Xena saw fit to wake her late the next morning, licking at her face with a tongue that smelled like it had just enjoyed its own breakfast.
Pushing her exuberant princess away, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes, becoming presently concerned as to how she’d ended up on the floor. Tangled-up as she was in the comforter, she figured she must’ve fallen off the mattress at some point and was evidently too tired to notice. Weirdly, she was wearing a different t-shirt than she had been, but she couldn’t remember changing; perhaps she’d spilled something on it during a trip to the kitchen for a glass of water, and it was easiest to accept that interpretation than to give into a mildly-disturbing analysis.
At any rate, she hadn’t slept uncomfortably. The addition of her pillows and an extra blanket draped over her suggested that one of the other women must’ve noticed her tumble, and that slight gesture of care soothed her initial panic; likely it had been Jersey as she lacked the djinn’s strength to simply lift her snoozing bulk back onto the mattress, which went a long way to reassuring her that the other girl didn’t harbour any resentment over what had happened the day before.
Genie had already gotten up ahead of her, so she tried to be a little thoughtful and put the couch back rather than leave it for Jersey. Jamming the mattress into place, she fixed the cushions before joining the other two women in the kitchen where she was set upon by a couple of odd details.
Firstly, Jersey seemed much shorter somehow. Initially Callie had thought that the discrepancy was because she herself had added another inch of height, but the comparison of the other woman to Genie suggested she had indeed shrunk. Having already lost at least half a foot of height, she wasn’t sure if her bestie even crested five feet anymore, the inches disappearing along with years of aging.
Secondly, Jersey appeared to be much thicker than before, too, both noticeably through her bustline but also the general vibe of her looks. Everything about her seemed to have swelled in size, from her lips to her rear, and as far as she could tell it correlated almost exactly to her dream ⸻ well, the parts of it she could remember anyway. The fog blurring her recollection was much more opaque in the morning-after, and she wondered what had happened to make the two align so closely.
Thirdly, both women had a certain consideration to the way they looked at her that had been absent the night before.
“Is there something on my face?” she started, leading with the obvious jest.
“Not anymore,” Genie mused. “Or at least, they’re not as large as they were last night.”
“But still bigger than yesterday afternoon,” Jersey opined, clearly clued-in to something Callie wasn’t picking up.
“What is?” she tried again, confused.
“Your teeth,” the djinn answered, tapping her own dentin. “Your canines are a great deal longer, comparatively-speaking, and your premolars look considerably sharper.”
Feeling around in her mouth with her tongue, she found that wasn’t the only change, either. Though her poking and prodding confirmed the alterations they’d claimed, she couldn’t help but notice that her tongue felt significantly longer than it had been. Concerned, she stuck it out to check before she realised exactly what it was she was doing, accidentally displaying its impressive length to the other two women.
“Yes, I remember that bit, too,” Genie retorted smugly as her cheeks flushed a slight pink, a colouration mirrored on her bestie.
“Is this a progression of the wish?” Callie asked as she covered her mouth with her hand, embarrassed by her altered assets and their absent-minded showcase.
“No, and yes,” the djinn answered unhelpfully. “The genesis of the changes is rooted in Jersey’s wish, I think, but their current source is likely the fault of your budding sorcery.”
“You ‘think’?” the taller girl questioned, an accusatory tone to her husky tenor. “Aren’t you supposed to be the one in control of all the magic?”
“My magic, yes,” Genie replied evenly, unphased by the other woman’s bark despite the steadily-growing strength of her bite. “There is still an amount of wish left for Jersey to use as she’d like, but my involvement in these particular changes are at their end.”
“I think I recall seeing something in your end, yes,” Jersey said teasingly, glancing knowingly at the dark-haired woman out of the corner of her eye.
“Don’t be jealous,” the djinn waved dismissively, “you needed the breather.”
“No thank you,” Genie said, declining. “I don’t even engage in that sort of thing with Kelly, and unless it’s strictly necessary I’ll be counting myself out of another sample.” Shifting slightly on her feet, she winced a little as though sore from exercise outside her regular regimen.
“The djinn protests a little too much,” Jersey tittered, a smug look on her face. “From the sound of it you were having a wonderful time.”
“Yes, well,” the dark-haired woman coughed awkwardly before reassuming her normally-immaculate composure. “That was then, and this is now.”
Having heard enough of the salacious banter to put it all together, Callie did a remarkable job of concealing her envy. It seemed that she’d been right after all; once she’d fallen asleep, the other two must have started entertaining each other back in Jersey’s room.
Was that why she wanted to ‘keep an eye’ on us? she wondered to herself, privately fuming that she’d been lost in some stupid dream of an unrealistic threesome while the girls were knocking boots in the next room. It was all so that she could keep her hands on Jersey.
It made sense, didn’t it? Genie had more or less confirmed the two had a ‘link’ together or whatever, likely forged during her absence in Seattle. Assuming Jersey’s initial transformation had been just as erotically-stimulating as what she’d woken to in her own flat, it would’ve been the most natural thing in the world for the djinn to see to her mistress’s pleasure.
Or, perhaps it was a little more than just mutual stimulation. Obviously she had no idea what a romance could look like between a mistress and djinn, but Genie’s comments about the mother of her children made it sound plausible after a fashion.
She hadn’t realised how caught in her introspection she’d been until several minutes later.
“Callie?” Jersey called, dragging her out of her thoughts.
“Yeah,” she replied numbly, entirely too conscious of how her chompers clacked together whenever she closed her mouth. “Just got a little lost for a second, is all.”
“Please try to pay a little more attention,” Genie admonished her, though it was less of a scolding and more rooted in genuine concern. “This is a very dangerous time for both of you, and I would rather you be as prepared as I can make you.”
“Sure,” she grumbled, wishing she could exit the conversation and go back to nursing her dignity. “I’m listening.”
“As I was saying,” the djinn continued, “now that we’ve, ah, rather exhaustingly ruled out Callie as the source of the presence lingering around Jersey, the two of you will need to be much more careful until I can find out what’s targeting you.”
“Presence?” Callie echoed. “This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
“You were still in Seattle when Genie first picked it up,” Jersey explained. “As I understand it, something local noticed my wish and is trying to exploit it.”
“How would that even work?” she asked, confused as she was by her relative ignorance of magic.
“Something’s connected to Jersey by one of those links I was talking about,” Genie explained. “It’s not necessarily a magical link, of course, but rather one of familiarity or something of that nature, which is why I initially suspected it to be either you or the pact you two share. Now that we know definitively that the source is external, that means it’s likely some kind of threat, and perhaps an intelligent one.” Get faster updates on g.com.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Callie grimaced, a low rumble building in her chest.
“Nor do I,” Genie agreed. “Until we can sever this link, I’m hesitant to either finish Jersey’s wishes or leave the two of you unsupervised. Perhaps when your familiar pact is stronger you’ll be able to handle the threat on your own, but that’s not yet the case.”
“So where’s the other shoe?” she questioned, waiting for the catch. “If we have a Genie on our side, does that mean this ‘danger’ outclasses you?”
“Certainly not,” the djinn replied, shaking her head. “If it came at me directly, I’d have little trouble with it. The snag here is that it’s going around my protection, and the Veil won’t let me interfere without severe consequence.”
“What’s stopping it from attacking, then?”
“It could be that it doesn’t feel it’s in a secure-enough position to,” Genie mused, tapping a thoughtful finger against her lips, “or it’s wary of my presence. If it’s the latter, then hanging around as much as I’m able will hopefully prove an effective deterrent.”
Picking up on a subtle clue from the normally-guarded woman’s body language, Callie could sense the worry and frustration the dark-haired amazon was hiding. “But you either can’t be here all the time,” she reasoned, “or you don’t want to be.”
Genie fixed her with a hard stare. “An astute observation,” she admitted, “but the safety of my mistress is slightly more important than my personal desires.”
“You mean your personal responsibility,” the taller girl argued, confirming what was already obvious. “You’ve got a family you’d rather be with.”
“Yes,” the djinn allowed, “and I would very much like to see how my little ones are getting on, but it would be irresponsible to abandon you.”
“You wouldn’t be leaving us defenseless,” Jersey piped up, sympathetic to Genie’s own wishes. “I have my ‘guardian,’ don’t I?”
“When she’s not at her classes, sure,” she hedged.
“Then when I’m on my own,” the shorter girl continued, outlining her plan, “couldn’t you just leave me with a way to contact you? So that if there’s any problems you can come back right away.”
“Communication through the Veil is not an easy thing,” Genie warned.
“But it’s possible, right?” Callie inquired, backing up her bestie despite her own misgivings; while she wanted to be sure nothing happened to Jersey, she couldn’t help but feel a little guilty about taking up so much of Genie’s time.
“There is a way, yes,” the djinn relented. “My human has come up with a rather ingenious method for such long-distance communication, but it’s not without its own problems.” Frowning, her brows furrowed as she recalled an unpleasant memory. “Our first tests of it were promising, but it’s strikingly prone to user error.”
“Then we can address that on our end,” Callie stated confidently. “We’ll make sure we’re diligent with its operation, and if that’s not enough then you can swing by for check-ins however often you’d like.”
It was an agreeable compromise, she suspected, but it took a few more rounds of promises and strategizing to bring Genie around. Eventually she produced a smart phone and had each of them scan a QR code to download an otherwise-unremarkable texting app, one that would apparently allow for communication through the Veil as long as they were judicious in its application.
Evidently having experienced significant issues with it before, she warned them to be overly cautious with its use; as far as the djinn was concerned, it would be far better to jump into a false alarm than it would be to allow a subtle threat to slide. After they both swore to use it exactly as ordered, Genie relaxed enough to allow the plan to proceed.
Before she popped off back to wherever her family was, however, she lingered for a moment to give Callie an appraising look. A tension rose between them as the djinn gave her the once-over, but whatever the other girl had been holding back remained unsaid; swallowing her words, she merely offered a polite wave before disappearing.