Gemini giggled and then asked, “Why not? My power is really strong, but it’s so cumbersome. Honestly, when you took control of my body I actually felt a sense of relief. There was no headache or pain, just pure pleasure… And fear. But once I realized what was happening, the fear vanished. Putting aside whether we could become immortal, I would like to meet you in person. To see what would happen when our four minds connected… Would we be able to speak telepathically like Cicada? Or would one of us completely overpower the other?”

“Cicada is a telepath?” After pausing for a second, Ana continued: “Wait, no, more importantly… What if we accidentally fuse into a single hive-mind and then effectively die, while that new persona takes over in our stead? Or we might just both go into a coma if we aren’t careful.”

“You like Cicada? So that’s why you were masturbating… Interesting.” She snickered softly while speaking with her other mouth, “I’ve been with Cicada lots of times and never had any trouble before. Her telepathy is very gentle and relaxing. My remote viewing lets me see through the eyes of animals and people, sometimes I don’t even need a medium at all, but yours… Your power is definitely different. It’s similar, sure, but so much more violent and domineering. You’re already technically controlling two bodies, yet you still have enough mental strength to spare.”

I snickered and shook my head, replying as Michael this time: “You’re actually two bodies as well, right? Two heads, four arms, a tail… A lot of extra information needs to be processed all the time just for you to function. So it’s possible that our powers are almost the same. The only difference being that you’re much more adept at using yours and it takes a bigger toll in return. While I’m still not sure what the fuck I’m doing and have to use way more ‘psychic power’ to just live my life with two independent bodies.”

“Aaahan~!” I heard two loud yawns coming from the phone, before Gemini sighed and told me: “I really want to meet you Michael. Do you know how hard it is to survive on your own when you can only stay awake for a few hours a day? You might be right. When I was younger, I never had this problem. But now, the time I can stay awake is getting less and less, as my powers grow stronger. I can feel it… I’m both afraid and somewhat relieved. But now that I know you exist… Can you blame me for grasping at a chance to survive?”

“Well… Hah~, fuck it. If you want to see me, you know where I live. How far away is your place from mine? Keep in mind that the farthest I’ve traveled on the island so far is to Eve-er-Chameleon’s house… Then again, I have been wanting to go Kayaking lately, but just never really built up the courage.” I sighed and got up off the bed, handing the phone to Ana and heading into the bathroom to take a shower. Also to brush my teeth. If I was going to meet Gemini, I didn’t wanna leave too bad of an impression.

Ana stood up and held the phone as she looked out the bedroom window… The Southern one, which allowed me to see the distant mountains. I didn’t see any weird portals or whatever, but it did give me a creepy feeling when I thought about it.

I could hear Gemini fumbling with something, or multiple things. Then I realized that she had four fucking arms, which meant that while one was holding the phone, she still had three hands to get dressed or packed, or whatever.

“I’ll come over to your house. I live less than a mile away to the west… I should be able to make it there before I pass out. I guess I’ll see you soon.” After that, she hung up and I started getting Ana dressed. She said to the West, which is the opposite direction of Chameleon’s house. So I was going to try and meet her halfway.

Although we only talked for a few minutes and really didn’t know each other too well, she seemed pretty nice. I couldn’t in good conscience just chill at home while she walked a mile through a fucking jungle to meet me, right? Well, I definitely could, but I still wanted an excuse to go outside and ‘explore’ the island a bit.

Of course, I wasn’t going out there unarmed or unprepared. First I put on some blue jeans, even though it was hot and I’d rather walk around in a bathing suit, who knows what kinda bugs and venomous snakes are lurking around. I wore a white sports bra, then a long-sleeved checkered green and black button-up shirt. Which I tucked into the jeans. I put on a ‘clean’ black belt, yes I clean my fucking belts, otherwise that’s gross.

Holstered my revolver on my right hip, a combat knife on the left, strung a shotgun across my back, made sure to grab a lot of extra ammo in case of emergencies. Put on a backpack that had emergency medical supplies, foodbars, water, energy drinks and some more ammo. Then I went downstairs, put on my heavy black combat-boots with steel toes.

When I went outside I smirked as I looked at the simple shooting gallery I set up in my front yard. All the targets had the ocean at their back. It had a lot of wood cut-outs, empty bottles and cans, stuff like that. There were also those straw targets for archery, so that my arrows wouldn’t be damaged during practice. After all, it’s kinda impossible to ‘make’ carbon-fiber arrows and titanium arrow-heads right now…

After that I started walking… In the wrong direction. After reaching Chameleon’s house, I sighed and turned around to walk past my house and followed the rocky beach. There were some areas of sand, but for the most part it was just waves crashing on big jagged barnacle-covered rocks. There were lots of little crabs and shrimp, hell, even some anemones and other weird creatures that looked colorful, but probably super dangerous. I also saw some baby crocodiles looking up at me curiously from the shallow water. They were kinda cute to be honest, but didn’t have the same uh ‘spiritual wisdom’ that those Guardians of Eden possessed. Basically they were normal-ish animals instead of cybernetically enhanced monsters.

Either way, I wasn’t too worried about them. I was more concerned when I saw the occasional bright-red or green snake hissing at me from the tall grass nearby. By the time I made it past a burned down building, which was covered in vegetation and inhabited by what looked like a bunch of komodo dragons or monitor lizards, Michael had finished his shower and put on some ‘clothes’. Basically just brown boxers and a white t-shirt. He picked up the phone and made a call to Gemini, but it didn’t connect. Said that the number I was dialing was unavailable.

“Hmmm…” I was a little curious, but figured that there might be some kinda connection between the various houses rather than a signal tower. In other words, even if Ana had taken the cellphone with her outside, it would have been totally useless.

Anyway, while komodo dragons look kinda cute, they’re actually extremely dangerous. I didn’t really want to test the limits of Ana’s immune system by getting bitten by venomous lizards or infected by deadly bacteria if it could be avoided. Thus I quickly continued along the shoreline and into a small pineapple tree grove. All the while I was looking around warily. Michael was laying on the bed with his eyes closed so that I could focus entirely on Ana’s surroundings.

After a few seconds, I reached a huge clearing. And I mean gigantic. Unlike my house on the hill or that ruined building that was surrounded by foliage and trees, this place was at least a few acres of cleared land. Tall chain-link barbed wire fences surrounded a massive pasture, with several barns and a decent sized house in the center of the property. It smelled like shit. Cow, pig, dog and chicken shit to be specific.

“Fucking A… How the hell do I get around this shit?!” The fence didn’t extend into the water, but there was a huge concrete bulkhead on the shore instead of a beach or rocks. In other words, unless I wanted to go for a short swim, I needed to either go pretty deep into the jungle or climb along the fence. It was a long fucking fence by the way.

“Arf! Arf arf arf!”

“Woof, woof!”

“Baaehehe~!”

“Ehehehe~!”

“Mooo~!”

As I was trying to decide, I started hearing dogs barking, goats and sheep yapping, along with cows making loads of noise. Of course, I could also see in the distance that there were at least five big golden retrievers gathering noisily around the other end of the fence, along with some cows, chickens, goats and even a couple pigs. There were plenty of other animals spread throughout the property, but they weren’t nearly as noisy or boisterous as the ones over there.

Ana’s eye-sight was pretty good, so once she squinted a bit, I could see a pretty normal-looking blonde woman that was riding on the back of a majestic white stallion. She rode over to a huge metal gate and unlocked it, before a familiar figure appeared.