On Tuesday, August 8, I summoned Victoria. It was the first time I’d had my Victoria here on a work day since the first time I brought her here accidentally, and the intent was to see how well my ability to just briefly direct her mind to do things allowed her to do useful stuff while I was working.

This allowed her to tend to her morning bathroom needs and shower with minimal interaction from me. While doing that, she discovered that she was in her period now. It was bound to happen eventually. Of course, that was easily handled, but as we ate breakfast it got me thinking. Four weeks earlier was July 11th, eight days after I had summoned Victoria for the very first time, and seven days before I summoned her again. If she was having periods on a normal cycle regardless of which days of the cycle she was here, I would have missed her previous period within that gap. I was pretty sure now that the other characters all had lives that went on every day while they weren’t here. Of course, Victoria was not there in her dream world on the days I didn’t summon her, so it was possible that she still lived only on days I summoned her, and that this was her first real-world period.

While trying to work this out, I drew a calendar on the first page of a lined, 3-hole-punched notepad, going back to Friday, June 30, the night when falling asleep in the doll allowed me to discover my ability.

Before I left for work, I managed to remember who I had summoned every day since this started and filled out the calendar. I wrote Monday, July 3 at the top of the second page. I left Victoria with the instruction to write down every event she remembered from that day, the first day she was here, and when she was through, to do the same for the other days I summoned her, starting each day on a new page. Eventually I’d add my own notes and get the other characters to write things up as well, and I’d have my own diary, of sorts. I found a binder I could reuse in my dream world and started it by tearing the calendar page off the pad and putting it in the binder. Maybe I’d make monthly pages like this and find some dividers.

I wasn’t sure how well that was going to work, but it turned out to work very well. During my work breaks I focused more intently on being Victoria and helped think of other incidents from those days. By the time I got home, I had a good record of the events of those four days, from her perspective, and a fifth page for today which was mostly just about her period and doing the writing.

After dinner from dream-world food, I rewarded Victoria by letting her choose the evening’s activity, but it was just sex her way.

On Wednesday, August 9, I summoned Nancy and gave her the same assignment. I was surprised to find myself fucking her in the ass when we awoke, but she explained that she was in her period and pulled down the tampon string she’d tucked inside her. It was interesting to note that she could smuggle it out of the dream world, but it was my magic, not Mona’s, so her restriction didn’t apply. I could, in theory, have one of my characters bring a wad of money or diamonds or something inside a condom in a body cavity like that, similar to the way that I had helped Mona take a sea dragon egg back with her, but that wasn’t why I was doing this.

I started bringing the women in basically out of loneliness, but I now find myself becoming very attached to these characters, women I know better than any of the girlfriends I had in high school or college due to having spent hundreds of nights with them in my dreams. Alt-Victoria did this because having the men there relieved her from being hit on by the guys she works with. Making money off it isn’t a consideration for either of us. Even the extent to which I’d taken food from the dream world was to get more variety than I could here, or for convenience of not driving the two-hour round trip to town, rather than the monetary savings.

Nancy had been here a lot of times, and wasn’t able to finish all of her pages, so when I summoned Mona on Thursday, August 10, that morning I took Nancy’s pages through into my dream world so she could continue updating them. The page for July 30th went into Victoria’s dream world to that Nancy, who was the one here that day and would best remember it. Also, I called my parents before work, briefly, to introduce Mona to them in a quick video call, but that’s all I did with them.

Friday, August 11 I summoned Aries and gave her a turn at writing up her part, and in the evening collected the pages from the Nancys in the dream worlds. And all these evenings I took time to write up the days when I didn’t have someone here with me, or had a different character, and my part of each day as well. By the end of Friday evening, while there were still some gaps, I had a log of at least the basic events that had occurred each day to help me better keep track of what was going on.

Saturday, August 12 I brought Nancy back for the promised call with my parents. In part that was so they could see Nancy, the only one of my regular summonees who they had not seen. And in part it was because she was the brightest and most familiar with the things that had been happening around me. If my parents came up with any interesting questions or information, I thought Nancy was the best one to be able to act on it.

With the assistance of my newly compiled log of events of the past six weeks, I described in various levels of detail, to the extent my parents were comfortable hearing some of it, all the different summonings and the ways I had changed the world for one day. They especially enjoyed hearing about the world of the Sea Men, though I kept the discussion of sex down to a minimum.

They were intrigued by the idea that there was an alt-Victoria, one who grew up in my place and used her power to summon male versions of some of my characters. But again, this was the first they had heard of anything of the sort.

They confirmed they had not encountered portal people or Sea Men apart from my calls, and had no knowledge of my father’s dead brother being alive. Even if they had been affected by my changes to the world, they wouldn’t remember it now, when I had restored the normal state of the world. But they remembered Aries and her unusual appearance, and all the other women I had shown them, while the men in camp conflated all of those into one person. This, along with my mother’s initial reaction to Aries, confirmed they weren’t affected by my changes to the world, but what happened to them when I did that?

We ultimately concluded the only way I was going to find out was to try contacting them during times I had changed the world. Would I get a copy of them like I apparently got of alt-Victoria? Would I get a different version of them who had grown up in that world? Would they be completely missing like in my dreams? When I was alt-Victoria if I called their number would Fred Davis be there instead of Anthony? The only thing that seemed certain is that if I called them from one of those worlds, the ones in the real world would not know I’d called.

After we ended the call and ate lunch, Nancy and I went to visit Mona.

“Are you here to see Aries?”

“Huh?” Nancy and I said in unison.

“She’s out playing with Bruno.”

“How did she get here?” I asked.

“The other day she came to visit me and asked me to create a doorway to her realm so she could come visit Bruno more often. And Bruno loves her, and the time he spends with her is helping Bruno get more used to being around people, so I made it.”

She pointed at something behind me. When I turned to look, I could see she now had three doorways side-by-side with matching doors. She had placed signs reading “Jody,” “Victoria,” and “Aries” above them.

“Does Aries come here every day now?”

“Yes. Either through your door or through hers.”

“Well, we were just visiting, but we might as well go visit Aries as well.”

Mona led us out there, and didn’t require us to wear the protective gear this time but brought a set with her. We saw Aries and Bruno playing in the water, splashing each other and swimming around. When we approached, Aries got out of the water to meet us, and Bruno waddled up behind her.

“I saw you two having a good time out there,” I told Aries.

“Bruno has fully adapted to being around me and I’m encouraging him to meet others as well. Bruno, come meet my friends.”

Aries lay down on the sand facing us in a position that put Bruno on the same side of her as us, and she patted the ground in front of her and close to us. I knelt down to pet the sea dragon. Bruno hesitated for a moment but waddled over to where I could pet him on the head. Bruno pulled his head away from the first touch, instead nuzzling it between Aries’ breasts for a moment, and then it looked like he sucked on one of her nipples for a moment. Aries put one hand between Bruno’s mouth and her breast.

“Not until you let them pet you,” she said, pointing toward us.

“Did Bruno take a bit of your milk?” I asked, uncertain whether that was what I really saw.

“Yes,” Aries replied.

Mona added, “I saw him do it for the first time yesterday, and I’m really surprised by the behavior. Sea dragons do not nurse from their mothers; they do not have breasts and do not produce milk. The young at first take food their mothers have already killed and pre-chewed.”

“And I don’t want him to get used to that because Mona won’t be able to feed him that way, but I’m allowing him to take small sips only as a reward. I’ve also been catching some of the fish from the pond and feeding him bits of them.”

Mona responded, “Well, if I really want to, I can enchant my breasts to lactate, but I’ve got plenty of reasons not to do that. It’s not natural for him and he’s already too big to live just off the milk one person can produce, in addition to the situations I wouldn’t want to be baring my breasts in.”

Aries was still covering her breast and pointing toward me with her other hand, and Bruno reluctantly let me pet him. I stepped back to let Nancy have a turn petting him as well. When Nancy stood up as well, Aries uncovered her breast and the little sea dragon came over and took about a 15-second draw from one breast before Aries cut him off again. At this point he turned back to me, hopeful he could get some more milk if he let me pet him again. I gave him a longer pet and Nancy did too, and by the time we were done, Mona had summoned a fish in front of Aries and she fed him part of the fish instead of her milk. We continued this way for a while until Bruno had had enough of that sort of attention and went back into the pond, and we all decided it was time to leave him there.

I was surprised by Aries’ behavior. I was used to her being a fun-loving jokester, but just now she sounded like a responsible adult. Was that because she felt a motherly instinct toward Bruno? If Bruno could treat her as his mother, then that could work the other way as well, even though his egg’s transformation had caused him to become a pet rather than a Sea Man-human hybrid child. At least, I think that’s what would have been in the egg. I’ve never seen one of those, to my knowledge, but I have guessed such a being could exist ever since Aries and I started having sex in my dreams and that sex led her to produce eggs.

Mona handed Aries a towel as we re-entered the castle, and we went back to the room with the doors. There, I asked Aries, “Mona told me she made a doorway to your world, but where does it go? Does it just open into a free-standing arch? You don’t have houses there.”

“Oh, we have houses, but they are smaller than yours.”

Mona opened the door and Aries led me and Nancy through it into her house. The house was similar to the tiny city houses I’d seen in the dream world of alt-Victoria the Sea Woman, but they were scattered haphazardly in an area with dirt and a bit of sand, and sparse grass. As in those houses, one wall of the house had a large window with a TV behind it, and an inner wall separated a space holding this TV from a tiny kitchen dedicated to preserving fish, and other storage space. The doorway was in this inner wall. And there was one of those chairs that resembled lawn chairs with white webbing.

When I asked her about it, Aries replied, “Oh, that’s made of fish bone.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we don’t make it here, but somehow they bind individual bones together into long filaments and weave them together. There’s a place we drop the bones of any fish we eat. They aren’t worth much, but neither is the salt. One of the regular delivery people buys cartons of fish bones for about what we sell the salt for and takes them back on his delivery truck.”

In the distance I could see the sea on one side, after a bit of a drop-off in elevation. There weren’t any paved roads or sidewalks, but there was a sort of a path that ran between the houses where there was no grass which was worn by foot traffic. Aries led Nancy and me down this path a bit to where another path branched off and led to a stone staircase cut into the land that led down to the seaside area that was familiar from my dreams. The reason I’d never seen any houses was that the houses were up on a cliff two stories high and recessed enough from the edge that none of them were visible from the shore.

Much like the people in the Sea Man work camp, they spent a lot of their free time down by the shore, and slept there as well, and so this had been where my dreams had always come. After we went down the stairs, Aries pointed out the play and sleeping area on one side. In the other direction, down near the shoreline, there was a long row of evaporators that used solar heating and electrical heating as backup on cloudy days to separate salt from seawater, making both drinking water and salt for preserving fish.

“The people who live and work here mostly eat fresh fish. Preserved fish are for people who have to drive into inland cities, and to trade, along with excess salt, for the goods that we need but don’t manufacture here,” Aries explained.

Back up the stairs, Aries showed me where there was a road, and a place where some cars and trucks were parked, a bit further inland from the area with the homes. A separate truck was full of tanks for transporting live fish which were used to replenish other cities’ supplies, again in exchange for whatever they make there.

Aries mentioned, but didn’t show me, that another area had a small school, a place where infants are cared for, and other facilities. And they have a sort of money, but never use it in the seaside town except in transactions with outsiders; the townsfolk live like one big family with a family business. If I had ever bothered to ask Aries about how Sea Men lived, rather than assuming I had seen it all in my dreams, she could have told me everything. It still didn’t explain everything in the life of alt-Victoria the Sea Woman, but I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge about human alt-Victoria as well.

“Thanks, Aries, for the tour. Which of those jobs do you do?”

“Oh, I’m part of the regular crew. We catch and preserve fish, collect salt from the evaporators and carry it up to the truck, care for the preschool kids, and do odd jobs around here as needed, like cleaning the beach of any junk that washes ashore. It works well with me sometimes being away for your summonings, though with the doorway, I can get back here now if needed. The schoolteachers, truck drivers, salt team leads and a couple other people with unique jobs are the only ones who have the same jobs all the time.”

“Salt team leads?”

“Two people each morning and two each evening gather others to help them with the salt. Each evaporator fills a big bucket with salt, and we have waxed cardboard containers that are stored flat but open up like so.”

She held her hands to indicate something about the size of the salt packages I’d seen in the work camp of alt-Victoria the Sea Woman. It must be a standard size for them even though it was way bigger than most humans would need today. But if you salted a lot of your food to preserve it, it made sense.

“If an evaporator’s working at full capacity, it can fill its bucket in 12 hours, which is also a full container. We empty them all out and stack them near the base of the stairs, then each of us carries two containers at a time up the stairs and load them on the truck, and leave a few for those of us salting fish. We don’t have to move the water; it flows into an underground reservoir and pumps bring it up to the houses.”

“I guess as leads they’re responsible for making sure that job gets done on time and the evaporators don’t stop working because they are full of salt.”

“Pretty much.”

“How long have you been doing that?”

“About five years. Before that I was a trainee, so I’d do some of those same things but with someone watching over me and helping me do it right, and before that I was in school rather than working.”

It sounded like the same length of time I’d been in college and working in Alaska, and made me assume she was the same age as me, that Sea Men mature at the same rate as humans, and that she went to school up to the same age we finish high school. I thanked her again and she helped me find her house again to leave.

I went back through Mona’s castle to get back into my own home. As I went, I looked at my phone, but unsurprisingly I was unable to get a cell phone signal either in Aries’ world or in Mona’s. If I wanted to make calls from these worlds, I would have to do it from a phone that belonged there.

I spent the rest of the day with Nancy trying to fill in gaps in our journal, as well as writing up today’s entry.

To start testing what would happen if I tried calling my parents on days I brought myself to other worlds, on Sunday, August 13 I summoned Doris and brought myself to the portal world.

I wasn’t expecting a whole lot here. When I was here before, I learned that everybody used each others’ portals and there were no toilets, and that they kept spare portals for people to use in emergencies at each site in case you needed to go while nobody was there.

The main thing was calling home. I hadn’t yet learned that my father had the same ability as me the last time I was in this world, and didn’t think to call him that day. Today I did, and the number wasn’t active. There was one of those recorded messages telling me it wasn’t an active number.

I decided to explore my dream world, which was clearly a portal person dream world. I found Portal Nancy there in her house in the usual location. Back in my dream-bedroom, I went to the doorway to Mona’s castle and knocked. After a bit, Mona seemed to open the door hesitantly.

“Hello, Jody. Which Jody are you?”

Understanding what she must have meant, I replied, “Portal person Jody. And you’ve probably met Doris at some point.”

“Yes. Hello, Doris. Come on in, both of you.”

When I did, I was surprised to find myself in a hallway instead of in the room with the other doorways, though I could see that room nearby.

Mona explained, “Recently, more doorways have started showing up here, ones I do not remember creating. I didn’t explore them before because I had no idea who might be opening more doorways here, or how they could. But I think it was your power doing it.”

There was a blank sign above the door and Mona pointed her wand at it, making it read “Portal Jody”. The other doorways in this hallway also had blank signs.

“So you’re the same Mona fully-human Jody visits, and not a portal person?”

“Correct. We aren’t portal people here.”

I had hoped to see the portal version of her world, but it seemed there wasn’t one. A normal Aries was there too, a Sea Woman and not a portal person. After I was done visiting Aries, I made a weird request of Mona.

“Mona, I’m trying to figure something out. The portal people send all their waste somewhere through the portals. Can you help me figure out where it goes?”

“You want me to poke my wand into your ass-portal to find out?”

“Um, yeah. I know that’s weird, but you’re a good friend.”

I unzipped my rear fly to give her access. She poked her wand through, several times, trying different spells.

“I still don’t know,” Mona explained. “It’s not any of the other places I’m aware of. It’s not in your world, in mine, in Doris’s, or in Aries’. I’m pretty sure it’s not in Victoria’s or the other Victoria’s, either, because even if they’re different, they resemble your world. This is some other place, either another planet or literally another dimension. The only life within the range I can detect there consists of penises poking through portals, so they are all temporary and partial.

“Thanks, Mona. Even though you couldn’t figure it out, just knowing it’s that much of a different place is helpful. I don’t know how the portal people got access to this place, but it shows they’re really sending the stuff far away. Doris, you don’t know, do you?”

“No. The portals were set up in my people’s world long before I was born. and wherever they lead to isn’t something people are generally taught. I’m sure someone knows, but I don’t know how we’d find them.”

“Hmm. Maybe, from your world, we can find out.”

We went back into my mobile home in the Alaska of her world. It was still Alaska. Doris’s world is much like mine, except for this one big change with the way they go to the bathroom, or the lack of such a place. There was an internet, but I didn’t have any success finding the information on it. And it wasn’t like I could go to a library and check it out; we were an hour’s drive from a small town, and that was a small town. If I couldn’t find it on the Internet, I wasn’t going to find it in whatever passed for a library there. Even finding it in Fairbanks seemed a longshot, and any further than that was definitely too far to travel. But Mona had the ability to get into the camp now via the doorways, and she could potentially teleport me further, or make more doorways, but it was still just a shot in the dark.

I asked, and Mona explained what she could do. She couldn’t make a permanent doorway in some random spot, but she could teleport us there. I suggested New York City as a place with good libraries, and Mona teleported us there. Or, at least, what in my world was called New York City. It was called Liberty here, but the city was more or less the same.

Doris, Mona, and I spent a couple hours in that city’s largest public library. The naming led us to briefly digress into researching that. After the American Revolution in this world there was a revolt against anything British or English. Most of the cities and the colonies had been named after people and places in Britain, and so everything got renamed. Some of them still had English names, but they were named after people on the American side of the war. Even the language was called American rather than English, though it seemed to be the same. Lots of other places named later on also got different names, so even though most of the same places existed, it looked like a foreign world.

Getting back to our search about the history of the portals, we actually found a book that described the genetic engineering behind it. Which, I realized, was another mystery. If they were at the same point in time as my world, how had they developed genetic engineering more than a century ago? We didn’t even know about DNA then!

As far as we could tell, it was a miracle. Or aliens. Or magic. That book described the genetic engineering and how the genome was changed using historical DNA from the 19th century, but also explained that nobody knew how it was done even today. But other books explained that it happened in 1883, seemingly all at once. Everybody suddenly had new organs and knew they were meant to be used to dispose of their wastes cleanly. At that time many people still did not have indoor toilets, and it obsoleted that technology before it ever took hold. Using portals to dispose of human waste was seen as so much of an improvement over toilets, outhouses, and other things people had used then that people quickly began to universally use them. The generation born at the start of the 20th century was raised with the idea that portals are the only proper way to do that, that it was right to help a stranger with that need if he or she had no acquaintance to provide the help, and that it was not in any way sex. Laws were enacted everywhere by 1920 banning any other method.

The first book explained the changes that were made and how some of them functioned, but that information had been reverse-engineered after the people of this world had figured out DNA. Reverse genetic engineering. As far as I could tell, nobody in this world knew where the stuff was going or how the specific genes added to the human genome created portals to get there.

I had hoped to solve a minor mystery, but I had only turned it into a bigger one. We decided the answer was not here to be found, and Mona brought us back to my home in the camp and she went back into her world. She did one last thing before leaving: She opened the door from Portal Victoria’s dream world into her castle and labeled the sign above that door.