Instant Family
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 14868
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"I think they must be mine, the result of my sin," the
previously black-skinned Astra says.
Her pregnancy had been fraught, due to her feelings of guilt over breaking
her vow of chastity
(not that she realistically had any choice in the matter). In spite of
that, though,
she finds that she feels maternal towards her babies, which are at about
the
stage of development they would have reached had the pregnancy gone to
full term.
She would look after them now, and worry about the consequences later. And
that vision
she'd had, which seemed to come from the goddess Artemis herself, had made
her feel
somewhat better about herself than she had before.
Then she winces in apparent pain. "Are you all right," Malachi asks, concerned. "I think so. I just had a headache for a moment, but it's gone now." Nobody notices that it coincides with the final dying of the light from the Crystallic. When it died, the portion of itself that had remained within Astra died too. It had used up the final portion of its energy in fulfilling Astra's wish that she should be returned to her physical state prior to becoming a demifox. That had not only involved restoring her skin and hair colour, and dealing with the pregnancy, but also restoring her to her old level of physical fitness. "Before anything else, we ought to find you some clothes," the other Astra says. "You look to be a perfect double for me, but I'm afraid we've run out of spare outfits." "That's no problem," Malachi says, and conjures up an outfit for ex-black Astra to wear. Ex-black Astra has many questions that she wants to ask: how Malachi can be alive when she'd seen her die, how she herself can have a double, how Fred can have a double (for his companionship with the other Astra indicates to her that he's not - as she had initially thought - her "own" Fred), where her own Fred is (not that she has any reason to expect that Malachi will know), who the other people are? But something else must come first. Her babies have awoken, and now they start to cry. Though Astra has no experience of motherhood, she instinctively knows that they are cold (they have no clothes) and hungry. Malachi conjures up three sets of baby clothes. Astra is worried about how the babies can be fed, though. It will be many months before they will be ready for solid food, and it had never occurred to either herself or the Crystallic to have this taken care of. "I can help you with that, if you're willing," Malachi says. "I know a spell to induce lactation. It's straightforward enough, but since I can't know for how long you'll want to breast feed it will have to be a permanent spell. Don't worry. All it means is that it will require another spell to cancel it, but if I'm not around then any competent magic user can do it for you." Astra is happy to agree to this. She soon discovers that three is an awkward number to have to breastfeed, though - three into two won't go. I suppose it could have been worse, she thinks. Three babies must have been at the lower end of the range of possibilities.
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JH
1/6/2001 9:05:10 AM
Extending Enabled
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