Chapter 37: Big Forest
I woke late the next day, the sun shining directly in my eyes through a bedroom window, it having climbed well above the horizon to achieve this striking angle. Ah: I was fully “I” again; Kristen and Kaitlyn were no longer bonded with me in my head.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Kristen said, laying on one side of me, one hand in mine, the covers riding just below her largish breasts, roughly between the size of Jess and Kaitlyn’s, intermediate in shape as well.
“We worked rather hard last night,” I said, yawning.
“Did we succeed?” she asked.
“We were the forest, all three of us together. What do you think?”
“Yes,” she said, then added in a joking tone, “We healed ourselves.”
“We think we are correct,” I returned with a smirk.
An arm flopped over my side, and Kaitlyn scooched up against my back, spooning me, nose just over my shoulder so she could see one-eyed through the Neck Pass of Mount Davie to our newest lover across the Valley of Bedclothes. “Yeah, we got it,” my wife affirmed.
Kristen demanded, “What was that? What precisely happened out there?”
I replied, “We first merged individually with Gaia, then with each other mentally, sharing the Gaia bond together, spread out over miles.”
“And then we merged physically,” added Kaitlyn.
“Do you have any sense of how many different sex positions we went through?” I asked Kristen.
She flopped on her back, making her breasts roll around for a second, sighing in memory of it all, an edging session that must have lasted six hours, based on how far the sun moved. It was hard to say exactly, our nearest clocks being miles away at the time.
“I’ve counted at least a dozen,” she finally said.
“Yeah,” Kaitlyn and I said together. I let her continue. “In rapport with each other like that, we simply decide to change up occasionally, so we move to achieve each new position as smoothly as our bodies allow. We did many other things like that. Did you notice that I taught you vaginal re-lubrication about an hour in when you were starting to get a bit dry?”
Kristen thought some more and slowly said, “Yeah!”
Then I sniffed, realizing that she was trying the skill out again. “Hold on there Ms. Nemo, we’ll put that skill to good use later in the day. First, we require sustenance.”
As Kristen moved bare-assed through the small kitchen to assemble breakfast, Kaitlyn and I continued to tag-team the lecture.
“We had to heal the forest together because it was too big for any one of us to heal all at once,” Kaitlyn began.
I added, “And we had to do it with sex magic because that amplifies our power considerably, especially when we gather up power in a long edging session like that.”
“We’ve done such things before, but on a smaller scale, Davie and I together.”
Kristen asked, “Could I do it myself, alone, obviously on a smaller scale still?”
We shook our heads together, I taking the question, “No, we’ve tried. Though personally gratifying, you simply can’t harness sex magic through masturbation. We’re not sure why; I’ve got guesses, but until I can put them to the test, I’d prefer to keep them to myself. Meanwhile, if you need a magical partner in a big sex magic working, I’ll be happy to serve.”
“And he has my blessing to do so if the ends are worthy,” my wife added. “If it’s a really big working, I can come in on it, too, as I did yesterday. Ultimately, though, we need to find you a mage husband, Kristen. You felt a bit bi during the working but with strong heterosexual leanings. Is that right?”
“Yeah, but don’t I get any say in who I marry?” Kristen asked, sounding a bit shocked.
“Of course,” Kaitlyn answered, “but whether you marry is not up for discussion. It’s a moral imperative that you do. We don’t have any good idea how common mages are in the world, but sex magic is such a powerful good — as you’ve just seen! — that it would be a crime to waste the gift by remaining single now that you know what you can do with it.”
“Well,” Kristen said, still sounding a bit miffed. “I really don’t want to just settle for the first guy to come along!”
“We wouldn’t ask that,” Kaitlyn said reassuringly, “but while mages remain rare, we don’t get to be as selfish as the general population.”
Kristen thought about that for a while, then nodded firmly, “You’re right of course, and your moral imperative is aligned with my life’s work as a ranger, so it’s really no hardship in principle. I just don’t want to be forced into a marriage just to fulfill an office thrust upon me by circumstance, like some kind of medieval queen.”
“A nudist ranger mage queen,” I said smiling.
“That sounds like something out of some kind of silly Internet erotica story,” she joked back.
“Not even the Internet could come up with something so screwy,” opined my wife, but I privately disagreed.
We all wolfed breakfast down, having tapped deeply into our bodily reserves last night.
As Kaitlyn and I did the dishes in her small stainless steel kitchen sink, I resumed the lecture, “So, I told you we did a much bigger working yesterday than we’d ever done before, but what I didn’t tell you is how much bigger. It’s hard to compare the size of our workings, since they’re so diverse, but based on the area we affected, I estimate we three wielded two orders of magnitude more power last night than the two of us ever have together.”
Kaitlyn nodded, glancing back over her bare shoulder at our slack-mouthed student.
“How is that possible?” she breathed.
I told her, “In part it’s because we’re simply getting stronger and more skilled. We took a big jump in both last night in fact: we invented that barrier shoving technique with you. In all of our prior workings of that sort, we just let the power build organically without ever really pushing toward any kind of hard limit, finding it and pushing it back until it could be pushed no more. Therefore, we never even tried to wield that much power even in a twosome together.”
My wife added from my side, wrist-deep in soapy dishwater, “There’s a pretty good chance that it was actually you that invented the barrier shoving technique, in rapport with us, but it’s hard to say in a state like that, our thoughts all intermingled. At some deep level, we may have collaborated on it instead. All we can really say is that we never did it before coming down here to be with you.”
“Ranger Kristen, magical inventress,” she mused, a smile on her face.
Kaitlyn continued, “Then there was our choice to do it as a magical three-way; that had to have contributed.”
I nodded emphatically. “I agree, the three-way trash collecting exercise showed us that. I wonder if it was literally two separate magnitudes of power growth: one from the limit shoving, one from adding another person.”
“So would a four-way give another order of magnitude improvement?” our student asked us.
We shrugged together, and she passed a clean dish wordlessly to me, I rinsing and racking it.
I turned my back to the sink while Kaitlyn pulled the stoppers, continuing, “We think there’s an entirely different way to increase the power, however: mage-sex.”
Kristen looked mystified, asking, “Isn’t that what we just did together last night?”
“No, Kristen,” my wife said, wiping her hands on a towel, “that was sex between mages while bonded in rapport with Gaia. Mage-sex is an entirely mental way of having sex. I got Davie off from fifteen miles away several months back that way.”
“Squirted everywhere, I did,” I added, chuckling.
“Ewww…” our student said, wrinkling her nose but smiling anyway.
I ignored this, continuing, “The thing is, we think we can combine them: physical sex like last night, but add mage-sex atop this.”
“Stimulated from inside and outside,” my wife added.
“That sounds absolutely epic,” Kristen said. “You want to knock the whole ecosystem back into line.”
“Yes, in one big bang, so to speak,” I said, grinning and nodding.
My wife cocked her head to one side, then asked, “I wonder if that’s how the universe’s Big Bang happened? I mean seriously, why not?”
“Why not indeed?” Kristen replied, nodding agreeably along with this fanciful premise. “Maybe there is a god, and a goddess, and a holy boy toy, and an angelic concubine, and an ascended gigolo, and a celestial courtesan. Maybe one eventful night 13.8 gigayears ago the holy sextuplet got together and had the orgy to end all orgies, gathering all the power they could collectively reach, simultaneously exploding in the ultimate orgasm, causing the formation of a new universe. Talk about the power of procreation!”
“Sex…tuplet,” I sniggered.
Kristen stuck a bit of her tongue out between her teeth in mock disgust at this pun.
“Yes, well, ennnnnyway,” my wife interjected in a mediating tone, “this terrestrial threesome still has work to do. The National Park Service says the pine beetles have also infested another nearby forest, and this one’s a lot bigger. It’ll make an excellent test of this new hypothesis.”
Our student got a resolute look on her face, saying, “Right, let’s go fix a forest!”
A bit over an hour later, we were out at the bigger of the two nearby beetle-besieged forests, parked along one edge, well back from the nearest dirt road.
“You know the drill, Kristen: get nekkid!” I told our student and began unzipping my cargo pants. As before, we filled the car’s passenger-side footwell with our things, hid the car keys, and got off into the forest to begin cleaning it of trash, preparing for the work to come.
It took us most of the morning to finish the forest cleanup, this one being so much larger than yesterday’s, so we went back to the car to prepare lunch. Between the fact that Kaitlyn and I kept our magical senses stretched out over the now-cleaned forest land and that we’d parked down an exceedingly rarely used side road, we weren’t worried about someone coming up on us without us seeing them first. Therefore, we stayed nude, using the time to continue our student’s education.
An hour later, we were fed, watered, and ready to go. It was time.
Wordlessly, we three hiked out to the center of the big forest and lay down in the dead pine needles.
“Ow!” griped Kristen. Through our bond with her, Kaitlyn and I both knew she’d rolled onto a pine cone. We took the opportunity to teach her self-healing. We’d taken care of it for her in our last session in the smaller forest, but we’d be leaving her again, so it was time she knew how to do it.
That taken care of, we merged our consciousnesses, three mages and a planet making love with each other, a forest at our center.
In that state, we began to introduce mage-sex, organically through actions rather than try to use words through the mage bond, not needing to explain what we were doing. What one of us showed, the rest knew. I’m not certain, our consciousnesses being so blended at the time, but I think Kristen introduced several refinements to the technique. What I am certain about is that what we did out there that day was far and a way more powerful than what Kaitlyn and I had ever done together, including yesterday’s three-way tryst with Kristen.
We edged up to sunset, releasing our pent up simultaneous four-way orgasm just as the sun disappeared behind a nearby bluff, lighting the sky in oranges and purples as we lifted the water and nutrients the forest needed to come back into balance, tons of material moved in seconds.
“Oshitoshitoshit!”
“Geeeeerrrrrrrraaaaagggh!”
“Aaaaaaaaaaayayyyaaaaaaayyaaaaiiiggggghhh!”
As we recovered from our exertions, allowing our entwined senses of self to begin slowly pulling back apart, one of us — I could not say who — said, “It was like saddling a tornado and riding it the whole afternoon, right over the horizon, chasing the sunset!”
Another said, “And it worked! This forest will fully recover, this very season.”
“It’s a bit early to conclude success,” opined another, “but at the very least, the ecosystem now has the resources it needs to recover naturally.”
We sighed with satisfaction. It was good. Very good.
As we drove back to Kristen’s home, one serene patient silence morphed into another in the way that a granite boulder emerges from a snowdrift in spring.
We three mages were nude, our dissolving mage bond letting us tap into her knowledge of this area’s back forest roads without needing to exchange explicit directions.
With the patience of erosion, that lone boulder became three, and those smaller individual boulders spread apart, acquiring individual identity.
One boulder woke and spoke, as it were: Kaitlyn started a conversation that kept us occupied through the drive home from the forest.
I thought about this gentle transition over the following days, wondering why we’d remained silent on our prior night drive. Why did Kaitlyn speak, and why did we answer her?
I decided that we were less impressed with ourselves tonight, even though we’d pulled off a bigger working this time. I hoped we’d never get jaded about doing things like this, but the first time is always special, isn’t it?
Kaitlyn’s spell-breaking words were, “Davie, you remember how we talked about magically fertilizing farmland so we could stop using chemical fertilizers?”
“Sure. I showed that we’d need something like five generations of wizards having six mage children per couple over the span of a hundred years to make it to world-wide scale, and then only if they all dedicated their whole lives to the project.”
“A hundred years‽” interjected our guide.
“Yeah, Kristen, I can run you through the math later,” answered my wife, “but what I wonder is if we just kicked a few key premises out from under Davie’s old argument with the dual discovery of mage-sex and magical four-ways with the planet. Can we now solve the problem of chemical fertilizers in our lifetime?”
I thought about it, running through the math again using the new data, finally answering, “No, I don’t think this changes very much about that scenario, actually. The main problem is that farm land is clustered, not as grouped as we’d need it to be to do what you propose. I mean, there are areas where there’s one farm after another, side by side over miles, but on a worldwide scale, each cluster encompasses only a small number of the total count of farms. Eventually you run up against some border: wasteland, city land, residential areas, forest land; something! I think our improvements in power and technique might cut the overall number of farms by a factor of ten or so, but you’ll recall that the argument was based on a geometric progression. That wipes out a single factor of ten easily.”
“Crap,” my wife grumped.
“Furthermore,” I went on, “I’m now much more certain that there’s an incorrect major premise on the other side of that argument, making the problem tougher than I previously argued it: the birth rate of mages is nowhere near the one in two value that I used at the time. I did that out of the principle of charity, to show that mages cannot reasonably fertilize the whole world’s farms even with unreasonably high levels of mage births, but now we know we don’t even have that going for us. We’ve been looking for more mages for most of a year, but we’ve only found one so far: Kristen here.”
“Double crap,” said my wife.
I’d been thinking more on this since the last time we discussed it, so I added, “Part of the problem is the way farm land evolves. We can see this in just the past several hundred years. Back when the New World was first settled, the European immigrant farmers snapped up all of the best farm land and settled it. The most popular spots for that became cities, since these highly productive farms were ipso facto the ones that could feed an urban population. But, as each city’s population grew, it swallowed up the nearest farm land, which tended to be closest to the water, and thus the best land. This necessarily pushed the farms further and further out into less productive land.”
“And yet the population keeps growing,” my wife observed.
I replied, “Yes, and I’ve looked into it: for the past few decades, farm land use has been roughly holding steady despite that. That’s at least partly due to increased efficiency in farm land use, which ironically is because of use of chemical fertilizers. If we went 100% organic today, we’d cause a worldwide famine so dire it’d probably kick off World War III as the powerful fought over the drastically reduced means of food production.”
“So we’ve got to build up to it carefully,” Kristen said.
“Sure, and we’ve got the time to do it: it’s a big country. That practice of pushing further and further out from the best land, nearest the rivers, can work for hundreds of years. This has also overlapped with the rise of globalization, which allows cities — even whole countries — to ship food in cheaply from thousands of miles away, as long as you’re willing to ignore the negative externalities of pollution. The problem is, we’re now starting to populate the deserts in earnest, and world population has grown to the point that those central farms are straining to keep up. We simply cannot sustain these trends indefinitely.”
My wife’s agile mind leapt multiple links down the logic chain in a single bound: “Clear-cutting the Amazon.”
Our unifying bond hadn’t fully faded yet, so I followed this easily. “Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s just the South American version of what we’re doing here in the western US: where we’re pushing farms into the desert, they’re pushing into the jungle. Kristen, how do you feel about eroding the National Park Service boundaries to allow it to be privatized as farm land instead? The forested parts are necessarily good growing land, right? It’s federal land, so we could legislate the farming practices for such land, insisting that it all be done with the best organic practices, 100% sustainable.”
The NPS ranger replied, “That idea sucks, Davie: you’re trading away ecosystems, carbon capture, and O₂ production just to get sustainable farming! Still, I get your point about needing to use less productive land with this scheme.” Then she asked, “This old argument of yours, the one needing generations of mages… I assume it rests on an assumption that farm land use will remain roughly constant going forward?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Increasing urbanization will continue to chew into existing farm land, and new farms will push out further into what we now call wasteland. On top of that, world population will also keep growing for decades at the least, but farm land use will become more efficient. I expect it to all net out about equal, so that land use for farming doesn’t change much over the next hundred years or so.”
“Well, why?” demanded le forestier nu. “Now that we’ve rediscovered magic, instead of pumping a continual amount of fertilizer into the current farmland like we do now, why not make, say, three times the current farm land area available from wasteland using magic? Let’s make sustainable farm land, you two! That will let farmers return to more sustainable practices based on crop rotation with nitrogen-fixing crop cycles, so we no longer need chemical fertilizers or covert nature mage fertilization efforts!”
I thought about that some, then replied, “Kristen, the last time Kaitlyn and I discussed this, we assumed the mages would have to keep returning to each farm at least once a year to replenish the land. Your idea means we only have to visit each patch of wasteland once to turn it into good, fertile farm land, allowing the farmers to take it from there, keeping that land fertile through sustainable farming practices.”
She nodded in agreement with my summarization.
“The thing is, your 3× multiplier wipes out a big chunk of the advantage you bought by visiting each plot only once. There’s simply too much farm land currently in use for any solution based on a small number of active mages to be practical.”
Kristen was looking skeptical, so I decided I had to walk her through a brief version of the mathematical argument I’d presented my wife, months back now.
“All right, Kristen,” I began, “let’s say we three each do two epic workings a day, just like the one we just did tonight, creating one of your triple-sized farms per: one in the morning, one in the afternoon, then go home to heal and rest, right? Let’s also say we work five days a week, and we work through the winter by wearing magical insulation bubbles. Make it a full time job, and never mind how we get paid for it. That comes to something like 520 of your sustainably chemical-free farms a year. Sound good?”
She bobbled her head a bit, then replied, “Mmmm, could work, I suppose. Sounds exhausting, but for the right motivation…”
She trailed off, so I continued, “Most farms are pretty big; not forest-big, but now we’ve just tripled their size to allow for natural nitrogen fixation, organic fertilization, and such, so we’d probably have to stick together, us three, and do a three-way on each farm to make this work.”
Kristen was looking like this sounded all right to her, so I turned to my wife and asked, “How many farms are there worldwide, love?”
I knew she’d looked this up since we’d had our prior US-based argument, so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Something like 570 million, Davie.”
I just looked at Kristen’s face, expecting her to approximate the arithmetic: hundreds of new farms per year divided into hundreds of millions of existing farms currently needed equals…
“A million years of work,” she dispiritedly observed. “Literally a million years. Shit!”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “It’s not nearly that bad once you account for the fact that we’ll find or breed more mages over the coming decades, but we’ve worked that math already, and we can tell you now that you don’t start to see that take a major effect until the compound growth in mages has roughly a hundred years to accumulate. We’ll be stuck with chemical fertilizers for quite some time to come, Kristen, even with tens of thousands of mages working actively on the problem.“
Her eyes dropped, clearly in deep disappointment.
“The simple fact is, Kristen, the Earth is a very big place, and so far we only know about three mages. We can’t fix the whole planet ourselves.”
Kristen’s eyes came up to mine with a new fire kindling inside. “That sounds like job number one, then: find more mages.”
“Yes, that was also my conclusion when we two discussed it earlier.”
Kaitlyn added, “There’s a huge difference between feeling good about what we’re doing versus doing good because of what we’re feeling, Kristen. If we get that backwards, we can end up with a brilliantly workable solution for the wrong problem.”
And with that, we lapsed back into silence until we got back to our student’s trailer, mulling what we now agreed was Job 1.
Kaitlyn and I spent the rest of our Spring Break there with Kristen, she having taken the week off work to be with us.
When one thinks of a threesome running around in scant to no clothing on the warm sand during Spring Break, one does not commonly think of red sandstone bluffs lined with sagebrush and junipers. Lake Powell licks gently at its shores rather than continuously pound it with crashing waves as the ocean does to its beaches, but we thought it sufficiently close to paradise for our purposes regardless.
It was a bittersweet parting: we didn’t want to leave, but we left more than a friend: we left a much more powerful mage and ally. The mages were beginning to spread!