munchausen
TMF Expert
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2001
- Messages
- 453
- Points
- 16
The Voyage Out Part 4: (Almost) Everybody Gets It. End of the Cruise, and a Beginning.
[This story is not for minors. Do not read if you are under 18.]
[Last time, our stalwart trio of female crusaders captured Dr. Mesani, the most vulnerable crew member in the know about the cruise directors’ sinister plans. Tickled beyond her endurance, Mesani is ready to talk.... If this doesn’t make sense, you really should read the first sections. On the other hand, tickling is tickling, so this section may stand alone for those unencumbered by plot concerns.]
Leah wiped Dr. Mesani’s forehead with a cool cloth as the defeated doctor regained some measure of composure. Even after Courtney reluctantly ceased her assault on the older woman’s soles, Dr. Mesani found her normally staid and professional speech laced with punchy, residual giggles. The good Doctor felt almost the way she had in college, when she had been tricked into eating three or four laced brownies during a study session. She struggled to maintain coherence.
“All right, I’ll t-tell you what I know. They’re planning on working some kind of grand magic very soon. I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t seen it work....” she trailed off into giggles.
“Get it together,” Leah said coolly.
“I-I’m sorry. It just looks so silly, the magic they use. It-It’s like Alistair Crowley via Walt Disney!” More giggles.
“What are you talking about?” asked Francesca, from her position by the sealed door.
Mesani took a deep breath, and spoke in a deeper, more controlled tone. “Whatever kind of crazy magic they use was apparently developed by this great, otherworldly sorceress aeons ago. The thing is, however powerful this woman may have been, she appears to have been something of a ditz. The type to dot her ‘i’s with little hearts, you understand. And so, her magic can only be used in certain ways–nothing overtly destructive, and always with a kind of cartoonish quality that appealed to her sensibilities. That’s why she keyed the whole system to feed off this ‘laughter energy:’ she naively envisioned a world of happy little people powering civilization through their own glee.
“The tickling, then, came about for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the only real way that the...ambitious in the other place can steal and stockpile energy. Secondly, it’s one of the few ways that this cutesie-pie magic can be shaped into an aggressive weapon. Yelena Kant, powerful as she is, always has to contend with her embarrassment about the nature of her craft.” A ripple of giggles raced through her quickly before she could tamp it down. Although the threat of tickling had abated, her long bare feet still reflexively hid one behind the other at intervals.
Leah stared, her agile mind churning like an outdated computer. She had been told, and forced to accept, so many bizarre things in the past 24 hours that she half feared that she would lose her sanity. “The only way to cope here,” she thought to herself, “is to behave as if it’s all true. Rational doubt can only slow me down here. If it isn’t true, I’ll deal with that when the time comes. I’ve seen too much to dismiss all of it. Just focus, focus on the situation as it appears...”
Francesca’s voice cut through her reverie. “Enough deep background, doctor. What are they going to do with this ship, and when?”
Dr. Mesani nodded. “As you know, they’re planning on crossing over to this other realm. They have not told me when, but it will be very soon. Now, in order to accomplish that feat with such an enormous vessel, they will need a single, mammoth burst of energy to be sustained until the process is completed. In order to achieve this, they plan a massive simultaneous assault on every passenger on this ship–a mystical (hee hee) tickle orgy!” Her giddiness returned in a rush.
“I’m sorry, it’s just all so ridiculous! But the money is real, and you won’t get in the way of that. There’s really nothing you can do–you would have to find and disable the portal transducer, and none but Yelena Kant and her closest confederates know where that is. There. That’s all I can tell you.” She uttered this last somewhat nervously, and fidgeted with her bare toes as Courtney strolled casually in her direction.
“Wait, Courtney,” Francesca said. She walked forward and fixed Dr. Mesani’s eyes with hers. “Akhana, do you know what they plan to do with the people on this ship when they cross over?”
“Well...they’ll all be set adrift, I suppose. The spells will protect them until they can be rescued–the ship’s itinerary was entered with the proper authorities. We will escape to the other side with their riches intact.” Mesani’s self-assuredness was beginning to wane. She had made a point of leaving the difficult questions unasked–a fact that had come to haunt her of late.
“No, Akhana. They are to be sold as slaves to some dark conglomerate on the other side. Harvested as sources of energy, then cast aside when their hearts burst from the strain.”
“N-no...they did not tell me...”
“Come on, Akhana. That’s the real payoff. And if you weren’t in on it, who’s to say whether you were to share our fate?”
Akhana Mesani held a rapid internal debate, trying to determine whether she should trust Francesca or Yelena Kant. The choice proved surprisingly simple. “That wicked bitch. Part of me always knew that people would be hurt in this. I suppose I have been trying not to care.”
Courtney looked skeptical. Leah and Francesca waited, noncommittal.
“All right. You may be able to find the nerve center from the observation room.”
“Observation room?”
“Yes. All the rooms are under camera surveillance from multiple angles at all times. Fortunately, the employee who mans the room is easily...distracted. It should be no great task to sneak up on him. Look in my coat pocket, there on the rack.”
Francesca reached into the pocket and produced a card key.
“That is the master key, giving entrance to all chambers. I offer this to you as a token of alliance. I will keep your secret–I have little to gain by revealing it.”
“I don’t buy it. Leave her tied up until we can figure this out,” Courtney said.
“I have appointments this afternoon. It will create much more suspicion if I am not there, and I would be easy enough to find.”
Leah sighed. “I say we trust her. She has told us more than we expected, after all.”
Francesca nodded reluctantly and began to loosen the doctor’s bonds. “Very well, Akhana. But if you betray us, the price will be great.”
With the doctor freed in exchange for the promise of secrecy and eventual cooperation, the small team formed its plans. Francesca and the doctor would go about their business to allay suspicions, while Leah and Courtney would find the observation room and use it to track down the command center.
In the observation room, Edmund Gray leaned back, opened his trousers, and proceeded to enjoy his latest spectacle. As was his habit, he had ignored his security duties in favor of lascivious pursuits, and switched all the displays to reflect a single, most interesting chamber from all angles. Today, it was the suite of Jack Fussky, Texas oil man and owner of a pair of professional sports teams, who was currently being entertained by his two cheerleader guests. The pair, both toned and deeply tanned, met with Edmund’s unreserved approval. Cissy, the shorter and younger of the two in her early twenties, had a perky body, a gleaming smile, and blonde pageboy haircut, and was the perfect counterpart to the taller of the two, a long-limbed, large-breasted knockout who went only by Trix, whose sloe-eyed beauty and waist-length black hair set her apart from her partner. His room had been a joy to watch, as the two went through cheerleader routines in various stages of undress, and frequently brought themselves, each other, and (a bit less frequently) the old man to climax with creativity and vigor.
Though certainly a virtual pro in the self-stimulation department, Edmund had trouble keeping up with the non-stop antics in the Fussky suite. The only scene he had found to match, aside from his frequent security sweeps of the women’s steam room, was the other afternoon when he had lucked into catching the cute, blonde Frost girl (he thought her name was Cassie or Cindy or something) giving in to the temptations of her own body in the bathtub in a stunningly spirited display. He had thought to tape that scene a short way in, and had virtually worn it (and himself) out since.
Today’s cheerleaderly entertainment was a classic: the girls were performing a series of “cheers” in a state of provocative semi-dress: though topless and barefoot, having discarded their halters and boots, they retained their short white skirts with, as far as the vigorously stroking but quite intent young Edmund could perceive, nothing underneath. From what little he had cared to glance at Fussky, the grizzled billionaire was busy entertaining himself in much the way that Edmund was.
As usual when watching this apex of all entertainment, Edmund was unable to pace himself, and as the two toned, tanned walking fantasies dropped into simultaneous splits, highlighted from almost every conceivable angle by the bank of monitors that stretched from floor to ceiling, Edmund blasted his sputtering tribute into a handkerchief.
Barely had he recovered and made himself presentable when a sound that he should NOT have heard–the clicking of a keycard–made him whirl to face the dynamically posed forms of that hot Laphroig woman and–whoa! The Frost girl!
They stood frozen for a moment, the young voyeur and the two interlopers, until the women realized what was happening on the monitors around them. “You dirty bastard!” Courtney said, incredulously. “You sit up here and spy on people and wank it?”
Edmund, shocked, recovered his wits quickly. “I wouldn’t be too judgmental, after your little bath yesterday.” He winked at the outraged blonde.
Courtney turned crimson. The small part of Leah that still worried about such things was glad that her small, discreet chrome “boyfriend” had not yet come out of her overnight bag.
Courtney’s response solved two problems–venting her outrage and removing Edmund as an obstacle. She kicked Edmund squarely in the balls with her sandaled foot. Edmund, hardly a warrior, dropped with a moan, clutching his injury. “Why did you have to go there?” he whined feebly.
Leah, meanwhile, was scrolling swiftly from room to room, searching for anything anomalous enough to be the central command center. Courtney, fuming, glared at the writhing Edmund with her fists planted on her hips. “I can’t believe you’d invade my privacy like that. You’re the lowest...”
“Yeah, yeah,” Edmund croaked in a pained but scornful voice. “You’ll never reach the central chamber in time. Lady Kant is summoning a Giggler for each of the passengers on this ship. They’ll start showing up any time now--they may have already begun. And once they’re summoned, they won’t wuit until the job is done.”
“Shut up, you. You’re a lying scumbag and a dirty spy...”
“Hurry and cuff him, Court. You’d feel awfully silly if he came off the floor and overpowered you while you lectured him.” Leah was more and more surprised at the authority with which she had come to carry herself since this debacle had begun. Courtney quickly complied, reddening again as she tossed the autocuffs Francesca had given her at the suffering rake. Swiftly, the small metal cuffs sprung to his wrists, yanked them behind him, and locked themselves, pinning his arms behind his back. Another tossed sphere gagged him. He groaned.
Leah quickly found the schematics Dr. Mesani had told her about, and now scanned them swiftly in search of the ship’s hidden inner sanctum. Courtney watched Edmund disdainfully as he lay slumped against the wall, and idly considered kicking him again. She tried resolutely not to remember the little “date with herself” that he had spied on. She hoped she had not been too vocal. Occasionally she stole a glance at the erotic antics on the screens in the room, then blushed and turned quickly away.
Suddenly, a dramatic change in the scene on the surrounding screens took over both of their attention....
FUSSKY’S ROOM
Jack Fussky, his evening’s ‘business’ done and towelled off his grizzled thighs and belly, laid back and relaxed as the girls stretched and cooled down after their “cheerleading” routine. Fussky, naked except for his stetson hat, sighed contentedly and scratched himself, eyes closed in peaceful meditation.
Suddenly, he jumped and snorted, eyes still closed. “Y’all gals quit that,” he snapped.
Cissy, the little blonde, was sitting by the window in the adjoining room and watching the ocean, well away from her erstwhile sugar-daddy. Trish (or Trix, as she called herself for career reasons) was just finishing a shower, and did not even hear Fussky’s gripe. “What’s that, sweetie?” Cissy called, rolling her eyes.
Jack, muttering to himself, ignored her. Then, a moment later, he felt it again--a teasing tickle on the soles of his big, knobby bare feet, sticking out the bottom of the blanket. This time, it was more insistent, and he couldn’t restrain a chuckle. “Ah said y’all qui-hi-hi-hi-HAAAAAA!” Something had grabbed his skinny ankles, pinning him in place, and began an unbearable scratching of the bottoms of both feet. He bucked helplessly and bellowed, tormented ticklishness vying with amazement as he peered over his clenched toes at the end of the bed.
A cartoonish pair of disembodied hands, sporting gloves eerily reminiscent of a Disney character, pinned his ankles to the bed, while another brought a kind of two-pronged back-scratcher to bear against his struggling feet. The gloves were all connected to each other by black cylindrical arms that met in the middle at a round “head” adorned only by a giant toothy grin. The Texas billionaire could only hoot and chortle uncontrollably as the bizarre creature tickled his feet.
Trix emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her long dark hair heavy and streaming with water. “Fussk? What’s so goddam funny?” she asked, a little annoyed. Almost simultaneously, she and Cissy reached the door to Fussky’s room and stopped dead. They gaped open-mouthed at the bizarre spectacle of the sputtering, writhing little man with the strange creature scratching the bottoms of his oversized feet. Cissy, sweet-natured and a little naive, was horrified; Trix, though also taken aback, was still somehow profoundly amused at the little tyrant’s plight.
“C-Come on he he he and he-help meeeeheheheheheheheee!” Fussky managed to blurt between gales of mirth. Tentatively, the two cheerleader concubines stepped toward the strange creature. Neither had any idea what to do--Cissy eyed a leaded glass vase uncertainly, wondering if it would deter the thing if applied with sufficient force. Trix, watching the man bounce on the bed with far more vigor than he had ever done under her, couldn’t bring herself to mobilize with any great urgency to help him.
Neither would have a chance, as it turned out. Suddenly, two silent flashes of light appeared, and two whirling shapes emerged from their centers. Each shape, a black, multi-armed, grinning twin of Fussky’s tormenter, flew with blinding speed at one of the women.
Both were still scantily clad and barefoot, and neither stood a chance. Cissy, the small, perky blonde who prided herself on her flexibility and acrobatic skills, found herself seized by her arms and legs by comically gloved hands and lifted aloft. Still naked except for her short cheerleading skirt, she found herself posed in a kind of aerial straddle, very much like a move she had done innumerable times during games. She shrieked as more hands burst forth from the center to dig into her sensitive ribs, kneading the tender muscles there and forcing a bubbling tide of manic giggles from the bare-breasted little beauty. Squealing and giggling cutely, Cissy squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head frantically as the absurd hands played her ribs like piano keys and occasionally darted into her helpless, smooth-shaven armpits. Even tickled to distraction, Cissy’s panicked mind registered a new, utterly unbearable disaster a few moments later: she let out a despairing, keening, but cute little wail as more gloved fingers began to tease and tickle the bottoms of her tiny, yet awfullly sensitive bare feet.
Trix, the tall, exotic brunette, had her own problems. A bit quicker on the uptake than Cissy, she at least had the presence of mind to wrap her long, white robe around herself as tightly as possible in an effort to shield her upper body from her strange attacker in the second before it seized her. She knew as soon as the Giggler took her, though, that she had not done herself a favor. The giggler’s arms extended to circle her entirely several times, trapping her in her robe, then hoisted her so that she lay parallel to the ground, suspended midway between floor and ceiling. The creature’s wide grin impossibly broadened as it flourished its gloved fingers in front of her frightened face, then zipped down to inflict devastating tickles on her large, wrinkle-rich bare soles. The terrible treatment of her wriggling, ticklish feet drove Trix into instant hilarity, and her deep. sultry, smoky laughter joined the crazed harmony already being created by the rapidly weakening Fussky and the writhing, jolting, squealing Cissy. As the thing zeroed in on the spot just under her toes, Trix screamed like a madwoman and cackled like a witch, body flopping like a rag doll, hair a wild dark nimbus, toes curling in fruitless desperation.
BACK IN THE OBSERVATION ROOM....
Leah and Courtney gazed flabbergasted at the strange scene; Edmund slowly, haltingly got to his feet. Forcing her attention back to the task at hand, Leah pulled up another schematic and scanned it rapidly, searching for a route to the central chamber. Both her concentration and Courtney’s rapt attention to the Fussky suite were shattered suddenly by the sudden flash of blinding light to Courtney’s right. Courtney let out a yell as the creature popped into being, its eerie disembodied grin mocking her. For an instant she had a wild impression of an animated 7-up dot, or the little green thing on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books; then the thing was on her and thought, both rational and irrational, all but stopped. The weird hands grabbed the pony-tailed young blonde and yanked her to the ground, pinning her shoulders to the carpet and hoisting her tanned legs up off the floor so her body made an ‘L’ shape. Hands pinned her ankles together, grabbed her sandals, stripped her barefoot; then, two more appeared and produced oversized, electric green plumes and began whisking them playfully over the soles of her bare ticklish feet.
Courtney absolutely couldn’t stand it. Her instant peals of raucous laughter were almost deafening, and her toned body jumped and bounced as if electrified as her small pink toes clenched, wiggled, and fought ineffectively. She hated having her feet tickled with a violent passion, as her anger at Dr. Mesani had indicated, and as powerful as her laughter was, no-one who heard would mistake it for anything but evidence of agony. Leah froze and stared helplessly at her friend’s plight. Edmund pointed and laughed--poetic justice, he thought, that the feet that had attacked his tender parts were now exploited for their own vulnerability. Leah reached out to stop the creature, only to be repulsed by a sharp crackling noise and a powerful invisible force. “No chance, honey,” Edmund said smugly. “You can’t stop magic that way. Blondie is in forthe long haul.”
At that moment, another flash appeared behind Leah. Pure instinct took over; with speed and strength she didn’t know she possessed, Leah grabbed the still-sluggish, handcuffed Edmund and hurled him into the emerging arms of the still-developing creature. Though created, no doubt, with Leah as its target, the creature seemed indiscriminate when presented with a warm body. It seized the helpless young man and laid into his sides with six hands, mingling the unpleasant sensations of wrenching tickles and the lingering ache in his groin.
Almost overwhelmed by the din of two endless streams of hysterical laughter, Leah bore down. She had bought herself some time, but she had no way of knowing whether another would come for her or not. She scanned rapidly through the remaining schematics and determined what looked like a clear path to the central chamber. Grabbing her shoulderbag, she mustered her resolve and started forth. As she moved toward the door, she paused to look back. Edmund jerked and cackled as hands plumbed his underarms; the poor barefoot Courtney thrashed and giggled as mystic feathers flicked her foot-bottoms. With a lingering glance into her friend’s tearing eyes, Leah promised, “I’ll stop this, Courtney! Just hang on!”
Leah sprinted across the deck of the ship, maintaining her focus on her goal by a sheer act of will. All around, momentary impressions of unbelievable scenarios threatened to distract her: sunbathers pinned to chairs while creatures fingered their underarms or feathered their feet; an aerobics class sending up choruses of giggles as a small army of Gigglers attacked and sneakers and socks went flying. As she ran toward a doorway at the end of the deck, she passed a pair of struggling bare feet protruding through a porthole, seeming oddly disembodied, being worked over by a grinning Giggler.
Taking a deep breath, the intrepid travel reporter darted inside and closed the door behind her. A dull roar of laughter seemed to be growing by the second as more and more passengers fell prey to Gigglers. A single, unadorned hallway stretched before her, seemingly to a dead end. Steeling herself, Leah made a headlong rush for the wall at the end of the corridor. If the schematics and Akhana Mesani were to be trusted, the wall should be illusory--if not, she was going to be in a lot of pain....
She ran through the false wall and fairly skidded to a stop. She was in a huge, high-ceilinged room, too big to be where it was on a conventional (non-magical) ship. At the far end, a giant machine stood almost as tall as the ceiling, and hummed with unfathomable energy. A bank of monitors displayed random scenes from the ship, as well as a stretch of empty ocean that seemed to ripple unnaturally. Akhana Mesani was there, as was Captain Caliban--both were tending various monitors and machines, and both stopped their work when Leah appeared. They were not Leah’s immediate concern, however.
In the center of the room, standing like a crimson-cloaked dark angel as if she had been waiting for Leah’s appearance, was the tall, menacing, scarlet-tressed form of Yelena Kant. She spoke softly, but somehow her voice was clearly audible over the crackling machine at the far end of the chamber. “Aha. Welcome, my lovely spy. We have been waiting for you. Ever since Akhana informed me of your plans, I have anticipated your arrival here, at our inner sanctum. I’ve been watching your progress with some interest--quite a neat trick, throwing Edmund to the Giggler. It would have been more impressive, I suppose, if it had not been meant for him in the first place. But bravo for the effort.”
Yelena’s pale, beautiful, sculpted face bore a wicked grin, framing gleaming white teeth with dark crimson lips. Her almost impossibly long, dark red hair was arranged in a high, ornate design that must have relied on sorcery to maintain, and her large, quasi-Asian eyes glittered like obsidian. Her scarlet gown and cloak were a stark contrast to her white skin, and her high, platform sandals added to her already considerable height. Leah felt a rush of hopelessness. She looked past the sorceress to Akhana Mesani, who lowered her head, ashamed to meet Leah’s gaze. “Come on, girl. This is how it is. Do the best you can and have faith,” she thought. As swiftly as she could, she darted her hand into her bag and hurled a sphere at Yelena Kant’s motionless form. “Eat this, amazon!” she shouted, then felt a little silly.
Yelena caught the sphere effortlessly with a negligible movement of one hand. “How naive,” she sighed.
Instantly, Leah found herself lifted a good six feet off the floor, arms pinned to her sides, legs bound together by an invisible force. She hung there, the failed adventurer in her navy shorts and t-shirt and the Yankees cap that concealed most of her shoulder-length dark honey-colored hair, lithe muscles straining helplessly beneath smooth golden skin. “What a pretty picture,” Yelena remarked, striding up to her. “You must have known that your efforts would fail. You and the Frost girl against my power? Absurd.”
“She didn’t mention Francesca,” Leah thought, a tiny sliver of hope breaking on the grim darkness of her thoughts. “Maybe...”
Her hopes were replaced by terror, though, as Yelena Kant’s long, scarlet-nailed fingers unfastened her sandals and slid them off of her tan, bare feet. “Oh, come on, Yelena. Isn’t this a little petty?” she said, with false bravado.
“Not at all. We need your energy. You should feel honored that I deign to see to you myself instead of trusting you to something as impersonal as a Giggler.”
Barefoot and unbearably ticklish, Leah could only whimper as Yelena’s sharp nails began to whisper across her soles. Yelena was an expert tickler, by virtue of her art’s demands, and she approached Leah’s exquisitely receptive feet with gusto. Fully cognizent that speed and force did not necessarily translate into efficacy, she played the unfortunate reporter’s feet like a musical instrument, flicking the bottoms of the tight-curled toes with the very tips of her nails, scratching with more intensity at the balls of the feet and heels, scampering wildly into the hyperticklish arches. Leah’s defiance cumbled into uncontrollable laughter, made all the more humiliating by Yelena’s uncanny ability to vary the location and intensity of her attack to attain exactly the sounds she desired from her captive.
“Now a few high, squeaky little giggles,” she would say offhandedly, then zero in on the toetips to produce exactly that from her red-faced prisoner. “Now a shriek, and some rich, deep belly laughs,” she would suggest, then strike at both soles suddenly with an eight-fingered attack, drawing the sustained laughter out with long, light, even strokes of the nails from the top of the heels to the base of the toes. Leah’s bare feet were like strings on a marionette, or, more accurately, like a control pad for a remote controlled robot--she was utterly and completely Yelena Kant’s to command, her reactions dictated by the relentless stroking of dark nails on the bottoms of her feet.
Leah’s face was a mask of mirth--tears began streaming down her now-rosy cheeks, clung to her long lashes, even spattered the hardwood floor. She gulped for air at the rare breaks in Yelena’s torment--her fingers splayed and clenched in fists even as her delicate toes wriggled and fought. “This could kill me,” she thought, even as still another wild whoop of laughter was torn from her by Yelena’s nails scratching her heels. “I’ve failed, and we’re all going to be slaves and we’re never going home.” The tears were now only half-laughter, as the physical apex of tickled hilarity became an ironic expression of the emotional nadir she had reached inside.
As her laughter became silent, as breaths became ever harder to seize in the face of the sadistic foot-tickling, Leah felt consciousness threatening to slip away. She wondered what would happen if Yelena just kept tickling, after she had passed out--whether she would suffocate or choke to death.
At that moment, cries of alarm from the end of the room by the great machine brought Yelena up short, and allowed Leah to open the teary eyes that had long since been squeezed shut in torment. There, storming across the room with bold determination, was Ellefson, the giant, Francesca’s lover. He was followed, a few steps back, by a bedraggled but intrepid Francesca, clad in a torn leotard and bare feet, hair mussed. Courtney, looking exhausted but exhilarated, followed them in, beaming.
Ellefson was like a wrecking ball. Yelena stepped back and threw a spell at him, creating a Giggler he caught it and destroyed it with a punch like a piledriver. Leah remembered through her slowly dissipating hilarious haze that he had been engineered to be immune to this kind of sorcery. He stopped in front of Yelena and drew back a fist, then stopped. “‘Cesca,” he said, emotionlessly, and stepped aside as Francesca hit Yelena with a right hook that, though it might not have equalled Ellefson’s capability, proved more than enough to send the sorceress staggering back until she collapsed in a heap. Ellefson effortlessly caught Leah as she fell, free of the spell.
Akhana, meanwhile, was in a flurry of activity at the far end of the room. She seemed to be sabotaging everything she could lay hands on, as a variety of buzzers and alarms rang out in response to her actions. The giant machine heaved and sputtered. The huge Caliban cursed and reached for the Doctor, but Ellefson was already there. For a moment, the two squared off, and Leah was reminded of an old comic book she had once seen when the Hulk battled the Thing. Then Ellefson’s fists moved with blinding speed, and Caliban went down.
Courtney and Francesca hugged Leah, all smiles and chatter, talking at once. “I’m sooo glad you’re okay! I thought that thing was gonna tickle me to death until Francesca and Ellefson showed up about five minutes after you left. Ellefson did a number on that thing! We left that shithead Edmund like he was...” Courtney was saying, while Francesca said,
“Akhana has been with us all along, since we, um, reasoned with her, concealing as much as she could without giving herself away. She’s been figuring out how to sabotage the machinery while pretending to help them. I had a little run-in with a Giggler--I’ll have to tell you about that one later--but Ellefson managed to find me and help me....”
“How fortunate,” a cold voice said. The women fell silent, and turned to see Yelena Kant, recovered from Francesca’s blow, up again and glaring at them. “However, you are all far too late. The crossover will begin NOW!”
She made a series of wild gesticulations, and the world began to shimmer and twist.
“My God, she’s going ahead with it!” Akhana shouted. A glowing field of light and swirling color began to emanate from the giant machine, and Yelena shrieked in exultation.
“Your efforts are for nothing! Your traitorous machinations will all come to naught!” The sorceress gloated.
Then Ellefson, with a herculean effort, tore a massive chunk off of the giant generator. The energy washed over him, powerless to affect his genetically engineered form. Yelena screeched, cursing, as the field buckled and began to collapse on itself.
Leah, for one moment, allowed herself to feel triumph. Then, she, Francesca and Courtney were lifted, still, hugging, from the floor and began to float upward. “No!” screamed Akhana, who ran out and rather foolishly grabbed Francesca’s ankles, only to be borne upward with them with ever increasing speed. Some distance away, Yelena Kant, a vision of rage and hatred, rose on the tide of mystic energy as well, her cloak billowing, her long hair now whipping around her in a medusean image of terror. “I will destroy you all!” she shouted, then hurtled skyward at blinding speed, passed through the ceiling as if it was not there, and disappeared.
The women, slowed by their collective weight, fought panic. “Ellefson! help!” Francesca cried. Ellefson stood stoically, holding Caliban to keep him from being lifted. “I can’t,” he said. “You’re being drawn to the other side. I don’t know exactly where you’ll go, but you’ll be okay. Find Dymion, my brother, in Khalkasa. He’ll help. I must stay to see that those on this ship reach safety, and that Caliban faces justice on this side. I will cross when I can, and help you get back....”
“Are you fucking kidding me?!!” Courtney yelled, as a particularly strong current of energy swept the group upward at a much greater rate of speed.
The sensation was bizarre--Leah could see the ship dwindling below them, the sea becoming an undifferentiated plane of blue as they sped skyward. She thought she saw a handful of other shapes zooming upward as well--perhaps a few others had been caught in the field before Ellefson had stopped it? Then, there was a wrenching feeling like nothing she had ever experienced, and she lost consciousness.
When she awoke, she was on a white, vast beach, with sapphire waves dappling its edge a few feet away. The sky was a magnificent blue, and the cool sea breeze was like a caress. Francesca, Courtney, and Akhana Mesani were slowly starting to stir around her; no-one else was in sight.
Leah rose to her feet and tried to maintain her sanity and to gain some impression of an alien world.
[Next: Who knows? We have a whole world to play with!]
Feedback on the board is greedily coveted.
[This story is not for minors. Do not read if you are under 18.]
[Last time, our stalwart trio of female crusaders captured Dr. Mesani, the most vulnerable crew member in the know about the cruise directors’ sinister plans. Tickled beyond her endurance, Mesani is ready to talk.... If this doesn’t make sense, you really should read the first sections. On the other hand, tickling is tickling, so this section may stand alone for those unencumbered by plot concerns.]
Leah wiped Dr. Mesani’s forehead with a cool cloth as the defeated doctor regained some measure of composure. Even after Courtney reluctantly ceased her assault on the older woman’s soles, Dr. Mesani found her normally staid and professional speech laced with punchy, residual giggles. The good Doctor felt almost the way she had in college, when she had been tricked into eating three or four laced brownies during a study session. She struggled to maintain coherence.
“All right, I’ll t-tell you what I know. They’re planning on working some kind of grand magic very soon. I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t seen it work....” she trailed off into giggles.
“Get it together,” Leah said coolly.
“I-I’m sorry. It just looks so silly, the magic they use. It-It’s like Alistair Crowley via Walt Disney!” More giggles.
“What are you talking about?” asked Francesca, from her position by the sealed door.
Mesani took a deep breath, and spoke in a deeper, more controlled tone. “Whatever kind of crazy magic they use was apparently developed by this great, otherworldly sorceress aeons ago. The thing is, however powerful this woman may have been, she appears to have been something of a ditz. The type to dot her ‘i’s with little hearts, you understand. And so, her magic can only be used in certain ways–nothing overtly destructive, and always with a kind of cartoonish quality that appealed to her sensibilities. That’s why she keyed the whole system to feed off this ‘laughter energy:’ she naively envisioned a world of happy little people powering civilization through their own glee.
“The tickling, then, came about for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the only real way that the...ambitious in the other place can steal and stockpile energy. Secondly, it’s one of the few ways that this cutesie-pie magic can be shaped into an aggressive weapon. Yelena Kant, powerful as she is, always has to contend with her embarrassment about the nature of her craft.” A ripple of giggles raced through her quickly before she could tamp it down. Although the threat of tickling had abated, her long bare feet still reflexively hid one behind the other at intervals.
Leah stared, her agile mind churning like an outdated computer. She had been told, and forced to accept, so many bizarre things in the past 24 hours that she half feared that she would lose her sanity. “The only way to cope here,” she thought to herself, “is to behave as if it’s all true. Rational doubt can only slow me down here. If it isn’t true, I’ll deal with that when the time comes. I’ve seen too much to dismiss all of it. Just focus, focus on the situation as it appears...”
Francesca’s voice cut through her reverie. “Enough deep background, doctor. What are they going to do with this ship, and when?”
Dr. Mesani nodded. “As you know, they’re planning on crossing over to this other realm. They have not told me when, but it will be very soon. Now, in order to accomplish that feat with such an enormous vessel, they will need a single, mammoth burst of energy to be sustained until the process is completed. In order to achieve this, they plan a massive simultaneous assault on every passenger on this ship–a mystical (hee hee) tickle orgy!” Her giddiness returned in a rush.
“I’m sorry, it’s just all so ridiculous! But the money is real, and you won’t get in the way of that. There’s really nothing you can do–you would have to find and disable the portal transducer, and none but Yelena Kant and her closest confederates know where that is. There. That’s all I can tell you.” She uttered this last somewhat nervously, and fidgeted with her bare toes as Courtney strolled casually in her direction.
“Wait, Courtney,” Francesca said. She walked forward and fixed Dr. Mesani’s eyes with hers. “Akhana, do you know what they plan to do with the people on this ship when they cross over?”
“Well...they’ll all be set adrift, I suppose. The spells will protect them until they can be rescued–the ship’s itinerary was entered with the proper authorities. We will escape to the other side with their riches intact.” Mesani’s self-assuredness was beginning to wane. She had made a point of leaving the difficult questions unasked–a fact that had come to haunt her of late.
“No, Akhana. They are to be sold as slaves to some dark conglomerate on the other side. Harvested as sources of energy, then cast aside when their hearts burst from the strain.”
“N-no...they did not tell me...”
“Come on, Akhana. That’s the real payoff. And if you weren’t in on it, who’s to say whether you were to share our fate?”
Akhana Mesani held a rapid internal debate, trying to determine whether she should trust Francesca or Yelena Kant. The choice proved surprisingly simple. “That wicked bitch. Part of me always knew that people would be hurt in this. I suppose I have been trying not to care.”
Courtney looked skeptical. Leah and Francesca waited, noncommittal.
“All right. You may be able to find the nerve center from the observation room.”
“Observation room?”
“Yes. All the rooms are under camera surveillance from multiple angles at all times. Fortunately, the employee who mans the room is easily...distracted. It should be no great task to sneak up on him. Look in my coat pocket, there on the rack.”
Francesca reached into the pocket and produced a card key.
“That is the master key, giving entrance to all chambers. I offer this to you as a token of alliance. I will keep your secret–I have little to gain by revealing it.”
“I don’t buy it. Leave her tied up until we can figure this out,” Courtney said.
“I have appointments this afternoon. It will create much more suspicion if I am not there, and I would be easy enough to find.”
Leah sighed. “I say we trust her. She has told us more than we expected, after all.”
Francesca nodded reluctantly and began to loosen the doctor’s bonds. “Very well, Akhana. But if you betray us, the price will be great.”
With the doctor freed in exchange for the promise of secrecy and eventual cooperation, the small team formed its plans. Francesca and the doctor would go about their business to allay suspicions, while Leah and Courtney would find the observation room and use it to track down the command center.
In the observation room, Edmund Gray leaned back, opened his trousers, and proceeded to enjoy his latest spectacle. As was his habit, he had ignored his security duties in favor of lascivious pursuits, and switched all the displays to reflect a single, most interesting chamber from all angles. Today, it was the suite of Jack Fussky, Texas oil man and owner of a pair of professional sports teams, who was currently being entertained by his two cheerleader guests. The pair, both toned and deeply tanned, met with Edmund’s unreserved approval. Cissy, the shorter and younger of the two in her early twenties, had a perky body, a gleaming smile, and blonde pageboy haircut, and was the perfect counterpart to the taller of the two, a long-limbed, large-breasted knockout who went only by Trix, whose sloe-eyed beauty and waist-length black hair set her apart from her partner. His room had been a joy to watch, as the two went through cheerleader routines in various stages of undress, and frequently brought themselves, each other, and (a bit less frequently) the old man to climax with creativity and vigor.
Though certainly a virtual pro in the self-stimulation department, Edmund had trouble keeping up with the non-stop antics in the Fussky suite. The only scene he had found to match, aside from his frequent security sweeps of the women’s steam room, was the other afternoon when he had lucked into catching the cute, blonde Frost girl (he thought her name was Cassie or Cindy or something) giving in to the temptations of her own body in the bathtub in a stunningly spirited display. He had thought to tape that scene a short way in, and had virtually worn it (and himself) out since.
Today’s cheerleaderly entertainment was a classic: the girls were performing a series of “cheers” in a state of provocative semi-dress: though topless and barefoot, having discarded their halters and boots, they retained their short white skirts with, as far as the vigorously stroking but quite intent young Edmund could perceive, nothing underneath. From what little he had cared to glance at Fussky, the grizzled billionaire was busy entertaining himself in much the way that Edmund was.
As usual when watching this apex of all entertainment, Edmund was unable to pace himself, and as the two toned, tanned walking fantasies dropped into simultaneous splits, highlighted from almost every conceivable angle by the bank of monitors that stretched from floor to ceiling, Edmund blasted his sputtering tribute into a handkerchief.
Barely had he recovered and made himself presentable when a sound that he should NOT have heard–the clicking of a keycard–made him whirl to face the dynamically posed forms of that hot Laphroig woman and–whoa! The Frost girl!
They stood frozen for a moment, the young voyeur and the two interlopers, until the women realized what was happening on the monitors around them. “You dirty bastard!” Courtney said, incredulously. “You sit up here and spy on people and wank it?”
Edmund, shocked, recovered his wits quickly. “I wouldn’t be too judgmental, after your little bath yesterday.” He winked at the outraged blonde.
Courtney turned crimson. The small part of Leah that still worried about such things was glad that her small, discreet chrome “boyfriend” had not yet come out of her overnight bag.
Courtney’s response solved two problems–venting her outrage and removing Edmund as an obstacle. She kicked Edmund squarely in the balls with her sandaled foot. Edmund, hardly a warrior, dropped with a moan, clutching his injury. “Why did you have to go there?” he whined feebly.
Leah, meanwhile, was scrolling swiftly from room to room, searching for anything anomalous enough to be the central command center. Courtney, fuming, glared at the writhing Edmund with her fists planted on her hips. “I can’t believe you’d invade my privacy like that. You’re the lowest...”
“Yeah, yeah,” Edmund croaked in a pained but scornful voice. “You’ll never reach the central chamber in time. Lady Kant is summoning a Giggler for each of the passengers on this ship. They’ll start showing up any time now--they may have already begun. And once they’re summoned, they won’t wuit until the job is done.”
“Shut up, you. You’re a lying scumbag and a dirty spy...”
“Hurry and cuff him, Court. You’d feel awfully silly if he came off the floor and overpowered you while you lectured him.” Leah was more and more surprised at the authority with which she had come to carry herself since this debacle had begun. Courtney quickly complied, reddening again as she tossed the autocuffs Francesca had given her at the suffering rake. Swiftly, the small metal cuffs sprung to his wrists, yanked them behind him, and locked themselves, pinning his arms behind his back. Another tossed sphere gagged him. He groaned.
Leah quickly found the schematics Dr. Mesani had told her about, and now scanned them swiftly in search of the ship’s hidden inner sanctum. Courtney watched Edmund disdainfully as he lay slumped against the wall, and idly considered kicking him again. She tried resolutely not to remember the little “date with herself” that he had spied on. She hoped she had not been too vocal. Occasionally she stole a glance at the erotic antics on the screens in the room, then blushed and turned quickly away.
Suddenly, a dramatic change in the scene on the surrounding screens took over both of their attention....
FUSSKY’S ROOM
Jack Fussky, his evening’s ‘business’ done and towelled off his grizzled thighs and belly, laid back and relaxed as the girls stretched and cooled down after their “cheerleading” routine. Fussky, naked except for his stetson hat, sighed contentedly and scratched himself, eyes closed in peaceful meditation.
Suddenly, he jumped and snorted, eyes still closed. “Y’all gals quit that,” he snapped.
Cissy, the little blonde, was sitting by the window in the adjoining room and watching the ocean, well away from her erstwhile sugar-daddy. Trish (or Trix, as she called herself for career reasons) was just finishing a shower, and did not even hear Fussky’s gripe. “What’s that, sweetie?” Cissy called, rolling her eyes.
Jack, muttering to himself, ignored her. Then, a moment later, he felt it again--a teasing tickle on the soles of his big, knobby bare feet, sticking out the bottom of the blanket. This time, it was more insistent, and he couldn’t restrain a chuckle. “Ah said y’all qui-hi-hi-hi-HAAAAAA!” Something had grabbed his skinny ankles, pinning him in place, and began an unbearable scratching of the bottoms of both feet. He bucked helplessly and bellowed, tormented ticklishness vying with amazement as he peered over his clenched toes at the end of the bed.
A cartoonish pair of disembodied hands, sporting gloves eerily reminiscent of a Disney character, pinned his ankles to the bed, while another brought a kind of two-pronged back-scratcher to bear against his struggling feet. The gloves were all connected to each other by black cylindrical arms that met in the middle at a round “head” adorned only by a giant toothy grin. The Texas billionaire could only hoot and chortle uncontrollably as the bizarre creature tickled his feet.
Trix emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her long dark hair heavy and streaming with water. “Fussk? What’s so goddam funny?” she asked, a little annoyed. Almost simultaneously, she and Cissy reached the door to Fussky’s room and stopped dead. They gaped open-mouthed at the bizarre spectacle of the sputtering, writhing little man with the strange creature scratching the bottoms of his oversized feet. Cissy, sweet-natured and a little naive, was horrified; Trix, though also taken aback, was still somehow profoundly amused at the little tyrant’s plight.
“C-Come on he he he and he-help meeeeheheheheheheheee!” Fussky managed to blurt between gales of mirth. Tentatively, the two cheerleader concubines stepped toward the strange creature. Neither had any idea what to do--Cissy eyed a leaded glass vase uncertainly, wondering if it would deter the thing if applied with sufficient force. Trix, watching the man bounce on the bed with far more vigor than he had ever done under her, couldn’t bring herself to mobilize with any great urgency to help him.
Neither would have a chance, as it turned out. Suddenly, two silent flashes of light appeared, and two whirling shapes emerged from their centers. Each shape, a black, multi-armed, grinning twin of Fussky’s tormenter, flew with blinding speed at one of the women.
Both were still scantily clad and barefoot, and neither stood a chance. Cissy, the small, perky blonde who prided herself on her flexibility and acrobatic skills, found herself seized by her arms and legs by comically gloved hands and lifted aloft. Still naked except for her short cheerleading skirt, she found herself posed in a kind of aerial straddle, very much like a move she had done innumerable times during games. She shrieked as more hands burst forth from the center to dig into her sensitive ribs, kneading the tender muscles there and forcing a bubbling tide of manic giggles from the bare-breasted little beauty. Squealing and giggling cutely, Cissy squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head frantically as the absurd hands played her ribs like piano keys and occasionally darted into her helpless, smooth-shaven armpits. Even tickled to distraction, Cissy’s panicked mind registered a new, utterly unbearable disaster a few moments later: she let out a despairing, keening, but cute little wail as more gloved fingers began to tease and tickle the bottoms of her tiny, yet awfullly sensitive bare feet.
Trix, the tall, exotic brunette, had her own problems. A bit quicker on the uptake than Cissy, she at least had the presence of mind to wrap her long, white robe around herself as tightly as possible in an effort to shield her upper body from her strange attacker in the second before it seized her. She knew as soon as the Giggler took her, though, that she had not done herself a favor. The giggler’s arms extended to circle her entirely several times, trapping her in her robe, then hoisted her so that she lay parallel to the ground, suspended midway between floor and ceiling. The creature’s wide grin impossibly broadened as it flourished its gloved fingers in front of her frightened face, then zipped down to inflict devastating tickles on her large, wrinkle-rich bare soles. The terrible treatment of her wriggling, ticklish feet drove Trix into instant hilarity, and her deep. sultry, smoky laughter joined the crazed harmony already being created by the rapidly weakening Fussky and the writhing, jolting, squealing Cissy. As the thing zeroed in on the spot just under her toes, Trix screamed like a madwoman and cackled like a witch, body flopping like a rag doll, hair a wild dark nimbus, toes curling in fruitless desperation.
BACK IN THE OBSERVATION ROOM....
Leah and Courtney gazed flabbergasted at the strange scene; Edmund slowly, haltingly got to his feet. Forcing her attention back to the task at hand, Leah pulled up another schematic and scanned it rapidly, searching for a route to the central chamber. Both her concentration and Courtney’s rapt attention to the Fussky suite were shattered suddenly by the sudden flash of blinding light to Courtney’s right. Courtney let out a yell as the creature popped into being, its eerie disembodied grin mocking her. For an instant she had a wild impression of an animated 7-up dot, or the little green thing on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books; then the thing was on her and thought, both rational and irrational, all but stopped. The weird hands grabbed the pony-tailed young blonde and yanked her to the ground, pinning her shoulders to the carpet and hoisting her tanned legs up off the floor so her body made an ‘L’ shape. Hands pinned her ankles together, grabbed her sandals, stripped her barefoot; then, two more appeared and produced oversized, electric green plumes and began whisking them playfully over the soles of her bare ticklish feet.
Courtney absolutely couldn’t stand it. Her instant peals of raucous laughter were almost deafening, and her toned body jumped and bounced as if electrified as her small pink toes clenched, wiggled, and fought ineffectively. She hated having her feet tickled with a violent passion, as her anger at Dr. Mesani had indicated, and as powerful as her laughter was, no-one who heard would mistake it for anything but evidence of agony. Leah froze and stared helplessly at her friend’s plight. Edmund pointed and laughed--poetic justice, he thought, that the feet that had attacked his tender parts were now exploited for their own vulnerability. Leah reached out to stop the creature, only to be repulsed by a sharp crackling noise and a powerful invisible force. “No chance, honey,” Edmund said smugly. “You can’t stop magic that way. Blondie is in forthe long haul.”
At that moment, another flash appeared behind Leah. Pure instinct took over; with speed and strength she didn’t know she possessed, Leah grabbed the still-sluggish, handcuffed Edmund and hurled him into the emerging arms of the still-developing creature. Though created, no doubt, with Leah as its target, the creature seemed indiscriminate when presented with a warm body. It seized the helpless young man and laid into his sides with six hands, mingling the unpleasant sensations of wrenching tickles and the lingering ache in his groin.
Almost overwhelmed by the din of two endless streams of hysterical laughter, Leah bore down. She had bought herself some time, but she had no way of knowing whether another would come for her or not. She scanned rapidly through the remaining schematics and determined what looked like a clear path to the central chamber. Grabbing her shoulderbag, she mustered her resolve and started forth. As she moved toward the door, she paused to look back. Edmund jerked and cackled as hands plumbed his underarms; the poor barefoot Courtney thrashed and giggled as mystic feathers flicked her foot-bottoms. With a lingering glance into her friend’s tearing eyes, Leah promised, “I’ll stop this, Courtney! Just hang on!”
Leah sprinted across the deck of the ship, maintaining her focus on her goal by a sheer act of will. All around, momentary impressions of unbelievable scenarios threatened to distract her: sunbathers pinned to chairs while creatures fingered their underarms or feathered their feet; an aerobics class sending up choruses of giggles as a small army of Gigglers attacked and sneakers and socks went flying. As she ran toward a doorway at the end of the deck, she passed a pair of struggling bare feet protruding through a porthole, seeming oddly disembodied, being worked over by a grinning Giggler.
Taking a deep breath, the intrepid travel reporter darted inside and closed the door behind her. A dull roar of laughter seemed to be growing by the second as more and more passengers fell prey to Gigglers. A single, unadorned hallway stretched before her, seemingly to a dead end. Steeling herself, Leah made a headlong rush for the wall at the end of the corridor. If the schematics and Akhana Mesani were to be trusted, the wall should be illusory--if not, she was going to be in a lot of pain....
She ran through the false wall and fairly skidded to a stop. She was in a huge, high-ceilinged room, too big to be where it was on a conventional (non-magical) ship. At the far end, a giant machine stood almost as tall as the ceiling, and hummed with unfathomable energy. A bank of monitors displayed random scenes from the ship, as well as a stretch of empty ocean that seemed to ripple unnaturally. Akhana Mesani was there, as was Captain Caliban--both were tending various monitors and machines, and both stopped their work when Leah appeared. They were not Leah’s immediate concern, however.
In the center of the room, standing like a crimson-cloaked dark angel as if she had been waiting for Leah’s appearance, was the tall, menacing, scarlet-tressed form of Yelena Kant. She spoke softly, but somehow her voice was clearly audible over the crackling machine at the far end of the chamber. “Aha. Welcome, my lovely spy. We have been waiting for you. Ever since Akhana informed me of your plans, I have anticipated your arrival here, at our inner sanctum. I’ve been watching your progress with some interest--quite a neat trick, throwing Edmund to the Giggler. It would have been more impressive, I suppose, if it had not been meant for him in the first place. But bravo for the effort.”
Yelena’s pale, beautiful, sculpted face bore a wicked grin, framing gleaming white teeth with dark crimson lips. Her almost impossibly long, dark red hair was arranged in a high, ornate design that must have relied on sorcery to maintain, and her large, quasi-Asian eyes glittered like obsidian. Her scarlet gown and cloak were a stark contrast to her white skin, and her high, platform sandals added to her already considerable height. Leah felt a rush of hopelessness. She looked past the sorceress to Akhana Mesani, who lowered her head, ashamed to meet Leah’s gaze. “Come on, girl. This is how it is. Do the best you can and have faith,” she thought. As swiftly as she could, she darted her hand into her bag and hurled a sphere at Yelena Kant’s motionless form. “Eat this, amazon!” she shouted, then felt a little silly.
Yelena caught the sphere effortlessly with a negligible movement of one hand. “How naive,” she sighed.
Instantly, Leah found herself lifted a good six feet off the floor, arms pinned to her sides, legs bound together by an invisible force. She hung there, the failed adventurer in her navy shorts and t-shirt and the Yankees cap that concealed most of her shoulder-length dark honey-colored hair, lithe muscles straining helplessly beneath smooth golden skin. “What a pretty picture,” Yelena remarked, striding up to her. “You must have known that your efforts would fail. You and the Frost girl against my power? Absurd.”
“She didn’t mention Francesca,” Leah thought, a tiny sliver of hope breaking on the grim darkness of her thoughts. “Maybe...”
Her hopes were replaced by terror, though, as Yelena Kant’s long, scarlet-nailed fingers unfastened her sandals and slid them off of her tan, bare feet. “Oh, come on, Yelena. Isn’t this a little petty?” she said, with false bravado.
“Not at all. We need your energy. You should feel honored that I deign to see to you myself instead of trusting you to something as impersonal as a Giggler.”
Barefoot and unbearably ticklish, Leah could only whimper as Yelena’s sharp nails began to whisper across her soles. Yelena was an expert tickler, by virtue of her art’s demands, and she approached Leah’s exquisitely receptive feet with gusto. Fully cognizent that speed and force did not necessarily translate into efficacy, she played the unfortunate reporter’s feet like a musical instrument, flicking the bottoms of the tight-curled toes with the very tips of her nails, scratching with more intensity at the balls of the feet and heels, scampering wildly into the hyperticklish arches. Leah’s defiance cumbled into uncontrollable laughter, made all the more humiliating by Yelena’s uncanny ability to vary the location and intensity of her attack to attain exactly the sounds she desired from her captive.
“Now a few high, squeaky little giggles,” she would say offhandedly, then zero in on the toetips to produce exactly that from her red-faced prisoner. “Now a shriek, and some rich, deep belly laughs,” she would suggest, then strike at both soles suddenly with an eight-fingered attack, drawing the sustained laughter out with long, light, even strokes of the nails from the top of the heels to the base of the toes. Leah’s bare feet were like strings on a marionette, or, more accurately, like a control pad for a remote controlled robot--she was utterly and completely Yelena Kant’s to command, her reactions dictated by the relentless stroking of dark nails on the bottoms of her feet.
Leah’s face was a mask of mirth--tears began streaming down her now-rosy cheeks, clung to her long lashes, even spattered the hardwood floor. She gulped for air at the rare breaks in Yelena’s torment--her fingers splayed and clenched in fists even as her delicate toes wriggled and fought. “This could kill me,” she thought, even as still another wild whoop of laughter was torn from her by Yelena’s nails scratching her heels. “I’ve failed, and we’re all going to be slaves and we’re never going home.” The tears were now only half-laughter, as the physical apex of tickled hilarity became an ironic expression of the emotional nadir she had reached inside.
As her laughter became silent, as breaths became ever harder to seize in the face of the sadistic foot-tickling, Leah felt consciousness threatening to slip away. She wondered what would happen if Yelena just kept tickling, after she had passed out--whether she would suffocate or choke to death.
At that moment, cries of alarm from the end of the room by the great machine brought Yelena up short, and allowed Leah to open the teary eyes that had long since been squeezed shut in torment. There, storming across the room with bold determination, was Ellefson, the giant, Francesca’s lover. He was followed, a few steps back, by a bedraggled but intrepid Francesca, clad in a torn leotard and bare feet, hair mussed. Courtney, looking exhausted but exhilarated, followed them in, beaming.
Ellefson was like a wrecking ball. Yelena stepped back and threw a spell at him, creating a Giggler he caught it and destroyed it with a punch like a piledriver. Leah remembered through her slowly dissipating hilarious haze that he had been engineered to be immune to this kind of sorcery. He stopped in front of Yelena and drew back a fist, then stopped. “‘Cesca,” he said, emotionlessly, and stepped aside as Francesca hit Yelena with a right hook that, though it might not have equalled Ellefson’s capability, proved more than enough to send the sorceress staggering back until she collapsed in a heap. Ellefson effortlessly caught Leah as she fell, free of the spell.
Akhana, meanwhile, was in a flurry of activity at the far end of the room. She seemed to be sabotaging everything she could lay hands on, as a variety of buzzers and alarms rang out in response to her actions. The giant machine heaved and sputtered. The huge Caliban cursed and reached for the Doctor, but Ellefson was already there. For a moment, the two squared off, and Leah was reminded of an old comic book she had once seen when the Hulk battled the Thing. Then Ellefson’s fists moved with blinding speed, and Caliban went down.
Courtney and Francesca hugged Leah, all smiles and chatter, talking at once. “I’m sooo glad you’re okay! I thought that thing was gonna tickle me to death until Francesca and Ellefson showed up about five minutes after you left. Ellefson did a number on that thing! We left that shithead Edmund like he was...” Courtney was saying, while Francesca said,
“Akhana has been with us all along, since we, um, reasoned with her, concealing as much as she could without giving herself away. She’s been figuring out how to sabotage the machinery while pretending to help them. I had a little run-in with a Giggler--I’ll have to tell you about that one later--but Ellefson managed to find me and help me....”
“How fortunate,” a cold voice said. The women fell silent, and turned to see Yelena Kant, recovered from Francesca’s blow, up again and glaring at them. “However, you are all far too late. The crossover will begin NOW!”
She made a series of wild gesticulations, and the world began to shimmer and twist.
“My God, she’s going ahead with it!” Akhana shouted. A glowing field of light and swirling color began to emanate from the giant machine, and Yelena shrieked in exultation.
“Your efforts are for nothing! Your traitorous machinations will all come to naught!” The sorceress gloated.
Then Ellefson, with a herculean effort, tore a massive chunk off of the giant generator. The energy washed over him, powerless to affect his genetically engineered form. Yelena screeched, cursing, as the field buckled and began to collapse on itself.
Leah, for one moment, allowed herself to feel triumph. Then, she, Francesca and Courtney were lifted, still, hugging, from the floor and began to float upward. “No!” screamed Akhana, who ran out and rather foolishly grabbed Francesca’s ankles, only to be borne upward with them with ever increasing speed. Some distance away, Yelena Kant, a vision of rage and hatred, rose on the tide of mystic energy as well, her cloak billowing, her long hair now whipping around her in a medusean image of terror. “I will destroy you all!” she shouted, then hurtled skyward at blinding speed, passed through the ceiling as if it was not there, and disappeared.
The women, slowed by their collective weight, fought panic. “Ellefson! help!” Francesca cried. Ellefson stood stoically, holding Caliban to keep him from being lifted. “I can’t,” he said. “You’re being drawn to the other side. I don’t know exactly where you’ll go, but you’ll be okay. Find Dymion, my brother, in Khalkasa. He’ll help. I must stay to see that those on this ship reach safety, and that Caliban faces justice on this side. I will cross when I can, and help you get back....”
“Are you fucking kidding me?!!” Courtney yelled, as a particularly strong current of energy swept the group upward at a much greater rate of speed.
The sensation was bizarre--Leah could see the ship dwindling below them, the sea becoming an undifferentiated plane of blue as they sped skyward. She thought she saw a handful of other shapes zooming upward as well--perhaps a few others had been caught in the field before Ellefson had stopped it? Then, there was a wrenching feeling like nothing she had ever experienced, and she lost consciousness.
When she awoke, she was on a white, vast beach, with sapphire waves dappling its edge a few feet away. The sky was a magnificent blue, and the cool sea breeze was like a caress. Francesca, Courtney, and Akhana Mesani were slowly starting to stir around her; no-one else was in sight.
Leah rose to her feet and tried to maintain her sanity and to gain some impression of an alien world.
[Next: Who knows? We have a whole world to play with!]
Feedback on the board is greedily coveted.
! Can't wait for the next part to put my fingers on...
