised to hear Jake claim that he'd use any magic he was given in real life to make a harem of sex slaves for himself and make himself the richest man alive and so on. He was very surprised, however, to read in Jake's mind that that was exactly what he'd do.

As the night went on, Ben took two more opportunities, when they took breaks for hot food, to keep reading minds, but the guys weren't going to change them. No matter how much he would have liked it to be true, his friends weren't the people he could rely on, come hell or high water. They each had their limits and, for all of them, the dead rising from their graves was already over the limit. Strapping into a suit of powered armor and fighting alongside a dragon to save the world went even farther out than that. An hour after dawn broke they thanked Ben for his hospitality, said goodbye and left him there, feeling deflated.

He shuffled off upstairs and said, "On Monday, I'm making suits for all of us." The girls paused with the cleanup to share uneasy looks.

Ben spent most of Sunday catching up with his schoolwork, but on Monday, he dove into powered armor construction as soon as he returned from classes.

The girls were very reluctant to continue with the development of the Iron Man suits, so Ben worked on his own, fabricating a suit for himself. He put an exoskeleton over the filaments and fibers and fabricated hard locks on all the joints so they couldn't be extended or flexed beyond what his own anatomy allowed. He also created and installed a power regulation system which kept the power of the contractive fibers on a low setting until they encountered resistance, at which point they would increase the power as needed. The system also cut the power to the fibers when the joint locks were activated, as an additional safety against ripping one's own limbs out of their sockets.

Ben adapted the system for his own body and tried to cajole the girls into letting him create suits for them, but they were still hesitant, despite his demonstrations. After the third time he demonstrated all the safeties he had installed and adjusted, Krista said, "Wait! What happens if you extend your limbs all the way, say under a heavy load, and the safeties engage and cut the power to the fibers? Do you lose strength and get crushed by what you had been lifting?"

The girls looked at Ben expectantly. He looked at Krista with a blank expression on his face for a few moments and then he said, "We'll continue development of the suits as soon as I address the issue that has just been raised." The girls groaned and grumbled. "It's just a minor hiccup, that's all!"

"Minor hiccups lead to major dislocations," Krista said, lifting Raven's arm.

"It was the other one," Raven said.

"This'll all be fixed," Ben said, defensively.

"Ben," Lisa complained.

"It'll be fixed," he said. "That's why we're doing this now, so I can fix it all in time for your training."

"Training," the girls asked as one.

"Yeah, dude," Ben said. "As soon as I make proper suits, we're off to the woods somewhere to learn how to fight together and do some target practice and so on."

"Target practice," the girls asked as one.

"Well, yeah," he said, frowning at their incredulous tone. "There's bound to be shooting there and I want you guys to be able to shoot back. I mean, I'll give you swords, or naginatas, or whatever, and I'll put spells on them, but you can't go into combat without a ranged weapon. That's just crazy." The girls shared incredulous looks but made no comment.

Ben took them to a firing range the next day. After the girls tried to shoot a gun for the first time in their lives, they were escorted out of the shooting range and banned from ever coming back. Ben had only this to say, "Well, look on the bright side! You can only get better at this. It doesn't get any worse."

After they visited two more shooting ranges during the next week, Ben said, "I'll mount a gun on a robotic arm and I'll work out some kind of computer-aided targeting system." Off the girls' looks, he added, "It'll all work out, you'll see!"

He resumed work on the powered armor, fabricating one version after another. Once he created the alloys with Greater Fabricate, recycling them from one version to the next was done with the simpler Fabricate spell. He was having trouble with the safeties against joint dislocation until he simply decided to make the fibers that powered the opposite motion incapable of extending that far and got rid of the power cutoff safety.

Shortening the fibers lessened the power the suit had, but the suit still amplified the wearer's strength by a factor of approximately seven. Ben installed a safety harness inside the suit. It fit snugly to the wearer's body underneath the impact-absorbent foam and was tethered to the outer armor with elastic cords threaded through the gaps in the outer layer of fibers. The harness cut down on the g-forces the wearer could experience and offered additional protection in case of falling from a great height, or being propelled into a wall by an explosion.

He demonstrated the new safety features to the girls. They hesitated still and Ben had to harshly order them to submit for fabrication and training. They participated under silent protest, frustrating Ben until he threatened to never again shapechange into an Ogre Mage.

The girls gasped in dismay and stood there, just staring at him with pleading eyes. Ben sighed and said, "Fine. If you do a good job today and stop acting like petulant children, I'll change into Mister Ogre and DP your brains out with my magic cum tonight." The girls squealed and hugged him. "But that's only if we get anything done!"

The armors were fabricated and tested for mobility in short order. After the girls repeatedly jumped off a tree and landed flat on their backs unhurt, Ben called it a day and teleported them all home. He cast a fresh Shapechange spell, changed into the Ogre Mage and fucked the girls with his big, hard dicks until they passed out from all the pleasure his demonic cum inflicted upon them.

On the last Sunday of November, he teleported to the Faroe Islands and cast Endure Elements on himself as soon as his magic resumed flowing. The place was covered in snow and the wind was both freezing and had a bone-chilling dampness to it. He changed into his Djinni form, became invisible and intangible, and flew around to read minds. The language barrier stymied his efforts. He couldn't read the minds of the locals, because he couldn't understand the language in which they thought.

After casting the Tongues spell on himself, he understood the language of the first person whose mind he could read. It was Danish. He quickly determined that person wasn't involved with the enemy in any way and had no information relevant to the portal. The next person whose mind he read thought in Faroese and he was given the ability to understand it as well.

He teleported from town to town and island to island, reading minds until he had gone through almost fifty thousand of them. He was dead tired and his search had yielded no clue as to the identity of the enemy. He left an anonymous message to the local police, alerting them to several lawbreakers he had identified in his search, and then he used his last seventh level spell slot to cast Greater Teleport and go back home.

The girls greeted him in front of a bedroom door, wearing transparent negligees and broad smiles, but he flashed them a tired smile in response. "Sorry, girls," he said, "I'm out of spell slots. Mister Ogre can't come out to play tonight." He yawned and turned to a different bedroom. "And I'm too tired to play, myself. Good night!"

"Wait, Ben," Krista called after him, "you forgot something!"

Ben turned around to see what it was and Krista placed a hand on Raven's chin to gently turn the blonde's face towards hers. She planted a soft kiss on her lips, while her hand strayed lower to caress her big tits. Lisa stepped up behind Raven and placed both her hands around the blonde's hips. She stood on tiptoes and kissed between her shoulder blades as she slowly started to knead the globes of her ass.

Ben's cock immediately responded to the erotic sight and he said, "Oh, that! Heh, I guess I did forget. Thank you for reminding me, Krista!" He walked over to the girls and they dragged him into the bedroom and made him lie down on the king-sized bed.

"You just relax, honey," Krista whispered in his ear, "we'll do all the work." Ben giggled and shivered at her hot breath in his ear, but he soon gasped in delight as Lisa undid his zipper and fished out his hard cock to suck. After he blew his load down her throat, Krista licked him to hardness and then rode him like a cowgirl. She came and relinquished her place to Raven. Ben grabbed the blonde's huge, perky tits and hung on to them as he shot his load into her. After that, he couldn't help passing out, no matter how hard he fought it.

The first Sunday of December found Ben teleporting to Svalbard. His reconnaissance of the islands was much quicker than that of the Faroes. There was only a few thousand Norwegians and Russians there and none had a single clue about what Ben wanted to know. He teleported home and threw himself on the couch in disappointment.

"Hey, Ben," Krista said, setting aside the book she was reading, "how did it go?"

"Awful."

"Did you find anything?"

"No," he said.

"Nothing at all," Krista asked.

"A big, fat zilch," he murmured.

Krista squinted and said, "So you couldn't read anyone's mind, or something?"

Ben frowned and looked at her. "I read everyone's mind! I read them thoroughly! I know who's fucking whom and who's scared of what! I know their innermost secrets!" He closed his eyes and grimaced. "Fuck me, I hate reading people's minds..."

"But you did find out one thing," Krista said.

"Yeah, everyone's dirty laundry, for all the good it does me."

Krista leaned forward in her seat and said, "You now know that the enemy has no presence or allies there and that's not nothing, Ben."

Ben screwed up his mouth in a grin of displeasure and said, "Yeah, but that doesn't give me a single clue on how to find the enemy."

Krista's face screwed up into a fearful expression and she flipped open the laptop. She turned it around for Ben to see what she was looking at. On the screen was a map of Svalbard. "Ben," she said, in a worried tone of voice, "if you don't find someone who can guide you to the enemy, then... how the fuck will we be able to find them? These islands are huge, Ben! There's no way for us to cover them all! Not with just the four of us!"

Ben clasped one of her hands in his and engaged her eyes. "Calm down, Krista," he said in a forceful voice. "I've already got that bit covered. Sean told me about some eggheads in Croatia that make Heliospheres. I'll use those to find the enemy."

"Helio-what's-its?"

"Rigid balloons filled with helium gas," he said. "They've got surveillance and station-keeping equipment attached to the underside and can cover huge areas with infrared cameras and such. I'll teleport to their warehouse and borrow all the prototypes, when the time comes."

Krista relaxed and sighed in relief. "So," she said, "we know where they'll be and when and we have a way to spot them in time for you to teleport us up their asses. We'll win. Right? We'll win this thing?"

"Definitely," Ben said, smiling with a confidence he didn't really feel. "It's just that I don't want to fight the enemy at the last possible moment. I don't want to go in there, guns blazing, with a sacrifice to rescue and only the three of you to back me up. It would be much better if I could find their hiding place and ambush them beforehand. And I have no idea how to do that."

Krista smiled. "I've been reading your books," she said and held up The Player's Handbook, "and this one tells of a spell called 'Speak With Dead' that sounds kinda useful."

Ben made a face and said, "Bleh."

"But you could interview the victims of the enemy and ask them what had happened to them," she excitedly said. "You could find out who the enemy is."

"I already tried that," he said, "with the True Resurrection spell and the soldier they blamed for the base massacre. He was attacked from behind and didn't see who, or what, killed him."

Krista looked stunned at the news. She flipped through the Handbook and read about True Resurrection. "Well, where's the soldier now," she asked. "We could, maybe, get him to-"

"Dead," Ben said, interrupting her. He glanced over at her confused face and said, "Killed himself when he found out how everyone... I couldn't resurrect him again, even if I tried. He'd refuse to come back again. Just like the Order of the Hammer zealots."

Krista frowned and bit her lip as she read the Handbook and thought for a minute. "But Speak With Dead doesn't need the dead soul's consent," she said. "If you were to cast it on the corpses of the people that don't want to be resurrected, then..."

Ben gave her a sad smile. "Now, see, this is more like it," he said. "Giving me advice, asking questions... that's all I wanted from you girls, someone other than Felicia to discuss things with. Someone who would challenge what I think I know. That sort of thing." Krista grinned at his words of approval, but she kept staring at him expectantly. "If I were to cast Speak With Dead, the corpse gains the ability to answer basic questions, provided its voice box is still mostly functional. The answers would be short and unclear. Plus, there's a chance the corpse could refuse to cooperate, if its alignment was different than mine, while it had been alive."

"Next to nothing is better than nothing at all," she said, "which is what we've got now. Come on! Let's go dig up some graves and ask some questions!"

"No," he said.

"There are some spells here that are just made for digging up graves," she said, flipping through the Handbook.

"No," he said.

Krista looked questioningly into his eyes. "Why not?"

"The soldier's corpse won't tell us anything new, I'm sure of it." Ben said. "No other victims could tell us anything new, either. As for the Order of the Hammer zealots... Their voice boxes had been destroyed when they had been killed." He picked up a mug of tea from the coffee table and took a sip from it. It was lukewarm and he let out a small noise of approval at the taste of it. "And the autopsies made double sure that the corpses wouldn't speak ever again."

Krista's cheeks puffed out as she slowly let out a big breath of frustration. She set the Handbook down on the table and sat back to look up at the ceiling. Ben sipped at the mug of tea. He looked over to Krista's mug and briefly wondered whose mug the one in his hand was. He shrugged and sipped some more.

The nearby toilet door opened and Raven came out. She walked over to them and put her fists on her hips as she shot Ben a look. "That was my tea," she said.

"Was," Ben said, grinning and taking another sip.

Raven snorted a brief laugh and then sat down on the couch next to him. She put her arm around his shoulder and asked, "Any luck in the North Pole?" He shook his head no. "Damn. So, what's our next move, fearless leader?"

Ben screwed up his face and shrugged. He opened his mouth to speak, but Krista beat him to it, saying, "We contact The Order of the Hammer."

Raven immediately blanched at the mention of The Order. "No," she whispered in fright.

Krista didn't hear her and said, "They could be a source of information, Ben. Or maybe even allies."

Raven withdrew her arm from around Ben and said, "No!"

"It's ok, Raven," Ben said, trying to keep her calm.

"No, it's not ok, Ben," Raven suddenly yelled. Her eyes darted between him and Krista and her expression was horrified as her mouth worked without any sound coming out. Ben tried to hug her close to him, but she stood up. Her eyes fixed on Krista's, with an accusing glare in them. "Those crazy bastards tried to kill me!" She turned back to Ben. "They would have killed me if you hadn't saved me. Ben, you can't be thinking about this! Please, tell me you're not going to get in touch with those homicidal maniacs!" She glared accusingly at Krista. "Why the fuck would you even suggest this!?"

Behind Raven, Ben could see Lisa emerging from an upstairs bedroom, drawn by the noise and Raven's alarmed tone. Their eyes met for but an instant, before Lisa started for the stairs. Raven started hyperventilating and fidgeting in place.

"Whoah," Krista exclaimed, finally perceiving Raven's panic.

Ben stood up and shot the redhead a dark glare before corralling a restless Raven into his arms. He hugged her tight and applied even more pressure when she started sobbing. Lisa came up behind the blonde and started rubbing her back. Ben and Lisa hushed Raven, as she shivered in his hug. Tears slowly rolled down her cheeks.

Krista stood up and awkwardly tried to get in on the comforting action. She gave up with a sad sigh and said, "I'm sorry." Raven calmed down after a few minutes and Lisa took her upstairs to lay her down in bed and keep her calm. Ben and Krista remained standing in place and watched them go. "I'm sorry. I didn't think she'd react so badly."

Ben watched Lisa close the bedroom door behind herself and said, "Well, they did show up in her home without any warning and almost executed her after killing Simon right in front of her." He shot Krista a glowering look. "That kind of thing tends to stick with you, you know?" Krista blushed and grasped for words under his gaze. His features softened and he gave a small wave. "Forget about it. Just don't remind her of them in the future."

"Ok," she said. "But I am right. You know that, don't you?" Ben nodded and then heaved a big sigh. "We need to publish those rituals that had drawn them to Raven and Simon the first time. We'll publish them from a computer someplace else, where you can lie in wait for them. They'll come to investigate and then you'll read their minds."

Ben grimaced. "I don't know about that."

Krista spread her arms and asked, "What's not to know? They come, you read their minds, we know about the Order and that's that! Easy-peasy!"

"I'm not gonna publish those rituals," he said.

"Why not," she demanded. "They're harmless! You said so yourself!"

Ben shot a quick glance at the door of the bedroom Lisa and Raven were in. He took Krista by the arm and led her to the media center on the other end of the apartment. "Those rituals are harmless," Ben quietly said, "that's true, but only if they're done perfectly. Want me to call Lisa down here to tell you what happens if you make even the tiniest of flubs while drawing the spells?"

"That was a freak accident," Krista said. "They messed up the spells and then got drunk and that one girl fell and broke her neck. What are the odds of that happening again?"

"I don't know what the odds are," Ben said, "and I don't care. I'm not going to just put those spells out there for anyone to stumble upon them and do something terrible."

"Oh, come on, Ben, publishing those rituals is our only way of finding out about a major player in all this mess. Think about it! This Order of the Hammer is obviously in the know. Hardly anyone's ever heard of them and they obviously don't go around killing every kid with a henna tattoo, or they'd be notorious by now. They showed up to investigate Outsider spells. That means they know, Ben. They know about The Outsiders."

Ben rubbed his temples in frustration. "Look, all that makes sense. Everything you just said. But I simply can't publish such dangerous things, ok? I can't."