Hannah Davis, in her third misadventure, samples "A Jar Full of Laughter"

*The following tale, which depicts a number of intelligent, responsible women tickled silly, is copyright 2002 by the author.
*This tale is not meant for the eyes and minds of those under 18. It does have some
sexual content. (Hmmmm. ‘Might have been wiser to claim it contained a moral, or something
else equally wholesome. That would drive the kids away, fer shure, But I digress…) Nor are any of the characters—no matter how childishly they behave—under 18.
*The institution of higher learning presented in this tale only coincidentally bears any
resemblance to any actual college or university. I mean, really, would anyone going to a school so infested with ticklephiles ever come away with a useful degree?
*Finally, the author wishes to thank Strelnikov, discerning habitue of this forum, for providing the initial premise for Hannah's third bow, for contributing the spirited character of Lauren Weaver, and for nudging me periodically to get the tale done. As it was, it took practically 11 months (!) to finish. (What's that? Tolstoy must have finished WAR AND PEACE faster? Yeah, but try to find any tickling in that! Nyaaaah!) Thanks, Strel! I couldn't have done it without you!

Now, let’s begin…

To students of the Ottoman Empire, it was an interesting, finely crafted example of
Iznat pottery. To the Vellication Irregulars, however, it proved, unmistakably, to be…

A JAR FULL OF LAUGHTER

a tickle tale featuring Hannah Davis
and the Vellication Irregulars

by Tee Hee Lawrence

Istanbul, Turkey

Dr. Junchiro Yamaguchi stepped out onto the rooftop and walked to the parapet. There he wearily removed his dusty Seibu Lions baseball cap from his unruly mop of black hair and rested his elbows on the flaking stone. He gazed upon the panorama of Istanbul, basking in the mid-morning sunlight, the ornate minarets dueling with the satellite dishes atop the office towers and apartment buildings for dominance of the great crossroads city’s skyline. Here the present (and the impatient future) existed only at the sufferance of the past. He loved places like this: Rome, Prague, Cairo, Bombay—cities where the legacies of lives past constantly interacted with the work of modern lives…where one couldn’t dig a hole without careful consideration of what historical treasures one might be disturbing.

This dig had been unusual for him, for it hadn’t been established in some remote area requiring an extravagantly mounted and staffed expedition. In these past several months, he hadn’t left Istanbul, and had enjoyed the relative comfort of a room at the American University dormitory. The project had very generous underwriting from a consortium of institutions, predominantly his employer, Commonwealth College, and the nascent Gates Museum in Seattle. However, it had been a surprisingly difficult effort, certainly the most stressful the 37-year-old scientist had ever supervised.

He and his colleagues (One, his liaison with the Gates Museum, was Yumi Menabe, a slightly older woman with whom he’d struck sparks, initially in turf conflicts and then, naturally, almost inevitably, in a passionate affair.) had been working below this very building, a warehouse here in the market district, painstakingly unearthing the remains of a 16th Century cellar. Daily he’d had to deal directly with Turkish authorities—brusque military attaches, fastidious clerks from the Ministry of Antiquities, suspicious Customs agents, as well as academics and curators concerned for their national patrimony (not to mention the warehouse’s irascible landlord). To his chagrin, Chiro had been less the hands-on archaeologist he preferred than a constant bureaucratic battler. Just thinking about it caused him to nervously stroke his
mustache and narrow beard, both flecked with incipient gray.

Thank goodness, his staff had been so dedicated. They had laid bare a marvelous find: a merchant’s storehouse, apparently forgotten since the reign of Suleyman, and full of a tremendous quantity of artifacts, many in extraordinarily pristine condition. True, there was no one spectacular object (This wasn’t a royal tomb, after all.). However, Chiro and his colleagues could anticipate many months—even years—of identifying, cataloguing, and studying the objects, most of which would remain here in Turkish museums and universities. He and his crew had worked through the night, cataloguing and packing the few select items to be shipped later that day to the States. In a few days, he and the other American members of the dig would follow.

Chiro was admiring the sunlight glinting off of the Blue Mosque across the Bosporous when he heard a theatrical cough behind him. It was Tansu, a student from Ankara employed on the dig. She was dressed in khaki coveralls—snugly fitted over her rich figure, and work boots. A black headscarf covered her wavy black hair and framed her striking black eyes, which flashed with provocation above her ever-present sardonic smile. She positively radiated self aware sensuality, which, coupled with the fact that she had a few inches over his own chunky, 5’ 6” frame, always caused Chiro’s palms to sweat when he encountered her alone. He could never decide if she was oblivious to his awkwardness in her presence, or whether she silently reveled in it. As it was, he was quite involved with Yumi, who was petite, barely 5’3” and waif thin, but who (happily) left him with no strength to act unwisely or unprofessionally with the staff.

She was shaking her head and smiling, and said in her proficient English, “You should hurry downstairs, Doctor. They are teasing Lauren. It’s so funny, but I don’t think they will stop until you come. She’s asking for you.”

Chiro smiled back, aware of how the approaching end of the dig was bringing out the prankishness in his mostly young crew. He said to her as he strode to the stairway, “It never fails. They feel homecoming is near and become children in anticipation. ‘Better give her a hand.” He was relieved to have an excuse to flee her unnervingly sensual presence.

He jogged down the narrow stairway to the warehouse basement, where he descended in a creaky open elevator to a sub-basement, from which he lowered himself on a ladder several meters to a low-ceilinged, stone-lined passageway. As he approached the repository, he heard playful laughter and a young woman’s sharp shouts of “Hey, don’t! Heh-heh! Cut it—haha--out! You’ll be sorr--eek! —sorry when I get outta here-heh-heh-heh!”

He entered a room filled with packing crates, bins of excelsior, and, on most every unoccupied surface, innumerable examples of pottery, ceramics, and mosaics from the height of the Ottoman Period. Whenever Chiro entered the room, he immediately thought of the end of the movie CITIZEN KANE, when the camera swooped over the vast possessions of the dead, once powerful rich man. The camera hovered over acres of priceless art crammed next to seemingly useless junk, a life’s legacy to be auctioned off or fed to a hungry furnace, their meaning to the dead man lost irretrievably. “Which object in this room,” mused
Chiro, “is like ‘Rosebud’ in CITIZEN KANE? Which is the piece of the puzzle that will illuminate life here over 400 years ago?”
“EEEEEE! Don’t-hehheh-don’t do that!” The voice of a giggling damsel in distress came from behind a pile of crates, where several of the project’s younger members--graduate students from Turkey, Western Europe, and the States--were gathered. They were laughing, and teasing someone in their midst.

“This little piggy…”crooned a sweet British soprano voice.

“…And thees leetle piggee…” sang a gleeful French baritone.

“Aargh! Ah-ha-ha! C-cut it out! Heh-heh!” giggled the unseen object of their teasing.

As the rowdy group parted slightly, Chiro, from the back, could see one of the larger Iznat jars, strikingly adorned with colorful faience and tile work. It was about 1.5 meters high and about 4/5 of a meter wide, though it narrowed a bit at the base and at the top, capped by a heavy lid. Most of its adornment consisted of detailed faience blue and red plumes, their feathery tendrils curling around the glazed white jar. The curled tips of the ornate plumes seemed to gesture to curious features built into the body of the jar.
On one side, two horizontal openings—8 cm high and 20 cm wide—were set--one directly above the other--into the jar; the upper slot began .4 of a meter below the lip and the lower slot began an equal measure below the first. On the reverse side, more inlaid feathers led to two parallel vertical openings, each 8cm wide and 20 cm high; both began 1/3 meter from the lip and were 1/3 meter apart. These side openings were rimmed by meticulous bands of blue and red mosaics.

Still more of the decorative plumes directed one’s eye to five semicircular openings in the lip of the jar. Two, each about ten centimeters wide and deep, about 1/3 meter apart, were in the lip above and on either side of the front slots. Two more semicircles, of slightly lesser width and depth, were in the lip directly across from each other halfway to the reverse side. A single wider, shallower semicircle, about sixteen cm wide and eight cm deep, was in the lip on the reverse side. The lip openings had been glazed substantially and their surfaces were quite smooth to the touch.

The lid of the jar was lavishly ornamented with faience of swirling plumes. It rested quite heavily on the lip. It, too, had openings built into it: three circles, each about eight cm in diameter, equidistant from each other and close to the small raised knob at its center; and a semicircle, about sixteen cm wide and an equal measure deep at the reverse, which matched the equally wide opening in the lip to form a neat circle.

Chiro, Yumi, and the rest of the crew had been debating for weeks just what the purpose of the jar was. The openings in the sides, which certainly appeared to be part of the original design, seemed to rule out the jar having been used to store oil or nuts. The ornate faience plumes and meticulous decorative tile work led one to assume the jar had been commissioned as an objet d’art. Yet, the peculiar variety of the openings, however, hinted at some specific but undetermined function for the jar.

Complicating the debate was their observation that, within the jar, was a semicircular shelf, thirty cm long, twenty cm wide, and eight cm thick extending from the earthenware wall, about .7 of a meter from the bottom. To their amazement, they found the shelf could be removed from the thick wall of the jar. The shelf fitted with careful balance and precision into a deep groove in the wall. As there were corresponding grooves on the wall above and below where the shelf had been, it was clear the shelf’s position was adjustable. The shelf was directly across from the lower opening in the face of the jar. The dig members asked, why the unusual openings in the sides and at the top? Why the movable shelf inside? And what was the significance of the copious plume decorations, seemingly meant to direct an observer’s eye invariably to the openings in its surface?

Chiro’s curiosity had definitely been piqued. The plume décor alone was sufficient. As a member of the Vellication Irregulars, back home at Commonwealth College, his imagination was always stirred by images of feathers, which worked on his cultivated interest in erotic tickling. Could the jar somehow have been involved in tickle play? He had discussed it one evening in his cozy dormitory room with Yumi, who, knowing of his yen for tickling, rolled her eyes before she began a spirited ten-fingered tickling aggression. (Yumi had made it clear that her interest was as a tickler only. Chiro fueled his sexual passion for Yumi with his frustration at not being able to tickle her. At least not when she was awake…) Thoughtful speculation was abandoned that evening…

Now, in the chamber, peering through the gaggle of giggling, teasing students, Chiro saw that the jar was not empty. Rather, it held someone in such a way that seemed to vindicate Chiro’s musings about its uses. For there, with only her head, hands, and feet rising from the openings in the lip of the jar, and kept there by the massive glazed lid, was the project’s other member from Commonwealth College, graduate student Lauren Weaver.

When not trapped in a jar, Lauren was usually a very clever (if a little willful) aspiring archaeologist, whose skill and enthusiasm for the careful detail work of their field made her Chiro’s most valued assistant. That she was a striking beauty--5’8” tall, perhaps 135 lbs. (He had helped her out of enough holes to be able to safely estimate.), with silky long ash blond hair, lively blue eyes, and flawless, pale skin—naturally had not influenced in the slightest his decision to have her join his project in Turkey. (Besides, his introduction to and subsequent intense involvement with the sagacious and smolderingly sensual Yumi Menabe made it simple to keep his relationship with Lauren strictly business.) Chiro valued not only Lauren’s youthful erudition and energy, but her good humor, embodied in her playful, ready laugh, and her devious imagination, which frequently led to her finding solutions to vexing questions before anyone else did.

Her colleagues around the jar was giggling as they playfully offered tickles to her helpless ears and neck, the palms of her hands, and, most effectively, to the soft, pink soles of her bare feet, from which they had removed her boots and socks, which were lying at the foot of the jar. Lauren was unsuccessfully trying to restrain her bubbling laughter as she hurled salty threats and creative curses at her eager tormentors.

Chiro swallowed hard and cleared his throat loudly. The group around the jar fell silent and, with red faces all round, stopped the tickling of Lauren, who emitted a few residual giggles before sighing with relief. The group parted wide and Chiro approached Lauren. She, blushing deeply and perspiring generously, cried, “Chiro! Thank God! I thought these guys would tickle me to death!”

Chiro cleared his throat again and addressed the group. “Well, this is a fine way to treat a precious object.”

“You said it!” insisted Lauren, waggling her hands and feet for emphasis.

“I meant the jar,” said Chiro, struggling to keep a straight face. “OK. Who’s behind this?”

“Well, uh, actually, sir,” offered Rene Lavocque, a French student who had been happily stroking Lauren’s right sole, “she was the one who inseested that we put her in zere.”

“He’s right.” Chiro was startled slightly by Yumi’s voice. She stepped out of the group and began to wipe Lauren’s moist face with a clean red bandanna. She continued, “Lauren was the one who figured out that the jar is meant to hold a person, who sits on the shelf within while her head, hands, and feet are restrained by the heavy lid. She was most eager to have us help her test her theory.”

“And I was right!” Lauren cried. “See how comfortably I fit in here! Well, I’m as comfortable as one can be in this position. Anyway, this proves the jar was designed for, ah, personal occupancy. I was right! And it felt great, until these guys started clowning.”

Anne Palmer, from Manchester University, failed to stifle her giggles as she said, “Professor, she—ha-ha-ha--looked so funny in there, waving her hands and feet, boasting about her ‘discovery’ and all, that we couldn’t resist knocking her down a peg. At first, we just thought we’d let her stew in there. Then, Yumi whispered ‘Tickle her!’ in my ear. And almost before you knew it, off came her boots and, well—we just couldn’t help ourselves!”

Yumi winked at Chiro, who cleared his throat yet again and intoned, “OK, why don’t all of you take a meal break of, say, thirty minutes? It’s your last rest until we’ve finished packing the last of the export artifacts. So, get going. And, ah, we’ll take care of Lauren.” He didn’t have to tell them twice, as they’d been working through the night. Soon, only he, Yumi, and the jarred Lauren remained.

He leaned rather casually upon the jar, by Lauren’s bare right foot and said, “Lauren, don’t you think you might have cleared it with me before ‘experimenting’ with this rare artifact?” He began to lightly stroke with his fingertips along her bare sole. This was simply too good an opportunity to satisfy a curiosity he’d long idly entertained about Lauren.

Lauren’s head whipped back as she screeched, “Oh, noooo! Stopstopstop! Ah-ha-ha-ha-naha-not you-hoo-too, C-Chiro!”

His fingertips sought out the tender undersides of her toes as he added, “I mean, it’s only 450 years old, perhaps the only one of its kind, so it might have been nice if you had at least mentioned that you intended to inhabit it.”

“Sorreeheeheehee, Chiro! I…I…Ahhahaha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-haaa!” Lauren howled. “Sta-ha-ha-ha-haaap! Oh, no-ho-ho-ho-ho! I remem-hehhehheh-remember! Ahhahahaha! At home—hehhehheh--you’re one of thohohohose—Ve-Velli-Vellication Irrationals! Ehhehhehhehheheeeeeek!”

“I believe the group is called the Vellication Irregulars,” Yumi corrected her, with another wink at Chiro. She knew—and he knew she knew—how thrilling this situation was to Chiro’s erotic imagination. “And Chiro—ah, Professor Yamaguchi is right to, ah, take you to task on this point.” She held Lauren’s big left toe firmly with three fingers, and began to flutter her fingertips ever so lightly just below the ball of the younger woman’s helpless sole. Her fingers moved along the soft surface of Lauren’s wriggling sole with infinite patience, eventually leaving no square centimeter of sensitive skin untickled.

Lauren’s blue eyes squeezed shut as she shrieked, “Aiee-hee-hee-heeee! N-not you, too-hoo-hoo! Plee-hee-heese s-stop it! You’re—hahaha—killing me-heeheeheeeee!”

Chiro shivered with empathy for Lauren as Yumi’s fingertips lightly grazed the tender flesh along the blonde’s pale arch. He knew from experience how skillful a tickler Yumi was, expert not only in violent, aggressive stroking but maddeningly gentle, subtle touches. This empathy, however, did not keep him from dragging his own fingertips along the wrinkles of Lauren’s other soft sole as if he were carefully tracing routes on a map. He followed the wrinkles until they led his questing fingertips to the very pale and tender flesh under her shapely wildly wiggling, and concertedly clenching toes. There he aggressively mined her laughter. Together, he and Yumi teased her thus for many long (for her) torturous minutes.

“Wha-ha-ha-ahahahahahaaaaa! Sta-ha-ha-haap! I’m gonna p-p-peeheeheehee in this ja-hahaha-ar!”

This desperate stab at the professional consciences of two of the project’s mentors (who, after all, were trained to mitigate damage to artifacts) definitely affected their tickling. With noticeable reluctance, they pulled their playful fingers back from her lovely, helpless soles, now noticeably pinker. She bubbled with giggles for quite a while before sighing loudly and pronouncing, “Some saviors you guys turned out to be!”

With a cartoon sneer, Yumi threatened to renew her tickling of Lauren’s toes as she said, “Who says we’re your saviors, hmmm?”

Lauren screeched and blurted, “Aieee! Enough please! Now I know, Chiro, why those people at home used to call you ‘Chiro Kootchy.’ You and Yumi make the perfect couple.”

This time, Yumi, her eyes crossed with mock menace, leaned back against the jar between Lauren’s waggling bare feet. Without comment, she spidered her fingertips spiritedly upon the jarred woman’s helpless soles.

“Wait! No! Wah-ha-ha-haaa!” Lauren howled. “Quit it! You guys are almost as bad as that bitch Hannah Davis. She tickled me until I peed my jeans. I was so embarrassed!”

“Oh, c’mon, Lauren!” Chiro snapped, rushing to the defense of the associate professor in American Studies (and fellow Irregular) at Commonwealth College. “Hannah was a little drunk, and, frankly, so were you. You seemed to laugh a lot—and enjoy it—at the time.”
Chiro thought back to an Irregulars party, held more than a year before in the spacious renovated farmhouse that faculty members Luci and Osvaldo Montanez called home. A curious Lauren had come with a date who was an irregular Irregular. There had been many pitchers of Sangria and margaritas passed around. When someone inevitably unveiled a set of padded stocks for the keenly anticipated tickle play, Lauren was herself too drunk—and too curious, to resist entreaties that she allow her wrists and ankles to be locked in the stocks. Her hosts pointedly reminded her that, throughout the day, she had been strenuous in her insistence during conversations that she just wasn’t very ticklish.

Now, Hannah Davis, with a sly smile, sat cross-legged before Lauren’s feet. Lauren had earlier that afternoon been introduced to the instructor, whom the grad student had known, by reputation alone, as a respected scholar and a popular instructor. Hannah, sporting owlish, dark-rimmed glasses, assiduously maintained a sober, poker-faced demeanor in public on campus.

The historian was in her mid ‘30s, her taut, trim frame--just shy of six feet tall--flattered by a silk blouse, tight jeans, and thick-soled blue suede clogs. Her rich, straight auburn hair was mostly tucked under an Alabama baseball cap. Her striking face had a clear, olive-tinged complexion, high forehead, strong cheekbones, expressive smoky eyes, and a broad sensual mouth with a slight overbite. Lauren could plainly see one reason for Hannah’s popularity: even straight-faced with glasses, she was quite attractive. And when Hannah Davis smiled, she
was incandescently radiant.

And Hannah was smiling now—very fetchingly, with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, clearly in a lightheaded and playful state of major intoxication. Lauren then realized another reason why Hannah so beguiled her students. Getting the historian to finally smile—so they could bask in its lovely, hard-won radiance, surely was her rapt young charges’ fondest wish. Lauren thought further that winning laughter from the serious Hannah must have fueled obsessive plotting, too. (And it did, many months later, as we—but not Lauren—witnessed in “Sabbatickle” and “A Ticklish Matriculation.”)

Lauren, considerably tipsy herself, was trying to reconcile all she had heard and read about Prof. Davis, with the smashed and beaming redhead sitting cross-legged before her. Professor Hannah Davis was, after all, an important, serious feminist scholar. And yet this pixilated Hannah Davis was a key, enthusiastic reveler at this gathering of The Vellication Irregulars, Commonwealth College’s circumspect circle of tickling celebrants. Clearly, in this select company, the serious professor figuratively let her hair down in eager tickle play.
Sure enough, Hannah removed her baseball cap and, shaking her head, let her auburn bangs fall to her shoulders. She winked up at Lauren, who, however drunk and open-minded she was, began to reconsider her helpless position in the stocks. As she removed the grad student’s sandals, Hannah, in a drink-husky Dixie contralto, announced, “Our young guest has assured us that she’s not ticklish. Ah say it’s … a likely story!” The gathering crowd chortled and urged Hannah on as she cracked her knuckles. She hovered her fingers just above Lauren’s long toes, flashing with blue glitter nail polish, and asked, “Tell me, dear. Do you know the words to ‘The Star Spangled Banner’?”

Lauren, her blue eyes misty in her own intoxication, snorted and rolled her eyes, saying, “Oh, puh-leeze, everybody does!”

Hannah nodded her head and said, “Good. Ah would like you to sing the first stanza (‘cause no one knows the second stanza). And when you finish, Ah’ll unlock these stocks.”

Lauren smiled to the assembled as if to humor this madwoman. Then, she made a goofy face and began to sing, “O-oh, say can you see….”

Hannah began to run a finger along each of Lauren’s bare soles.

Violently waggling her feet, Lauren abruptly stopped singing to protest, “Hey! Heh-heh! D-don’t! Heh-heh! D-don’t tickle my…” before it dawned on her pickled mind that, after all, tickling was why she’d been goaded into the stocks. She was helpless to prevent her tender feet from revealing how hopelessly ticklish she really was. The game had clearly been named—and it was afoot, so to speak. And unless she got her act together—quickly! —the smiling Professor would tickle her into hysterics, to the cheers of the gathered Irregulars. Fighting her building mirth, she recommenced singing, “Uh, by--Aiee! --the dawn’s early--eek!--light. Oh, so proudly—Hey! Hee-hee! --we hail…”

Hannah suddenly brought all ten of her fingers to bear on Lauren’s feet, spiritedly stroking up-and-down her soft, wrinkly soles despite all her evasive efforts. Almost immediately, Lauren abandoned the anthem, and tumbled into hysterical laughter. Periodically, she’d try to pick up the tune, but this effort would collapse in shrieks of laughter and pleas for Hannah to stop. This went on for what seemed like hours, and well past the moment her bladder had surrendered…

Over a year later, in the jar beneath Istanbul, Lauren remembered acidly, “She just wouldn’t stop! Teasing me in that syrupy mint julep voice of hers while she tickled my feet and teased my toes until I-I just lost control. I hate to lose control. She wouldn’t stop!”

“Well,” reasoned Chiro, “you didn’t finish the song.”

“What the hell does that have to do with it?” shrieked Lauren. “My God, Chiro, you’re as sick as she is. Well, someday, I’ll catch the great Professor Hannah Davis in a helpless position—and she’ll learn what it means to be mercilessly tickled until one can’t—until one can’t control oneself!”

“You mean,” offered Yumi, “helpless--like you, now, in this jar?”

“Yeah,” agreed Lauren, “in this jar… Hmmm! Now, that’s a thought!”

She was still musing on this when Yumi began to tickle her feet anew. Lauren shrieked and insisted on being released. Chiro, thinking he heard some of their colleagues returning from lunch, stopped Yumi. The two then carefully removed the lid, and helped Lauren out of the jar. They crouched beside her as she, donning her socks and boots, sat in front of the jar.

Anne Palmer, walking into the room, teased, “Aw! They let you out! I was hoping we could have worked while you…laughed!”

“You wish, dolly bird!” Lauren barked, over her shoulder. Lacing up her boots, she considered the jar’s glistening, plumed surface. To Chiro and Yumi, she murmured, “You know, I’ll admit I’m pretty ticklish, but, I swear, trapped in there, I felt sensitive like you wouldn’t believe!” She mused, “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s as if, well, as if the jar made me more ticklish. Even more than that day Hannah Davis had me in the stocks…”

She paused in her lace tying, her face suddenly alight with a cunning smile. Yumi and Chiro exchanged curious glances. They leaned in as she thought aloud, “Yeah…Hannah Davis…. Trapping her in this jar at my mercy. Sure…. After all, it’s one of the few artifacts that will come back to Commonwealth College with us. What a great idea! Of course, I’ll need both of you to help….”

Yumi rested a hand on Lauren’s shoulder and smiled, as if she were sharing the plan beginning to form in Lauren’s imagination. Both stared in fascination at the jar. It may have been a trick of the harsh work lights glinting off its surface, but it seemed to them as if the faience plumes were swaying ever so gently, as if from some unbidden breeze….

Chiro, disturbed by their seeming complicity (against which, he knew, he would have little resistance) coughed nervously and stood. To their returning colleagues, he barked, “OK, people! Enough fun and games.” He directly a stern look down at Lauren and Yumi, who stuck her tongue out at him. He cleared his throat and announced, “OK, let’s get these artifacts packaged quickly but carefully. Unless you want to miss your flights home….”

(Continued below...)

"A Jar Full of Laughter" continues...

A few days later, Hannah Davis was moderating a class discussion when her watch peeped. The class had been considering the synergistic interplay of Margaret Sanger’s efforts to provide birth control education with the increasingly militancy of women’s suffrage and labor movements in turn-of-the-century New York. Hannah had been silently gratified by the lively exchange, and regretted that her students were now reflexively checking their own watches. As chairs were slid back and backpacks were filled and zipped closed, Hannah reminded her students to read the photocopies of contemporary press accounts of Sanger’s work, as well as the relevant chapters in Dorothy Day’s autobiography for the next class. Then, as it was almost Friday evening, the class dispersed with predictable alacrity save for a few equally predictable stragglers. “Hannah’s Acolytes,” as one campus wag once dubbed them, happily carried on the discussion with her as she gathered her materials into her shoulder bag, donned her raincoat, eased out of the room, and walked across the Quad to the building that housed her office.

She, with some regret, said goodbye to the last of the Eager Young Things at the building entrance. She arrived at the office door to find a red rose, its long stem wrapped in translucent red plastic, taped below her nameplate. The anonymous bloom might have been a token of affection, she thought, smiling, from one of the shyer student crushes she encountered each term. Or, she considered, her heartbeat rising just a tad, it might have been a sign from a member of the faculty she’d been sharing a few campus events and meals out with lately--that a more serious relationship would not be dismissed out of hand, if suggested. Her spirited homecoming to the Vellication Irregulars had rekindled erotic yearnings that had lain dormant since the departure of her previous lover.

“God knows,” she thought, as she grabbed the rose and unlocked the door, “this sure beats finding a goose quill or a printout from an online site of a photo of a model being tickled—only digitally altered with my head atop the feathered model’s bod.” She blushed as she remembered such pranks following on the heels of the circulation around campus of a certain video earlier that winter. The video consisted of an elegantly simple close-up of her own hilarious face while, unseen, two clever young women, posing as students selling shoes door-to-door, skillfully and at length tickled her expertly restrained bare feet. Her friends in the Vellication Irregulars had helped her pay back the two ticklers—teenaged townies Clarice Witciewicz and Dominique Harad—with interest. (Of course, that was only after the Irregulars revealed that they in the first place had recruited the pair to visit Hannah and tickle her back to their midst. And it was only after the Irregulars joined with their proteges to memorably remind an again tied-up Hannah not only how tickling cured the blues but how wonderfully it awakened sleeping Eros.). The pair’s video, however, had made the dignified Hannah an irresistible target for classroom cutups and campus pranksters.

She had received countless phone messages filled with cackling laughter and cartoon voice offers to tickle her silly. Her e-mail and snail mailboxes were filled with ticklish proposals (As alarming as some of these were, an amused Hannah had no doubt that many were sent by her Irregular pals.). Her office door had become a magnet for anonymously posted feathers and drawings of her being subject to tickle torture of astonishing variety. She received packages bearing chattering teeth and laugh boxes from joke shops. Someone had glued stencils of a bare sole and a feather on the floor all the way from the elevator to her office. (A custodian had winked at her from his knees one morning as he was painstakingly scraping them off the tiles.) She had even found, after one class on a snowy February day, that someone had glued long rubber stamps, reading “Tickle Me!” in big, block letters, to the soles of her boots, which she had heedlessly left standing near a radiator in the back of a classroom. She only discovered that when a trailing “acolyte” pointed out her suggestive footprints in the fresh snow.

She was not ashamed of her interest in tickling (or her activities with the Irregulars), nor would she deny how much stress relief and downright pleasure it brought her. But, when she forgot herself and idly slipped her feet out of her shoes in class, she couldn’t help but notice some of her students staring at them. She then feared her lesson was being crowded from their thoughts by daydreams about tickling her. She actually used to enjoy her students’ efforts in class to undermine her reputed serious demeanor with wit and playful argument. But, as for her new rep as a “tickle babe,”…well, she was determined to somehow work through her embarrassment and restore her dignified, scholarly reputation. She had to restore the firewall between her work and her playful Irregular activities. She preferred being known for her writing and her teaching, and not her fondness for and susceptibility to tickling, thank you. She was hoping that time, the natural turnover of students—and a refusal to acknowledge any of the prankish behaviors—would restore the old status quo.

Entering the office, she hadn’t even turned on the light when the phone began trilling. Hoping it was that colleague brought to mind by the rose, she picked up the receiver and drawled, “Davis here. Speak. Ah’m open-minded.”

“I know you are, Hannah. That is why you’re just about the first Irregular I’ve called. This is Chiro!”

“Chiro! My Lawd, are you callin’ all the way from Turkey?”

“Hah-hah! Oh, no-no! My colleagues and I arrived here last night. I would have called sooner, but my body is still on Istanbul time.”

“In which century?” Hannah teased.

“Why, the Sixteenth, naturally,” Chiro replied. “And we’ve brought many pieces of that time back with us to the college museum. I think one in particular might interest you. Are you busy this evening?”

Hannah stroked her chin with the petals of the red rose and answered, “Well, Ah had been waitin’ for a certain party to call with an offer.” She sighed. “But, my grandmama used to tell me that slow-cookin’ made the best meals. So, Ah guess Ah’m free tonight.”

“Fine,” Chiro said. “I and a few colleagues will be, ah, working this evening, unpacking our artifacts and preparing some for display. The museum will be very quiet. We’ll have it all to ourselves. I can show off our new treasures, and you can tell me all about your, ah, recent return to the Irregulars.”

Hannah figured Chiro could hear her blushing as she said, “Oh, ha-ha, you, ah, you heard about that escapade, did you?”

“I talked to Rachel Klamour…”—a poet on the faculty and current chairperson of the Vellication Irregulars’ self-dubbed Grrllz Squad—“…before I called you,” Chiro said. “She told me how depressed you had been and how they had recruited two kids to, ah, inspire, you back to life.”

“Ha-ha! Well, you know me, Chiro. Once Ah was back in the fold, Ah gave as good as Ah got! Anyway, look, can we meet for dinner? Ah’d rather catch up on your adventures in a cozy restaurant first before going to that spooky museum. How about meeting me at The Ambitious Sprout at seven?”

“Wow! TVP burgers and wheatgrass shakes! I dreamed about that menu every time I reluctantly devoured a lamb kebab in Istanbul!”

“Ve-ry funny!”

“Can I bring my colleague, Yumi? She’s fascinated by American self-denial.”

“Careful, bud, or Ah’ll reveal your secret weakness to her!”

“She knows, Hannah, believe me. Seven?”

“See ya!”

Hannah had gone home to change from her conservative teacher garb to clothes more comfortable and, she hoped, more flattering. She opted for a banana yellow silk blouse with rhinestone buttons, a snugly-fitting pair of blue jeans, fire engine red socks, and highly-polished Doc Martens. Hannah was delighted to see Chiro again. He was one of her favorite male Irregulars, not least of which because, like herself, his playful demeanor at Irregular functions was at such variance with his sober public persona. He was clad in his usual academic “uniform”: a gray tweed jacket over a black turtleneck, black corduroy slacks, and black sneakers.

His guest, Yumi Menabe was staying at Commonwealth College for a few days to help him sort out the artifacts. After that, she would return to the Gates Museum in Seattle with its share of the artifacts. It didn’t take Hannah long to perceive that Yumi was clearly more than Chiro’s colleague. The looks and touches they exchanged—while demure in what she supposed was a Japanese manner—made it plain that they were a couple. When introduced, Yumi smiled and scrutinized Hannah, causing the historian to blush at the intensity of her gaze.
Hannah guessed that Yumi was in her late 30s, betrayed by a very few strands of gray in her short wavy, shining jet-black hair. Otherwise, with her mischievous dark eyes, her pert nose, her puckish smile, and her compact, 5’ 4” frame and tiny hands and feet, she could have been mistaken for someone much younger. Yumi’s apparel seemed youthful as well, yet tastefully stylish. She wore a simple sleeveless black dress that fell to mid-thigh; across her shoulders, a lovely embroidered red and black woolen shawl that she’d purchased in a bazaar in Istanbul; lacy black stockings; and low boots mimicking the fur of a Himalayan snow leopard.

The talk at dinner was initially an exchange of shoptalk between Hannah and Chiro. She proudly detailed her new course on the American women’s suffrage movement. He raved about the uniquely important site his group had found in Istanbul and ranted over the constant battles with bureaucrats he’d endured while recovering its treasures. Chiro generously praised Yumi for her management of the project’s daily operation. Without her, he confessed, the dig would have collapsed in chaos and political infighting. Yumi smiled puckishly, nodded with coy
self-mockery, then spoke softly of her role as a visiting curator for Ottoman Art with the Gates Museum, opening soon in Seattle. The many residents of Japanese ancestry in that city, she said, were served by so many shops, restaurants, and newspapers reminiscent of her birthplace Osaka that she considered Seattle home. Of course, with the Museum’s extensive involvement in projects relating to her expertise, she’d probably be seeing much more of Spain, North Africa, Turkey, and Iran than either Japan or America in the months to come.

Over dessert and coffee (with Chiro complaining that his spoon wouldn’t stand up in the brew, as it did in Istanbul), the conversation moved on to personal matters. Hannah, who
had warmed to Yumi, felt comfortable in wistfully recalling the sad departure overseas of a longtime lover. She recounted her slide into a working depression.
Chiro remarked, “Ah! So that’s why you became estranged from the Irregulars!” Nodding to Yumi, he added, “Under torture, Yumi made me tell her all about them.” Yumi looked at him with exasperation.

“Oh, well,” Hannah blushed and explained, “There were too many memories. We’d shared so much Irregular play. Ah just sort of curled up emotionally like an armadillo. ‘Did nothing but work. ‘Ignored the Irregulars completely.”

“Until,” Chiro said helpfully, “the Irregulars rescued you from melancholy by….”

Hannah burst into embarrassed giggles, and described how her sister Irregulars—and two clever tyros named Clarice and Nikki, “one light and one dark,” had tickled her happily back into the fold. Chiro, grinning broadly, said that, busy as he’d been in Istanbul, he had missed the raucous pranks of the Irregulars. Then, with a quick squeeze of Yumi’s hand, resting on the table, he softly admitted that there had been compensations. Yumi again made an exasperated face at him, but did not remove her hand. She did, however, ask a number of questions about the Irregulars, and, particularly, Hannah’s interest in tickling. The historian got the distinct feeling that Yumi was skeptical that such a reputable academic could find such apparent pleasure in tickling—and being tickled.

“Oh, make no mistake, Yumi,” Hannah said, chuckling, “Heh-heh! Ah’ve done some wild, crazy things with the Irregulars. Those that Ah remember, that is! Lord knows what Ah don’t remember! Heh-heh! We’ve had some good times. And if I was ‘gotten’ recently, heh-heh, I’ve ‘given’ far worse, believe me!”

“Ah, I see,” Yumi said. But she thought, with satisfaction, “So, Professor Hannah Davis admits that she was quite capable of doing what Lauren described. I think it’s time she were made helpless, too, and tickled until it wasn’t fun anymore! It would be a good lesson for her—and Chiro, too!”

She kicked Chiro’s ankle sharply under the table. He started, affected a casual glance at his wristwatch, and immediately waved for the check. “Oh, how late! We so much want to show you the fruits of our labor, Hannah, before most are scattered to other institutions.”

“And,” Yumi added, “I’ll be flying west with some in a few days. Who knows when I shall return, no? I’m eager to see your, ah, reactions.”

Hannah, as she stood and began to don her leather aviator’s jacket and long burgundy scarf, drawled, “You’re mercilessly ticklin’ mah curiosity. Let’s go already!” She began tapping one foot impatiently.

Chiro and Yumi exchanged raised eyebrows and restrained smiles as they slipped on their coats and rose to join her.

(Continued below...)

Still more of "A Jar Full of Laughter"

At the Commonwealth College Museum, its galleries cloaked in silence and shadows, the two gave Hannah a breathless tour of a storeroom crowded with crates and barrels. This was the staging area for the cataloguing of the artifacts, the distribution of some to other American institutions, and the choosing of which to display here at the museum. One item, already removed from its padded crate, stood impressively beneath a ceiling spotlight in one corner of the room. Chiro took Hannah’s jacket as she approached the tall jar.

Hannah marveled aloud at the beauty of the jar, with its ornate faience and mosaic
ornamentation glittering in the spotlight. She traced her fingers along the detailed plumes, following them to the narrow, tile-edged slots. The jar’s heavy lid, bearing three central holes and the semi-circular opening that matched one in the lip of the jar, was resting on a blanket on the floor behind it. Two rolling metal staircases stood on either side of the jar, and a sling hanging from a block and tackle was positioned over its back.

“Have you any idea what this jar was meant for, Chiro?” asked Hannah, as she fingered the upper front slot distractedly. “What is the deal with all these openings?”

Chiro exchanged a glance with Yumi, before replying, “Well, we, ah, have some ideas about that. All very, ah, tentative, of course.”

“We do think, however,” Yumi added, smiling enigmatically, “that we know what the jar was meant to hold.” She paused dramatically. “A person.”

“Ha-ha! You’re kidding!” giggled Hannah. “How did you figure that out?”

“Ah, through a, um, controlled experiment,” stated Yumi. “There’s a shelf along the inside of the jar upon which a person could rest her, ah, posterior.”

“Wha-at?” laughed Hannah. “This I must see!” She climbed onto one of the platforms and peered into the jar. “Well, how do you like that? And you say you conducted an experiment?”

Chiro received a glance from Yumi before clearing his throat and answering, “Ah, yes. One of our, ah, colleagues actually sat in the jar.” He paused and Yumi nodded to him. He ventured, “Would you like to try it on for size?”

Hannah giggled and said, “Whoa! Ah’m a big girl! Aren’t you afraid Ah’ll damage it? The thing must be priceless.”

Yumi smiled and said, “Oh, if you take off your big shoes, I’ll think it will be all right. I’m worried, however, about your lovely blouse. Perhaps you should remove it.”

“Ah-ha-ha, Ah’ll bet Chiro would love that,” Hannah chuckled. She dipped her head away in mock shyness. “Ah’m not wearing anything under it.”

Yumi grabbed a school tee shirt off of a nearby desk. She unfolded it and held it across Hannah’s front, saying, “You can wear this, no?”

Hannah stepped down and looked dubiously at the small shirt. Then she shrugged and gestured for Chiro to turn around. He coughed and did so. She exchanged her blouse for the shirt, which she was barely able to pull over her head. It hung well above her navel. “Hmmm!” she observed. “Looks like a costume left over from ‘Baywatch.’ Oh, well, it’s what the well-dressed jar spelunker is wearing this season.” Yumi admired the ample area of bare flesh exposed between the shirt and Hannah’s jeans, and winked at Chiro, who cleared his throat uneasily.

Hannah eagerly slipped off her Doc Martens and ascended the platform again. She carefully moved from it to sit facing forward atop a blanket Chiro had placed on the front lip of the jar. She then eased back so that her rear rested on the rubber sling and her legs rested on the front lip. Carefully, Chiro lowered her into the jar, until her butt rested on the shelf within, her ankles on the front lip, and the back of her neck in the opening in the back lip.
“Heh-heh! I feel like a circus midway contortionist,” Hannah said. “It’s no worse, I guess, than some of the yoga positions I practice at home. Hey! Maybe that’s what this was for: you know, establishing a meditative position.”

Yumi’s smile twisted a bit as she muttered, “Could be.” She removed the blanket and guided Hannah’s ankles into the openings in the front lip, while Chiro made sure her wrists were properly in the semicircles atop the sides. He also saw that the back of her head and neck rested comfortably on a towel lining the rear lip opening.

Chiro and Yumi then ever so carefully lifted the lid of the jar from the floor. They carried it slowly up the ladders and, holding their breath, settled it upon the lip so that only Hannah’s head, hands and red socked feet rose from the jar. They stepped down to the front
to consider her.

“Mah, this feels weird,” Hannah observed. “It’s not uncomfortable, but, well, Ah’m rather helpless, aren’t Ah? And Ah can feel a draft from the front slot below. With my legs set a bit apart …well, it’s a good thing Ah’m wearin’ pants. Now, really, what do you think this jar was used for?”

Chiro, distracted by Hannah’s long feet, in their bright red socks, waggling within easy reach of his fingertips, cleared his throat. He said, “An object of such curious design and so lavishly decorated could only have been meant for use in one of the households of the ruling family. And I’m guessing that, if it indeed was used to restrain an individual like this, the most likely location for the jar in the household would have been the harem.”

“Mah, mah!” marveled Hannah, fluttering her feet and hands as she admired the tile work on the lid before her face. “I’ve read about the role of women in the harem of the Ottoman Empire. It’s commonly assumed that it was an institution of exploitation, like the Victorian brothel, say, or the geisha house in Edo period Japan. Women in those social structures, however, displayed more initiative and wielded more power than we moderns give them credit for.”

“Initiative? Power? Bold words coming from someone stuck in a jar!” A pretty, blond-haired woman, wearing a baseball cap and an open black leather jacket--both bearing the yellow Commonwealth College “CC” logo—skintight sky blue Spandex workout togs, and matching blue New Balance jogging shoes, stood back in the doorway. She closed the storeroom door and walked into the spotlight around Chiro, Yumi, and the jarred historian. Hannah thought she’d met the woman on campus before, but couldn’t recall where.

The newcomer said, “’Been at the gym.” Her face did bear the healthy flush of recent exertion. “’Been pumping myself up for my ‘rematch’ with the esteemed Professor Hannah Davis.” She stared into Hannah’s puzzled eyes.

“Hannah,” Chiro said, “you remember Lauren Weaver? She is a graduate student here in my department and proved an invaluable colleague on the Turkish dig. I believe you met her at an Irregular party at Luci and Osvaldo’s.”

“Yes,” Yumi added, “Lauren remembers that day very well.

Hannah squinted as she struggled to remember. “Ah, hmmmm…that must have been one of those parties…before my, ah, sabbatical from the Irregulars. Things did, ah, sometimes get out of hand at those affairs.”

Lauren removed her jacket and her leather workout gloves. “I was the one in your hands that day,” she said, flexing her hands near Hannah’s feet. “And I was completely helpless. Like you right now.” She reached to pinch one of Hannah’s big toes. “Nice socks.”

Hannah cried, “Hey! No fair!” She laughed, “Ha-ha! Thank goodness, this isn’t a Vellication Irregulars gathering! I mean, ha-ha, could mah tender tootsies be any more vulnerable?” She waggled them to demonstrate, while she was struggling to remember Lauren and the party. She really must have tied one on, she thought, if she couldn’t remember it.

Chiro, Yumi, and Lauren exchanged conspiratorial smiles, and then, almost as one, smiled at Hannah with mock innocence. There was a pregnant silence. Hannah gulped and said, “Well, this was an interesting experience, but I believe Ah’m ready to get out.”

“Oh, Chiro!” cried Lauren, as one hand rose to her cheek while she pointed to a wall clock. “Didn’t you tell me yesterday that you had an online chat with the Turkish Museum staff in Ankara tonight?”

“Wow! I-I forgot!” Chiro blurted, checking his own watch. “I hope I’m not too late!” He began to dash from the room. “’Sorry to rush off like this, Hannah.”

“Heh-heh! Wait a minute!” Hannah cried, laughing nervously. “With you gone, who’s going to get me out of here?”

“You’re in good hands with Yumi and Lauren. I’ll be in my office. See you later.” And the storeroom door closed loudly behind him.

Hannah looked uneasily at the two women for just a moment. Then, she smiled and shook her head. “How like an archaeologist!” she cracked. “A genius on the past, but a doofus in the present. Anyway, ‘think you guys can get this lid off?”

Winking at Lauren, Yumi said, “Lauren was the member of our team who discovered that the jar could hold a person. So, she knows exactly how helpless you feel.”

“Yep, as helpless as I felt when you had me in those stocks at that party Chiro mentioned!” smirked Lauren, staring intently at Hannah, who seemed confused. “No? ‘ Still don’t remember? Well, you were pretty sloshed. But I remember very well all the ‘fun’ you had with me in front of all those Ventilation Irregulars.” She began to tug at the toe of Hannah’s right sock.

Hannah reflexively said, “Vellication.” Then, suddenly, her memory cleared. Blushing, and spreading her toes to keep her sock from being pulled off, she said, “Oh, God! Now Ah remember! Heh-heh, Ah-Ah was perfectly wicked to you that day, wasn’t Ah? You laughed and laughed….” She lost herself in a reverie briefly. “It was all meant playfully, of course. Hey, now, there’s no need to pull off…?”

Lauren finished yanking the red sock off, revealing that the historian was wearing a tan nylon underneath. Holding the sock theatrically overhead a moment, she laughed at Hannah’s wiggling stocking toes and said, “This is like a set of Russian dolls! Socks and stockings?”

Hannah couldn’t help but giggle in return and insisted, “Well, Ah changed after class in a big hurry! Besides, mah Southern tootsies like feeling toasty on these cold nights.”

Oooh, your toes are nice and warm,” Lauren crooned, as she pinched a couple playfully.

“Oh, heh-heh, no mischief now!” Hannah chided. She looked at Yumi and said, “Can you two raise this lid now and help me out of here. My butt’s beginning to ache.”

Yumi gave her a puckish smile. “You look so funny with only one sock on, Professor Davis. Here. I’ll fix that.” With two hands, she smoothly pulled off Hannah’s remaining sock.

“Fine! Thanks!” Hannah said, nervously. “Now, about this lid….”

“Professor Davis,” Yumi said, “when Lauren told us how you’d tickled her so that afternoon, I could see that she would not be truly happy until the tables…had been turned. Thus…you…in the jar…in your stocking feet…before me….”

“…And me!” Lauren whispered, triumphantly. She crowed, “Now, then, Professor Davis, I’d like you to sing us a song. Let’s see…. Ah! How about “Dixie”? Do you know it? Why, of course you do! Sing it for us, and we’ll remove the lid and help you out of this jar.”

Hannah, miffed, made thumbs down with each hand, and said, “If you think you can make me sing that silly song before you help me out of here, you’re mistaken!”

Lauren and Yumi exchanged sly winks. Each began to stroke along one of Hannah’s sleek, nylon soles with a few fingertips.

Hannah’s striking smoky eyes widened. A grin forced its way across her mouth as she cried, “Now, wait—AIEEEE! Nononono! Stopitstopiiittt! Ah-ha-ha-ha-haaa!”

Lauren burst into giggles herself as Hannah easily surrendered to laughter. The budding young archaeologist gained a firm hold of the historian’s waggling foot and dug her fingers eagerly just under its ball. “Heh-heh-heh-heh! This-this is great, Professor Davis! Heh-heh! You’re-ha-you’re soooo ticklish!”

“Please sta-ah-hahahahahahahaaaaa! God! No-ah-hahahahahahaaaa! This isn’t funneeheeheeheeheeeeeeee! N-n-noohh-hehheh-haha-AIEEE! WAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!”

At the change of pitch in Hannah’s hysteria, Lauren looked up from her gleeful sole stroking. She saw that Yumi had pulled back the toes of Hannah’s left foot so that the nylon was tautly stretched just above the surface of Hannah’s tender sole. Yumi was faintly cooing, “Tickletickytickletickytickle…” as she fluttered four fingertips with maddening precision up-and down upon the nylon. Thus, Hannah’s sensitive sole was being tickled not only by Yumi’s fingertips, but by the fabric of her own stocking. And it was driving her wild!

“Heeheeheeheeheee! Pleeheeheeheeheese! You-hoho-you’re keeheeheeheeeeling meeheeheeheee!”

Lauren, while admiring Yumi’s disciplined and delicate touch (After all, she’d laughingly experienced it herself.), was determined not to concede the honor of tickling Hannah better. After all, this had been her idea. Hannah had turned her into a laughing idiot. She pulled back the toes of Hannah’s right foot and dug her nails through the nylon into the assuredly tender skin between the howling historian’s digits.

“OhGodAhhaha! Ahhaha-Ah can’t stand tha-ha-ha-ahhahahahaaaaaa! Stahhaha-stop that! Ah-ha-ha-hahahahahaaaaa…!””

Hannah was gasping and crying and giggling and hooting, and her Southern accent seemed more pronounced in her desperation. Her hysterics were fueled by the unyielding helplessness of her physical position and her amazement over the skill of her tormentors. She barely remembered “meeting” Lauren and only met Yumi tonight. Yet, these two relative strangers were tickling her silly as well as any number of her experienced friends in the Vellication Irregulars. Her voice was going hoarse and her sides ached and her feet tingled and her butt was beginning to feel numb, and the laughter poured out of her…

“Ohhohohohohooo! Nonononahahahahahahaaaa! C-c’monhahahahaha! Stopithehheheheh!”

Lauren grinned wickedly as her fingers tantalizingly skated upon the nylon below Hannah’s toes. “Kitchey-kitchey-koo, Pro-fessor Davis! Tickle-tickle-tickle! Hey, Yumi? I haven’t heard a note of “Dixie” from the good Pro-fessor, have you? Kitchey-kitchey-koo, Hannah, sweetie. C’mon, sing for us!”

Yumi finally broke off her continuous and maddening fingertip feathering upon Hannah’s left sole. The historian, desperate to placate Lauren, overcame her laughter to sing, “Ahha-ahhahaha-I-I-wish I was in the la-and of co-haha-otton….” The fact that she hated this song, used in so many simpleminded, stereotypical old movies set in the South, made her surrender to Lauren so galling. But, she just couldn’t take much more of this malicious foot tickling.

And she might actually have stumbled through to end of the first verse, maybe earning Lauren’s mercy, had not Yumi returned to start rubbing her stocking sole with a hard rubber brush normally used to brush grime from glazed pottery. The rubber teeth of the brush, gliding along the nylon coating her sole, positively electrified her. She burst into heightened shrieks of laughter.

“Lo-ok away-HEY! Naoooowahhahahahahahahahahaaaaa! Stahahahahaaoppit! Pleheheheeeeeeseheeheeheeee…!”

Yumi met Lauren’s delighted eyes and nodded her head once as if to say, “Beat that!”

Lauren began to intensely scratch with five fingernails atop Hannah’s stocking foot and five through the nylon underneath. The foot was unable to evade Lauren’s ten-fingered tickling assault for even a second. Between Yumi’s relentless rubber brushing and Lauren’s tireless nails, Hannah screamed her laughter to every corner of the storeroom—and no doubt, it echoed throughout the deserted museum beyond. Completing the despised “Dixie” seemed a forlorn hope.

Lauren continued to tickle her foot top and bottom, but Yumi broke off her brushing to pluck two objects from the nearby worktable. She held two long handled brushes, each with a soft ball of silken filaments at its tip. These were used to clean hard-to-reach places in pots and urns. Yumi stepped behind the jar and whispered into Hannah’s ear, “Hannah’s short shirt means unprotected sides.”

Hannah immediately knew what this threatened. “Ohhohohoho! You-hoohoo-wouldn’t-hahahaha…!”

“More tickle-tickle!” hissed Yumi, who inserted the soft round brushes into the slots
in the backside of the jar until she felt them meet Hannah’s helpless sides, uncovered by the far-too-small tee shirt. Yumi spun the handles between her fingers, causing the blobs of silky filaments to whirl along Hannah’s ribs.

Hannah howled at this new assault. “Eeeek! Heee-heeee-heee! Ah-ha-ha! Yumieee! Pleeheeheeseeeeee!”

Lauren took advantage of Yumi’s move to set herself between Hannah’s weakly waving feet. She aggressively began to run five fingers across the slick nylon upon each sole from toes to heel and back again. Yumi sometimes reversed the brushes so she could prod Hannah’s ribs gently with the rubber-tipped handles. Hannah whooped with each probe between each rib. She bubbled with laughter from Lauren’s soleful stroking. Front and back, along ribs and under toes, Hannah was being tickled into incoherence as she struggled to finish
the damned song.

And yet, after long minutes of howling laughter, Hannah summoned all of her willpower and bellowed, “Ohhohohoho! To-hoo li-heh-ive and dieaieaieaie in Diiiixieee! Ohhoho, stop, pleheeheeheese!”

Lauren seemed stunned by Hannah’s effort, and stilled her tormenting fingers. Seeing that, Yumi relented as well, and began to stretch and mutter about fatigue.

“Me, too, Yumi,” conceded Lauren, massaging her weary hands.

Nigh breathless, Hannah wailed, “How do you think Ah feel? Jugged and jolly and sore! Won’t you let me out?”

“I duuunnooo,” Lauren sang, playing with Hannah’s toes again. “Kitchey-koo! What do you think, Yumi? Has she had enough?

Yumi smiled slyly and began to spider her fingers under Hannah’s soles. Hannah yelped and screeched, “Heeheeeenough, pleeheeheeheese!” Yumi sighed and stopped tickling. She nodded to Lauren.

“OK, Professor, I think we’re even,” Lauren decided. She put an arm around Yumi’s shoulders in the manner of an athlete celebrating with a teammate after a sweet victory. Lauren poked Yumi’s middle and said, “Thank you, Yumi. I couldn’t have done it without you. Or Chiro, for that matter. The useful dear.”

“What is this? The Academy Awards?” Hannah whined. “Thank each other later. Get-me-out-of-here!”

“OK, tenderfoot!” agreed Lauren, with one final swipe across Hannah’s soles. “C’mon, Yumi! Let’s go!”

“Wait!” cried Hannah. “You aren’t going to leave me in here?”

“Relax, Prof!” assured Lauren. “We have to get Chiro. We’ll need his help to lift you out. Besides, I can use a drink! Yumi?”

“Guinness Stout, please!” Yumi requested.

“’Sure, and the colleen’s from Japan, she is!” teased Lauren. “I’ll settle for a Coke. How ‘bout you, Hannah?”

“Yes! Coke! Guinness! Anything!” Hannah growled with exasperation. “Find Chiro and get-me-out!”

“I liked you better when all you could say was ‘Stop! Hahaha! Please! Hohoho!’ ” Lauren said, as she and Yumi headed for the door. She added, “Now, don’t go ‘way!” And Hannah was left alone, grumbling about disrespectful grad students and sneaky Japanese guests.

(Yes, there's more below...)

"A Jar Full of Laughter" runneth over...

As the minutes wore on, Hannah, to keep from emitting a Dixie yell for help, decided to concentrate on speculations on the true purpose of the jar she was snugly nestled in. From her position, the decorations on the lid appeared to be feathers beckoning comers to tickle her vulnerable feet, as if the vengeful Lauren (How could such a pretty, young thing, thought Hannah, tickle so savagely?) and the quiet, eager Yumi needed much encouragement. Furthermore, Yumi proved that the rear slots offered a tickler easy access to an occupant’s ribs. The “seat” inside, the holes atop convenient for restraining head, hands, and feet, the slots that offered choice views and access to the wiggling occupant, the adorning riot of plumes: did all that add up to a jar truly intended by its makers to hold someone helpless for tickle torture?
Despite her long, laughing ordeal, Hannah was skeptical. Where would such a “tickle jar” be used, and why? Chiro, an eminent archaeologist, had suggested the harem. Fine, but why? No one needed to tell Hannah how erotically stimulating tickling could be. (Her pals in the Irregulars recently demonstrated how intense tickling set off Hannah’s fireworks quite nicely, thank you.) However, she still could not believe Ottoman artisans were commissioned to craft pottery for the tickling of harem slaves.

All this speculation, on the heels of being tickled silly, was wearing Hannah out. She yawned prodigiously, and it echoed throughout the storeroom. “Those two bitches probably went to a campus watering hole and forgot about me. They’ll get drunk and return and boozily tickle me to death,” she thought, shuddering, and then yawning again. “Ah’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, and if they’re not back, Ah’ll start screaming! Some security guard might find me. I don’t care what kind of scandal results.” She briefly envisioned the news racing around campus, and all the tickling pranksters targeting her anew. She sighed, and, closing her eyes, eased into a doze…

She awoke with a start, feeling a bit dizzy and disoriented. She couldn’t recall feeling like this since her brief experiments with hash in her undergraduate days. Someone apparently had turned off the lights, but there was a reddish glow emanating from burning coals in three ornate iron braziers standing several feet off the floor around the jar. Some gray smoke rose from the coals, forming dancing shadows in the light flickering upon Hannah and the jar. The coals must have been sprinkled with incense, because a pungent sweet perfumed aroma wafted off the braziers with the smoke.

Whoever had set up the braziers had removed the raised platforms and the block and tackle set-up. Someone had—an impressive trick! —also removed the rubber sling from under her butt without waking her. She focused on her bare feet rising from the openings in the front lip of the jar. As she wiggled her toes, she suddenly was aware of how impressive the trick really was! For, as the feeling of smooth porcelain against her bare butt confirmed, she was still firmly ensconced in the jar, but was now entirely naked! She had to give her tormentors credit. They were playing this to the hilt.

She called out, “OK. Lauren! Yumi! Chiro? C’mon, enough’s enough!” Her Southern contralto echoed in the mist.

Despite her nudity, the room seemed warmer and more humid than before. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, she was aware that the room also seemed more spacious than before; indeed, she could not discern any of the storeroom’s furniture, nor its walls. Was it possible that she and the jar had been relocated as well?

She could hear water running gently and, with a break in the haze, caught the reflection of the braziers on the smooth surface of a large pool of steaming water a few yards away. At the pool’s center, a mosaic-covered fountain sent forth a continuous little geyser, atop which a little ball was bouncing.

Hannah thought she heard whispers and light, effervescent giggling from the shadows around her. Then, the reverberant tones of a bell being struck echoed in the pall. In its wake came a flute, playing an insinuating melody that Hannah somehow simply knew to be native to the Bosporous Straits.

A ripple disturbed the glass calm of the pool. A face slowly surfaced halfway between the fountain and the mosaic edge of the pool. Its dark, shining eyes opened and fixed Hannah with an intense stare complemented by an assured, seductive smile. Hannah was transfixed as the staring, smiling woman slowly, sinuously moved forward, her robust body gradually revealed from the ebon pool. Steaming water streamed down the long, thick, black hair reaching the tops of her buttocks, as well as her resplendent, oiled skin as she rose through the shallows. When she reached the pool’s edge—still fixing Hannah with her gaze—she held out her shining arms, and was quickly draped in opalescent silk veils by several women, similarly veiled in various colors, who appeared suddenly from either side. Soon, only her hypnotic eyes and the ghost of her smile could be seen past her the silk cloaking her face and enfolding her rich figure. Even her small shapely feet had been clad, slipped into soft, brocaded slippers.

Accompanied by her attendants, she, to the whisper of the silk covering her body, approached the bound Hannah. Her smile broadened with a flash of pearl teeth as she considered Hannah’s feet. She then circled the jar, finally placing her face against Hannah’s. She planted a slow kiss upon Hannah’s left cheek and brought her warm lips to Hannah’s left ear, allowing the tip of her tongue to tease the lobe.

“I hope you are comfortable, my dearest,” she whispered through the veil. Though Hannah was sure that she was not speaking English (It sounded like a Middle Eastern tongue.), the historian somehow clearly understood her.

Hannah responded in her Southern drawl, “Ah’d be happier if Ah were out of this damned tickle jar.”

The dark, smiling beauty obviously had no trouble understanding Hannah’s Dixie bred
English, for she giggled and whispered, “Oh, no, my lovely! Do not close your spirit and your body to almost unlimited pleasure.” Her small but strong hands began to massage Hannah’s neck. “Resist, yes--for that sharpens the appetite. But do not refuse Tansu’s gift.”

Hannah started to protest, “Now, look, Ah just want to get…get…” before her words melted into unbidden sighs. She closed her eyes. She was normally not adverse to some playful romantic attention, but she was, after all, being restrained here against her will, surrounded by strangers. However, the hands of the veiled woman—Tansu—were warm and massaging her neck very, very pleasantly.

Tansu began to plant tiny kisses on Hannah’s right temple. She soon moved to kissing along Hannah’s right cheek, even while saying, “The vessel restrains you—comfortably, I trust. You’ll find this helpless position encourages you to surrender to sensation. You’ll find that the vessel itself, by some mystical means, seems to draw out your passion, from every untapped vein.”

She began walking around the jar, allowing her fingertips to stroke the palm of Hannah’s right hand as she passed. She continued, “We do this at the behest of our Master, to measure the depth and tone of your passion. But, really, we do it to bond you with us, in mutual pleasure, so that no one from outside the sanctum—not even our Master—can move you as we do.”

Facing the front of the jar, Tansu stood admiring Hannah’s long, lovely bare feet, bathed in the flickering warm light from the braziers. Taut tendons strummed beneath the pale, smooth skin atop her feet and tiny knuckles cracked when she flexed her toes. Hannah’s toes were long and wiggled dexterously (as the trapped historian nervously considered her position). Their nails flashed with fire engine red polish. Their pads underneath were soft and flushed a rosy red, as indeed were the edges, balls, and heels of her long soles. Just below her scrunching toes, her soles displayed deep wrinkles. Very pale pink, baby-soft skin spread across her high arches and under her toes between the rich fleshiness of her toe pads and her upper soles. Hannah’s fabulously tender bare feet seemed too tempting not to touch…to stroke…to tickle…

Hannah, seeing the other veiled women gathering with apparent anticipation around the jar, tried to call on her professorial manner to reason with them once more. “Ah don’t know where Ah am or who you are, but Commonwealth College is responsible for the safety of this jar—and me, too, since Ah’m a faculty member. If this is some kind of sorority prank, you’ll have to answer not only to the Administration but also to the Student Assembly. Now, if you were to release me immediately…”

Hannah’s words seemed only to amuse Tansu and the other women closely ringing the jar. Tansu chuckled and winked at Hannah. Holding Hannah’s right heel firmly with one hand, while prying open the helpless historian’s clenching toes with the other, Tansu licked her lips eagerly and began to peck warm, wet kisses underfoot.

Hannah squealed and cried, “Eeeee! Heh-now, s-stop that! Heh-heh! Ah’ve been tickled eee-hee-heenough today. Tee-hee-hee! This-this isn’t fair! Nah-ha-ha-not there! Cut it ou-ah-ha-ha-ha-ha…”

Tansu giggled happily. She began alternating snake flicks of her tongue with the quick kisses along Hannah’s tender sole, before delightedly concentrating her tongue’s efforts under the long toes. Her fingertips, meanwhile, grazed playfully across the soft, wrinkly sole from ball to heel. The other veiled women themselves bubbled with giggles as they joined in, applying their own lips and fingertips to tickle Hannah wherever she poked up through the lid. They stroked the tops of her feet, kissed her palms and wrists, playfully skated fingertips along her neck and licked her ears. And while Tansu devoted her attention to Hannah’s right foot, one of the other women mirrored the gentle torment upon Hannah’s left foot—kissing, licking, and stroking the tremulous, touchy toes and the soft, sensitive sole.

Hannah’s eyes squeezed shut and her head shook from side to side as she surrendered to deeply drawn laughter, “P-puh-huh-lee-hee-hee-heese! Heh-heh-help! G-ah-ha-od! St-ah-haop that! Heh-heh-hehhehhehheh….” Her howls of hilarity echoed loudly throughout the misty dim confines--so much so that it seemed as if four, five, or even six other Hannahs were being tickled as mercilessly as she.

Tansu, clearly warming to her work, positioned herself between the helplessly waggling bare feet, so that she might alternate her teasing touches between them. She continued to lightly kiss and lick the toes—the cunning tip of her tongue occasionally darting between them when they were spread open, and her wet lips closing over a hapless solitary toe to lash it with her tireless tongue. Along the expanse of Hannah’s bare soles, her fingers stroked the soft flesh more swiftly but lightly. She marveled and giggled with obvious pleasure as Hannah, absolutely helpless with laughter, tried desperately, vainly, to waggle her bare feet away from her tenacious tormentor. The other women stopped their physical teasing, apparently content to step back and playfully exhort Tansu on.

Hannah’s giggles began to be interspersed with occasional gasps and soft moans. She always found having her feet tickled to be an arousing as well as an amusing experience. However, the sensual kisses and licks by the veiled woman at her feet were exciting her far more than Lauren’s and Yumi’s earlier, vindictive tickling. Endless minute by minute, the wet kisses, slow caresses and playful, energetic strokes upon her feet were flooding her with widening waves of welcome warmth.

Her arousal only increased when the other women resumed tickling, each one now teasing her with a long peacock plume. Two held her hands open and tickled her palms with the blades of the feathers. Two others stood beside her head and teased her neck, ears, and cheeks with the tips of the plumes. Another pair was minutely careful to graze the tops of her feet with the tendrils. This collective added delicate stimulus pushed her laughter to a hysterical pitch, as it fed the heat building in her pleasure center. She was gasping and moaning as much as laughing, uncontrollably en route to exuberant ecstasy.

Tansu stopped her deft tongue and lip work, although she continued to scrabble her
long-nailed fingers across Hannah’s soles. She hissed, “So, my sister’s passionate spring, with attentive care, can be made to simmer and bubble very nicely. Let us see if we can bring it to a full boil!”

She accepted a long, iridescent peacock plume from one of her attendants and descended beneath Hannah’s tear-streaked field of vision. After she disappeared, two of the others assumed stroking Hannah’s reddened wrinkled soles with their plumes, so her delicious agony of laughter continued.

“Ah-ha-ha-haaaaaa! Ohho-oh, plee-hee sta-haaap ti-ih-ih-icklin’ mah fee-hee-hee-eet! Ge-hehhehheh-et those th-ih-ih-hings away! Ah-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!”

Hannah could not see the smiling Tansu kneeling directly before the narrow slot set low between two of the inlaid plumes on the face of the jar. The dark beauty inserted the tip of the peacock feather into the slot and, focusing one eye through the opening, began sliding the plume inside. The slot was positioned so that the tip of the feather soon hovered next to the ledge extending from the inside wall of the jar. Hannah’s shapely ass rested on the ledge, with her legs, slightly parted, extending up towards the lid. Her pubic area, its moist red curls glistening in the light streaming through the holes in the lid above, expressed itself quite openly to Tansu’s eyes and the waving plume she was proffering.

Hannah’s eyes dramatically widened as she felt the first delicate sweeps of the plume between her legs. “Oh, Law-ha-ha-hawd! Ah-ha-ha-ha-Gahhhhhhwd! Oooooh, this-iss-iss-isn’t fair. Oh, Ga-ha-ha-haahwd! You-hoohoo-r-really know-hoho-ha-how t-to tease a g-girl! (Gasp!) Oh-ho-ho-ho-hooooo….”

Grinning Tansu was deftly manipulating the plume, dancing it upon Hannah’s inner thighs, delicately dusting under her ass cheeks, and flicking its tip across the now wet, swollen lips of her mound. She never permitted the hilarious Hannah a second’s respite from the suspense of such capricious teasing of this most lubricious area.

“Oh! Oh mah! Ha-ha-ha! (gasp) You-hoo-hoo-must-tee-hee-hee-s-simply stah-ha-ha-ha-ap naow-wahhahahahaaaaa!”

This was Hannah’s last coherent entreaty, for five other women then directed their plumes through the other openings in the jar. Immediately, Hannah felt their tickley touch, it seemed, everywhere at once. Two plumes twirling through holes in the lid feathered her quivering breasts and her quite erect nipples. Another swirled through the upper slot in front to dance upon her helpless tummy and slip its tip into her bouncing belly button. Two feathers negotiated the rear slots and began to wave under her arms and slide along her ribs.

“Oh-oh-Ahhahahahahahahahahaaa! No-no-pleeeeheeheeheeheeheeeese! Ohho(gasp)ohhohoho!”
A final, maddening touch was a lone woman cunningly sweeping her peacock feather across Hannah’s toes, still helplessly suspended outside. Whatever wiggling and clenching Hannah could distractedly direct her toes to effect was scant defense against such persistent feathery torment.

All of the veiled ticklers were playfully giggling, clucking their tongues, and crooning endearments. Hannah herself was laughing, sighing, gasping, moaning—sure that she would not be able to hold back the force of her passion another moment, not if they tickled and teased her so…

She heard Tansu’s warm voice—directed at the unbearable pressure between Hannah’s legs—insist—even as her plume tickled mercilessly there, “Fight, my dearest! Make us earn our conquest! Hold back! Be strong!” Hannah’s eyes were squeezed shut. She was sweating rivers. Every muscle was taut, every nerve ending tingled. The waves of pleasure rippling from her middle were eroding her remaining tattered resistance. Tansu’s exhortations were perversely being undermined by the giggles and teasing utterances of “Tickle, tickle!” and “So tall, so strong!” from the others.

She was teetering right on the edge of the yawning abyss into bottomless ecstasy, when her eyes opened and the flickering room and the veiled figures and the waving plumes blurred and all soon were smothered in warm darkness…

“Hey, what’s the matter with her?”

“She—she looks, ah, overheated in there. Perhaps, ah, we should get her out?”

“Damn right! What did you two do to her? I thought you were just going to tickle her a little.”

Hannah’s eyes opened again and squinted in the glare of the spotlight in the museum storeroom. Her vision was blurred by tears not only from its brilliance, but also by the unbearable volcanic pressure of the astonishing arousal rumbling through her. Had she been dreaming? Or had she really been…oh, who gave a damn?!? She felt about to explode…

“Well, that’s all we did! Then we came to get you. She wasn’t like this when we left!”

“Never mind! Help me remove the lid!”

“Chirooooo!?!” Hannah cried, as her eyes struggled to focus on her fellow Irregular. She simply had to be granted release—or she’d just die! “Chirooooo!?!” she repeated.

“I’m here, Hannah,” he replied. “We’ll have you out….”

“Nuh-no! Wait! F-first…t-tickle me!”

“Huh? Hannah, are you…?”

“Tickle me! P-please! T-tickle mah toes! Now!”

As an avid Vellication Irregular, Chiro quickly overcame his bewilderment—and his natural reluctance not to take advantage of a colleague seemingly out of her mind. He began to wiggle five fingers into the nylon under Hannah’s left toes. She burst into laughter and shrieked, “Eeeyah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaaa! M-more! Ple-heehee-heese!”

Chiro caught Lauren’s amazed gaze and motioned with his chin at Hannah’s right stocking foot. Lauren shrugged, then grinned, and began running two fingers along Hannah’s frenetically windmilling right sole. “Kootchy-kootchy-coo! God, she really is a Vellication Irrational!”

“Irregular!” Chiro corrected, as he dug his fingers between Hannah’s wiggling toes.

Hannah shrieked, “Aieeee! Ha-ha-hahahahaha! Ahhhhhh, yehehhehhehes! Ahahahhahahaaaa…ooooooh…YEEEESSSS!” She suddenly was silent, though the room still echoed with her last shout. The two ticklers jerked their heads at her ensuing prodigious intake of breath.

Then, Hannah roared with her head thrown back as far as her restraint would permit. She bellowed and the jar noticeably trembled from her body’s shock waves. Chiro and Lauren stopped tickling as her stocking feet arched violently under their fingers and her toes twitched and splayed yawningly wide. They marveled as her head, hands, and feet jerked time and time again, as she rasped, “Yeah…oh, yeah…mah, oh mah…yeah…yeah….”
It was many long minutes before Hannah opened her smoky eyes—soaked in pleasure—and focussed on the three stunned figures standing before her. She muttered dreamily, “’Just goes to show that archaeology is good for somethin’ after all, eh, Chiro?”

Yumi stared in wonderment at Hannah, deliriously sated, resting in the jar, its faience and tile surface glistening. Yumi thought, Chiro had hinted at the effect tickling was reputed to have on this woman, but this was extraordinary. Hannah was clearly overflowing with absolute carnal bliss. Yumi recalled that when she and Lauren had stopped tickling Hannah earlier, there certainly hadn’t been any pleading by her for them to continue. Indeed, she wanted out, not seeming a bit excited by their vengeful tickling. Restrained as she was, she couldn’t have pleasured herself while they were gone. What had happened?

Obviously stunned, she stared as Chiro and Lauren, with noticeable effort, removed the lid and placed it carefully upon a blanket on the floor. Then, she watched as Chiro used the winch to slowly raise the woozy Hannah, still sitting on the rubber sling suspended from nylon cords, out of the jar.

As Hannah’s bluejeaned butt reached the lip, Chiro looked back at the transfixed Yumi and growled, “Yumi, are you a statue? Give us a hand guiding her onto the platform.” Still musing on the jar and its effect, Yumi helped Lauren wrestle the limp Hannah out of the sling and onto the platform.

Propping up the rubberlegged Hannah between them, the three eased the besotted Professor down the steps and into a desk chair, one with arms to help keep her upright. Hannah was smiling dreamily, giggling occasionally, and muttering in her rich Southern voice, “You’ve got to be careful whose dinner invitation you accept. Or you’ll find yourself jugged in a harem and tickled sappy. ‘Still can’t figure out how they got my clothes off.”

The three exchanged puzzled looks. Then, Chiro knelt before his delirious colleague and said, “Hannah, this is my fault. I let these two talk me into setting you up for some revenge tickling. Besides putting this priceless jar at risk, I let them strip you, ah, of your dignity.”

“Hey!” protested Lauren. “Who was happily helping to tickle her a few minutes ago, ‘Chiro Kootchy’?”

“Oh, ah, well” he fumbled, “only--only because you’d cruelly left her nearly mad with, ah, stimulated desire.”

“She wasn’t that ‘stimulated’ when we left her. We just tickled her a while!” insisted Lauren. “You Vellication Insatiables are just sexually twisted, is all.”

“Irregulars,” Chiro corrected her. Then, to Hannah, he said, “Hannah, we’re going to take you home. Lauren, help me put her blouse on.”

As they directed her limp arms into her yellow top, Hannah snorted and said, “Chiro,
this jar…maybe it’s here and now…but it’s there and then, too….”

“Uh-huh,” said Chiro, with a look of concern to Lauren, who rolled her eyes and said, “Professor Hannah Davis, noted historian, began her lecture eloquently. Hah!”

Hannah’s features turned serious and she turned to look at the skeptic. She insisted, “I was there! Where the jar had been before. I can’t explain it. But I felt it. Ooooo, did I feel it!” The silly smile returned to Hannah’s face, and she began to slide out of their hands and off the chair, bound for the floor.

They caught her, and finished buttoning her blouse. As they worked, she was mumbling details of the great dark room she found herself in, and of the veiled women. Then, they put on her socks and shoes, although Lauren couldn’t resist one last tickle along her arch as she was sliding the sock on. Hannah jerked and giggled, “Heh-heh! Stop that!”

“So who’s insatiable now, huh?” Chiro chided Lauren. After Hannah was shod, he said, “OK, let’s stand her up.”

While all this was going on, Yumi had slowly approached the jar, and was studying its plumed surface intently. Her ear was cocked to Hannah’s giggly description of her ordeal. The woman must have been dreaming, Yumi thought. All this babbling about being naked in the jar within a vast bathhouse, about veiled women waving plumes, and a ritual of erotic tickling…. Surely the Professor had fallen asleep in the jar after she and Lauren had tickled her and she’d dreamed it all.

But, Yumi thought, as she fingered the faience on the lid, Hannah’s extreme sexual excitement, and ensuing explosive ecstasy… those were plainly apparent. No matter how erotic Hannah found being tickled to be, it was as Lauren said. They hadn’t tickled her to that state. Yumi prided herself on her reason, but she couldn’t suppress wild speculation. Was there something…mystical about this ornate jar? Did it somehow magnify a receptive subject’s sensitivity to tickling and enhance her sexual energy? And if the highly rational Hannah, while resting within it, had been receptive to it, Yumi thought, maybe she herself might be, as well? She simply had to experience being in the jar. She had to…

Her musings were interrupted by Chiro, who said, “Yumi, we must take Hannah home. She’s in no condition to go alone.” As he and Lauren began to ease the tall, limp Hannah towards the door, he blurted, “It’s-it’s as if she were drunk! She didn’t drink at dinner, and there’s no alcohol here. I-I can’t figure it out!”

Lauren rolled her eyes as she struggled under Hannah’s dead weight. She teased, “A woman’s got other means of intoxication, Chiro. I guess Hannah gets her bell rung as much by being tickled as by tickling others.”

“Certainly,” said Chiro, as he stopped to keep Hannah’s arm from limply sliding off of his shoulders, “but this is ridiculous! The woman acts like she’s supremely stoned.”

“Aw, she’s kinda cute this way!” Lauren conceded, as she bore up under the broad shoulder of the giggling Hannah.

Chiro intoned, “I thought you hated her and wanted to tickle her to death.”

“Yeah, I did,” admitted Lauren, “but it was actually kinda fun helping her over the edge into bliss.” She shivered. “And—I’ll confess—a little exciting.” She paused, before adding, “You know, there may be something in being a Vellication Incurable.”

“Irregular!” huffed Chiro, as they reached the storeroom door. “Let’s just get her to the car now.” He turned his head back and said, “Yumi, you have a pass card. Can you lock up for me?”

“Wait!” cried Yumi. “I want…I want to be placed in the jar tonight! Now!”

“Oh, be reasonable, Yumi!” chided Chiro. “It’s not going anywhere. And haven’t you “played” with it enough this evening? See you at my apartment.”

“No!” Yumi insisted, angrily stamping with one boot. “You are not listening to me, Junchiro! There is something…unusual about this jar.”

“Do tell! Do tell!” said Hannah, airily.

Chiro sighed and nodded to Lauren and then to a chair by the door. “Here. Let’s rest Hannah here for a moment.” They eased happy Hannah into the chair, and walked back to the fuming Yumi.

Chiro and Yumi began a lively discussion in Japanese. Lauren watched Yumi point to the front slots of the jar, as Chiro nodded, seeming to concede a point. Soon it was all Yumi, and Lauren could see Chiro’s face noticeably soften as she spoke adamantly. Lauren looked back at Hannah, who wore a silly grin as she blearily watched the scene. Lauren shrugged at her, then realized the Japanese couple had become silent.

Chiro tenderly was rubbing the back of Yumi’s neck, and she was almost purring with pleasure. After a few moments, he met Lauren’s gaze and said, in English, “Yumi is going to wait here. She’s right. I think the jar bears further…study. First, though, we’ll take Hannah home.” He gestured at the historian sprawled in the chair. She had taken a wireless phone from her belt, and was, with exaggerated care, thumbing a number. Looking again at Lauren, he added, “Then, I’ll come back here, and, ah, you’re welcome to join us for another, ah, experiment.”

Lauren shook her head and said, “Not me! You might talk me back into that jar. You guys are unbelievable! A Vellication Irresistible never sleeps, huh?”

“Irregular,” Chiro corrected, with a wink. They watched as Hannah somewhat unsteadily brought the phone to her face, and spoke in tones too low for the others to hear.

“Hey, Davis!” Lauren called across the room. “Who’re you talking to at this ungodly hour? Your analyst? Or are you ordering a pizza?”

Hannah stopped talking and shakily clipped the phone onto her belt. She smiled dreamily and said, “’Had an idea, and just had to tell someone ‘bout it.”

“Uh-huh! Gloating about ecstasy! You rascal, you!” teased Lauren, who approached Hannah and poked her in the ribs. Hannah giggled and gave her a knowing wink.

Chiro gave the back of Yumi’s neck a final affectionate squeeze. Then, he and Lauren raised the limp Hannah out of the chair, again standing her between them, with her arms over their shoulders.

“Relax, Yumi. Take a nap,” Chiro said, pointing to a cot in a dim corner. “We’ll be back in about an hour, I guess.”

“’Bye, Yumi,” Lauren said. “’Bye, Yumi!” Hannah parroted.

They left the storeroom. Yumi could hear their slow progress to the service entrance of the Museum. Then, a door closing shut echoed throughout the hall, and Yumi was alone in the museum.

(But, not for long, as you'll see below...)

The brew thickens in "A Jar Full of Laughter"

For long minutes, Yumi, bristling with mounting impatience, leaned against the jar. She thought, “I cannot wait! Who knows when they’ll be back? I must experience being in the jar. But, alone, I can’t adjust the shelf, lower myself into the jar, and restrain myself with the heavy lid. I’ll need help!”

Finally, she marched out of the storeroom to the service entrance of the museum, its shadowed corners echoing with her boot steps. She stepped through a door onto the loading dock, overlooking a side street and a campus parking lot. One end of the street emptied out onto the campus center. Chiro had earlier pointed out the concentration of student housing in the other direction.

Earlier that day, the parking lot had been filled to capacity, and a steady stream of students passed the science building between the campus center and the residential quarter. Now, however, past midnight, there were just a couple of parked cars in the lot, and no passersby. After a few minutes of vain hoping that she could find someone to help her, Yumi sighed and became resigned to wait for Chiro to return. She went back into the building.

She had, shuffling despondently, almost made it back to the storeroom, when she heard the buzzer sound from the service entrance. It sounded again and again, as if being pressed impatiently. Excited, she jogged to the door, figuring Chiro had perhaps forgotten his wallet. Perhaps she could convince him to help her now and take Hannah home later. By the time she reached the door, the buzzer sounded continuously.

When she pulled the door open, she beheld a young blond woman leaning on the door buzzer. “Thank goodness!” the blonde cried. Not waiting for Yumi to respond, she hurried through the doorway, dragging along another young woman, who was thin and dark. The blonde gasped, “Quick! Close the door! Close it!”

Yumi did so, then stepped back to examine her guests, breathless and nearly doubled over. The blonde was about her height, but with a lush, Rubenesque figure. She had a sweet, red-cheeked face, with large blue eyes, a cutely bobbed nose, and a wide mouth with lips painted a garish Kelly green. She was dressed in a red ski cap, white parka, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes. The other was a head taller, rail-thin, dark olive skinned, with an elfin face marked by almond-shaped dark eyes and narrow lips painted black. Her abundance of shining, straight black hair was loosely pinned on top. She wore a Kelly green silk scarf, a heavy, dark green sweater, a black leather skirt, slightly frayed black fishnet stockings, and black leather flats.

The blonde finally caught her breath. She said, “We spotted you outside from far up the street, but weren’t near enough for you to notice. We don’t know how much farther we coulda run. They woulda found us if you hadn’t been here.”

“Who?” Yumi asked.

“Crazy, drunk frat boys,” replied the blonde. “We were at a St. Patrick’s Day party at…at…hey, what was the name of that house?”

The dark one furrowed her brow and said, “Stigmata Toe Delta?”

“Whatever,” the blonde continued. “Anyway, this deb cut in front of me in the keg line, so I tripped her, and she ended up face first in the green potato salad. ‘ Turns out I tripped the date of the house prez….”

“You would,” the thin one added.

The blonde elbowed her pal in the ribs, and went on, “Before we knew it, the whole mob of college types were after us, shouting how they were going to strip us and paint us green or something. We managed to jump out a window, but couldn’t reach our car, so we ran towards the campus. Bad move. It’s a ghost town this time of night. Locked doors and there’s never a cop when you need one. If you hadn’t been here, I don’t know what woulda happened.”

Yumi thought, “Two students. They’re perfect! They’re so happy to be hidden from their pursuers, they’ll do anything to help me. And they look like such guileless young women. They’ll believe anything I tell them about me and the jar.” She then said, “Well, you’re welcome to stay here until you think it’s safe. My colleague will be back soon. He can give you a ride to your car if you like.” She began to walk towards the storeroom.

The newcomers hastened to fall into step behind her. Their footsteps echoed through the museum. To her back, the blonde said, “Th-thank you! You’re a lifesaver, uh…I didn’t catch your name.”

“Yumi Menabe, of the Gates Museum in Seattle.”

“Yu-mi…Yumi,” repeated the blonde. She winked at her tall friend, and they exchanged quick smiles. “Great!” she added. And then she offered her own name.

The dark girl offered hers, too, adding, “You are very kind. We don’t want to be any trouble.”

Yumi, impatient to have them help her, barely registered their names. She distractedly said, “You’re no trouble. In fact, I’m in the middle of an, ah, experiment, and you can be a big help!”

The blonde chuckled, “Really? Cool! Working late, huh? What is this place, anyway?”

“This is the campus museum.”

“No kidding! Aren’t you afraid you’ll wake the mummies?”

“Heh-heh,” Yumi replied. “No, no. We’re just back from an archaeological project in Turkey, with many artifacts. They’re in here….”

She ushered them into the crowded storeroom. She masked her impatience for them to help her with the jar by walking them around the room and chattering about different artifacts. “These are objects from the ruling houses at the height of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th Century. Fortunately, for some reason, they were secreted in a deep cellar, forgotten for centuries, but there spared pillage or damage, until a survey party for Turkish Rail, doing soundings for a subway line, discovered it. My museum and this college joined forces to help the Turkish authorities properly unearth and inventory the site…”

“…for a share of the loot,” the blowsy one cracked.

Yumi cleared her throat and said, “Ah, heh-heh, more or less.” Then, she led them to the back of the room, where the jar stood under its spotlight. “This is one of the more, ah, interesting finds. We believe it was crafted in Iznat around 1570.”

Blondie, wide-eyed, circled the jar, chirping, “Whoa! It’s huge!” She pointed at the holes atop. “What is it? The world’s biggest salt shaker?”

Yumi smiled and replied, “Oh, no. We’re, ah, not sure what it was for. We have, ah, some ideas.”

The dark-haired girl ran her fingers along one of the faience plumes curling near the lid. She said, softly, “It’s covered with all these swirling feathers. Beautiful….”

Yumi decided that she could wait no longer. “Ah, with your help, I can show you one, ah, use for the jar we discovered. It was a place to, ah, meditate in. Yes?”

The blonde could not disguise her skepticism. “In there? No shit?”

“No, ah, shit. Come. Help me, and I will show you.” She quickly explained what they were going to do, carefully pointing out the holes in the lip and the corresponding ones in the lid resting on the floor. Then, after kicking off her boots (The thin one said, “I love your boots. Are they Japanese?” Yumi replied, “Well, I bought them at Takashimaya, but I think they’re Italian.”), she ascended one of the steel platforms.

Yumi asked the two to follow her. Then, she bent over at the waist into the jar. She directed the pair to grab her legs and lift them, holding onto to her as she hung upside down in the jar, There she grabbed onto the removable ledge within and moved it to its highest position, one suited to comfortably seat a person of small stature. While she was busy making the adjustment, her stocking toes wiggled near their faces. The dark young woman, in particular, seemed mesmerized by the cute little toes moving under the nylon before her eyes. Sighing, she stuck out her tongue and leaned her head towards the dancing digits. The blonde coughed and shook her head no. The other, with obvious regret, withdrew her tongue.

From inside, Yumi called, “Everything all right up there?”

“Yeah, sure,” croaked the blonde, her nostrils twitching as she, too, considered Yumi’s warm stocking foot hovering just under her nose.

“Then, pull me out please.”

After they had, with some red-faced effort, done so, Yumi reached into her handbag and pulled out a wireless phone. “I’m just securing a ride for you,” she told them. Punching in a number, she soon began speaking in Japanese into the phone. After a bit, she said in English, “They are two nice girls named, ah…”

Each one said her own name, which Yumi repeated into the phone, before continuing, “They are hiding from some bad boys from a party. Hurry back so you can give them a ride to their car.“ She rang off, and said to them, “By the time you’ve finished helping me, he’ll be here to protect you. Now, let’s begin….”

******

Chiro’s Celica was winding its way up Crane Hill, a prominence on the outskirts of town overlooking the campus. Inside, he was slipping his phone back into his jacket pocket. In the back seat, Hannah was dreamily resting her head on Lauren’s shoulder. The historian occasionally sighed, giggled, and mumbled.

Chiro, looking into the rear view mirror, said, “That Yumi! She wasn’t kidding when she said she couldn’t wait to get in that jar. Now she’s dragged in from the street two students who she said were fleeing a rowdy frat party. ‘Said their names were, I don’t know, Lari and Rikki, I think.”

Hannah narrowed her eyes slyly and mumbled under her breath, “They made it! Good!” She smiled wickedly!

Chiro, outraged, continued, “That’s great! A roomful of invaluable artifacts—not to mention the jar itself, and she brings in a couple of probably drunken kids to stumble about among them. As soon as we see Hannah safely home, we’ve got to rush back to the museum.”

“Oh, relax, Chiro!” Lauren insisted. “Yumi can take care of herself.”

“Yes, normally,” Chiro said. “However, she seems fixated on the damn jar. I wish now that I’d never agreed to help you two use it to trap Hannah. If I’m not careful, all of the Irregulars will want, ah, to play with it. The college and its insurers will have my head if they find out. Besides, look what we’ve done to Hannah!”

Blowing playfully in Lauren’s ear, Hannah sighed and laughed softly.

“Oh, she’s not complaining,” Lauren said as she jerked her head away and patted Hannah’s head. “And remember, Chiro, you had agreed that I deserved payback for what she’d done to me.” She met his eyes squarely in the rear view mirror.

He averted his glance and muttered, “Well, I-I….”

“…get turned on seeing women like Hannah and me tickled, hmmm?” She caught his eye again and winked flirtatiously.

He cleared his throat and, eager to change the subject, heartily said, “Ah! Here’s Hannah’s house, at last.” The Celica pulled into the short driveway of a modest two-story Tudor cottage, with trim rose and rhododendron bushes lining the foot of the house and the short flagstone walk to the front door. A young magnolia tree, bearing incipient, early spring buds, stood in the center of the narrow front yard.

Getting out of the car, Lauren marveled, “Wow, she practically lives on the summit of Crane Hill! The campus looks tiny from up here. Look at that view!”

“Look at it later, please!” growled Chiro, who had come around to pull the woozy Hannah out of the back seat. “Help me get Hannah to the front door.”

Hannah was able to walk now under her own power, but was still somewhat unsteady. She was humming “Dixie” and even mumbling some of the lyrics. Chiro and Lauren guided her to her door. While Chiro supported Hannah, Lauren fumbled through the historian’s purse until she came up with a set of keys. She tried several before finally opening the door and swinging it wide.

Hannah crooned, “Ah, home, sweet home!” They eased her inside.

Chiro nodded to a staircase. He said, “Let’s take her upstairs to her bedroom. She’ll probably go out like a light once her head hits the pillow.”

“Ummm…Bed!” Hannah dreamily agreed.

She giggled softly as the pair guided her unsteadily upstairs and into her bedroom. She sat heavily onto her antique four-poster bed, the one she’d inherited from her Aunt Ruby, who’d supposedly inherited it herself from one of the last of the Confederate widows.

“Let’s put her to bed,” Chiro said. “It’s the least we can do after the ordeal you put her through.”

“Some ordeal!” Lauren chuckled. “You should be so happy. Look at her! No wonder she’s an Irregular. Tickling goes right to her G-spot!”

“You said it, honey!” Hannah said with a bleary smile.

“C’mon, Lauren, find some pajamas for her. Look in that bureau.”

“’Don’t wear pajamas, silly,” Hannah sang, giggling. “I like sleepin’ in a big Ole Miss sweatshirt.”

“Like this?” From the bureau’s top drawer, Lauren pulled out a voluminous white sweatshirt with the University of Mississippi logo across its front.

“You are good, girl!” replied Hannah with a wink.

Chiro carefully removed Hannah’s eyeglasses, folded them, and set them beside the woozy historian on a bedside table. When he turned back to her to begin undressing her, his hands hesitated at the top button of her blouse. He muttered to Lauren, “Ah, yes, well, just so you know, I’m not in the habit of undressing women, um, colleagues…”

Lauren groaned and shoved him aside, “How shy can a guy be! Here, I’ll do it!” She unbuttoned Hannah’s blouse and removed it. Hannah yawned and smiled serenely, offering no resistance, but not making it easy for the grad student to remove the “Baywatch” tee shirt. Lauren chided her, “C’mon, Professor! Lift up your arms! You really are wiped out, eh? Whoa! No bra, huh?” She removed the shirt. When Hannah didn’t immediately lower her arms, Lauren playfully poked her underneath each. Hannah giggled, hugged her sides, and stood, saying, “Hey! Stop that!”

Lauren grinned and said, “God, you’re ticklish! I’ve never tickled a professor before tonight. It’s…habit-forming. OK. Gimme these goofy red socks.” She pulled Hannah’s socks off, making her squeal with a brief fingertip flutter under her right arch. “ Now, giggles, the jeans go next.” She yanked them down the giggly historian’s long, nyloned legs.

Uncomfortably finding himself in Hannah’s bedroom while she was being undressed--and anxious about what was happening at the museum, Chiro tried to focus on the spines of the books in a nearby case. As if it had all along been his reason for coming, he pulled out one volume and, opening it, began to study the table of contents. Hannah spied him, squinted, and said, “Is that Galbreath’s study of New Orleans’ Storyville brothels, Chiro? Fascinating details and—Damn! Where are mah glasses?”

Stepping out of her jeans, he lurched to the bedside table, reaching for her glasses, but knocked them to the floor. When she bent down to retrieve them, she somehow managed to kick them under the bed. Lauren, watching all this, smiled and shook her head. She said, “Someone here needs to get to bed! C’mon. Shimmy out of that panty hose.”

“Wait a minute! Ah just want to show Chiro a different survey of Southern sex workers. But, Ah need my glasses.” Hannah fell to her knees and felt about by the table.

“Silly,” Lauren said as she got to her knees and peered under the bed, “ you kicked ‘em back under the headboard. I see them!”

Hannah reached under the bed, pursing her lips in her effort. “Too far,” she gasped. “And Ah surely can’t fit under there.” She looked at Lauren helplessly.

“OK, OK! I get the message!” Lauren muttered. “I’m smaller than you. I might fit. I just hope you’ve vacuumed under there lately. I’m allergic to dust bunnies.” She unzipped her leather jacket and tossed it onto the bed.

Lauren lay as flat as she was able on the carpet. Taking a deep breath, she crawled headfirst under the bed. Even with only the skintight workout togs upon her healthy figure, it proved to be a tight squeeze. After a concerted effort, she had advanced to the point that her Spandex coated butt was wedged snugly under the edge of the bed frame. Watching this, Hannah opened a drawer in the bedside table and brought out a spare pair of dark-rimmed eyeglasses.

From underneath the bed came Lauren’s muffled, “Whouf! I don’t think I’m going any further. I…think it’s far enough, though.” Grunting like a woman tennis champion returning a would-be ace, she stretched her right hand out until she could snag the elusive, dusty eyeglasses. “Got ‘em!” she shouted.

Hannah, donning the spare glasses, said, “Good girl!” She then sat heavily on the edge of the bed, with her stocking feet astride Lauren’s blue Spandex thighs.

“Hey! Get off the bed!” came Lauren’s muffled cry. “How do you expect me to wriggle back out with this frame pressed against my tush?”

Chiro pulled his nose out of the book he’d been browsing long enough to dart a shy look at Hannah (who was still, after all, topless) and, looking quickly away, to say, “Hannah, be careful. You might hurt her.”

Smiling at his discomfiture, Hannah drawled, “Ah’m not hurting her, Chiro. Am Ah, Lauren?” She prodded Lauren’s buttocks with her stocking toes for emphasis.

“What?”

“Ah asked, am Ah hurting you?”

“Well…no, it doesn’t hurt. But it doesn’t tickle either. I’m stuck! Get off!”

“Hmmmmm,” Hannah mused, with a wink at the still embarrassed Chiro before she drew the roomy sweatshirt over her head. It stretched nearly to her knees. “So it doesn’t tickle, eh?” She began rubbing her hands together like a theatrical Victorian villain. Her bearing was now quite steady, her eyes flashed with purpose. Whether her hapless resemblance to a wet noodle earlier had been a ruse or not, Hannah Davis was in a commanding position now.

Chiro, relieved that she was somewhat clothed, chuckled in spite of himself, as he remonstrated, “Now, Hannah….”

Below, it finally dawned upon Lauren that she’d been suckered. “Wait! You-you aren’t going to…I mean…I thought you were all, uh, shagged out…. C’mon, I just wanted to pay you back for that day in the stocks…. And you made out all right…. You must have set a record for climaxing by foot tickling.”

“Uh-huh,” Hannah admitted, as she reached down to grab Lauren’s carelessly raised right foot. “Ah did have a good time…less attributable to your fiendish efforts, Ah think, than something about that amazing jar.” Holding the struggling leg by its Spandex foot strap, she untied the lace of Lauren’s New Balance shoe, yanked it off, and tossed it aside. “But, if you really knew the Vellication Irregulars, Lauren, you would have realized that turnabout is always fair play, especially against the self-righteous.”

“Hey! Stop! Wait! This-this isn’t fair!” Lauren stammered. “I-I figured the score was even. I was even helping you home to bed!”

“Ah was helping you help me home to bed.” Hannah said, as, holding the ankle, she slipped the Spandex strap off from Lauren’s instep. “Ah may have been pleasured silly, my dear, but you underestimate me if you think mah wits could be so completely undone.” Grabbing it at the ankle, she pulled Lauren’s floppy white athletic sock off and flung it away. She delicately plucked a bit of lint from amidst Lauren’s upturned bare pink toes, which wiggled in response. “Mmmmm! Now Ah remember this lovely, soft, and sweetly sensitive bare foot.”

“N-no! Don’t! Chiro! Help me!” Lauren wailed from under the bed. “Don’t let her do this to me again!”

Chiro, smiling and shaking his head at Hannah, had finally replaced the book on the shelf and came to kneel beside Lauren’s left leg. He said, in a mentoring tone, “Hannah’s right, you know, Lauren. We played a wicked trick on her tonight—her, ah, climactic pleasure notwithstanding. She is due a just reprisal. That is the way of the Vellication Irregulars.” He caught her waving left lower leg in an arm lock, and proceeded to efficiently remove shoe, Spandex strap, and sock from her left foot. He had to admit that her small, shapely foot, with its pale, smooth top and soft, pinked, wrinkly sole, was an irresistible tickling target.

“You Irregular bastards!” Lauren howled. “You’re a bunch of plotting perverts! All of you!”

“Honey,” Hannah purred, grazing the soft pads of Lauren’s toes with her burgundy fingernails, “You were quite willing to plot with Yumi and Chiro…”—Hannah winked at him and he coughed. —“…against me. So spare me the under bed castigation.” She opened the bedside table drawer with her free hand, which then from therein extracted, in turn, a small feather duster, a hairbrush deep with rubber-tipped bristles, and a wooden backscratcher. She placed them beside her on the bed. Surveying them with satisfaction, she mused, “This round, Ah’ve got the home court advantage!”

Chiro, picking up the feather duster, glanced at his watch. To Hannah, he said, “I’ll stay and help you, ah, entertain Lauren a little while, Hannah. But I must go soon and attend to Yumi.”

“Don’t go, Chiro!” Lauren screeched. “Don’t leave me like this with her! Eeeeek! Stop!”

Hannah, clucking her tongue, had begun to stroke down Lauren’s soft pink sole with the nail of her forefinger. She smiled at Chiro and said, “You needn’t worry about Yumi, Chiro. Those two ‘students’ with her are, uh, pals of mine. Remember when Ah made a call before? Ah was inviting the two newest Irregulars to help Yumi, uh, try out the jar. She’s getting just what she was askin’ for, right about now, Ah’ll bet.”

(What'll YOU bet that there's more to come below?)

Fasten your belts! It's the wild conclusion to "A Jar Full of Laughter"...

“There. The lid’s in place,” the blonde said, brightly. “Comfy?”

“Ah, yes, thank you,” Yumi replied. She moved her head and waggled her hands and stocking feet as if to demonstrate their relative comfort as they were restrained in the lip openings under the lid. Her position was awkward—She felt a draft between her legs! --but was not unpleasant. Pushing against the lid made it readily apparent that she would not be leaving the jar without help. Good, she thought, feeling helpless probably contributes to the jar’s effect.

However, she thought further, merely being helpless in the jar apparently isn’t enough for it to work its magic. After all, Hannah didn’t have her astonishingly stimulating experience until she was left alone in the jar. Thus, Yumi decided she had to get rid of her newfound helpers, immediately.

She intoned, “Again, I can’t thank you enough for helping me in here, but I-I would like to be alone to, ah, to meditate. If you wait by the back entrance door, Dr. Yamaguchi should be back very soon to escort you. Please make sure that storeroom door closes on your way out, OK?”

The young women made no apparent move to exit. Rather, the robust blonde, smiling slyly, stood with her arms folded, seeming to study the seams in the nylon upon Yumi’s wiggling toes. She said, “Hey, Nikki, whaddaya think? Doesn’t it seem a waste to leave someone who has herself crammed into a jar decorated with all these feathers, without attending to her cute little feet helplessly sticking out?” She dragged a forefinger down the middle of Yumi’s right sole.

Yumi gasped and her foot wildly gyrated. She protested, “Stop that! This is not what we agreed!” Wriggling helplessly in the jar, Yumi was having second thoughts. She still wanted to rest in the jar until any mystic aura it possessed could affect her. However, she realized she had left herself utterly at the mercy of two students she’d plucked out of the night. She nervously insisted, “Ah, Dr. Yamaguchi…and other colleagues will be back any moment. Thank you, but you should leave.” The forefinger began stroking up her sole. Yumi gasped again and cried, “Leave at once or I’ll—I’ll….”

“Or what?” giggled the dark-haired one, who was hovering so close to Yumi’s left foot that she was practically sniffing Yumi’s toes, which wiggled as the dark one’s exhalations fluttered the nylon covering them. Yumi realized with alarm that the girl was, with rapt intent, very subtly, but effectively, tickling her tender toes and sensitive sole by rippling her stocking with puffs of breath She, fighting rising giggles, wondered how this could be so; she’d never felt this ticklish before. She whirled her foot, trying to maintain a straight face as she blurted, “Loo-ook! S-stop! I helped you escape a mob, remember?

The two young women burst out laughing. Then, the blonde said, “Oh, that! Jeez, Nik’, we should get Oscars.” Fluttering a pair of fingertips in Yumi’s instep, she explained, “Prof Hannah called us, asking a favor. She clued us in on your being alone here and really needing our…special attention. We cooked up the frat riot story to get you to take us in. Hell, you did the rest.” She began fluttering her fingertips all over the black nylon stretched upon Yumi’s small, soft sole. “You know, I think you had us put you in here because you get excited when someone does this and says, ‘Kitchey-kitchey-coo!”

Yumi’s foot jerked. The girl’s light touches were like little shocks. Yumi tittered involuntarily, saying, “Tee-hee. Ah, p-please! W-won’t you s-stop-teehee-and pleheese leaheeve?” But she was suddenly aware the girl was quite right.
Before tonight, Yumi would have, well, laughed if anyone had suggested that being tickled was at all sexually stimulating. Yumi had frustrated Chiro’s desire to bind and tickle her. (She had shown him no such mercy, to her great satisfaction.) Indeed, it had been so long since anyone had exploited her ticklishness that she had deluded herself into thinking she really had no such weakness. She had assumed that the only kick to be found in tickling was to be the merciless tickler. Had she all along been repressing a desire to be made helpless and gently teased to the point of no return? Did she secretly crave being tickled?

Her helpless giggles said yes. The blonde’s teasing touches and the dark one’s warm puffs on her feet were undoing her self-possession with astonishing speed. She admitted now that she was somewhat ticklish, yes, but, suddenly, her feet seemed ridiculously sensitive. Was the jar somehow enhancing her ticklishness? Was this why Hannah, after a long spell in the jar, begged to be tickled, and soon after, her teased libido erupted like a long-rumbling volcano?

Her speculations ceased, though, after the dark, thin girl murmured, “Awesome!”. Sharing a delighted look with the blonde, she, too, brought a few fingertips up to skate them ever-so-lightly on the sheer nylon coating Yumi’s left sole. “Tickle-tickle-tickle!” she teased, softly.

The little, stocking-enhanced tickles were maddening, and a swollen brook of childlike giggles began bubbling from Yumi. “Heehee! Heh-heh-heh! Ple-hee-heese! You-hoo must stahhahaop!” Her giggly pleas, echoing in the room, reminded her of similar ones from Hannah earlier. Those had only seemed to inspire her and Lauren to tickle even more cruelly. As cruelly as these two…

“Wait!” Yumi thought. “Hannah phoned these two? ‘ One light and one dark’?”

Desperately trying to meet her tormentors’ eyes, she stammered, “Heeheehehheh! Y-your names! Heh! What are your-ahhahha-your names again?”

The plump blonde stopped her fluttering fingers for a moment and, meeting Yumi’s teary gaze, said, “Why, I’m Clarice, sweetie!”

The thin dark girl peered over Yumi’s toes, which she continued teasing, and whispered, “My name is Dominique…but call me Nikki.”

“Teehee! Clarice? Nikki? Why you’re…you’re…!” Yumi realized that these two were the young women dispatched by the Vellication Irregulars last fall to invade Hannah Davis’ home. They had tickled the prodigal Irregular silly, prompting her to return to the group seeking help to retaliate. The two then joined with the Irregulars to tickle Hannah completely out of the solitary blues she’d been wallowing in for months. Hannah had described these two as amazingly proficient and absolutely merciless ticklers. And, thoughtlessly, Yumi had let them in and actually encouraged them to trap her in the jar, leaving her helpless before them. How could Hannah have done this to her after the pleasure she’d received? Yumi thought--as the pair eagerly applied twenty frisky fingers to her soles: “What a horny idiot I’ve been to set myself up like this!” She exploded with high-pitched, breathy laughter.

“AH-HA! HEE-HEEEEEE! OH-OH-AH-HA-HAHAHA-AHHAHAHAHA-HAHAAAAAAA!”

Clarice and Nikki giggled and giddily teased her with “Kitchey-coo!” and “Tickle-tickle!” Both avidly stroked all over her stocking feet, their fingertips skittering across her sheer foot tops, sliding around her insteps, scratching her heels, poking under the balls of her feet, and digging gleefully under her toes. They were happily aware that her nylon stockings were accentuating every tickling touch they gave her tiny, tender feet. She was all too aware as well!

“EEEEEK! NO-NO-NO! AH-HA-AHHAHAHAHA! EEHEE-EEHEHEEHEEHEE! AHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!”

After a (torturous) time, Clarice surrendered the tickling of both of Yumi’s feet to a thoroughly delighted Nikki, who began playing light but spirited five-finger exercises upon each sole. Clarice pointed down to the front of the jar and said to an understandably distracted Yumi, “I wonder what can be seen through this conveniently located peep hole!”
Clarice knelt to peer through the lower front slot. She grinned and sang, “Oh-ho! I see Paris! I see France! I see Hello, Kitty underpants! I gotta take advantage of thi-is!” She stood and spotted an unusual brush on a nearby worktable. At one end of a thin, long wooden shaft were a few inches of flattened soft plastic bristles. At the other end was a button which, when twisted and pressed, caused the bristles to extend in a wide, fine fan. Clarice chuckled, “Uh-huh! This’ll do!” She was unaware of its intended function—as a delicate cleaner of hard-to-reach places in artifacts—but immediately saw its potential for tickling Yumi’s hard-to-reach spots.

She knelt back down and inserted the bristly end of the brush through the slot until its foremost end nudged the cartoon kitties covering Yumi’s love triangle. To tease the tender button, Clarice pressed the shaft’s button, causing the many bristles to fan out between Yumi’s thighs. She then began spinning the shaft in her fingers, so the fine bristles began to ever so lightly stroke inside Yumi’s upper thighs, under her buttocks and in the tender divide between them. As the fan swept over the thin, illustrated cotton panties, Clarice crooned, “’Just brushin’ the pussies. Brush-brush-bruuuush!”

At her first awareness of this new bristly torment, Yumi gasped, and her helpless laughter was edged with a new desperation not to surrender so easily. “No-no-nuh-nuh-notthere-eeeheeheeheehee-ahha-hahhah-OHHOHO-AHAHAHA-AAHHAHAHAHA-AAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA…!”

Nikki was almost beside herself in her present position. She was standing with her long legs wide, straddling Clarice, who was kneeling below and busy teasing Yumi through the jar’s lower slot. Nikki grinned as her fingers feverishly danced upon the tender, nylon-coated skin of the small, pretty feet helplessly waggling before her. As she relentlessly tickled, she beheld Yumi’s hysterical face, slick with sweat and tears, with eyes sometimes squeezed shut, sometimes opened comically wide, and cute, high laughter tumbling out over the perfect little white teeth of a small mouth stretched broadly open. Occasionally, breathy unintelligible words—presumably Japanese—tumbled out amidst her shrieks and giggles.

This alone would have aroused Nikki quite enough, with her own honey pot below beginning to throb and ooze warm sweetness. However, Clarice’s head was also bobbing between Nikki’s legs. Clarice’s soft blond hair was inadvertently but persistently brushing her pal’s inner thighs and the bottom of her ass through her fishnets. Nikki couldn’t believe how wonderfully this tickled!

Thus stimulated, she found Yumi’s small, soft, shapely feet, struggling before her, more appetizing by the moment. She grabbed the toes of the right foot and, burying her face in the warm sole, began flicking the tip of her tongue along the arch. With Yumi adding squeals to her emoting, Nikki moved on to long, languorous licks around the ball, and sharp nibbles under the toes.

Clarice glanced up and cracked, “Diggin’ right in, huh, Nik’?”

Nikki’s response was to reach down with her right hand and probe around her friend’s right underarm.

Clarice jerked, shouted “Hey!”, spluttered with giggles, but did not stop her nether feathering of Yumi. She did, however, resort to whirling the brush in one hand while, with the other, she reached down and snaked her fingers into the black, soft leather flat loosely fitted on
Nikki’s left foot. There, she wiggled her fingertips in her pal’s stocking instep, and chortled, “Heh-heh! T-heh-ake t-that!”

Nikki, despite her preoccupation with Yumi’s toes, chuckled and yanked her foot from her shoe. This, however, only exposed her entire stocking sole to Clarice’s doggedly tickling fingers. Nikki soon was herself breathlessly giggling into Yumi’s warm sole, which she continued to kiss and tickle. Clarice snickered below as she tickled her pal, but, unable to dislodge Nikki’s fingers tickling her underarm, she was giddy with giggles even as she brushed Yumi’s kitties.

On top, Yumi, with eyes squeezed shut, was amazed to find she was laughing even more hysterically. For, in addition to the expert teasing from these two, she unaccountably began to feel tickling sensations all over her body. It was as if she were being lightly brushed by dozens upon dozens of soft plumes, stroking the skin along her arms and legs, up and down her sides, across her tummy, behind her ears, upon her palms—everywhere! Clarice and Nikki weren’t responsible for this pervasive torment, for the feathery touches were all over--even inside her dress and under her stockings. What was happening?

Her incredulity—and her hysteria—were heightened when she felt the plumes began to brush with agonizing teasing purposefulness atop and under her small, sensitive breasts. Her dress and bra proved no defense against the persistent feathering. Had these two removed the lid and torn off her clothes to tickle her so?

She suddenly opened her tear-filled eyes. The room had darkened, and all around her were veiled women, laughing playfully, wiggling long plumes through the myriad openings in the jar. One was breathing warmly into her ear and—in what sounded like perfect Japanese! -- murmured, “Laugh for Tansu, my dearest! Laugh!” This teaser then danced to the front of the jar and—her vulpine smile gleaming through her veil—began to slide a plume between the big and second toes of each of Yumi’s feet, suddenly, unaccountably, bare! Tansu chuckled as
Yumi screamed with laughter, her bare toes helpless against the feathery assault.

Yumi, in hilarious agony, shut her eyes again. When, apparent seconds later, she reopened them again, she beheld the work lights, the storeroom, and a giggly Nikki nipping at her toes. With her last vestiges of coherent thought, Yumi decided that the jar truly was mystical. Back in Istanbul, the tickling of Lauren within it had awakened its magic after centuries of slumber. Hannah had fallen fully under its spell, and, Yumi thought, haplessly, so had she. The jar had bewitched her, exploited a weakness hidden deep within her, compelled her to be trapped within it, and was now directing and abetting these crazed girls in tickling her out of her mind. In the jar’s embrace, Hannah had seemed suffused with pleasure. Yumi feared, however, that she was going insane from such pleasure. She resolved to make one last stand of resistance.

Almost immediately, however, she felt the tips of phantom plumes begin to mercilessly circle the tips of her nipples and caress her love triangle. All the other tickling seemed to stop. She felt only the light, maddening caress of the plume tips on these key erogenous zones. Time seemed to freeze as she screamed with full-throated laughter and surrendered the last vestiges of reason.

“AH-HA-HA-HAAAAAAA! EEEEEEEEKKKKK! EEEE-HEEE-HEEE-HEEE-HEEEEEEE!”

As the first of innumerable orgasmic shocks this night began to ripple through her, her last rational thought was, improbably enough “(Gasp!) Heeheehee! And people tell me…museum work—heh-heh—is so…is so…dull…(Gasp!).”

******

Atop Crane Hill, under Professor Hannah Davis’ four-poster bed, Lauren howled with laughter. Chiro hummed contentedly as he swept the feather duster along her bare right foot for long minutes. He then set the duster aside and, sighing with pleasure, began a meticulous two-finger tracing of the wrinkles across her soft sole.

Meanwhile, Hannah was noisily teasing Lauren by unleashing her long, strong fingers freely upon the grad student’s bare left foot from toes to heel and back again. “So, my dear Ms. Weaver, you thought you could not only tickle me silly, but make me sing that damned song—and figure Ah’d just let it go, huh?”

Lauren screamed, “NONONOHOHOHO! STAHHAHAHAAAAP PLEEHEEHEESE, HANNAH-HAHAHAHAAAAA!”

“We’re not stopping, no, are we, Chiro?” Hannah intoned, digging her nails under Lauren’s toes. “No, we won’t stop until you agree, dear, to become one of us. To join the Vellication Irregulars.”

“Haha-huh? Whuh-ha-ha?”

“You obviously love to tickle, my dear.” Hannah said. “You do it very well, as mah tootsies can testify. And--Kitchey-kitchey-koo! —Ah think you have the most ticklish feet I’ve ever had the pleasure of exploring. Even more ticklish than my Irregular pal Shaundra Manley—and she’s heretofore been cited as having the most ticklish toes on God’s green earth. And, while you may be loath to admit it, Ah think you get excited when you’re tickled, too. You belong with us, girl. What do you say?”

Hannah stopped her tickling, and, with her foot, nudged a reluctant Chiro to do so as well.

Panting and moaning under the bed, Lauren said, “F-forget it! I’m not joining you psychos!”

“Ah!” smiled Hannah, winking at Chiro. “She needs a bit more convincin’. Keep her from kickin’, will you, Chiro?” He did, by leaning across Lauren’s calves. Hannah, meanwhile, had picked up the hairbrush and straddled Lauren’s stretched-out, Spandex legs. She gave Lauren’s buttocks a few playful, but forceful whacks with the back of the brush. “That’s for calling us names!”

“Ow-huh! Bitch!” Lauren spat.

“OK. Spankin’ just makes you mad!” Hannah reasoned. “Let’s try the business side of this brush on your tender sit-upon.” Hannah began lightly stroking the Spandex covering Lauren’s ass and the backs of her thighs with the rubber-tipped hairs of the brush. “This feel any different?”

Lauren gulped. The thin synthetic fabric seemed to accentuate the rubber tips stroking her and soon this unusual tickling was causing her to helplessly giggle anew. “Now—hehhehheh—you stop that! Hehheh—Now! Heh-heh-heh! Plee-heese!”

Chiro was moved by that plea to complement Hannah’s upper leg teasing by bringing the soft feather duster back sweeping across both of Lauren’s lovely, sensitive soles. Lauren shrieked and surrendered to continuous, keening laughter.

Hannah, circling the brush on Lauren’s butt, asked, “How ‘bout it, dear? Will you swear to become a Vellication Irregular?”

“Ne-heh-heh-hehever!” insisted Lauren amidst her hilarity.

While Chiro continued his feathering, Hannah put aside the brush and took up the back scratcher. “You forget, mah dear, that your very ticklish self is pitted against a Vellication Irregular. Being tickled can, Ah’ll admit, undo me—Lord knows! —but—and Ah would think you’d remember, as it prompted your nifty jar trap—Ah tickle good enough to win Olympics gold.”

Hannah brought the curled end of the wooden scratcher against the Spandex upon Lauren’s hip and began moving it ever so lightly, up-and-down. Lauren yelped as she laughed and tried to move her hip away, but Hannah pursued it, tickling without mercy. Lauren howled and futilely jerked her hips until she had managed to reach back and yank the back scratcher from a chuckling Hannah’s grasp.

“Ah! I prefer freehand anyway,” insisted Hannah. She moved up to straddle Lauren’s quivering butt and reaching under the bed, squeezed Lauren’s hips. Lauren screamed anew, not only from this expert hip checking, but also from Chiro snaking a strong solitary finger into the sweet spots between her clenched toes.

Before long, under this dual assault, Lauren screeched, “AHHAHAHA! All right! Hehhehheh! You win! AHHAHA!”

Hannah cocked an ear, but did not relent tickling. She asked, “You promise to join the Irregulars?”

Lauren hesitated just a beat before shrieking, “Ye-heh-heh-hess! I’ll--hahaha—join! Only stop! Hahaha! Pleeheeheeheese!”

Hannah, his hands easing up on Lauren’s hips, turned to look back at Chiro. With forearm still firmly restraining Lauren’s calves, he had turned to look at Hannah. Their eyes met in silent, simultaneous query. They smiled, chuckled, and shook their heads in agreement. He gained a firm hold on Lauren’s right ankle, as Hannah moved beside him to hold Lauren’s left foot. They nodded to each other and simultaneously began stroking her soles.

Lauren laughed in outrage. “AHHAHAHA! HEY! STOP! HEHHEHHEH! DIDN’T YOU HEAR? YOU WON-AHHAHAHAHAAAAAAA….” Perhaps her laughter kept Lauren from the realization that, with Hannah no longer sitting on it, the bed was no longer pinning her beneath it. Or maybe she was just too exhausted, too giddy to do anything but laugh, and enjoy it…

Hannah, scratching the young grad student’s robustly red, soft heel, couldn’t resist playing the pedagogue. She intoned, “Lauren, tonight you and Yumi—once Clarice and Nikki get through with her—have learned two important lessons from the Vellication Irregulars. One is… Chiro?”

He, having plucked a feather from the duster, was immersed in a light but exhaustive teasing of Lauren’s wiggling toes. Still, he cleared his throat and announced, “One good tickling deserves another!”

“Right!” Hannah Davis said. And, scratching under Lauren’s arch, she added, “And, Lauren, remember: No matter what the tickled say, enough is never…enough!”

******

Chiro’s Celica pulled up alongside the loading dock of the museum. He shut the motor off, and it ticked lightly as it cooled. He took a pull at a Sapporo hidden in a paper bag. Hannah, who had hastily slipped a down vest over her Ole Miss sweatshirt, and donned jeans and cowboy boots, sat in the passenger seat, sipping a Samuel Adams. They had stopped at the 24/7 before dropping Lauren off at her apartment.

Chiro muttered, “I wonder if Lauren will leave Commonwealth because of us. She was so quiet on the ride to her building, and she left the car without a word.”

“Not only that,” Hannah added, reaching over the seat. “She left without these.” She held Lauren’s New Balance runners in one hand. She and Chiro burst out laughing.

Struggling for composure, Chiro said, “No, really! I think we went too far tonight, Hannah. You can’t force someone to become an Irregular.”

Hannah tossed the shoes into the back seat. She smirked at him and said, “Ah wouldn’t worry about Lauren goin’ anywhere, Chiro. She’ll stick around—and join the Irregulars—if only to pay us back.” Chiro laughed. Hannah insisted, “You think you’re safe because you’re her mentor. Think again! Ah only met her twice, but Ah know that girl! Believe me, Ah felt her glee as she was ticklin’ me. She was born to be an Irregular. She won’t stay away. Not for long, anyway. Besides, she wouldn’t leave you—and the artifacts from your dig—in the lurch.”

“Oh! The artifacts! The jar!” Chiro cried, hastily removing his seat belt. “I’d completely forgotten! Yumi and those friends of yours! I’m afraid what we’ll find!” He rushed from the car, and Hannah, amused, followed.

As their footsteps echoed through the museum, Hannah teased, “You realize, Chiro, that if you try and keep the other Irregulars away from that jar, they’ll join forces and trap you in it. Then, they’ll leave you alone with Lauren and Yumi.” Chiro noticeably shuddered. Hannah continued, “Seriously, once they hear of mah experience in it, all the Irregulars will want
to sit in it.”

Chiro winced and said, “Perhaps, Hannah, we can, ah, downplay that experience. For the sake of the artifact, of course.”

“Why, Dr. Yamaguchi,” Hannah purred, “Ah believe you’re askin’ me to lie. Very ticklish territory—ethically speaking, that is.”

Chiro sighed and muttered, “That’s the problem. I’ve let tickling dictate my ethics in this whole affair. Very unprofessional. I only hope that Yumi showed some restraint while we were gone.”

They entered the storeroom to find that Yumi was under restraint, as Hannah had been, in the jar. Her eyes were closed and a goofy smile was plastered on her face. She was singing softly in Japanese, punctuated by occasional giggles. Her feet, with their nylons peeled back to her ankles, waggled limply in front. Her bare soles glistened moistly and glowed a livid red.

At the foot of the jar lay a snoozing Clarice and Nikki, their bodies intertwined and mostly unclothed. Clarice was wearing only her ski cap and a Boston Bruins jersey. Nikki was clad only in her scarf and her fishnet stockings. Clarice was snoring lightly, with her green lips slightly parted. Nikki was smiling sweetly and sighing in her sleep, perhaps because Clarice’s breathing was causing the bristles of the long-handled brush to almost imperceptibly stroke Nikki’s little breasts.

First to approach the jar, Hannah marveled, “Mah, mah! A good time was had by all. Yumi looks like she’s just returned from that wonderful, mysterious place where Ah found myself. As for these two….” She knelt before the young sleeping Irregulars and reached out to tickle Clarice’s pudgy bare toes, twitching as she dreamed.

Hannah caught herself, though, observing, “Wait! It might be safer letting these two sleeping beauties lie. When they’re awake, they always find a way to reduce me to hysterics.” She turned to Chiro and added, “But, how rude of me! You haven’t met. The snoring blonde, Chiro, is named Clarice. And her skinny, uh, buddy is named Dominique. Nikki to her friends. They’re the newest of the Irregulars, and Ah daresay among the most enthusiastic.” Her smoky eyes narrowed and she smiled. “Hmmm! I wonder if we can replace Yumi in the jar with one of these sleeping beauties.” She chuckled and pulled a quarter from her pocket. “Heads, Clarice. Tails, Nikki.”

Speechless, Chiro walked over to the front of the jar. He stared at Yumi’s bare feet and, after a brief hesitation, gently tickled beneath her right toes. She squealed and opened her eyes wide, but looked right through him. Breathlessly, she cried in English, “No-no, Tansu! Please! I can’t bear it! No more!” She laughed wildly for a moment and then settled back into her seeming trance.

“W-who? T-Tansu?” Chiro stammered, flashing back to a sensual smile in Istanbul.

Hannah stood and patted his shoulder. “It’s all right. Ah’ve met her. She’s very friendly.”

“B-but how?”

“Trust me. She seems to hang around the jar. ‘Care to meet her?”

Chiro, distracted both by Yumi’s dreaminess said and her bare-footed helplessness, agreed absently.

“Fine,” said Hannah. “Help me get spacey Yumi out of the jar. Then, somehow we’ll put you in, and we’ll see if you can downplay your experience!”

Perhaps it was only a trick of the spotlight reflecting off of the jar, but the red and blue plumes adorning its surface seemed to quiver and wave, as if in thrilled anticipation…

MEETING ADJOURNED.

*The author hopes that the liberties he has taken with Ottoman history, Turkish culture, and academic, not to mention archaeological, standards of conduct didn’t tick anybody off. Tickle, yes. Tick off, no.

*The author also empathizes fully with readers who howled in frustration when the story ended before Chiro got his turn in the jar. Please note that, if you’ve been following the Hannah Davis series, the tickling has been gradually (all right, glacially) widening its inclusiveness. SABBATICKLE presents a mature woman academic ambushed by two young female rogues. A TICKLISH MATRICULATION offers a wider circle of women academics, who join the three from SABBATICKLE in what is essentially a tickling round robin. A JAR FULL OF LAUGHTER introduces the series’ first male tickler, in what admittedly is a mere, ah, toe in the water during another femme fest.
Rest assured that the author has no prejudice against depictions of men being tickled.
Indeed, in what I hope will be the very next entry in the series (although absolutely no one should hold his/her breath waiting), a number of male Vellication Irregulars dominate the proceedings. Tentatively titled HANNAH’S HA-HA-HAUNTED HOUSE! , the tale will
see the guys opportunistically exploiting their women colleagues’ celebrated weakness, before
a fitting justice is done. In other words, I don’t think Chiro will get away next time…
As for what happens after the curtains falls in the third entry, who can say? With my maddening (to me!) penchant for revising stories, he might get it in this one yet. As they say, stay tuned…


SHAMELESS PLUG: The marvelous artist Tim Rocks and I, under the watchful eye of Oblesklk, have collaborated on what I humbly think is a hilarious and exciting tickle comic. It's the premiere issue of THE AGENCIES, and the wild story is titled "Kitchey-Coo Switcheroo!" If you like your comics fast-paced, gadget-laden, and filled with characters too ticklish to be true, I urge you to order THE AGENCIES #1. Just go to www.the-agencies.com for more info and to place your order. And I thank you!

Superb, as expected....

When magnificence becomes a matter of course, an author enters into a rare class indeed. Looking forward to many more, and I hope to check out "The Agencies" as well.

Well worth the (LONG) wait...

...and you captured Lauren's spirit and personality perfectly. I hope we'll see more of her in the future. Thanks, amigo, for a great story!

Strelnikov

BOING! OWOOOOOO! BAM! BAM!

<p>Munch, Strel, Ancil,<p>
<p>I greedily and indiscriminately lap up all praise, but when it comes
from three correspondents of known and knowing discernment--Fine wordsmiths, all!-- I get all
goofy, my eyes bug out, I howl and start hitting my head with a mallet (Sorta like the smitten
wolf in Tex Avery's classic WWII cartoon RED HOT RIDING HOOD.).<p>
<p>Thanks for the kind words!, friends.<p>

Fine story! I enjoyed it very much. And certainly do include some f/m in your next one.

Now I realise that this is quite a bump. And notwithstanding the later additions in the Wanderlust series, unless I'm very much mistaken, the continuation to this great work - HANNAH’S HA-HA-HAUNTED HOUSE! - has never been exhibited here. And that is a tragedy. This epic is far too good not be continued. Please Capt. Spalding / Tee Hee, please give us more!

A (Tentative) Pledge

GrantSA said:

Now I realise that this is quite a bump. And notwithstanding the later additions in the Wanderlust series, unless I'm very much mistaken, the continuation to this great work - HANNAH’S HA-HA-HAUNTED HOUSE! - has never been exhibited here. And that is a tragedy. This epic is far too good not be continued. Please Capt. Spalding / Tee Hee, please give us more!

Click to expand...

If this isn't the longest bump in the history of the Forum, Grant, it must be damned close. <br>
I thank you for unearthing this ancient post and for reminding me that I've been remiss in fulfilling my assurances of coming Hannah attractions.<p>Every so often (usually when autumn rolls around) I dust off the latest draft of HANNAH'S HA-HA-HAUNTED HOUSE! and hammer away at it with the intention of finally posting it here for Halloween. There must now be a half-dozen OTHER Hannah tales-in-progress receiving similar revisits and rewrites. That I never seem to finish any of them says much about how fond of Hannah I am and how protective I am of getting her major opuses JUST right.<pr>
One of the reasons I began the (now also stalled) HANNAH IN WANDERLUST series was to have a place where I could write Hannah without agonizing too much about continuity and character. The "anything goes" fantasy context was supposed to make it easy for me to knock the chapters out and not worry overmuch about keeping the world of Hannah and the Irregulars real, rich, and affectionate. Sure enough, I'm finding that the third WANDERLUST entry has run away from me, with plot tangles and appearances of others from my stock company rendering it longer and subject to my persnickety rewriting.<br>I realize this seems, rather than tragedy, simply silly, doesn't it? It's JUST tickle fiction, produced for a modest audience, with no financial gain even contemplated. But, it IS consistent with my nature in general: I'm slow and second guessing in EVERYTHING, not just in writing ornate tickle traps for my dear Professor.<p> Tell ya what: the Holiday season is upon us. It's almost time for Strelnikov's annual post of his wonderful TICKLE STREET Christmas story, which so fondly and faithfully features Hannah that it ALWAYS makes me smilingly tearful. Let's see if I can beat him to the punch and finish a full-length Hannah tale of mine own. (Fingers crossed.) <p> Thanks again for the nudge.

TeeHee, Many thanks for your reply. Far from being silly, I can quite understand and do very much appreciate the time and evident care you take in crafting Hannah and co. and keeping her stories real, rich and affectionate. While the audience may be modest in number, with no financial return, I like to believe that as our industry grows, the truly talented pioneers may well gain an increasingly respected and recognised place. And if you get half the pleasure writing so qualitatively that we do reading your stories, then success is already assured. And while talking of talented pioneers, might I enquire why neither Capt. Spalding nor TeeHee have sections in the TMF Stories Archive? Surely this is more than a massively glaring oversight?

In the interim I have to say I'm now doubly glad that the Holiday season is here. Finger crossed, anxiously and most appreciatively. Grant