For the second weekend in a row you wake up in a girl's dorm. This time though, your bedmates are naked. And you're laying in the wet spot.
At some point during the night Sarah has rolled away and is laying back-to-back against you, while Susan is cuddled up right in front of you looking directly into your eyes with a dainty hand stroking your cock. You don't have time to do more than blink at her a few times before you're gently tugged off the bed cock-first. As soon as you're stable on your feet the shorter girl almost climbs you like a tree to get right in your face.
"I have… a problem."
It is way too early for this shit. You push into her mind and find she's not actually mad and is honestly pretty turned on by what happened last night and decide to roll with whatever she's trying to spring on you. "That's horrible, you should do something about it." Your voice is a little hoarse but that just helps the dryness of your tone.
Wiggling until she slips off of your hands and back to the floor she prods you to a suspiciously positioned chair then grabs a pillow pre-positioned in arm's length and kneels between your legs. You like the idea of where this is going, but you're a bit confused on the why.
It honestly looks like she's about to dive face-first into your cock when your finger on her forehead stops her. "Your problem is my dick?"
The long-suffering look she gives you is honestly pretty amusing. "My problem is that you got me off like a hundred times last night and I didn't get you off at all."
You have to change from a finger to the palm of your hand because of how hard she's leaning in. "You don't keep score in bed, there's no tit-for-tat going on here." Peeking in a bit further into her thoughts tells you that she has a bit of an oral fetish and really wants to blow you but doesn't want to just come out and say it. You give her your kindest, most gentle smile, "There's no rea-"
Susan growls—actually growls—at you. "James, shut up and let me suck your dick." Cheeks burning, she slaps your hand aside and takes you to the entrance of her throat without batting an eye. Pulling back she runs one hand down your length while the other hand's nails tickle feather-light over your balls before she starts to slide down again. A handful of slow repetitions pass before you're once again as deep as she can take you. A deep breath through her nose and she opens her eyes to look directly into yours before swallowing as you pop into the burning wet heat of her throat. Holding for a second she pulls back and gasps, never dropping eye contact even with tears pricking the corners of her honey-colored eyes.
"F-fuck," you pant as she dives back down, sliding into her throat just a little easier as she focuses on closing the distance to the base of your cock with each stroke. You cup the back of her head and almost hit her with a cheering charm before you remember how violently Sarah reacted last night. Trying for something less powerful you try pushing just a little bit of magic to your fingers, like when you've tried to cast wandlessly. Trying to concentrate is almost impossible with the wonderful feelings Susan is causing but you manage to cobble something together right as the bushy-haired brunette pulls back to breathe again.
Wrapping both hands around you Susan takes just the head of your cock in her mouth and lashes her tongue around it wildly. Focusing on your magic touch you run your fingers through her hair and her eyes go half-lidded. This time instead of struggling to deepthroat your cock she makes it in three smooth gulps and manages to look up at you triumphantly before her eyes glaze over and she works just a few inches back and forth. Desperately trying not to cum you reach down and tweak a nipple, magic still in your hands, and a deep groan flows up from her throat into your cock and you know you've lost. "Susie—!" you cry, the girl kissing the base of your shaft and swallowing hard as you fire thick ropes into her throat and mouth as she drags herself off of you. "Holy fuck."
You pull Susan up into your lap and run your hands over her body as she catches her breath, but she stops you before you can dip in between her thighs. "Noooo," she pants, resting her forehead against your lips, "If I let you do that we won't stop and people are going to start knocking soon." She pulls you down a bit and whispers in your ear, "But I wouldn't mind a second helping sometime."
When the two of you finally pull back you see Sarah awake and watching with wide eyes. "How in the hell did you do that?!" she exclaims, "where did it fit?"
Susan giggles a little while she wipes her cheeks and the corners of her eyes. "How did it fit in you last night?"
"I don't know if it did, I'm sore as fuck," the asian girl mutters as she slowly scoots to the edge of the bed. "I need some magic hands."
As Susan opens her mouth to reply there's a knock on the door and the girls share a startled glance at the clock. There's a sudden scramble to locate clothes and you're able to hit Sarah with a mild painkiller without her noticing. Your underwear are tossed at your face and your pants land in a pile at your feet as you're hustled half-dressed towards the door.
There's a bunch of bullshit being peddled as you're almost thrown out of the room while the girls 'finish getting ready' so you end up being pulled in to Sierra and Savannah's room and laying on hands there. As everyone finally heads out to breakfast you have a sneaking suspicion that the roommates' not-so-subtle attempt to keep everyone from noticing anything weird in their room is completely offset by the smug smile that Sarah is wearing whenever she isn't wincing and the lip-licking that Susan is trying to tease you with.
You finally manage to escape and arrive back to your apartment right as Crystal texts you. She's having breakfast with her mother and Amy, so any getting together gets pushed off to the early afternoon. Also, Amy still had your coat apparently. You had wondered if Savannah had stolen it.
Now that you have time you head over to your lair, pull out the trunk, and start doing some serious research into something that might protect from mind control (or is it emotion control?) like Glory Girl's, and some way to seal a secret, because at some point someone's going to catch you using magic and it's best to get ahead of it.
Having two things to research actually helps, giving you a chance to switch tracks when you get frustrated. After almost four hours of research you've found some useful leads in both areas.
As you first considered, Vicky's aura seems a little less like mind control and a little more like emotion control, cycling between awe and fear. Following that logic you were able to track down a spell that supposedly provides resistance to spells and magical creatures that effect emotions, as well as things like veela aura. It's careful to claim that it's not complete proof against it, but some self-experimentation with using it and then casting cheering charms and various jinxes to try and affect your mental state seems like it does work, if not perfectly. Enchanting an item with it at your current level of skill would make it less effective than a cast charm, but something is better than nothing, right?
Unfortunately the other options you have are… complicated. You find some notes that makes it seem like Occlumentic barriers could be erected in another's mind—only a shield type—which could then be tended by the target if they had some Occlumency skill, or would need to be maintained in the case of untrained people. It appears that this option was mostly used on younger children before they had training in the mind arts. You can envision the steps of shielding another mind, but you have no idea if it would work in this case. The magical rules you seem to be working off of tells you that unlike canon, squibs could sometimes use magical items and in a few rare cases may be able to do something resembling Occlumency, so emplacing a shield and teaching her to maintain it may be possible. You could also totally fuck up Amy's mind even worse than it already is.
The other options seem equally useful, but are beyond your abilities at the moment. You find records of runes which could be carved into an item or made into tattoos which apparently create an artificial mental barrier that is similar to Occlumency. Unfortunately your current dabblings in Runes are way, way to poor to even attempt the idea. You lack a ready-made rune string that you could copy, and any such construction would need additional personalization that your runic skill just doesn't support anyhow.
Another option would be to construct a ritual to fix the issue. Either a ritual that creates mental barriers, or one that renders the recipient immune to outside mental tampering would work. Your problem in this case is that you know nothing about ritual magic. Comments in other books seem to paint a picture that rituals are capable of anything and everything so long as they go right, and horrible screaming death if you screw up even the tiniest detail. Researching more would have you start at square one with ritual magic and you have no idea how long it would take to get to a level where you could even begin to formulate an idea on a ritual to accomplish what you wanted.
Secrecy magic, on the other hand, gives up its secrets pretty easily. Since you're surrounded by squibs and muggles, you can ignore the Unbreakable Vow. That leaves a fair number of options which should work on anyone. A blood pact would work because of the use of blood—you find a record where it was used successfully on a muggle. Other secrecy charms also seem to work on muggles so long as blood is involved. Squibs seem to be affected no matter what, although blood as a reagent never seems to hurt when it comes to secrecy.
Contracts honestly seem to be the worst option, as they only seem to have penalty clauses and that's totally not helpful to enact a penalty after the fact, you want prevention of information spreading in the first place. Besides a blood pact, the Subrosa charm could be cast on any number of people and allow secrets to be shared that could only be spoke about with the agreement of all others in the group. Trying to speak or write of the secret would cause a person 'to begin talking about the most inane thing they had heard in the last day'.
There are also a couple of secrecy charms that have been tailored for use on muggles, possibly from before Obliviation was perfected. You note them down, but they are apparently messy if not used correctly. That explanation isn't elaborated on, but sounds bad enough that you don't consider them good ideas to use on friendlies.
You leave your research out and pop back to your apartment to begin prepping lunch. Crystal shoots you a message not too long after you've gotten all of the mise en place ready. You give her your address and head downstairs. She picks you up and you head to a nearby auto parts store, grab a battery, and end up back at your place in your never-used parking space.
Crystal seems content with watching you and making small talk, although she smirks when you point out that you're expecting your jacket—that she's wearing—back.
"I didn't think I was getting it back from Amy, honestly. I think she might have worn it to bed if I hadn't teased her about it." She rubs her hands over the lapels and leans against a pillar in the parking garage. "I mean it's hella comfortable, but kind of strange."
You finish pulling the old battery out and put the new one in. "Yeah, I'm surprised she asked after the frosty reception she gave me on Friday."
The blonde groans and huddles into your coat. "Ugh. She was in such a better mood yesterday. I keep telling Vicky not to set her sister up on dates because Amy just doesn't seem interested but she does it anyway."
The swap is done in short order an after making sure everything starts up fine you lead her to your apartment. You are a little worried that you've fucked something up and left obvious magical stuff sitting around, but other than a cursory glance, Crystal's attention seems to be focused on you. In fact, as you fire up the oven and stove and pull out everything you got ready ahead of time, you find her face over your shoulder as she asks about what you're cooking. It's pretty amusing (and kinda cute) to have her hovering around being inquisitive, something you've never seen her do in public.
After getting the chermoula ready and everything else in the oven you both sit on one of your new couches. Crystal sits against one arm, cross-legged facing you and you get a little worried as the smile falls off her face.
"So…. we need to talk."
Your everything tenses as one of the most worrisome sentences in the english language hits you.
"Um, it's nice that you made that 'you're Crystal, not Laserdream' comment the other day, but I am kind of a public figure and all. Same with the rest of my family—like if anything Vicky and Amy have it worse—but you need to know that there were pictures taken of you on Friday and they've been posted on the internet." She wrings her hands together and doesn't meet your eyes. "No-one's like, named you or anything, but if we keep, uh, hanging out it's going to happen. You're going to get attention from crazy internet people."
Oh, it's this conversation. The relaxation of tension in your shoulders feels heavenly. "I wondered about that. I figured that something might happen but I didn't expect the serious look on your face. If I was super bothered by it I would have said I needed to stay in and wash my hair or whatever." That finally gets a little smile out of her as you continue, "Is it going to be that bad?"
Flipping her hair forward over her shoulder she plays with the tips in between sneaking looks at you. "I mean the PHO thread for me is on its like fourth reboot after becoming too long, but Amy and Vicky's are over twenty threads. Anytime someone shows up in public with me more than once you're going to get a nickname and at least a dozen posts trying to find out who you are. The fact that we were all out together means you're in their threads too—crap, I didn't check that…." she trails off and pulls out her phone, obviously reading things as she scrolls. "Well shit."
Your phone dings a moment later and you see that Crystal's sent you a number of links. Clicking on the first takes you to Vicky's PHO thread right where a poster starts ranting about how 'Our wonderful Glory Girl is back with that Dean Stansfield asshole'. Over the next couple of posts there are something over a hundred picture links as well as crossposts to Amy's and Crystal's threads where you discover you have apparently been dubbed 'green-eyes'. "Wait, Lucas the jock was named and shamed, and I'm just 'green-eyes?'"
Crystal slides up against you and pulls your phone arm over her shoulder to look. "Yeah, he got named because someone saw them going into the theater and then saw him trying to slide his arm around her shoulders. He's gonna get so much shit in school tomorrow." Flicking a finger she scrolls down farther, "You were green-eyes because they were super noticeable, but you became 'peacoat' for a while when Amy wore your jacket." She laughs at the look on your face. "Seriously, she's obsessed. I wonder if she'd be like that with your other clothes."
The timer goes off and she follows as you pull things out of the oven and start plating. "I thought women were supposed to steal hoodies, not jackets." You hand her a plate and you both sit at your kitchen table.
Taking a bite Crystal makes a small sound of surprise and pops more chickpeas in her mouth. "Do you have a hoodie I can borrow?"
"Trying to get me naked already, or staking a claim on something before Amy steals all my clothes?"
There's a twinkle in her eye even as she deflects the question. "Anyway, I'm serious about the public attention thing." She looks at her phone and points at it with her fork. "Yeah, someone posted that they saw us buy a battery for my car. There's speculation that I'm using you, that we're dating, and that we're secretly living together in like the next ten posts."
"What the fuck?"
"It's gonna be like that." Shy Crystal is back as she puts the fork down and wrings her hands again, and the playful mood is killed. "I understand if this is way too much to deal with."
Yeah, her words might say she understands, but the tone of her voice tells you that plenty of guys have bailed out at this point. You tell her
[X][Crystal] Write-in
Putting your fork down you take a deep breath and ignore the way that the blonde tenses. "Honestly, I like you, and the media thing is weird but not a dealbreaker. I'd like to try an actual relationship." You meet her small smile with your own and hold up a hand, "However, since it's possible that this could come back to bite me in the ass if I don't mention it ahead of time, full disclosure—I hooked up with Sarah and Susan last night."
As she hears the words 'hooked up with Sarah' Crystal's eyes go curiously blank and she slowly laces her fingers together. When you add 'and Susan' she jerks and stares right at you. "You what? Are—Susan?"
…that's the part that bothers her? "Yes?" You don't want to try and mind read her and get distracted, but boy you're gonna do it as soon as you have a chance. "Both of them, but you're surprised by Susan?"
"We hung out yesterday, but Sarah wasn't there for most of it—she was doing sorority stuff like making punch or hazing pledges or whatever so I didn't meet her until right before the party. Susan though, she kept the other girls in line, she didn't seem like the kind of person to just… do that."
At this point you try a bit of legilimency and Crystal seems irritated but not quite angry. Still, you feel like you're navigating a minefield. "I can't say I'm a gentleman since well," you gesture vaguely, "but I'm not kissing and telling any more than I already have."
The blonde cape's ire doesn't even seem directed at you. "I knew she was going to do something! She kept making those boyfriend comments… argh!" Her hands come up and curl like she's not sure if she wants to strangle someone or punch them. "And she—"
You have both hands up now in a conciliatory gesture. Crystal seems… miffed? Miffed is a good word. She doesn't seem like she's going to explode into violence or anything, but damn. "I'm totally willing to promise it won't happen again."
"Just, just," she trails off into inarticulate noises for a second, snatches up her phone and starts pecking hard at it, then stands and heads for the door. "Just don't go anywhere, I'll be back."
"…It's my apartment, where would I go?" you ask the door.
The better part of a half-hour later a much calmer Crystal walks back through the door. You've already cleaned up your dirty dishes (manually, no need to get caught using magic) and have resorted to leaning against the kitchen counter browsing the PHO threads on New Wave. You look up as she shuts the door firmly and flies through the intervening space quickly to rest a hand against your chest and look you right in the eyes.
"Okay, look. I said that you could act like her boyfriend for the night and I hadn't staked a claim but I didn't think Sarah'd just jump in bed with you like that." She takes a breath and visibly slows herself down. "I've never done an open relationship, and I'm not going to start one like this. If we're dating, we're exclusive, okay?"
"Okay." You meet her eyes and push a legilimency connection but don't actually try to do anything yet.
She deflates and touches down on the floor before tucking her head under your chin. Crystal's tall enough that it's not super comfortable, but you wrap your arms around her loosely as she relaxes against you.
Taking the opportunity, you use the existing connection to peek into her head a bit. She had been talking to Susan out on the roof and holy shit Susan took pictures of your dick while you slept. And shared them with Crystal. And gave a glowing review of both your cock and your skills in bed. Wow. Oh, and she took a video of her deepthroating you. Super!
The woman in your arms starts to pull back so you return your focus to the real world, specifically her pouty cupid's-bow lips that quirk a bit before she gives you a shaky grin. "I totally deserve a hoodie. Girlfriend privileges."
You nod. "Totally. However, you get to tell Amy 'no' when she asks about my jacket in the future."
This time your girlfriend's smile is a lot more genuine. "If it makes her happier like she's been the past couple of days I'd probably be willing to compensate you for it." She blushes a bit as that comment brings up her recent conversation with Susan. "I'm kind of done with heavy stuff for the day, but can we cuddle for a while?"
"We can use the couch; I wouldn't want you to think any worse of me for suggesting the bed," you smirk at her, and her blush returns just as it had started to fade, "wanna pick out a hoodie to steal first?"
Your hiding spot across from the factory wasn't swarming with stank druggies with guns, so you use it again to scope out what's going down outside. The cars scattered around are different than yesterday and all of the rolling doors are down, but nothing else looks different. Taking the time to ensure everything is secured and you're still disillusioned you focus on a window that seems to lack glass completely and throw yourself forward on the broom, crossing the distance in seconds. A quick peek inside and you roll in and find yourself on scaffolding right above an overhead crane.
You silence the rickety metal you're standing on and survey what you can see from your new vantage point. A number of guards are walking around in singles or pairs, and what looks like more sitting around and smoking near what you assume to be a security office, if all the monitors you see are correct. Well damn, when did the Merchants actually start caring about shit like this? You're amazed and kind of appalled, really.
The rest of the space is divided into vehicle storage with some very Mad Max-looking trucks, panel vans, and cars, and what is clearly Tinker space for Squealer. Flying closer you can see she isn't around, but one of the panel vans is over there to be fixed, as you watch the cloaking turn on and off randomly, occasionally marked by multicolored sparks shooting out and skittering across the floor. A second space has what looks like an exoskeleton partially-build, the legs and torso being held up on a frame and a couple types of arms just scattered around. It looks a little like a power armor frame from Fallout, and a bit like the power loader from Aliens.
So in all this is kind of a bust—it doesn't look like anyone important is around, but this does look to be Squealer's main (or only?) Tinker workshop. You could…
[X][Merchants] Find a hiding spot, ward it, and use it to check back occasionally
You find a spot a little more towards the Tinker side up near the ceiling that isn't easily accessible from anywhere and pull out some wardstones you had made just for this possibility. You're not sure how often any of the new higher-ups might show up, but this was definitely a good chance to catch Squealer. Now what you'd do with her—that you don't know.