← Book 3, The Healing Power of Magic
Content Advisory: This work of erotic fiction is intended for adults only. The story contains the following themes: magic; romance; therapeutic & erotic massage; naturism; stripping; nudity dares; nude art photography; exhibitionism; voyeurism; only one naked (OON); embarrassment (ENF & ENM); oral sex (MF & MM); intra-, extra-, and pre-marital sexual intercourse; straight & gay sex; group sex; mixed bathing; skinny dipping; and even spooning! My!
Disclaimer: This is fiction. To the extent that there are people or places named in this book that exist in the real world, they are not as described here. The author recommends that you do not take practical advice from fictional persons.
Dedication: This book is for the body servants. I do not envy your difficulties in addressing client needs under the culture’s demands.
“Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters.”
— Adam Smith
Prologue
Kaitlyn and I were naked, hauling our carful of possessions back into our house, having just graduated from massage therapy school up in Salt Lake. Nude because it’s easier for a mage to heal scrapes from the physical work than to clean the consequent biological products out of our clothing. Under Moab’s noonday spring sun, clothes were more hindrance than help to us at the moment.
Our house sits atop a sharp rise from highway level, perhaps ten meters above the road surface and sixty or seventy meters back from it. Since we couldn’t see the top of the occasional jeep or SUV as it whooshed past on its way out to the deep Southern Utahan canyonlands, it stood to reason that they couldn’t see us, either.
If someone were to drive up the dirt and gravel path that led to the house, they’d see us readily, but the only people we knew well enough to be visiting us here already knew we were part-time nudists and had seen us naked before.
We didn’t exactly proselytize. We simply practiced our therapy skills on all of them, and we believed in the reciprocal nudity doctrine of massage, being that you should get to ask your therapist to be naked if you take your massage that way. Fair’s fair, right?
? Pikka-tink-ta-link! Pikka-tink-ta-link! ?
“Argh!” Kaitlyn growled in exasperation, vaulting up onto the front porch, bypassing the front steps in her haste to dig her phone out of the clothes pile we left in the living room shortly after getting home. Her leap had a predictably wonderful effect on her buns and breasts as she disappeared rapidly indoors to answer the call before it went to voicemail.
“Ahhhh,” I sighed in appreciation. I thanked Gaia every day that I had the sense and good luck to marry her.
I am Devindra Bhat, nature mage; Davie to my friends, only half of whom know about my magical powers.
It’s no exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t be married if Kaitlyn wasn’t also a mage, but I’ve chronicled that story elsewhere.
To our knowledge, there is only one other nature mage currently practicing on the planet. This massage therapy scheme is part of our plan to find a fourth, a fifth, and so on.
You see, magic can only be done at a sufficient distance from technological artifacts, which is why there is so little magic in the modern world. A piece of clothing is far from the most high-tech thing in our lives, but it is usually the tech closest to the body, and for most modern humans, that coverage is all but complete, all day long, excepting only brief periods to change clothes or bathe.
Bedclothes count, so this even applies to those that sleep nude. To the magic, the only functional differences from wrapping your body in Milanese haute couture versus a fraying Walmart sheet set come down to the fabric type, coverage, and distance.
As for type, the higher tech the fabric is, the worse it is for a mage. That’s basic. All-natural fabrics are better for mages than synthetics, but no fabric at all is best.
Quantity also affects our magic. A mage bundled up on a winter night, her nude body tucked tight between 100% cotton sheets with two hand-woven woolen blankets and a silk-shelled hempen-batt duvet on top to keep her nice and toasty will be magically impotent even though her bedding’s all-natural.
That’s not a guess, that’s an experimental result: Kaitlyn tried it last February while we were up in Salt Lake.
Me? I can barely do magic in bed with a single cotton sheet draped over me. I’m a lot more capable if I throw off that top sheet, but there’s still the fitted mattress sheet below, not to mention the mattress itself, so it’s not an ideal working environment. To do serious magic, I have to take my work outside.
Through further experiments, Kaitlyn and I have confirmed that magic follows an inverse square law: halve the distance between a mage and a technological artifact and you quadruple its damping effect on the mage’s talents. A mage Porky-Pigging it in a cotton shirt and nothing else is still going to have trouble doing magic, the fabric being so close to his skin, touching it most places, tenting just above it in others.
We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year nailing down the principles of magic one by one, and we’re beginning to uncover some of its laws. We expect this process of discovery to take the rest of our lives, but this much is already clear: magic is scientific. The only mysterious part about it is the form the energy takes and how it must be wielded.
And so, we went naked whenever we could get away with it.
Kaitlyn emerged from the house carrying a small lump of mage kryptonite, that being her smartphone. There are higher-tech items in the world, but there is scarcely another thing manufactured that puts as much high tech into as small a space, which is also regularly carried by normal people. The last time we measured it, Kaitlyn lost all ability to do magic when I brought her phone within 1.2 meters of her bare body, down from 1.4 when she was a new mage. With it clamped to her head like that, she was as incapable of doing magic as any normal person despite being absolutely naked.
“Yeah, mom, everything’s good here,” she was saying into it as she walked back out onto the front porch.
Pause.
“Yeah, we’d love to. We’ve got maybe another half hour of work here to do before we can leave, though.”
Pause.
“Uh, huh.”
Pause.
“I don’t know what we can bring… The fridge’s empty… Our renter didn’t leave us any leftovers.”
Pause.
“Sure, the unsalted sort, right?”
Pause.
“All right, see you then, mom. Thanks; bye!”
I guessed, “We’ve been invited to your parents’ house.”
“Bingo,” my wife confirmed. “She wants us to swing by the grocery store on our way through town and bring her a pound of butter for a recipe she’s trying.”
“Small ask,” I commented. “Is this party for us? Some kind of welcome home thing?”
“She didn’t say, but I know my mom: she’s got an ulterior motive.”
“Hmmm!” I replied with a waggle of my thick, dark, and oh-so-evocative Indian eyebrows. “Well, let’s get back to it.”
We were unpacking the last of our things when Kaitlyn said, “Oh, I almost forgot: mom was very clear that she expected us to bring the massage stuff. I don’t think she’d turn us away if we arrived without it, but…” She trailed off with a small ironic smirk.
“Tables, too?” I asked, referring to our heavy massage tables, which were decidedly not bike-portable despite the manufacturer molding the word “Portable” into their undersides.
“Mom said no but wouldn’t explain why not. She wants us to bring all the rest, though.”
Considering the amount of gear we’d both accumulated through our schooling, I replied, “I’d rather not repack our massage kits into the bike panniers. Let’s take mi burro.”
This being my 1984 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ45, the uncommon short-bed pickup truck configuration, my little beast of burden. We took only Kaitlyn’s Subaru up to Salt Lake, leaving my ride sitting idle by the house for the seven months of our schooling, and I missed driving it badly. Noisy it is, and a gas guzzler it is also, but it is so very expressive. The machine speaks clearly enough that even a deaf person can understand its growls and rumbles, up through the seats and gear shift, feeling the machine speak.
She didn’t object to my desire to put some miles on the FJ, so I went on, “I hope your family doesn’t have unrealistic expectations, between our magic and our schooling. We’ve healed all of them as well as we could back at Christmas. I expect we’re kind of plateaued with them all at the moment.”
“Oh, don’t fret,” she chided. “They’ll be plenty happy with whatever we can deliver. C’mon, let’s go get cleaned up.”
We put the last of our things away, went out into the backyard, called up a sand shower, scrubbed ourselves clean, dressed, tossed our massage kit bags behind the seats of mi burro, and got back onto the road.
Congrats on your 4th book Elli.
If I’m brave enough to face the MM stuff one day, which of your 4 books is the best? Are they stand-alone books? Also how many chapters are in your last book?
Cheers
You’re referring to the content advisory? That’s largely confined to ch.16, and it’s done as tastefully as I could, given the needs of the story. You can jump over that chapter, if you’re willing to fill in back-referenced details yourself. I tried to leave it out, but it broke the arc, so it has to be there for the story to be complete.
I like #1 the best, but realize that I’m writing them in part because I couldn’t find anything quite like them. That explains the initial appeal to me, but whether you’re of the same mind is another question entirely.
The remaining books are simply Kaitlyn and Davie telling their stories to me after I invented them, then me retelling them to y’all.
Only in a loose sort of way. Each book recapitulates some of the universe so a reader isn’t fully lost if they don’t start at the beginning, but they form an arc, each subsequent book building on the previous one.
Rather than start in the middle, I’d suggest reading book 1, then decide if you want to go on from there. It’s standalone in the sense that it doesn’t end in a cliffhanger, so you aren’t compelled to continue. There’s just more to the story is all, as in all of life.
#1 is also the shortest at 87k words, so it’s considered a short novel.
65, counting prologue and epilogue. I’ll try to get the rest posted tomorrow, but realize that I do a final edit pass while posting, so I’m posting slower than you’d read them yourself.
Perhaps a more useful total is the word count, roughly 150k, so a bit longer than your typical paperback novel, but nowhere near as long as a tome by Clancy or Grisham, or in fact most of epic fantasy.
Does the MM stuff mean they are banging each other? Or just they snuggled? Sorry, you don’t have to give a spoiler. I’m about as liberal minded about same sex relationships as a heterosexual man can possibly be, but I certainly don’t want the private gory details (on the male side). Yikes!
So Book 1, okay. Thanks.
So the other books have no action? It’s just all being ‘re-told’? Like sit around the fire and hear second hand stories? Or am I misunderstanding that? Maybe you simply mean that they had more adventures.
65? Wow… how long did it take for you to write that?
No, it’s oral only, and it’s not gratuitous: it advances the plot.
Rather the opposite, but to say more would be to spoil the plot point.
Then I think there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll share the same opinion of it that I did when writing it: it has to be there, and it’s done as tastefully as possible.
Of course, “possible” is a self-judgement of my own writing abilities. There are many better writers than me, so I assume there’s a better way to handle it, somewhere between what I wrote and simply taking it out. Something delicate yet powerful, beyond my ability.
All of the books have sex in them. This is just the first in the series that has MM sex. See the content advisories for a summary of what’s in the earlier books.
In book 1, the first sex scene is something of a climactic event, so it’s late in the story, but the amount increases later in the series.
I wouldn’t say the amount of sex increases through the series, though. I’m half-tempted to graph the incidence of sex through the books, to find out which has the most sex scenes per unit of writing, but my sense is that I’ve tapered off as it goes, because I have this thing about gratuitous sex. For me, there always has to be a reason for it; it has to advance the plot. “These two bang, and isn’t that fun?” isn’t good enough.
I’m running out of reasons for Kaitlyn and Davie to have sex, and there’s only so much sex I can let them have with others before it gets silly.
No, all of the books are written in first-person perspective, primarily present tense.
I simply mean that when I sat down and wrote the first word of book 1, I had no idea there was going to be 5 of them, plus a sequel series currently planned at 3 books. I learned this later, Kaitlyn and Davie “telling” me their stories, so I’ve written them down. I hope the voices in my head aren’t bothering you. ?
(Minor spoiler: Kaitlyn and Davie are peripheral characters in the second series, which is why I don’t say there are 8 planned books in the series.)
What I did sit down to write was that first book, because it seemed an obvious premise, and I was annoyed I couldn’t find a book depicting it, so writing it fell to me. For better or for worse, you now have my interpretation of the idea and its consequences.
If there’s any justice, someone actually good at fiction writing will hear of this premise now and do it right. ?
I took the advice of some famous author and wrote 3 books before publishing the first here, allowing me to go back into book 1 to add details and fix up plot points as I was writing book 2, then back into the first two when writing the third.
I therefore began work on book 4 shortly before I published the first chapters of book 1 here, mid-February of last year.
But, it is not the case that it took me a year to finish this book, because once I finished the first draft of book 4, I moved onto book 5, then onto book 1 of the next series.
I finished the first draft of book 4 (this one) about 2 months after starting it. You’d recognize the plot of the first draft after reading this one, but it’s changed a tremendous amount since that version. I was still making substantial plot and structural changes to it through the end of January of this year.
I then sat on it through most of last month to clear the decks in my mind, then did the final edit passes on it in the past few weeks.
Some days it’s 10k words in half a day, and some days it’s nothing a-tall. Some days I end up changing just one word, some days I reorder whole chapters. Shrug. Is what it is.
That must be quite the MM plot point.
Sorry, by action I had meant action, not sex.
8 Books? That’s a lot.
2 months, wow.
Without going into any details, whatsoever, about what percentage of your first story is about a naked male?
Well, it’s not like the whole story turns on that axis. Its simply a significant event, without which the Saga’s world would materially shrink. I’d expect “but what about” type questions if I took it out.
Oh. Well, if you’re asking if there’s more than just naked people running around and having sex, then yes, there’s very definitely a plot. The primary protagonists (Kaitlyn & Davie) live in a fair approximation to the real world, and they have real lives and real problems. Being naked helps them to get through all of this. More I can’t say without giving spoilers.
Shrug. Lots of authors end up with series that large.
The series is only half-complete on that book-count basis, and who knows where it will end up on the more useful word-count basis.
Your own “Resort Ambassador” currently clocks in at 173k words, and as far as I can tell, it’s still unfinished. By the old paper book publishing standards, you’d want to split that, so you might have 2 books yourself already.
(Incidentally, I’m waiting to start your book until it’s finished. I prefer to binge the whole thing than get stuck waiting for the next chapter to appear. It’s why I publish my books whole, not serialized.)
After posting that reply, I went off and found some numbers on typical typing speeds, and even my 10k in 4 hours numbers aren’t remarkable. They’re right at the “typical lay typist” speed. Since I don’t type continuously through one of those four hour flows, and I do occasionally go back and edit, that does mean my typing speed must be a bit above average, but I don’t think it’s extraordinary.
If you then take the ~140k length of this book at the end of that first draft and divide the 2-month span into it, you come to about 2400 words per day, a quarter my “running” speed.
It’s not sprinting, it’s walking. Diligent walking, but just walking nevertheless.
Lots of authors complete a novel in a month.
(My first book was in fact started a bit before November 2019, but I didn’t enter it into NaNoWriMo.)
About 75%, by chapter count.
Kaitlyn shows up about a quarter the way into Book 1, and after that, the two have approximately equal “naked time.” Each has one chapter where they’re naked and the other is not. This continues through the series.
Therefore, I wouldn’t characterize any of these books as “naked male,” only individual chapters. A fairer characterization is that the protagonists are nudists, and the prime protagonist happens to be male. He isn’t alone.
It is also the case that these books don’t try for that inexplicable condition where only the women get naked. I suppose that condition is no more fantastical than my series’ magic system, but a book shouldn’t have competing premises. Mine’s the magic system, so I try to keep everything else plausible beyond that; to the extent that my books are implausible, I’ll argue that you can trace the divergence from reality to that single premise.
It’s speculative fiction: you set the ground rules for a counterfactual situation, then see what develops from that.
Yeah! A new book! I am really looking forward to reading it in the coming weeks probably at a relative slow tempo where I can enjoy it. I like stories where the characters like or prefer to be nude. I don’t mind the occasional embarrassment but it shouldn’t be the turning point of a story. So I hope this book is just as good as the previous books in the series.