The hand of god, still fleshly formidable even meagre. The hand of man: elegant but not weak, somewhere between twunk and otter. Sutta grasped, Crow grasped, and a little flicker of upheld cycle: grab and go, once more.
The pure long range teleport corridor was a bright cyan with circuitry both darker and lighter. Maybe the mask was more than the man beneath it, zodiac and heaven. Crow, or at least that thing in human shape and corvidae visor, was in this life light and a smug joyous perhaps associated with delinquency, dark over golden light. He had perhaps indwelt, supped so much on the radiant essence of his master as to be obscene, or simply been a hand. Yellow hair, fair skin, brown eyes, light build to physical senses, well hung. Insofar as beyond the mask there was actual clothing, a white robe that bore black feather patterns and an inconsistent enough 'little else' that Sutta was pretty sure it was some form of magic to be appropriately-clothed per scenario. To divinity, a morass of could-bes split atop the 'basic' cultivation that the Turning of the Wheel treated as a resetting-shape. The mask was more important than the physique, at this point. Priests these days...
Teleportation was instantaneous, but what Sutta had in eyes Crow had a similar eye for value. Besides, Sutta would be presenting himself to humans. Better to compress possibility into a frame. To physical shape, Sutta was tall, dark, handsome, and muscular. A black man, sure, but black in the way of deep ebon almost blue that might pass for Sudanese. Lighter spots of silvery-blue that could pass for tattoos or costume makeup freckled his body like the few stars battling urban light pollution. Very short hair of conventional darkness both atop the hair and on the face, as if left unshaven after being previously shaved. He was wearing a nice fur coat and something that could probably be called breeches with boots, looking like royalty or wealth blurred across time and place.
To the senses of divinity, and to a scrying Strategem... More. Much more. Teaching, speech, a canon of majesty in a library of divine sparks. The second living god to walk this world since the last war, alive only at the direct command of the other. The word, the thing after death, the answer. Even being cleaved to dead letter was but quiescence, particularly given the literacy of humanity. Crow had stared into the divine wheel and come away horny: it wasn't that much harder to treat a library as sexy when it came in the form of a well-read attractive man.
Space resumed, time stopped doing that 'picturesque glance' thing, frames slotted into place, and the little differences sorted themselves out. Gravity, atmospheric pressure, displaced air, a little ruffling of the details in mass and momentum... Certainly it worked. It was something that straddled the line between 'long term hotel room' and 'penthouse', a fancy suite in a fancier complex. The home away from home of wealth and power, business turned residence turned pleasure.
"Care to try out that new flesh you've put on?" Crow teased, in a way that was pretty clearly reading Sutta's casual glance as the kind of behavior Turner of Wheels seduced with.
Well, he wasn't wrong. Sutta shrugged. "Might as well test-drive what I'm packing. Sex fine with you?"
"More than fine," Crow said, loosening his robe and confirming that the little-else he was wearing could be 'some form of underwear' consistently enough to set it aside and take the rest with it. Or, no, it was suddenly some form of amulet. A clothing-projector? Potentially kinky but probably just a fashion choice. The mask stayed on, though it withdrew into something shorter that more shaded his eyes than concealed them. "Let's get started."
(Sutta's curiosity made him bother to look at the passively-overlooked, and his new spark finally commented on the ambiguous outfit 'Defensive strike, projects clothing at will, energy cost mooted by attunement-based cap reduction while active'. Some ancillary technical data followed, but that didn't matter at present.)
Sutta dismissed his clothing more than took it off, a little rustle of fur and starlight as text returned to text. At any rate, both men were well endowed in that their flaccid was intentionally a bit larger than some people's hard-ons. For Sutta this was proportionality in a body built to be attractive to a given dynamic. For Crow it was convenient biology he'd only really change for sex reasons. Not that Crow was staying flaccid, already close to half-mast. Sutta was a bit taller than Crow, perhaps a half-head or so, and allowed himself to contemplate this height difference in one of the lesser thoughts gods may have in ancillary consciousnesses. Crow approached, fondling the god's impressive package with long, slow strokes. Sutta allowed his emulation of biology to let it harden in response to stimulation, steadying upward.
"Before we really get going," Sutta noted, "I should probably self-express a bit more."
With the sort of neck-roll of someone stretching and sideways hip shake of someone about to shake their booty, two more bodies of Sutta expressed into space like a triplication powerup in trailing light. A twosome suddenly becoming a foursome was not particularly expected, but not entirely unexpected either. Hot trios were still hot, obviously.
"Three cocks for the price of one, oh joy." Crow said, already falling to his knees. With his mouth he began to lick Sutta's initial penis, and with his hands he grasped the other two.
The priest certainly knew how to satisfy the physical body, but his spiritual aspects were more tentative. Sutta decided to be physically receptive, but more spiritually active. He opened a simple telepathic channel of intent (more 'sexual consent affirmation' than divine revelation) and allowed his essence to spread a little further from its embodiments. Crow gave the very slightest of human starts but shifted it instead into a longing glance, before managing affirmation over data. From the divine library were reviewed entries on 'erection', 'tentacle', 'onahole', and so Sutta's essence coiled in word around Crow's manhood to fondle him as a deep god might study a substrate. The very gentlest of suction just to titillate, a soft stroking around the balls. A perusal of 'arousal', 'stimulation', suddenly 'prostate': to directly toy with the body is the prerogative of a god with mind-over-matter. And of course, to gently(ish) give the reward of being pounded without being pounded.
Crow came. Sutta siphoned the resulting physical essence (mostly semen and some additives), felt like doing more, and so punctuated the concept of orgasm. Orgasm. Orgasm. Orgasm, from 'swell or be excited'. Sutta's physiology filled Crow's mouth and the other two instances bukakke'd over him for good measure. All three god-bodies watched with bemusement as Crow experienced all of it, squirting a few more times. Certainly he remained a bit swelled downstairs and very excited upstairs, but mindblowing was pretty much just getting a bit handsy for gods. Well, Sutta was a little-god at present and the priest had a job to do, best not overdo it.
'Absorption'. 'Cleansing'. A simple reading to introduce the concepts into the surrounding space, taking what was worth taking and cleaning up the rest. Neatly sorted.
"So that's another notch on my gods list..." Crow mutter-babbled with that smile of someone coming down from a high. "Post nut clarity multiplier is awesome."
"It helps shake out the loops, yes." Sutta answered, recoalescing into one man and glancing down at his own fingernails as if he did not perfectly control their length and just cleanse them of impurity for good measure. "I assume the Turner prefers his own cycles."
"Not usually so reciprocal, yeah." Crow said, manifesting underwear from that clothing-setter and letting the robe-thing lapse into ambiguity until he needed it. "Sometimes, but I think he just wants to put me throughout a cycle and check."
"Others don't usually lay with him?" Sutta bothered to inquire, seeing as it would probably affect his job responsibilities if they did.
"Nah, they're all... aspected." Crow started, shrugging then stretching his arms. "Wolf is more adoration than culmination. Jackal loves accumulation but the finish is the wrong kind of short-term. What Alligator does has more in common with violent change, though they do it just because it's hard on a frame."
"I guess you're sort of reflecting his lust." Sutta stated flatly, corroborating memories and gifts with plausible trends.
"Naturally." Crow said. "Wolf and I may disagree on beauty standards, Jackal hates it being kinda flat, but Alligator gets me when I'm trickster."
"Cycles be cycling." Sutta demurred, looking out the hotel window at the urban Japanese morning.
A knock on the hotel door prompted both men to remanifest more substantial clothing.
"I'll get it!" Crow yelled in the door's general direction, opening it to the sight of Jackal's put-upon maid-bodyguard, nametagged Anput Nephthys. She was an older lady but you wouldn't know the 'older' part, grateful that Crow was at least trying to be decent first. Professional, dark haired, of ambiguous background and ambiguous tone, and Jackal's errand-runner for the more annoying of high-clearance errands. Some faint lineage of demigod and atavistic jotun, enough to be a little-principle like these priests-of-power no investment needed. Good for Turner on opportunistic HR, Sutta would have to find out the details later.
"Preparations, Cabalist." she stated stiffly, handing over a card pack. "Jackal's public persona is handling matters."
"Oh, sweet, he's come around." Crow said, tearing it open and watching it disintegrate with the card packs into knowledge. Sutta knew it as some vague domain effect related to 'communication of relevant communications', and his new spark helpfully appended it was almost certainly an Exposition Stratagem. Some form of magical infodump effect, good. The particulars were mostly telling Crow to keep it in his pants, out of other people's pockets, and away from their shiny things generally until the new norm normalized. Sutta had already been given a substantial portion of public story in his own onboarding infodump, this was just the priests having to back-fill technology and memetics. Probably he had been gifted the cleanup because the Turner of Wheels was tired of modpack configuration...
The Asiatic Intro Tourney would be mostly Jackal's wealth and Wolf's distribution onboarding the old levers of rich and powerful into the newer ones Crow had built. The Turner of Wheels had greased himself (at least somewhat literally if Crow's muttered commentary of Alligator and a deep fryer was to be believed), and done some opening amendments to expected play patterns as playtesting was underway. So the actual practicalities would be divinely graced to 'it just works', mercifully enough. Sure, Crow and later Alligator had been shaking things up to shake them up. Sending out new packages and bonus bosses was going to adjust matters. But the centerpiece would be a matter of bugtesting and oath-amending.
The Turner's initial draft had assumed some firmer partner-play dynamics than were actually present. Some amendments were issued for solo magi and mediums, mostly things like 'conditions under which using the other type of effects is permissible' and 'summoning/self-partition to get partners or vessels'. So there were rituals, transformations and proxies that could emerge if a player wanted to prove something or test something, but it would be less energy-efficient. And subject to a bit of perversion, if the aspects used were not the best choices. Mode-switching and energy-economy effects would definitely become basegame, potentially even as cardless abilities powered by circumstance. Speaking of cardless effects, card acquisition needed a bit of inflow to balance out... Exchange rituals and something related to kink-triggered card formation would allow expensive or sexy actions to actually generate additional cards, reducing the ritual infrastructure strain on existing cultists. Reality-building also stemmed from other reality-building, so people could try writing heartfelt fictions and ideals to the misinterpretative non-mercies of cycling phases. Really there'd be some anime stuff specifically so the wheel could put friction only where it wanted to...
"C'mere, you two, check this." Crow said, manifesting some tablet-laptop thing similar to Sutta's and pulling up a collection of images. "I have some ideas on how we get started."