It was already the end of August, so I had three months to try and plan out these weddings.

I confirmed the vacation time first. We technically only had Thanksgiving Day as a holiday, but so many people used vacation time around it that all the wells were usually set to simply shut down if anything went wrong, and there was mainly a skeleton crew monitoring them.

I continued summoning one of my fiancées each day, though it barely seemed necessary. I summoned Victoria every second or third day, since she wasn’t present except when I did, while the others lived in their own worlds and could meet up through the doorways any day.

My parents and my fiancées did a lot of the planning, either providing me with locations and sources for things we needed, or fully setting up deals only needing my approval. We located a place that printed wedding invitations (which these days I assume was nothing but a printer with fancy paper and fancy ink) and a bridal shop for Victoria’s dress. I wasn’t going to know until I had the dress home with me overnight whether it changed to a fit and style for the other women, but I expected it would. All their other clothes changed!

I had appointments at both stores on Saturday, September 2 and summoned Victoria on that day to be there for both, and we made the trip into town. At the print shop, after looking through a catalog of invitation styles, they gave us samples in two of the styles, with our real names and planned wedding date but the name and address of the shop in place of where we would actually get married, for us to consider.

The bridal shop did not have a very wide selection, but it was for a small town, after all. But knowing how things changed, we weren’t even sure if Victoria would get married in the same dress we were getting. We picked one Victoria liked and was available in a good size and they measured her to tailor it properly. Good size, in this case, meant it fit over her breasts; the rest could be taken up.

The sample invitations changed to have the names of all my other women on them during the week, so I was sure they’d work as we guessed. At some point Mona had acquired a last name, though I was sure she didn’t have one when I first summoned her in early July, or at least she had an ID that didn’t show it. Mona’s last name was simply Galbreath, the name of the castle, which made sense when there were a limited number of sources of magic in the world that all had fabulous castles built on top of them. She was the heir and current owner of the Galbreath magic and all that went with it, and if I inherited it from her I would probably go as Jody Galbreath in her world. Aries’ last name was indeed Trout, as I remembered seeing in the birth records in her village.

I summoned the other women throughout the week and Victoria on Tuesday, September 5, exactly 4 weeks after her previous period, and she was in her period again. This confirmed that, even though unlike the others she wasn’t accessible somewhere and didn’t have memories of the other days, she still lived those days, and was having periods on the same schedule as if she lived continuously.

We made appointments the following Saturday, September 9 to place the final order for the invitations and pick up Victoria’s dress. By this point, my parents had arranged for wedding chapels for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and so we had a location to print on the real invitations.

On Thursday, we had the largest chapel available near where I grew up, so I could invite all my high school friends. The other days, we’d be in small places that were each a short drive from their apartment in Jacksonville. They’d also decided on a place for a reception after the Thursday wedding, which naturally included Thanksgiving dinner. This avoided having to rearrange my parents’ small apartment to fit in seating for 7. While Mona could have magicked up the food, we were doing this for real, with real catering, which would look normal to everybody involved.

The dress fit properly along with all the accessories. We paid for it and took it back with us. We also got the wedding bands, which Nancy had placed an order for one day that she was summoned. And the invitation printing place was in fact just a fancy printer, and after the other stops we went back there and picked up 150 invitations. I didn’t expect nearly so many people to attend, but we were having it in my home town and a lot of my high school friends would be there. Only a couple dozen of the invitations were going to people I knew lived elsewhere.

Back home, I hung up the dress in a section I set aside in the closet where it wouldn’t get rumpled or crushed by other clothes. We removed some of the clothes that the weather was now too chilly for and placed them in dream-world storage.

Both Nancys had ordered wedding bands in their dream worlds, too, from the same jewelers who we bought the engagement rings from, and Victoria and I went there later in the day to get those. This was when we found out Victoria’s Nancy was planning a polyamorous three-way wedding in her dream world in which she would marry both Victoria and me. I had each Nancy hold onto the bands for her own wedding. Both Nancys were planning their weddings in each dream world the Saturday after my Thanksgiving trip with the other weddings, but at different times.

Sunday, September 10 I summoned Aries, in large part to have her try on the dress. And when we looked at the dress together, it was a completely different dress. It was shorter in front, just going past her knees, and the lace over parts of the dress was blue, matching the color of her skin, with a pattern that resembled fish scales. The train was shorter as well, and entirely different; it basically looked like a mermaid tail. I was glad it hadn’t turned into a bikini or disappeared entirely.

All the accessories that went with it, the bra, panties, and the single garter that is for no purpose other than being removed publicly afterward, were also blue. I can’t say Aries was excited to see it; the wedding is just not as important an event in her culture as it is for the others. But when I explained that I wanted her to try everything on to make sure they fit, she did, putting them on right there in front of me and neither seeking nor expecting privacy in doing so. And of course they fit.

She also took me into her world to go ring shopping. We knew Mona’s magic would not let us take real jewelry through it, so it had to be acquired there. They didn’t make jewelry in the fishing village, but she found a ring online like the one she wanted, somewhat like what the real-world engagement ring turned into for her. We followed the site’s instructions for measuring Aries’ ring size. I took down all the information to use later, when I was fully in the Sea World, to order the ring to be shipped to her.

Monday, September 11, I summoned Victoria and myself into the Sea Man world and I ordered the ring for Aries that day. The dress looked similar to the way it did for Aries, though it was tailored to fit Victoria. I expected this to apply only today because Victoria was a Sea Woman today, and when I go back into the real world it’ll look like a normal wedding dress.

This left Mona’s ring, and I asked her about it on Tuesday, September 12 when I summoned her.

“Mona, I know your magic won’t let me take wealth through the doorways, and I have nothing in your world with which to buy a ring.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I am not as rich as the sorcerer-kings of old, but I can afford to buy the ring. After I saw the beautiful ring that the one you bought for Nancy turned into when you summoned me, I ordered one like it. They had to custom make it, though, and I’m expecting to get it Friday, along with wedding bands in the same red gold. Visit me, say, this time next week and I’ll give it to you to propose to me there. Don’t summon me, though. It’s supposed to happen entirely within my world.”

“Sure. That sounds good. Both Nancys are planning weddings in their dream worlds Saturday, December 2, the weekend after our real world weddings. Do you want to do yours the day after?”

“Maybe the same day,” Mona suggested. “You’ll have Victoria summoned that day, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I don’t need to be summoned because I’m real there when you don’t summon me. Victoria can be my maid of honor. And I can arrange with Nancy to stagger our times.”

“OK. It’ll be a little crazy, but as long as you all work it out. Oh, and we still have a bit of unfinished business with summoning you as Manuel so you can start to get his memories.”

“Don’t do it Friday or next Tuesday. Otherwise, whenever.”

Mona tried on her fully red wedding dress with equally red accessories, and of course everything fit. The dress (back to the usual white) also fit Nancy when I summoned her on Wednesday, September 13.

It was Thursday, September 14, when I finally got around to summoning Manuel with myself as alt-Victoria. This was mainly for Mona to learn about Manuel, through the memory-sharing feature these people with multiple versions seem to have, but I’d completely forgotten that this was when alt-Victoria was getting married. Her diary entries the last couple weeks were furious with notes and plans for it. She shipped ahead both her wedding dress and a second doll she had made and tested to confirm she could convert as well as the original. She had taken yesterday and today off work, had driven to Fairbanks and flown to Seattle yesterday, stayed in a hotel, and was making the rest of the journey today. This travel time was why I hadn’t visited my parents since I’d been up here until the idea of Mona transporting us there in an instant was brought up.

Fortunately, that wasn’t happening in my copy of her world. I was working like normal and my truck was waiting for me in the parking lot here. And the wedding dress (my wedding dress, of course) was still in the closet, not having been shipped ahead. So I let Manuel familiarize Mona with memories from alt-Victoria’s version of him by thinking through those memories while I went to work.

In the evening, Manuel asked me if I was the same size as the other Victoria.

I thought for a moment and answered, “I think so.”

I looked in my wardrobe and checked several garments that had size tags.

“Yes. All the same sizes. Do you want me to strip so you can measure me?”

“No need,” he said.

He did a quick bit of magic that apparently measured me while I was still dressed.

“Done. Mona will remember the sizes this magic has informed me of. Mona has already arranged for Victoria’s maid of honor dress and just needs to send the sizes over. Summon her on the same day you come to propose to me with the ring in my world, and she can try the dress on, too.”

I summoned Aries on Friday, September 15 and she told me her ring order was expected to be delivered the next day. I had put her email address on the delivery notifications since I wasn’t going to be in the Sea Man world after the day I placed the order and wouldn’t see the notifications in Sea Man Jody’s email.

Starting on Saturday, September 16 I summoned Victoria every other day. We were at this point gathering addresses for guests at our wedding. I was worried that the different summonings could have far-reaching and unexpected consequences on the world, so, since the wedding was going to be on a Victoria summoning day, I gathered addresses only on days Victoria was summoned. Presumably, if any of them did change, the addresses on my envelopes would change to match, and somehow or other the invitations would get to the right place.

Because the wedding was where I grew up, friends I had known in high school and before were the majority of the invitation list. People I knew in college were also invited, though I expected few of them to show up. Even Pansy was invited, though I figured there was no chance in hell that she would come. We discovered that people unique to Victoria’s dreams were not here. Apparently, summoning her did not also bring those people into existence.

In the evening, I went through the doorways into Aries’ world and found her sitting in her little house. She probably would usually be out on the beach, but she was there on this day for the same reason I was there. She let me open the package with her ring in it, and I knelt with it and asked, “Will you marry me?”

Aries said, “Yes,” and kissed me with another of those abnormally deep kisses only her species could deliver.

And then she said, “And so we’re married.”

“Huh?” I asked, confused.

“Remember, we don’t have formal weddings here. The promise is all we have. This is a promise for us to eventually have a child together, even if someone else carries it for us.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember now. I’m not promising to have that child soon, but sure, eventually.”

“Of course. People who want to have the child right away don’t bother with this kind of promise.”

Remembering what I knew about Sea Man biology, I replied, “Right. The initial sex and the egg implantation can all happen within one day.”

On the evening of Wednesday, September 20, a day I had summoned Victoria, I went to visit Mona. I formally proposed to get married to her in her world, and Victoria tried on her maid of honor dress for the wedding in that world, which fit perfectly.

“Mona, this is strange. We’ve arranged for Victoria to be the maid of honor at our wedding here, but I still don’t know who’s going to fill that role at my real world weddings.”

“Nancy is,” Mona replied. “Except at Nancy’s weddings, I will be. Nancy and I, respectively, won’t be summoned on those days, but coming through doorways from our own worlds, so we are each getting dresses made in our own worlds. And we’re wearing the same one each time. Too complicated otherwise.”

I agreed, “Yeah, not much point. Aries didn’t want something special?”

“Aries left it completely up to us, since this kind of wedding is foreign to her species.”

“Wait, what is Aries wearing when she’s attending the real-world weddings as a guest?” I asked, afraid the answer was “nothing.”

“I had a normal dress made for her here that she will wear to each wedding. She said she would wear it only for the actual ceremonies, though. She’s wearing a bikini at your parents’ place.”

“Sure, that’s fine; they know about her now.”

Mona continued, “We haven’t figured out all the male roles yet.”

“Er, am I going to have a best man and a father of the bride at each of these weddings?”

“Fortunately, no. We decided at the small weddings in your real world we do not need those roles, except Aries uniquely among us has a living father available and we will be bringing him through along with her mother to attend her wedding.”

“Appropriately clothed, I hope.”

“Yes, both will be appropriately clothed for your world. I’ve been into Aries’ world to explain your whole wedding tradition to them. As for your main wedding, Nancy asked your father to serve as the father of the bride, since he’s the closest counterpart we have available for Victoria’s father, and he agreed. But you still need a best man.”

“I’ll work on that.”

“If the same person exists in the dream worlds, you can invite him to take the role in Nancy’s dream world weddings, too.”

“Oh, those are going to be real weddings with guests?”

“Yeah, both Nancys are inviting practically the whole high school class.”

“That is going to be one crazy day,” I replied.

So when I got back to the real world, I had three best men to figure out. It was too late to call Florida, but I emailed Arturo and Jeremy about it. Tim didn’t live there anymore, and I didn’t expect him to attend even though he had been a close friend. Arturo and Jeremy were a gay married couple now, but that didn’t preclude one of them from being my best man. If one of them accepted, I would ask the same one in my dream world. That left Victoria’s dream world, where those guys had been replaced by women, and I needed to find someone else.

I went with Victoria into her dream world, and tried looking up who was still around. Eventually we considered Larry, who was a nerd in my world, but in alt-Victoria’s world she had trained him how to act socially and not look like a klutz or like he was scared to be around other people. But my Victoria hadn’t done that, as far as I knew. When we looked through her memory together, we found Larry was as socially inept in her world as in mine.

But that was in high school. When we looked him up in her world, today, we found that Kimmy had married him. Kimmy, the artistic female counterpart to my world’s Tim, had become a professional artist, and unlike Tim, she still lived in my home town. Larry modeled for her work. He had a career in technology that he worked Monday to Friday, but evenings and weekends, he posed for her wearing whatever she needed for any particular piece of art. And so there were hundreds of paintings and drawings of Larry in every state of dress from a tuxedo to nude, though she sometimes painted other faces on them, usually for specific commissions.

In the dream world we weren’t as limited by time, so we showed up at her studio at 7 PM even though it was 9 in my world now and too late, in the time zone that it would normally have been, there, to visit. And Larry was happy to do it. Furthermore, since Victoria was also a part of this wedding, and Kimmy was one of her best friends, Kimmy agreed to be a bridesmaid for Victoria. She wasn’t put off at all by the weird three-way wedding that Victoria’s Nancy had set up after Victoria and I had proposed to her together.

With that done, we went back to the real world and Victoria was hungry for sex so I let her have her way with me until bedtime.

When Victoria was here on Friday, September 22, we finished getting the addresses for most of the planned invitees; there were a few others we were waiting on email responses for. Also, Jeremy had agreed to be my best man in Victoria’s real-world wedding. We invited the version of him in my dream world to do the same via another personal visit there, and he agreed there as well.

On the morning of Sunday, September 24, we addressed a couple more invitations based on emails, and took a stack of over 100 invitations to town to mail them. The post office was closed, but mailboxes were available. It was now under two months to the wedding, and we’d made most of the arrangements through a whirlwind month of planning.

After this, we relaxed more. Saturday, September 30, with Victoria present I took another smaller stack of invitations off to be mailed. And then we waited for the replies to come in. As expected, more than half of the people declined, but by mid-October we had 51 guests from the invitations and another 62 family members, plus my family party of 7, and I had numbers to give the caterer. Both dream-world weddings had similar numbers, too, but fortunately they were being paid for with the same imaginary money that bought everything else there.

As one of the few magic users, Mona was a bit of a celebrity in her world, so there were thousands of people who wanted to attend her wedding, but she had only invited 200 people and their families and most of them had accepted. So it was going to be a pretty large group. The wedding was going to happen on the castle grounds, and Mona was going to supply everything herself and only hire someone to marry us.

Unlike the other weddings, Mona was going to provide the food for this wedding via magic, but it was in her own domain and the preparation was easier. On one of my visits to her castle, she led me to a section I’d never seen, a big empty space with rows of tables and chairs set up, the tables set for a huge banquet, many of the dishes already being full of food, but with visible magical barriers over them.

“To keep from overexerting myself, I’m filling these in stages. It was easy to assemble the tables and chairs from where they had been put away, and to set out all the place settings, but creating this much food is more than I can do at once. I’m filling about 40 plates at a time and covering them with a magical time-stop spell that I will drop all at once when they are served. Everybody will have food as fresh as if I had made it just then, and they will see the illusion of the whole thing, tables, chairs, plates, and food appearing all at once.”

I commented, “So real magic is a bit like stage magic in my world. It looks more impressive when you prepare in advance and deceive a bit about what you’re actually doing.”

“Oh, I suppose so. Tell me more about your stage magic.”

That led to a long discussion and even a visit to a stage magic show in my dream world (by time-walking to when and where one was occurring) to illustrate to Mona. I didn’t know how all the tricks were performed, but I knew that the performers used a variety of techniques, including hidden objects and distractions to misdirect viewers’ attention away from where stuff was really happening in order to make things appear to be created by magic. In the end she fully agreed with my statement that had led to this diversion.

Also, once our planning was complete, I took the time to be alt-Victoria again with Manuel on Saturday, October 28. Alt-Victoria was in her period, which the journal confirmed was consistent with the only other time I’d seen it happen for her, and it also matched her birth control pills.

As with my other occasions living a day in her life, the time I was her while she was supposed to be traveling to her parents’ place for her weddings had not interfered with her activities in her world at all. She had managed to make her weddings work without using any of Manuel’s magic, since she had never figured out the tricks I had used to allow Mona to create doorways and greatly expand the capability of her magic in the real world by letting her bring her usual wand. She had another two-day journey to get back to the work camp from there, so the entire trip took a week.

She even had a video of the wedding to her version of Jody, which was her main wedding, as I was doing with my Victoria. I guess I wasn’t surprised that in her world, all of Victoria’s friends were there and the ones from my world who were absent or had been replaced in Victoria’s dreams were not. There wasn’t any way for my Victoria to watch this directly, but I watched it all and replayed it for her in our minds when I summoned her Monday, October 30.

On Wednesday, November 1, I became alt-Victoria again, accompanied by Manuel. I offered to let him do the gender scan on her. I thought he would take me back into his castle. Or Mona’s castle, whatever was there. But he looked at the doorway back to his world and shook his head.

He told me, “Never go through that door. Don’t even knock.”

But he remembered the spell from Mona’s memories of casting it three times already, and he could do the scan with the chopstick-turned-wand as long as he had a place to draw a spell diagram. We went into my dream world and tacked down a bedsheet on the floor. He drew the spell diagram on that, and it worked just as well as the one in Mona’s library. Manuel confirmed the result was like Jody’s when Victoria wasn’t summoned, with both strong genders in there, though there were aspects of them that were different, unlike the way Jody and Victoria separately seemed to have the same gender identities that were combined in Jody at other times.