Turns out, each one of the soldier guys had their own flask, and Mark, their de facto leader, had some secret ring that functioned like Gungnir in the way that it could store an incredible amount of crap. Sitting around a big bonfire, we all swapped stories as we sipped on potent liquor from different flasks that Mark kept surreptitiously filling up from his ring. The one that made us laugh the hardest was their retelling of how they nabbed twenty huge kegs of thick brown rum from a Dwarven caravan, but they all got quiet when I asked where they kept it. Keeping my gaze flat, I pulled out Gungnir and had it pour out a pile of bullets.
After that, we were suddenly best friends. All of the guys who were ready to kill me as soon as they saw me accepted when they figured out that there was really nothing they had that I wanted. My own power, the kinds of things I could make, as well as the overt generosity let them view me as another one of them. To which, we found ourselves in front of the flesh golem off to the side of the entire party where the light petered out into the dark forest.
“Come on Scott, you do it. He’s your butt buddy, which means you’re first.”
“Fuck off, you know me Stacy are having fun.”
“That’s why you’re right here! Hahaha, can’t satisfy her can ya?”
I looked around at the guys who were nervously looking around at each other while still cracking jokes, all knowing what they wanted to do but not really trusting anything about it. Holding in my laughter at this moment was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. For all they know, they have to put their dicks in the golem for it to enlarge them, but I fibbed a little bit knowing something like this would happen. All they had to do was stick any body part in there and the flesh golem would do the enhancement anywhere. If they were going to replace a leg, then sticking that particular leg in is what they’d have to do. So here they stood, all of them wanting bigger dicks but not man enough to just shove it in.
“What?” I said. “Don’t look at me. I’ve already done this.” Total lie, but worth it.
“All right you sick fucks, we’ll do this the way we pee in the woods together. No eye contact, and look up if you have to.” After giving his drunk order, Scott pulled his pants down and shoved it in. Shouts of ‘just do it’ and ‘fuck yeah’ somehow gave them all the courage to do the same, except for Jamal who just sat there.
“What?” he said, as I looked with the question clearly on my face. “Dude, I got nothing to complain about down there.” Chuckling at his buddies, he took another pull on his flask and leaned over. “Just between you and me man, they bout’ to learn about big dick problems.”
We couldn’t stop laughing and it got even worse when Scott took a step back, proudly showing off an extra appendage. “I know for a fact Stacy ain’t down with both lanes!” Mark said as Jamal and I howled with laughter. Grumbling at the fact there were more men than women in the group, Scott used the flesh golem to remove the extra dick. “Oh my god! I can’t wait to tell Stacy what you were thinkin’!” Mark said, tears streaming down his face.
I leaned on Jamal for support even though he was making it difficult due to his full on belly laughing. After five minutes of making fun of Scott, who eventually joined in laughing at himself as well, Jamal looked at the flesh golem and then back at me. “Anything huh? Just touch it and I can do whatever I want to my own body?” A quick shrug with a nod was all he needed. Placing his hand on it, Jamal closed his eyes, whispering out loud, “Shredded as a mofo, and uh, let’s put the heart of dragon in me too.”
My eyes bugged out. “Wait, what!?” I yelled, lurching forward to put one hand on the golem and another on his back. Enveloping them both with my flesh sorcery, I watched as the flesh golem sucked Jamal in until his most of chest was inside of it but his head was still out. Tendrils of invasive red magic speared through Jamal’s heart, twisting it, devouring it while simultaneously replacing the bits just like he drunkenly wished for. I was so glad that I put in the automatic pain-numbing programming in the golem because otherwise the pain itself might have killed him. Regardless of not feeling the pain, the sheer speed and power of the violent internal changed rocked Jamal, his body trying to seize and vomit but the golem wouldn’t allow his body to react.
Using my own magic, I quickly knocked him unconscious and assisted with the change, making sure that the all of the subsidiary veins and arteries were strengthened to handle the increased power of a dragon’s heart. Subtle changes were needed as well, the shaving off of the instinctive heightened aggression and dominance that comes with the draconic territory, the lessening of the hoarding desire as well as the overwhelming lust part too.
As soon as it was over, the flesh golem spit Jamal out, returning to its normal orb state, albeit just a bit smaller. Waking Jamal up, I smacked just to drive my point home. “What, in, the, FUCK!? At least ASK before you do something that drastic and STUPID! The flesh golem is LITERAL! Doing just that would have killed you in the five minutes after the change if I hadn’t fixed you!”
He came to all hazy, his eyes unfocused as he spoke, “Did it work?” Handing him his own flask, I pulled Jamal to his feet, doing my best to return his mind and body to a calm state.
“Yes,” I answered, shaking my head. “But damn dude, that kind of change needs to be planned out first. Ask me next-”
“ME NEXT!” I didn’t have time to react as Mark walked into the golem, squatting a bit so that he fit inside except for his head which stayed just above it. God it looked weird, like a two-tiered fleshly snowman. Putting my hand on his hand to get a picture of what was going on, I looked Mark in the eye.
“Whatcha mean, next?” I growled, noting the changes. Honestly, I was surprised because the changes weren’t overly radical. With a dopey grin, Mark stepped out of the golem after two minutes, the golem much smaller for the change as Mark was much bigger, much. He had gained about two inches in height and about fifty pounds of muscle. The man gave the Greek statues of Hercules a freaking complex right now.
“If a dragon heart is too crazy for a change, then I’ll settle for being able to kick Schwarzenegger’s ass!” Flexing to show off his naked body, Mark twisted and did every exaggerated pose a body builder would, each muscle popping out.
“Gross dude,” Scott said, turning away. “You’re a steroid experiment gone wrong! Bet your dick shrank off too.”
“No steroids here baby,” Mark grinned. “Just hundo P perfect magic muscle here! Bet I could bench a freaking tree right now.”
“Betcha can’t scratch your head.” We all had a good laugh as Mark instantly tried and failed to do so.
Deciding that we had had enough drunken fun with the golem for one night, I overrode its programming and shut it down until I could get someone to be in charge of it, preferably some magic user with a background in healing or transformation. The next morning came too soon for some, but for me it wasn’t an issue. Hangovers don’t exist for flesh sorcerers. Waking up early to do a quick reconnaissance flight around the camp, I stumbled upon a group of women quietly arguing amongst themselves around the flesh golem.
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“You don’t need this! You’re already perfect!”
“Shut up Lovera! Not all of us popped in perfect condition like you did! Shit, I know for a fact that my nose is too damn long, fucking genetics and fucking parents!” Cassandra angrily whispered. “My big nosed dad had to find himself a hooked nose wife and then looky’!” Pointing at her own nose, Cassandra slapped the flesh golem. “And then the guys had to play with it and break it!
Yup, I was peekin’. This was just too good not to watch. Fifteen women in all arguing with each other how perfect the rest of them were while simultaneously shooting greedy looks at the golem as the women magic users kept examining it trying to get it to work. Several teenage girls were there as well arguing with what looked to be their mothers. The usual arguments of wanting bigger boobs to go with a nice ass deflected by the matronly ‘perfect-as-you-are’ speech while the other moms without kids were discussing getting rid of stretch marks and toning up certain parts.
“Ladies, please!” I interrupted after not being able to hold in my laughter anymore. “I turned it off for the night so the guys wouldn’t do anything more stupid than they already did. Real quick, who’s in charge of the camp? I need to figure out who’s planning everything.”
Lovera looked at me, a bit of relief flashing across her face. “We have a ragtag council and one emergency leader,’ she answered. “Mark is in charge of the soldiers which I guess now are mainly the Glyph Blades? Cassandra is in charge of the magic users which is made almost entirely up of women, is that normal?” Plowing ahead without letting me answer, she ticked off her fingers while finishing. “Stacy is in charge of logistics relating to living spaces and children while Jamal splits his time with helping out logistics and perimeter security.”
Looking around, I asked the more obvious question. “So who’s in charge of healing? Is there a doctor round here?”
The group got quiet. “That person’s dead huh?” The look everyone had on their faces was one of resignation, fear, and pain. “I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot, but is there a replacement or someone who could learn? This golem can do more harm than good if used incorrectly, just like a surgeon.” Leaning forward, I put my hand on it lightly and reactivated it. “And remember ladies, it needs to be fed when it shrinks. It can alter, enhance, upgrade, heal, and replace any kind of flesh.” Looking at the older ladies of which there were a few who were around the forty mark, I spoke forcefully to make sure I got my point across. “Yes, it can also restore a sizable resemblance of youth, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and make huge changes, those changes may end up killing you. Jamal almost died last night, he would have if I weren’t there.”
A veritable storm of questions instantly were thrown in my direction. Raising my hand to quiet them, I continued, “He’s fine, in fact he’s better than he’s ever been. He replaced his heart with a dragon’s heart without considering that the rest of his body had to be adapted to accommodate something that powerful. Getting a boob lift or removing some excess fat you don’t want or even healing an old messed up ankle is no problem, but trying to make yourself a teenager again is a lot. Do this in small steps, in bits and pieces so you can easily reverse it if you need to.”
Touching the flesh golem, I found the DNA of Mark, Jamal, Stacy, and Cassandra already inside. With a bit of help from Kraken, I made them the ‘admins’ of the golem so that it couldn’t be used without one of them present. The only exceptions to that rule were standard regenerative healing and Glyph Blade tattoo alterations; all of this was mainly making sure that no one fed a human to the flesh golem in the dead of night.
Just to make my point, I took one of the older ladies and walked her through the process of flesh alterations. Heather took to it like a duck to water, making small changes at a time. I monitored everything with my own magic as she first removed some skin discoloration, and then a wrinkle or two, and then injected some youth and health into her skin section by section. With a bit of encouragement to experiment, Heather began doing the alterations that most women do when they see swimsuit model magazines, quick skin tightening in the chest area with toning in the midsection as legs. Going a bit further with a bit of advice from me, she added some muscle and repaired tendons at the microscopic level while letting the magic of the flesh golem restore her eyesight to perfect vision.
Ten minutes later, Heather pulled her hand back looking a good fifteen years younger. “I feel, fantastic!” She screamed, jumping around and hugging her friends who were salivating at the chance to feel the rush of youth again. I left Heather to it as she worked with the older women, Lovera pulling me off to the side.
“Does it really make you younger? Did you just give all of us eternal life?” Her eyes were burning as her fingernails dug into my arm.
“Not really,” I answered, raising one eyebrow and glancing at her hand. “Why, you mad that everyone has a chance to be as pretty as you or that you can’t believe that there isn’t a tangible price?”
Her questioning face turned red as her jaw dropped. Laughing at her because I couldn’t help myself, I pulled back just a bit. “Relax, the easy answer is the price feeding the damn golem and putting up with women that will soon be too beautiful to handle. The guys won’t be complaining but if I know anything about female politics, well . . .”
A disapproving frown showed that maybe I hit a bit too close to the mark. Modern society before the apocalypse had a sort of hierarchy between women that got more and more fragmented as society became bigger and bigger due to social media. It used to be that in a small farming village, the biggest and wealthiest dude married the hottest and wealthiest girl and had a bunch of kids, while the second biggest and wealthiest dude got the next hottest and wealthiest girl and so on and so forth. With social media, womens’ options opened up to hundreds of miles away from their zip codes and men had to compete with men hundreds of miles away from their own homes for the girl next door, so women could have whoever and men’s competition just got many times more intense.
Now, we’re back to old school politics, where there will probably be one man generally in charge of the men and one woman in charge of the women and the strongest and most powerful person leading the whole thing. Without digital media to connect people from hundreds of miles away, and travel being perilous in the world now that magic holds sway, their options are limited once again to their group. This made being a hermit have its upsides, cause I’m outside the political structure. But all of these people probably aren’t thinking about it this way, the women are probably making alliances and subtly shifting their ways of thinking to figure out their own hierarchy while the men are off doing their own thing not knowing or caring about the political machinations taking place. This is why I made sure to have at least two men and two women as admins, so that there would not be a monopoly on the biggest game-changer in the settlement.
As I left, one girl I hadn’t seen yet who was in her early teens walked up to me and pulled me a bit closer so she could whisper in my ear. Closing my eyes so as to not laugh at the ridiculousness of the request, I whispered, “No, you can’t be a ‘cat-girl’, not yet anyway. You have to find a cat and feed it to the golem.” I walked back to the overcrowded golem and erected a stone wall behind it, inscribing the directions of how to use the golem, the administrators of the golem, and then all of the available functions and DNA types available for use. Satisfied with a job well done, I thought for a second and put a big caution message at the type for those attempting more radical changes.
Jamal bounded over when I finally extricated myself from the growing horde of women. “Yo! My dude, what’s happenin’, what’s goin’ on, that your group of women now?”
“Hey man,” I said, my voice wavering a bit with caution. “You feelin’ ok?”
“Never better! I feel like a million bucks fucked steak and shrimp buffet with a small bucket of cocaine DAMN I FEEL GOOD!”
Reaching forward quickly, I poked Jamal in the chest with my finger inserting my flesh sorcery and instantly calming him down. Twisting his clashing hormones down a bit, I then tweaked his adrenal glands that were wide open to close. His body was experiencing its own form of shock thanks to the dragon heart.
“Ok, that was weird,” he said, looking at me. “What’d you do?”
“Turned your shit from eleven back down to three man. I guess I’m gonna have to stay here for a couple days. Your uh, changes, or alterations need a bit of maintenance to make sure you’ll be ok,” I answered. “The human body wasn’t meant to house a dragon’s heart and we’ll see exactly what needs to be done to keep you alive.” Continuing with my examination, I fixed the micro-tears in his muscles and tendons and a couple hairline fractures in several bones. Tweaking his natural physiology again, I allowed his heart to ramp up his healing processes so that these issues would be taken care of.
“If all goes well,” I said, explaining a bit more for him. “Then the dragon heart will break down your body and repair it bit by bit so you’ll actually be more durable and dragon-like by the time you’re done. Make sure to eat a lot or visit the golem for extra healing.”
“Thanks man!” Taking off at a sprint, Jamal vanished into the woods. And this is how the next week went. I spent it tweaking body enhancements and watching as the children and some adult magic users did some incredible work building the settlement with my wands. The solar panels really helped speed things along as it just recharged the people who ran out of mana and allowed some of the people not using the wands to practice their magic all day. The Glyph Blades tried out a bunch of rune combinations and started making their own compendium of useful runic channels.
I assisted the endeavor by compiling everything Reeanth knew about the Glyph Blades as well as any knowledge of Centauri rune channels and combat techniques in a compacted memory file with consciousness sorcery. That file, I stuck in the flesh golem along with a lot of the knowledge I had discovered so far. It was downright genius of me to use the golem as a freaking computer as it removed how necessary I was to the day to day operations of the camp. I didn’t have to heal because of the golem, I didn’t have to build because of the wands, I didn’t have to make them gear of any kind because they already had my knowledge; I worked myself out of a job.
Feeling pretty damn good about myself, I took one last tour around. A bunch of single story houses had been built, some out of stone and some grown out of trees. There was a large pier built into the river complete with several canoes and two barges grown out of trees. Communal showers had been hooked up away from the settlement kitchen and the wizards of the group had done a damn good job enchanting all kinds of various tools, especially with my memories to go off of. Heating enchantments on stone disks to functions as a stove, stone knives with self-sharpening enhancements, directional lightstones and sunstones spotted each house and the dirt paths of the settlement.
There were two things the wizards had trouble doing, which was conjuration and summoning of elementals. As the final piece of goodwill, I helped four teenagers bond with elementals, one boy and one girl each got a water elemental and another boy and girl got an earth elemental. I made sure to educate them on the elemental growing in stature and in power the longer they were bonded but that didn’t matter to the elemental as much as they measured millenniums the way we measure days.