Luz groaned, sat up, and rubbed her jaw, while Aiden and Thirsha knelt down next to her.
"Wow," Luz whispered. "I...swore I had just gotten hit in the face by-
holy shit Aiden you have bat wings!"
She said, excitedly, her language shifting almost at the same time she forgot any lingering pain from being whacked in the face and sent flying across the room. Aiden craned his head backwards and looked his wings over. He let out a little sigh.
"Yeah, I think I have wings," he said.
"Well, you were getting my powers," Thirsha said, sounding matter of fact about it. "Come on."
She slid her arms around Luz and his waist, walked to the window, kicked it open with a grunt, then leaped out of the apartment building. Luz squealed in excitement, while Aiden realized that having two different modes of flying - Kryptonian style 'just do whatever' flight and big bat wings emerging from his shoulders flight - made for an extremely confusing place inside of his brain. And so, rather than sweeping the two girls into his arms, he simply allowed himself to be carried as Thirsha cut away from Dimension City and into the rolling hills beyond. There she swept down, landed, and placed both of them on the edge of a hill that looked out over a glittering forest.
Luz panted as she stepped away. "Haha! Flying!" She threw her arms up.
"You fly every day with me," Aiden said.
"And I do this every day toooo!" She bounced on her feet.
Aiden had to admit she had a point.
Thirsha, meanwhile, had closed her wings against her back and stretched her arms behind her. The fact that she had not even bothered to get even
slightly
dressed again after sex didn't seem that shocking. In even this relatively tame, temperate wilderness, her pale, long limbed body seemed to be utterly at ease. Her long, batlike ears twitched as she took in the sounds of the forest, her finger touching the bracelet around her wrist. "Now," she said, simply. "If you have my powers, you need to understand how to use them."
"Yeah," Aiden said, trying to stand normally. Not like he was naked too. He didn't manage to handle it as gracefully as Thirsha did.
"My abilities are to draw on the flows of mana through the world," Thirsha said, looking outwards. "By focusing my will, I am able to turn that mana into a constructed entity - summoning the people of my land to my side. Unlike my siblings, I...don't use it to construct...buildings. Beyond a few mystic wards and loadstones." She nodded. "Loadstones being the most important part. Without a loadstone providing energy to you, your mana ceases to flow and you cannot make anything."
"Got it," Aiden said.
"Can he learn to make buildings?" Luz asked, curiously, the buttons on her top popping free as she slid her fingers down from her throat. She slipped her top off, exposing her cute, perky chest to the bright sunlight. At Aiden's confused expression, she gave him a sheepish grin, then jiggled her tits, as if to say:
Well? Duh?
...she had a point.
"I suppose," Thirsha said, in the same way she would have responded to the question of 'can I eat bugs.' Actually, wait, no, Thirsha would be down to...
Before Aiden's eyes, she plucked a bug off a nearby tree and popped it into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed before continuing: "Now, first, we need to acquire you some loadstones. The thing to look for is Kandarian ruins."
She put her hand over her eyes, shading them. "There," she said, pointing, then took to the air with a beat of her wings. Luz frowned as Aiden bundled her into his arms, then tried to take to the air in the classical Kryptonian style. This meant his wings dragged behind him awkwardly. He tried beating them, but that got his brain to stop flying Kryptonian style. He wobbled, trembled, then fell to the ground beside Thirsha, who had found a...a...a collection of standing stones, centered around a glowing crest set into the grassy ground like a cap over some ancient source of power.
"I need to fix these wings," Aiden muttered as Thirsha gestured to the cap.
"This is the site of power," she said. "There are others, but this will be your first."
"Wait, wait, wait," Luz said, holding up her hands. She made a T with them, for time out. "Time out! Hold on! We're in another pocket dimension entirely, separate from the fantasy world you're from. So, like, these aren't ruins! They'd just things that got build, like, a few months ago. And why would they even have magical energies or ley lines or anything? This place was thrown together by overworked bureaucrats! They didn't know nothing about nothing!" She kicked the capstone. "This is just a prop! For the isekai fantasy!"
Thirsha shrugged.
"So, he's just gonna make a useless prop!" Luz said.
"I mean, when I got Hyperman's powers, I got actual super strength," Aiden said. "Why shouldn't this capstone work too?"
"...because...it's..." Luz frowned. "I guess!" She threw her hands up.
They all looked at the capstone. It throbbed gently.
The branches and brushes rustled nearby and a pair of men came jogging out of it, cutting across the edge of the clearing. Thirsha, Aiden, and Luz all looked over at them. One of them was a haggard looking man with thick sideburns and a bristling mustache, who's lips were seemingly permanently affixed in a kind of half-grimace, half-rock star glam smile. He was dressed in a black jacket with a rumpled fedora, and was carrying a boombox in his hand. Behind him was a faintly concerned Asian man with a pencil mustache in a poofy bombardier's jacket that had been bright orange when it had been new and was now faded to a dull orange.
"Detective, where-" the Asian man gasped. "-are we going?"
"Trust me," the haggared man said, his voice sounding like if a lizard had gargled glass for this entire life. "I have
paranatural
abilities. This way!" He ducked back out of the clearing, not even noticing the three naked teenagers.
The Asian man glanced over. He frowned. "Is school out already?"
"Yeah!" Luz said, blushing brightly.
"Okay then," he said, then shook his head.
"Kim! Kim! My senses! They're
tingling
!" The haggared man shouted from a shockingly far distance, considering the appearance of his physical fitness. He could really jog. The man in the orange jacket sighed, then jogged after him.
"...who the FUCK were they!?" Aiden asked.
"They seemed nice," Luz said, nodding.
Thirsha, turning away from where the two men had vanished, said: "Now, let us begin with some basic summoning practice..."
The actual mechanics of summoning was a lot more complex than Aiden would have expected. Luz hung on every single word as Thirsha detailed the correct gestures of the hand, the correct position of her fingers, the correct words that needed to be incanted, spoken, or woven from whole cloth to produce even the
beginning
of an effect. As she showed him the final gesture of the first pass, Aiden whistled softly. "This is...harder than I thought it would be."
"I did have an immortal lifespan to learn it, in my old world," Thirsha said, her voice quiet. "Now. Show me your own take on the pass."
Aiden cracked his knuckles. Breathed in. Ruffled his wings. He looked back over his shoulders, frowning. "Is there a way to get rid of the wings?" he asked.
"Not to my knowledge," Thirsha said, shrugging. "If you didn't want wings, you should have gone for Lokken."
Luz made a noise like a chewtoy being vigorously worked by a nymphomaniac in a nunnery.
"I'm not bi," Aiden said.
"Or...
are
