munchausen
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Just in case anybody still cares, here's the next installment in The Voyage Out series. Lots of set-up, but lots of tickling, too, including some just desserts. Hope you enjoy it -- let me know.
The Voyage Out, Part 10
The Net Closes.
Even on the bizarre, eclectic world of the Other Side, the three women gathered on the
roof of Khalkasa’s highest building (the Kandaele building, naturally) would have attracted open-
mouthed stares wherever they went. Granted, ordinarily they traveled in somewhat more
conventional clothing, but tonight they had neither the time nor the inclination for the trappings of
more “civilized” society. The night air surrounding them seemed to crackle with energy; their
environs seemed unnaturally quiet, as if a rush of white noise blocked out the incidental sounds of
urban night.
Kimara, or “Kimmie,” as she winkingly referred to herself, was the shortest of the three,
though her slight stature cast little doubt on the eldritch powers she commanded. She wore a
short, low-cut, somewhat diaphanous sky-blue silken dress that accentuated her ample chest and
seemed to sparkle as it billowed in the slight breeze; high-heeled white boots reached almost to
her knees. Wreathed by a cataract of blonde curls, her pixie-like, heart-shaped face and big blue
eyes seemed made for flirtatious smiles and faux-naivete, but for the moment were composed and
serious.
The other two listened intently, equally solemn. To her right stood the witch who had
tormented the women at the travel agency – tall and imposing, her dark skin set off by the golden
mane gathered improbably into two long ponytails that stood out from the back of her head. She
still wore the catsuit, boots, and silver cloak from her earlier evening’s work. Her name was Cyan,
and she was, to appearances, the least patient of the three – she shifted frequently, tapped her
foot, and tossed her oddly coiffed hair.
The third witch was as dramatic in her aspect as the other two. She stood as tall as Cyan,
lean and lithe but amply endowed, though not quite so much so as Kimmie. Her skin’s ivory tone
did not detract from the overall sense of force and health her body exuded. She had patrician
features, a roman nose, and eyes as black and glistening as the straight, thick hair that draped
elegantly over her bare shoulders down to her waist. She wore an elaborate crimson evening
gown with various, seemingly aimless gold sashes accentuating it, no stockings, and stiletto-
heeled scarlet shoes. Her name was Desyr.
Kimmie led the meeting in clipped, professional tones somewhat removed from the cutesy-
pie drawl she had used to torment Abe Michaelman, though her Southern accent stole in at the
edges. “All right, to recap. Yelena Kant wants these women brought to her alive, and will pay us
richly to do her dirty work. Cyan took significant, if not foolhardy,” she shot a look at Cyan, who
rolled her eyes and blew out her breath, “risks to find out their destination from the travel agency.
Fortunately, she also had the presence of mind to charm the women there into forgetting her visit.
Unfortunately, she forgot the very simple step of erasing the security camera’s records. This
shouldn’t be a big problem, as we can go back and do that from a distance, and they’re not likely
to have any call to review the tapes if they don’t remember that anything happened. Still, sisters, I
feel that sometimes I need to remind you that we have to stay conscious of technological, as well
as magical, threats in this part of the world.” She fixed her gaze on the defiant Cyan, who, after a
few moments, grudgingly nodded.
“Anyhow, my own tracing of the womens’ signatures, once I had enough information to
zoom in on the specific neighborhood, revealed that three of them are staying at a house in the
suburbs belonging to Luther and Marion Dearborn. A bit of research revealed that Luther
Dearborn was once called Dymion Ellefson, the brother of the military experiment who caused
Yelena Kant so much trouble on her last crossover – that would explain their choice of shelter.
“The fourth appears to be staying at a sorority house on the University of Khalkasa
campus. Now, these women, though they have no real power, mystical or otherwise, to speak of,
have shown themselves to be surprisingly resourceful – so don’t be overcautious, but stay alert.”
Desyr spoke, her voice deep, rich, and strangely musical. “I suggest we delegate tasks.
Perhaps we should minimize the possibility of something going awry by isolating them as best we
can. My surveillance of the Dearborn house showed that the tall, strong one – Francesca, I believe
– has gone to exercise at the local health club. So, at this moment, Leah Maitland and Akhana
Mesani should be at the Dearborn house, Courtney Frost at the sorority house, and Francesca at
the gym. Shall we go now, to take them while their defenses are low?”
“Good idea,” Kimmie said, with a nod. “Before we go, though, I need to brief you on
another mission Yelena has cooked up for us to do after we finish here – a potentially more
challenging one...”
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Mina Elhonne’s two story penthouse epitomized urban sophisticate cool; decorated
entirely in blacks and whites, it was sharp and angular where it should be, soft and welcoming
where it should be. Thanks to her largely automated cleaning staff, everything perpetually
gleamed with a high polish; her panoramic view of Khalkasa was magnificent. It would have been
perfect, she thought, if not for the goddamn stairs.
Mina teetered down her spiral staircase on impossibly high heels, navigated her way across
her spacious living room to her formidable computer set-up, and collapsed into her desk chair.
She pulled off the long crimson wig she had been wearing and tossed it onto the couch, then
slipped her feet out of the torturous heels and wiggled her long, delicate toes in their fishnet
stockings. Sighing, she began brushing out her long, sleek silver tresses. “Mail,” she said softly,
and a message window popped up on her flat-screen monitor. She read through a series of
messages, face dispassionate, then stopped short, eyes widening slightly. “Message to Emperor
Jaga Khan,” she said, cold aura of control immediately reasserting itself.
“Your excellency: we have received reports that Yelena Kant may be mobilizing Agents
Azure, Gold, and Ivory. This may be in the service of a personal agenda, but if our suspicions
hold, she may also be preparing to search for The Resting Place. We will continue to monitor the
situation.
We at Kandaele look forward to continuing our partnership, and eagerly anticipate the
realization of both of our goals. We apologize again for the failure of our recent mission, and
hope it will not jeopardize our working relationship. May the reign of Khan continue into
perpetuity. Sincerely, Mina Elhonne.”
“Close message, send,” she said clearly, then under her breath, “how much more
convincingly can I grovel?”
She turned in her chair and gazed out over the starlit Khalkasa skyline. “Well, Yelena…if
these women are so important to you, perhaps they could be important to us, as well…”
A light tinkling sound came from upstairs; Owen MacArthur was ringing for her again.
Insatiable! She thought, with a little shiver. She pulled the elaborate red wig back into place,
slipped her complaining feet back into the spiky shoes, and mounted the stairs once more. She
wasn’t crazy about the costume, or about the woman it was meant to represent, but it put a
charge in Owen, and when one of the two most powerful men in the world asked her to do
something, she was too savvy not to do it. “Beware, little man,” she called as she reached the top
of the stairs, “Your mistress Yelena is coming to have her way with you…”
-------------------------------------------------------------
In her temporary bedroom in the suburbs of Khalkasa, Leah Maitland, somewhat less
exotically dressed than Mina Elhonne in a black shirt, moderately low-rise, slightly flared jeans,
and bare feet, typed intently at the laptop she had purchased on the companions’ arrival. Her long,
dark-blonde hair was wound up in a loose, impromptu bun and held in place with a pencil, and she
had caved in to necessity and donned her big-rimmed reading glasses, which magnified her
almond-eyes to elven proportions. Marion Dearborn, the woman who owned the house in which
she and her companions were staying, was out showing Akhana some sights, and Francesca had
gone to the local gym to ‘rescue her body,’ as she put it; Leah had opted to stay home alone to
catch up on her writing. She wasn’t sure if she would ever find a publisher for this particular
project, but, journalist that she was, Leah found that writing helped her make sense of the
otherwise nonsensical. She had experienced a particularly persistent urge to write lately.
“We have reached the home of Ellefson’s brother, who he called Dymion, but who now
goes by the name of Luther Dearborn. I’m not entirely clear on the reasons for the name change,
but I have the impression that he used to be involved with something top secret and has since
adopted a new identity. I’m not sure how recent the change has been. Luther, an archaeologist,
anthropologist, and inventor, is off in the north doing research for now, so he won’t be able to
help us for awhile, but Marion Dearborn and her daughter Ashley have been extraordinarily open
and welcoming. Their house is spacious and beautiful, big enough to allow each of us our own
room. So, we’ve settled into suburban paradise for the short term.
“I can hardly stand it. Under different circumstances, I might be enjoying myself, but each
time I try to relax the monstrous truth of our situation hits me again: we’re stranded on an alien
world, and probably being hunted by a vindictive sorceress for ruining her plan to sell us all as
slaves. Marion seems very optimistic that Luther will be able to help us on his return - she keeps
saying, ‘God knows what all gear he’s got in that basement, but I’m sure that if you need it, he’ll
have it.’
“The other girls seem to be holding up well. Courtney has gone off with Ashley, Luther’s
and Marion’s daughter, to her sorority house - hopefully, she’s enjoying herself. This must be
especially hard for her; she’s still in her teens. Then again, maybe she has more of an appetite for
adventure than the rest of us do.
“Francesca is stoic, as usual, and does her best to maintain our morale. I know she’s as
worried about getting Ellefson back as she is about getting home. She really seems to love him.
She tries, but she’s less convincing in her enthusiasm for our time-killing activities - mostly
shopping and partying -- than the rest of us manage to be. She’s discovered a gym down the
block, and spends a lot of her time there.
“Akhana is something of a cipher. If she is troubled by being here, she gives very little
sign. Occasionally, she will engage the problem in a practical way, doing research, gathering
information, and that sort of thing, but she never seems emotionally affected by the situation. She
seems unbelievably cool. I’m honestly not sure whether that’s reassuring or disturbing. She has
certainly shown no signs of betraying us, and has more than earned our trust -still, I can’t forget
that she was originally working with our abductors.
“As for me, I go back and forth between terror, excitement, and uncontrollable curiosity.
The travel writer in me is jumping out of her skin; a big part of me wants nothing more than to sit
down for about 48 hours and write about all the incredible things I’ve seen. I want to explore this
place, observe its customs. I want to get outside Khalkasa, which, for all its obvious differences,
seems like a sanitized copy of an American or Canadian city, and see the really exotic things that
have only been hinted at in our travels so far. I want to see the wild northlands, the less civilized
regions ruled by the mysterious emperor Jaga Khan.”
She paused for a moment, struck by a thought. Her eyes widened for a moment, then
narrowed. “But right now, as I sit here alone in the Dearborn house, with the promise of a few
solitary, uninterrupted hours ahead, I want to see Luther Dearborn’s basement.”
Leah allowed herself a devilish smile. She saved her journal, shut down the computer, and
set aside her reading glasses. She was slightly hesitant about snooping around the Dearborn house
behind Marion’s back, but, after all, she hadn’t been expressly told that the basement was off
limits. And the idea that Luther Dearborn’s top secret inventions, archaeological discoveries, and
who knew what other wonders lay a short distance beneath her feet was too intoxicating not to
explore.
She pulled the pencil from her hair, allowing it to tumble around her shoulders, then went
down the stairs to the kitchen and opened the door to the basement with the key that hung inside
the pantry. Switching on the light over the stairs, she slowly climbed down into the cavernous
basement.
One of the first things she noticed was that the stairs and basement floor were surprisingly
warm and comfortably carpeted; she hadn’t even stopped to think that it might be less than
comfortable to go into the basement barefoot, but it proved to be no hardship at all. Upon
reaching the bottom of the staircase and opening the door to the main basement, though, Leah
forgot all about the comfort of her feet.
The stairs leading to the basement had been surprisingly plentiful, and, upon stepping into
the basement proper, Leah could see why. She was in a large, high-ceilinged room, brightly but
attractively lit by a series of floating, glowing orbs that blazed to life as soon as she entered. The
place looked like half museum, half workshop, littered with books, bits of machinery, and
hundreds of objets d’art of varied and wild descriptions. A series of locked cabinets lined the far
wall, and a gallery of statues and pottery, some of which represented an array of nations and
historical periods, others of which were completely alien to Leah’s considerable artistic
knowledge, stood in a far corner. Closer by were various machines, some that looked like
antiques, others that resembled the super-high tech weaponry that Francesca had given them to
capture Akhana back on the ship. Leah was in nosey reporter heaven.
She spent the next couple of hours poking around, exploring the incredible wealth of
bizarre and fascinating artifacts in the archaeologist/scientist’s secret horde. In addition to the
artwork and inscrutable machinery, she found a small area with botanical experiments-
magnificently flowering plants, odd vines that moved of their own volition as she approached, and
strangely luminous fruit. Every ten minutes or so, a hiss would sound from that area as one of the
plants seemed to water the others.
Typically, perhaps, for someone so bookish at heart, Leah was most excited by the
journals she found scattered about the room. The journals of Lucas Dearborn, apparently
consisting of some eighteen volumes of tiny scrawl that reminded her of Kevin Spacey’s
character’s writings in the movie “Seven,” presented a chaotic, bizarre, and fascinating gazetteer
of the flora, fauna, and scientific history of Eldrun. The tone varied wildly from detached scientific
overviews to very personal anecdotes about his travels and adventures, some of which made Leah
blush in their frankness.
As she read through the journals, a strange and wondrous vision of a world emerged. The
land had been created millennia ago by a powerful, good-natured, but oddly scatterbrained
sorceress who had been imbued through a bizarre confluence of cosmic energy with divine power
(but not quite, alas, divine wisdom.) The sorceress, as best as any historians and scientists had
been able to determine, had traveled astrally through time and space, finding all that she found
appealing and delightful in earth history and sowing its seeds in her wonder-world. In hopes of de-
railing humanity’s bellicose and imperialist tendencies, she had engineered an energy system that
drew power directly from the most dramatic expression of sheer joy-laughter. Powerful, but no
true divinity, she had taken a deistic approach to her world - setting things into motion, then
disappearing and allowing things to take their own course. The result is a bizarre mixture of
cultures and societies, each an exotic ideal in its own way; a kind of benevolent Babel.
For the most part, her experiment seemed to work: she had created a world of beautiful
people and wonderful, magical phenomena, largely free of war, famine, and other ills that plagued
earth. However, as the millennia passed, evolution took its course: predatory animals and even
plants developed, “energy vampires,” who began to prey on the peaceful people. Dealing with
them was fairly easy in a place of magic, though, and the civilized nations of the south began to
quarantine those strange and dangerous species in the “uncivilized” northlands. Civilization
naturally began to congregate and develop in the Southlands, while the north remained relatively
undeveloped, and typically stereotyped as backward. There were vague hints in the journal, which
quoted liberally from earth texts like Aristotle’s musings on the polis, that the de facto shunning
of the north by the more prosperous south led to resentment, and that their exclusion from the
prosperous part of Eldrun had fomented anger in some quarters that now threatened, under the
mysterious emperor Jaga Khan, to spill over into conflict of some kind.
The sections about Lucas’s specific research were often more difficult to understand, and
were liberally interspersed with racy memoirs and technical mumbo-jumbo. After a time, Leah did
determine that he had been working on energy siphoning technologies and fauna, trying to
develop defenses against the possibility of a sorcerous attack from malevolent forces in the north.
The most dangerous of his experiments were locked in the great steel cabinets at the far end of the
basement-his “antimagic arsenal.” He was vague about what was actually there, but the hints he
dropped whetted Leah’s already rampant curiosity.
When a small, nondescript key dropped out of one of the most recent volumes,
Leah picked it up and gazed at it uncertainly for several moments. “This might be really stupid,
Leah,” she said to herself. “He locks those things up for a reason. On the other hand, if we’re
being hunted by a sorceress, we may need all the ordinance we can get. So just wait till Marion
gets home, and ask her to help. …Yeah, sure, you can wait indefinitely before you explore bizarre
otherworldly magical weaponry.”
By the time Leah reached this point in her internal monologue, she was already standing in
front of the third cabinet - the key hadn’t worked on the first two. With a soft click, the key
turned in the lock, and Leah slowly opened the great steel door.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Francesca was in fitness-geek heaven. The GoodBody Health Center went far beyond any
of the many high-end clubs she had seen in terms of atmosphere, machinery, and bells and
whistles. She could have spent the entire day just walking around, drinking the magnificent
concoctions at the juice bar, watching the impeccably toned men who lifted and ran with little
apparent effort, and swimming in the enormous, sapphire-tinted pools, of which there were nine at
her last count. She had hit the nautilus and cardio machines with a vengeance, using physical
exertion to burn off the fear and trepidation that had understandably haunted her since the
crossing over, and found that although she maintained a pleasant and energizing sweat, even after
two hours of hard work she still smelled as fresh as the proverbial daisy. The sorceress’s
sweetness-and-light philosophy of world creation seemed to extend into every aspect of life.
It was late, now, and as she emerged from the locker room, freshly showered, her long
dark hair hanging in damp waves and loose ringlets around her shoulders, she saw that the club
seemed completely empty. It seemed a bit odd – when she had gone in to shower, there were still
a fair number of people around – but perhaps she had luxuriated a little longer than she thought
under the soothing, perfect-temperature, steamy water flow. “Oh, shit, I hope they haven’t
closed,” she thought. “I might be keeping someone here.”
Walking through the enormous, oddly empty weight room, she was suddenly distracted by
desperate, comical gasping noises from the far corner. Turning, she saw a young woman, perhaps
about her age, with longish, curly blonde hair and the latest in spandex workout regalia, mounted
ineffectively on an inclined sit-up board. Her problem was in her positioning – her sneakered feet
(complete with pom-poms on the ankle-socks, Francesca noticed with a little smile) were resting
on top of the apparatus that was meant to hold the ankles in place, rather than threaded through it
so it could do its work. The board was jacked up to a wicked incline, and the woman, though she
appeared to be in fairly admirable shape, was struggling in vain to do sit-ups, her feet rising off the
apparatus with each attempt, and almost rolling off the side of the board to the floor.
The woman glanced over at Francesca and, flushed with exertion as she was, blushed
crimson. Francesca smiled encouragingly.
“Ah just cain’t seem to get goin’,” the woman said, with an embarrassed laugh. “Ah’m
usually pretty good at this kind of thing.”
Francesca felt her inner physical trainer coming out. She walked over to where the woman
lay catching her breath on the sit-up board. “You just need to get situated,” she said brightly. “Put
your feet through the spaces between the pads, here...no, one on each side...no, between, not
underneath...”
The blonde woman laughed apologetically. “Ah’m a lil thick today, it seems,” she said.
“Ah know you just had your shower and all, but would you mind showing me how to do it?”
Francesca smiled. There was something charming about this flaky woman with her accent
and big blue eyes. “Sure,” she said, as the woman stood aside.
Francesca, dressed to go back to the Dearborns’, was wearing a white t-shirt and soccer
shorts with thick-soled flip flops that added about three inches to her already ample height. She
paused for a moment, then stepped out of her shoes and mounted the board barefoot, slipping her
broad, tanned feet into place with practiced ease. She did a couple of effortless incline sit-ups to
demonstrate proper use of the equipment.
“Oh, oookay,” said the blonde, realization dawning. “So your feet go right through here.”
She traced her hands over the assembly, as if trying to understand; as she did so, her thumb
grazed the wrinkled, golden sole of Francesca’s right foot.
“AYII!” Francesca shrieked; her toes splayed and a tremor bucked her whole body. She
glanced about in alarm and embarrassment, trying to collect herself from the brief touch; no-one
seemed to be around to hear except the seemingly mortified and abashed blonde.
“Ah’m so sorry,” she said, in a breathy drawl. “Ah din’t mean to tickle your foot. Boy,
Ah’m battin’ zero tonight. Ah feel so foolish.”
Francesca smiled, fluttering a hand in front of her chest as if fanning her heart. “It’s okay.
You just surprised me, that’s all.”
An odd smile came over the blonde’s face – not the ingenue-like smile of before, but a
devilish grin. “Dearie, you have not yet begun to be surprised.”
Suddenly, Francesca felt strong, flexible ropes wrapping around her body, under her
breasts, at her elbows and waist, knees, and shins, strapping her helplessly to the board. She cried
out in alarm as she saw the blonde’s clothing shimmer and change into the sky-blue and white
ensemble that Kimmie had adopted for the day. The helpless little Southern waif was replaced by
a resplendent sorceress; the baby-doll face and locks of the woman she had been before now
glowed with a kind of palpable power.
“Now, I suppose I should introduce myself,” she said, her accent less pronounced, but still
detectable. “My name is Kimara, but I kind of like to go by Kimmie. It just sounds sweeter, don’t
you think?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Whatever you want, you’ve got the wrong
person,” Francesca said savagely, realizing as she did the stupidity of her claim.
“You and your friends, dear heart, have made a very powerful enemy, and she’d like
to...ah, discuss her grievance in person.”
“You’re crazy. This is a public place. Security, the police–somebody will come and stop
you.”
“Darling dear, don’t you think I’ve taken care of that? Didn’t it seem a little weird for us
to be completely alone in this place, when it was full of folks twenty minutes ago? Everybody
inside suddenly got the strangest urge to go home. The staff even locked the doors. Craziest
thing, isn’t it? All I did was mumble a little spell.”
Francesca’s heart sank into her stomach, which was uncomfortably taut as she fruitlessly
raised her head, the only part of her with full mobility, off the board to talk to Kimmie. “All right.
I’ll go. But you’ll never find the others.”
“Tut, tut, sweetie. We already have – y’all will be reunited shortly. Now, let’s see...” she
looked Francesca over – even bound and half-inverted, she was an impressive and powerful
specimen. “I’ve got ample energy to get us where we’re goin’, but a big strong gal like you might
give me some trouble, unless I’m good and charged. So I’m afraid, dear heart, that we’re gonna
need to have a lil’ play time before we go, to take the starch out of you, and to, well, put it in
me.” She winked and made a clucking noise with her tongue.
Oh, no, Francesca thought, realizing that this could only mean one thing....
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Courtney awoke wishing she was dead. Every muscle in her body screamed, her throat
was sore and ragged; she had the kind of headache that started as a dull throb and rocketed up in
intensity whenever she moved. It took her a moment to remember why she felt that way – then
she remembered her torturous experience at the “community service” event earlier that day.
She checked the clock – she had been asleep for about four hours since Ashley, Gen, and Cassie
had checked on her. They were almost painfully apologetic about the whole thing, feeling like
they had somehow caused her to be mistreated; Courtney had had to tell them a hundred times
that it was all right, something she really didn’t feel like working at in her current condition. The
three of them had to go to the award ceremony to accept the Community Service prize Courtney
had unintentionally won for them – another fact for which they apologized about six hundred
times.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Courtney had croaked, waving them off. “So, I’ll just be here by
myself?”
“Well, no...” Ashley said, a little sheepishly. “Kim Cho’s downstairs studying, so if you
need anything...”
“I’ll be sure to ask the toilet,” Courtney said bitterly.
“Oh, she’s really not that bad,” Cassie said earnestly. “She feels really bad about what
happened. She said so when she got back to the house.”
“Yeah, okay. I think I’m going to get some more sleep,” Courtney rasped, her voice
almost gone.
After the four-hour nap, she felt a little better. She stretched, used the bathroom, brushed
her teeth, had a hot shower, and ventured hesitantly from her room in search of refreshments.
The house was very large, and built almost like a hotel, with a big, open living room on
the ground floor, and all the bedrooms upstairs, ranged around the perimeter of the living room,
on a hallway that looked down on the living room below. As soon as Courtney stepped out of her
room, she heard Kim Cho’s voice coming from the living room below, amplified by the echoes of
the cavernous ceiling.
“Yeah, they were totally trying to blame it on me. Like I know how the stupid machine
works. Like I even care enough about her to try and do something like that to screw with
her...yeah, I know YOU think she’s really sweet. You showed that pretty well at the party last
night, you asshole...”
Talking to her boyfriend, Courtney thought. Without thinking about it, she got down on
her knees, so that Kim Cho wouldn’t see her over the low balcony wall, and peered down into the
living room from her hidden vantage point.
Kim Cho lay sprawled on the couch, her long, silky black hair rich with recently added
highlights – probably the appointment she had to rush off to after the service event –and fanning
out around her bitchily pretty face. She wore a purple belly shirt that exposed her perfect abs and
the jeweled stud that winked in her navel, and flared. low-rise jeans. She was barefoot, and silver
rings adorned two of her long, elegant toes.
The last thing Courtney wanted to do was talk to her. She knew exactly what had
happened, and was well and truly pissed, but was in no mood for a confrontation. She stepped
back from the balcony, far enough that Kim Cho wouldn’t see her with a casual glance, and began
to walk toward the upstairs game room, which had a stocked fridge.
Kim’s voice continued to rise from downstairs. “No, I don’t think so...not for a while, I
think,” she said, smiling in a self-satisfied way. She laughed, a little bark. “Right, like you’re so
irresistible. I get myself off better than you ever can, anyway. No, I’m not kidding. In fact, I ought
to tell you all about it, just to give you blue balls...” Courtney raised her eyebrows, a little shocked
at Kim’s frankness in the open living room. Kim’s boyfriend was way too good for her, Courtney
thought, but found even rancorous reflection too exhausting to maintain.
“...But I’m too tired. You just spank it for a few days, and think about what you did.
Yeah, right, like you’ll really break up with me. Sorry, I don’t think your new little friend will be
in any mood to boff you any time soon. She’ll be lucky to be able to walk, after what happened to
her today.” She laughed, a high, dainty sound. Courtney cursed under her breath as she took a
soda from the refrigerator.
Suddenly, she heard Kim Cho cry out, “Who the fuck are you!?” from downstairs.
Courtney started, spitting orange soda onto the floor, and ran quickly to the balcony to see what
was happening.
Cyan had arrived, in full sorceress regalia. An aura of black energy crackled around her,
and she hovered six inches off the floor. At the moment, Kim Cho, who had drawn her knees up
into a defensive posture on the couch, seemed to have her whole attention.
“Aren’t you pretty,” Cyan said, her voice surprisingly gentle and soothing. “What’s your
name?”
“K-kim Cho,” the girl replied, a little mollified by the complement she had been paid. For
all her exotic appearance and menacing air of magic, Cyan could, when she desired, talk like a
second grade teacher.
“Well, Kim Cho, my name is Cyan, and I need a big favor from you. I came here looking
for a pretty blonde girl, about your age, I think, named Courtney Frost. Now, I know she’s
around here, but for some reason I can’t get a good read on her energy signature – it’s as if she’s
been drained of all her energy, or some such nonsense. Anyhow, that’s not your concern. All I
want you to do is to tell me where she is.”
“W-what do you want her for?” Kim Cho asked, to her credit.
“She made a powerful sorceress very angry, and I’m here to take her back to her,” Cyan
responded. No reason to lie to one who could be so easily compelled to comply.
Kim Cho did not hesitate for a second; she stood up on the couch and pointed directly to
the door of Ashley’s room, where Courtney had been sleeping not ten minutes before. “She’s up
there. Been sleeping all day - shouldn’t give you any trouble.”
“That bitch!” Courtney thought.
She wasted no time. Fighting the aches and pains that ravaged her body, she slid the
window open and climbed out. Metal lattices overgrown with ivy decorated the outside of the
house at intervals – Courtney was lucky enough to emerge right next to one. Cursing her bare
feet, she managed to half-scale, half slide down the wall, free-dropping the last six feet and
landing in a deep puddle. She started to run away, but curiosity got the better of her. She knew
the witch couldn’t trace her energy signature, whatever that meant – and she should really make
sure nothing too awful happened to Kim Cho.
She crouched in the bushes outside the large picture window to the rear of the house,
which afforded her a clear view of the living room. Because the nearby smaller windows were
open to let in the pleasant, sweet-scented breeze, she could hear what was going on inside as well
as see it – not that Cyan would have been difficult to pick up through six inches of solid concrete.
“She’s not there!” she announced, her voice booming, colored with a mixture of parodied
sweetness and pure rage. “Has little Kim Cho been lying to me?” She floated out over the
balcony, surrounded by crackling energy, her exotically beautiful face unearthly with power and
fury.
Kim Cho, who had been standing on the couch on her tiptoes to catch a glimpse of
whatever violence the witch might do to her real or imagined rival, made a little squeaking noise
in her throat, and, for lack of a better plan, dove over the back of the couch in the general
direction of the front door. Cyan was blindingly fast, though, and managed to snare her in mid-
leap with mystic bonds that wrapped around her extended wrists, knees, and ankles, with the
result that Kim Cho was trapped, suspended with her outstretched hands about four inches from
the floor in a kind of frozen dive, feet upmost. She squirmed and struggled in vain against the
ropes that held her, and took to begging as she glanced fearfully back over her shoulder at the
descending witch.
“Please...I thought she was there...I don’t know how she could have gotten out past me.”
“Oh, of course. And of course you wouldn’t be trying to protect your dear sister, now
would you?”
Kim Cho’s eyes widened. “Oh, god, no, no way, I can’t stand her. She isn’t even my sister
– I don’t know where she came from.”
The witch landed next to her, and hunkered down on her haunches to look her in her
frightened eyes. Cyan’s eyes were a bright silver, flecked with gold. “Now, darling, this is very
unfortunate. I fear you are in a position to undergo a great deal of unpleasantness. You see, now
I’m going to have to chase after this girl, and my energies are already depleted. So here’s how it’s
going to work. I’m going to use you to recharge. If you tell me where she is, I may stop before I
otherwise would. If you lie, I will know, and will continue. If you don’t know where she is, I will
still use you to recharge, and you will simply be unfortunate.”
“W-what do you mean, rechaHAHAHAHAHAHAAARGE!!!!” Kim Cho, who had been
craning her head around to try and keep Cyan in sight, suddenly felt the witch’s strong, insistent
fingers dig into either side of her taut, outstretched belly, a deep, wracking tickle that forced the
air out of her and made her bound, suspended body shake powerfully. Cyan had not bothered with
any sort of teasing tickle “foreplay:” she had gone directly into squeezing the young girl’s
muscular, writhing belly, a technique that tickled violently and almost hurt. Kim Cho heaved with
spasms of laughter, interspersed with broken screams of protest.
Cyan kept digging her fingers into her belly for a while, until the girl started coughing,
then stopped and stepped back. Kim Cho heaved and gasped for a few moments, until her
breathing came under control. She felt like she did after a particularly rigorous ab workout.
“Anything to tell me?” Cyan asked casually.
“She—she’s, um, at the University, in the library.”
Cyan squatted down again, looking her in the eyes. “No, I don’t believe she is,” she said
lightly, after a moment.
She walked back around out of view of Kim Cho’s desperately craning head. In an instant,
she felt a draft, and realized that her belly shirt had vanished, leaving her upper body exposed
except for a black bra. Suddenly Kim Cho’s nerves were overwhelmed by another kind of
sensation, as Cyan’s fingernails – long, but filed to smooth points – danced over her defenseless
ribs and into her bare underarms, little spidery touches along taut skin, making her jump and
giggle desperately. Cyan was less workmanlike, here, and somewhat more playful, striking at
irregular moments, making Kim Cho jump and shriek in surprise, building wicked tension in the
poor tortured girl. The feeling was utterly maddening: her sides were ticklish enough, and as the
fingers spider-walked over them, Kim Cho shook and giggled uncontrollably. But even that
desperate tickling was worsened by her dread every time the fingers slowly climbed into her
horribly sensitive armpits. Teeth gritted, eyes shut tight, she trembled, squeaked, and whimpered
until the fingers dove into her smooth armpits and scrabbled wildly, making her eyes and mouth
burst open in shrieking laughter as she thrashed ineffectually in her bizarrely bound, suspended
position. Then the fingers would ever-so-lightly skim back down, making her whinny and jolt as
they traced her ribs, hip-bones, and belly before swooping in again to invade the soft, private
spaces of her underarms.
“Any more to say?” Cyan asked, as she finally gave the heaving girl a break. Kim Cho
couldn’t speak for some time, gasping and sputtering. Tears ran down her reddened face, and her
throat was raw from laughing and crying at the same time. “I...I swear...I don’t know....can’t help
you...please...”
“Tsk tsk. Darling, as you must understand by now, those two ideas do not amount to the
same thing. You may not be able to tell me, but you are helping me immensely. My mystical
powers are mightily refreshed by your delicious laughter.”
Kim Cho gasped for a few moments longer, then ventured to ask: “Are...are you finished
with me, then?”
“Almost, dear, almost.” She strolled around again, outside of Kim Cho’s field of vision. “I
am fairly well charged, and I fear even your youthful endurance has been taxed by all this. Perhaps
I should just let you go now...”
Kim Cho allowed herself an instant’s flicker of desperate hope.
“Oh, but looook,” she said, in the manner of a woman gushing over pictures of a friend’s
baby. “Look at these precious little bare feet!”
“NO!” squeaked Kim Cho, with a sudden surge of alarm. She had been hoping against
hope that the witch wouldn’t notice that she was barefoot, but given that she had been snared
with the soles of her feet upmost, the highest point of her body, she knew deep down that her
hope was vain.
The laughter forced forth from her raspy throat as Cyan’s wicked fingernails danced
ticklish shapes over the soft, pampered bottoms of her bare feet was different in kind, if not in
intensity, from that produced by the underarm tickling. It would have been difficult to say whether
her feet were more ticklish than her armpits, but the sensation was somehow even more awful, the
nerves in sharper and more insufferable relief, and Kim Cho shrieked and bellowed in terrible,
ticklish torment. Her long, agile, bejewelled toes wiggled and clenched to no avail; her long,
smooth soles flexed and wrinkled under the onslaught. Cyan luxuriated in the waves of energy
that washed over her as she tickled and tickled Kim’s vulnerable soles. Soon, Kim Cho had lapsed
into body-wracking, silent sobs of laughter, and the only sounds in the room were her occasional
hisses and wheezes and the unrelenting soft, frantic rasp of Cyan’s fingernails on the bottoms of
her feet.
Courtney, watching from her hiding place outside the window, felt torn. On the one hand,
she felt vindicated–after all, Kim Cho was suffering nothing worse than what Courtney herself had
gone through the day before. But Courtney was, at heart, simply a kinder person than Kim Cho
was, and as she watched with sympathetic winces as the girl suffered her ticklish torture, she felt
increasingly sorry for the little bitch. She knew that she was Cyan’s real target, and that she would
be putting herself in peril if she intervened, but still, as she watched Kim Cho’s contorted face,
streaked with helpless tears, she resolved to do something to help. Her hand closed around a large
stone among the bushes – maybe if she broke the window, Cyan would be distracted...
Perhaps to Courtney’s everlasting good fortune, Cyan stopped moments before Courtney
would have taken action. She waved her hand in the air once, and Kim Cho’s bonds disappeared –
she fell to the ground in a heap, arms wrapped around her sore ribs, bare feet rubbing against one
another in an effort to rub out the lingering tickle sensation.
“Ah, well. I suppose you really didn’t know anything, after all. In any event, your energy
has been delicious, and you’ve been such a joy to drain. I will leave you to recover. Tell about
what happened or not – it’s not as if anything you say will impede my mission in the slightest.
Farewell, little flower.”
With that, she simply vanished – blinked out of existence, leaving Kim Cho in a crumpled
heap, traces of a hysterical grimace still on her pretty face. Courtney waited several minutes, to be
sure she was gone, then set off for the Dearborn house to warn the others of what she had seen.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Kimmie, the blonde witch, was a playful tormentor, and seemed highly amused by the
reactions she produced from the bound, muscular Francesca. Her access to Francesca’s upper
body was limited by the bonds; still, she managed to get some satisfying giggles by digging into
her defined belly and teasing her navel. For the most part, she focused on the gorgeous Italian’s
lower body, which proved more than sufficient for both her practical and entertainment purposes.
Squeezing her knees, bent up as they were to accommodate the contours of the board, sent
Francesca into thrashing hysterics, as did judiciously applied pressure to the “seams” where her
inner thighs met her groin. Kimmie spent a good deal of time alternating between these two sites,
cooing and shouting in delight at Francesca’s strong, hoarse cackles.
Most effective and amusing, though, were the barefoot woman’s remarkably ticklish soles
and toes, trapped as they were on delightful display. Francesca’s response to fingernails scribbling
over her arches seemed indefatigable – she thrashed and bellowed with uncontrollable laughter at
each of Kimmie’s frequent assaults. Sometimes, Kimmie would trace her index fingernail slowly
from Francesca’s heel to the base of her toes and back., never breaking contact with the soft,
golden sole, making Francesca grit her teeth, clench her toes, shudder violently, and make
desperate giggly keening sounds. Other times, she would attack the bottoms of both bare feet
with light, insistent, energetic scratching, forcing howls of laughter from her prisoner.
All the while, Kimmie cooed and teased as if she were tickling a baby. The more powerful
Francesca’s desperate responses, the more delighted Kimmie seemed, giggling along and gushing
over her victim. “Oooh, look at these pretty feet! They’re so soft and ticklish, aren’t they, pretty
girl! Yes, they are!” Francesca squealed and whinnied as Kimmie held both feet in her hands and
ran both thumbnails up and down her arches. “Oh, and these perfect, wiggly toes! Are your toes
ticklish, too, sweetheart? Oh, yes they are!” Francesca went into redoubled hysterics as Kimmie
tickled over the pads of her toes, delving into the tender valleys in between them.
It was agonizing, and more than a little humiliating. Kimmie played a full and enthusiastic
game of “This Little Piggy” with Francesca’s twitching toes, giving her a moment’s respite to
suck in haggard gulps of air and relax her aching stomach muscles, but, predictably, tickled both
bare soles wickedly to accompany the final little piggy’s homeward journey. Francesca whooped
and chortled, tears pouring from her eyes into her dark, shiny hair.
By the time Kimmie finished with her terribly ticklish feet, Francesca felt drained and
loopy. Kimmie gave her knees a couple of final squeezes, making her spasm and croak (her throat
was too raw for much more), then stroked her cheek tenderly. “Thank you, sweetie. You’ve given
me more than enough energy to make our journey, and I’d venture a guess that you won’t be in
any shape to do much resisting, now.”
Francesca couldn’t have responded if she had wanted to. The wild sensory overload of her
tickle torture was ebbing a little, replaced by a deep consternation about what would become of
her now, in the clutches of this crazed witch. As Kimmie completed an incantation, and space
seemed to warp and melt around her, Francesca clung to the desperate hope that her friends
would come and find her...
NEXT: Showdown at the Dearborn House. A parting of ways. Setting out for the unknown.
The Voyage Out, Part 10
The Net Closes.
Even on the bizarre, eclectic world of the Other Side, the three women gathered on the
roof of Khalkasa’s highest building (the Kandaele building, naturally) would have attracted open-
mouthed stares wherever they went. Granted, ordinarily they traveled in somewhat more
conventional clothing, but tonight they had neither the time nor the inclination for the trappings of
more “civilized” society. The night air surrounding them seemed to crackle with energy; their
environs seemed unnaturally quiet, as if a rush of white noise blocked out the incidental sounds of
urban night.
Kimara, or “Kimmie,” as she winkingly referred to herself, was the shortest of the three,
though her slight stature cast little doubt on the eldritch powers she commanded. She wore a
short, low-cut, somewhat diaphanous sky-blue silken dress that accentuated her ample chest and
seemed to sparkle as it billowed in the slight breeze; high-heeled white boots reached almost to
her knees. Wreathed by a cataract of blonde curls, her pixie-like, heart-shaped face and big blue
eyes seemed made for flirtatious smiles and faux-naivete, but for the moment were composed and
serious.
The other two listened intently, equally solemn. To her right stood the witch who had
tormented the women at the travel agency – tall and imposing, her dark skin set off by the golden
mane gathered improbably into two long ponytails that stood out from the back of her head. She
still wore the catsuit, boots, and silver cloak from her earlier evening’s work. Her name was Cyan,
and she was, to appearances, the least patient of the three – she shifted frequently, tapped her
foot, and tossed her oddly coiffed hair.
The third witch was as dramatic in her aspect as the other two. She stood as tall as Cyan,
lean and lithe but amply endowed, though not quite so much so as Kimmie. Her skin’s ivory tone
did not detract from the overall sense of force and health her body exuded. She had patrician
features, a roman nose, and eyes as black and glistening as the straight, thick hair that draped
elegantly over her bare shoulders down to her waist. She wore an elaborate crimson evening
gown with various, seemingly aimless gold sashes accentuating it, no stockings, and stiletto-
heeled scarlet shoes. Her name was Desyr.
Kimmie led the meeting in clipped, professional tones somewhat removed from the cutesy-
pie drawl she had used to torment Abe Michaelman, though her Southern accent stole in at the
edges. “All right, to recap. Yelena Kant wants these women brought to her alive, and will pay us
richly to do her dirty work. Cyan took significant, if not foolhardy,” she shot a look at Cyan, who
rolled her eyes and blew out her breath, “risks to find out their destination from the travel agency.
Fortunately, she also had the presence of mind to charm the women there into forgetting her visit.
Unfortunately, she forgot the very simple step of erasing the security camera’s records. This
shouldn’t be a big problem, as we can go back and do that from a distance, and they’re not likely
to have any call to review the tapes if they don’t remember that anything happened. Still, sisters, I
feel that sometimes I need to remind you that we have to stay conscious of technological, as well
as magical, threats in this part of the world.” She fixed her gaze on the defiant Cyan, who, after a
few moments, grudgingly nodded.
“Anyhow, my own tracing of the womens’ signatures, once I had enough information to
zoom in on the specific neighborhood, revealed that three of them are staying at a house in the
suburbs belonging to Luther and Marion Dearborn. A bit of research revealed that Luther
Dearborn was once called Dymion Ellefson, the brother of the military experiment who caused
Yelena Kant so much trouble on her last crossover – that would explain their choice of shelter.
“The fourth appears to be staying at a sorority house on the University of Khalkasa
campus. Now, these women, though they have no real power, mystical or otherwise, to speak of,
have shown themselves to be surprisingly resourceful – so don’t be overcautious, but stay alert.”
Desyr spoke, her voice deep, rich, and strangely musical. “I suggest we delegate tasks.
Perhaps we should minimize the possibility of something going awry by isolating them as best we
can. My surveillance of the Dearborn house showed that the tall, strong one – Francesca, I believe
– has gone to exercise at the local health club. So, at this moment, Leah Maitland and Akhana
Mesani should be at the Dearborn house, Courtney Frost at the sorority house, and Francesca at
the gym. Shall we go now, to take them while their defenses are low?”
“Good idea,” Kimmie said, with a nod. “Before we go, though, I need to brief you on
another mission Yelena has cooked up for us to do after we finish here – a potentially more
challenging one...”
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Mina Elhonne’s two story penthouse epitomized urban sophisticate cool; decorated
entirely in blacks and whites, it was sharp and angular where it should be, soft and welcoming
where it should be. Thanks to her largely automated cleaning staff, everything perpetually
gleamed with a high polish; her panoramic view of Khalkasa was magnificent. It would have been
perfect, she thought, if not for the goddamn stairs.
Mina teetered down her spiral staircase on impossibly high heels, navigated her way across
her spacious living room to her formidable computer set-up, and collapsed into her desk chair.
She pulled off the long crimson wig she had been wearing and tossed it onto the couch, then
slipped her feet out of the torturous heels and wiggled her long, delicate toes in their fishnet
stockings. Sighing, she began brushing out her long, sleek silver tresses. “Mail,” she said softly,
and a message window popped up on her flat-screen monitor. She read through a series of
messages, face dispassionate, then stopped short, eyes widening slightly. “Message to Emperor
Jaga Khan,” she said, cold aura of control immediately reasserting itself.
“Your excellency: we have received reports that Yelena Kant may be mobilizing Agents
Azure, Gold, and Ivory. This may be in the service of a personal agenda, but if our suspicions
hold, she may also be preparing to search for The Resting Place. We will continue to monitor the
situation.
We at Kandaele look forward to continuing our partnership, and eagerly anticipate the
realization of both of our goals. We apologize again for the failure of our recent mission, and
hope it will not jeopardize our working relationship. May the reign of Khan continue into
perpetuity. Sincerely, Mina Elhonne.”
“Close message, send,” she said clearly, then under her breath, “how much more
convincingly can I grovel?”
She turned in her chair and gazed out over the starlit Khalkasa skyline. “Well, Yelena…if
these women are so important to you, perhaps they could be important to us, as well…”
A light tinkling sound came from upstairs; Owen MacArthur was ringing for her again.
Insatiable! She thought, with a little shiver. She pulled the elaborate red wig back into place,
slipped her complaining feet back into the spiky shoes, and mounted the stairs once more. She
wasn’t crazy about the costume, or about the woman it was meant to represent, but it put a
charge in Owen, and when one of the two most powerful men in the world asked her to do
something, she was too savvy not to do it. “Beware, little man,” she called as she reached the top
of the stairs, “Your mistress Yelena is coming to have her way with you…”
-------------------------------------------------------------
In her temporary bedroom in the suburbs of Khalkasa, Leah Maitland, somewhat less
exotically dressed than Mina Elhonne in a black shirt, moderately low-rise, slightly flared jeans,
and bare feet, typed intently at the laptop she had purchased on the companions’ arrival. Her long,
dark-blonde hair was wound up in a loose, impromptu bun and held in place with a pencil, and she
had caved in to necessity and donned her big-rimmed reading glasses, which magnified her
almond-eyes to elven proportions. Marion Dearborn, the woman who owned the house in which
she and her companions were staying, was out showing Akhana some sights, and Francesca had
gone to the local gym to ‘rescue her body,’ as she put it; Leah had opted to stay home alone to
catch up on her writing. She wasn’t sure if she would ever find a publisher for this particular
project, but, journalist that she was, Leah found that writing helped her make sense of the
otherwise nonsensical. She had experienced a particularly persistent urge to write lately.
“We have reached the home of Ellefson’s brother, who he called Dymion, but who now
goes by the name of Luther Dearborn. I’m not entirely clear on the reasons for the name change,
but I have the impression that he used to be involved with something top secret and has since
adopted a new identity. I’m not sure how recent the change has been. Luther, an archaeologist,
anthropologist, and inventor, is off in the north doing research for now, so he won’t be able to
help us for awhile, but Marion Dearborn and her daughter Ashley have been extraordinarily open
and welcoming. Their house is spacious and beautiful, big enough to allow each of us our own
room. So, we’ve settled into suburban paradise for the short term.
“I can hardly stand it. Under different circumstances, I might be enjoying myself, but each
time I try to relax the monstrous truth of our situation hits me again: we’re stranded on an alien
world, and probably being hunted by a vindictive sorceress for ruining her plan to sell us all as
slaves. Marion seems very optimistic that Luther will be able to help us on his return - she keeps
saying, ‘God knows what all gear he’s got in that basement, but I’m sure that if you need it, he’ll
have it.’
“The other girls seem to be holding up well. Courtney has gone off with Ashley, Luther’s
and Marion’s daughter, to her sorority house - hopefully, she’s enjoying herself. This must be
especially hard for her; she’s still in her teens. Then again, maybe she has more of an appetite for
adventure than the rest of us do.
“Francesca is stoic, as usual, and does her best to maintain our morale. I know she’s as
worried about getting Ellefson back as she is about getting home. She really seems to love him.
She tries, but she’s less convincing in her enthusiasm for our time-killing activities - mostly
shopping and partying -- than the rest of us manage to be. She’s discovered a gym down the
block, and spends a lot of her time there.
“Akhana is something of a cipher. If she is troubled by being here, she gives very little
sign. Occasionally, she will engage the problem in a practical way, doing research, gathering
information, and that sort of thing, but she never seems emotionally affected by the situation. She
seems unbelievably cool. I’m honestly not sure whether that’s reassuring or disturbing. She has
certainly shown no signs of betraying us, and has more than earned our trust -still, I can’t forget
that she was originally working with our abductors.
“As for me, I go back and forth between terror, excitement, and uncontrollable curiosity.
The travel writer in me is jumping out of her skin; a big part of me wants nothing more than to sit
down for about 48 hours and write about all the incredible things I’ve seen. I want to explore this
place, observe its customs. I want to get outside Khalkasa, which, for all its obvious differences,
seems like a sanitized copy of an American or Canadian city, and see the really exotic things that
have only been hinted at in our travels so far. I want to see the wild northlands, the less civilized
regions ruled by the mysterious emperor Jaga Khan.”
She paused for a moment, struck by a thought. Her eyes widened for a moment, then
narrowed. “But right now, as I sit here alone in the Dearborn house, with the promise of a few
solitary, uninterrupted hours ahead, I want to see Luther Dearborn’s basement.”
Leah allowed herself a devilish smile. She saved her journal, shut down the computer, and
set aside her reading glasses. She was slightly hesitant about snooping around the Dearborn house
behind Marion’s back, but, after all, she hadn’t been expressly told that the basement was off
limits. And the idea that Luther Dearborn’s top secret inventions, archaeological discoveries, and
who knew what other wonders lay a short distance beneath her feet was too intoxicating not to
explore.
She pulled the pencil from her hair, allowing it to tumble around her shoulders, then went
down the stairs to the kitchen and opened the door to the basement with the key that hung inside
the pantry. Switching on the light over the stairs, she slowly climbed down into the cavernous
basement.
One of the first things she noticed was that the stairs and basement floor were surprisingly
warm and comfortably carpeted; she hadn’t even stopped to think that it might be less than
comfortable to go into the basement barefoot, but it proved to be no hardship at all. Upon
reaching the bottom of the staircase and opening the door to the main basement, though, Leah
forgot all about the comfort of her feet.
The stairs leading to the basement had been surprisingly plentiful, and, upon stepping into
the basement proper, Leah could see why. She was in a large, high-ceilinged room, brightly but
attractively lit by a series of floating, glowing orbs that blazed to life as soon as she entered. The
place looked like half museum, half workshop, littered with books, bits of machinery, and
hundreds of objets d’art of varied and wild descriptions. A series of locked cabinets lined the far
wall, and a gallery of statues and pottery, some of which represented an array of nations and
historical periods, others of which were completely alien to Leah’s considerable artistic
knowledge, stood in a far corner. Closer by were various machines, some that looked like
antiques, others that resembled the super-high tech weaponry that Francesca had given them to
capture Akhana back on the ship. Leah was in nosey reporter heaven.
She spent the next couple of hours poking around, exploring the incredible wealth of
bizarre and fascinating artifacts in the archaeologist/scientist’s secret horde. In addition to the
artwork and inscrutable machinery, she found a small area with botanical experiments-
magnificently flowering plants, odd vines that moved of their own volition as she approached, and
strangely luminous fruit. Every ten minutes or so, a hiss would sound from that area as one of the
plants seemed to water the others.
Typically, perhaps, for someone so bookish at heart, Leah was most excited by the
journals she found scattered about the room. The journals of Lucas Dearborn, apparently
consisting of some eighteen volumes of tiny scrawl that reminded her of Kevin Spacey’s
character’s writings in the movie “Seven,” presented a chaotic, bizarre, and fascinating gazetteer
of the flora, fauna, and scientific history of Eldrun. The tone varied wildly from detached scientific
overviews to very personal anecdotes about his travels and adventures, some of which made Leah
blush in their frankness.
As she read through the journals, a strange and wondrous vision of a world emerged. The
land had been created millennia ago by a powerful, good-natured, but oddly scatterbrained
sorceress who had been imbued through a bizarre confluence of cosmic energy with divine power
(but not quite, alas, divine wisdom.) The sorceress, as best as any historians and scientists had
been able to determine, had traveled astrally through time and space, finding all that she found
appealing and delightful in earth history and sowing its seeds in her wonder-world. In hopes of de-
railing humanity’s bellicose and imperialist tendencies, she had engineered an energy system that
drew power directly from the most dramatic expression of sheer joy-laughter. Powerful, but no
true divinity, she had taken a deistic approach to her world - setting things into motion, then
disappearing and allowing things to take their own course. The result is a bizarre mixture of
cultures and societies, each an exotic ideal in its own way; a kind of benevolent Babel.
For the most part, her experiment seemed to work: she had created a world of beautiful
people and wonderful, magical phenomena, largely free of war, famine, and other ills that plagued
earth. However, as the millennia passed, evolution took its course: predatory animals and even
plants developed, “energy vampires,” who began to prey on the peaceful people. Dealing with
them was fairly easy in a place of magic, though, and the civilized nations of the south began to
quarantine those strange and dangerous species in the “uncivilized” northlands. Civilization
naturally began to congregate and develop in the Southlands, while the north remained relatively
undeveloped, and typically stereotyped as backward. There were vague hints in the journal, which
quoted liberally from earth texts like Aristotle’s musings on the polis, that the de facto shunning
of the north by the more prosperous south led to resentment, and that their exclusion from the
prosperous part of Eldrun had fomented anger in some quarters that now threatened, under the
mysterious emperor Jaga Khan, to spill over into conflict of some kind.
The sections about Lucas’s specific research were often more difficult to understand, and
were liberally interspersed with racy memoirs and technical mumbo-jumbo. After a time, Leah did
determine that he had been working on energy siphoning technologies and fauna, trying to
develop defenses against the possibility of a sorcerous attack from malevolent forces in the north.
The most dangerous of his experiments were locked in the great steel cabinets at the far end of the
basement-his “antimagic arsenal.” He was vague about what was actually there, but the hints he
dropped whetted Leah’s already rampant curiosity.
When a small, nondescript key dropped out of one of the most recent volumes,
Leah picked it up and gazed at it uncertainly for several moments. “This might be really stupid,
Leah,” she said to herself. “He locks those things up for a reason. On the other hand, if we’re
being hunted by a sorceress, we may need all the ordinance we can get. So just wait till Marion
gets home, and ask her to help. …Yeah, sure, you can wait indefinitely before you explore bizarre
otherworldly magical weaponry.”
By the time Leah reached this point in her internal monologue, she was already standing in
front of the third cabinet - the key hadn’t worked on the first two. With a soft click, the key
turned in the lock, and Leah slowly opened the great steel door.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Francesca was in fitness-geek heaven. The GoodBody Health Center went far beyond any
of the many high-end clubs she had seen in terms of atmosphere, machinery, and bells and
whistles. She could have spent the entire day just walking around, drinking the magnificent
concoctions at the juice bar, watching the impeccably toned men who lifted and ran with little
apparent effort, and swimming in the enormous, sapphire-tinted pools, of which there were nine at
her last count. She had hit the nautilus and cardio machines with a vengeance, using physical
exertion to burn off the fear and trepidation that had understandably haunted her since the
crossing over, and found that although she maintained a pleasant and energizing sweat, even after
two hours of hard work she still smelled as fresh as the proverbial daisy. The sorceress’s
sweetness-and-light philosophy of world creation seemed to extend into every aspect of life.
It was late, now, and as she emerged from the locker room, freshly showered, her long
dark hair hanging in damp waves and loose ringlets around her shoulders, she saw that the club
seemed completely empty. It seemed a bit odd – when she had gone in to shower, there were still
a fair number of people around – but perhaps she had luxuriated a little longer than she thought
under the soothing, perfect-temperature, steamy water flow. “Oh, shit, I hope they haven’t
closed,” she thought. “I might be keeping someone here.”
Walking through the enormous, oddly empty weight room, she was suddenly distracted by
desperate, comical gasping noises from the far corner. Turning, she saw a young woman, perhaps
about her age, with longish, curly blonde hair and the latest in spandex workout regalia, mounted
ineffectively on an inclined sit-up board. Her problem was in her positioning – her sneakered feet
(complete with pom-poms on the ankle-socks, Francesca noticed with a little smile) were resting
on top of the apparatus that was meant to hold the ankles in place, rather than threaded through it
so it could do its work. The board was jacked up to a wicked incline, and the woman, though she
appeared to be in fairly admirable shape, was struggling in vain to do sit-ups, her feet rising off the
apparatus with each attempt, and almost rolling off the side of the board to the floor.
The woman glanced over at Francesca and, flushed with exertion as she was, blushed
crimson. Francesca smiled encouragingly.
“Ah just cain’t seem to get goin’,” the woman said, with an embarrassed laugh. “Ah’m
usually pretty good at this kind of thing.”
Francesca felt her inner physical trainer coming out. She walked over to where the woman
lay catching her breath on the sit-up board. “You just need to get situated,” she said brightly. “Put
your feet through the spaces between the pads, here...no, one on each side...no, between, not
underneath...”
The blonde woman laughed apologetically. “Ah’m a lil thick today, it seems,” she said.
“Ah know you just had your shower and all, but would you mind showing me how to do it?”
Francesca smiled. There was something charming about this flaky woman with her accent
and big blue eyes. “Sure,” she said, as the woman stood aside.
Francesca, dressed to go back to the Dearborns’, was wearing a white t-shirt and soccer
shorts with thick-soled flip flops that added about three inches to her already ample height. She
paused for a moment, then stepped out of her shoes and mounted the board barefoot, slipping her
broad, tanned feet into place with practiced ease. She did a couple of effortless incline sit-ups to
demonstrate proper use of the equipment.
“Oh, oookay,” said the blonde, realization dawning. “So your feet go right through here.”
She traced her hands over the assembly, as if trying to understand; as she did so, her thumb
grazed the wrinkled, golden sole of Francesca’s right foot.
“AYII!” Francesca shrieked; her toes splayed and a tremor bucked her whole body. She
glanced about in alarm and embarrassment, trying to collect herself from the brief touch; no-one
seemed to be around to hear except the seemingly mortified and abashed blonde.
“Ah’m so sorry,” she said, in a breathy drawl. “Ah din’t mean to tickle your foot. Boy,
Ah’m battin’ zero tonight. Ah feel so foolish.”
Francesca smiled, fluttering a hand in front of her chest as if fanning her heart. “It’s okay.
You just surprised me, that’s all.”
An odd smile came over the blonde’s face – not the ingenue-like smile of before, but a
devilish grin. “Dearie, you have not yet begun to be surprised.”
Suddenly, Francesca felt strong, flexible ropes wrapping around her body, under her
breasts, at her elbows and waist, knees, and shins, strapping her helplessly to the board. She cried
out in alarm as she saw the blonde’s clothing shimmer and change into the sky-blue and white
ensemble that Kimmie had adopted for the day. The helpless little Southern waif was replaced by
a resplendent sorceress; the baby-doll face and locks of the woman she had been before now
glowed with a kind of palpable power.
“Now, I suppose I should introduce myself,” she said, her accent less pronounced, but still
detectable. “My name is Kimara, but I kind of like to go by Kimmie. It just sounds sweeter, don’t
you think?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Whatever you want, you’ve got the wrong
person,” Francesca said savagely, realizing as she did the stupidity of her claim.
“You and your friends, dear heart, have made a very powerful enemy, and she’d like
to...ah, discuss her grievance in person.”
“You’re crazy. This is a public place. Security, the police–somebody will come and stop
you.”
“Darling dear, don’t you think I’ve taken care of that? Didn’t it seem a little weird for us
to be completely alone in this place, when it was full of folks twenty minutes ago? Everybody
inside suddenly got the strangest urge to go home. The staff even locked the doors. Craziest
thing, isn’t it? All I did was mumble a little spell.”
Francesca’s heart sank into her stomach, which was uncomfortably taut as she fruitlessly
raised her head, the only part of her with full mobility, off the board to talk to Kimmie. “All right.
I’ll go. But you’ll never find the others.”
“Tut, tut, sweetie. We already have – y’all will be reunited shortly. Now, let’s see...” she
looked Francesca over – even bound and half-inverted, she was an impressive and powerful
specimen. “I’ve got ample energy to get us where we’re goin’, but a big strong gal like you might
give me some trouble, unless I’m good and charged. So I’m afraid, dear heart, that we’re gonna
need to have a lil’ play time before we go, to take the starch out of you, and to, well, put it in
me.” She winked and made a clucking noise with her tongue.
Oh, no, Francesca thought, realizing that this could only mean one thing....
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Courtney awoke wishing she was dead. Every muscle in her body screamed, her throat
was sore and ragged; she had the kind of headache that started as a dull throb and rocketed up in
intensity whenever she moved. It took her a moment to remember why she felt that way – then
she remembered her torturous experience at the “community service” event earlier that day.
She checked the clock – she had been asleep for about four hours since Ashley, Gen, and Cassie
had checked on her. They were almost painfully apologetic about the whole thing, feeling like
they had somehow caused her to be mistreated; Courtney had had to tell them a hundred times
that it was all right, something she really didn’t feel like working at in her current condition. The
three of them had to go to the award ceremony to accept the Community Service prize Courtney
had unintentionally won for them – another fact for which they apologized about six hundred
times.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Courtney had croaked, waving them off. “So, I’ll just be here by
myself?”
“Well, no...” Ashley said, a little sheepishly. “Kim Cho’s downstairs studying, so if you
need anything...”
“I’ll be sure to ask the toilet,” Courtney said bitterly.
“Oh, she’s really not that bad,” Cassie said earnestly. “She feels really bad about what
happened. She said so when she got back to the house.”
“Yeah, okay. I think I’m going to get some more sleep,” Courtney rasped, her voice
almost gone.
After the four-hour nap, she felt a little better. She stretched, used the bathroom, brushed
her teeth, had a hot shower, and ventured hesitantly from her room in search of refreshments.
The house was very large, and built almost like a hotel, with a big, open living room on
the ground floor, and all the bedrooms upstairs, ranged around the perimeter of the living room,
on a hallway that looked down on the living room below. As soon as Courtney stepped out of her
room, she heard Kim Cho’s voice coming from the living room below, amplified by the echoes of
the cavernous ceiling.
“Yeah, they were totally trying to blame it on me. Like I know how the stupid machine
works. Like I even care enough about her to try and do something like that to screw with
her...yeah, I know YOU think she’s really sweet. You showed that pretty well at the party last
night, you asshole...”
Talking to her boyfriend, Courtney thought. Without thinking about it, she got down on
her knees, so that Kim Cho wouldn’t see her over the low balcony wall, and peered down into the
living room from her hidden vantage point.
Kim Cho lay sprawled on the couch, her long, silky black hair rich with recently added
highlights – probably the appointment she had to rush off to after the service event –and fanning
out around her bitchily pretty face. She wore a purple belly shirt that exposed her perfect abs and
the jeweled stud that winked in her navel, and flared. low-rise jeans. She was barefoot, and silver
rings adorned two of her long, elegant toes.
The last thing Courtney wanted to do was talk to her. She knew exactly what had
happened, and was well and truly pissed, but was in no mood for a confrontation. She stepped
back from the balcony, far enough that Kim Cho wouldn’t see her with a casual glance, and began
to walk toward the upstairs game room, which had a stocked fridge.
Kim’s voice continued to rise from downstairs. “No, I don’t think so...not for a while, I
think,” she said, smiling in a self-satisfied way. She laughed, a little bark. “Right, like you’re so
irresistible. I get myself off better than you ever can, anyway. No, I’m not kidding. In fact, I ought
to tell you all about it, just to give you blue balls...” Courtney raised her eyebrows, a little shocked
at Kim’s frankness in the open living room. Kim’s boyfriend was way too good for her, Courtney
thought, but found even rancorous reflection too exhausting to maintain.
“...But I’m too tired. You just spank it for a few days, and think about what you did.
Yeah, right, like you’ll really break up with me. Sorry, I don’t think your new little friend will be
in any mood to boff you any time soon. She’ll be lucky to be able to walk, after what happened to
her today.” She laughed, a high, dainty sound. Courtney cursed under her breath as she took a
soda from the refrigerator.
Suddenly, she heard Kim Cho cry out, “Who the fuck are you!?” from downstairs.
Courtney started, spitting orange soda onto the floor, and ran quickly to the balcony to see what
was happening.
Cyan had arrived, in full sorceress regalia. An aura of black energy crackled around her,
and she hovered six inches off the floor. At the moment, Kim Cho, who had drawn her knees up
into a defensive posture on the couch, seemed to have her whole attention.
“Aren’t you pretty,” Cyan said, her voice surprisingly gentle and soothing. “What’s your
name?”
“K-kim Cho,” the girl replied, a little mollified by the complement she had been paid. For
all her exotic appearance and menacing air of magic, Cyan could, when she desired, talk like a
second grade teacher.
“Well, Kim Cho, my name is Cyan, and I need a big favor from you. I came here looking
for a pretty blonde girl, about your age, I think, named Courtney Frost. Now, I know she’s
around here, but for some reason I can’t get a good read on her energy signature – it’s as if she’s
been drained of all her energy, or some such nonsense. Anyhow, that’s not your concern. All I
want you to do is to tell me where she is.”
“W-what do you want her for?” Kim Cho asked, to her credit.
“She made a powerful sorceress very angry, and I’m here to take her back to her,” Cyan
responded. No reason to lie to one who could be so easily compelled to comply.
Kim Cho did not hesitate for a second; she stood up on the couch and pointed directly to
the door of Ashley’s room, where Courtney had been sleeping not ten minutes before. “She’s up
there. Been sleeping all day - shouldn’t give you any trouble.”
“That bitch!” Courtney thought.
She wasted no time. Fighting the aches and pains that ravaged her body, she slid the
window open and climbed out. Metal lattices overgrown with ivy decorated the outside of the
house at intervals – Courtney was lucky enough to emerge right next to one. Cursing her bare
feet, she managed to half-scale, half slide down the wall, free-dropping the last six feet and
landing in a deep puddle. She started to run away, but curiosity got the better of her. She knew
the witch couldn’t trace her energy signature, whatever that meant – and she should really make
sure nothing too awful happened to Kim Cho.
She crouched in the bushes outside the large picture window to the rear of the house,
which afforded her a clear view of the living room. Because the nearby smaller windows were
open to let in the pleasant, sweet-scented breeze, she could hear what was going on inside as well
as see it – not that Cyan would have been difficult to pick up through six inches of solid concrete.
“She’s not there!” she announced, her voice booming, colored with a mixture of parodied
sweetness and pure rage. “Has little Kim Cho been lying to me?” She floated out over the
balcony, surrounded by crackling energy, her exotically beautiful face unearthly with power and
fury.
Kim Cho, who had been standing on the couch on her tiptoes to catch a glimpse of
whatever violence the witch might do to her real or imagined rival, made a little squeaking noise
in her throat, and, for lack of a better plan, dove over the back of the couch in the general
direction of the front door. Cyan was blindingly fast, though, and managed to snare her in mid-
leap with mystic bonds that wrapped around her extended wrists, knees, and ankles, with the
result that Kim Cho was trapped, suspended with her outstretched hands about four inches from
the floor in a kind of frozen dive, feet upmost. She squirmed and struggled in vain against the
ropes that held her, and took to begging as she glanced fearfully back over her shoulder at the
descending witch.
“Please...I thought she was there...I don’t know how she could have gotten out past me.”
“Oh, of course. And of course you wouldn’t be trying to protect your dear sister, now
would you?”
Kim Cho’s eyes widened. “Oh, god, no, no way, I can’t stand her. She isn’t even my sister
– I don’t know where she came from.”
The witch landed next to her, and hunkered down on her haunches to look her in her
frightened eyes. Cyan’s eyes were a bright silver, flecked with gold. “Now, darling, this is very
unfortunate. I fear you are in a position to undergo a great deal of unpleasantness. You see, now
I’m going to have to chase after this girl, and my energies are already depleted. So here’s how it’s
going to work. I’m going to use you to recharge. If you tell me where she is, I may stop before I
otherwise would. If you lie, I will know, and will continue. If you don’t know where she is, I will
still use you to recharge, and you will simply be unfortunate.”
“W-what do you mean, rechaHAHAHAHAHAHAAARGE!!!!” Kim Cho, who had been
craning her head around to try and keep Cyan in sight, suddenly felt the witch’s strong, insistent
fingers dig into either side of her taut, outstretched belly, a deep, wracking tickle that forced the
air out of her and made her bound, suspended body shake powerfully. Cyan had not bothered with
any sort of teasing tickle “foreplay:” she had gone directly into squeezing the young girl’s
muscular, writhing belly, a technique that tickled violently and almost hurt. Kim Cho heaved with
spasms of laughter, interspersed with broken screams of protest.
Cyan kept digging her fingers into her belly for a while, until the girl started coughing,
then stopped and stepped back. Kim Cho heaved and gasped for a few moments, until her
breathing came under control. She felt like she did after a particularly rigorous ab workout.
“Anything to tell me?” Cyan asked casually.
“She—she’s, um, at the University, in the library.”
Cyan squatted down again, looking her in the eyes. “No, I don’t believe she is,” she said
lightly, after a moment.
She walked back around out of view of Kim Cho’s desperately craning head. In an instant,
she felt a draft, and realized that her belly shirt had vanished, leaving her upper body exposed
except for a black bra. Suddenly Kim Cho’s nerves were overwhelmed by another kind of
sensation, as Cyan’s fingernails – long, but filed to smooth points – danced over her defenseless
ribs and into her bare underarms, little spidery touches along taut skin, making her jump and
giggle desperately. Cyan was less workmanlike, here, and somewhat more playful, striking at
irregular moments, making Kim Cho jump and shriek in surprise, building wicked tension in the
poor tortured girl. The feeling was utterly maddening: her sides were ticklish enough, and as the
fingers spider-walked over them, Kim Cho shook and giggled uncontrollably. But even that
desperate tickling was worsened by her dread every time the fingers slowly climbed into her
horribly sensitive armpits. Teeth gritted, eyes shut tight, she trembled, squeaked, and whimpered
until the fingers dove into her smooth armpits and scrabbled wildly, making her eyes and mouth
burst open in shrieking laughter as she thrashed ineffectually in her bizarrely bound, suspended
position. Then the fingers would ever-so-lightly skim back down, making her whinny and jolt as
they traced her ribs, hip-bones, and belly before swooping in again to invade the soft, private
spaces of her underarms.
“Any more to say?” Cyan asked, as she finally gave the heaving girl a break. Kim Cho
couldn’t speak for some time, gasping and sputtering. Tears ran down her reddened face, and her
throat was raw from laughing and crying at the same time. “I...I swear...I don’t know....can’t help
you...please...”
“Tsk tsk. Darling, as you must understand by now, those two ideas do not amount to the
same thing. You may not be able to tell me, but you are helping me immensely. My mystical
powers are mightily refreshed by your delicious laughter.”
Kim Cho gasped for a few moments longer, then ventured to ask: “Are...are you finished
with me, then?”
“Almost, dear, almost.” She strolled around again, outside of Kim Cho’s field of vision. “I
am fairly well charged, and I fear even your youthful endurance has been taxed by all this. Perhaps
I should just let you go now...”
Kim Cho allowed herself an instant’s flicker of desperate hope.
“Oh, but looook,” she said, in the manner of a woman gushing over pictures of a friend’s
baby. “Look at these precious little bare feet!”
“NO!” squeaked Kim Cho, with a sudden surge of alarm. She had been hoping against
hope that the witch wouldn’t notice that she was barefoot, but given that she had been snared
with the soles of her feet upmost, the highest point of her body, she knew deep down that her
hope was vain.
The laughter forced forth from her raspy throat as Cyan’s wicked fingernails danced
ticklish shapes over the soft, pampered bottoms of her bare feet was different in kind, if not in
intensity, from that produced by the underarm tickling. It would have been difficult to say whether
her feet were more ticklish than her armpits, but the sensation was somehow even more awful, the
nerves in sharper and more insufferable relief, and Kim Cho shrieked and bellowed in terrible,
ticklish torment. Her long, agile, bejewelled toes wiggled and clenched to no avail; her long,
smooth soles flexed and wrinkled under the onslaught. Cyan luxuriated in the waves of energy
that washed over her as she tickled and tickled Kim’s vulnerable soles. Soon, Kim Cho had lapsed
into body-wracking, silent sobs of laughter, and the only sounds in the room were her occasional
hisses and wheezes and the unrelenting soft, frantic rasp of Cyan’s fingernails on the bottoms of
her feet.
Courtney, watching from her hiding place outside the window, felt torn. On the one hand,
she felt vindicated–after all, Kim Cho was suffering nothing worse than what Courtney herself had
gone through the day before. But Courtney was, at heart, simply a kinder person than Kim Cho
was, and as she watched with sympathetic winces as the girl suffered her ticklish torture, she felt
increasingly sorry for the little bitch. She knew that she was Cyan’s real target, and that she would
be putting herself in peril if she intervened, but still, as she watched Kim Cho’s contorted face,
streaked with helpless tears, she resolved to do something to help. Her hand closed around a large
stone among the bushes – maybe if she broke the window, Cyan would be distracted...
Perhaps to Courtney’s everlasting good fortune, Cyan stopped moments before Courtney
would have taken action. She waved her hand in the air once, and Kim Cho’s bonds disappeared –
she fell to the ground in a heap, arms wrapped around her sore ribs, bare feet rubbing against one
another in an effort to rub out the lingering tickle sensation.
“Ah, well. I suppose you really didn’t know anything, after all. In any event, your energy
has been delicious, and you’ve been such a joy to drain. I will leave you to recover. Tell about
what happened or not – it’s not as if anything you say will impede my mission in the slightest.
Farewell, little flower.”
With that, she simply vanished – blinked out of existence, leaving Kim Cho in a crumpled
heap, traces of a hysterical grimace still on her pretty face. Courtney waited several minutes, to be
sure she was gone, then set off for the Dearborn house to warn the others of what she had seen.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Kimmie, the blonde witch, was a playful tormentor, and seemed highly amused by the
reactions she produced from the bound, muscular Francesca. Her access to Francesca’s upper
body was limited by the bonds; still, she managed to get some satisfying giggles by digging into
her defined belly and teasing her navel. For the most part, she focused on the gorgeous Italian’s
lower body, which proved more than sufficient for both her practical and entertainment purposes.
Squeezing her knees, bent up as they were to accommodate the contours of the board, sent
Francesca into thrashing hysterics, as did judiciously applied pressure to the “seams” where her
inner thighs met her groin. Kimmie spent a good deal of time alternating between these two sites,
cooing and shouting in delight at Francesca’s strong, hoarse cackles.
Most effective and amusing, though, were the barefoot woman’s remarkably ticklish soles
and toes, trapped as they were on delightful display. Francesca’s response to fingernails scribbling
over her arches seemed indefatigable – she thrashed and bellowed with uncontrollable laughter at
each of Kimmie’s frequent assaults. Sometimes, Kimmie would trace her index fingernail slowly
from Francesca’s heel to the base of her toes and back., never breaking contact with the soft,
golden sole, making Francesca grit her teeth, clench her toes, shudder violently, and make
desperate giggly keening sounds. Other times, she would attack the bottoms of both bare feet
with light, insistent, energetic scratching, forcing howls of laughter from her prisoner.
All the while, Kimmie cooed and teased as if she were tickling a baby. The more powerful
Francesca’s desperate responses, the more delighted Kimmie seemed, giggling along and gushing
over her victim. “Oooh, look at these pretty feet! They’re so soft and ticklish, aren’t they, pretty
girl! Yes, they are!” Francesca squealed and whinnied as Kimmie held both feet in her hands and
ran both thumbnails up and down her arches. “Oh, and these perfect, wiggly toes! Are your toes
ticklish, too, sweetheart? Oh, yes they are!” Francesca went into redoubled hysterics as Kimmie
tickled over the pads of her toes, delving into the tender valleys in between them.
It was agonizing, and more than a little humiliating. Kimmie played a full and enthusiastic
game of “This Little Piggy” with Francesca’s twitching toes, giving her a moment’s respite to
suck in haggard gulps of air and relax her aching stomach muscles, but, predictably, tickled both
bare soles wickedly to accompany the final little piggy’s homeward journey. Francesca whooped
and chortled, tears pouring from her eyes into her dark, shiny hair.
By the time Kimmie finished with her terribly ticklish feet, Francesca felt drained and
loopy. Kimmie gave her knees a couple of final squeezes, making her spasm and croak (her throat
was too raw for much more), then stroked her cheek tenderly. “Thank you, sweetie. You’ve given
me more than enough energy to make our journey, and I’d venture a guess that you won’t be in
any shape to do much resisting, now.”
Francesca couldn’t have responded if she had wanted to. The wild sensory overload of her
tickle torture was ebbing a little, replaced by a deep consternation about what would become of
her now, in the clutches of this crazed witch. As Kimmie completed an incantation, and space
seemed to warp and melt around her, Francesca clung to the desperate hope that her friends
would come and find her...
NEXT: Showdown at the Dearborn House. A parting of ways. Setting out for the unknown.
