Mastertank1
2nd Level Yellow Feather
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A Prize In the Gladiatorial Games
A tickling romance of a might yet be future.
Starring Steph of the TMF and myself
By Mastertank1
The first two decades of the 22nd century had been chaotic and strange in the United States. First had come what historians now called the RRR. The Religious Rightwing Revolution.
It had included a flurry of constitutional amendments rammed through the ratification process. It criminalised a host of common behaviors. Then it provided draconian, often deliberately humiliating punishments for the new crimes and older ones.
Then had come the Rational Backlash. Most of the new amendments had been repealed even faster than they were originally ratified. The politicians who had allowed themselves to become solidly identified with the RRR now found that they could not disassociate themselves from it. In a single election most of them were swept away. In the space of six years the last RRR officeholders were gone, unable to even receive the nominations of their party.
However, there was one holdover. For a variety of reasons, the repeal of the XLVth amendment was never ratified. It takes 38 states to ratify an amendment or repeal one, and there were 13 states of the 50 which stubbornly refused to ratify the repeal of the amendment which allowed convicted felons to be sentenced to enslavement instead of prison.
It was during that same turbulent time that the State Of California created the first modern Gladiatorial Games. It was a money making scheme, to allow the reduction of taxes. With worldwide media coverage and pari-mutual betting, it rapidly exceeded the most optimistic predictions as to how much money it made for the state.
Each entrant into a given tournament paid a $2,000 entry fee and signed a sheaf of waivers. No weapons were used, but the barehanded matches were decided by actual injury inflicted. Crippling and death were possible, the former quite common.
There were several classes of tournament. The most common was a class 4. That meant an initial field of 256 entrants in an 8 round single elimination by brackets format. First place took a $250,000 prize. Second place got $125,000. The 2 losers of the semifinal round each got $31,250 while the 4 losers of the quarterfinals each took home $15,625.
All the associated administrative, service and support costs were more than covered by ticket sales and concession income. The massive fees paid for domestic and international media coverage and the sponsorship fees had grown so huge that the state income tax had been repealed. Then the state sales tax had gone away. Now there was a state negative income tax paid to all citizens resident before the institution of the games, similar to the negative income tax paid by the State of Alaska out of oil tax revenues.
There were bigger tournaments, held less frequently. A class 3 was a 12 rounder in the same format, requiring 4,096 entrants. The top prize was $4 million, and the smallest prizes went to the 8 losers in the last elimination round before the quarter finals.
There were annual class 2 tournaments. They were 16 round single elimination by brackets, with a starting field of 65,536. The $64 million first prize lured a lot of fighters. The prizes extended to anyone who made it into the last five rounds.
The big ones took place every three years. A class 1 was a 20 round tournament in the same format. 1,048,576 contestants were needed to fill the huge field. The billion dollar first prize drew them from all over the planet. Any fighter who made it into the last six rounds got some kind of prize.
After the first few years, there was a problem. There just weren’t enough egomaniacal macho jackasses to keep filling all the fields. That’s when they came up with a new way to lure contestants. They began to offer convicts who had been enslaved as prizes in the games. Because 99.99 percent of the entrants were male, the slaves offered as prizes were almost all female.
This was a very big inducement. Thousands of men, and a few women, who would never have risked entering the games for money did so for the chance to own a slave.
Until then, convict/slaves were all owned by the state. They were rented out for a profit for labor purposes only to private companies. There were strict limits on how they could be treated, how they could be disciplined, how they must be fed and cared for. They were STATE property. Until the games.
Any competitor in the gladiatorial games who won any cash prize would also be given the right to choose one from a group of slaves who were assigned as prizes in that particular tournament. That slave became the winners’ outright property. No legal limits on treatment, discipline, use or abuse. That brought them out of the woodwork.
Rich people who wanted to own a slave but had no hope of winning a tournament hired professionals to win for them, then pick the slave the sponsor told them to and sign the slave over to the sponsor. Some corporations sponsored teams of fighters for the publicity. If the sponsored fighter won, they got to keep part of the cash prize as a bonus on their salaries and the slave they got to choose.
The pressure of the vast sums of money at stake inevitably corrupted the criminal courts of the State of California. After a while, any attractive woman who found herself in court on a felony charge was likely to be convicted even if innocent. She was also likely to be sentenced to enslavement and assigned to a tournament.
Any famous woman who wound up in criminal court was certain to end up as a prize slave. That brought out the stalkers in droves. Desperate, obsessed fans. The possibility, however remote, of actually OWNING the object of their obsession was too much to resist.
The fact that they stood little chance of surviving, let alone winning, never registered with these men. They scraped up the entry fees and showed up to fight, praying that somehow the sheer strength of their desire would make up for their lack of size, power, speed, quickness, dexterity, agility, endurance, stamina and skill. Of course, it didn’t. No matter how many of them died or were maimed, there were always more the next time a famous woman was offered as a prize.
All tournaments were advertised nationally on the Gladiatorial Games Commission (GGC) website. This included photos and short bios of the prize slaves.
This was a class 4, but it was expected to draw wider interest than usual. It had been announced that this class 4 was to get a celebrity convict as a prize, just who was yet to be announced.
One of the prizes announced at the outset was Steph. Steph had been railroaded. Framed. She had been a professional patients’ rights advocate, and a few greedy surgeons felt she was entirely too good at her job. Steph’s zeal for her patients’ welfare was interfering with the desire of these surgeons to perform surgical procedures.
For whoever was paying, these were expensive procedures. For the surgeons, they were very lucrative procedures. For the patients, these were often needless procedures. Steph made it her business to protect them against getting cut open needlessly. The surgeons had banded together, and framed Steph for theft of drugs from a hospital and dealing them illegally on the street.
Once she was in court, Steph’s attractiveness and the corrupt predilections of the courts took over. Her cogent defense was disregarded. The jury was virtually ordered to find her guilty by the judge. The sentence was slavery. Big surprise.
When Steph’s picture and bio appeared on the GGC website, it at once caught the attention of a man in Pittsburgh. He was an Internet friend of hers, and had been following the court proceedings via the net. He was worried. He thought there was something he could do, but wasn’t sure how necessary it was.
When he scanned down the list of 10 some odd men who had already entered that class 4, he saw something that made his blood run cold. A regular competitor who went by the handle “Kung Fu Killer 44” had entered. That man was a salaried proxy for a wealthy sadist who had already brutally tortured five prize slaves to death. That was why he paid KFK44 to win slaves for him.
The man in Pittsburgh was known on the net as Mastertank1, but his name was Mitch. He quickly checked his bank balance, then registered and paid his entry fee online as contestant number 14, “The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair.”
Mitch signed all the waivers, and the GGC website began to play up his entry as comic relief. He made reservations to travel to the huge GGC complex, which had it’s own airport those days.
About a week later, with the total of entries for that class 4 tourney stalled at 57, the GGC announced the identity of the celebrity prize slave. Perennial Hollywood bad girl Lindsay Lohan had been convicted of attempted vehicular homicide. The sentence, as expected in California those days, was enslavement. The remaining 199 slots in the tournament brackets filled up within 20 minutes.
Not all the registrants intended to participate. At least 50 tournament slots changed hands in pre-arranged private sales over the next week, many for immense profits. 50 more showed up on eBay. Desperate, obsessive fans and would be stalkers bid the prices up to ridiculous levels, frantic for the chance to actually own a famous ‘beauty’. The GGC didn’t care. They would make their big money off their percentage of the betting on the bouts.
Two days before the first day of elimination bouts, Mitch arrived at GGC City. He took the cheapest accommodations available and got his schedule adjusted to the time zone change. On his way to the locker room he stopped at abetting window and wagered his last $500 on himself to win.
If he lost and somehow survived, he would be left with no place to stay and no way to get home. But he had a trick in mind, and thought he could win at least in the first round.
The pari-mutual board announced that the actual betting would have had the odds against him way higher, but the legal limit of 10,000 to 1 odds was in effect. The $500 he bet on himself did not change the odds. He had counted on that. He knew that there were computerized investment expert systems that looked for virtual sure things like maximum odds on a bout, and ‘invested’ any otherwise idle money under the system’s control by betting on the sure thing, on the theory that any return was better than none.
Normally, Steph had no interest in these bloody games, but as a prize being offered she now had a personal interest. When she first saw the player name “The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair” she smiled. She thought to herself that this sounded like the wry, self-deprecating humor typical of her online friend Mastertank1. Then she clicked to open the player photo, and gasped in shock.
There he was, wheelchair and all. It WAS Mastertank1! What was he doing here, and in this contest? Didn’t he know he could get killed? God, the GGC flacks were touting his match as great comic relief; an old fart in a wheelchair against a fighter whose handle was “Street Samurai 4230”. She saw the quoted odds.
Could he have possibly come all this way and put himself in this kind of danger just because she was one of the prizes? Steph couldn’t imagine what else it could be.
Then the bout started. Mitch rolled right out to the corner of the fighting mats in his beat up, battered old wheelchair. He painfully levered himself up out of the chair and stepped onto the corner of the combat area. He planted his feet squarely and just stood immobile.
He was in the chair due to a damaged left hip. For years, he had been working out, exercising the muscles around the bad hip to make them stronger. They were now able to take most of the weight off of the damaged joint. He waited patiently, demonstrating the qualities that had caused his first Sifu, teacher of K’ung Fu, Raymond Chiang, to nickname him the serene mountain.
Street Samurai 4230 came in flamboyantly, waving to the crowd and capering for the cameras. He was talking a LOT of trash about what he was going to this fat old cripple. When one of the sports reporters stuck a microphone in Fat Old Man’s face, he bit the tip off the microphone and spat it in the reporter’s face. Then he ignored the man. The crowd loved it.
Street Samurai took his place on the opposite corner of the mat, and the bout was formally announced. Street Samurai mockingly bowed until his long hair brushed the mat. Old Man inclined his head and said; “Hai!” (Japanese for yes.)
When the gong sounded, Street Samurai shot across the mat, then pulled up short and began to dance around his opponent, throwing an endless flurry of feints and fake attacks. Old Man remained in his corner where Street Samurai had no way to come at him from behind or the sides. He didn’t react at all to any of the extravagant fakes and feints. The crowd, easily bored, began to boo.
Old Man ignored the crowd, but Street Samurai was upset by the boos. He decided that his opponent wasn’t reacting to the moves he kept throwing because the Old Man couldn’t. Samurai stopped his dancing around a threw a serious roundhouse kick at Old Man’s left temple with his right foot. If that kick connected, it would crack the skull wide open.
Old Man swayed his upper body back just far enough to make the kick miss by a half inch. His right hand shot up like lightning and seized Samurai’s ankle as it passed.
Old Man’s fingers closed like a power vise, bruising the tendons. His left hand whipped up to grasp the top of Samurai’s knee. Pushing powerfully up with his right hand and down with his left, The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair bent Street Samurai 4230’s right knee joint 90 degrees in the wrong direction. The snapping and grinding of bones was clearly audible throughout the arena.
The crowd was instantly silenced. Street Samurai fell on his back in the middle of the mats, staring in shock and horror at his mutilated leg. Then the pain reached his brain and he screamed. The referee formally awarded the bout to The Fat Old Man while medics rushed to administer pain medication.
As soon as the scoreboard showed his victory, Mitch felt behind himself for his wheelchair, and as soon as he found it collapsed into it. Standing up to fight like that had been intensely painful, but he had showed no outward sign of that pain.
He paused in the locker room only long enough to hang his gym bag over the back of his wheelchair. He went straight to the betting windows and handed in his $500 winning bet stub. At odds of 10,000 to 1 he now had $5 million dollars. The actual amounts bet would have made the odds over 100,000 to 1. The GGC had just made a fortune on his bout, and a lot of investment fund managers had just lost multiple millions.
Mitch was respectfully conducted to the office of the shift manager of the betting department. After withholding taxes for the IRS, the State Of Pennsylvania and the City Of Pittsburgh, a total of 40%, his winnings were $3 million. The helpful manager set up a betting and drawing account for him, with a debit card he use right now, with no delay or wait.
With everything he had brought to California with him in his gym bag, Mitch rolled down the ramp from the betting windows to the lobby of the hotel attached to the arena. He rolled up to the service desk reserved for tournament contestants and presented his contestant ID card and his new debit card. The desk clerk was at once respectful, despite Mitch’s ragged appearance. The balance the debit card reader showed made sure of that. The clerk asked what he could do to serve the honorable winner.
Mitch replied at once; “Book me into one of your gladiator suites. The top of the line ones, that go for $5,000 a day. I’m going to need a lot of the services that come with it.”
“As soon as possible this afternoon, have the sports medicine specialist, the sports dietician, the personal trainer and the physical therapist whose services come with that room report to me for a team conference. I need to create a comprehensive exercise and diet program to lose weight and gain strength and stamina. I have to adress certain specific areas.”
“Tell the doctor, trainer and therapist they’ll need to bring their documentation on working around damaged hip joints. Tell the dietician they’ll be preparing and serving all my food intake until further notice.”
“As soon as that conference is over, I’ll need one of the concierges to act as a guide to the hotel mall. I have some serious shopping to do. Everything I brought with me from Pittsburgh is in that ragged-ass gym bang hanging off the back of my chair.”
Mitch went to bed early that evening, satisfied with the new wardrobe hanging in his closet and the plan of activity that would fill every waking moment until his next bout. That would be in 8 weeks. There were several different tournaments in progress at any one time, and the arena was limited to 24 bouts per day. The weekends and prime time were reserved for the bouts with the highest public interest.
The first round of a class 4 involved 128 bouts, and only 16 bout slots per week would be allocated to such a relatively unimportant tournament. It was only the fact that Lindsay Lohan was one of the prizes that got them slots in afternoon sessions instead of the less desirable morning timeslots.
Steph, with an obvious personal stake in the outcomes, avidly watched every bout in ‘her’ tournament. When the second round started, she watched for the announcement of The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair’s bout. When she saw the announcement, she did a double take. For the first round bout, Mitch’s weight had been listed as 364 pounds. Now, 8 weeks later, it was listed at only 308. She realized at once that he must have been training and dieting like a madman to accomplish that.
She could see that he moved more easily and with less pain than the first time as he stood up from what looked like a brand new manual wheelchair. The old one had been patched with packing tape and cable ties. This one was pristine.
She saw that Mitch was also wearing a new robe. When he shrugged it off to leave it on his chair, it was clear that he still carried about 40 pounds of excess fat, but there was an incredible mass of hard muscle underneath.
Mitch’s opponent in this bout went by the handle Karateman 552. He was the same flash type as Street Samurai, but when he caught his first sight of the new Mitch the bluster and bravado seemed to leak right out of him. He visibly gulped.
The odds on this match were still pegged at the maximum allowed; 10,000 to 1. This allowed the GGC to reap huge profits. That’s why all the official publications had dismissed the Fat Old Man’s victory in round 1 as a fluke.
Steph read every story regarding ‘her’ tournament. She realized, they stories avoided actually describing the action. She had seen the fight. It didn’t look like a fluke to her. She realized the official stories were not to be trusted.
Mitch stood on his corner of the mats, flexing and stretching his arms and shoulders, loosening up. Karateman eyed him while doing his own stretching exercises.
The gong sounded, and Karateman 552 crossed the mats deliberately. He began with a series of fakes, but unlike Street Samurai, Karateman was watching carefully, trying to get some idea of just how good his opponent might be. Mitch refused to react to the fakes, reading them for what they were.
Karateman finally lost patience and launched a full focus right handed punch at Fat Old Man’s throat. Fat Old Man caught the punch square in the palm of his right hand and clamped down with his powerful grip. As Fat Old Man bore down hard, Karateman felt his own finger bones starting to crumble and grind.
Fat Old Man brought his left hand up to clamp down hard on the meat of Karateman’s forearm. Mitch twisted his hands in opposite directions. The sound of Karateman’s ulna and radius snapping was clearly audible even in the back row cheap seats.
When a bone breaks, that’s a fracture. If a piece of bone tears out through the skin, that’s a compound fracture. If both sides of the broken bone tear through the skin, that’s a double compound fracture. If the two pieces of bone tear through at two separate places, that’s a displaced double compound fracture.
The twisting motion of Mastertank’s powerful hands caused not one but two displaced double compound fractures. One was of the ulna bone, the other of the radius bone. Karateman screamed, turned and ran for the medical aid station. The judge formally awarded the bout to The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair.
There was a limit on how much a contestant could bet on themself to win when the odds were at maximum. For the second round of a class 4 tourney, that limit was $50,000. That was fine with Mitch. At odds of 10,000 to 1 that brought $500 million, $300 million after taxes.
Mitch allowed himself one day off to spend some of his money. He wired payment in full for a two full floor penthouse condo that occupied the two top floors of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pittsburgh; $30 million. He bought a three story plus full attic vacation home on the west bank of the Mystic River in Connecticut, facing the great maritime Museum Of America And The Sea across the river; $10 million.
Mitch faxed full sets of plans for the remodeling of both of his new homes to an architectural firm, with instructions to turn the scale drawings into blueprints and build the indicated modifications. The plans were accompanied by another wire transfer; $40 million for the work on the two properties.
Detailed instructions and tentative contracts were sent back and forth with an interior decorating firm. Eventually, it would cost $50 million more to decorate, furnish and equip the two homes.
Then it was back to his training regimen, all day long every day. Steph prayed for Mitch’s health and success every night.
The GGC managed to keep the pari-mutuel odds against Mitch at the allowed maximum of 10,000 to 1 by spinning the stories about him and his two bouts. By wagering the $100,000 third round maximum on himself, Mitch added $600 million more after taxes. He bought the 244 foot power megayacht ‘Katana’. It had originally been built for a software tycoon.
Mitch had it updated and modified to his specifications. He sent plans he had drawn to scale to the yachtbuilders Palmer and Richardson, with a $30 million wire transfer. The Katana herself cost him $120 million. He deliberately reduced the guest accommodations from 4 V. I. P. staterooms and 8 regular guest staterooms down to 1 V. I. P. and 2 regular. With the extra space, the owner’s suite became the owner’s deck.
To the original master bedroom, master bath and office, Mitch’s plans added a gymnasium,/dojo, art studio, craft workshop, strongroom, armory, private galley/dinette, private foredeck observation lounge and aft deck refectory, and a private library. Most important of all, he added a fully equipped dungeon playroom. Each of his two homes also had one of those. The crew quarters were enlarged and upgraded. A fully equipped surgery and pharmacy were added for a newly hired ship’s doctor.
Again, Mitch allowed himself only one day for this spending spree. Then it was back to training.
After 3 straight wins, the GGC could no longer sit on the facts nor spin them away. The reporters and analysts no longer called Mitch’s victories flukes. Instead they spoke of ‘blinding hand speed’ and ‘upper body strength nothing less than shocking’. The odds for Mitch’s fourth bout dropped to a mere 5 to 1 against.
That was okay. With the odds so normal, Mitch was allowed to bet $200 million on himself to win. With billions worth of bets being placed on every bout in this formerly obscure class 4 tournament, that wager barely raised a ripple.
Mitch’s win in that bout was unspectacular but solid. That meant that even if he lost in his next bout, in the quarterfinal round, he would still win a minor amount of cash and the right to choose a slave prize. The moment his status as a quarter finalist was confirmed he registered his choice of slaves as Steph. He also had a lawyer visit his suite to draw up some documents. His big wager meant that he also added another $600 million after taxes to his account.
Steph was notified at once that a quarterfinalist, a man who would have the right to a slave no matter how well or poorly he did from now on, had filed a claim for her. The only way any other contestant could take her away from Mitch was to kill him in a bout.
Of the other 7 quarterfinalists, 5 were starstalkers. The remaining 2 were mercenary gladiators; professional contestants who had been hired by wealthy stalkers to fight on their behalf. All 7 had registered Lindsay Lohan as their choice.
After 4 wins, the GGC publicity department changed Mitch’s official program listing to ‘The Terrible Old Man In The Wheelchair’. For his quarterfinal bout against a Lohan fan who called himself Star Stalker 20, the odds actually shifted in his favor by 7 to 6. Wagering $1.2 billion shifted them to 6 to 5. The easy win swelled his account by another $600 million after taxes.
Now, the nature of the competition changed. There were four men left; Mitch, 2 professionals, and one last obsessed star stalker. The pros were both known for killing opponents in the last few rounds, in order to obtain extra slaves to sell to their thrillkiller employers.
The last star stalker, Lohan fan 3, died in broken agony at the hands of Deathgod 5, one of the professionals. Mitch, knowing that if he forfeit a match all the other winners would choose ahead of him, and he might not get to choose Steph, had to face Kung Fu Killer 44.
Deathgod and Kung Fu Killer had each killed their semifinal opponents. Deathgod now had the right to take 3 slaves, Kung Fu Killer had rights to 2.
If Mitch backed out, the winner of the bout between the two pros would choose 5 slaves before Mitch got to pick. One of them, he felt, was sure to choose a beauty like Steph.
After months on the diet and exercise program that slave prizes were forced to follow, along with the attentions of the finest makeup artists and hairstylists Hollywood had to offer, all the slaves in the prize gallery were at there best ever. Steph had been a beauty to start with. Now, she was utterly breathtaking. Mitch knew that in order to be sure that he would get Steph, he had to defeat the two pros. But, he had a plan.
Mitch’s rigorous training had regained a lot more mobility than he had yet displayed. He would use that now, for the first time in the tournament.
Steph watched anxiously as Mitch took his stance on the mat, just as he had in his six earlier bouts. With Kung Fu Killer 44 a well known regular winner, the odds against Mitch had shot back up to 5000 to 1. That was, until Mitch placed his own wager. The solid billion dollar bet on himself to win left the odds just 2 to 1 in favor of the Kung Fu Killer.
The KFK charged across the mats when the bout started. He didn’t bother with a lot of attempts to fake Mitch off balance. KFK just threw a full focus running punch at Mitch’s center of mass, thinking himself too fast and strong to block effectively.
Mitch agreed. That was why, at the last moment, Mitch used his hitherto concealed mobility to sidestep. As KFK went by, Mitch delivered a full focus punch of his own, slammed in with all the power gained in his recent months of training, into the right side of KFK’s chest.
The impact broke four ribs, and drove the sharp ends of two through KFK’s heart. The professional fighter and gleeful killer, employee of a murderous sadist, was dead before he hit the ground.
That night, it was announced that the interest in this class 4 tournament, as measured by the amounts being bet, was so great that the final bout would not be held at once. It would be delayed until it the next ‘Night of Finals’, in six months time. The announcer stated that never before had a class 4 drawn so much interest as to be deemed worthy of inclusion in a Night of Finals special. This would be an all evening, four hour special telecast in which every bout presented would be the final of a tournament, culminating in the finals of four class 2 tourneys.
The finals of the three year long class 1 were always an all evening special all by themselves. This class 4 final would become the opening act for three high interest class 3s as well as the 4 low interest class 2s.
The moment he heard that announcement, (which he had been expecting,) Mitch began to implement a contingency plan based on suddenly having six months to prepare for the final bout against Deathgod.
Mitch took a day to relax and enjoy, as he had taken to doing after each win. The next day he entered a private hospital. During the past few weeks, he had gotten himself measured for replacements for his damaged hip joints, and the extra large and super strong ones he needed pre-fabricated. He had also arranged for a team of surgeons to be on call.
A new technique was used. Both new hips were installed in a single procedure, and the muscles were folded and pressed out of the way instead of being cut. Two weeks after the surgery, Mitch began physical therapy on a grueling schedule.
Ramping up quickly, he was soon taking physiotherapy 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. As his abilities grew he replaced some of the physiotherapy with training for strength, speed, agility and stamina.
In the last two months, Mitch gradually switched his training regimen over to full time martial arts work with his old sifus and senseis. Now all in their 70s, Mitch knew they all still had much to teach him. Under their relentless tutelage, he honed his skills at several forms each of Karate and Kung Fu, plus Sammvo, Savate, Hapkido, Aikido and Capoeira. On the ‘Night of Finals’, he was ready.
His homes and his yacht were also finished, staffs and crew hired. The yacht was awaiting him at a mooring at Marina Del Rey. Mitch had been on board to inspect, and pronounced himself fully satisfied.
All this training and improvement had been accomplished well away from the GGC facilities. No one connected with the games knew that Mitch no longer needed a wheelchair. He no longer lived in the Games Complex, but on his docked yacht, the Dol Amroth.
The odds on this final were running at 5 to 2 in favor of Deathgod. Steph was watching the ‘expert analysts’ explain the intense interest in this one competitor. He had become a symbol, or more accurately two different symbols, to two different groups.
To the elderly and disabled, he had become a symbol of hope and dignity. They accounted for the $2 billion wagered on him to win. The other group, Gen-Xers, Gen-Yers, slackers and young macho men and jocks, saw him as symbol of every authority figure who had ever caused them to feel stupid, or small, or incompetent, or generally not good enough. They were not so much betting on Deathgod to win, but against Mitch. They accounted for the $5 billion now wagered against him.
When Mitch checked in to the GGC medical office for the weigh in ceremonies one day before the bout, he was not in a wheelchair. He walked in, and explained that he had two brand new hips. He weighed in at a rock solid 266 pounds. He also, for the first time, demanded to pick his own registered name for the programs, instead of letting the Commission choose one as he had until now. He was now to be listed as The Tank.
During the weigh in, the two fighters who would meet on the mats the next day were required to stand side by side and interact. Deathgod strutted in talking all kinds of trash. When he saw that his opponent was no longer wheelchair bound, he was taken aback for a moment. Then he resumed his trash talk, even more raucous and Insolent than before. He was trying to hide it, but he was scared and sweating.
Deathgod was a pro. He did not take opponents for granted. He always studied video of their bouts. He didn’t omit that procedure for this bout, reasoning that even if this guy was in a wheelchair, he had just won five tournament bouts, in the last one actually killing the pro fighter who had called himself Kung Fu Killer 44.
Deathgod had concluded that when the analysts spoke of the blinding hand speed and shocking strength of ‘The Terrible Old Man’, for once it was no hype. Deathgod had worked out tactics to deal with a largely immobile foe who was stronger than himself and had equal hand speed. He was not sure how to deal with that foe if the man was now normally mobile. Nevertheless, he trash talked as though utterly confident. The Tank kept ignoring him. Finally, Deathgod shouted in the face of The Tank; “Hey, you old fart! What’re you, thinking about writing your will? I’m talking to you here! I expect an answer!”
The Tank replied; “You have the right to speak. You do NOT have the right to be listened to. If I choose to disregard your nonsense as the empty noise it is, that is MY right. However, I do have just two things to say to you, boy.”
“First, the experience and treachery of age will ALWAYS defeat the strength and skill of youth. Second, in addition to having more experience and being more treacherous than you, I am also bigger, stronger, faster, quicker, more agile, more dexterous, rougher, tougher, meaner and nastier. You don’t stand a chance.”
Deathgod gritted out; “Who are you calling a boy, you walking fossil! I’ve killed 27 men on the mats! You’ll become number 28 tomorrow!”
Mastertank1 grinned nastily. He held up his hands, displaying the scars they were seamed with. “These have killed more men, on and off the mats, than yours have shaken hands with, BOY. But I only kill those who have earned death.”
“I killed KFK44 because he killed opponents in the tournament when he didn’t have to, because he had them totally outclassed. I’m going to kill you for the same reason. May God have mercy on your soul, because I won’t have any on your ass!”
On his way out, he bet $2 billion from his account on himself to win, dropping the odds down to 5 to 4 against him. As bettors read the news of his new hips on the GGC Internet report pages, a surge of betting came in. By the time betting closed as he walked out to the mats the next day, the odds were straight 1 to 1.
Deathgod, like many professional Games Gladiators, was very superstitious. Where he remained unfazed by anything Tank had said to him, when he saw that the odds on the pari-mutuel board were 1 to 1, he was really spooked. Never before had the odds failed to be in his favor. Seeing those odds, he believed for the first time that he might actually lose this fight. Fear caused him to make a mistake.
Deathgod opened the bout with a rapid fire progression of kicks and punches. Tank stood his ground and blocked every one. It seemed that Tank was taking no offensive action at all, but he was delivering his blocks with such force that they were bruising Deathgod’s forearms and lower legs. After a few minutes and dozens of blocks, with painful bruises upon bruises, Deathgod was starting to flinch from the impacts and wasn’t even aware of it.
Those unconscious flinches were Deathgod’s downfall. When Tank unleashed his first overt attack, a lightning fast punch to the throat. For all its speed, that punch would have been blocked if Deathgod, subconsciously conditioned to flinch from the painful impacts of Tank’s hard blocks, not flinched again.
That microsecond of delay in throwing his block was enough to let the punch land. Deathgod’s windpipe collapsed, with the hard rings amid the cartilage breaking and driving sideways, piercing both of the carotid arteries. Even a tap to the carotids was enough to cause unconsciousness. Actual piercing was instant death.
The bout was followed at once by the awards ceremony. By this time the cash Tank had won by betting on himself made the quarter of a million dollars irrelevant. The fact that he would now get to choose 6 slaves was of far more importance.
Mitch had investigated the court records of all the slaves offered as prizes, and had seen that six of the eight, including Steph, had been railroaded by California courts hungry for slaves. They were innocent even though convicted.
The two who were guilty included the famous actress, Lindsay Lohan. And one other.
When the award ceremony took place, Tank surprised the spectators and press more than once. First, he directed that all the cash prizes that were due him, from his own prize and those of all the quarter finalists who were now dead, be divided among the heirs of the three who had been killed by Kung Fu Killer and Deathgod.
Then he chose Steph as his first prize slave. The stunned look on Lohan’s face was priceless. It got more shocked as he chose the other 5 women who had been falsely convicted, one by one. Lohan was chosen by the obsessed fan who had finished seventh, who was unable to believe his luck.
Mitch had arranged for each of the other five slaves to be provided with a suitcase full of clothing in their proper sizes and a set of manumission papers setting her free. He had cabs waiting to take them to the airport, and each was given a prepaid credit card with a million dollars on it, to start new lives outside the jurisdiction of the California courts, and a ticket on a flight to New York City. Mitch had also arranged a place for them to stay until each made her mind up where to go and what to do.
When the cabs had left, a classic Bentley Limousine pulled up to the curb. Mitch handed Steph in and climbed in himself. Steph looked at him expectantly. He handed Steph her own set of manumission papers. Before she had a chance to speak, he began to explain himself.
He told her the entire story of what he had done and what had happened as a result since he read that she was to be a slave prize in a tournament. He mentioned that they were on the way to his yacht at Marina Del Rey, where she would find an entire wardrobe of new clothes in her sizes in the VIP guest stateroom. He suggested that they wait until she had time to absorb the change in her status to plan what she would do in the future.
Steph looked at Mitch in amazement. She asked; “What do you get out of this deal?”
He replied; “Well, I’m hoping that you’ll let me take you out on enough dates to get to know me, so you can decide if you’re interested in an intimate relationship with me, with bondage, tickling and sex.”
Steph said; “Mitch, I’ve read every post of yours on TMF for nearly two years now. I know the kind of person you are. What you’ve done. I can make that decision right now.”
“But Steph, this is the first time we’ve ever met in person! Surely, you want to get top know me better before you decide?”
“Mitch, you spent what was then your last dime to travel across the country in your wheelchair and pay your way into this tournament. You risked your life eight separate times. And you did all that, not because you meant to own me as a slave, but to make sure that i would be no one’s slave against my will. I’m a free woman again, thanks to you. What the HELL else do I need to know about you? At this point, if you want me, you have me. On any terms you choose. We’ll need to move all those clothes you bought for me into your stateroom. I won’t be using mine.”
“Okay then, here are the terms I want. We’ll be live in lovers. I’ll do anything I can to help you follow any career you want to back in Pittsburgh where I live. There’s a huge hospital complex there with it’s own HMO, and they need a director of patient advocacy. I’ve mentioned you to them, and they’re eager to interview you for the position. They’re paying no attention to the conviction; they realize how little that means in a California court these days when the defendant is a beautiful woman.
When we’re actually playing bedroom games, I’m the ‘ler and you’re the ‘lee. At all other times, we’re equals, and that’s the way I’ll treat you. If I ever fail to, I want you to call me on it right away.
You won’t do any cooking or cleaning, we’ll have servants for that. Any time you want to change anything, just tell me and we’ll talk it over. If you decide that you want to leave, I’ll make it as easy as possible for you, and we’ll still be friends. I guess that about sums it up.”
“ Not quite. What if we decide we’re in love at some point?”
“Ah, well, if that happens then I guess we’ll get married, if you want to. Do you think you might want to?”
With a smile, Steph said; “It could happen.”
At that point they turned a bend in the road, and Mitch pointed out the modified Katana, renamed as the Dol Amroth and painted in azure blue and white.
http://www.newzealand.com/travel/library/q84816_3.jpg
(click the above link for a photo of the 74.5 meter [244.4 foot] motor yacht Katana)
Steph exclaimed; “Oh, she’s beautiful!”
Mitch told her; “That’s where we’re going. That’ll be home until we get to Pittsburgh. We’re going to pass through the Panama Canal. Then sail north across the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico. We’ll go up the Missus Hip, then follow the Ohio upstream to Pittsburgh. I reserved docking space, within a short walk of my place. Which is a duplex penthouse on top of the best hotel in town.”
Barely slowing down at all, the driver followed the instructions he had been given in advance. He drove right up the ramp into the cargo bay without even pausing. By the time the car stopped and Mitch was offering his arm to Steph to exit the Bentley, the crew had already raised the ramp and cast off the lines, and was closing the cargo bay doors.
Powerful tunnel thrusters at the bow and stern were pushing the ship directly away from the quay. Once they were clear, the stern thruster reversed and the vessel pivoted on her vertical center point axis. As soon as the bow pointed to the clear channel leading to the open ocean, the main engines, already warmed up, were cut in at emergency speed ahead.
It took about ten minutes to reach the ship’s full speed of 50 knots (nautical miles per hour, equal to 60 statute miles). Twelve minutes after that they had cleared the twelve mile limit and were out of the legal jurisdiction of the California courts.
This was important, because those courts did not take kindly to the manumission of legally sentenced slaves. That was why Mitch had given the manumission papers in private and sent the newly freed slaves out of state as quickly as practicable.
The well paid in advance cabbies had made the connection to the flight to New York just in time. At about the same time as the Dol Amroth passed into international waters, the flight that the other five freed slaves were on passed from California Air Traffic Control to that of Nevada, and beyond recall by state authorities.
Of the other 49 state governments, not one would extradite a manumitted slave back to California. It wouldn’t matter what excuse the California authorities cooked up, the answer would be no.
Hand in hand, Mitch and Steph made their way through the ship. Mitch pointed out the many amazing and luxurious features. They ended up on the forward, open air observation lounge of the owner’s deck, reveling in the wind of the ship’s passage. Well out to sea now, they had slowed to the vessels 25 knot cruising speed.
It was late afternoon of a glorious, sunlit late summer day on the Pacific Ocean off Southern California. They were heading south at a mile every two minutes. Steph kept thinking about that lovely dungeon playroom Mitch had shown her.
In truth, Steph had been anticipating this day ever since she knew Mitch had made it into the final bout of the tournament six months ago. She had worried about him, but had felt pretty confident that he would win. As far as she was concerned, Mitch was her hero, and she wanted to give him the traditional hero’s reward for rescuing a damsel in distress.
Mitch turned to Steph and asked if it would be okay if he took her in his arms and kissed her. Steph was honestly puzzled that he would ask first, and said so. Mitch explained; “So far you’ve agreed to be my ‘lee, not my sub. And not full time/lifestyle, but only during bedroom games. That may change in the future if you want it to, but as things stand now I have no right to assume that you’ve given me approval in advance for any physical intimacies I want. That’s why I asked.”
“Damn, boy! You really are an old fashioned gentleman, aren’t you? Okay, let’s save some time. From now on, assume that my answer to any question of that nature is yes, until I say different. Now, to quote someone or other, kiss me you fool!”
He did so. Slowly, softly, sensuously, and very, very thoroughly. While his hands caressed the curve of her spine and the back of her neck, his lips nibbled and teased her upper lip first, then her lower lip, the tip of his tongue lightly teasing. Then they both opened up to a deeper, more passionate kiss, pressing their bodies together front to front.
Mitch picked Steph up in his arms and carried her inside to the playroom. One of the crew had lit the fire in the playroom fireplace. It crackled invitingly. He carried Steph to the bondage bed and gently placed her standing next to it.
Mitch slowly undressed Steph. Each new area of skin that was exposed received kisses and caresses. Steph closed her eyes and just enjoyed.
When he had her entirely nude, Mitch paused to quickly remove his own clothing. The scars from the hip replacements were only the newest, almost lost among the many other scars from a lifetime of risking his life to protect others.
Mitch lifted Steph up again, to lay her down on the bed. Then he stretched out beside her. He caressed her and kissed her all over. Very literally from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers and toes. He was closely observing her reactions to everything he did. He returned and lingered on the places that turned her on the most.
His patience seemed endless. He sought out the touches that gave Steph the most pleasure, then repeated them and varied them. Then, in the midst of a warm, tender kiss, Mitch fastened one of the built in leather cuffs on Steph’s right wrist. Steph smiled, anticipating what she knew would be next.
A couple of minutes later, Steph’s wrists were fastened in place above her head and twelve inches apart. Each upper arm was fastened to the bed in it’s own cuff. Each of her lower shins was encased in a very wide cuff, also fastened in place to the bed, about 30 inches apart.
Mitch made his touch lighter, feathery light. His fingertips skimmed her skin, teasing and tickling wherever they went. He carefully noted where Steph was the most responsive. He was gratified to note that her beautiful feet and cute little toes were among her most sensitive places.
He began with a light, circular tease on her flat belly. Watching the smooth skin quiver and ripple as she giggled. He widened the area of his attentions, tickling Steph’s groin and hips. Mitch leaned over to flicker her navel with the very tip of his tongue. He loved the way she giggled and squealed in delight. He loved the way she wiggled.
For a couple of minutes Mitch tickled Steph’s ribs. He adored the happily agonized expression on her face as she laughed. The way she squirmed was wonderful.
It was so sweet to hear the way Steph’s laughter changed in pitch and timbre as his tickling fingers changed from probing her ribs to gliding up and down her smooth sides. After enjoying that for a while, Mitch moved his hands up to tickle her underarms.
That got her laughing and struggling really wildly. This was really fun! He could tell by the way Steph’s body responded that she was enjoying this, possibly as much as he was. Perfect!
Several minutes of armpit tickling had Steph going wild, but then Mitch began to tickle her lovely breasts, and she really went nuts. She laughed slightly less, but her body was writhing and wriggling like a serpent. The way she was moving, it looked like she was seeking more of the delicious sensations his fingertips on her breasts were giving her, even while trying to avoid them and escape.
Mitch lavished several long, slow kisses on each of Steph’s erect nipples, and also on her mouth. Steph did her best to kiss back while laughing uncontrollably. Whew, things were getting way hot too fast. He decided to dial the intensity down a notch.
Mitch flopped himself end for end, and began to play with Steph’s legs. “My God!” he thought. “What unbelievable legs this girl has! Gorgeous!”
Mitch let the tips of his fingers wander over Steph’s ankles, traced the curves of her calves. He playfully teased the very tender spots behind her knees and explored the wonderful play of muscles beneath the surface of her shapely thighs.
Her soft, helpless giggles, the sweet and sexy movements of her legs, the delicious feel of her soft, warm skin under his hands, all were intoxicating to Mitch. Steph’s mind was almost short circuited with enjoyment. The look on Mitch’s face, the sheer pleasure he took in her response to his teasing, enhanced her own pleasure immensely.
For some unknown reason, a lyric fragment from an old Anne Murray song popped into Steph’s mind; “That wanting me look, all over your face, is driving me wild.” Well, it was.
Mitch flipped himself farther down the bed. He positioned himself face down with his legs hanging off the edge, his head between Steph’s legs. He started kissing and nibbling his way up her calves and the hollows behind her knees while his fingers tickled her ankles.
Mitch then began kissing and licking his way up Steph’s lovely thighs while his hands tickled behind her knees. As his mouth drew ever closer to her sex, her giggles became interspersed with happy moans. By the time he arrived there, her labia were fully engorged and her clit was erect, the tip just peeking out from under the fleshy hood that normally protected it.
Mitch’s mouth explored Steph’s sex. His tongue felt the shapes, finding and just flicking the edge of her G spot, softly tapping her U spot a few times, then moving on to tease the tip of her clit. Meanwhile, his hands were groping blindly down Steph’s legs, past the cuffs, past her ankles to poise at the edges of her feet.
Mitch tilted his head back just enough to let him see Steph’s face between her breasts as he looked up the length of her torso. He used his upper lip to gently press that fleshy hood back out of the way, then engulfed her clit with his lips. He stroked the clit up and down with his lips while the very tip of his tongue swirled around the tip of her clit.
Mitch watched carefully, seeing the growing pleasure on Steph’s face. When he judged she was seconds away from a climax, he started to tickle her feet. Steph exploded in her loudest laughter yet. Her body was bucking and thrusting against its bonds. The combined agony and ecstasy on her face was exquisite.
It tickled so much that the orgasm that had been only seconds away was delayed by several minutes. When it did arrive, it was many times more powerful than it would have been without the tickling.
Mitch watched her orgasm peak and begin to subside. He backed off a little on both the cunnilingus and the tickling, but didn’t completely stop either. He knew right away when her body reacted to the release by almost doubling in tactile sensitivity.
Now was the time to step it back up. He watched while Steph came laughing again, then a third and a fourth time. Each one was bigger and better than the last. Throughout, Mitch kept his eyes open, watching her face.
There was only one thing that he knew of that was better than watching the face of a woman he cared for so deeply while he gave her multiple tickled climaxes. That one thing was next.
Mitch brought her back to a few seconds from a fifth orgasm. Then, he detached the leg cuffs from the hold down points and rested her ankles on top of his shoulders. He scooted himself forward, up the bed. He eased his rampant member into her eagerly welcoming depth. It felt wonderful.
Mitch tilted his hips back to make sure that the top of his member would rub against her G spot while the tip touched her A spot, just above the entry of the cervix. When he had the right position, Steph gasped with the pleasure.
Mitch attached the cuffs on Steph’s legs to the ones around her upper arms. Then he leaned forward. He rested the weight of his upper body mostly on his own elbows. His fingers were poised above the now upward turned bottoms of Steph’s tender feet. Steph took in what was about to happen, and, smiling widely, mouthed; “Oh, No!”
Mitch began tickling Steph’s feet again. This time he could see what he was doing, and teased the flats of her soles. Steph howled and wailed with laughter. Her hips bucked and thrust as she involuntarily tried to pull her desperately ticklish feet away from those maddening fingertips. Every movement rubbed her erotic trigger points in the most delicious way. It was only a few minutes before she came again.
Mitch kissed her, stopping her frantic laughter with his mouth while he kept tickling. This made her feel more helpless than ever, which somehow made her feel more turned on. She soon came again.
Breaking the kiss and pulling back to grin at Steph wickedly, Mitch began to play with her cute little toes. Steph went crazy. She laughed long, wailing peals of forced mirth while squirming in sheer desperation. Her orgasms came closer together, and still getting better with each one.
Mitch had planned to draw this out a little bit longer, but Steph’s wonderful responsiveness had him so turned on he just couldn’t hold out any longer. He went directly to letting his fingertips spiderdance in her deep, soft-skinned arches.
Her skin there was silken smooth and butter soft, and exquisitely, excruciatingly ticklish. Her whole body galvanized as if being electrocuted. She vibrated, shaking with laughter so intense that no sound came out. Then the sound broke through, just as her entire nervous system seemed to explode with the pleasure of the most powerful orgasm she had ever had. That pushed Mitch over the edge, and he roared with pleasure. Each of them seemed to feed off the other’s pleasure, drawing their climaxes out longer than either could remember ever having experienced before.
Mitch opened the six cuffs, releasing Steph’s limbs, and levered his own massive weight sideways before most of it could come down on her. They lay side by side and cuddled for a while. Mitch said; “Wow. That was amazing. YOU are amazing! The best ever.”
“Damn. Beat me to it. I was about to say that about you.”
The two lovers grinned at each other. Mitch asked; “You hungry?”
“Famished!”
Mitch called their dinner order down to the ship’s chef. By the time they showered together, dried each other off and dressed, it was all ready.
After dinner, they sat side by side in a settee facing the taffrail, gazing out over the moonlit wake as the Dol Amroth made it’s way south. They sipped a fine wine and played footsies, while happily contemplating a joint future.
The End
A tickling romance of a might yet be future.
Starring Steph of the TMF and myself
By Mastertank1
The first two decades of the 22nd century had been chaotic and strange in the United States. First had come what historians now called the RRR. The Religious Rightwing Revolution.
It had included a flurry of constitutional amendments rammed through the ratification process. It criminalised a host of common behaviors. Then it provided draconian, often deliberately humiliating punishments for the new crimes and older ones.
Then had come the Rational Backlash. Most of the new amendments had been repealed even faster than they were originally ratified. The politicians who had allowed themselves to become solidly identified with the RRR now found that they could not disassociate themselves from it. In a single election most of them were swept away. In the space of six years the last RRR officeholders were gone, unable to even receive the nominations of their party.
However, there was one holdover. For a variety of reasons, the repeal of the XLVth amendment was never ratified. It takes 38 states to ratify an amendment or repeal one, and there were 13 states of the 50 which stubbornly refused to ratify the repeal of the amendment which allowed convicted felons to be sentenced to enslavement instead of prison.
It was during that same turbulent time that the State Of California created the first modern Gladiatorial Games. It was a money making scheme, to allow the reduction of taxes. With worldwide media coverage and pari-mutual betting, it rapidly exceeded the most optimistic predictions as to how much money it made for the state.
Each entrant into a given tournament paid a $2,000 entry fee and signed a sheaf of waivers. No weapons were used, but the barehanded matches were decided by actual injury inflicted. Crippling and death were possible, the former quite common.
There were several classes of tournament. The most common was a class 4. That meant an initial field of 256 entrants in an 8 round single elimination by brackets format. First place took a $250,000 prize. Second place got $125,000. The 2 losers of the semifinal round each got $31,250 while the 4 losers of the quarterfinals each took home $15,625.
All the associated administrative, service and support costs were more than covered by ticket sales and concession income. The massive fees paid for domestic and international media coverage and the sponsorship fees had grown so huge that the state income tax had been repealed. Then the state sales tax had gone away. Now there was a state negative income tax paid to all citizens resident before the institution of the games, similar to the negative income tax paid by the State of Alaska out of oil tax revenues.
There were bigger tournaments, held less frequently. A class 3 was a 12 rounder in the same format, requiring 4,096 entrants. The top prize was $4 million, and the smallest prizes went to the 8 losers in the last elimination round before the quarter finals.
There were annual class 2 tournaments. They were 16 round single elimination by brackets, with a starting field of 65,536. The $64 million first prize lured a lot of fighters. The prizes extended to anyone who made it into the last five rounds.
The big ones took place every three years. A class 1 was a 20 round tournament in the same format. 1,048,576 contestants were needed to fill the huge field. The billion dollar first prize drew them from all over the planet. Any fighter who made it into the last six rounds got some kind of prize.
After the first few years, there was a problem. There just weren’t enough egomaniacal macho jackasses to keep filling all the fields. That’s when they came up with a new way to lure contestants. They began to offer convicts who had been enslaved as prizes in the games. Because 99.99 percent of the entrants were male, the slaves offered as prizes were almost all female.
This was a very big inducement. Thousands of men, and a few women, who would never have risked entering the games for money did so for the chance to own a slave.
Until then, convict/slaves were all owned by the state. They were rented out for a profit for labor purposes only to private companies. There were strict limits on how they could be treated, how they could be disciplined, how they must be fed and cared for. They were STATE property. Until the games.
Any competitor in the gladiatorial games who won any cash prize would also be given the right to choose one from a group of slaves who were assigned as prizes in that particular tournament. That slave became the winners’ outright property. No legal limits on treatment, discipline, use or abuse. That brought them out of the woodwork.
Rich people who wanted to own a slave but had no hope of winning a tournament hired professionals to win for them, then pick the slave the sponsor told them to and sign the slave over to the sponsor. Some corporations sponsored teams of fighters for the publicity. If the sponsored fighter won, they got to keep part of the cash prize as a bonus on their salaries and the slave they got to choose.
The pressure of the vast sums of money at stake inevitably corrupted the criminal courts of the State of California. After a while, any attractive woman who found herself in court on a felony charge was likely to be convicted even if innocent. She was also likely to be sentenced to enslavement and assigned to a tournament.
Any famous woman who wound up in criminal court was certain to end up as a prize slave. That brought out the stalkers in droves. Desperate, obsessed fans. The possibility, however remote, of actually OWNING the object of their obsession was too much to resist.
The fact that they stood little chance of surviving, let alone winning, never registered with these men. They scraped up the entry fees and showed up to fight, praying that somehow the sheer strength of their desire would make up for their lack of size, power, speed, quickness, dexterity, agility, endurance, stamina and skill. Of course, it didn’t. No matter how many of them died or were maimed, there were always more the next time a famous woman was offered as a prize.
All tournaments were advertised nationally on the Gladiatorial Games Commission (GGC) website. This included photos and short bios of the prize slaves.
This was a class 4, but it was expected to draw wider interest than usual. It had been announced that this class 4 was to get a celebrity convict as a prize, just who was yet to be announced.
One of the prizes announced at the outset was Steph. Steph had been railroaded. Framed. She had been a professional patients’ rights advocate, and a few greedy surgeons felt she was entirely too good at her job. Steph’s zeal for her patients’ welfare was interfering with the desire of these surgeons to perform surgical procedures.
For whoever was paying, these were expensive procedures. For the surgeons, they were very lucrative procedures. For the patients, these were often needless procedures. Steph made it her business to protect them against getting cut open needlessly. The surgeons had banded together, and framed Steph for theft of drugs from a hospital and dealing them illegally on the street.
Once she was in court, Steph’s attractiveness and the corrupt predilections of the courts took over. Her cogent defense was disregarded. The jury was virtually ordered to find her guilty by the judge. The sentence was slavery. Big surprise.
When Steph’s picture and bio appeared on the GGC website, it at once caught the attention of a man in Pittsburgh. He was an Internet friend of hers, and had been following the court proceedings via the net. He was worried. He thought there was something he could do, but wasn’t sure how necessary it was.
When he scanned down the list of 10 some odd men who had already entered that class 4, he saw something that made his blood run cold. A regular competitor who went by the handle “Kung Fu Killer 44” had entered. That man was a salaried proxy for a wealthy sadist who had already brutally tortured five prize slaves to death. That was why he paid KFK44 to win slaves for him.
The man in Pittsburgh was known on the net as Mastertank1, but his name was Mitch. He quickly checked his bank balance, then registered and paid his entry fee online as contestant number 14, “The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair.”
Mitch signed all the waivers, and the GGC website began to play up his entry as comic relief. He made reservations to travel to the huge GGC complex, which had it’s own airport those days.
About a week later, with the total of entries for that class 4 tourney stalled at 57, the GGC announced the identity of the celebrity prize slave. Perennial Hollywood bad girl Lindsay Lohan had been convicted of attempted vehicular homicide. The sentence, as expected in California those days, was enslavement. The remaining 199 slots in the tournament brackets filled up within 20 minutes.
Not all the registrants intended to participate. At least 50 tournament slots changed hands in pre-arranged private sales over the next week, many for immense profits. 50 more showed up on eBay. Desperate, obsessive fans and would be stalkers bid the prices up to ridiculous levels, frantic for the chance to actually own a famous ‘beauty’. The GGC didn’t care. They would make their big money off their percentage of the betting on the bouts.
Two days before the first day of elimination bouts, Mitch arrived at GGC City. He took the cheapest accommodations available and got his schedule adjusted to the time zone change. On his way to the locker room he stopped at abetting window and wagered his last $500 on himself to win.
If he lost and somehow survived, he would be left with no place to stay and no way to get home. But he had a trick in mind, and thought he could win at least in the first round.
The pari-mutual board announced that the actual betting would have had the odds against him way higher, but the legal limit of 10,000 to 1 odds was in effect. The $500 he bet on himself did not change the odds. He had counted on that. He knew that there were computerized investment expert systems that looked for virtual sure things like maximum odds on a bout, and ‘invested’ any otherwise idle money under the system’s control by betting on the sure thing, on the theory that any return was better than none.
Normally, Steph had no interest in these bloody games, but as a prize being offered she now had a personal interest. When she first saw the player name “The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair” she smiled. She thought to herself that this sounded like the wry, self-deprecating humor typical of her online friend Mastertank1. Then she clicked to open the player photo, and gasped in shock.
There he was, wheelchair and all. It WAS Mastertank1! What was he doing here, and in this contest? Didn’t he know he could get killed? God, the GGC flacks were touting his match as great comic relief; an old fart in a wheelchair against a fighter whose handle was “Street Samurai 4230”. She saw the quoted odds.
Could he have possibly come all this way and put himself in this kind of danger just because she was one of the prizes? Steph couldn’t imagine what else it could be.
Then the bout started. Mitch rolled right out to the corner of the fighting mats in his beat up, battered old wheelchair. He painfully levered himself up out of the chair and stepped onto the corner of the combat area. He planted his feet squarely and just stood immobile.
He was in the chair due to a damaged left hip. For years, he had been working out, exercising the muscles around the bad hip to make them stronger. They were now able to take most of the weight off of the damaged joint. He waited patiently, demonstrating the qualities that had caused his first Sifu, teacher of K’ung Fu, Raymond Chiang, to nickname him the serene mountain.
Street Samurai 4230 came in flamboyantly, waving to the crowd and capering for the cameras. He was talking a LOT of trash about what he was going to this fat old cripple. When one of the sports reporters stuck a microphone in Fat Old Man’s face, he bit the tip off the microphone and spat it in the reporter’s face. Then he ignored the man. The crowd loved it.
Street Samurai took his place on the opposite corner of the mat, and the bout was formally announced. Street Samurai mockingly bowed until his long hair brushed the mat. Old Man inclined his head and said; “Hai!” (Japanese for yes.)
When the gong sounded, Street Samurai shot across the mat, then pulled up short and began to dance around his opponent, throwing an endless flurry of feints and fake attacks. Old Man remained in his corner where Street Samurai had no way to come at him from behind or the sides. He didn’t react at all to any of the extravagant fakes and feints. The crowd, easily bored, began to boo.
Old Man ignored the crowd, but Street Samurai was upset by the boos. He decided that his opponent wasn’t reacting to the moves he kept throwing because the Old Man couldn’t. Samurai stopped his dancing around a threw a serious roundhouse kick at Old Man’s left temple with his right foot. If that kick connected, it would crack the skull wide open.
Old Man swayed his upper body back just far enough to make the kick miss by a half inch. His right hand shot up like lightning and seized Samurai’s ankle as it passed.
Old Man’s fingers closed like a power vise, bruising the tendons. His left hand whipped up to grasp the top of Samurai’s knee. Pushing powerfully up with his right hand and down with his left, The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair bent Street Samurai 4230’s right knee joint 90 degrees in the wrong direction. The snapping and grinding of bones was clearly audible throughout the arena.
The crowd was instantly silenced. Street Samurai fell on his back in the middle of the mats, staring in shock and horror at his mutilated leg. Then the pain reached his brain and he screamed. The referee formally awarded the bout to The Fat Old Man while medics rushed to administer pain medication.
As soon as the scoreboard showed his victory, Mitch felt behind himself for his wheelchair, and as soon as he found it collapsed into it. Standing up to fight like that had been intensely painful, but he had showed no outward sign of that pain.
He paused in the locker room only long enough to hang his gym bag over the back of his wheelchair. He went straight to the betting windows and handed in his $500 winning bet stub. At odds of 10,000 to 1 he now had $5 million dollars. The actual amounts bet would have made the odds over 100,000 to 1. The GGC had just made a fortune on his bout, and a lot of investment fund managers had just lost multiple millions.
Mitch was respectfully conducted to the office of the shift manager of the betting department. After withholding taxes for the IRS, the State Of Pennsylvania and the City Of Pittsburgh, a total of 40%, his winnings were $3 million. The helpful manager set up a betting and drawing account for him, with a debit card he use right now, with no delay or wait.
With everything he had brought to California with him in his gym bag, Mitch rolled down the ramp from the betting windows to the lobby of the hotel attached to the arena. He rolled up to the service desk reserved for tournament contestants and presented his contestant ID card and his new debit card. The desk clerk was at once respectful, despite Mitch’s ragged appearance. The balance the debit card reader showed made sure of that. The clerk asked what he could do to serve the honorable winner.
Mitch replied at once; “Book me into one of your gladiator suites. The top of the line ones, that go for $5,000 a day. I’m going to need a lot of the services that come with it.”
“As soon as possible this afternoon, have the sports medicine specialist, the sports dietician, the personal trainer and the physical therapist whose services come with that room report to me for a team conference. I need to create a comprehensive exercise and diet program to lose weight and gain strength and stamina. I have to adress certain specific areas.”
“Tell the doctor, trainer and therapist they’ll need to bring their documentation on working around damaged hip joints. Tell the dietician they’ll be preparing and serving all my food intake until further notice.”
“As soon as that conference is over, I’ll need one of the concierges to act as a guide to the hotel mall. I have some serious shopping to do. Everything I brought with me from Pittsburgh is in that ragged-ass gym bang hanging off the back of my chair.”
Mitch went to bed early that evening, satisfied with the new wardrobe hanging in his closet and the plan of activity that would fill every waking moment until his next bout. That would be in 8 weeks. There were several different tournaments in progress at any one time, and the arena was limited to 24 bouts per day. The weekends and prime time were reserved for the bouts with the highest public interest.
The first round of a class 4 involved 128 bouts, and only 16 bout slots per week would be allocated to such a relatively unimportant tournament. It was only the fact that Lindsay Lohan was one of the prizes that got them slots in afternoon sessions instead of the less desirable morning timeslots.
Steph, with an obvious personal stake in the outcomes, avidly watched every bout in ‘her’ tournament. When the second round started, she watched for the announcement of The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair’s bout. When she saw the announcement, she did a double take. For the first round bout, Mitch’s weight had been listed as 364 pounds. Now, 8 weeks later, it was listed at only 308. She realized at once that he must have been training and dieting like a madman to accomplish that.
She could see that he moved more easily and with less pain than the first time as he stood up from what looked like a brand new manual wheelchair. The old one had been patched with packing tape and cable ties. This one was pristine.
She saw that Mitch was also wearing a new robe. When he shrugged it off to leave it on his chair, it was clear that he still carried about 40 pounds of excess fat, but there was an incredible mass of hard muscle underneath.
Mitch’s opponent in this bout went by the handle Karateman 552. He was the same flash type as Street Samurai, but when he caught his first sight of the new Mitch the bluster and bravado seemed to leak right out of him. He visibly gulped.
The odds on this match were still pegged at the maximum allowed; 10,000 to 1. This allowed the GGC to reap huge profits. That’s why all the official publications had dismissed the Fat Old Man’s victory in round 1 as a fluke.
Steph read every story regarding ‘her’ tournament. She realized, they stories avoided actually describing the action. She had seen the fight. It didn’t look like a fluke to her. She realized the official stories were not to be trusted.
Mitch stood on his corner of the mats, flexing and stretching his arms and shoulders, loosening up. Karateman eyed him while doing his own stretching exercises.
The gong sounded, and Karateman 552 crossed the mats deliberately. He began with a series of fakes, but unlike Street Samurai, Karateman was watching carefully, trying to get some idea of just how good his opponent might be. Mitch refused to react to the fakes, reading them for what they were.
Karateman finally lost patience and launched a full focus right handed punch at Fat Old Man’s throat. Fat Old Man caught the punch square in the palm of his right hand and clamped down with his powerful grip. As Fat Old Man bore down hard, Karateman felt his own finger bones starting to crumble and grind.
Fat Old Man brought his left hand up to clamp down hard on the meat of Karateman’s forearm. Mitch twisted his hands in opposite directions. The sound of Karateman’s ulna and radius snapping was clearly audible even in the back row cheap seats.
When a bone breaks, that’s a fracture. If a piece of bone tears out through the skin, that’s a compound fracture. If both sides of the broken bone tear through the skin, that’s a double compound fracture. If the two pieces of bone tear through at two separate places, that’s a displaced double compound fracture.
The twisting motion of Mastertank’s powerful hands caused not one but two displaced double compound fractures. One was of the ulna bone, the other of the radius bone. Karateman screamed, turned and ran for the medical aid station. The judge formally awarded the bout to The Fat Old Man In The Wheelchair.
There was a limit on how much a contestant could bet on themself to win when the odds were at maximum. For the second round of a class 4 tourney, that limit was $50,000. That was fine with Mitch. At odds of 10,000 to 1 that brought $500 million, $300 million after taxes.
Mitch allowed himself one day off to spend some of his money. He wired payment in full for a two full floor penthouse condo that occupied the two top floors of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pittsburgh; $30 million. He bought a three story plus full attic vacation home on the west bank of the Mystic River in Connecticut, facing the great maritime Museum Of America And The Sea across the river; $10 million.
Mitch faxed full sets of plans for the remodeling of both of his new homes to an architectural firm, with instructions to turn the scale drawings into blueprints and build the indicated modifications. The plans were accompanied by another wire transfer; $40 million for the work on the two properties.
Detailed instructions and tentative contracts were sent back and forth with an interior decorating firm. Eventually, it would cost $50 million more to decorate, furnish and equip the two homes.
Then it was back to his training regimen, all day long every day. Steph prayed for Mitch’s health and success every night.
The GGC managed to keep the pari-mutuel odds against Mitch at the allowed maximum of 10,000 to 1 by spinning the stories about him and his two bouts. By wagering the $100,000 third round maximum on himself, Mitch added $600 million more after taxes. He bought the 244 foot power megayacht ‘Katana’. It had originally been built for a software tycoon.
Mitch had it updated and modified to his specifications. He sent plans he had drawn to scale to the yachtbuilders Palmer and Richardson, with a $30 million wire transfer. The Katana herself cost him $120 million. He deliberately reduced the guest accommodations from 4 V. I. P. staterooms and 8 regular guest staterooms down to 1 V. I. P. and 2 regular. With the extra space, the owner’s suite became the owner’s deck.
To the original master bedroom, master bath and office, Mitch’s plans added a gymnasium,/dojo, art studio, craft workshop, strongroom, armory, private galley/dinette, private foredeck observation lounge and aft deck refectory, and a private library. Most important of all, he added a fully equipped dungeon playroom. Each of his two homes also had one of those. The crew quarters were enlarged and upgraded. A fully equipped surgery and pharmacy were added for a newly hired ship’s doctor.
Again, Mitch allowed himself only one day for this spending spree. Then it was back to training.
After 3 straight wins, the GGC could no longer sit on the facts nor spin them away. The reporters and analysts no longer called Mitch’s victories flukes. Instead they spoke of ‘blinding hand speed’ and ‘upper body strength nothing less than shocking’. The odds for Mitch’s fourth bout dropped to a mere 5 to 1 against.
That was okay. With the odds so normal, Mitch was allowed to bet $200 million on himself to win. With billions worth of bets being placed on every bout in this formerly obscure class 4 tournament, that wager barely raised a ripple.
Mitch’s win in that bout was unspectacular but solid. That meant that even if he lost in his next bout, in the quarterfinal round, he would still win a minor amount of cash and the right to choose a slave prize. The moment his status as a quarter finalist was confirmed he registered his choice of slaves as Steph. He also had a lawyer visit his suite to draw up some documents. His big wager meant that he also added another $600 million after taxes to his account.
Steph was notified at once that a quarterfinalist, a man who would have the right to a slave no matter how well or poorly he did from now on, had filed a claim for her. The only way any other contestant could take her away from Mitch was to kill him in a bout.
Of the other 7 quarterfinalists, 5 were starstalkers. The remaining 2 were mercenary gladiators; professional contestants who had been hired by wealthy stalkers to fight on their behalf. All 7 had registered Lindsay Lohan as their choice.
After 4 wins, the GGC publicity department changed Mitch’s official program listing to ‘The Terrible Old Man In The Wheelchair’. For his quarterfinal bout against a Lohan fan who called himself Star Stalker 20, the odds actually shifted in his favor by 7 to 6. Wagering $1.2 billion shifted them to 6 to 5. The easy win swelled his account by another $600 million after taxes.
Now, the nature of the competition changed. There were four men left; Mitch, 2 professionals, and one last obsessed star stalker. The pros were both known for killing opponents in the last few rounds, in order to obtain extra slaves to sell to their thrillkiller employers.
The last star stalker, Lohan fan 3, died in broken agony at the hands of Deathgod 5, one of the professionals. Mitch, knowing that if he forfeit a match all the other winners would choose ahead of him, and he might not get to choose Steph, had to face Kung Fu Killer 44.
Deathgod and Kung Fu Killer had each killed their semifinal opponents. Deathgod now had the right to take 3 slaves, Kung Fu Killer had rights to 2.
If Mitch backed out, the winner of the bout between the two pros would choose 5 slaves before Mitch got to pick. One of them, he felt, was sure to choose a beauty like Steph.
After months on the diet and exercise program that slave prizes were forced to follow, along with the attentions of the finest makeup artists and hairstylists Hollywood had to offer, all the slaves in the prize gallery were at there best ever. Steph had been a beauty to start with. Now, she was utterly breathtaking. Mitch knew that in order to be sure that he would get Steph, he had to defeat the two pros. But, he had a plan.
Mitch’s rigorous training had regained a lot more mobility than he had yet displayed. He would use that now, for the first time in the tournament.
Steph watched anxiously as Mitch took his stance on the mat, just as he had in his six earlier bouts. With Kung Fu Killer 44 a well known regular winner, the odds against Mitch had shot back up to 5000 to 1. That was, until Mitch placed his own wager. The solid billion dollar bet on himself to win left the odds just 2 to 1 in favor of the Kung Fu Killer.
The KFK charged across the mats when the bout started. He didn’t bother with a lot of attempts to fake Mitch off balance. KFK just threw a full focus running punch at Mitch’s center of mass, thinking himself too fast and strong to block effectively.
Mitch agreed. That was why, at the last moment, Mitch used his hitherto concealed mobility to sidestep. As KFK went by, Mitch delivered a full focus punch of his own, slammed in with all the power gained in his recent months of training, into the right side of KFK’s chest.
The impact broke four ribs, and drove the sharp ends of two through KFK’s heart. The professional fighter and gleeful killer, employee of a murderous sadist, was dead before he hit the ground.
That night, it was announced that the interest in this class 4 tournament, as measured by the amounts being bet, was so great that the final bout would not be held at once. It would be delayed until it the next ‘Night of Finals’, in six months time. The announcer stated that never before had a class 4 drawn so much interest as to be deemed worthy of inclusion in a Night of Finals special. This would be an all evening, four hour special telecast in which every bout presented would be the final of a tournament, culminating in the finals of four class 2 tourneys.
The finals of the three year long class 1 were always an all evening special all by themselves. This class 4 final would become the opening act for three high interest class 3s as well as the 4 low interest class 2s.
The moment he heard that announcement, (which he had been expecting,) Mitch began to implement a contingency plan based on suddenly having six months to prepare for the final bout against Deathgod.
Mitch took a day to relax and enjoy, as he had taken to doing after each win. The next day he entered a private hospital. During the past few weeks, he had gotten himself measured for replacements for his damaged hip joints, and the extra large and super strong ones he needed pre-fabricated. He had also arranged for a team of surgeons to be on call.
A new technique was used. Both new hips were installed in a single procedure, and the muscles were folded and pressed out of the way instead of being cut. Two weeks after the surgery, Mitch began physical therapy on a grueling schedule.
Ramping up quickly, he was soon taking physiotherapy 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. As his abilities grew he replaced some of the physiotherapy with training for strength, speed, agility and stamina.
In the last two months, Mitch gradually switched his training regimen over to full time martial arts work with his old sifus and senseis. Now all in their 70s, Mitch knew they all still had much to teach him. Under their relentless tutelage, he honed his skills at several forms each of Karate and Kung Fu, plus Sammvo, Savate, Hapkido, Aikido and Capoeira. On the ‘Night of Finals’, he was ready.
His homes and his yacht were also finished, staffs and crew hired. The yacht was awaiting him at a mooring at Marina Del Rey. Mitch had been on board to inspect, and pronounced himself fully satisfied.
All this training and improvement had been accomplished well away from the GGC facilities. No one connected with the games knew that Mitch no longer needed a wheelchair. He no longer lived in the Games Complex, but on his docked yacht, the Dol Amroth.
The odds on this final were running at 5 to 2 in favor of Deathgod. Steph was watching the ‘expert analysts’ explain the intense interest in this one competitor. He had become a symbol, or more accurately two different symbols, to two different groups.
To the elderly and disabled, he had become a symbol of hope and dignity. They accounted for the $2 billion wagered on him to win. The other group, Gen-Xers, Gen-Yers, slackers and young macho men and jocks, saw him as symbol of every authority figure who had ever caused them to feel stupid, or small, or incompetent, or generally not good enough. They were not so much betting on Deathgod to win, but against Mitch. They accounted for the $5 billion now wagered against him.
When Mitch checked in to the GGC medical office for the weigh in ceremonies one day before the bout, he was not in a wheelchair. He walked in, and explained that he had two brand new hips. He weighed in at a rock solid 266 pounds. He also, for the first time, demanded to pick his own registered name for the programs, instead of letting the Commission choose one as he had until now. He was now to be listed as The Tank.
During the weigh in, the two fighters who would meet on the mats the next day were required to stand side by side and interact. Deathgod strutted in talking all kinds of trash. When he saw that his opponent was no longer wheelchair bound, he was taken aback for a moment. Then he resumed his trash talk, even more raucous and Insolent than before. He was trying to hide it, but he was scared and sweating.
Deathgod was a pro. He did not take opponents for granted. He always studied video of their bouts. He didn’t omit that procedure for this bout, reasoning that even if this guy was in a wheelchair, he had just won five tournament bouts, in the last one actually killing the pro fighter who had called himself Kung Fu Killer 44.
Deathgod had concluded that when the analysts spoke of the blinding hand speed and shocking strength of ‘The Terrible Old Man’, for once it was no hype. Deathgod had worked out tactics to deal with a largely immobile foe who was stronger than himself and had equal hand speed. He was not sure how to deal with that foe if the man was now normally mobile. Nevertheless, he trash talked as though utterly confident. The Tank kept ignoring him. Finally, Deathgod shouted in the face of The Tank; “Hey, you old fart! What’re you, thinking about writing your will? I’m talking to you here! I expect an answer!”
The Tank replied; “You have the right to speak. You do NOT have the right to be listened to. If I choose to disregard your nonsense as the empty noise it is, that is MY right. However, I do have just two things to say to you, boy.”
“First, the experience and treachery of age will ALWAYS defeat the strength and skill of youth. Second, in addition to having more experience and being more treacherous than you, I am also bigger, stronger, faster, quicker, more agile, more dexterous, rougher, tougher, meaner and nastier. You don’t stand a chance.”
Deathgod gritted out; “Who are you calling a boy, you walking fossil! I’ve killed 27 men on the mats! You’ll become number 28 tomorrow!”
Mastertank1 grinned nastily. He held up his hands, displaying the scars they were seamed with. “These have killed more men, on and off the mats, than yours have shaken hands with, BOY. But I only kill those who have earned death.”
“I killed KFK44 because he killed opponents in the tournament when he didn’t have to, because he had them totally outclassed. I’m going to kill you for the same reason. May God have mercy on your soul, because I won’t have any on your ass!”
On his way out, he bet $2 billion from his account on himself to win, dropping the odds down to 5 to 4 against him. As bettors read the news of his new hips on the GGC Internet report pages, a surge of betting came in. By the time betting closed as he walked out to the mats the next day, the odds were straight 1 to 1.
Deathgod, like many professional Games Gladiators, was very superstitious. Where he remained unfazed by anything Tank had said to him, when he saw that the odds on the pari-mutuel board were 1 to 1, he was really spooked. Never before had the odds failed to be in his favor. Seeing those odds, he believed for the first time that he might actually lose this fight. Fear caused him to make a mistake.
Deathgod opened the bout with a rapid fire progression of kicks and punches. Tank stood his ground and blocked every one. It seemed that Tank was taking no offensive action at all, but he was delivering his blocks with such force that they were bruising Deathgod’s forearms and lower legs. After a few minutes and dozens of blocks, with painful bruises upon bruises, Deathgod was starting to flinch from the impacts and wasn’t even aware of it.
Those unconscious flinches were Deathgod’s downfall. When Tank unleashed his first overt attack, a lightning fast punch to the throat. For all its speed, that punch would have been blocked if Deathgod, subconsciously conditioned to flinch from the painful impacts of Tank’s hard blocks, not flinched again.
That microsecond of delay in throwing his block was enough to let the punch land. Deathgod’s windpipe collapsed, with the hard rings amid the cartilage breaking and driving sideways, piercing both of the carotid arteries. Even a tap to the carotids was enough to cause unconsciousness. Actual piercing was instant death.
The bout was followed at once by the awards ceremony. By this time the cash Tank had won by betting on himself made the quarter of a million dollars irrelevant. The fact that he would now get to choose 6 slaves was of far more importance.
Mitch had investigated the court records of all the slaves offered as prizes, and had seen that six of the eight, including Steph, had been railroaded by California courts hungry for slaves. They were innocent even though convicted.
The two who were guilty included the famous actress, Lindsay Lohan. And one other.
When the award ceremony took place, Tank surprised the spectators and press more than once. First, he directed that all the cash prizes that were due him, from his own prize and those of all the quarter finalists who were now dead, be divided among the heirs of the three who had been killed by Kung Fu Killer and Deathgod.
Then he chose Steph as his first prize slave. The stunned look on Lohan’s face was priceless. It got more shocked as he chose the other 5 women who had been falsely convicted, one by one. Lohan was chosen by the obsessed fan who had finished seventh, who was unable to believe his luck.
Mitch had arranged for each of the other five slaves to be provided with a suitcase full of clothing in their proper sizes and a set of manumission papers setting her free. He had cabs waiting to take them to the airport, and each was given a prepaid credit card with a million dollars on it, to start new lives outside the jurisdiction of the California courts, and a ticket on a flight to New York City. Mitch had also arranged a place for them to stay until each made her mind up where to go and what to do.
When the cabs had left, a classic Bentley Limousine pulled up to the curb. Mitch handed Steph in and climbed in himself. Steph looked at him expectantly. He handed Steph her own set of manumission papers. Before she had a chance to speak, he began to explain himself.
He told her the entire story of what he had done and what had happened as a result since he read that she was to be a slave prize in a tournament. He mentioned that they were on the way to his yacht at Marina Del Rey, where she would find an entire wardrobe of new clothes in her sizes in the VIP guest stateroom. He suggested that they wait until she had time to absorb the change in her status to plan what she would do in the future.
Steph looked at Mitch in amazement. She asked; “What do you get out of this deal?”
He replied; “Well, I’m hoping that you’ll let me take you out on enough dates to get to know me, so you can decide if you’re interested in an intimate relationship with me, with bondage, tickling and sex.”
Steph said; “Mitch, I’ve read every post of yours on TMF for nearly two years now. I know the kind of person you are. What you’ve done. I can make that decision right now.”
“But Steph, this is the first time we’ve ever met in person! Surely, you want to get top know me better before you decide?”
“Mitch, you spent what was then your last dime to travel across the country in your wheelchair and pay your way into this tournament. You risked your life eight separate times. And you did all that, not because you meant to own me as a slave, but to make sure that i would be no one’s slave against my will. I’m a free woman again, thanks to you. What the HELL else do I need to know about you? At this point, if you want me, you have me. On any terms you choose. We’ll need to move all those clothes you bought for me into your stateroom. I won’t be using mine.”
“Okay then, here are the terms I want. We’ll be live in lovers. I’ll do anything I can to help you follow any career you want to back in Pittsburgh where I live. There’s a huge hospital complex there with it’s own HMO, and they need a director of patient advocacy. I’ve mentioned you to them, and they’re eager to interview you for the position. They’re paying no attention to the conviction; they realize how little that means in a California court these days when the defendant is a beautiful woman.
When we’re actually playing bedroom games, I’m the ‘ler and you’re the ‘lee. At all other times, we’re equals, and that’s the way I’ll treat you. If I ever fail to, I want you to call me on it right away.
You won’t do any cooking or cleaning, we’ll have servants for that. Any time you want to change anything, just tell me and we’ll talk it over. If you decide that you want to leave, I’ll make it as easy as possible for you, and we’ll still be friends. I guess that about sums it up.”
“ Not quite. What if we decide we’re in love at some point?”
“Ah, well, if that happens then I guess we’ll get married, if you want to. Do you think you might want to?”
With a smile, Steph said; “It could happen.”
At that point they turned a bend in the road, and Mitch pointed out the modified Katana, renamed as the Dol Amroth and painted in azure blue and white.
http://www.newzealand.com/travel/library/q84816_3.jpg
(click the above link for a photo of the 74.5 meter [244.4 foot] motor yacht Katana)
Steph exclaimed; “Oh, she’s beautiful!”
Mitch told her; “That’s where we’re going. That’ll be home until we get to Pittsburgh. We’re going to pass through the Panama Canal. Then sail north across the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico. We’ll go up the Missus Hip, then follow the Ohio upstream to Pittsburgh. I reserved docking space, within a short walk of my place. Which is a duplex penthouse on top of the best hotel in town.”
Barely slowing down at all, the driver followed the instructions he had been given in advance. He drove right up the ramp into the cargo bay without even pausing. By the time the car stopped and Mitch was offering his arm to Steph to exit the Bentley, the crew had already raised the ramp and cast off the lines, and was closing the cargo bay doors.
Powerful tunnel thrusters at the bow and stern were pushing the ship directly away from the quay. Once they were clear, the stern thruster reversed and the vessel pivoted on her vertical center point axis. As soon as the bow pointed to the clear channel leading to the open ocean, the main engines, already warmed up, were cut in at emergency speed ahead.
It took about ten minutes to reach the ship’s full speed of 50 knots (nautical miles per hour, equal to 60 statute miles). Twelve minutes after that they had cleared the twelve mile limit and were out of the legal jurisdiction of the California courts.
This was important, because those courts did not take kindly to the manumission of legally sentenced slaves. That was why Mitch had given the manumission papers in private and sent the newly freed slaves out of state as quickly as practicable.
The well paid in advance cabbies had made the connection to the flight to New York just in time. At about the same time as the Dol Amroth passed into international waters, the flight that the other five freed slaves were on passed from California Air Traffic Control to that of Nevada, and beyond recall by state authorities.
Of the other 49 state governments, not one would extradite a manumitted slave back to California. It wouldn’t matter what excuse the California authorities cooked up, the answer would be no.
Hand in hand, Mitch and Steph made their way through the ship. Mitch pointed out the many amazing and luxurious features. They ended up on the forward, open air observation lounge of the owner’s deck, reveling in the wind of the ship’s passage. Well out to sea now, they had slowed to the vessels 25 knot cruising speed.
It was late afternoon of a glorious, sunlit late summer day on the Pacific Ocean off Southern California. They were heading south at a mile every two minutes. Steph kept thinking about that lovely dungeon playroom Mitch had shown her.
In truth, Steph had been anticipating this day ever since she knew Mitch had made it into the final bout of the tournament six months ago. She had worried about him, but had felt pretty confident that he would win. As far as she was concerned, Mitch was her hero, and she wanted to give him the traditional hero’s reward for rescuing a damsel in distress.
Mitch turned to Steph and asked if it would be okay if he took her in his arms and kissed her. Steph was honestly puzzled that he would ask first, and said so. Mitch explained; “So far you’ve agreed to be my ‘lee, not my sub. And not full time/lifestyle, but only during bedroom games. That may change in the future if you want it to, but as things stand now I have no right to assume that you’ve given me approval in advance for any physical intimacies I want. That’s why I asked.”
“Damn, boy! You really are an old fashioned gentleman, aren’t you? Okay, let’s save some time. From now on, assume that my answer to any question of that nature is yes, until I say different. Now, to quote someone or other, kiss me you fool!”
He did so. Slowly, softly, sensuously, and very, very thoroughly. While his hands caressed the curve of her spine and the back of her neck, his lips nibbled and teased her upper lip first, then her lower lip, the tip of his tongue lightly teasing. Then they both opened up to a deeper, more passionate kiss, pressing their bodies together front to front.
Mitch picked Steph up in his arms and carried her inside to the playroom. One of the crew had lit the fire in the playroom fireplace. It crackled invitingly. He carried Steph to the bondage bed and gently placed her standing next to it.
Mitch slowly undressed Steph. Each new area of skin that was exposed received kisses and caresses. Steph closed her eyes and just enjoyed.
When he had her entirely nude, Mitch paused to quickly remove his own clothing. The scars from the hip replacements were only the newest, almost lost among the many other scars from a lifetime of risking his life to protect others.
Mitch lifted Steph up again, to lay her down on the bed. Then he stretched out beside her. He caressed her and kissed her all over. Very literally from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers and toes. He was closely observing her reactions to everything he did. He returned and lingered on the places that turned her on the most.
His patience seemed endless. He sought out the touches that gave Steph the most pleasure, then repeated them and varied them. Then, in the midst of a warm, tender kiss, Mitch fastened one of the built in leather cuffs on Steph’s right wrist. Steph smiled, anticipating what she knew would be next.
A couple of minutes later, Steph’s wrists were fastened in place above her head and twelve inches apart. Each upper arm was fastened to the bed in it’s own cuff. Each of her lower shins was encased in a very wide cuff, also fastened in place to the bed, about 30 inches apart.
Mitch made his touch lighter, feathery light. His fingertips skimmed her skin, teasing and tickling wherever they went. He carefully noted where Steph was the most responsive. He was gratified to note that her beautiful feet and cute little toes were among her most sensitive places.
He began with a light, circular tease on her flat belly. Watching the smooth skin quiver and ripple as she giggled. He widened the area of his attentions, tickling Steph’s groin and hips. Mitch leaned over to flicker her navel with the very tip of his tongue. He loved the way she giggled and squealed in delight. He loved the way she wiggled.
For a couple of minutes Mitch tickled Steph’s ribs. He adored the happily agonized expression on her face as she laughed. The way she squirmed was wonderful.
It was so sweet to hear the way Steph’s laughter changed in pitch and timbre as his tickling fingers changed from probing her ribs to gliding up and down her smooth sides. After enjoying that for a while, Mitch moved his hands up to tickle her underarms.
That got her laughing and struggling really wildly. This was really fun! He could tell by the way Steph’s body responded that she was enjoying this, possibly as much as he was. Perfect!
Several minutes of armpit tickling had Steph going wild, but then Mitch began to tickle her lovely breasts, and she really went nuts. She laughed slightly less, but her body was writhing and wriggling like a serpent. The way she was moving, it looked like she was seeking more of the delicious sensations his fingertips on her breasts were giving her, even while trying to avoid them and escape.
Mitch lavished several long, slow kisses on each of Steph’s erect nipples, and also on her mouth. Steph did her best to kiss back while laughing uncontrollably. Whew, things were getting way hot too fast. He decided to dial the intensity down a notch.
Mitch flopped himself end for end, and began to play with Steph’s legs. “My God!” he thought. “What unbelievable legs this girl has! Gorgeous!”
Mitch let the tips of his fingers wander over Steph’s ankles, traced the curves of her calves. He playfully teased the very tender spots behind her knees and explored the wonderful play of muscles beneath the surface of her shapely thighs.
Her soft, helpless giggles, the sweet and sexy movements of her legs, the delicious feel of her soft, warm skin under his hands, all were intoxicating to Mitch. Steph’s mind was almost short circuited with enjoyment. The look on Mitch’s face, the sheer pleasure he took in her response to his teasing, enhanced her own pleasure immensely.
For some unknown reason, a lyric fragment from an old Anne Murray song popped into Steph’s mind; “That wanting me look, all over your face, is driving me wild.” Well, it was.
Mitch flipped himself farther down the bed. He positioned himself face down with his legs hanging off the edge, his head between Steph’s legs. He started kissing and nibbling his way up her calves and the hollows behind her knees while his fingers tickled her ankles.
Mitch then began kissing and licking his way up Steph’s lovely thighs while his hands tickled behind her knees. As his mouth drew ever closer to her sex, her giggles became interspersed with happy moans. By the time he arrived there, her labia were fully engorged and her clit was erect, the tip just peeking out from under the fleshy hood that normally protected it.
Mitch’s mouth explored Steph’s sex. His tongue felt the shapes, finding and just flicking the edge of her G spot, softly tapping her U spot a few times, then moving on to tease the tip of her clit. Meanwhile, his hands were groping blindly down Steph’s legs, past the cuffs, past her ankles to poise at the edges of her feet.
Mitch tilted his head back just enough to let him see Steph’s face between her breasts as he looked up the length of her torso. He used his upper lip to gently press that fleshy hood back out of the way, then engulfed her clit with his lips. He stroked the clit up and down with his lips while the very tip of his tongue swirled around the tip of her clit.
Mitch watched carefully, seeing the growing pleasure on Steph’s face. When he judged she was seconds away from a climax, he started to tickle her feet. Steph exploded in her loudest laughter yet. Her body was bucking and thrusting against its bonds. The combined agony and ecstasy on her face was exquisite.
It tickled so much that the orgasm that had been only seconds away was delayed by several minutes. When it did arrive, it was many times more powerful than it would have been without the tickling.
Mitch watched her orgasm peak and begin to subside. He backed off a little on both the cunnilingus and the tickling, but didn’t completely stop either. He knew right away when her body reacted to the release by almost doubling in tactile sensitivity.
Now was the time to step it back up. He watched while Steph came laughing again, then a third and a fourth time. Each one was bigger and better than the last. Throughout, Mitch kept his eyes open, watching her face.
There was only one thing that he knew of that was better than watching the face of a woman he cared for so deeply while he gave her multiple tickled climaxes. That one thing was next.
Mitch brought her back to a few seconds from a fifth orgasm. Then, he detached the leg cuffs from the hold down points and rested her ankles on top of his shoulders. He scooted himself forward, up the bed. He eased his rampant member into her eagerly welcoming depth. It felt wonderful.
Mitch tilted his hips back to make sure that the top of his member would rub against her G spot while the tip touched her A spot, just above the entry of the cervix. When he had the right position, Steph gasped with the pleasure.
Mitch attached the cuffs on Steph’s legs to the ones around her upper arms. Then he leaned forward. He rested the weight of his upper body mostly on his own elbows. His fingers were poised above the now upward turned bottoms of Steph’s tender feet. Steph took in what was about to happen, and, smiling widely, mouthed; “Oh, No!”
Mitch began tickling Steph’s feet again. This time he could see what he was doing, and teased the flats of her soles. Steph howled and wailed with laughter. Her hips bucked and thrust as she involuntarily tried to pull her desperately ticklish feet away from those maddening fingertips. Every movement rubbed her erotic trigger points in the most delicious way. It was only a few minutes before she came again.
Mitch kissed her, stopping her frantic laughter with his mouth while he kept tickling. This made her feel more helpless than ever, which somehow made her feel more turned on. She soon came again.
Breaking the kiss and pulling back to grin at Steph wickedly, Mitch began to play with her cute little toes. Steph went crazy. She laughed long, wailing peals of forced mirth while squirming in sheer desperation. Her orgasms came closer together, and still getting better with each one.
Mitch had planned to draw this out a little bit longer, but Steph’s wonderful responsiveness had him so turned on he just couldn’t hold out any longer. He went directly to letting his fingertips spiderdance in her deep, soft-skinned arches.
Her skin there was silken smooth and butter soft, and exquisitely, excruciatingly ticklish. Her whole body galvanized as if being electrocuted. She vibrated, shaking with laughter so intense that no sound came out. Then the sound broke through, just as her entire nervous system seemed to explode with the pleasure of the most powerful orgasm she had ever had. That pushed Mitch over the edge, and he roared with pleasure. Each of them seemed to feed off the other’s pleasure, drawing their climaxes out longer than either could remember ever having experienced before.
Mitch opened the six cuffs, releasing Steph’s limbs, and levered his own massive weight sideways before most of it could come down on her. They lay side by side and cuddled for a while. Mitch said; “Wow. That was amazing. YOU are amazing! The best ever.”
“Damn. Beat me to it. I was about to say that about you.”
The two lovers grinned at each other. Mitch asked; “You hungry?”
“Famished!”
Mitch called their dinner order down to the ship’s chef. By the time they showered together, dried each other off and dressed, it was all ready.
After dinner, they sat side by side in a settee facing the taffrail, gazing out over the moonlit wake as the Dol Amroth made it’s way south. They sipped a fine wine and played footsies, while happily contemplating a joint future.
The End
now
