Chapter 302: My Girlfriends Could Steal the Sofa

Cherry’s first words on the call were that the sofa had moved, followed by Lyra explaining that this was technically correct but left out the part where Cherry had been testing whether it could.

I put the call on speaker through the room’s receiver so Bridget could hear them. She sat beside me, looking from the ringing device to the new skill instructions she could apparently read without borrowing my eyes.

Old Mate explained the change privately, leaving me responsible for translating anything that wasn’t suitable for saying before breakfast.

[System: Bridget’s permanent bond completed the link, mate. All three get your equipped skills and usable abilities while keeping their own bodies, which means you’ve become a subscription service for extremely questionable decisions.]

I wanted it on record that none of them had accepted a terms page written by me.

The rule covered flight, underwater breathing, thermal vision, Current Sense and usable smoke abilities as well as the four equipped skills. It didn’t turn anybody into a copy of my species or stretch a woman to twelve feet because I happened to enjoy the option.

Their abilities worked through their own bodies. Ether-fins could support flight, smoke could move around their existing shapes, and the theft destination needed to touch their body rather than demanding coils they didn’t possess.

They didn’t receive Old Mate, my phone, my possessions or a duplicate account full of EXP and IP. The System supplied the necessary skill instructions, while purchases and replacements still came through my equipped list.

[System: Swap one out and it changes for all four of you, champ. Each person runs their own cooldown after activation, but joining copies any time you’ve still got left, and swapping isn’t a cheeky fucking reset button.]

Four people with my shopping history sounded less like a power upgrade and more like a reason to increase the deposit on everything we rented.

I explained the rules to the girls, including the removals. Nobody had Nuh-Uh, Miniature Multitude or Snake-Eyes Gamble anymore, no matter how useful an old scene made them sound in memory.

Cherry had moved the sofa because its center was within three meters and the space beside her actually fitted it. It had arrived at full weight, blocking the wardrobe and demonstrating why a power could work perfectly while the decision remained rubbish.

Lyra made her wait the forty-five seconds before moving it back. That felt reassuring until she asked whether the same trick worked on the casino’s locked cash trolley, at which point I became interested in who else could hear the call.

"Yes, love, if you could see the actual target and it fitted, but please start with something that wouldn’t make the accountants think we were under attack."

Bridget chose a cushion for her own first test. It moved from the chair into the open space touching her knee, and her face changed in a way that made every disaster of the previous day feel briefly worthwhile.

She wasn’t watching me do something impossible. She was doing it herself, and the little delighted laugh she tried to hide made me want to show her everything at once.

We started small instead. Galaxy Brain let her sort the instructions without fog or confusion, but she still had to practice making her body respond, just as knowing a dance didn’t mean her feet had learned it.

Thermal vision changed what she could perceive. She described the warm pipe behind the cabinet, then adjusted back when the extra information became distracting rather than pretending more detail automatically made every task easier.

For underwater breathing, we used the bath with me beside her and her hand resting on the rim. She lowered her face, took a careful breath and came up laughing at the oddness rather than gasping for air.

"That was considerably prettier than my first attempt at understanding my body, sweetheart. Mine mostly involved trying to bite things and discovering that I was the thing people wanted to bite."

She splashed me, which I accepted as a fair review of the lesson. On the call, Cherry demanded a turn at flight before Lyra reminded her that the casino ceiling remained an actual ceiling.

We kept the flight test low and clear of furniture. Bridget’s new ether support moved with her own wings, adding the shared function without replacing what already belonged to her.

Current Sense needed water movement to read, so she tested it in the bath while I disturbed the surface from the opposite end. Strong splashing muddied the signal, an inconvenient limit we were much happier discovering indoors than during a torpedo argument.

Bio-Recall remained a lethal ability with the same conditions, including qualifying unnatural mutation and actual eye contact. We didn’t turn a morning lesson into an experiment on a living target just to prove the icon worked.

Red Light got an empty rolling cart in the clear corridor. Bridget stopped it for two seconds, watched it resume and then caught the handle normally while I reminded her that passengers wouldn’t politely freeze along with their vehicle.

[System: Four people who can stop traffic and none who’ve passed a driving test together. This family’s going to make the news for reasons nobody puts on a Christmas card.]

We were starting with a cart, which counted as restraint by our standards.

The call ended when somebody knocked at the casino’s staff door. Lyra said she would answer after putting the room back in order, while Cherry sounded much too pleased with how useful the sofa trick might become.

Downstairs, the cow lady called up that the morning delivery had arrived with three extra collection fees nobody had agreed to pay.

Bridget looked at me, then at the little cooldown timer beside her theft skill. Her smile was entirely her own, which somehow made the expression much more worrying than if she had copied it from me.

"We should probably read the invoice first," she said, already heading toward the stairs with the confidence of someone who had just discovered several new ways to disagree.