38. Fertility

  Atla was a girl again. She didn’t think that she really really would be a girl forever forever, but her father had said that it was okay to play around with how she presented herself to people. She was a planet , after all, and planets didn’t have boy-parts or girl-parts. But she was also an eidolon, and she had chosen to be a human eidolon, and so she could choose to be a boy or a girl.

  The question she had to ask herself, and himself, is what face she wanted to wear at the moment, and how she wanted others to treat her.

  She could manifest as a man or a woman as well, but Father said that she was a child yet, and she trusted his wisdom on the matter. And she liked the way that the people living on her treated her as a child. She didn’t think they’d be nearly so doting or tolerant of her curiosity if she used an adult eidolon.

  So it was that she was having her hair done by Taimei and Mai Mai when the topic turned to their pregnancy. Hair braiding was one thing that she liked about being a girl. There were about three different ways to wear her hair as a boy, but there were dozens of different things that the women would offer to do to her hair if she was a girl.

  She thought of something, and a little part of her nudged Di Sana to come into the room. She couldn’t do that with everyone, and they could choose to ignore her nudges, but Di Sana was very sensitive to her planet-voice, so she didn’t need to manifest in the other room to ask her to join the conversation.

  The two young women fell silent when the door opened, then promptly smiled and welcomed the older woman into the conversation. They resumed discussing their pregnancies, and Di Sana was pleased and honored to serve as the voice of experience, having given birth to four children by her first husband and therefore being something of an expert on the matter.

  “There are several herbal remedies to morning sickness, but I’m not certain that they’re available this far south,” she was saying. “But it usually calms down after a few months on its own, and it sounds like you have a very minor case of it anyway, Mai Mai.”

  “What sort of herbal remedy is it?” Taimei asked.

  “Oh, it is a tea of a plant that flowers red. It’s leaves are triangular and serrated. You crush the bulbs that it forms and dry them. The women of the village I was born in always keep an eye out for it when it is in season, because even if they do not conceive it makes a good gift for a young woman who is having her first child,” Di Sana said. She smiled sadly as the memories of her old village fluttered to the surface and Atla frowned, for that wasn’t the direction that he wanted the conversation to go.

  “What does it look like?” She asked.

  “I told you, it has a red flower and—”

  “A lot of flowers look like that. Which one is it?” Atla asked, and she waved her hand and several different varieties of flowers appeared. They weren’t really there, they were just images. She was borrowing a little from her Father’s Dao to do this, but they were so closely linked that this was easy.

  Di Sana was not put out by the display at all. She bit her thumb, then pointed to one of the flowers and said “It looks more like this one than any of the others.”

  ?  Atla waved her hand, and several different variations of that family of flowers appeared.

  “This one,” Di Sana said, pointing definitively to one of the options.

  “I’ll go get some,” Atla volunteered. Then she popped and was in the part of her world that she knew this flower grew.

  As she was exploring, she began to wonder whether this was really girl-behavior, or whether it was boy behavior, and she decided to switch into her boy-eidolon as she explored. Exploring was something boys did, right? Girls did it too though. But he was gathering flowers for girls, and that’s something that boys did. Wasn’t it? Girls gathered flowers too, though.

  He was lost in thought when he realized that he wasn’t alone in the field. A girl was looking at him. He looked at her, then frowned when he realized that he didn’t know anything about her. He could see that she had a good bloodline because he could sense those things, but he didn’t know where on his worldbody she was born or who her family was or any of the other things that usually popped into his head when he looked at someone.

  Then he remembered that so many people had come from Majeesha and were living on him in this area now, and he realized that was the reason.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She blinked in surprise. “You speak Majeeshan?”

  “I speak human,” he said, smiling. “I’m Atla. I’m the Eidolon of the world.”

  “Oh. Okay. Uh-huh. If you don’t want to tell me your name that’s fine, but I’m Sora.”

  “Hello Sora. My name really is Atla though.”

  “Right, whatever. Who are you gathering flowers for?” she asked.

  “Um, some older ladies I know. They’re pregnant, and these flowers are supposed to be good for morning sickness,” he answered. “If you help me, I’ll help you too, okay?”

  “My big-sister is pregnant,” Sora said.

  “Okay, so we’ll gather up a bunch and you can take some. I think they said you crush the bulbs. They don’t have bulbs yet, but I’ll fix that,” he said, and he looked at the plants he’d uprooted in his hand and made them change to the stage in their life cycle where they had bulbs.

  “Wow! How did you do that?” Sora asked him.

  “Magic,” he answered, grinning proudly. “I make things grow. I’m good at it and I like doing it.”

  They worked together for half an hour, gathering a good number of the flowering plants and throwing them all in a pile. When the pile was pretty big, Atla used his magic to change them into the mature plants, then took two thirds of the pile and left the rest for Sora to take to her big sister.

  Atla was pretty sure that Sora’s sister wasn’t really her sister. Not by bloodlines, since none of the Majeeshans seemed to be grouped in family groups. Atla didn’t really like that, it made things confusing and harder to keep track. He also noticed something.

  “Your womb is broken,” he told Sora.

  “What? Yeah, I mean,” the girl was embarrassed. “They did that to all of us when we were sent to the tower. They said that it would just get in the way if we turned into mothers and fathers.”

  “Do you want me to fix it?” Atla asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can fix you if you want,” he said.

  The girl’s eyes narrowed at him. “You’re not trying to get me to take my clothes off, are you?”

  “No, you don’t have to. I can just fix you with magic like I made the plant mature. But if you don’t want me to I won’t,” he said. “Father said I shouldn’t do things like that without asking, so I thought I’d ask.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The girl was silent for a moment. Then she said “I think maybe I do want to be a mother someday,” she admitted.

  So Atla shrugged and used his magic to begin fixing the little tubes in her belly that were broken. The girl suddenly gasped and grasped her belly as she had the worst case of cramps she could imagine, but it was better in a few minutes.

  “There, they’re fixed,” he said. “If anyone else from Majeesha wants to have babies they should just ask me to fix them. It’s not that hard.”

  Then he zipped back and he was with Mai Mai, Taimei, and Di Sana again. He popped back into his girl avatar and plopped her pile of pregnancy-flowers down on the table then sat and demanded that they resumed braiding her hair.

  A few days later, the requests began to come in and Atla found that she was suddenly too busy fixing wombs and boy-parts to do anything else for a little while. But the Majeeshans that he helped were very happy. And before very long, the requests began coming in from the people who had been living on him for forever and he was even more busy than before.

  But he liked making people happy, and it was good that the people who couldn’t have babies were able to now, right?

  He asked his father, and father told her that as long as the people were happy with what he was doing than she was doing a good thing and that he should be proud of herself. But then it got strange.

  ~~~~~~~

  “Father, people are being weird,” Atla said. He was back to being a boy again, and had been more or less stable in that form for the last three days. I didn’t really care, but it was a little hard to keep up with which pronoun to use when he changed between genders in the middle of a conversation.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, they’re starting to make statues of me. Except they don’t have the face, and sometimes I’m not wearing clothes, and it’s really weird. And they’re offering me weird things like red petaled flowers and red fruits. I don’t get it.”

  I stifled a laugh as I continued to walk about the tunnels beneath the city. I was in the midst of setting up a powerful series of interlinked formations in preparation for the tournament. “Atla, remember what I told you before that sometimes our actions will have unintended consequences?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, when you started fixing everyone who was infertile or sterilized, the people started to get certain ideas about you,” I informed him gently. “I think they believe now that you’re a fertility god. Which, in a sense, you sort of are.”

  “A what?”

  “You do have a lot of the characteristics of a fertility god,” I commented philosophically. “So it only makes sense. There are a lot of worse things that you could be thought of as. I don’t think this is a bad thing.”

  “But some of the statues don’t have clothes,” he insisted.

  “A lot of statues don’t have clothes. Especially on the mid-eastern continent,” I pointed out. “And a few weeks ago it was a struggle to keep you in them anyway.”

  “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “But I thought you’d be upset about that.”

  “I don’t care about statues, Atla. But if it bothers you, go to the statue makers and tell them that you want the statues to be dressed,” I said.

  He frowned as he thought of the matter carefully. I paused in a location, then used a bit of earth Qi and space-time Qi and various other types of Qi to construct an intricate array. It was inactive at this point, but it would link in with several dozen others that I had yet to construct. I had six days before the tournament, and I was confident that I could finish in time.

  “But what about the weird things that they’re saying to my statues, and the stuff that they’re putting in front of them, and the weird demands they’re making about making me make other people like them and stuff?”

  “Atla, I’m not sure that there’s anything we can do at this point to stop a religion from springing up around you,” I admitted. “You’ve literally started performing miracles, so that ship has set sail. But you can control the narrative. You like fixing infertility, right?”

  “When I can, yeah. Even if their bloodlines aren’t the best,” he admitted.

  “Well, if you plan on continuing to do that, then tell the people how to get your attention before performing that particular miracle,” I suggested. “Since they’ve already linked on to the red flowers and fruit thing, maybe something to do with that? Go out to the places where those statues are and tell the people there how to worship you.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be worshiped,” he protested.

  “Then stop answering prayers and let them forget you,” I told him. “But this particular fad is probably going to continue for a while.”

  He pouted, then poofed out while I continued to explore the depths of the city of Mer’cah. I had a pretty good sense of where the tunnels I needed to access were with the use of my earth Qi techniques, but often I found tunnels that were drowned or caved in and I needed to empty them out.

  I continued to work through the day and through the night setting up the vast array that span the city. It would draw in power from considerably beyond that, but I’d more or less finished by the time that the sun rose.

  Satisfied, I went back home, where I found Polkluk, Taimei and Mai Mai waiting for me. I kissed Mai Mai and then waited as she served us all tea. She was not a servant, but serving tea was central to her path. Even as she acquired her own servants, when tea was to be served, she appeared and did that herself.

  “So, with the two of you here together, I have something to say,” I said to the newly wed couple. I kowtowed to them politely. “I humbly apologize for ruining your wedding.”

  They both exchanged embarrassed looks, then Polkluk said “Oh get up, it’s weird to have you kowtow to us. And it’s not something that you planned or could have helped, is it? It was just bad timing on behalf of the other you that you sent off weeks ago, before we were even set to get married, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Taimei agreed. “What my husband said.”

  I sat back on my heels and nodded. “Even so, it needed to be addressed. I hope that my recovery did not impede the honeymoon?”

  “No, it certainly did not,” Taimei said, and Polkluk blushed just a little as she overshared just a little bit. I smiled and began exchanging a few tips in that regard, and before long had both of my friends blushing.

  I shrugged. “You pick up a few tricks living as many lives as I had,” I said when I sensed that they’d had enough.

  “I can only imagine,” Polkluk said.

  “But this isn’t the reason you came to me,” I said. “Whatever it is, I’m happy to help if I can.”

  The couple exchanged looks, then nodded in resolution. They kowtowed. “We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your tutelage thus far, but at this time your humble students request to withdraw from your active disciples to raise a family of our own,” they said in perfect unison.

  I blinked, for I hadn’t seen this coming. I mean, I would have if I’d looked at their fates, but I tried not to do that with my friends very often, and when I do , it’s only for life-ending events. Since this was just a deviation of their path, it wouldn’t have drawn my focus.

  “I consent, of course,” I said. “And I wish you well. However, I selfishly ask that you remain in your current roles until the end of the tournament. Taimei, you are of course not expected to compete, but it would be good for the public’s opinion if you remain until then. We can announce that you are planning to retire into parenthood at the opening ceremonies, and the time we spend together during the event itself will prove that I am not banishing the two of you out of displeasure.”

  They both relaxed and sat back on their heels as I made my selfish requests. They exchanged looks, then nodded. “That is a perfect solution,” Taimei said eventually. “Which brings us to part two of the request.”

  “Oh? Something else?” I asked.

  Polkluk nodded. “We want to take on students,” he said. “Actually, it’s more than that. We want to start a school. Not a sect, since we’ll only accept students in the foundation realm, and we’ll graduate them when they reach silver. But as our master, we need your blessing for this endeavor.”

  “You have it, of course,” I agreed. I took a sip of the tea and Mai Mai served me another cup. “Why don’t we discuss the shape of this plan for a while, and perhaps me or Mai Mai can help you refine your plans.”

  And so we talked late into the night about the future.

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