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.

Waking up and living a day as both Jody and Victoria was old hat to me now. But I realized this was another day where I had to let Victoria control things. I’m sure Victoria would love to marry me, but I have to do it right. I can’t simply ask her, “Will you marry me?” and then with her mouth say, “Yes.”

On Monday, August 14, I tried to summon Aries and bring myself to the world of the Sea Men again, but as Jody this time. It didn’t quite work, though. I arrived in the world, but I was sleeping alone on the beach and the doll was just a doll, in my house. I decided that this answered one of my questions about the power in one of the ways I thought might be true. I could not summon Aries today because I was trying to summon her into a world where she already exists, even though that was some distance from here.

Too exhausted to actually plan out a dream, I ended up dreaming of Victoria being in the world of the Sea Men together with Nancy and Aries. The three of us were being completely flirty with the Sea Men, having sex with several, and each of us laying an egg before it was over. None of us implanted the eggs, though. Despite our tiredness, we were all aware of how realistic the dreams had become, and we were all afraid we would really produce children whose fathers would present them to us on a future visit.

In the dream, within her dreamworld, I tried to see how far into Victoria’s past I see. And it was what wasn’t there that stood out. There were memories, and more memories of Victoria’s than I could ever remember exploring before. I could actually follow my Victoria back a bit further now in her mind, before I could remember ever having dreamed of being Victoria, though not all the way back to when I first invented Nancy before we had even started school. But this Victoria, the one who I grew up being in dreams, was not, no way, no how, the same as alt-Victoria that I brought into the world the other day. Even if she had some of the same personality traits, it was clear that she followed a different path.

The portal people had come up with a different solution to the sewage problem. Rather than a system of pipes and waste processing plants and controversy over where those let out, they had genetically engineered their bodies so that they did not need any of that, or even toilets.

Monday, July 17, my bed-mate was just the doll again. I spent the day back out at well 2 again, but we resolved the problem that day and so they had me take Tuesday off. Since I felt like I had been neglecting her, I focused on dreaming about Victoria that night. Being Victoria had been awkward when I was working, and I’d had other priorities the last two weekends, so this was the first day that was convenient to bring her back since I’d figured out I had some control.

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!

When I awoke, Victoria was there in the place of the doll. Remember when I said her story was for another time? I guess it’s “another time” now.