"You had us wrapped around your finger, and you never had sex with us? What's wrong with you?" Megan's incredulous look was priceless.

  My sigh was epic. This was the fifth time she'd brought it up in the last twenty minutes. Her indignation was surprising, I'd have thought that she would be glad I didn't sleep with her doppelganger. I was glad everyone else had gone to bed.

  I'm still not convinced their not more Corpo plants, even if Amanda was absolutely certain they were the real deal. I could probably tell if I used my Aura or touched them, but I was loathe to make contact with them.

  Okay, I'll try this again. Megan would just keep asking until she got whatever she wanted out of this. I'm not sure she knew what she actually want half the time.

  "One, the finger wrapping was like more the other way around, and two, I was waiting for something I couldn't properly define. Still can't explain it. We'd plenty of fun, though, and I wasn't in a rush. I was afraid of screwing everything up." I scratched my head, they couldn't seem to understand why I'd never banged them. To be fair, I didn't really understand either, not in a conscious way. It just never quite felt like the right moment.

  "Why didn't I just push you down and 'convince' you to go further? There's no way I'd ever let a man string me along." Sally attitude was offended. Somehow me not availing myself of her doppelganger's womanly charms was deeply insulting to her, too.

  "You tried, and I made you cum your brains out. After a minute, you couldn't have moved if Wraiths were going to kill you, never mind reaching for my dick. Like I said, we had tons of fun. Just not that kind." I tried hard to keep the smirk off my face. Well, maybe not that hard. Heh. It was fun to remember, but remembering also hurt. How could it not?

  We were sitting around the farmhouse's dinning room table. Drinking coffee that had been newly grown back in New Lordaeron. This was almost a charming scene of the reunion of former lovers. Sadly, that wasn't what it really was. This was an interrogation. My interrogation.

  "That's what I really don't get. I've been healed by the priests of the Light, and it feels great, but it never brought me anywhere near an orgasm. Why's your power so different?" Megan had a doubtful look on her face. The only reason neither called me a liar to my face, was because of what I had done to Amanda earlier. Still, this was the first truly new question of our conversation, so I tried to answer properly.

  "Between Meadran, Jaina, and me, we'd pieced together a rough idea of why my healing works that way." I created a little ball of mana over my right hand. It's rich green color, spoke of growth and health. I let it spin around slowly while it rotated quickly. "Nature mana, which is my primary element, is concerned with living things and the balance of the forces that allow life to flourish. Growing, changing, reproducing, and ultimately killing, affecting these factors are easy for me." I reabsorbed the mana ball and created a tinier ball of flame, its bright and cheery color somehow still tinted slightly green.

  "Controlling the classical elements is harder but still something I can manage. I have to work at it, really push to fully control it. Mating though, that is tied up in the very concept of my mana. I couldn't separate that effect out of my healing, even if I wanted too. Not yet at least." I dispersed the flame, noting that I couldn't as easily reabsorb mana that had been converted into a physical or chemical form. "The Light, on the hand, and this is only from what little I'd managed to gather, mostly concerns itself with purifying corruption, and advancing ideas of heroism and nobility. It might make you braver or more stubborn, but it isn't interested in getting you off." I shrugged.

  "Then there's the issues of mana density. I'm literally patient zero, on this planet, for mana. My mana density is much higher than anyone else's. So my much denser mana carries the concepts of Nature deeper and harder into those I use it on." My right hand punched lightly into my left. "Is that the whole reason? Probably not, but it's what we'd came up with."

  Megan nodded. She was probably already thinking of ways to use that data to her advantage. Sally looked puzzled, but not because she didn't get it, she was working on a thought.

  "Okay, but then why aren't you more, 'Rawr, I'm going fuck you now.' It seems you should be raring to go all the time. Especially with two nova outputs like us." Still about them. She waved her hand at both of them.

  Yeah, that. I had been struggling with that very problem subconsciously, the whole time I'd been here. It was only after my transformation, and the strengthening of my instincts that I'd started to actively question why I held back. "I am. I always wanted to bury myself into you both and never come out. 'Forget the world. Just fuck the pain away.' Some little voice was whispering that into the back of my mind. All the time." I stopped trying to frame my next words. "But it isn't right or fair. How much of what was between us was because of my power? No clue, I never asked, and you never brought it up."

  I had to restrain my Aura from reaching for both of them. I wanted them, it wanted them. It would be simple to reach into them and have them explode in joyous sensation. I knew those bodies like I knew the back of my hand. I closed my eyes and swallowed. I gritted my teeth and pushed the feelings down into the pit. That place where the emotions you can't deal with get tossed, allowed to fester and rot, until they come out again in twenty years as cancer or a stroke. I wanted to cry and scream, bellow and rage, but I could afford to do none of those things. So I didn't. Especially not now, not here with them. So into the pit with all of it.

  I looked up at the ceiling because continuing to look at them was painful. "I could've kept you both senseless and breathless, endlessly. It's so easy to give in to the things that feel good, and who doesn't want mind-bending sex?" I grimaced, "But it would have been wrong, even more so, knowing what I know now."

  As much as I wanted them, these weren't the women with whom I had shared those experiences. Whether they were the real Megan and Sally or not, it would be wrong to so much as touch them with those feelings still locked up inside me.

  So into the pit.

  I was tired of talking. Every word seemed to burn something vital out of me.

  "What if I wanted that?" Megan sensing my weakness struck, she couldn't help it, her nature demanded it. Sally looked at her like she'd grown another head. They shared a look, they were good at conveying thoughts to each other without words.

  "We've had plenty of one night stands, and he is attractive... " Sally began.

  "Let me stop you there. No." My face went blank, this was dangerous ground. I knew it, but I had to walk it.

  Megan narrowed her eyes at me. "Why?"

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I could stop myself, I scoffed at her, "You know why."

  After all her attitude, Sally actually looked hurt, "Well, I don't."

  I sighed, it was a bitter breath. "I'd never be able to keep the feelings straight. The good and the bad. That wouldn't be fair to you ladies. No matter how wonderful it started, at some point I'd end up venting the pain of their betrayal on you two. You really don't want that." My voice was thick and dark, these days it seemed there was always a slight growl to it, but it was more pronounced now.

  "So the best relationship "we've" ever had, with the all the pleasure "we" could stand, and it was our evil twins that got to enjoy it?" Megan voice rose an octave and seemed to crack by the end.

  "Yes, that's exactly it." I nodded at her.

  We all stared at each other, our eyes filled with pain. All of us an inch away from pulling our iron. All of us an inch away from tearing off our clothes.

  "Fucking sucks." Sally moped.

  I looked out the nearby window, watching the moonlight dance on the plants swaying slightly in a breeze.

  "Can we please talk about something else now? Literally anything else." I asked, not bothering to hide how done with this I was.

  "We shouldn't be alive." Megan whispered. Her face unnaturally still especially for her. She swirled her cup of tea, and stared blankly into the depths of its contents. I didn't want to look at them right then, but Megan's statement drew my eyes to her. I felt her pain, faintly, which I found exceedingly odd. Sally looked down at the coffee cup in her hands, her lips firmed up to prevent quivering. She hated the thought of being powerless.

  Oh, my Aura was touching them, it'd slipped the leash. That had given me all the information I could ever want about their bodies.

  I frowned, "I had the same thought. But after everything that's happened, I'm sure neither of you are agents." Life Crafting gave me a lot of information about whatever it focused on, and most of its purpose was instinct driven. But I'd no way before Regrowth evolved into it, to understand cyberware at all. Now I can measure the affect of the chrome versus standard functions of the body. It took some effort on my part, and a lot of attention, but that was all. No one would be able to pull the face stealing trick, the same way, on me again.

  If they were fakes they were full biological clones this time. Possible but unlikely.

  Megan stared at me intensely, "Are you sure?"

  I returned her look, "Absolutely." I lied, I could still be wrong. My power could be wrong. There could still be some kind of deception going on here.

  "They kept us hooked up to machines, half out of our minds with drugs." Sally dropped that into my lap. "We experienced everything they did, as they did it. But we couldn't do anything about it, or focus too much on anything. I hated every second of it. It was like being trapped in a nightmare." She shuddered.

  "It was some kind of experiment." Megan said, "I managed to stay a little more lucid than Sally, probably because of my experiences running the NET. I occasionally overheard our keepers talking." Now that I could feel both of them, all of their pain and anger was shared. It was faint, like a half remembered thought, but it was there in the back of my mind.

  Sally got up, to get more coffee, but I knew it was to avoid letting me see more of her vulnerability. Megan kept her eyes down, her usual playful nature choked out by the suffering they'd gone through. The memories haunted her, and would for a long time.

  "Most personality implants are simply recordings. With a large enough sample to work with, they are fairly accurate. Maybe 80% of baseline. However, they break down when faced with traumatic or dangerous events. I don't know why, they never discussed that part in front of us." Megan slowly sipped her tea, clinging to the cup like it would save her from the past. "We were kept alive to be throughputs for situations where the normal implants would break down. They would have killed us the instant their agents achieved their goals." Megan's voice was soft, gentle, and terrified.

  "That's also why we needed to be healthy, if out of control, our bodies' condition would have affected how we felt and how they reacted." Sally said from behind me, her voice was angry but I could hear the tears she was holding back.

  "I heard one of the techs said they reached 98.4% compatibility even with stressor events. A victory for them, more grant money for them, more people like us subjected to that bullshit in the future." Megan sighed. "Then you came along." She smiled, it was a weak and fragile thing but it was there.

  They both paused and looked at each other, sharing thought I probably would want to be privy to.

  "We'd never been infatuated with anyone before. Usually we were the ones getting chased by people, most meant nothing to us." Sally started. She'd come back to the table and sat down. "You fucked us up in a way, we had never been fucked up before. It was a great test of their system, and you were definitely someone they wanted to keep an eye on."

  "You broke their system a few times, you and your magic. They could never have account for it." Megan shrugged, "Regrettably, they managed to fix their system up better than before."

  She turned to Sally. "Do you remember how we made a game out of breaking guys' spirits. Setting little tasks we knew they couldn't complete, and then use their failure as an excuse to push them more." Megan smirked her evil grin.

  "That was all you, you evil bitch, I just told them to fuck off. Not my fault that none of them realized I really meant it." Sally gave her friend a withering look.

  "Bitch, please you loved watching hope die in their eyes, as much as I did." Megan smirked at the blonde. This was a kind of stress relief for them. They needed it.

  That didn't mean I needed to listen to their games. Me, I was reminded of the fact that people, men or women, are damned hard to get along with. These two were definitely not women I should've gotten involved with in the first place. Does that count as failure in the opposite direction of my previous problems with women? An interesting question.

  Their bickering went on for a few more minutes, while I tuned it out. No one likes looking at the horrible parts of people they love... loved, even if it was a bizarre proxy situation. Then I made myself examine them closer, maybe flinching away from the bad in the folks we love is part of way relationships fail. At least, some of them. Sally and Megan were badasses, but they were also fucked up girls. Sure we could argue why that might be all day, but it didn't change that they already were messed up, long before our current day. When it's pointed at others it could be funny, which says more about me than I'd like to admit. Yet when it's pointed at me... I can't help but think I made a terrible mistake by being involved with these two. At all.

  But was I ever going to be able to find anyone who wasn't fucked up? Not in this World. Best to find the women with the types of insanity that I could live with, even if only temporarily. Megan, of course, missed none of that going through my head. She was smart and manipulative, and couldn't help but to pull the levers she saw that others often missed. Even if she suffered for it.

  "If you really wanted a stable girl, you never would have given those bitches more than a couple of dates." She dug in deep there. There was also a bitter note in there. She knew I really didn't like what I was seeing in them. In myself. I'd been so happy to finally have some attention from women, I ignored what was attached to it.

  "Oh, I know. The problem is I don't have enough experience to know what I really do want." I locked eyes with her, "Cut that shit out, now is not when you should be rooting around in my psychology. Pissing me off is a negative sum game these days."

  For once in her life, Megan backed down. Sally wisely also didn't say anything. While she might not have been the mental powerhouse her friend was, she was good at knowing when to be quiet, and when to shoot.

  "So that explains why you are both alive, but why did they give you back?" Let's rip that band-aid off.

  "It can be traced back to you again. They wanted samples of all the crops and livestock, for their farms back east. Later, they knew once the Nations started arriving that fighting over them would be too expensive and likely would destroy what they wanted in the first place." Sally gave my shoulder a friendly tap.

  "So they used the one thing they knew Amanda would want above all else to trade for unspoiled samples. Us." Megan finished.

  I rolled that around. It made sense. I was obviously looking for the double play here. Corpos never do anything for just one reason. Plus, why didn't they kill them right after their agents were made?

  "Yeah, we have no clue either. They should have killed us when you uncovered the agents. So we've been waiting for the iron to fall on us since we've been back. We don't know much, but I doubt their bosses like the idea of the bits of data we have being out of their control." Megan's insight was eerie sometimes. Perhaps she was a latent psyker, or more likely she was just that fucking smart. Which I found even more terrifying.

  I heard a rooster crow. The new day's sun was fast approaching.