The character I dreamt of that night was one of the many not-quite-human species my wild childhood imagination had invented during the period after I had learned how sex works and was imagining other ways that it could work. Aries was not the ram from the zodiac, but a member of a species called the Sea Men. The pun on semen wasn’t intended at the time I named these people. They’re actually based on the seahorse!

Sea Men (and Sea Women) are a humanoid species with blue skin and some small fins that help them swim. They aren’t mermaids, in the traditional sense. They have two arms and two legs, and they have lungs, not gills. They live either on land near the sea, or near the surface of the water where they can still get air.

Sea Men impregnate Sea Women in the way people do, but that’s the end of where their reproduction resembles that of humans. Some hours after a Sea Woman gets impregnated, she lays an egg. But a lot of species lay eggs; what’s special is how she does it. Before she does so, her vagina grows outward. When it’s done, the uterus is in her pelvis and her cervix is aligned with the surface of her crotch. The entire vagina is outside the body, looking like a long, thick cock. That organ is actually an ovipositor, existing for one purpose only, to lay her egg. Once that’s done, the changes revert in about half the time it took for the organ to take that shape.

The egg is a little larger than a chicken’s egg, about the size of a duck’s egg. It has a leathery shell like a turtle’s egg. If they want to make a child with this egg, the egg is deposited into a sac on the Sea Man’s stomach. Within the environment of the sac, the eggshell dissolves over the course of a day and the embryo within attaches to the Sea Man’s navel, which acts like the placenta in humans, providing nutrients taken from the father’s bloodstream and removing wastes.

I never had a protracted dream covering an entire pregnancy, but I assumed the Sea Man’s gestation was similar to the human nine months. The child grows to that size, anyway. Rather than having to push the child out, though, Sea Men give birth simply when the fetus grows too large to remain in the sac and its head protrudes. The father places the child’s head on one of his breasts, which have developed in the female human style during the pregnancy. The consumption of father’s milk triggers the separation of the child from the father’s navel, and within a day or so of the head protruding, the father pulls the child out and into the world.

The Sea Women mothering these children have breasts, too; laying an egg causes them to develop, and either being around a pregnant Sea Man or continuing to lay eggs regularly causes them to start lactating. Both parents can feed the child after it is born, but the father also takes milk from the mother during the pregnancy to help with the child’s nutrition. Sea Men and Sea Women are as addicted to sex as humans are, simply letting their eggs fall onto the sea floor as a means of contraception, and as a result, many Sea Women have breasts and are lactating all the time.

In my dreams there is a whole civilization of Sea Men, and sometimes I’m one of them (either as Jody or as Victoria) living with them on the shore and in the water. Those dreams were often sexual, and in them I’ve played all the roles: Man fucking woman, woman being fucked, woman laying the egg, man having the egg laid in him, pregnant man, man giving birth. But initially, I knew only a single Sea Woman named Aries.

I started frequently encountering Aries in dreams just after I was first starting to feel sexual sensations and was trying to figure out my sexuality. I liked the sexual encounters with Nancy, but the other dreams like these made me wonder. In these early Aries dreams, Aries was living in a house with me, rather than at the shoreline, I was in my own human male body, and since I didn’t have the stomach sac, Aries was always trying to lay the egg in my ass or down my throat or hide it in my lunch box or some other such stunt.

Getting Aries poking me in the butt made me wonder if I was gay. I was curious what it would feel like in real life. I went so far as to acquire a dildo and a vibrator back then, so I could answer that curiosity. Ultimately, I decided that I was not gay, at least not in that way. Those toys did nothing for me and I stopped using them, in real life, anyway. Victoria used such toys in dreams sometimes; they worked for her.

Once I figured out I wasn’t gay, this became more like a game. The price for fucking Aries was having to play this evasion game with her afterward. Eventually, the egg came out of her, and I won if it didn’t end up going inside me. Of course, since I never went to the bathroom in dreams, if it went up my ass, it was stuck inside me for the rest of that dream. Usually, though, this happened near the end of the dream and I woke up shortly afterward with the need to poop. There was no actual egg to push out, though, because until very recently these dreams were only dreams and didn’t enter my reality.

Aries was in bed with me when I woke up Friday, July 7. In her typical style, before I left for work and after I had explained the situation here to her, Aries asked for sex without the condom so she could lay an egg today.

“Why? What do you plan on doing with the egg?”

“I promise, I just want to leave it with you as a gift. Maybe one of the other women will find a use for it.”

I decided it was a mistake telling Aries about the other women, but I can’t put that genie back in the bottle now.

“OK, but promise me you will hand me the egg when I get home, and it’s not going to be hidden in my food, nor attempted to be implanted inside me, nor inside any of my neighbors.”

“I promise, I will hand you the egg when you get home.”

I was still worried there was going to be some sort of trick, but we did a quickie before I got ready for work.

Remembering that I was trying to do research, I checked her purse. Sea Women didn’t even carry purses, as far as I could remember; they lived in a society very close to nature, eating fish from the sea. I’d never seen them use money, keys, or makeup. They didn’t have tampons since they didn’t menstruate. They didn’t seem to need the things human women might carry in their purses. So the purse was just the same purse, the money and chopstick hadn’t changed, the ornament on the key ring had become a fish, and the ID card was back to looking like a sample card, though it did have her picture and the name Aries printed on it. However, Aries had lived in a house with me some of the time, so she was at least familiar with some aspects of human society, and I explained the money and keys to her.

She had set out a bowl of cereal with milk for me when I got out of the shower. Of course, she didn’t have one, because the Sea Man diet mostly consisted of fish. My cereal tasted unusually sweet, so I asked Aries, “What did you put in my cereal?”

Her response was simply squeezing one of her breasts so that it squirted a bit of milk, which landed neatly in my cereal bowl. Of course, since Aries was always laying eggs, she was lactating all the time. I considered throwing it out, but I knew her milk was safe to drink, just different, and I went ahead and ate what she had prepared.

Seeing her still not eating, I told her, “I don’t have any fresh fish for you, but there is a pond nearby, and some of the men go out and catch fish there sometimes. There should be times during the day when no one is fishing and you can go catch some, in your way. If you decide to go out there, though, you can’t go naked. Um, let me see what you have to wear.”

Nancy hadn’t bought a bathing suit, but when I checked her clothes, everything that wasn’t cold-weather gear had been replaced with bathing suits. I found two parts of a bikini that matched and brought them to Aries, and held each one over the part it was meant to cover. Even though she didn’t normally wear clothes, she had been around humans in my dreams enough to understand. She put the garments on before I left for work.

Aries was true to her word and just handed me the egg when I got home.

“I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with this egg.”

“You could eat it. It wouldn’t be cannibalism for you.”

“Um, no. It’s an egg fathered by me. It’s equally as much cannibalism for me to eat it as it would be for you.”

“Oh, sorry.”

But then I had an idea. I wrapped the egg in paper on which I’d written DO NOT EAT.

“Here. I am giving this back to you. Everything belonging to the women is changing each time I bring a different woman here. Maybe for one of the other women, it will be something useful. Go put it in the fridge so it stays fresh until then.”

She came back with a plate with two fish on it. “I have another gift for you, one you shouldn’t have any qualms about.”

“Did you already eat dinner?” I asked her.

“Yes. Both fish are for you.”

“Well, I only need one fish this size for a meal, so I’ll save the other for tomorrow.”

I cooked and ate my fish. I’m sure Aries had simply eaten hers raw, because that was the way of her people.

Aries pleaded for sex without a condom in the evening, but this time I had to deny the request.

“I don’t know when during the night the change happens, and I do not want to risk impregnating one of the other women,” I told her.

“Awwww. But I understand.”

This time I focused on dreaming about Nancy. I wanted her to be the one to fill out more of a wardrobe for my women, and more belongings that might change for each one.

For the second time, I managed to control my dream and summon Nancy by plan on Saturday, July 8.

Nancy’s keychain ornament was a hippo. I thought that was weird until I remembered that was the game that Pansy wouldn’t play with me: Hungry Hungry Hippos. A little kids’ game about trying to control a plastic hippo and have it eat marbles in the middle of the gameboard before the other players’ hippos get them.

The other stuff in the purse was back to how it was for Nancy the last time, and her clothes were Nancy’s, too. When we checked it carefully, we saw none of it was the stuff we’d bought last Saturday; it was all things she had worn in dreams.

We also looked at the egg. It had changed into some other kind of egg, an ordinary white one, but without hatching it, we had no idea how to tell what. We decided to leave it around and see if it changed again for other women.

Having some more evidence to support Nancy’s ideas, when we went out shopping, Nancy decided we should buy the cheapest clothing available that fit her.

She explained, “It’s going to change to clothes appropriate to each other woman. After the change, when I’m here it ends up as the kind of thing I would wear, regardless of how it started. It only has to be something that could believably be mine.”

So we bought about twice as much clothing as the last time at about two-thirds of the total price. But there were more different types of clothing, and other things as well. Anything Nancy thought a typical woman would own that wasn’t too large or expensive, including some basic makeup. There was a lot more room for it in the larger house.

I did my post office and food shopping stops as well; I was likewise able to buy more food now because of the larger fridge in the new house, which was still small for a family refrigerator, but at the small end of the usual size range.

I was pleased with my apparent ability to control who I brought into the world each day by focusing on them as I went to bed. I wanted to get Mona back, as the most useful character to test our theories. Would the chopstick work as a wand for her? And what would the egg become?

Sunday, July 9 I succeeded in bringing her. As I expected, her entire wardrobe was a uniform red, all in rich fabrics and probably with any one item costing as much as everything we’d bought yesterday combined. Even things in the hamper were changed to her style; Mona day was never going to be laundry day! Her purse and ID were also changed as before. Her keychain ornament was some kind of sea monster.

When I showed her the wand, she was stunned.

“Yes, it’s really a magic wand. Not my wand; whatever magic is making these changes wasn’t powerful enough to duplicate it here, I suppose. But it’s a wand I can use to do some magic.”

She demonstrated by laying out breakfast for two on my dining table, not my cereal, but bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, the whole deal.

As we ate, Mona explained, “There are a few fundamental limits on my magic which all the magic-users where I come from are forced to abide by under a sort of magical law, which I won’t be exempt from here, even if I was able to have my usual wand. First off, I can’t make money. It would be too easy to destroy the value of it if I could. Also not substitutes for money like gold and gems. When you see me craft a gold tiara out of thin air, it’s not real gold. Also, I can’t use my magic to steal things. If I summon an existing item, it has to belong to me unless I have permission to use it from the owner. Apparently the clothes you keep here sort of implicitly belong to all the women your power brings here, though, so I can summon those.”

“What about the breakfast? Did you summon it from back home?”

“No, it’s possible for me to create some things. Food, in general, is one of the unrestricted categories I can always create.”

“So could you run a food company just by creating all the food magically?”

“Maybe, but it would be a pretty small food company. Even the magic I am allowed to cast uses up magical energy from a supply I have. The supply is large and replenishes over time, but it’s still limited. If I had my own wand, I could cast bigger spells using more of that magic in one spell, but it wouldn’t make any more total magic available.”

Since I didn’t actually open the fridge for breakfast, it was later when we looked at the egg. I wasn’t even sure it was still an egg, but Mona identified it as the egg of a sea dragon, a creature that exists in her world.

“Is that what your keychain ornament is?”

She found it in her purse.”

“Yes, this is a stylized, cutesy version of a sea dragon. In truth, they are generally dangerous wild animals.”

“Wait, did you save me from one once in one of the dreams?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Thank you for that.”

Mona returned to considering the egg. “Sea dragon eggs are highly valued. If you raise a sea dragon from the egg, it will be a loyal pet and fierce protector. But they have to be kept warm; even human body temperature is barely warm enough, and they’d prefer warmer. This one’s surely dead if it’s been in here overnight.”

“I take it, then, that they do not lay these eggs in the water.”

“Right. They live much of their lives in the water, but they hollow out nests in the sand at the peak of summer and lay one or two eggs there, which are warmed by the heat of the sun during the day and by the dragon’s body at night. And people try to sneak in and steal these eggs when the mother dragon’s out getting food during the day. But it’s dangerous, because it is hard to know when one of them is near but underwater. They can easily kill a man if they catch him, cook him alive, even, and without worry of hurting their eggs.”

“Oh, do sea dragons breathe fire?” That was not something I remembered.

“Steam, actually. Which makes them a lot safer to have them as pets; they aren’t likely to start fires. I assume this was some other egg for the other women, since I know you don’t have dragons in your world.”

“Aries laid the egg, and it just looked like an ordinary chicken’s egg for Nancy, but we couldn’t test it.”

She did something with her wand near the egg, but it seemed to have no effect and she frowned.

“I don’t think I have enough magical power with this wand to transport the egg home. So I’d have to find another way, in addition to you getting me a live one. But if you can help me with those two things, I would be deeply indebted to you and I’d be willing to do quite a lot for you with my magic, subject to its limits.”

So we spent much of the day trying to figure out Mona’s limits here more precisely. I did have sex with her, but we didn’t do it as I went to sleep because it was less useful to me to have a woman here on a day I was working when I couldn’t be with her most of the day (and quite inconvenient if she was Victoria).