The door burst open, and an old woman in her nightgown greeted us with her presence. She saw me in Nia’s arm and asked, “Who’s this?”
“Your new helper.” Nia smiled.
“Ah?” Marmar was confused. She was a woman with grey hair, thin lips, and a wrinkled face. Also, she had a prosthetic hand made out of wood.
“Are you going to let us in, or what?” Nia teased.
“Ah, sure.” Marmar stepped out of the way and let us in. The inside was slightly better than the outside. It was clean and organised.
“What happened to her?” She read my sad face.
“Stole food.” Nia summarised the whole incident. She spun me around and showed my back to her.
“Oh.” She saw my back and got the gist of it. She was quick to help. “Lay down over there,” she pointed at her bed. “On your stomach. I’ll get the herbs.” She muttered and shuffled over to the cabinet. I followed her instructions and laid on her bed with my face on the pillow. “I need to make more… Tell the fatty to get me more flax seeds.” She brought over a jar of brownish-green paste.
“Reem?”
“Who else.” She sat down on the bed beside me and studied my back. “She went easy on you.”
“She was obedient.”
“Is that right…” She pulled down my pants and looked at the mark on my ass. “I guess that makes it official. Welcome to the crew.”
“Thanks, I guess,” I mumbled into the pillow.
Nia opened the jar for her. “So, what did she do?” She asked as she scooped up the paste and applied it to my skin. I grunted.
“Stole some wine and food.”
“Hmm… How did she get in there?”
“The door was open, apparently.”
“How did she get into the amusement park?”
Their eyes looked to me for an answer. “I climbed over the wall.”
“So, you did more than just steal food,” Marmar mumbled as she applied more of the brownish paste to my wounds. It stung. “You better not tell her.” She told Nia.
“I won’t.” They became silent, and my moans and grunts filled up the room. Finally, when all my wounds were covered up by the medicine, Nia closed the jar and said, “Then I’ll be off. I’ll leave the rest to you.”
“You want a magician to help me with the animals?” Marmar asked, taking the jar from her.
“She’s a magician?” Nia scrutinised me.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Can’t you tell?” Marmar shook her head. “Look at how soft and smooth her skin is.”
“Do all magicians have soft skin?” Nia inquired.
“Ye-.”
“No.” We interrupted each other with Marmar answering ‘yes’.
She looked down at my tired body and clicked her tongue, “Forget it.”
Nia yawned. “All right, I’m going. You take care of her.”
“You going to bed?”
“Why? You want to go for some drinks?”
“I thought we drink outside for a bit.”
“Ah…” She thought about it for a moment and refused. “Nah, I have an early day tomorrow.”
“You do?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” She pursed her lips into a line.
“All right, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Make sure you ask Reem about flax seeds.”
“Alright, when I get the chance.” With those final remarks, she walked out the door.
“Bye.”
Nia waved the back of her hand as she walked away.

Marmar closed the door and sat down on the chair beside the bed. She looked at  my half-naked body and asked, “What were you thinking climbing over the  walls?”
“Ah… Nothing. I was just wandering around.”
“You have friends? Family?”
“No.” I shook my head.
“Where were you living? Or should I ask where are you living?”
“What do you mean? I’m a bum. I just sleep wherever I can.”
She leaned over, grabbed my hand and examined it. Flipping it back and forth… “It’s soft.”
I groaned and pulled my hand out of her grasp. “Does it matter if my hands are soft?”
“I have lived in the streets for many years. Even for a magician- Living out in the streets… Who were you living with?”
“No one,” I said defensively. Was she this keen in the game, I wondered. Our eyes locked in the dim room. The clock ticked… And she gave.
She sat back on her chair and said, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Here, we don’t care about a woman’s past.” She looked  over my clothes, the mark on my ass, and the brownish paste on my back. “We can talk when you feel better. More comfortable.” She rose from her seat and moved to the lamp. “You can have the bed tonight. I’ll take the couch.” She turned the light off.

***

I woke up to Marmar cleaning my back. “Don’t move.” She warned when she noticed me wake up. “I’m going to put some Melo leaves on your back. It should cool the pain and keep it from getting dirty.” Beside her was a bucket filled with water; inside it were long strips of leaves.
“Okay.” So she took out these long strips of wet leaves and put them over my wounds. They were sticky and stuck to my back. “I need new pants,” I told her.
“You can wear one of mine.”
“And a new shirt would be nice too.”
She was annoyed but agreed nonetheless. “I’ll give you one of mine.”
“Okay…”

“There,  all done.” She patted my back, which made me hiss. She giggled. “Go pick out whatever you want from the closet, and I’ll cook us up something to eat.”
“Okay…” I rose from the bed, and my breasts wobbled freely. I moved to the closet and went through her clothes.
“Don’t pick out anything fancy. You’ll be working. Pick out something  that goes with those boots. Any of those boots.” She pointed to the bottom of the closet, where laid pairs of boots. She then walked off with the bucket of leaves.
I looked at the pairs of boots on the ground and wondered, “Which one’s yours.”
“I’m wearing mine.” I glanced at her feet, and sure enough, she had on boots. I scanned her from head to toe. She was dressed for work. A grey rubber coat, cargo shorts, and steel boots. I picked out similar stuff from her closet while she prepared our breakfast. When I sat down at her little dining table, fully dressed, she smiled, “We’re having Ostpoor  omelettes.” The egg was the size of my head and green as grass. She cracked it open and poured it onto a sizzling pan. I had noticed she’d  replaced her prosthetic hand with a wooden spoon. She threw in some cut-up onions, peppers, leeks, parsley, and garlic. And mixed it all up, her wooden spoon spinning like a twister on the pan. The trailer filled with the fresh scent of breakfast.

“Fresh Ostpoor omelette, Marmar style.” She smiled and slid a plate of it to me. I noticed one of her teeth was missing.
“Smells delicious. Thank you.” I dug in.
She sat down with a plate of her own and ate with me.

****

After breakfast, we went out to the zoo. “First, I’ll show you the Ostpoor coop. So you know how to gather the eggs.” She led me to a giant wire dome. Inside the wire dome was a wooden house. “It takes me forever with only one hand.” She showed me her wooden hand. “With you around, it’ll be a lot easier.” I felt guilty knowing I’d be gone after fucking the twins. And she’d be left to do everything on her own again.
“Ah… right.”
“Come on.” She opened the metal door. The door was kind of small, and we had to bend down to get into the dome. She led the way to the coop. The sun was only halfway up, and the day was still new. “They won’t be up for a few more hours.” She whispered as we climbed the Ostpoor coop ladder to the wooden door.
“So they’re not like chickens.” I knew cocks liked to cry early in the morning. Or was it they liked to stiffen?
“No.” She shook her head. The coop door was big and matched the size of an Ostpoor. They were asleep and balled up in their made-up nests when we went in. Their colours ranged from grey to green, and their feathers were puffy. Marmar pushed her body against one of them and pointed, “See, new eggs.”
“Yeah.” I saw it. Green, oval, and big as a human head.
“Grab it.” She hissed.
“Right, okay.” I jumped to work and grabbed the eggs away from its butt.
“Alright, good.” She approved. “Now, let’s see about the others.” She pushed against another Ostpoor and, tipping it, looked beneath it.  “Nothing. Let’s see.” She hopped from one to the next, tilting each to check for eggs beneath their bums. She did this without waking any of them up. “Ah, there.” She cheered whenever we found an egg. “Grab it.”  She encouraged. I picked them up and gathered them near the door. The Ostpoor coop had two floors, each filled with nests. So we went up and did more searching… There were 23 Ostpoors in all.

All in all, we found 6 eggs. When we came out with them in our arms - I had 4, and she held 2 - she said, “Today was a good day. Usually, I find around 3 or 4.”
“Oh, okay.” I nodded along.
“We have to check these guys first thing every morning.”
“Okay.”
“The amusement park will be open in a few hours, and all the domestic animals will be open for viewing. Kids will be coming in to pet them and  all that…”
“Oh, okay.” I just nodded along and followed her out the wire dome.
“So we have to do all these animals - monsters - first.” Ostpoor’s had cores, so they were technically monsters. But since they could be domesticated and it was more beneficial to keep them alive than to harvest their cores, they weren’t treated like monsters. “Then we can deal with the monsters that are just monsters. Those ones, we gotta keep fed so they can perform for the show. The show is still the biggest pull in this place. Even with all the new rides and fancy stuff, people love the show.” We walked back to her trailer. She struggled with the door for a second but got it open somehow. “We can put these here in my basket.” She put the eggs in a cushy basket. “They’ll be safe in there.” She took the eggs off my hands and put them in the basket. “One of the cooks will come around later to take away a few.”
“Ah, okay.”
“Alright, now we have to fill up the feed.” She slapped her hands clean. I followed her outside and to the back of the trailer. Piled up on one corner were buckets labelled Crown Seed. It was Ostpoor feed. “Why don’t you try lifting one of those buckets up.”
So I tried. I realised right away that it was expansion magic. The buckets were low-quality expansion magic with no weight-modification magic attached to them. Without weight magic lightening the load, it was impossible for me. I moaned and grunted and managed to lift one bucket off the ground for a few seconds. “Do I need to do this every morning?” I  was already sweating and only managed to slide it a few inches on the ground.
“Hmm…” She watched with a frown. After watching me struggle for a few more seconds, she stepped in. “Move.” She commanded and lifted it up with one hand. “One bucket has around 100 kilograms of Ostpoor feed.”
“Oh…”
“Three buckets need to be emptied into the feeding station every morning.”
“What!?”
“This job is no good for a magician…” She glanced at me, disappointed at my very existence. “But I suppose it can’t be helped,” she sighed. “I’ll teach you how to do some of the other stuff. You can leave this to  me.” I followed behind her as she carried the bucket to the Ostpoor’s  dome. “When we finish with the Ostpoors, I’ll show you how to milk the  goats.”
“Okay,” I mumbled. “You know I could try using [telekinesis] on it, but with something that heavy, I might break it.”
She heard me. “You can use [telekinesis]?”
“Ah, yeah.” I didn’t mind revealing all the spells I got until level 15.
“Hmm… That could be useful when we have to feed some of the monsters.” We dipped back into the dome. There was a feeding station beside the coop. “You don’t want to get too close to some of those suckers.” She showed me her prosthetic hand.
“Right…”
She took off the bucket’s lid and, using her knee, tipped it into the feeding station. A deluge of seeds poured into the feeder. “These buckets are expensive. You break one, and you’re stuck here for life.” I wasn’t naive; given the usury practises of the ringmaster, I was already stuck for life if I played by her rules. “We send these back to Crown Seed after they’re empty. And they fill them back up.” She explained while emptying the first bucket.
“I see…”
I followed her back and forth as she emptied two more buckets into the feeder. “Tomorrow, while I’m doing this, you’ll be milking the goats.”
“Right…”