Becca didn’t need to hesitate. “I’ll do it,” she said.
“You’re sure now?” Min asked. “There’s no going back, and you’ll be stuck with me and Mark forever.”
Becca’s eyes narrowed. “I know you’re looking out for me, but I can make my own decisions. If we were joined already, you’d see that there is not a slight bit of doubt or hesitation in me.”
“As long as you’re really sure,” Mark spoke. “Since I’m the outsider here…”
Min cut him off with his own voice. “Shut up, you. You want this bad, too, and for more than the pervy reasons. You crave connection. The same connection you failed to get from your family, or your high school girlfriend. The same connection you sought, and again failed to get, from the Pi Epsilon house. You love the intimacy you and I share. You love me...”
“See what it’s like Becca?” Mark interrupted. “No secrets. Total honesty.”
“I’ve never wanted anything more in my life,” Becca said solemnly.
It only took an hour this time, and unlike Min, Becca was awake to experience the whole thing. She watched as the golden bodies of Mark and Min dissolved into clouds of glittering particles which then entered her body directly through the skin. She had expected intense pain or pleasure, so she was a little surprised at how gentle the process felt. It was as if every cell in her body were being caressed, and she had never felt so calm. She could feel Mark and Min inside her head, soothing her, reaching out to her, becoming her. She had assumed she would be losing parts of herself in the process. Instead, she felt like she was gaining two other selves. Two other selves who cared about her, who loved her, who wanted her to share her love with them.
And that’s when she came a little. Sorry, she thought to herself, but there was noone to hear her. She was Mark and she was Min and she was Becca, but they were all one. The others had warned her about the lack of secrets and privacy, but if they had told her about the feeling of pure love she now shared, she would have rushed the process even more than she did. She could feel Min’s consciousness taking shape within her, so she walled off a little part of Becca, so that they could talk as if it were the former times. Min showed her how to coalesce a new body out of the glittering cloud of particles that she now existed as. Mark joined them a moment later. Their bodies fading from solid gold to their more human-looking tanned voluptuous bodies.
The body claimed by Becca took the hands of the other two, and Mark and Min completed the circle.
“One being in three persons,” Becca joked. “We’re kind of like the Holy Trinity.”
“What?” Min, the lifelong atheist asked.
“Great,” Mark quipped. “As if my conservative Catholic parents weren’t going to freak out already about everything that’s happened. Now we can add blasphemy to the list.”
Becca narrowed her eyes at Mark. “I’d apologize if I thought I offended you, but I know for a fact that I didn’t.”
Now it was Mark’s turn to laugh. “I stopped going to church immediately after Confirmation. But we shouldn’t get too full of ourselves. We’re not invulnerable, and we’re going up against Julie, who is just shy of being all-powerful. One slip-up and we’re at her mercy.”
“Only she doesn’t have Mercy,” Min said glumly.
“But she doesn’t have any real imagination, either,” Becca added. “Maybe we can use that to our advantage. She’s really only limited by her own creativity, which should buy us some time to put a plan into action.”
“Still want to appeal to her better nature?” Min asked. Even though they all shared thoughts, they found it helpful to have their old personas bounce ideas off of each other.
“We have to,” Becca said. “She might be too powerful for us otherwise. And she might be a bitch, but I think we know her well enough to give her incentives to rein things in.”
“I hope you’re right,” Mark and Min said in unison.
Sun May 24 00:32:12 2020