This chapter features a river otter in a prairie. I lost a bet in real life and had to include it as a forfeit. Please, gloss over it and enjoy the read.
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A day after they defeated the robot making warlock, Jamie chartered a cargo plane and took his girls to the big city. College classes would start in a matter of weeks and Jamie decided to get a jump on things early. He wanted them to have a base of operations in the city that they would likely spend the next four years of their lives in. They drove away from campus in an ever widening circle and searched for a place of their own.
Soon, they found an abandoned, two-storied factory under foreclosure. It was less than a mile from campus in a quiet, mostly residential part of town. There was nothing even remotely interesting within a three block radius of the place. Jamie nodded to himself and sent Rose in to take a look around the premises.
Ever since the girls had told him what their old, pre-enslavement selves would have felt in their current circumstances, he let go of the crippling guilt that had weighed on his soul for a long time. Sure, he was a slave owner, and Helena was enchanted to be forever in love with him, but he no longer felt horrible about it. Things went on, largely the way they did before the revelation, except that he decided to let Rose take point and make all the decisions that didn't really matter. She was the one that would be designing and decorating their new pad, so she was the only one that went in to take an appraising look.
Ten minutes later, she exited with a smile.
They drove to the bank that held the property and Jamie whipped out his ID under the name of Julius Jordan, his alias that held the money, and used his mind tricks to get the bank officials to disclose to him just how much money was originally owed to them so they had to foreclose on the place. It was almost an order of magnitude less than the place was worth. He then got them to agree to take that six-figure sum as fair price for the real estate and forgo the price their ridiculous interest rates inflated.
The next two weeks were spent doing the place up. Rose, Sandra and he used their magic to strip the place of all traces of its former occupants. They then decorated it to her designs, also using magic to install the various amenities. The basement was cleaned up, then left empty and bare of decoration. He was going to make a workshop down there, as soon as he found something to work on.
In a corner of the basement, they dug out a secret tunnel, using magic, and heavily warded it against detection. It led to a small, warded garage, located less than two hundred yards from their place and facing away from it. In the garage, they put a van he had bought. It was fully fueled, heavily warded and packed with emergency provisions and clean clothes. It was to be their means of escape if something went very wrong, someday. Jamie had watched and read enough military Sci-Fi to know you never hole up someplace without having a secret way of extracting yourself.
The first floor was left wide open, with support columns breaking up the space. The only walled off sections of it were the guest bathrooms, near the doors. A kitchen, worthy of TV cooking shows, was against the back wall and flanked by a breakfast nook in the East corner and a dining area in the West corner. Two large entertainment areas flanked the floor's centerpiece, which was an antique coffee table with sitting arrangements around it, made to evoke the feel of European coffee houses.
Upstairs were the many bedrooms, each decorated in its own, distinctive style. Big bathrooms and some office type rooms took up the rest of the space. The roof was converted into a pretty garden. In its center were a wooden cabin, that contained the sauna, and a very large hot tub. The place would have been a beautiful oasis of green in the otherwise drab urban landscape, except that it was heavily warded against prying eyes, much like the rest of the building. The girls sunbathed in the nude and people in helicopters overhead saw nothing but tarmac.
Sandra, Jamie and Rose warded the living daylights out of the place, piling one ward over another. They made wards that would make everyone just walk on by and not notice anything, even if Jamie was fucking one of his slave girls up against the huge windows, flattening her big boobs for the world to see. The windows and walls were enchanted to be bulletproof and soundproof. Inside their new house, they were safe from prying eyes, prying ears and all manner of magical detection. They also laid down a metric fuckton of magical traps and debilitating wards. Their inspiration were the traps they saw at the beginning of summer, back in their home town, but their own were slightly more forceful and less forgiving.
It was a lot of exhausting work, but, with Helena and Sonya's mundane help, they did it all in just two weeks. Jamie was happy with the way the place looked. He was ecstatic with the way the place felt. It was his fortress. "Girls," he said, as he popped open the bottle of sparkling wine, "I name our new home Bastion!" The girls held out the flutes and he poured the wine. They toasted to Bastion and wished it a long and happy life.
After they celebrated with an orgy, they went out shopping for cars. He wanted to add three more cars to their pool, so each would have their own. He bought a Jeep Wrangler from a used car lot and then Rose began insisting she had to have a race car red Ferrari. He wanted the new additions to the motor pool to be the kind of vehicles everyone would gloss over, even without magical wards, but, in light of his new policy to let her have as free reign as possible, he bought it for her. She then talked him into buying a Porsche Cayenne for himself. They drove the cars back home and went about warding them.
With a week to go before freshman orientation, the girls asked Jamie to take them shopping for clothes. Jamie was quite reluctant about the whole matter and only agreed when the girls suggested they would just go to the largest mall and eschew all the hundreds of fancy boutiques that were strewn across the city. Rose and Sandra used their magic to fix up hair and makeup for all four of the girls before they went out. They did that every day, ever since Jamie had first possessed them and taught them the Jedi way of using magic.
Their first stop, however, was a tailor's shop where Jamie had to hold still for measurements. The girls talked to the tailor and made arrangements for a number of suits and dress shirts to be made for Jamie. He tuned out their talk and let his girls ramble on. Jeans, T-shirts and turtlenecks were what he always wore and will continue to be. After the brief stop, the girls dragged him from boutique to boutique where they modeled outfit after outfit for him.
He just grinned and shrugged at them. The girl inside the dress was what mattered to him. They looked hot no matter what they wore. They seemed a bit disappointed to find him all but disinterested in their various outfits, but they didn't let that stop them from dragging him around until mid afternoon. By then, he was bored and tired and he called it a day, stopping their protestations with a raise of his hand. They packed up their stuff in the cars and went to dinner, followed by a movie and the customary orgy after they got home.
The next day, Jamie was again dragged to the tailor's place, where he put on a mockup of a suit and moved around in it. The tailor asked a lot of borderline personal questions of Jamie and the girls had to pull the man away to answer them in private, lest Jamie lose his patience. They could tell they were dragging him way outside of his comfort zone.
Outside of the tailor's store, Jamie decided he had had enough. "Alright girls," he said, preempting their whining and pleading, "here's my credit card. That is, Mr. Jordan's card. Go off and buy what you want. Don't spend too much! I'm going to take a day to myself. I've got a lot of catching up to do. Go on! Off with you!"
The girls went off on their shopping trip and Jamie went exploring. He realized just how much his life had changed recently. Ever since he got caught up in this whole magic malarkey, he hadn't seen any new movies or read any new comics.
He watched a Sci-Fi feature film at the multiplex and then browsed the comic book stores before attending the screening of a comedy. He bought a deck of Magic: The Gathering cards and went home to look it over, before adding it to his sizeable library. When he drove home, he parked his Cayenne next to the Ferrari and snapped his fingers. The red Ferrari turned meadow green with white daisies painted all over it. He smiled to himself.
Jamie was reading the comics he had bought when the girls showed up and began unloading bags of purchases. Rose gave him a playful glare as she took her first load upstairs. It took each girl three trips up and down the stairs to haul all of their purchases to the closets. Jamie finished his comic and made a mental note to check the expenses incurred on this date in his bank statements. "If there's anything that could make them break through the control I have over them, it would be me giving them an arbitrary limit on a no limit credit card," he thought to himself.
The girls whipped up a quick dinner and they sat down to eat. After about ten minutes of them bragging about how much prettier he'll find them in this dress or that, he ordered, "No more talk on this subject." They were becoming annoying and Jamie was glad they had to obey him. Well, three of them had to. Helena kept on talking about a teal, off the shoulder dress that would bring out her eyes. Jamie shook his head to himself. Did girls actually think guys noticed that sort of crap? "How much did you spend today?"
"Fifty thousand," answered Sandra. Jamie grunted. "We got a lot of great bargains."
"For fuck's sake," exclaimed Jamie, softly. They had spent more than eighty thousand dollars on clothes in two days. He came from a family that was lucky if it managed to make that much money in two years. "That's it. No more spending money on clothes."
"But, Jamie," countered Helena, "we haven't even bought any lingerie, yet!"
"What," asked Jamie, flatly. When Helena shook her head at him, he looked around at the other girls. "You spent eighty thousand dollars on every day clothes?"
When they nodded, he buried his face in his hands. Helena hugged him and rubbed his back. "That's not that much, Jamie," she consoled. "When you discount the down payment for the tailor, it comes out to only eighteen thousand per girl." Jamie snorted. "And the lingerie will be worth every penny. I promise. We all do."
