Victoria, Aries, Mona, and Nancy shared my bed with me again the next four mornings December 21-24, and there were no more gifts, but more sightseeing and exploring the city as a group. On the 23rd I briefly visited with both Nancys and confirmed both of them would be available on Christmas, and they agreed to swap around so that each of them could be with my parents part of the day.

On Monday, December 25, I woke up with Victoria as planned, but once we got dressed in nice clothes we gathered up the others. Aries wore something from Victoria’s wardrobe. I knew from being in Victoria’s mind while she loaned Aries the dress that Aries didn’t have any underwear on, not that Victoria wouldn’t lend her any, but because Aries chose not to wear any, just like during our wedding. Aries always wore the least clothing practical for any situation.

Victoria also put in a panty liner in the morning. She knew, though I had, yet again, failed to pay attention to the fact that it was likely today that she’d begin her period, even though I had a journal documenting these times that I could have extrapolated from if I had simply bothered to think about it. I apologized to her silently through our mental connection. Victoria’s thought in response was that I had no need to apologize because it’s a natural function and it was inevitable that it was going to happen on Christmas Day this year.

I had gotten some small gifts for my parents that Mona had helped me get out to buy that I’d kept hidden until now, but brought out for the gift exchange before breakfast. My parents had gotten me a fancy pen, a nice binder, and a stack of loose-leaf paper so I could continue my journals into the next year. My wives already had their gifts from my parents, and I had asked them back when we were planning this vacation if there was anything they wanted from me as a gift and they all declined. This get-together was thus their gift, the obvious one, anyway.

After breakfast, the rest of the morning was dedicated to educating Aries and Mona about Christmas. Victoria and Nancy grew up in some version of my world and already knew about it, but it was completely foreign to the two from other worlds.

We went at it from every angle. We explained the religious bit, how it celebrated the birth of a religious figure from two millennia ago. Aries explained that there were religions in her world but they were somewhat different, and few people seriously believed in them these days, but it was still part of the culture to pray to the gods for salvation or blessings.

Mona had a highly skeptical viewpoint. In her mind, if there was one god who had power over all the people, he would have enslaved them all and they would have taken turns being his personal servants. She also pointed out, after a series of questions revealed the existence within Christianity of both Satan and the “false gods” of the Old Testament, that there wasn’t only one god.

“If the other gods had not actually existed, the Christian god wouldn’t have had to command people not to worship them, as that worship would have been meaningless. So clearly they existed, at some time, and the fact that they aren’t active in the world today the way they were in the past implies that they lost their power at some point. Either that or the whole thing was made up.”

Clearly Mona wasn’t going to be convinced this was anything other than a human myth, but it didn’t matter. She was there to experience this special day in my world, as I hoped to be there for whichever ones she had.

We continued with the story of Saint Nicholas, a real historical figure who liked to give people secret gifts, a tradition that turned into both the story of Santa Claus and the real modern tradition of people giving each other gifts at Christmas. Some people linked the tradition to the gifts given by the three magi in the story of Christ’s birth rather than to those given by Saint Nicholas. It is hard to say exactly how traditions arose and it is possible both instances of gift-giving helped inspire it.

We had the typical early afternoon Christmas dinner, and as I had expected, there really wasn’t enough room around my parents’ table with the leaf inserted to fit seven of us along with the big feast meal. It had worked at breakfast when each person just had their plate. Mona produced a lap table from her world that she might be served meals on sometimes by Cecilia either in a chair or in bed, and sat on their sofa, which we moved to face the dining room table.

Aries ate the food with us and didn’t complain. She understood it was a special occasion. Of course, there was meat and she could manage with that.

As soon as Nancy was done eating, I left with her and retrieved Victoria’s Nancy, who took the first Nancy’s seat and ate what we had saved for her. She was with us for the rest of the day.

When the big meal was done, we restored my parents’ furniture to its usual arrangement. We spent the rest of the day watching Christmas shows on TV, which gave us opportunities to point out various parts of the Christmas traditions to Mona and Aries as told through these stories.

When we were ready to go to bed, we gathered all our things and proceeded back through the doorway. I ensured Victoria’s Nancy and everybody else got back to their proper worlds.

The next four days each of my wives had another turn with me and my parents. We mostly spent these days talking about ideas for the future.

Tuesday, December 26, Aries hoped we could have a child within the next year, but didn’t want to rush me. She knew I was moving to Oklahoma in February and wondered how life was going to be like there. She also recognized that being out of the harsh climate and frontier world of Alaska would make it more practical for me to have a child, though for her it didn’t matter, if the child was raised in her seaside village.

Wednesday, December 27, Mona realized I was still going to be working after my Christmas break ended, but hoped I could visit a lot in evenings and weekends to make me more of a part of her world. One thing was that as her heir, I was going to have to either produce her an heir or start my own magic training, or probably both. This led to a discussion of how people actually learn magic in her world.

“People who are considered first heirs, and sometimes second heirs are expected to take magic preparatory lessons. The second heirs do so if there is reason to doubt the first heir can outlive the current magic holder, or whether the current holder will live long enough to let the first heir reach adulthood. If there is uncertainty who the first heir actually is, all the candidates may train. While these people remain only potential heirs, they can’t do any actual magic, but they learn the principles behind our magic and how they would use it, if they could. Usually the current magic holder teaches this directly, as there aren’t exactly a bunch of magic tutors out there. Sometimes multiple magic holders get together and share in these lessons.”

“Do the different magic users ever get involved romantically?” Mom asked.

“Sometimes,” Mona admitted. “But they never marry and avoid having children together. There is nothing that prohibits one person from becoming the heir to more than one magic domain. But if they did, their spouse and descendants would become the heirs, together. The two realms would effectively be permanently fused, and their owner would be significantly more powerful than the other magic users, unless that person’s entire line died out and the heir became someone who branched off the line of ancestry before the point that person inherited both realms. You might think the magic users would want that, to have a more powerful shared heir, but in fact, they worry that the one more powerful magic user would be feared, shunned, and alienated from the others.”

“Ah, I didn’t think about it that way,” Mom replied.

“The second part of the magical training would be the practical part, after I am gone and you or our child actually controls the magic. This would be taught by one of the other current magic holders, and is a reason you would be introduced to them during the first part of the training.”

“Wait, one of the other magic holders would leave his domain to teach the new one?”

“Yes, but they’d make a doorway like the ones I made into your other worlds. They would always be in one of the two domains.”

“Oh, of course.”

Thursday, December 28, Nancy didn’t have any particular ambitions. Nancy was interested in having a child with me, but worried about raising a child.

“Plenty of children grow up in the dream world, but as part of the dream. How would a real-world person grow up in the dream world? How would he go to school? Would the teachers and other students all be faceless to him? Would he even learn?”

We didn’t know. We’d never had a child there and we weren’t sure, even if we found people we could talk to who had had children in the dream world, whether their experience would match the one my child might have.

Friday, December 29, Victoria was the only one who didn’t want to have a child with me. We had discussed that we are probably as close genetically as siblings and it was too risky, but that wasn’t it. To a large extent, she had the same apprehension as me of getting pregnant and giving birth. This wasn’t something entirely foreign to me, because I’d grown up partly as Victoria and had the knowledge impressed on me through her that getting pregnant and having children is a part of life most women experience at least once.

And it was a step beyond the idea of me being a pregnant Sea Man. While that pregnancy was awkward, having a child growing on your belly for most of a year, at least the birth was easy. Giving birth as Victoria meant feeling that myself. While I could block out her sensations, it was hard to do so continuously for a long time, and I worried I would not be able to block out feelings so intense. And should I? I was going to experience the memories in her head afterwards. It might actually be less traumatic if I experienced it first hand.

And the end of the day on the 29th, I made sure we brought everything with us out of my parents’ apartment and Mona came and closed the doorway.

I spent the weekend and New Year’s Day largely in Mona’s world, learning more about things there. Part of that was about her other servants. I never saw them because they lived outside the castle, but within the magical grounds. For the most part their jobs were that they cared for the grounds outside the castle and the structure of the castle itself. Each of them had had a major magic cast for them, though none of them were exactly the same as Cecilia, and they were all in various stages of their 7-year terms.

During this weekend, Mona cast a tracking spell on me. When she rescued me in the past, it was because my dream brought me where she needed to be. This was for real-world rescues. She explained that when she went out on all these rescues, it’s because she had a spell that triggers on someone in distress. The strong emotion from someone truly in need of help makes it easy to detect magically and so even a broad spell that covers a radius of hundreds of miles around her territory is cheap to maintain. This spell, though, would target me specifically, and would work anywhere in her world. It would also work in other worlds if Mona was in the same world with me. And the reason for the extra caution was because I was now the heir; it was expected by the people in her world.

Tuesday, January 2 was my back-to-work day and it was also the day they delivered to me more detailed plans about moving. They had virtual house tours over the Internet and I would be able to explore the houses almost as well as if I was actually there.

Over the next couple weeks I actually took these tours as well as learning about the town I’d be moving to. It was small, but still larger than the town I drove 60 miles to in Alaska to get my mail, and there were cities significantly larger than Fairbanks and a much closer drive. And of course, while it might snow during the winter, it wasn’t going to be frozen over for several months of the year. And I was going to be back to normal sunlight that actually got high up into the sky, even during the winter, and didn’t stay lit until midnight during the summer.

There weren’t actually very many choices in houses, and some of them were going to be taken by my co-workers moving at the same time as me. As far as they were concerned, I was a young, recently married man perhaps eager to be starting a family after my time in isolation, so I was being shown two- and three-bedroom houses. They were in good shape, not fixer-uppers. It was shocking to see how low the prices were here compared to what I knew some of my college friends had paid; the two-bedroom houses were within the capacity of my savings from two-and-a-half years in Alaska.

I had my summoned wife with me for each viewing, and Mona also arranged to be where she could cast a spell that recorded the images on screen and turned them into a three-dimensional, real-size image we could walk through that she left projected on the grounds near her castle, so we could all go there and compare them afterward. I supposed that computers could do that these days, capture all the video and combine images to make a three-dimensional representation of the house, inside and out, but I’d probably view that on screen or with a head-mounted viewer as opposed to being able to literally walk through Mona’s projection.

So we all (even Victoria when I summoned her) checked them all out and compared them and expressed our preferences. Mona also teleported the whole group there once to look at the neighborhood and see if there were things not shown in the video. What made the choice though, was not a defect not shown in the video, but that one of them had access from the back yard into a forested area with a pond a quarter-mile in. When nobody else had a strong preference between them, letting Aries have another source of fresh fish made the difference.

On Monday, January 22 I made an offer on that house, informing them that I had the money on hand to buy it outright, which was going to save costs in setting up a mortgage, much less the interest. I got the house, and started making my plans to move.

Those were not like anyone else’s plans. Some people would sell their vehicles and buy another there, and some might ship them. The closest airport was in Oklahoma City, but it was a good way out from there to Enid, and cabs or rideshare from there a bit further to our new homes. There were alternatives, and to give people flexibility, they were giving everyone either actual moving expenses or a flat rate, and of course I took the flat rate.

I was going to put some of my stuff on the shared truck because everyone expected me to. But besides that, I would put some of my stuff into the other worlds and bring it through from there. Mona would make a doorway from my dream world to my parents’ house and take down the one that connected my dream world to the mobile home in the camp in Alaska. Finally, I’d take two suitcases in the truck and drive off with Mona. There was a turnoff about 10 miles down the road toward town. I would stop there and Mona would teleport the truck with us to somewhere near my parents house. I would visit with them for two days and then teleport to near my new home and move in.

I wrote out this plan, and starting Monday, January 29 I used my power to visit all the other worlds where I was working in Alaska. Every one of me had bought that house and they all had plans matching mine, save for alt-Victoria, who was flying and shipping everything.

Thursday, February 15 was my last working day in Alaska. The 16th was moving day, and at various times throughout the day I did all those things I was supposed to do. With suitcases in the truck, stuff I didn’t want anyone else to see stashed in a dream world or Mona’s, and the mobile home disconnected from other worlds, Mona and I turned in our keys and I settled my final bill with Pedro. In the late afternoon, I drove off with Mona, theoretically to Fairbanks for a late flight to Seattle, continuing the next day, but actually stopping before I got very far and teleporting to my parents’ place.

Sunday, February 18 I arrived at my new home, stopping first at a real estate office where I signed paper copies of documents I had already signed electronically, took my copies of documents, and picked up my keys.

First thing was that I changed the locks. Then of course Mona put a doorway from my new bedroom to my dream world, and ultimately from there to my parents’ apartment, too.

Because I moved from college directly up to Alaska, and the small homes up there were furnished, I never bought furniture and appliances, so that was on the shopping list for most people. Well, for me, too; I was still going to live in this house much of the time for a while, and I had the money to buy basic furniture. With the truck and multiple people to help, I could easily move in all the furniture myself. I had the appliances delivered.

Monday the shared moving truck also arrived and delivered everybody’s stuff, so I got the stuff of mine that had been on it. I also gathered all the stuff of mine I’d stowed in other worlds and put it where it belonged.

It was Tuesday, February 20 when I started back to work, finding my way out to a well site much warmer than what I had experienced in Alaska last week yet still somehow just as desolate. The difference was there were miles and miles of farmers’ fields around it rather than tundra. Many of the fields were still empty, but they were starting to prepare some fields for planting, and those machines were the only signs of humanity apart from the well workers. We had a plot for the well no larger than three homes in my neighborhood combined, with a private paved road leading off the main road about a quarter mile into one of the fields. There was one well, one derrick where they were drilling a second well, and a variety of equipment. Some of it was for maintaining the well, some for getting the oil into a pipeline, some was spares to be prepared in case of breakdowns, and there were various pieces of equipment associated with the drilling operation.

Nancy was summoned at my house, and she was responsible for trying to get things back to normal, and figuring out what trash pickup schedules and other town standards were.

I had a pretty non-eventful week. There were more wells around, and they were in clusters. Just out of sight of the well I’d been to Tuesday was another pair of wells in another farmer’s field, but no more drilling was happening there. Wednesday my work site was there, and Thursday at another nearby well. Friday had me back at Tuesday’s well site where they were having trouble with the drilling. But I drove as far those four days as I sometimes did in one day in Alaska. There were wells farther away I’d be called to sometimes, but they started me on some of the closer ones to keep me from having to go so far my first day on the job here.

Home life was different. We actually lived in a town now, typical small-town America. There were neighbors and small businesses within walking distance and parks and schools and the other things you’d expect. Nancy and Victoria were able to walk to stores and supplement their meager wardrobe I’d had from Alaska. There was no reason they couldn’t have full wardrobes now with plenty of warm-weather gear except for the fact that the stores weren’t selling it... Nah, that didn’t limit them, either. They bought what they could, and when it stayed overnight in my house when I summoned someone else, it changed to appropriate clothing. Aries’ wardrobe of bikinis hadn’t changed, and she went out in one to the pond near the house and was disappointed in the fish she found there, but at least got something. So Friday, when Mona was summoned, she stocked the pond with her magic.

I visited my parents briefly, now with less time-zone difficulty. I visited all the worlds over the weekend. I visited Aries and Bruno; the little sea dragon was not so little anymore, and Aries could ride him as long as she balanced herself well and didn’t “rock the boat” too much.