NOVEL WEB Prologue
He’d turned my own sister against me. Seeing her there, naked save for his collar, looking at him with that empty-headed smile on her face, it threw me into a fit of rage. It made me want to burn the world.
Starting with him.
I ascended high into the heavens like the goddess I was, inhaled deeply, then let loose the fires of creation.
My fire didn’t just scorch the earth, it melted it, bathing them in flames hotter than the sun. The rising heat and expanding gases twisted the atmosphere, tornadoes ravaging the landscape miles away from the site of our battle.
But no matter how much flame I exhaled at his smug, grinning face, the man refused to burn. No, my sister refused to let him burn, her powers creating a refuge just large enough for the two of them.
So it was going to be like that, was it?
I dove back towards the earth and she rushed up to meet me mid-air. But that was exactly what I’d wanted her to do. I opened my mouth up and breathed out thick, choking black smoke this time, rendering us both blind. But while she searched for me within that smog, I kept going for my original target; once I killed him, I could fix my sister. I just knew it!
And he was nothing but a man. One strike was all it would take. I’d lop his head off before he could even blink.
At least, that’s what I’d thought would happen.
Instead, as I dove down towards him like a falcon descending on her prey, I felt my body being pulled towards the earth even faster, my body accelerating. I’d heard that he had some meager telekinetic abilities, but working together with my own momentum, he wasn’t just sending me off target; he made me crash into the earth, sending hot lava flying out in all directions as I formed a crater on the landscape.
I growled as I went to all fours, tore at the ground to launch myself back towards him, only to find myself pinned to the earth once more, this time by a small iceberg’s worth of ice, courtesy of my sister. She’d gotten me good, the mountain of ice resting on top of me with only my head sticking out, my chin forced to rest on the ground. And as fast as I could melt and boil it into steam, she could create more. Worse, with my body in direct contact with the ice, I could feel my core temperature dropping faster than I could replenish it. I could feel my power waning.
But then, I thought that my sister had made a mistake. I didn’t need more than my head to kill this man! I breathed in deeply, focusing what remaining power I had deep within my core, then expelled everything with one final dragon’s roar of flame, enough force behind it to punch a hole completely through the mountain.
It should have killed him. He should have been incinerated with nothing left, not even ashes.
But I’d been tricked. I’d thought I’d seen him cowering not ten yards before me, but that had been an illusion. He’d already circled around to my right, and just as my flames had begun to die down, he’d tossed one of those infernal devices right into my face.
A Silencer. Flexible straps like latex clung to my face like a spider’s web and a firm, red rubber-like ball was forced into my mouth, inflating until my jaw was aching. Like latex. Like rubber. But my jaw was strong enough to chew through rock and even so, I could do nothing to resist it.
“Ommph uill hee!” Just kill me! I’d screamed at him as I struggled to free myself. He had me helpless, and if he was going to do to me what he’d done to my sister, I thought death would be the better option.
“No. I think not. It’ll be so nice to have a matching set, don’t you think?” He gripped my chin in his palm and pulled my head up, forced me to meet his gaze. I breathed flame through my nostrils to try and cook his arm, but what little power I had left might have been enough to kill most mortals, but it couldn’t hurt him. “Just relax.”
That’s when I felt his touch.
Not his hand. His mind. Pushing against mine, forcing its way inside. That word: relax. It was echoing inside of my head, again and again. It repeated with his voice, then with mine, and I could feel my anger fading, felt myself grow tired.
“Ah uill eehuh... huee uuu…” I will never serve you.
That’s the last thing I remember before the red light took me.
But I was wrong. So very wrong. As I slept within that red light, his voice was there, telling me the Truth of the world. Telling me who I belonged to. I resisted it at first. When he released me, I still didn’t believe any of it. I was no man’s slave, and a Goddess would never be the pet of a mere mortal.
But then your father got me down on all fours, and whatever psychic abilities he might have, they truly are nothing compared to the skill that man has with his tongue. He found my clit and teased it out of the hood. I struggled, but that only made it worse. I’d never felt so hot, and…
Well, about a month later, I laid an egg. That was you. But it’s been eighteen years since you hatched, so it’s time for you to go and find your destiny. You’re going to Pocket Monster University! And my darling child, I’ve come to collect you!
“I’m going where now?”
Honestly, I had more questions than I could keep up with. But the first question I’d asked this woman had been “What are you doing in my bedroom?” and she’d gone off on a whole tangent for several minutes, weaving together a crazy story about pokegirls and how my father was some kind of psychic bdsm-fetishist.
My dad was a quality engineer for culinary products. The only thing in his hands was how ergonomic the latest slap chops might be.
“Pocket Monster University,” my ‘mother’ repeated. “It’s a school where you’ll be trained in how to control your powers, as well as how to tame pokegirls like me.”
The woman did look something like a pokegirl. The pointed ears. The even pointier horns. That large tail that moved on its own. That, and just how attractive she was. The classic blonde and blue-eyes combo with a face that looked more perfect than Photoshop and a voluptuous hourglass body that didn’t belong on any mother of a teenager like myself. Not to mention she was dressed in little more than a leotard and leather cuffs.
But pokegirls were as unreal to me as celebrities, politicians, and porn stars. It was hard to imagine a real one had ambushed me in my own bedroom, right? What, was the Prime Minister hiding in my closet too?
“Right. Can you prove it to me? That what any of you’re saying is true? Some evidence?” I asked.
“Oh? A demonstration of my powers, is that it? You cheeky son of mine! Very well, something like this?” She held out her fingertip, and a floating gout of flame about three inches long started flickering right near the tip.
Even if she was sitting on my bed and I was still at the doorway, I could feel the heat of it from the distance between us. “Wow. So you really are—”
“Hm? Oh, this isn’t the demonstration. This is!” The woman pointed her outstretched finger towards the far wall, away from me, and the small gout became the exhaust of a rocket, a solid mass of flame that smashed against the wall and blew it away as though it were made of styrofoam, incinerating the material before it could even turn into debris, opening up the wall so that the rest of the suburban neighborhood could now see what I was up to.
It took a minute before the ringing in my ears died down enough that I could hear what she was saying again.
“--provided for you, so for now, you should just pack a few things and we’ll be gone. I can explain more on the way.”
I looked at the smoldering remains of my room. I felt my sunburned face. “What about my parents? I’m just going to leave without saying goodbye?”
“Of course! We can’t afford to waste time, after all. And you should feel honored that your real mother is taking time out of her busy schedule to be with you on this most important of days, to tell you about your grand destiny, and guide you towards—” There was a jingle and my mother (?) pulled out a red smartphone, “Oh. Is it already two o’clock? Sorry, sweetie! Nevermind! Mommy is going to have to go and take care of boring work stuff instead. But here. Take these.”
She handed over another smartphone, along with some kind of black and pink ball. “Classes start on Monday, so try and get moved in before then, okay?”
And with that, she took off into the sky, flying out of the giant gaping wall she’d left in my home.
I looked at my bed, which was now lopsided and also on fire, and wondered if maybe getting involved in all of this pokegirl stuff was the best idea. Before I made a decision one way or the other, I turned on the phone. It asked for a fingerprint and retina scan, then started authorizing and updating, ticking over to 2% done after three minutes. That left the ball.
Black on one side, pink on the other, with another pink button at the center of the black half. I pressed down on the button, and then there was an explosion of pink lightning without thunder in the room… and I saw the pokegirl who had been stored inside.
Unlike my mother (??), I had no doubt this was a pokegirl. Even if she didn’t have the horns, wings, and whiplike tail and her only exotic feature was the purple hair, human women didn’t have breasts that big, perky, and soft. Not all three at once, and they jiggled hypnotically as she emerged from the ball.
Plus, she’d come out of a ball small enough to fit in my palm. That was my other clue.
“...Huh? You’re my brother?” she said without trying to hide her disappointment. “I thought you’d be… taller.”
“Wait… you’re my sister?!”
The next few days was a crash course in learning about this new world I’d be entering of superpowers, hot women, and higher education. I’d had enough time to say goodbye to my family after all, then it was a short flight across the country, followed by a much slower final leg of the trip that ended with me on a bus watching the trees go past.
I won’t go into the details. There were some teary-eyed goodbyes, some raised voices in argument, but nothing too terribly exciting. Sure, I loved my parents, but both of them admitted that I wasn’t just adopted, but that they’d been paid to raise me for the past eighteen years by my biological father. It left me with a complicated tangle of emotions I was burying down deep, to be untangled later. Maybe around the holidays?
For now, though, I had plenty of distractions. Including the sister I’d never known.
Apparently, I had a lot of sisters. Half-sisters, at least, from a dozen different mothers. And those were just the women my biological father knew about! All of them happened to be pokegirls too.
Pokegirls. As far as I knew, no one had a very good idea of the exact origin of the phenomenon, but archaeological records showed that they had been around at least as long as humanity. It could be thought of as a genetic condition. Some years after puberty, people would have the potential to develop supernatural abilities. If they became unable to control their powers, they would transform into a pokegirl (for men, there was an intermediary stage where they transformed into a woman first).
Wild pokegirls would lose their humanity. Sometimes they would be peaceful and benign, seeking isolation from civilization. But more often than not, they would be dangerous, disrupting local ecosystems and even attacking humans, whether to defend their territory or kidnap men so that they could breed.
To rise up to that danger, Bonding rituals were developed through the centuries, relying on symbolic magic to link a pokegirl’s soul to a trainer, restoring her humanity and keeping her under control. In the modern age, all of those runic symbols had been reduced down to 1s and 0s, a digital Sympathetic Network handling all the magical technicalities instead.
Which brought me back to my sister, Lina.
My first pokegirl.
That had been one of the first things we did after my new smartphone had finally finished updating.
“Okay, dweeb. Let’s have a look at your Profile.” Without asking, Lina took the device and navigated to my profile. She did hold it out in front of her though so that we could read through it together.
Benjamin Krimson
- Level: 1
- Skills: Fire (+0), Psychic (+0)
- Abilities: Born in Flames, UNKNOWN 1, UNKNOWN 2
- Corruption: 1%
- Harem: 0/X
- Balance: 10,652$
“Is this good or bad?” I asked, burning with curiosity. The only thing that made sense to me was the 10,652$ under Balance, since I’d only had 652 dollars in my savings last week. The rest I needed a tutorial on and I couldn’t wait for it. The idea that trainers could have a harem of pokegirls was every man’s fantasy, but right now I was more interested in the superpowers part of the deal.
“It’s mixed. By the time they enter university, most trainers are at least level 10 with their skills ranked up. But on the flip-side, you’ve got two Supernatural skills unlocked already, and three Abilities. Most trainers only ever have one.”
Lina tried to get more info on the two Unknown skills, but it only said:The Trainer has hidden potential. The entry for Born in Flames was more helpful: The Trainer is the progeny of a powerful Fire-type Pokegirl and is immune to high temperatures under 2000 degrees celsius.
That one had been worth testing, and when we tried it on a hot stove, I saw that it worked. I could put my hand on the flames of the grill and they felt like a warm wind rising up. “Wow.”
“It’s a party trick Ability, unless you decide to start fighting forest fires or something.” Lina pointed out.
As for the skills, Lina wasn’t any help. Right now I only had the potential to learn them, and just trying didn’t seem to be worth anything. No mind-reading or pyrokinesis, but presumably the teachers at the university could help with that.
“What about Corruption?” I had asked after the stove test.
“1% is good. Try and keep it under 10% if you can. The higher it goes, the more feminine you’ll become. Around 50%, you’ll make the switch to the fairer sex. At 100%, well…” Lina shrugged. “Being a pokegirl isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you.”
Apparently, Lina had attended the University last year as a freshmen Trainer, only to end up transformed into a pokegirl. She’d been caught and kept by one of the other students until the end of the semester, when ownership had been transferred back to her family.
Technically, she’d still been Bonded to my father when we met, but I was expected to Bond her to myself as soon as possible.
“So how do I do that? Do we need to visit a Center, or a hospital, or…?”
“The digital paperwork is already taken care of on your phone. The only thing left is completing the ritual.”
I nodded. “What do I do first?”
She laughed, smirked at me, pushed her index finger against my chest. “There’s only one step, dork. Make me cum. Hard. Hard enough that my soul breaks off our old man and latches on to you.”
That had been four days ago, and even though she said I was welcome to make the attempt whenever I felt like it, I was still working up the courage for it. Besides, I had all that other stuff to deal with. Like moving into my new dorm.
The university itself was near the west coast, far enough north that the forest was thick and old and the winters cold, not so far that the summer beaches weren’t a popular destination. The campus was about ten miles inland from the coast and hidden by the forest. The nearest town was a three-mile drive and had a population under 2,000, all of them vetted by the University.
Remote as it was, the buildings themselves were really nice. They looked modern, but with an eye for classical aesthetics. And the dorms were nice, too. More like apartments that I was going to be sharing it with three roommates, but the living room, kitchenette, and bathroom were all nicer than the ones at home. And this bedroom had all four walls, so that was definitely a plus.
It was spacious, with lots of room to move around in, especially with both of the beds on loft frames. Even if I had to share it with a couple of guys, I didn’t have any complaints. As long as they were the kind of guys who wouldn't leave dirty dishes in the sink and their laundry on the floor, I was sure we could get along just fine.
“Damn, I don’t know what you’re packing under those jeans, but you’re going to be real popular with the girls, aren’tcha buddy?” That was the first thing my roommate said to me when we met.
As it turned out, my roommate was female. As fortune would have it, the other two we were sharing the apartment with were too. I’d known that most Trainers were female, but I’d sort of expected that they’d lump what male students they had together. This was a pleasant surprise.
She introduced herself as Yang Xin and tossed her suitcases and a stuffed full duffel bag underneath one of the loft beds, then stretched. She was wearing nothing but a pair of skintight spandex shorts and a sports bra, her well-toned, athletic body on full display for me. “Nice to meet ya, Benny boy. But if you don’t want to be mistaken for a girl, maybe you ought to put on some more muscle, yeah?”
“Not a bad idea. I’ve tried putting on muscle before, but was never able to put on weight no matter how much I ate.”
Personally, I didn’t think I was all that feminine to begin with. Maybe I’d let my hair grow out a little too long. And yeah, I still didn’t have peach fuzz on my face. But especially standing next to her, I don’t think anyone would mistake me for a girl.
“Well sure. For most folks, diet and exercise is the way to go. But for us, things are a little different. Let me know if you ever want to train together. See if we can put some meat on your bones.” Yang gave me a solid punch to the shoulder that makes me stagger backwards and flinch.
“Yeowch!” From the shocked look on her face, I didn't think she was trying to hurt me, but that punch had landed with the force of a grown man delivered in the much smaller area of her feminine fist.
“Sorry about that. Still getting used to things myself.” She gave me a sheepish, apologetic grin. If that was her love tap, she was a lot stronger than she looked.
I rubbed at the sore spot, sure that there’s going to be a bruise later. “Don’t sweat it. Good to know I’m not the only one starting from zero.”
“There’s a difference between not being able to control your power and simply not having power,” Lina joined the conversation, her head poking out from the top of my bed. Since she wasn’t a part of my Harem yet, she could freely enter and leave her pokeball. She was also not under any obligations to listen to my orders. “I’m hungry. Let’s order pizza.”
An hour later, the three of us were hanging out in the living room talking over food and drinks when the other two roommates came in together.
“Wow wow wow! Would you look at this place? How much you think a place like this would go for in a city, you think?” The first girl dashed right in like an overexcited puppy, spinning around to try and take in every detail. She opened up my bedroom door and let herself inside for a minute, then dashed out to look into her own room. “Gawd! There’s so much room in these… uh… rooms!”
Her rushed inspection finished, she finally noticed the three of us watching her. She jumped over the back of the couch to land in the middle, wedged between Lina and Yang, then leaned over to grab a slice of the pizza. “Hiya! I’m Faye! Isn’t this place just the coolest?”
If Lina was sexy and Yang was hot, the first word that came to mind to describe Faye was “pretty”, with “cute” as a close second place. Very petite and slender, a good head shorter than me, with vivid pink hair and what took me a moment to realize were horns growing from her head. That meant her Corruption level must have been at least in the 70s.
Still, that I was only considering her “pretty” said less about her and more about how desensitized Lina had made me after just a few days together, that I wasn’t a nervous mess around a girl as cute as she was.
Her friend was similar in a lot of ways. Just as small and petite and with her own pair of prominent horns on display. Though where Faye had felt at home slamming open doors and stealing my food, she had barely made it past the doorway.
“Sorry about her. She gets really excited sometimes.” The blue-haired girl said so quietly I could just barely make it out. “And that’s not your food. And we still need to unpack. And d-don’t sit so close to other girls.”
Faye stuffed the rest of the pizza slice into her mouth, gulped it down. “Right! That’s Yuna. Don’t let the cute face fool you, though. Girl gets crazy jealous all the time.”
“You two are an item?” Yang asked.
“We’re practically married!” Faye answered with a big grin, summoning up a bright pink blush on Yuna’s pale cheeks.
“Faye! Come on! Help me unpack!”
“Yes, Mistress~ Coming~!”
“Gahhhhh!!!!!!!” I couldn’t see how much worse the blush on Yuna’s face was, what with her covering her hands and running back out the door.
“Heehee~ That never gets old.” Faye jumped out of the couch and started after Yuna.