Why are you special?

Basking in the afterglow of Wanda "thanking" me for the milking, I get directions from David and head to the prisoners, a smile on my face.

As I see the unconscious bodies lying there - four men and two women - I consider: How do I want to play this?

Diplomacy would make them friendly, and that might let me get them to talk. Intimidate does the same via fear. Bluff and disguise… yeah, getting them to think I'm their proper report would be a really hard sell when I don't even know their names.  Dominate… yeah, that’s not perfectly reliable, as Fred taught me. Oh. Scribe's Binding. I can read them like a book, just like I did with Fred. And I'll at least be able to tell if anyone has tampered with them via that Sense Motive check in the spell. Perfect….

Six quick castings of Persistent Scribe's Binding later, I have six magical tomes, which I memorize via Scholar's Touch and Autohypnosis. And they know… basically nothing about the day to day operations of their masters… don’t even know who their masters are, really.  They’re paid via dead drops and get orders via similar methods triggered by prearranged signals set up by middlemen; they never encounter the actual clients, and the middlemen only rarely… and how that came to be has been wiped from their minds; there’s blank spots in their pages, also altered sections that aren’t trustworthy.  Of course: Mind control and memory probes are a thing, so the field agents are kept in the dark.  Great.  Hmm… I can at least track one.  Six Freedom spells give them back their bodies, freeing them from their bookish state, and I pick one of the girls at random for a Heightened Persistent Chain of Eyes spell. It’s a fun spell from Spell Compendium.  It’s just second level on the Sorcerer or Wizard spell list, and also shows up on the Cleric (at third level) and Druid (at fourth level) spell lists.  You touch a creature, and can borrow their eyes.  Whenever the currently affected creature touches another, the spell gives me the option of trying to transfer the sensor to the creature touched.  The new target gets a new save to end the spell… but I have a very high Charisma, and so that’s quite difficult… and they’ll need to roll twice and take whichever is worst, thanks to Persistent Spell. I’m blind while I’m actually using it, but blindsense and blindsight will cover me fine for most things.  It’s a Divination spell… but it does NOT have the Scrying tag, so it’s not subject to things like leaded rooms or being spotted with a good Perception check… and it’s not separate from the creature, so things like See Invisibility won’t notice it either. Oh yes, and because everything I cast is permanent and non-magical… well, I can keep up the remote stakeout for a long time.

That done, we leave the room, and once we’re elsewhere I have Oscar release them from his enchantment of sleep … which is quite easy.  You see, he picked it up as a “temporary talent”, which means it ends as soon as he trades it out for another talent the exact same way he switched it in - the Veilweaving Sphere.  It’s quite useful: There’s a Veil set - Sphereshaper - of a little over forty veils, each of which has an associated magic or combat sphere from Spheres of power.  Veil Knowledge gets him (at his caster level of 45) gets him ten known.  He takes it five times, and gets the entire Sphereshaper set, plus a few.  Add in Sphereshaper’s Talent, which lets him gain real Spheres magic talents from the associated sphere for veils he has bound, and Shift Veil to rapidly switch which veils he has bound, and… well, I had him spend a few talents on other things, but he can pick up twenty combat or magic talents from sixteen combat and eighteen magic spheres arbitrarily by spending a spell point as a move action… and I can provide him the spell points.  They’re not necessarily permanent, nor are they necessarily non-magical… but he’s very, very flexible.  And the temporary nature of his magic talents known has an occasional benefit, in that it gives him an easy way to drop a running effect: Lose the magic talent that spawned it, which is just another spell point and move action for him. And I can feed him the spell points.

When they wake, I keep an eye on my surroundings with Blindsight as I watch through my victim's eyes.

Yeah. This kind of spying gives me the heebie-jeebies, and the dissonance of Blindsight vs. her sight while walking around is making me a little dizzy. But… well, I’m spying on a spy, or maybe an assassin. And I don't have very far to go… I just need to get back to Wanda so I can ask her what she found.

The walk goes much more smoothly once I remember I can switch back to my own vision.

Soon enough, I'm sitting just left of Wanda on her bed, with Oscar watching the door… constructs: So obedient. She still hasn't gotten dressed, and that's fine by me. David is sleeping off his session with her, also still unclothed, right behind us. My buffs make him immune to fatigue (that aspect is from the Sheltered Vitality spell, specifically), but after a couple of rounds with Wanda, pretty much any guy is super relaxed,  and that lends itself well to falling asleep.  Alfred is in a similar state, but he's curled up on the floor, his tail twitching slightly and his wings folded close to his body.

I wrap an arm around Wanda's waist as I begin, "So what did you find out?"

Wanda practically purrs as I stroke the side of her right udder, "Ahh, that's nice … there's no one thing that always applies beyond 'rarely' and 'just the head family'... oh, and apparently the head family doesn't marry outside the head family…."

I nibble on her left ear as I slide my right arm underneath her bosom and towards her folds, "So what sorts of examples do people have?"

"Keep going…" Wanda starts to pant as she answers, "About three years ago one burned an iron golem to death with a spell…."

Sounds like something I might do to show off: Iron golems are normally repaired by magical fire, you can't hurt them with it, "Keep going yourself…" I slide my hand into her dripping folds… still slightly slimy from Alfred, but I can deal.

"Ooh, that's the stuff…" Wanda moans as she continues, "And about a decade ago, one erected a building in seconds… a full building, still there today."

I start pumping my fingers slowly in and out of her as I use my other hand to bring one of her milkers to my mouth, "Anything more?" I start sucking on her tap.

"Yes…" she bites her lip, "... but nothing I could verify that can't be explained with 'normal' magic."

And she is still hopped up from earlier, based on her twitching down there… I pause sucking to ask another question,  "Are they suffering from the kinds of deformities expected from inbreeding?" and go right back to it as I speed up my hand.

"Faster… harder…" Wanda's having a bit of trouble concentrating now… "No… not at all… strange…"

So either they're lying about the incest thing, or it doesn't apply to them for some reason, or it doesn't apply here… and the me at my office confirms it is a risk here per my divine books.

I drop her milk tap from my mouth long enough to say, "Thank you," and rub Wanda to completion, making sure both of her girls are well stimulated with my mouth and left hand while my right handles her insides. I have her screaming out my current adopted name soon enough.  She's such a fun pet.

And of course, I'm tireless, and now that I'm sitting down, I can simply keep going as I am while I do the boring work of watching through the eyes of my compromised spy slash assassin for a good chance to switch to a better proxy.

That takes a while. Now that I have my hands-on entertainment, though, time passes quickly as I watch through the mark's eyes as she has dinner, books a room at an inn, orders up a private bath, undresses, bathes… she really enjoys her baths; I don't bother looking up Frank in her stored memories, but that’s the name she calls out… dries off, and goes to sleep, alone in her bed.

Once I'm sure she's sound asleep, I take stock… Alfred and David are still sleeping, Wanda is… technically awake, but quite out of it, and the straw wrapped in cloth that this place calls a mattress is a lost cause. They might be able to reuse the bedframe if they scrub it a bit. Oscar is still watching the door, bless his nonexistent heart.  

And I’m clean as a whistle a moment after I take my hand out of Wanda: The Fastidiousness spell handles that. And yes, I included that buff for all of my companions. If I'm going to be traveling with people, I want them clean, and it's easy to mix in with the others.

Still… there's only so much I can gather indirectly. At some point, I'll need to meet these people.

But that can wait until morning. For now… I watch Wanda jiggle as she breathes.