munchausen
TMF Expert
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Hi everyone,
Here I am, reviving my over-long and long forgotten magnum opus, The Voyage Out. I sincerely hope you enjoy it. I hope it isn't presumptuous to suggest it, but if any artists out there like my stuff and are stuck for ideas, I'd love to see some interpretations of my characters!
Previous chapters are linked to this post: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=906459
The Voyage Out XI:
Escape. Showdown at the Dearborn House.
Leah didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Fortunately, it was not a choice she had to make, as, for the past four or five minutes (hours?), she had been doing both. The fact that her situation could have been infinitely worse was a pale consolation – her rational mind realized it, and was grateful, but the wrinkling, flexing sole of her foot, her struggling, writhing toes, her sore and heaving abdominal muscles, even her newly complaining tailbone, aching from the less than gentle contact with the floor her struggles continually occasioned, registered no sense of relief. As seemed par for the course in this world, the physical agony of her torment was redoubled by the absurdity of its circumstances.
Leah had always been a barefoot kind of person – not for any of the crazyish reasons that some people tended to be, motivated by some erotic attraction or half-baked hippy creed, but simply because she was more comfortable that way. Socks and stockings were confinements to her, and, while she certainly appreciated the appeal of high fashion shoes and boots, she tended to shuck them as quickly as possible whenever appropriate. It was an indoor affectation – though she appreciated the feel of soft grass or beach sand under her bare feet, they were too tender to permit much more adventurous barefooting – but it was nevertheless persistent. At weddings, she was the first woman barefoot on the dance floor; in winter, indoors, one could often see her in a heavy sweater or wrapped in a blanket, but, glancing down, would glimpse her bare brown toes wiggling in the rug. It wasn’t a preoccupation, and wasn’t even really anything she thought about, except when a friend (or, more often, her mother) would comment that her feet must be cold, and she replied that she hated cooping them up.
Now, she found herself cursing this mildest and least dramatic of affectations, which had led her to explore the Dearborns’ mysterious basement barefoot. And yet, her current situation, she would be forced to admit if she were capable of balanced reflection, was more result of her curiosity than of her wardrobe choices. Unable to control herself, or to wait until Marion Dearborn returned home, Leah had ventured into the basement where Luther Dearborn’s research specimens, inventions, and experiments were stored. Poring over his diaries and journals, she found a small key that fit the lock on one of the great steel storage chambers at the end of the basement.
She had opened the door for perhaps seven seconds – long enough to gape open-mouthed at the sight of the monstrosity within. Inside was an enormous plant, perhaps seven feet high and nine feet around, shaped rather like an octopus, with a central spherical bulb with tentacles growing out on all sides, but with perhaps thirty tentacles rather than eight. It reminded her a bit of the giant plant from Little Shop of Horrors, but, she supposed, that was probably just because it happened to be a giant plant. Standing at the threshold, she began to read the sign posted on the far wall, barely legible in the dimness. The first line was, “DO NOT EXPOSE TO LIGHT!” Rather an odd thing to write on a sign, she thought; after all, one needed to see to read. At that moment, the tentacles closest to her, bathed in the light from behind her, began to slither to life.
To her credit, Leah moved fast. Her experiences over the past several days had sharpened her nerves and reflexes, and for once her impulse toward self-preservation won out over her curiosity. She leapt backward and slammed the door against the oncoming tendrils.
Congratulating herself even as her heart pounded in her ears, she was turning the key in the lock when she felt something brushing against her toes. A single tendril – really, it seemed, only a tiny part of one of the monster plant’s great compound tentacles –had managed to insinuate itself between the door and the jamb as she had slammed and locked it. It was small and unprepossessing – perhaps as big around as a pencil, and covered in a soft but prickly fuzz – but before she could escape it had wrapped itself gently but firmly around her right big toe.
Leah let out a little scream before she could tamp it down and remind herself she was tough. The tendril began pulling at her toe. It was a gentle, but insistent and irresistible pull, and it tugged upward on her foot until she was obliged to sit down to avoid falling over. For a few moments, a bizarre tug-o-war ensued, as she pulled backward on her leg with both hands, and it held steady with that same gentle, firm grip on her toe. More frustrated than anything else, Leah began to look around for some way to cut herself free.
Then, the awful part started. Its toehold secure, the tendril extended slightly, poised snakelike for a moment in the air, and then it began, methodically as an animal feeding, to stroke its soft, prickly, fuzzy tip up and down over the bottom of her bare foot.
The effect was instant and devastating – Leah, of course, had wickedly ticklish feet, and this specimen was of a species evolved to tickle for its very survival. Leah immediately convulsed with shrieks and giggles, thrashing on the carpet and pounding the floor with her fists. She kicked ineffectually at the tendril with her free foot, tried to pry her toe free with her fingers, but nothing she did impeded the insistent and devilishly effective tickling of her sole. She clenched her bare toes, turning her sole into a web of wrinkles which the tickly tip navigated with contemptuous ease. She tried, more than once, to cover as much of the bottom of her foot as she could by grasping it with both hands, but it always found the seam in this makeshift armor, and the heaving of her laughter combined with her awkward position made sitting up long enough to maintain this too much for her admittedly impressive abdominal muscles. Before long, all she could do was lie back and howl with uncontrollable laughter as the tendril tickled her arch, traced over her heel, flicked teasingly at the ball of her foot, or snaked between her wiggling toes.
Amid her laughter, a single passage from Luther Dearborn’s journals came to Leah’s mind with ridiculous and mocking clarity – a sketch of just such a plant as this, executed with a Naturalist’s precision, captioned with a latin name and, beneath it, the common designation: “Barefoot’s Bane.”
Her voice was going, now – tears streaked her high cheekbones, and her body ached as she writhed on the floor and heaved with giggles and whoops of laughter. For a mindless plant, the thing worked with astonishing skill and efficiency: though it focused entirely on the sole of one foot, and returned with punishing regularity to the most sensitive spot, the highest part of the arch, it varied its attack enough that Leah never became desensitized. Even after several minutes of solid tickling, it could still make her squeal with surprise as it attacked her toes, or wrack her with belly laughs as it zipped up the length of her sole like a child licking a popsicle, making her toes curl tight and her sole wrinkle. The small part of her mind not overloaded with hilarity began to picture scenarios ranging from the embarrassment of having Marion or Ashley come home to find that her twitching and gasping like a fish out of water on their basement floor, to herself dead of a heart attack and not caring what they thought, to the very real possibility of her wetting her jeans if this kept up much longer.
Then, even as the tendril invaded the undersides of her toes and forced a noise from her like the squeak her mother’s cat made when it yawned amplified a hundredfold, an idea came into her tormented mind. Forcing her muscles to work, she managed, with Herculean effort, to pull her shirt off over her head, leaving her in just jeans and a black bra. With one final, wrenching effort, she tossed the shirt over her trapped foot and the tendril that imprisoned it, covering it completely from where it had squeezed through the doorjamb to its merciless, tickling tip.
For a few moments, whimpering with laughter as it continued to tickle her feebly struggling foot with horrible effectiveness, Leah thought she had only succeeded in making her eventual discovery more humiliating. Soon, though, the tendril’s touch became softer, more haphazard, and its grip began to weaken until, at last, she was able to wrench her foot free. The light had stirred the plant to life; shrouded by the shirt, it slipped swiftly and mercifully into dormancy.
Leah rolled violently away from the tendril and lay there, heaving and sobbing, for a moment. When she could move, she wiped at her tears, then massaged her victimized foot until some semblance of normal feeling returned. “Stupid,” she hissed to herself, between gasps for breath. “Stupid.”
When she had more or less recovered, curiosity began to supplant horror, and Leah tracked down the volume of Luther Dearborn’s journal where she had seen the sketch and description of “Barefoot’s Bane.” Much of the description simply mirrored her own experience – the plants, common in the Northern regions, “came to life” only when exposed to light and in the presence of potential prey, and fed off of mirth energy by trapping people and tickling them. As Dearborn noted, the name was something of a misnomer, as, while being barefoot might speed the victim’s torment, the species had evolved to the point at which it could undo and remove many kinds of clothing and footwear. Certain kinds of light – notably black light – could be used to drive the plant back, and eventually into dormancy, and Dearborn recommended carrying a black light projector when traveling on foot in the northern woods.
Leah noticed a device resembling Dearborn’s sketch of a black light projector he had developed on a work table across the room – it lay among a number of odd-looking tools and objects, the only one of which Leah readily recognized. The device was small – about the size of two inkpens fused together, and had two “barrels,” or lenses – one clearly for black light, the other resembling a conventional penlight. Turning each on in turn (after carefully pointing the thing away from herself), she discovered that that was exactly what it was, but that somehow each barrel was able to cast light in a much broader radius than she would have expected from such a narrow lens. She held the light in her hand and paused for a moment, looking back at her shirt where it lay covering the offending tendril. She liked that shirt. And her curiosity, gift and curse that it was, prodded her insistently.
Taking a broom from the corner, Leah crept slowly back toward the great steel cabinets. She found herself tiptoeing across the carpeted floor – probably a bit silly, as she doubted the plant had ears, but after her ordeal she was taking no unnecessary chances. “Except, of course, for the utterly stupid and unnecessary chance I’m taking by messing with this thing again in the first place,” she thought, but continued nonetheless. Standing as far back as possible, she reached out with the tip of the broom handle and slowly lifted the shirt off of the tendril.
The thing lay motionless for several seconds, then snapped to life, snaking quickly across the floor, making a beeline for her bare feet. Leah jumped backward and let it have it with the black light. The thing recoiled instantly, seeming to shrink back on itself; Leah imagined it hissing in displeasure, though of course it made no sound. She kept the beam trained on it as it backed away, slithering the way it came, until finally it slipped back into the steel cabinet and went dormant again. Fascinated and elated, Leah pocketed the light and picked up her shirt. She hesitated a moment, loath to put it back on after its contact with the creepy plant, and tossed it back toward the steps. It was warm in the house anyway. “I win, jackass,” she said, and was immediately embarrassed to be taunting a plant. Shaking her head, she went back to the shelves of journals, resolved to do a bit more research before exploring the steel cabinets further.
MEANWHILE, high in the night sky above God knew where, Francesca blinked against the brisk onrushing wind and wondered what to do. Her captor, the bizarre southern belle-like witch who went by the improbable name of Kimmie, held her almost-dead weight effortlessly under one arm as she flew through the air. They had been flying for several minutes at a speed at which Francesca couldn’t even guess. She was still dressed as she had been at the gym, and her flimsy t-shirt and black soccer shorts did little to combat the chill of the onrushing wind.
Francesca, all resistance initially tickled out of her at the gym, had regained her breath and strength some time ago, but hung limp nevertheless for lack of any other reasonable course of action. Had she been able to, she might have broken free and risked a short drop as they took off, but now, hundreds of feet up, flying over a part of an alien world that she had never seen or heard about, she realized that breaking free would be suicide. Unless she could somehow bring them both down, slowly enough that the fall wouldn’t hurt them…
She turned her head, the wind whipping her lustrous black hair into her face, and looked at the side of Kimmie’s perfect, heart-shaped face. Kimmie was paying her little attention – the magical aura that enabled her to fly made Francesca’s weight a negligible consideration, and Kimmie was thinking of other things – first among them, the reward her captive was likely to bring from Yelena Kant. Even if Francesca had wanted to fight back, all Kimmie would have to do was drop her, then catch her in an energy sphere for the rest of the trip. The only reason she hadn’t done this from the start was that it tended to slow the journey somewhat, and to dilute the pure pleasure of flight. Kimmie was not one to dilute her pleasures.
Francesca’s inner strategist began to take over. She forced herself to think as rationally as possible, given the circumstances. What worked against sorceresses? She knew Ellefson had told her about them, about where their power came from, about how they had been beaten in the past by weapons that drained their power. Draining power -- that was an idea…
Francesca set her jaw and took a deep breath. If she did this right, then Kimmie’s power should wane gradually. At least, she hoped. There was at least a small chance that they would plummet instantly to the ground below. No – if they really started falling, she would just stop and let Kimmie fly again. And probably take some nasty revenge.
Well, she was certainly not going to let Kimmie take her wherever she was planning to take her. With a sudden, powerful move, Francesca twisted in Kimmie’s grasp and wrapped both arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Mystically enhanced as her strength was, Kimmie’s surprise kept her from responding before Francesca planted the bottoms of both feet against Kimmie’s trim waist, dug her bare toes into the sorceress’s firm but yielding tummy, and began wiggling them wildly.
Kimmie whooped and thrashed, spasming frantically at the deep, muscle-wracking tickles assaulting her belly. It was all Francesca could do to hold on, especially against the first mystically-enhanced jerk that wrenched at the muscles in her shoulders, but almost immediately Kimmie’s magical strength began to ebb drastically as her laughter was forced from her by Francesca’s strong, determined toes. Francesca teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, glared straight into Kimmie’s frantic, panicked eyes from about three inches away as the cool, teasing Southern belle’s face wavered between an uncontrollable, wild grin and a look of pure terror.
Their flight became erratic; they were losing altitude rapidly. Francesca’s toes stopped, but maintained their terrible pressure on Kimmie’s tense, ticklish tummy muscles. The stunningly beautiful stars wheeled and glittered around them as they soared, dove, and rolled in the sky. “Take us down,” Francesca demanded in a Clint Eastwood rasp. Kimmie started to shake her head, but a few more tickling digs of Francesca’s talented toes made her shriek her assent to their descent.
Gradually, they began to coast downward, as a crimson-faced Kimmie gasped for breath. “And…just…where do you intend…to go?” Kimmie managed. “Weah in the middle of…nowhere, and you’re hardly a sorceress.” Francesca did not reply as they descended to gently alight in a valley among lightly wooded hills.
As Kimmie’s feet touched the ground, Francesca, now sufficiently in control due to her strength, which was far superior to Kimmie’s when the latter was drained of her magic, lowered her own feet to the soft, grassy turf. She took one step back from Kimmie, who stood glaring and heaving, then hit her a strong right cross to her delicate, tapered jaw that summarily put her out. Francesca rummaged through Kimmie’s dainty shoulder-bag, finding it full of crystals that glowed with stored energy. “Probably mine,” she thought bitterly, taking the bag herself. She knew it would be some time before Kimmie’s energy would naturally replenish itself without laughter to feed on, and there would be little enough of that in the wilderness. Without the crystals, she would be powerless for at least a few hours.
Francesca dragged Kimmie’s inert form to a nearby tree, tore several strips from the hem of her magnificent, shimmering gown, and used them to tie her hands behind her back around the base of the tree. Kimmie’s beautiful, porcelain doll face looked surprisingly peaceful, her long lashes at rest on her apple cheeks: it was marred only by the angry bruise that was coalescing along her jawline. She wasn’t going anywhere for a good while, Francesca thought with satisfaction. She thought about taking her boots, so that she herself wouldn’t have to wander the countryside barefoot, but a quick glance told her that Kimmie’s dainty feet were several sizes smaller than her own. Better to get out while the getting was good – or as good as it was going to get.
The pair’s wild, looping descent had left her even more disoriented than she would ordinarily have been. She couldn’t even orient herself reliably by the stars – who knew how they aligned above this strange, mystical world? Francesca took a deep breath, picked a direction at random, and set out, her only guiding influence the need to place as much distance between her and Kimmie as she could.
Back at the Dearborn house, Leah had discovered a wealth of valuable information. A much more cautious search of the basement had yielded, alongside a gallery of bizarre artifacts, a virtual arsenal of anti-magickal weaponry: None of the weapons inflicted any actual damage, as the “natural laws” of the Sorceress’s world prohibited it, but they presented numerous ingenious advantages to one forced to face off against a magic-user. There were tangle-spheres, like the one they had used to incapacitate Akhana back on the ship, and directional jammers, which, according to Dearborn’s notes, interfered with mages’ ability to control their flight. Perhaps most useful were the anti-magic pendants, which would render the wearer immune to any direct magics cast against him or her, and the spellshells, small crimson spheres that, when activated, would generate a fifteen foot diameter field that prevented any magically-influenced objects from entering – useful in the event that a sorcerer, frustrated by a pendant’s blocking his spells, simply enchanted a tree and commanded it to grab his target. Leah learned the uses of all of these tools, and began to feel somewhat more secure, at least in some small way, about her safety in this strange world.
Leah was just beginning to nod off over a volume of Luther Dearborn’s observations about native flora and fauna when she heard someone calling upstairs.
“Mrs. Dearborn! Leah! Akhana! Francesca! This is really important! Something really bad is going on!”
It was Courtney, Leah realized, and hurried up the steps to find her young friend standing wide-eyed, barefoot, and bedraggled in the foyer. She looked haggard and exhausted, eyes wide with fear and intensity.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened to you?” Leah asked, putting an arm solicitously around Courtney’s trembling shoulders.
“Don’t worry about me. The important thing is that we’re not safe here. I don’t know if we’re safe anywhere. There was this…witch, I guess, and she’s hunting me. I barely got away, but if she’s after me, she’s got to be after all of us. We’ve got to get out of here, for our sake and the Dearborns’. Where are ‘Cesca and Akhana?”
Leah felt her initial surge of panic quieted, again, by the steely calm that she had come to feel at crucial junctures since the start of their misadventure. When she spoke, her voice was strong and serious. “They’re out. We have to hope they’re okay, and do what we can to protect ourselves for now.”
Courtney looked at her with desperation. “I don’t think you understand. She’s got these…powers, like that redheaded bitch on the boat. If they find us, there’s nothing we can do.”
Leah allowed herself a smile, more to comfort Courtney than to express her own confidence. “That’s not entirely true. Come on – into the basement.”
Desyr was, among sorceresses, rather understated and dignified. While she was not without a certain flair for the dramatic, as her crimson and gold gown, stiletto heels, and long flowing raven locks indicated, she regarded her compeers’ theatrics as often tawdry and needless. As she glided from the night sky to alight on the Dearborns’ porch, she used a simple cloaking spell to conceal herself from passersby – Cyan would have wreathed herself in an aura of light and landed amid a fanfare of trumpets. Instead of blasting the door from its hinges, she simply caused the locks to release, stepped inside, and locked the door behind her.
Floating a few inches above the floor so that the noise of her shoes would not betray her presence, Desyr began her search. She zipped from room to room, moving quickly and expeditiously, humming the melody line of a symphony softly to herself. Her exquisite patrician countenance bore a gently thoughtful expression, as if she were trying to recall items on a grocery list. She was slightly troubled – for some reason, entering the house had dampened her ability to lock in on the energy signatures of the women she sought. Surely this innocuous suburban dwelling would not have anti-magic defenses implemented? No matter. If she had to search, she had to search. Her quarry, after all, consisted of Earth people, who could hardly have become sufficiently acquainted with magic and the defenses against it to trouble her.
A quick sweep of the upper floors revealed little, other than the owners’ fine taste in décor; swiftly, Desyr narrowed her options to the basement. A sweep of her hand opened the barred door, and she drifted regally down the steps.
She was surprised, momentarily, by a kind of battlecry from the far end of the enormous basement. Quickly, though, she recovered her wits and used a “helping hand” – a giant hand spell originally intended to help with work, but which sorceresses had managed to adapt better than most of the original Sorceress’s sappy spells to combat purposes – to deflect two tangle-spheres that the women crouched at the opposite side of the room had hurled in her direction. The spheres bounced away and unraveled on the floor, their cables hissing against one another like snakes.
Leah and Courtney felt their spirits sink as the crimson-clad, raven-haired witch smiled haughtily at them. “Well, it appears my search has ended,” she intoned in a soft, dulcet voice that still managed an undertone of menace. “Come with me, little poppets. Enough of this fuss.”
Leah, protective instincts kicking in, moved half-consciously in front of Courtney and triggered the directional jammer, the only offensive weapon she had left. Desyr’s face reflected a moment of panic as she glided suddenly and violently to the left, but she simply glided to the floor and stood facing them, separated by some sixty feet of basement. “Irritating, those jammers. But, I fear, not much help to you if I simply remain earthbound. Now, let’s end this unpleasantness, shall we? Yelena has business with you, and it will be so much easier on you if you simply come with me.”
She raised her hand to throw a spell only to find it blocked by Leah’s hastily activated spell shell.
Desyr cursed, her musical voice transforming even her oath to melody. They stood, at a stalemate, glaring at each other. Leah stood tall and firm, jaw set, while Courtney peered cautiously out from behind her. Occasionally, the air around Leah and Courtney shimmered slightly, as it might on an exceptionally humid day – the only visible sign of the force field that protected them. Desyr, long, lean, buxom and imposing, stared at them, eyes flashing, for several moments. Then, abruptly, she strode nonchalantly over to a desk chair, sat down, and propped her stiletto-clad feet up on a table.
“Very well,” she said breezily. “I can certainly wait, if I must. That spell shield will last, I imagine, for about another thirty minutes. I can take you then as easily as I could now.”
Leah knew that she was right. She and Courtney would have to figure something out, and quickly. For the time being, though, they were safe…
Sounds came from upstairs – the front door opening, the rustle of shopping bags, the breathless conversation of Marion Dearborn and Akhana Mesani, returned from a day out. For a moment, Leah thought they were saved – that perhaps this sorceress would slip away rather than risk encountering others in the house. Her hopes were dashed, however, when she saw the grin on the face of the witch, who had now risen again from her seat.
“Friends of yours, I imagine,” she purred. “Perhaps we should make them comfortable.” She raised her arms and chanted a spell.
Marion Dearborn, exhausted but exhilarated from a successful day fashion-hunting, had barely set down her packages when she felt it happening. In a flash, she had literally sunk into the floor of her foyer, up to her shins, and was now trapped there. She was perfectly comfortable, but, try as she might, she could not pull her legs free! A startled cry from Akhana, just to her left, indicated that the same thing had happened to her – the women gaped at each other, dumbfounded: they had no idea of what was going on in the basement below, and could not begin to guess at the cause of their current condition.
At that exact moment, the back door banged open and a wave of girls poured noisily in. Ashley and two of her friends – the dark-haired, sloe-eyed Cassandra and the pert, nut-brown redhead, Gen – swept into the hallway in a rush of conversation, then stopped short at the sight of Marion and Akhana sunken calf-deep into the floor a few yards away.
“Mom? Are you okay?” Ashley asked, her face somewhere between concern and amusement, one brow raised in surprise. Before Marion could answer, the girls cried out in alarm as they, too, sank into the floor, their briefly noncorporeal legs passing through the beautiful varnished hardwood up to mid-calf, leaving them trapped and alarmed.
The view from below was bizarre: five pairs of feet, variously clad, protruded from the basement’s high ceiling – one group of two, one group of three, facing each other, separated by perhaps four yards of distance. Leah and Courtney could hear muffled voices from upstairs, raised in concern, but could not make out words.
Desyr grinned broadly, eyes flashing with menace. Her thick, sleek, shiny raven hair flowed about her shoulders, almost taking on a life of its own as her excitement mounted. “Your friends have come a bit late to the party,” she cooed, “but I’m certain they’ll have a delightful time. Your spell shield is proof against me now – but it protects them not at all. Perhaps if I draw a bit of power from them, I will be able to shatter your shield. Perhaps not; nevertheless, I shall certainly enjoy the diversion they offer.”
“Oh, you bitch,” Leah hissed, realizing immediately what the sorceress intended to do.
One by one, the shoes began to drop from the suspended feet. Ashley, Gen, and Cassandra, like most college girls in warm weather, were wearing flip flops, some of which had already fluttered to the floor – the rest were swept away in a moment. Marion Dearborn was wearing black pumps of the marvelous kind native to this world that managed to be high-heeled and stylish but as comfortable as tennis shoes, and no stockings. One by one, her heels popped free, then each slipped off of her grasping toes to fall to the basement floor. Had any doubt existed that something unnatural was happening, the loss of Akhana’s footwear would have dispelled it. She wore black half-boots over smoky grey stockings; each boot, in turn, was slowly unzipped and discarded, then invisible hands drew the stockings down her lithe, strong legs and off of her long, delicate feet.
Five trapped, barefoot women now regarded each other with confusion and consternation in the Dearborn foyer. Above Leah’s and Courtney’s heads, five distinctive pairs of bare feet struggled and fidgeted as their owners tried in vain to reclaim them.
Akhana and Marion found themselves in a difficult position, even beyond the fact that they were trapped in a makeshift floor-stocks. They suspected – were almost certain that – this was the work of one of Yelena Kant’s minions, who had tracked down the Dearborns’ houseguests. They also knew what to expect from their current situation, particularly now that their feet were bare. The girls, on the other hand, knew nothing of the kind. They thought about vengeful sorceresses about as often as most people think about rampaging grizzly bears – they knew vaguely that some existed somewhere, but didn’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about them. Ashley knew only that the houseguests were friends of Ellefsons, and had some connection to her dad – beyond that, she only knew that they were fun to be around, and that Leah couldn’t hold her liquor. Plus, even trapped and barefoot, tickle torture for nefarious ends was not the first thing that would occur to them.
In a moment, the girls calmed down enough to talk to the similarly ensnared older women. “Mom, what’s going on? Is this one of dad’s machines screwing up again?” Ashley asked. While she was annoyed, she was not particularly afraid – strange things in the Dearborn house were not unheard of.
“You think your dad did this?” Gen squeaked. “Can he undo it? I’m supposed to meet Brad for dinner in, like, an hour.”
Marion tried to force a smile, her eyes wide with surprise and fear. “I honestly don’t know, sweetheart. But don’t worry – Francesca and Leah should be home before long. They’ll be able to get us out.” She wished she believed it herself, but she saw no reason to terrify the girls when there was nothing any of them could do.
“This is sooo messed up,” Gen said. She turned her pixie-like face abruptly toward Cassie. “What’s your trip?” She asked impatiently.
Cassie, usually so quiet and staid, had let out a sudden yelp, followed by a flood of giggles that surprised and mortified her, turning her pale face crimson with embarrassment. Her fit subsided for a moment, and she glared at Gen, wide-eyed and breathless behind her stylish, thin-rimmed glasses. “Gen, quit it!” Rarely did the beautiful but bookish brunette speak with such heat.
“Quit what? What are you talking about?’
“You tickled my feet with your to-ho-ho-HO-HOOOOES!! AAAHAHAHAHAASTAHAHAHAAP!!!” Cassie began laughing in earnest, now, alternating between pulling helplessly at her submerged legs and whacking at the hapless and innocent Gen with her hands. Had she been able to think clearly, which she could not while someone was tickling the fire out of her smooth, sensitive bare soles, Cassie would have realized that for Gen to be doing this, her toes would have to be sixteen inches long and quadruple-jointed. As it was, though, she batted helplessly at her friend’s innocent shoulder as she shook with laughter. “STAHAHAHAAAAP TIHIHIHIIICKLING!!” she managed between heaves. Quickly, her laughter went silent, and she could no longer summon the strength to swat her sorority sister.
For their parts, Ashley, and to a lesser extent Gen, who had to worry about Cassie’s feeble but frenzied blows, saw what was happening to their friend as hysterically – if bizarrely – funny. Cassie the bookworm, the studious, “I’m super-hot but I don’t care” girl with the boobs and bone structure to kill for, screaming and hooting and now crying with laughter as somebody tickled her feet beneath the floor. They had seen her tickled – as they had both been tickled – at the community service event, but this was different: it didn’t have the air of priggish, volunteerist propriety that that tickling-for-a-cause took on. This was just a brainiac going to jelly because of someone messing with the bottoms of her feet. It was all they could do not to point at her and laugh.
In the basement, the view got stranger by the second. Desyr had returned to her relaxed, feet-up position in the desk chair, but now simply and casually pointed to one of the pairs of bare feet – a large, pale, elegant pair, with high arches and active, dexterous toes – which sent them into a frenzy, toes wiggling, soles flexing and struggling. They were obviously being tickled by invisible fingers, as the peals of laughter from above, muted but clearly audible, indicated. The gemstones in Desyr’s earrings began to glow with absorbed energy.
“This is a wonderful spell,” she said offhandedly to Leah and Courtney, whose shield was beginning to feel like as much prison as protection. “All I have to do is point, and it’s as if a pair of invisible, expert hands are relentlessly tickling the target. I’m told the victim can even feel the fingernails. I control the intensity and pace with a thought – I can tease, tweak, or outright torture as I wish. Perhaps I’ll let the two of you sample it as we travel back to meet Yelena Kant.”
Leah and Courtney said nothing; there was really nothing to say. Leah gave Courtney’s hand a reassuring squeeze.
Up above, Cassie’s writhings stopped abruptly, leaving her heaving for breath and wracked with occasional, residual giggles. She took in a deep, ragged breath, then looked up at Gen and Ashley, who couldn’t help grinning at her hapless plight. “You guys…this…is…so…not…funny!” she managed.
“I’m sorry,” Ashley, ever the diplomat, managed. “I’m sure it’s just one of my dad’s machines gone haywire. He does all kinds of research into energy and laughter and stuff, and we probably triggered some kind of a tickle machine or something.”
Cassie, still gasping, said, “well, I hope like hell it’s finished with me!”
The girls’ conversation was interrupted by the sound of a high-pitched squeak at the other end of the hallway. They gaped in surprise, and Marion turned in alarm, to see Akhana – the cool, cosmopolitan, exotic, supermodel-with-three-advanced-degrees African beauty – contorting and grimacing as she tried in vain to resist the sensations that were overtaking her from below the polished floor. Six seconds she held out – an admirable interval for one as sensitive as she – before her rich, velvet-voiced laughter rang out in uncontrollable peals in the echoing, high-ceilinged hallway.
Below, Desyr had moved on to another tempting station on her bizarre barefoot buffet. For Leah and Courtney, there was no mistaking the victim – not only was Akhana the only one who matched the long, slim, coffee-colored, light-soled bare feet that had begun the peculiar, frenetic, helpless dance of the tickled, but they were in the rare position of having tickled those feet before, and knew the peculiar, distinctive toe-splaying freak-out they did when the tickling reached the tops of the heels. Akhana’s laughter, too, was distinctive – deep, booming, and musical, strong-sounding even in hysteria, a state she had speedily reached once the tickling started. “Poor Akhana,” Courtney murmured, as Leah glared at Desyr, who smiled back in feigned innocence.
Above, Akhana was a wreck. She was the type of woman who always looked put-together, whether rolling out of bed on a weekend or attending a gala event. Still, elements of her person were flawless – her skirt, blouse, and jacket were perfect, her long, lustrous, perfectly straight black hair still fell fetchingly over her shoulders (she had freed it from its occasional corn rows today, and brushed it out to its full glory). Her face, though, was a mask of hilarity: brilliant white teeth flashed in a broad, uncontrollable grin; exotic, quasi-asian eyes squeezed shut and leaked tears stained by once-tasteful and understated mascara. Her whole body shook and trembled as she alternated between a kind of through-the-teeth hissing giggle (usually when the spectral fingers visited the spaces between and just below her long and nimble toes) and a bursting, echoing, whooping laugh (usually when they scrabbled over the arches, balls, and heels of her feet). The vision of elegance was quite another picture as the foot-tickling torture continued.
To the girls, even the recently tortured Cassie, Akhana’s contortions were, again, hilarious. Polite and considerate enough not to laugh at her openly, they gazed disbelievingly at the cackling sophisticate, marveling at the disproval of their unconscious and illogical idea that one’s degree cosmopolitan cool would necessarily be inversely proportional to the ticklishness of one’s feet. Marion, also crazily amused in spite of her panic, at least managed to squeeze Akhana’s hand in an effort to support her through the worst of it.
After a few minutes, which seemed, naturally, much longer to Akhana than to everyone else, the hands left the esteemed Doctor’s tormented tootsies. Akhana panted and wheezed, blowing her breath. “Oh…God…” she rasped, and repeated at intervals.
The remaining three – the two sorority sisters and the gorgeous housewife – looked at each other in consternation. Cassie being tickled had been one thing – it was actually fairly credible that someone in their admittedly incredible situation might have triggered some device or other in Luther Dearborn’s peculiar basement. When Akhana – the farthest one from Cassie – had been tickled, as well, the situation had changed. They glanced from one to another frantically, waiting for the next strike with a sense of dread – Marion’s, tempered by an undertone of genuine fear about the true motivation behind all this; the girls’, tempered by a kind of amused outrage at the absurdity of it all.
After ten seconds of silence, broken only by Akhana’s recovering gasps and sobs, Gen positively exploded. “WHOOOHOOOHOOOHOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!” She ejaculated, her small but strong body tensing and vibrating like a plucked string. She clenched her tiny fists, threw her head back, and howled with laughter as Desyr’s phantom hands found their next target.
From below, Leah and Courtney saw the smallest pair of bare feet – an undeniably cute, dark-tanned, pink-soled, gumdrop-toed pair, ornamented with a toe ring on each second toe – begin their own wiggly, fidgety tickle-dance. Gen’s tiny soles wrinkled and flexed as her toes wriggled frantically in response to the expertly tickling fingers that zipped over her arches, flicked at her toetips, scratched devastatingly at the balls of her feet. She seemed comically determined to mount a defense, hiding one bare ticklish sole behind another, then switching as each foremost foot-bottom proved as terribly ticklish as the one it protected. Desyr found this enormously amusing, and even teased aloud, more for Leah’s and Courtney’s benefit than for that of her unhearing victim: “which should I tickle? This one? No, that one? Ah, this one again!”
Above, Gen’s reactions were somewhat different than Cassie’s and Akhana’s had been. They were at least as powerful: every flicker of a fingertip across her madly flexing bare feet brought forth peals of adorable laughter from the little red-haired gymnast, and she could at least stake a claim as the most ticklish yet. The difference was, while Cassie and Akhana fundamentally disliked being tickled – perhaps because it was so counter to the images each liked to project – Gen actually kind of liked it. She was a youngest child, gleefully uninhibited, and used, as a small girl with a bubbly personality, cute as a button features, and a natural air of giggliness, to being tickled with some regularity by brothers, boyfriends, and even sorority sisters who couldn’t resist the invitation of a taut, navel-ringed, tan tummy in a belly shirt or of tiny pink toes peeking out from under the hem of flared jeans. Tickling was fun for her, and while the all-out assault on her vigorously but ineffectively squirming feet was certainly more intense than what she was used to, her response differed in degree rather than kind – even as she whooped, howled, and hollered, she did so through a flushed, beaming, delighted grin.
Watching the bizarre tableau helplessly from within the spell shield, Leah began to notice something about Desyr. As she commanded the tickling hands to do their work, and as the victims’ laughter charged her with sorcerous energy, she began to appear unmistakably aroused – her eyes would close now and then, her tongue would snake out over crimson lips, her pale skin now bore a clear pink flush. Now and then, a tiny moan would escape her lips. Although Leah had no way of knowing this, the effect was common among sorcerous types, and unquestionable proof that this world, and its magicks, had been created by a woman: once mystical energy reached particularly lofty levels, if it was not immediately discharged, it went to work on the pleasure centers of a female mage’s brain – further, it began to directly stimulate primary and secondary sexual organs. Desyr, charged with a great deal of energy from her succession of ticklish victims, was feeling an insistent hum of sexual pleasure, electrifying her stiffened nipples, moistening her tingling sex. It was not yet enough to bring her to orgasm, but it kept her in a heightened state of arousal that was beginning to interfere with her ability to concentrate, as her excitement mounted and mounted.
Riding the crest of her arousal, Desyr decided to up the intensity. She withdrew the tickling hands from Gen’s exhausted little feet and abruptly doubled the spell, pointing two hands skyward at the remaining two pairs of bare feet: Ashley’s golden-tanned, youthful extremities, and her mother Marion’s shapely, mature, crinkly-soled ones.
There was no break, this time, between victims. No sooner had Gen’s body sagged as she relaxed, a goofy, giggly smile on her reddened face, than Ashley and her mother shrieked as one and launched into a harmony of desperate, overbubbling giggles – strikingly similar in sound, Marion’s perhaps a half-octave lower in pitch. The Dearborn girls both had wildly ticklish feet, and each knew very well how ticklish the other was: once, in a silly mood, they had had a contest, each placing a bare foot in the other’s lap, each drawing one fingernail slooooowly up and down the center of the sole, to see who said uncle first. Marion had lost, squeaking out a feeble “uncle” after about ten seconds as she shook with silent laughter, but then tightened her grip on her daughter’s ankle and tickled in earnest until Ashley had screamed it not once, but ten or eleven times.
A judge would have been hard-pressed to score this contest, however. The two barefoot Dearborns were instantly overcome with hilarity. Their shapely feet flexed and squirmed, their toes clenched and wriggled as the invisible fingers scrabbled over their sensitive soles. Somehow, watching the other writhe in ticklish torment enhanced the sensation for both mother and daughter – each felt for the other, but each knew the other so well that there was an odd, affectionate sympathy that penetrated the sensations overwhelming their bodies and minds. Ashley, through her wild hysterics, had a flashback to a time when she and her mother had gone to get pedicures together, and how each, in turn, tried unsuccessfully to fight off giggles: they had made laughed at and with each other, then, but this seemed considerably less funny.
Down below, the two pairs of tickled feet reacted almost as mirror images of one another: their hot spots were identical, and, as Desyr’s ghostly fingers attacked both in identical ways, the feet reacted identically, as well. Both sets of toes curled together, spread together; both pairs of soles wrinkled together, flexed together, rubbed against each other simultaneously in a vain effort to reduce the tickling. Up above, both women were completely swept up in waves of roaring, full-throated laughter, shaking their heads so that their brown locks danced around their shoulders, clenching their fists, sometimes pounding ineffectually on their knees as tears of mirth poured down their pretty cheeks. Gen and Cassie tried to support Ashley, patting her shaking shoulders awkwardly, and Akhana stoically endured the death-grip of Marion’s fingers on her hand, as the two Dearborns quaked with desperate laughter, slaves to the soles of their ticklish feet.
Meanwhile, down below, Desyr was becoming more and more swept up in the waves of pleasure washing over her. The sexual dimension of mirth energy had been studied and documented; Desyr knew the theories, and, in less task-oriented times, had certainly done her share of exploring its parameters and applications. Never before, though, even when she rode the waves of mirth energy consciously and intentionally to orgasm, had she felt arousal of this desperate intensity. She could not have known that Luther Dearborn’s various mystical and scientific curiosities were working every moment to heighten and amplify the effect. Desyr began to tremble slightly, her thighs pressing together, creating almost – but not quite – enough friction to put her over the edge.
Courtney nudged Leah and nodded in her direction. “Um…it looks like she may have other things than us occupying her attention,” she whispered, blushing.
Leah nodded – she herself had been thinking that this could be the break they had waited for. A plan had been kicking around in her head since early in their standoff, and now she saw the chance to put it into action. “Courtney – on my signal, I want you to run as fast as you can over to the second steel storage chamber on the far wall – the one with my shirt lying in front of it. I left it unlocked. When she and I get close, I want you to yank open that door – but stay behind it, and watch your feet!”
Courtney looked at her questioningly for a moment, then nodded. Leah stretched a kink out of her neck, set her jaw, and awaited her moment.
Desyr’s tickling became more haphazard as the distraction of her arousal began to interfere with her spell. It was still plenty enough to keep her two victims jumping like spastic marionettes, but the spell was beginning to lose substance. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to throw caution to the wind, delve a hand between her thighs, and quench the burning lust that overcame her. She was beginning to feel desperate – she was rather demur, by sorceress standards, and would ordinarily not consider masturbating in front of strangers, but the idea of continuing her task much longer without bringing herself off seemed increasingly impossible. Almost in spite of herself, she lowered one hand – Ashley heaved a shuddering, giggly sigh of relief – and began rubbing herself through her clothes.
Suddenly, two shapes came streaking toward her from the far side of the room. One streaked by without stopping, and the other plowed into her full force just as her orgasm hit her. Her cry of pleasure cut short by a guttural grunt upon impact, she found herself driven backwards by Leah, who had rammed into her like a linebacker, and then shoved with surprising force backwards. Still rocked by the residual waves of her intense but interrupted climax, she staggered over her stiletto heels several yards backwards, only to find herself instantly entangled in strong, supple vines of Leah’s earlier horticultural discovery – the Barefoot’s Bane.
Courtney hopped and skipped out of the way of the few tendrils that swiped at her bare feet, but the vast majority of the plant’s attention was understandably focused on the massive (though quite shapely) source of energy that had just been dumped into its coils. Shaking off the fog of her pleasure, Desyr suddenly realized what had happened to her! She began frantically trying to gesticulate a spell, but the vines that held her kept her hands from obeying, and another, outrageously, covered her mouth to keep her from uttering any vocal magicks. Leah and Courtney stepped back to watch from a safe distance.
Now that it had fully ensnared its prey, the plant seemed bizarrely playful in its treatment of the furious, beautiful, raven-tressed witch. It held her in a profoundly undignified position, a kind of splayed sitting posture that hoisted her spread, slightly bent legs out in front of her in a way that caused her shimmering dress to reveal her excitement-dampened silk panties. Eyes flashing fire, she struggled and grunted into her makeshift gag as two tendrils moved, with teasing slowness, toward her stiletto-clad feet. One by one, they eased the shoes from her heels – they slipped free with audible pops. Then, as if savoring the anticipation, they drew the shoes completely away, revealing a flawless pair of quite large, shapely, creamy-pale soles and ten long, agile, nervously wiggling toes. It held her there for a moment, in a position of utmost embarrassment – she felt profoundly exposed, somehow more at the ostentatious display of her bare and intensely vulnerable soles than at the haphazard show of her panties. Leah and Courtney grinned – Leah, knowingly, Courtney, amazed, but starting to catch on – as she looked daggers at them.
Simultaneously, the plant pulled aside the gagging vine and brought a bunch of wriggling tendrils to each of the barefoot sorceress’s helpless soles. Desyr’s tickling expertise came, in part, from an acute knowledge of vulnerability: she was enormously, unbearably, excruciatingly ticklish. She was ticklish all over her body; a light brush on her arm, a gentle scratch on the back of the neck could make her shiver and giggle. The bottoms of her big, bare, beautiful feet, though, seemed to gather every nerve in the rest of her body and consolidate them in hypersensitive bunches from the base of her heels to the tips of her toes. She shrieked, screamed, bellowed, wracked with laughter of an intensity that surpassed even the five extraordinarily ticklish victims she had just finished torturing. The tendrils tickled with terrible tenacity, teasing wiggly toes, gliding over dreadfully ticklish arches, painting invisible masterpieces across the pair of large and shapely canvasses that were Desyr’s naked foot-bottoms. Held virtually immobile by the vines at her ankles, knees, thighs, waist, chest, elbows, and wrists, Desyr could only thrash her gorgeous head about and clench and wiggle her toes as the predatory plant tickled her silly.
As she was tickled into helpless hysteria, the massive quantities of mirth energy she had stored began to be discharged into the air around her – the plant couldn’t metabolize it fast enough. Multicolored sparks and flares filled the air around her, creating a magnificent lightshow that would have impressed even Desyr, had her eyes not been squeezed shut as she spasmed with cataracts of uncontrollable giggles. The spell that held the women upstairs faltered, setting them free, and Leah heard the muffled thumping of their feet descending the basement stairs over Desyr’s histrionics.
All seven women stood, stunned and gape-mouthed, staring at the scene. Desyr, crimson-clad, ivory-skinned paragon of feminine force, whooped and cackled as the now critically over-energized plant tickled and tickled and tickled her extraordinarily receptive feet with stunning versatility. As laughter wracked her body, her magickal energies escaped in amazing pyrotechnic displays, filling the room with shooting stars and harmless fireballs. The women watched their tormentress – for they had figured out upon seeing her that that must be who she was – as she was utterly ravished by the tickling tendrils, until at last she was rag-limp, gasping and wheezing, the fireworks reduced to the occasional spark as the plant, now glutted and overfull of energy, brushed absently at her still-cringing soles. As the last feeble tickles came to a halt, signifying the utter draining of the bedraggled, crimson-faced, sobbing captive, Leah stepped forward.
“Now,” she said. “We can play this one of two ways. You can tell me what I need to know, and we can set you free, put a magic-damper collar on you, and turn you over to the authorities. Or, you can refuse to tell me what I need to know, and we can just leave you here with the knowledge that every time your magical energy begins to return, that plant will tickle it out of you.
“This,” she said, holding up a random piece of machinery from one of Luther’s tables (it could have been a marital aid, for all she knew) “will tell me whether or not you’re telling the truth. You know what will happen if you lie.”
“Very…well…” gasped Desyr, all her hateful fire long since tickled out. “Place the collar on me. I will…tell you everything.”
Here I am, reviving my over-long and long forgotten magnum opus, The Voyage Out. I sincerely hope you enjoy it. I hope it isn't presumptuous to suggest it, but if any artists out there like my stuff and are stuck for ideas, I'd love to see some interpretations of my characters!
Previous chapters are linked to this post: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=906459
The Voyage Out XI:
Escape. Showdown at the Dearborn House.
Leah didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Fortunately, it was not a choice she had to make, as, for the past four or five minutes (hours?), she had been doing both. The fact that her situation could have been infinitely worse was a pale consolation – her rational mind realized it, and was grateful, but the wrinkling, flexing sole of her foot, her struggling, writhing toes, her sore and heaving abdominal muscles, even her newly complaining tailbone, aching from the less than gentle contact with the floor her struggles continually occasioned, registered no sense of relief. As seemed par for the course in this world, the physical agony of her torment was redoubled by the absurdity of its circumstances.
Leah had always been a barefoot kind of person – not for any of the crazyish reasons that some people tended to be, motivated by some erotic attraction or half-baked hippy creed, but simply because she was more comfortable that way. Socks and stockings were confinements to her, and, while she certainly appreciated the appeal of high fashion shoes and boots, she tended to shuck them as quickly as possible whenever appropriate. It was an indoor affectation – though she appreciated the feel of soft grass or beach sand under her bare feet, they were too tender to permit much more adventurous barefooting – but it was nevertheless persistent. At weddings, she was the first woman barefoot on the dance floor; in winter, indoors, one could often see her in a heavy sweater or wrapped in a blanket, but, glancing down, would glimpse her bare brown toes wiggling in the rug. It wasn’t a preoccupation, and wasn’t even really anything she thought about, except when a friend (or, more often, her mother) would comment that her feet must be cold, and she replied that she hated cooping them up.
Now, she found herself cursing this mildest and least dramatic of affectations, which had led her to explore the Dearborns’ mysterious basement barefoot. And yet, her current situation, she would be forced to admit if she were capable of balanced reflection, was more result of her curiosity than of her wardrobe choices. Unable to control herself, or to wait until Marion Dearborn returned home, Leah had ventured into the basement where Luther Dearborn’s research specimens, inventions, and experiments were stored. Poring over his diaries and journals, she found a small key that fit the lock on one of the great steel storage chambers at the end of the basement.
She had opened the door for perhaps seven seconds – long enough to gape open-mouthed at the sight of the monstrosity within. Inside was an enormous plant, perhaps seven feet high and nine feet around, shaped rather like an octopus, with a central spherical bulb with tentacles growing out on all sides, but with perhaps thirty tentacles rather than eight. It reminded her a bit of the giant plant from Little Shop of Horrors, but, she supposed, that was probably just because it happened to be a giant plant. Standing at the threshold, she began to read the sign posted on the far wall, barely legible in the dimness. The first line was, “DO NOT EXPOSE TO LIGHT!” Rather an odd thing to write on a sign, she thought; after all, one needed to see to read. At that moment, the tentacles closest to her, bathed in the light from behind her, began to slither to life.
To her credit, Leah moved fast. Her experiences over the past several days had sharpened her nerves and reflexes, and for once her impulse toward self-preservation won out over her curiosity. She leapt backward and slammed the door against the oncoming tendrils.
Congratulating herself even as her heart pounded in her ears, she was turning the key in the lock when she felt something brushing against her toes. A single tendril – really, it seemed, only a tiny part of one of the monster plant’s great compound tentacles –had managed to insinuate itself between the door and the jamb as she had slammed and locked it. It was small and unprepossessing – perhaps as big around as a pencil, and covered in a soft but prickly fuzz – but before she could escape it had wrapped itself gently but firmly around her right big toe.
Leah let out a little scream before she could tamp it down and remind herself she was tough. The tendril began pulling at her toe. It was a gentle, but insistent and irresistible pull, and it tugged upward on her foot until she was obliged to sit down to avoid falling over. For a few moments, a bizarre tug-o-war ensued, as she pulled backward on her leg with both hands, and it held steady with that same gentle, firm grip on her toe. More frustrated than anything else, Leah began to look around for some way to cut herself free.
Then, the awful part started. Its toehold secure, the tendril extended slightly, poised snakelike for a moment in the air, and then it began, methodically as an animal feeding, to stroke its soft, prickly, fuzzy tip up and down over the bottom of her bare foot.
The effect was instant and devastating – Leah, of course, had wickedly ticklish feet, and this specimen was of a species evolved to tickle for its very survival. Leah immediately convulsed with shrieks and giggles, thrashing on the carpet and pounding the floor with her fists. She kicked ineffectually at the tendril with her free foot, tried to pry her toe free with her fingers, but nothing she did impeded the insistent and devilishly effective tickling of her sole. She clenched her bare toes, turning her sole into a web of wrinkles which the tickly tip navigated with contemptuous ease. She tried, more than once, to cover as much of the bottom of her foot as she could by grasping it with both hands, but it always found the seam in this makeshift armor, and the heaving of her laughter combined with her awkward position made sitting up long enough to maintain this too much for her admittedly impressive abdominal muscles. Before long, all she could do was lie back and howl with uncontrollable laughter as the tendril tickled her arch, traced over her heel, flicked teasingly at the ball of her foot, or snaked between her wiggling toes.
Amid her laughter, a single passage from Luther Dearborn’s journals came to Leah’s mind with ridiculous and mocking clarity – a sketch of just such a plant as this, executed with a Naturalist’s precision, captioned with a latin name and, beneath it, the common designation: “Barefoot’s Bane.”
Her voice was going, now – tears streaked her high cheekbones, and her body ached as she writhed on the floor and heaved with giggles and whoops of laughter. For a mindless plant, the thing worked with astonishing skill and efficiency: though it focused entirely on the sole of one foot, and returned with punishing regularity to the most sensitive spot, the highest part of the arch, it varied its attack enough that Leah never became desensitized. Even after several minutes of solid tickling, it could still make her squeal with surprise as it attacked her toes, or wrack her with belly laughs as it zipped up the length of her sole like a child licking a popsicle, making her toes curl tight and her sole wrinkle. The small part of her mind not overloaded with hilarity began to picture scenarios ranging from the embarrassment of having Marion or Ashley come home to find that her twitching and gasping like a fish out of water on their basement floor, to herself dead of a heart attack and not caring what they thought, to the very real possibility of her wetting her jeans if this kept up much longer.
Then, even as the tendril invaded the undersides of her toes and forced a noise from her like the squeak her mother’s cat made when it yawned amplified a hundredfold, an idea came into her tormented mind. Forcing her muscles to work, she managed, with Herculean effort, to pull her shirt off over her head, leaving her in just jeans and a black bra. With one final, wrenching effort, she tossed the shirt over her trapped foot and the tendril that imprisoned it, covering it completely from where it had squeezed through the doorjamb to its merciless, tickling tip.
For a few moments, whimpering with laughter as it continued to tickle her feebly struggling foot with horrible effectiveness, Leah thought she had only succeeded in making her eventual discovery more humiliating. Soon, though, the tendril’s touch became softer, more haphazard, and its grip began to weaken until, at last, she was able to wrench her foot free. The light had stirred the plant to life; shrouded by the shirt, it slipped swiftly and mercifully into dormancy.
Leah rolled violently away from the tendril and lay there, heaving and sobbing, for a moment. When she could move, she wiped at her tears, then massaged her victimized foot until some semblance of normal feeling returned. “Stupid,” she hissed to herself, between gasps for breath. “Stupid.”
When she had more or less recovered, curiosity began to supplant horror, and Leah tracked down the volume of Luther Dearborn’s journal where she had seen the sketch and description of “Barefoot’s Bane.” Much of the description simply mirrored her own experience – the plants, common in the Northern regions, “came to life” only when exposed to light and in the presence of potential prey, and fed off of mirth energy by trapping people and tickling them. As Dearborn noted, the name was something of a misnomer, as, while being barefoot might speed the victim’s torment, the species had evolved to the point at which it could undo and remove many kinds of clothing and footwear. Certain kinds of light – notably black light – could be used to drive the plant back, and eventually into dormancy, and Dearborn recommended carrying a black light projector when traveling on foot in the northern woods.
Leah noticed a device resembling Dearborn’s sketch of a black light projector he had developed on a work table across the room – it lay among a number of odd-looking tools and objects, the only one of which Leah readily recognized. The device was small – about the size of two inkpens fused together, and had two “barrels,” or lenses – one clearly for black light, the other resembling a conventional penlight. Turning each on in turn (after carefully pointing the thing away from herself), she discovered that that was exactly what it was, but that somehow each barrel was able to cast light in a much broader radius than she would have expected from such a narrow lens. She held the light in her hand and paused for a moment, looking back at her shirt where it lay covering the offending tendril. She liked that shirt. And her curiosity, gift and curse that it was, prodded her insistently.
Taking a broom from the corner, Leah crept slowly back toward the great steel cabinets. She found herself tiptoeing across the carpeted floor – probably a bit silly, as she doubted the plant had ears, but after her ordeal she was taking no unnecessary chances. “Except, of course, for the utterly stupid and unnecessary chance I’m taking by messing with this thing again in the first place,” she thought, but continued nonetheless. Standing as far back as possible, she reached out with the tip of the broom handle and slowly lifted the shirt off of the tendril.
The thing lay motionless for several seconds, then snapped to life, snaking quickly across the floor, making a beeline for her bare feet. Leah jumped backward and let it have it with the black light. The thing recoiled instantly, seeming to shrink back on itself; Leah imagined it hissing in displeasure, though of course it made no sound. She kept the beam trained on it as it backed away, slithering the way it came, until finally it slipped back into the steel cabinet and went dormant again. Fascinated and elated, Leah pocketed the light and picked up her shirt. She hesitated a moment, loath to put it back on after its contact with the creepy plant, and tossed it back toward the steps. It was warm in the house anyway. “I win, jackass,” she said, and was immediately embarrassed to be taunting a plant. Shaking her head, she went back to the shelves of journals, resolved to do a bit more research before exploring the steel cabinets further.
MEANWHILE, high in the night sky above God knew where, Francesca blinked against the brisk onrushing wind and wondered what to do. Her captor, the bizarre southern belle-like witch who went by the improbable name of Kimmie, held her almost-dead weight effortlessly under one arm as she flew through the air. They had been flying for several minutes at a speed at which Francesca couldn’t even guess. She was still dressed as she had been at the gym, and her flimsy t-shirt and black soccer shorts did little to combat the chill of the onrushing wind.
Francesca, all resistance initially tickled out of her at the gym, had regained her breath and strength some time ago, but hung limp nevertheless for lack of any other reasonable course of action. Had she been able to, she might have broken free and risked a short drop as they took off, but now, hundreds of feet up, flying over a part of an alien world that she had never seen or heard about, she realized that breaking free would be suicide. Unless she could somehow bring them both down, slowly enough that the fall wouldn’t hurt them…
She turned her head, the wind whipping her lustrous black hair into her face, and looked at the side of Kimmie’s perfect, heart-shaped face. Kimmie was paying her little attention – the magical aura that enabled her to fly made Francesca’s weight a negligible consideration, and Kimmie was thinking of other things – first among them, the reward her captive was likely to bring from Yelena Kant. Even if Francesca had wanted to fight back, all Kimmie would have to do was drop her, then catch her in an energy sphere for the rest of the trip. The only reason she hadn’t done this from the start was that it tended to slow the journey somewhat, and to dilute the pure pleasure of flight. Kimmie was not one to dilute her pleasures.
Francesca’s inner strategist began to take over. She forced herself to think as rationally as possible, given the circumstances. What worked against sorceresses? She knew Ellefson had told her about them, about where their power came from, about how they had been beaten in the past by weapons that drained their power. Draining power -- that was an idea…
Francesca set her jaw and took a deep breath. If she did this right, then Kimmie’s power should wane gradually. At least, she hoped. There was at least a small chance that they would plummet instantly to the ground below. No – if they really started falling, she would just stop and let Kimmie fly again. And probably take some nasty revenge.
Well, she was certainly not going to let Kimmie take her wherever she was planning to take her. With a sudden, powerful move, Francesca twisted in Kimmie’s grasp and wrapped both arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Mystically enhanced as her strength was, Kimmie’s surprise kept her from responding before Francesca planted the bottoms of both feet against Kimmie’s trim waist, dug her bare toes into the sorceress’s firm but yielding tummy, and began wiggling them wildly.
Kimmie whooped and thrashed, spasming frantically at the deep, muscle-wracking tickles assaulting her belly. It was all Francesca could do to hold on, especially against the first mystically-enhanced jerk that wrenched at the muscles in her shoulders, but almost immediately Kimmie’s magical strength began to ebb drastically as her laughter was forced from her by Francesca’s strong, determined toes. Francesca teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, glared straight into Kimmie’s frantic, panicked eyes from about three inches away as the cool, teasing Southern belle’s face wavered between an uncontrollable, wild grin and a look of pure terror.
Their flight became erratic; they were losing altitude rapidly. Francesca’s toes stopped, but maintained their terrible pressure on Kimmie’s tense, ticklish tummy muscles. The stunningly beautiful stars wheeled and glittered around them as they soared, dove, and rolled in the sky. “Take us down,” Francesca demanded in a Clint Eastwood rasp. Kimmie started to shake her head, but a few more tickling digs of Francesca’s talented toes made her shriek her assent to their descent.
Gradually, they began to coast downward, as a crimson-faced Kimmie gasped for breath. “And…just…where do you intend…to go?” Kimmie managed. “Weah in the middle of…nowhere, and you’re hardly a sorceress.” Francesca did not reply as they descended to gently alight in a valley among lightly wooded hills.
As Kimmie’s feet touched the ground, Francesca, now sufficiently in control due to her strength, which was far superior to Kimmie’s when the latter was drained of her magic, lowered her own feet to the soft, grassy turf. She took one step back from Kimmie, who stood glaring and heaving, then hit her a strong right cross to her delicate, tapered jaw that summarily put her out. Francesca rummaged through Kimmie’s dainty shoulder-bag, finding it full of crystals that glowed with stored energy. “Probably mine,” she thought bitterly, taking the bag herself. She knew it would be some time before Kimmie’s energy would naturally replenish itself without laughter to feed on, and there would be little enough of that in the wilderness. Without the crystals, she would be powerless for at least a few hours.
Francesca dragged Kimmie’s inert form to a nearby tree, tore several strips from the hem of her magnificent, shimmering gown, and used them to tie her hands behind her back around the base of the tree. Kimmie’s beautiful, porcelain doll face looked surprisingly peaceful, her long lashes at rest on her apple cheeks: it was marred only by the angry bruise that was coalescing along her jawline. She wasn’t going anywhere for a good while, Francesca thought with satisfaction. She thought about taking her boots, so that she herself wouldn’t have to wander the countryside barefoot, but a quick glance told her that Kimmie’s dainty feet were several sizes smaller than her own. Better to get out while the getting was good – or as good as it was going to get.
The pair’s wild, looping descent had left her even more disoriented than she would ordinarily have been. She couldn’t even orient herself reliably by the stars – who knew how they aligned above this strange, mystical world? Francesca took a deep breath, picked a direction at random, and set out, her only guiding influence the need to place as much distance between her and Kimmie as she could.
Back at the Dearborn house, Leah had discovered a wealth of valuable information. A much more cautious search of the basement had yielded, alongside a gallery of bizarre artifacts, a virtual arsenal of anti-magickal weaponry: None of the weapons inflicted any actual damage, as the “natural laws” of the Sorceress’s world prohibited it, but they presented numerous ingenious advantages to one forced to face off against a magic-user. There were tangle-spheres, like the one they had used to incapacitate Akhana back on the ship, and directional jammers, which, according to Dearborn’s notes, interfered with mages’ ability to control their flight. Perhaps most useful were the anti-magic pendants, which would render the wearer immune to any direct magics cast against him or her, and the spellshells, small crimson spheres that, when activated, would generate a fifteen foot diameter field that prevented any magically-influenced objects from entering – useful in the event that a sorcerer, frustrated by a pendant’s blocking his spells, simply enchanted a tree and commanded it to grab his target. Leah learned the uses of all of these tools, and began to feel somewhat more secure, at least in some small way, about her safety in this strange world.
Leah was just beginning to nod off over a volume of Luther Dearborn’s observations about native flora and fauna when she heard someone calling upstairs.
“Mrs. Dearborn! Leah! Akhana! Francesca! This is really important! Something really bad is going on!”
It was Courtney, Leah realized, and hurried up the steps to find her young friend standing wide-eyed, barefoot, and bedraggled in the foyer. She looked haggard and exhausted, eyes wide with fear and intensity.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened to you?” Leah asked, putting an arm solicitously around Courtney’s trembling shoulders.
“Don’t worry about me. The important thing is that we’re not safe here. I don’t know if we’re safe anywhere. There was this…witch, I guess, and she’s hunting me. I barely got away, but if she’s after me, she’s got to be after all of us. We’ve got to get out of here, for our sake and the Dearborns’. Where are ‘Cesca and Akhana?”
Leah felt her initial surge of panic quieted, again, by the steely calm that she had come to feel at crucial junctures since the start of their misadventure. When she spoke, her voice was strong and serious. “They’re out. We have to hope they’re okay, and do what we can to protect ourselves for now.”
Courtney looked at her with desperation. “I don’t think you understand. She’s got these…powers, like that redheaded bitch on the boat. If they find us, there’s nothing we can do.”
Leah allowed herself a smile, more to comfort Courtney than to express her own confidence. “That’s not entirely true. Come on – into the basement.”
Desyr was, among sorceresses, rather understated and dignified. While she was not without a certain flair for the dramatic, as her crimson and gold gown, stiletto heels, and long flowing raven locks indicated, she regarded her compeers’ theatrics as often tawdry and needless. As she glided from the night sky to alight on the Dearborns’ porch, she used a simple cloaking spell to conceal herself from passersby – Cyan would have wreathed herself in an aura of light and landed amid a fanfare of trumpets. Instead of blasting the door from its hinges, she simply caused the locks to release, stepped inside, and locked the door behind her.
Floating a few inches above the floor so that the noise of her shoes would not betray her presence, Desyr began her search. She zipped from room to room, moving quickly and expeditiously, humming the melody line of a symphony softly to herself. Her exquisite patrician countenance bore a gently thoughtful expression, as if she were trying to recall items on a grocery list. She was slightly troubled – for some reason, entering the house had dampened her ability to lock in on the energy signatures of the women she sought. Surely this innocuous suburban dwelling would not have anti-magic defenses implemented? No matter. If she had to search, she had to search. Her quarry, after all, consisted of Earth people, who could hardly have become sufficiently acquainted with magic and the defenses against it to trouble her.
A quick sweep of the upper floors revealed little, other than the owners’ fine taste in décor; swiftly, Desyr narrowed her options to the basement. A sweep of her hand opened the barred door, and she drifted regally down the steps.
She was surprised, momentarily, by a kind of battlecry from the far end of the enormous basement. Quickly, though, she recovered her wits and used a “helping hand” – a giant hand spell originally intended to help with work, but which sorceresses had managed to adapt better than most of the original Sorceress’s sappy spells to combat purposes – to deflect two tangle-spheres that the women crouched at the opposite side of the room had hurled in her direction. The spheres bounced away and unraveled on the floor, their cables hissing against one another like snakes.
Leah and Courtney felt their spirits sink as the crimson-clad, raven-haired witch smiled haughtily at them. “Well, it appears my search has ended,” she intoned in a soft, dulcet voice that still managed an undertone of menace. “Come with me, little poppets. Enough of this fuss.”
Leah, protective instincts kicking in, moved half-consciously in front of Courtney and triggered the directional jammer, the only offensive weapon she had left. Desyr’s face reflected a moment of panic as she glided suddenly and violently to the left, but she simply glided to the floor and stood facing them, separated by some sixty feet of basement. “Irritating, those jammers. But, I fear, not much help to you if I simply remain earthbound. Now, let’s end this unpleasantness, shall we? Yelena has business with you, and it will be so much easier on you if you simply come with me.”
She raised her hand to throw a spell only to find it blocked by Leah’s hastily activated spell shell.
Desyr cursed, her musical voice transforming even her oath to melody. They stood, at a stalemate, glaring at each other. Leah stood tall and firm, jaw set, while Courtney peered cautiously out from behind her. Occasionally, the air around Leah and Courtney shimmered slightly, as it might on an exceptionally humid day – the only visible sign of the force field that protected them. Desyr, long, lean, buxom and imposing, stared at them, eyes flashing, for several moments. Then, abruptly, she strode nonchalantly over to a desk chair, sat down, and propped her stiletto-clad feet up on a table.
“Very well,” she said breezily. “I can certainly wait, if I must. That spell shield will last, I imagine, for about another thirty minutes. I can take you then as easily as I could now.”
Leah knew that she was right. She and Courtney would have to figure something out, and quickly. For the time being, though, they were safe…
Sounds came from upstairs – the front door opening, the rustle of shopping bags, the breathless conversation of Marion Dearborn and Akhana Mesani, returned from a day out. For a moment, Leah thought they were saved – that perhaps this sorceress would slip away rather than risk encountering others in the house. Her hopes were dashed, however, when she saw the grin on the face of the witch, who had now risen again from her seat.
“Friends of yours, I imagine,” she purred. “Perhaps we should make them comfortable.” She raised her arms and chanted a spell.
Marion Dearborn, exhausted but exhilarated from a successful day fashion-hunting, had barely set down her packages when she felt it happening. In a flash, she had literally sunk into the floor of her foyer, up to her shins, and was now trapped there. She was perfectly comfortable, but, try as she might, she could not pull her legs free! A startled cry from Akhana, just to her left, indicated that the same thing had happened to her – the women gaped at each other, dumbfounded: they had no idea of what was going on in the basement below, and could not begin to guess at the cause of their current condition.
At that exact moment, the back door banged open and a wave of girls poured noisily in. Ashley and two of her friends – the dark-haired, sloe-eyed Cassandra and the pert, nut-brown redhead, Gen – swept into the hallway in a rush of conversation, then stopped short at the sight of Marion and Akhana sunken calf-deep into the floor a few yards away.
“Mom? Are you okay?” Ashley asked, her face somewhere between concern and amusement, one brow raised in surprise. Before Marion could answer, the girls cried out in alarm as they, too, sank into the floor, their briefly noncorporeal legs passing through the beautiful varnished hardwood up to mid-calf, leaving them trapped and alarmed.
The view from below was bizarre: five pairs of feet, variously clad, protruded from the basement’s high ceiling – one group of two, one group of three, facing each other, separated by perhaps four yards of distance. Leah and Courtney could hear muffled voices from upstairs, raised in concern, but could not make out words.
Desyr grinned broadly, eyes flashing with menace. Her thick, sleek, shiny raven hair flowed about her shoulders, almost taking on a life of its own as her excitement mounted. “Your friends have come a bit late to the party,” she cooed, “but I’m certain they’ll have a delightful time. Your spell shield is proof against me now – but it protects them not at all. Perhaps if I draw a bit of power from them, I will be able to shatter your shield. Perhaps not; nevertheless, I shall certainly enjoy the diversion they offer.”
“Oh, you bitch,” Leah hissed, realizing immediately what the sorceress intended to do.
One by one, the shoes began to drop from the suspended feet. Ashley, Gen, and Cassandra, like most college girls in warm weather, were wearing flip flops, some of which had already fluttered to the floor – the rest were swept away in a moment. Marion Dearborn was wearing black pumps of the marvelous kind native to this world that managed to be high-heeled and stylish but as comfortable as tennis shoes, and no stockings. One by one, her heels popped free, then each slipped off of her grasping toes to fall to the basement floor. Had any doubt existed that something unnatural was happening, the loss of Akhana’s footwear would have dispelled it. She wore black half-boots over smoky grey stockings; each boot, in turn, was slowly unzipped and discarded, then invisible hands drew the stockings down her lithe, strong legs and off of her long, delicate feet.
Five trapped, barefoot women now regarded each other with confusion and consternation in the Dearborn foyer. Above Leah’s and Courtney’s heads, five distinctive pairs of bare feet struggled and fidgeted as their owners tried in vain to reclaim them.
Akhana and Marion found themselves in a difficult position, even beyond the fact that they were trapped in a makeshift floor-stocks. They suspected – were almost certain that – this was the work of one of Yelena Kant’s minions, who had tracked down the Dearborns’ houseguests. They also knew what to expect from their current situation, particularly now that their feet were bare. The girls, on the other hand, knew nothing of the kind. They thought about vengeful sorceresses about as often as most people think about rampaging grizzly bears – they knew vaguely that some existed somewhere, but didn’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about them. Ashley knew only that the houseguests were friends of Ellefsons, and had some connection to her dad – beyond that, she only knew that they were fun to be around, and that Leah couldn’t hold her liquor. Plus, even trapped and barefoot, tickle torture for nefarious ends was not the first thing that would occur to them.
In a moment, the girls calmed down enough to talk to the similarly ensnared older women. “Mom, what’s going on? Is this one of dad’s machines screwing up again?” Ashley asked. While she was annoyed, she was not particularly afraid – strange things in the Dearborn house were not unheard of.
“You think your dad did this?” Gen squeaked. “Can he undo it? I’m supposed to meet Brad for dinner in, like, an hour.”
Marion tried to force a smile, her eyes wide with surprise and fear. “I honestly don’t know, sweetheart. But don’t worry – Francesca and Leah should be home before long. They’ll be able to get us out.” She wished she believed it herself, but she saw no reason to terrify the girls when there was nothing any of them could do.
“This is sooo messed up,” Gen said. She turned her pixie-like face abruptly toward Cassie. “What’s your trip?” She asked impatiently.
Cassie, usually so quiet and staid, had let out a sudden yelp, followed by a flood of giggles that surprised and mortified her, turning her pale face crimson with embarrassment. Her fit subsided for a moment, and she glared at Gen, wide-eyed and breathless behind her stylish, thin-rimmed glasses. “Gen, quit it!” Rarely did the beautiful but bookish brunette speak with such heat.
“Quit what? What are you talking about?’
“You tickled my feet with your to-ho-ho-HO-HOOOOES!! AAAHAHAHAHAASTAHAHAHAAP!!!” Cassie began laughing in earnest, now, alternating between pulling helplessly at her submerged legs and whacking at the hapless and innocent Gen with her hands. Had she been able to think clearly, which she could not while someone was tickling the fire out of her smooth, sensitive bare soles, Cassie would have realized that for Gen to be doing this, her toes would have to be sixteen inches long and quadruple-jointed. As it was, though, she batted helplessly at her friend’s innocent shoulder as she shook with laughter. “STAHAHAHAAAAP TIHIHIHIIICKLING!!” she managed between heaves. Quickly, her laughter went silent, and she could no longer summon the strength to swat her sorority sister.
For their parts, Ashley, and to a lesser extent Gen, who had to worry about Cassie’s feeble but frenzied blows, saw what was happening to their friend as hysterically – if bizarrely – funny. Cassie the bookworm, the studious, “I’m super-hot but I don’t care” girl with the boobs and bone structure to kill for, screaming and hooting and now crying with laughter as somebody tickled her feet beneath the floor. They had seen her tickled – as they had both been tickled – at the community service event, but this was different: it didn’t have the air of priggish, volunteerist propriety that that tickling-for-a-cause took on. This was just a brainiac going to jelly because of someone messing with the bottoms of her feet. It was all they could do not to point at her and laugh.
In the basement, the view got stranger by the second. Desyr had returned to her relaxed, feet-up position in the desk chair, but now simply and casually pointed to one of the pairs of bare feet – a large, pale, elegant pair, with high arches and active, dexterous toes – which sent them into a frenzy, toes wiggling, soles flexing and struggling. They were obviously being tickled by invisible fingers, as the peals of laughter from above, muted but clearly audible, indicated. The gemstones in Desyr’s earrings began to glow with absorbed energy.
“This is a wonderful spell,” she said offhandedly to Leah and Courtney, whose shield was beginning to feel like as much prison as protection. “All I have to do is point, and it’s as if a pair of invisible, expert hands are relentlessly tickling the target. I’m told the victim can even feel the fingernails. I control the intensity and pace with a thought – I can tease, tweak, or outright torture as I wish. Perhaps I’ll let the two of you sample it as we travel back to meet Yelena Kant.”
Leah and Courtney said nothing; there was really nothing to say. Leah gave Courtney’s hand a reassuring squeeze.
Up above, Cassie’s writhings stopped abruptly, leaving her heaving for breath and wracked with occasional, residual giggles. She took in a deep, ragged breath, then looked up at Gen and Ashley, who couldn’t help grinning at her hapless plight. “You guys…this…is…so…not…funny!” she managed.
“I’m sorry,” Ashley, ever the diplomat, managed. “I’m sure it’s just one of my dad’s machines gone haywire. He does all kinds of research into energy and laughter and stuff, and we probably triggered some kind of a tickle machine or something.”
Cassie, still gasping, said, “well, I hope like hell it’s finished with me!”
The girls’ conversation was interrupted by the sound of a high-pitched squeak at the other end of the hallway. They gaped in surprise, and Marion turned in alarm, to see Akhana – the cool, cosmopolitan, exotic, supermodel-with-three-advanced-degrees African beauty – contorting and grimacing as she tried in vain to resist the sensations that were overtaking her from below the polished floor. Six seconds she held out – an admirable interval for one as sensitive as she – before her rich, velvet-voiced laughter rang out in uncontrollable peals in the echoing, high-ceilinged hallway.
Below, Desyr had moved on to another tempting station on her bizarre barefoot buffet. For Leah and Courtney, there was no mistaking the victim – not only was Akhana the only one who matched the long, slim, coffee-colored, light-soled bare feet that had begun the peculiar, frenetic, helpless dance of the tickled, but they were in the rare position of having tickled those feet before, and knew the peculiar, distinctive toe-splaying freak-out they did when the tickling reached the tops of the heels. Akhana’s laughter, too, was distinctive – deep, booming, and musical, strong-sounding even in hysteria, a state she had speedily reached once the tickling started. “Poor Akhana,” Courtney murmured, as Leah glared at Desyr, who smiled back in feigned innocence.
Above, Akhana was a wreck. She was the type of woman who always looked put-together, whether rolling out of bed on a weekend or attending a gala event. Still, elements of her person were flawless – her skirt, blouse, and jacket were perfect, her long, lustrous, perfectly straight black hair still fell fetchingly over her shoulders (she had freed it from its occasional corn rows today, and brushed it out to its full glory). Her face, though, was a mask of hilarity: brilliant white teeth flashed in a broad, uncontrollable grin; exotic, quasi-asian eyes squeezed shut and leaked tears stained by once-tasteful and understated mascara. Her whole body shook and trembled as she alternated between a kind of through-the-teeth hissing giggle (usually when the spectral fingers visited the spaces between and just below her long and nimble toes) and a bursting, echoing, whooping laugh (usually when they scrabbled over the arches, balls, and heels of her feet). The vision of elegance was quite another picture as the foot-tickling torture continued.
To the girls, even the recently tortured Cassie, Akhana’s contortions were, again, hilarious. Polite and considerate enough not to laugh at her openly, they gazed disbelievingly at the cackling sophisticate, marveling at the disproval of their unconscious and illogical idea that one’s degree cosmopolitan cool would necessarily be inversely proportional to the ticklishness of one’s feet. Marion, also crazily amused in spite of her panic, at least managed to squeeze Akhana’s hand in an effort to support her through the worst of it.
After a few minutes, which seemed, naturally, much longer to Akhana than to everyone else, the hands left the esteemed Doctor’s tormented tootsies. Akhana panted and wheezed, blowing her breath. “Oh…God…” she rasped, and repeated at intervals.
The remaining three – the two sorority sisters and the gorgeous housewife – looked at each other in consternation. Cassie being tickled had been one thing – it was actually fairly credible that someone in their admittedly incredible situation might have triggered some device or other in Luther Dearborn’s peculiar basement. When Akhana – the farthest one from Cassie – had been tickled, as well, the situation had changed. They glanced from one to another frantically, waiting for the next strike with a sense of dread – Marion’s, tempered by an undertone of genuine fear about the true motivation behind all this; the girls’, tempered by a kind of amused outrage at the absurdity of it all.
After ten seconds of silence, broken only by Akhana’s recovering gasps and sobs, Gen positively exploded. “WHOOOHOOOHOOOHOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!” She ejaculated, her small but strong body tensing and vibrating like a plucked string. She clenched her tiny fists, threw her head back, and howled with laughter as Desyr’s phantom hands found their next target.
From below, Leah and Courtney saw the smallest pair of bare feet – an undeniably cute, dark-tanned, pink-soled, gumdrop-toed pair, ornamented with a toe ring on each second toe – begin their own wiggly, fidgety tickle-dance. Gen’s tiny soles wrinkled and flexed as her toes wriggled frantically in response to the expertly tickling fingers that zipped over her arches, flicked at her toetips, scratched devastatingly at the balls of her feet. She seemed comically determined to mount a defense, hiding one bare ticklish sole behind another, then switching as each foremost foot-bottom proved as terribly ticklish as the one it protected. Desyr found this enormously amusing, and even teased aloud, more for Leah’s and Courtney’s benefit than for that of her unhearing victim: “which should I tickle? This one? No, that one? Ah, this one again!”
Above, Gen’s reactions were somewhat different than Cassie’s and Akhana’s had been. They were at least as powerful: every flicker of a fingertip across her madly flexing bare feet brought forth peals of adorable laughter from the little red-haired gymnast, and she could at least stake a claim as the most ticklish yet. The difference was, while Cassie and Akhana fundamentally disliked being tickled – perhaps because it was so counter to the images each liked to project – Gen actually kind of liked it. She was a youngest child, gleefully uninhibited, and used, as a small girl with a bubbly personality, cute as a button features, and a natural air of giggliness, to being tickled with some regularity by brothers, boyfriends, and even sorority sisters who couldn’t resist the invitation of a taut, navel-ringed, tan tummy in a belly shirt or of tiny pink toes peeking out from under the hem of flared jeans. Tickling was fun for her, and while the all-out assault on her vigorously but ineffectively squirming feet was certainly more intense than what she was used to, her response differed in degree rather than kind – even as she whooped, howled, and hollered, she did so through a flushed, beaming, delighted grin.
Watching the bizarre tableau helplessly from within the spell shield, Leah began to notice something about Desyr. As she commanded the tickling hands to do their work, and as the victims’ laughter charged her with sorcerous energy, she began to appear unmistakably aroused – her eyes would close now and then, her tongue would snake out over crimson lips, her pale skin now bore a clear pink flush. Now and then, a tiny moan would escape her lips. Although Leah had no way of knowing this, the effect was common among sorcerous types, and unquestionable proof that this world, and its magicks, had been created by a woman: once mystical energy reached particularly lofty levels, if it was not immediately discharged, it went to work on the pleasure centers of a female mage’s brain – further, it began to directly stimulate primary and secondary sexual organs. Desyr, charged with a great deal of energy from her succession of ticklish victims, was feeling an insistent hum of sexual pleasure, electrifying her stiffened nipples, moistening her tingling sex. It was not yet enough to bring her to orgasm, but it kept her in a heightened state of arousal that was beginning to interfere with her ability to concentrate, as her excitement mounted and mounted.
Riding the crest of her arousal, Desyr decided to up the intensity. She withdrew the tickling hands from Gen’s exhausted little feet and abruptly doubled the spell, pointing two hands skyward at the remaining two pairs of bare feet: Ashley’s golden-tanned, youthful extremities, and her mother Marion’s shapely, mature, crinkly-soled ones.
There was no break, this time, between victims. No sooner had Gen’s body sagged as she relaxed, a goofy, giggly smile on her reddened face, than Ashley and her mother shrieked as one and launched into a harmony of desperate, overbubbling giggles – strikingly similar in sound, Marion’s perhaps a half-octave lower in pitch. The Dearborn girls both had wildly ticklish feet, and each knew very well how ticklish the other was: once, in a silly mood, they had had a contest, each placing a bare foot in the other’s lap, each drawing one fingernail slooooowly up and down the center of the sole, to see who said uncle first. Marion had lost, squeaking out a feeble “uncle” after about ten seconds as she shook with silent laughter, but then tightened her grip on her daughter’s ankle and tickled in earnest until Ashley had screamed it not once, but ten or eleven times.
A judge would have been hard-pressed to score this contest, however. The two barefoot Dearborns were instantly overcome with hilarity. Their shapely feet flexed and squirmed, their toes clenched and wriggled as the invisible fingers scrabbled over their sensitive soles. Somehow, watching the other writhe in ticklish torment enhanced the sensation for both mother and daughter – each felt for the other, but each knew the other so well that there was an odd, affectionate sympathy that penetrated the sensations overwhelming their bodies and minds. Ashley, through her wild hysterics, had a flashback to a time when she and her mother had gone to get pedicures together, and how each, in turn, tried unsuccessfully to fight off giggles: they had made laughed at and with each other, then, but this seemed considerably less funny.
Down below, the two pairs of tickled feet reacted almost as mirror images of one another: their hot spots were identical, and, as Desyr’s ghostly fingers attacked both in identical ways, the feet reacted identically, as well. Both sets of toes curled together, spread together; both pairs of soles wrinkled together, flexed together, rubbed against each other simultaneously in a vain effort to reduce the tickling. Up above, both women were completely swept up in waves of roaring, full-throated laughter, shaking their heads so that their brown locks danced around their shoulders, clenching their fists, sometimes pounding ineffectually on their knees as tears of mirth poured down their pretty cheeks. Gen and Cassie tried to support Ashley, patting her shaking shoulders awkwardly, and Akhana stoically endured the death-grip of Marion’s fingers on her hand, as the two Dearborns quaked with desperate laughter, slaves to the soles of their ticklish feet.
Meanwhile, down below, Desyr was becoming more and more swept up in the waves of pleasure washing over her. The sexual dimension of mirth energy had been studied and documented; Desyr knew the theories, and, in less task-oriented times, had certainly done her share of exploring its parameters and applications. Never before, though, even when she rode the waves of mirth energy consciously and intentionally to orgasm, had she felt arousal of this desperate intensity. She could not have known that Luther Dearborn’s various mystical and scientific curiosities were working every moment to heighten and amplify the effect. Desyr began to tremble slightly, her thighs pressing together, creating almost – but not quite – enough friction to put her over the edge.
Courtney nudged Leah and nodded in her direction. “Um…it looks like she may have other things than us occupying her attention,” she whispered, blushing.
Leah nodded – she herself had been thinking that this could be the break they had waited for. A plan had been kicking around in her head since early in their standoff, and now she saw the chance to put it into action. “Courtney – on my signal, I want you to run as fast as you can over to the second steel storage chamber on the far wall – the one with my shirt lying in front of it. I left it unlocked. When she and I get close, I want you to yank open that door – but stay behind it, and watch your feet!”
Courtney looked at her questioningly for a moment, then nodded. Leah stretched a kink out of her neck, set her jaw, and awaited her moment.
Desyr’s tickling became more haphazard as the distraction of her arousal began to interfere with her spell. It was still plenty enough to keep her two victims jumping like spastic marionettes, but the spell was beginning to lose substance. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to throw caution to the wind, delve a hand between her thighs, and quench the burning lust that overcame her. She was beginning to feel desperate – she was rather demur, by sorceress standards, and would ordinarily not consider masturbating in front of strangers, but the idea of continuing her task much longer without bringing herself off seemed increasingly impossible. Almost in spite of herself, she lowered one hand – Ashley heaved a shuddering, giggly sigh of relief – and began rubbing herself through her clothes.
Suddenly, two shapes came streaking toward her from the far side of the room. One streaked by without stopping, and the other plowed into her full force just as her orgasm hit her. Her cry of pleasure cut short by a guttural grunt upon impact, she found herself driven backwards by Leah, who had rammed into her like a linebacker, and then shoved with surprising force backwards. Still rocked by the residual waves of her intense but interrupted climax, she staggered over her stiletto heels several yards backwards, only to find herself instantly entangled in strong, supple vines of Leah’s earlier horticultural discovery – the Barefoot’s Bane.
Courtney hopped and skipped out of the way of the few tendrils that swiped at her bare feet, but the vast majority of the plant’s attention was understandably focused on the massive (though quite shapely) source of energy that had just been dumped into its coils. Shaking off the fog of her pleasure, Desyr suddenly realized what had happened to her! She began frantically trying to gesticulate a spell, but the vines that held her kept her hands from obeying, and another, outrageously, covered her mouth to keep her from uttering any vocal magicks. Leah and Courtney stepped back to watch from a safe distance.
Now that it had fully ensnared its prey, the plant seemed bizarrely playful in its treatment of the furious, beautiful, raven-tressed witch. It held her in a profoundly undignified position, a kind of splayed sitting posture that hoisted her spread, slightly bent legs out in front of her in a way that caused her shimmering dress to reveal her excitement-dampened silk panties. Eyes flashing fire, she struggled and grunted into her makeshift gag as two tendrils moved, with teasing slowness, toward her stiletto-clad feet. One by one, they eased the shoes from her heels – they slipped free with audible pops. Then, as if savoring the anticipation, they drew the shoes completely away, revealing a flawless pair of quite large, shapely, creamy-pale soles and ten long, agile, nervously wiggling toes. It held her there for a moment, in a position of utmost embarrassment – she felt profoundly exposed, somehow more at the ostentatious display of her bare and intensely vulnerable soles than at the haphazard show of her panties. Leah and Courtney grinned – Leah, knowingly, Courtney, amazed, but starting to catch on – as she looked daggers at them.
Simultaneously, the plant pulled aside the gagging vine and brought a bunch of wriggling tendrils to each of the barefoot sorceress’s helpless soles. Desyr’s tickling expertise came, in part, from an acute knowledge of vulnerability: she was enormously, unbearably, excruciatingly ticklish. She was ticklish all over her body; a light brush on her arm, a gentle scratch on the back of the neck could make her shiver and giggle. The bottoms of her big, bare, beautiful feet, though, seemed to gather every nerve in the rest of her body and consolidate them in hypersensitive bunches from the base of her heels to the tips of her toes. She shrieked, screamed, bellowed, wracked with laughter of an intensity that surpassed even the five extraordinarily ticklish victims she had just finished torturing. The tendrils tickled with terrible tenacity, teasing wiggly toes, gliding over dreadfully ticklish arches, painting invisible masterpieces across the pair of large and shapely canvasses that were Desyr’s naked foot-bottoms. Held virtually immobile by the vines at her ankles, knees, thighs, waist, chest, elbows, and wrists, Desyr could only thrash her gorgeous head about and clench and wiggle her toes as the predatory plant tickled her silly.
As she was tickled into helpless hysteria, the massive quantities of mirth energy she had stored began to be discharged into the air around her – the plant couldn’t metabolize it fast enough. Multicolored sparks and flares filled the air around her, creating a magnificent lightshow that would have impressed even Desyr, had her eyes not been squeezed shut as she spasmed with cataracts of uncontrollable giggles. The spell that held the women upstairs faltered, setting them free, and Leah heard the muffled thumping of their feet descending the basement stairs over Desyr’s histrionics.
All seven women stood, stunned and gape-mouthed, staring at the scene. Desyr, crimson-clad, ivory-skinned paragon of feminine force, whooped and cackled as the now critically over-energized plant tickled and tickled and tickled her extraordinarily receptive feet with stunning versatility. As laughter wracked her body, her magickal energies escaped in amazing pyrotechnic displays, filling the room with shooting stars and harmless fireballs. The women watched their tormentress – for they had figured out upon seeing her that that must be who she was – as she was utterly ravished by the tickling tendrils, until at last she was rag-limp, gasping and wheezing, the fireworks reduced to the occasional spark as the plant, now glutted and overfull of energy, brushed absently at her still-cringing soles. As the last feeble tickles came to a halt, signifying the utter draining of the bedraggled, crimson-faced, sobbing captive, Leah stepped forward.
“Now,” she said. “We can play this one of two ways. You can tell me what I need to know, and we can set you free, put a magic-damper collar on you, and turn you over to the authorities. Or, you can refuse to tell me what I need to know, and we can just leave you here with the knowledge that every time your magical energy begins to return, that plant will tickle it out of you.
“This,” she said, holding up a random piece of machinery from one of Luther’s tables (it could have been a marital aid, for all she knew) “will tell me whether or not you’re telling the truth. You know what will happen if you lie.”
“Very…well…” gasped Desyr, all her hateful fire long since tickled out. “Place the collar on me. I will…tell you everything.”
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, and then get tickled. Other than yourself, Strelnikov gets it -- so does Shemthepenman, and i64ever, and some others. I'm honestly pretty behind the times in reading tickle fiction, so I'm probably leaving out some real masters. 
