Sablesword
TMF Master
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2001
- Messages
- 785
- Points
- 18
This is part one of a story based on a couple of really excellent pieces of artwork by scavenger01 (posted in the tickling art forum). Edit: The conclusion is here
A Secret Military Experiment
by Sablesword
As the prison transport crossed the Moraxian Limit, a silent groan of disappointment went through the command center of the pursuing Terran destroyer.
"Check weapons," the captain ordered, stone-faced. She had been willing to risk casualties among the human prisoners in an attempt to rescue them, but she wasn't willing to kill them just to stop the squidcats from escaping.
"There she goes," someone whispered as the hyperspacial vortex formed in front of the fleeing transport. But this vortex was unsteady - and too small to for the transport to pass through. Instead, a dozen small spheres detached from the crippled ship and fled, disappearing as they fell into the vortex.
"Ma'am, she's launching escape pods. They're abandoning ship!"
"Launch the marines!" the captain rapped out.
Several minutes later, the marine lieutenant's face appeared in a comm screen. "We have the ship, Ma'am. The scuttling charges have been disarmed. No prisoners, though. It looks like the ship had both kraken and leotaurs on board, as well as some human prisoners, but they all got away."
"Well done," the captain answered. "Too bad about the prisoners, but the brass will be glad enough to get their hands on a squidcat ship. Tell your people 'well done.'"
"You want to do what?" the admiral asked.
"We've already learned everything we can from the hardware side," Dr. Harkess explained. She was lean and dark as a panther, and annoyingly civilian. "We need to learn how the squidcats manage to break our people down. You've seen the reports: They're not prisoners anymore, once the kraken and the leotaurs have worked them over. They're," she shrugged. "Harem slaves."
"I know." The admiral leaned back in his chair, frowning. Humanity was barely holding on against the unlikely alliance of the cat-like centauroids and tentacled things that humans had dubbed 'leotaurs' and 'kraken.' And low morale was the worst problem of all - precisely because the squidcat alliance did take prisoners - and then turned them into 'harem slaves.' This female mad scientist was right on that point, at least.
"We'll have to ask for volunteers, of course," Dr. Harkess went on.
"Volunteers?! You want to ask my people to volunteer for that?" he waved his hand at the datachip inserted in his desk's reader.
"It's the only way, Admiral," Dr. Harkess told him softly.
The admiral frowned more deeply than before. A minute passed, and then a small evil smile tugged the corners of his mouth. "You may have ten volunteers for your experiment," he told the waiting scientist. "Provided that you yourself are one of them."
The ebony face of Dr. Harkess could not turn purple, but her eyes bulged as a horde of emotions migrated across it. Anger. Fear. Horror. Disgust. And finally, a grudging acceptance.
"Agreed," she said.
Marine Sergeant Kathy Smith shut the locker and sealed it. Like the nine other volunteers for "a special project," she now stood nude in the locker chamber. Eight of the other women she already knew, and she held out her hand to the ninth. "Sergeant Kathy Smith," she introduced herself.
"Dr. Emily Harkess," the dark woman answered. "Civilian, not navy or marines. In fact, this whole crazy project was my idea, so you can blame me for what's going to happen."
"What is going to happen?" Kathy asked.
"You weren't told? You should have been briefed before you volunteered. Anyway, it's - "
At that moment the bosun-buzzer sounded, drowning out all conversation. "Now hear this," an equally loud male voice announced. "All volunteers will form a line at the indicated airlock." A green light flashed over one hatch. "Exit the chamber one at a time, and proceed down the corridor. Now hear this. All volunteers..." The voice repeated its message as the ten nude women, ranging in size and color from short and blonde like Sergeant Kathy Smith to tall and black like Dr. Emily Harkess, formed a line and stepped one by one through the hatch.
Sergeant Kathy Smith went through the airlock first. By the time she had taken three steps past the hatch, she realized that she was now on board a squidcat ship. "Great," she muttered under her breath, keeping a wary eye on the manipulator unit that hung inert from the ceiling in front of her. She took a fourth step and the tee-pod hit her, squelching against her back. On contact with her skin, the basketball-sized alien creature unraveled, wrapping ribbon-like tendrils around her body. It pinned her arms to her side, and held her legs together, with more and more tendrils winding around her until she was encased like a mummy. Only her head, her bare feet, and the skin around her navel were left exposed.
Kathy tottered, but before she could fall, the manipulator whirred to life. Its grabbers seized her and it carried her off, following the track set in the ceiling. As it left, another manipulator moved into position.
Half a minute later, Dr. Emily Harkess emerged from the airlock. She knew what to expect in general, but not in specific: Once she had 'volunteered' for the project she had been cut off from the planning sessions. So when she stepped forward, looking around nervously for the tee-pod projector that she knew was there, she didn't see it until too late. In moments the second tee-pod had Emily wrapped up, and the second manipulator was carrying her away.
Emily also knew just what a tee-pod was: A psi-active alien creature, first discovered by the leotaurs and then genetically engineered by the kraken for the purpose of restraining and subduing human and humanoid prisoners. The first function was accomplished by the ribbon-tendrils that were now tightly wrapped around her body, and the second function was accomplished by tickling.
Already Emily could feel the tee-pods thicker tentacles wrapping around her toes and probing the soles of her feet. Another set of tentacles began to explore the exposed patch on her stomach. Emily began to giggle.
In the same way, the other eight volunteer-victims were captured. One by one they stepped through the hatch and took a few steps down the corridor before being trapped by the tee-pods. One by one the manipulator units whirred into action, carrying them into a hold where ten restraint couches waited. The manipulators placed Kathy at one end of the row, and Emily at the other, then filled the places between with the other eight women.
Each couch had a camera attached, focusing on the bare and vulnerable soles of the female occupants. Each couch also had a pair of black restraint-straps that clicked automatically into position across the ankles and chest. And each couch was equipped with a sensor-net that monitored and recorded the responses of the female captives as the tee-pods performed the task for which they had been bred.
Once the victim was lying on a firm surface, a tee-pod would secrete an adhesive, gluing the victim into place. This helped restrain the victim further as she squirmed and bucked - and the victims did squirm and buck, as hard as they could, but to no effect. For the tee-pods heavier tentacles probed and stroked and tickled the naked skin left exposed around the victim's navel as well as the helpless soles of the victim's bare feet. A victim might try to shield one foot with the other, but the tee-pod would then just grab the two large toes with one tentacle, while others applied a gentle and fiendishly effective tickling.
Most of the ten volunteer-victims were already giggling when the manipulators lowered them into their couches, and as the tickling progressed, the laughter grew louder and more frenzied: "Hahahaha...ohno...hehe not the belly but..eeeehehehehahahah!" "My haheehaheeehahaha feeeet!" "Ohahahohohoho eeeeee! hahahahaha!" "T- hahaheeheeha...t-tehehehohahaha...toes! Toehaheeheehahahahahahaha!" Tears started in the eyes of the victims as the tickling went on, and sweat slicked their skin as the tentacles touched and stroked and wiggled. They tickled the twenty bare soles, heel and ball and instep, the pads of the toes, and between them as well. They tickled the ten navels and the sensitive belly-skin around those navels. Guided by the psionic senses of the tee-pods, those tentacles knew just where, when, and how to tickle for optimum effect. They could not be avoided. They could not be resisted. The women might strain their utmost, might buck as hard as they could, but the confining tendrils and restraint-straps, and the tee-pods secreted adhesive, prevented more than the slightest squirming wiggle. And that squirming did not interfere with the tickling at all.
Time went by. To the ten volunteer-victims, suffering through the tickle torments of the tee-pods, it seemed like an eternity, but by the chronometers it was 57 minutes and 12 seconds when the first tee-pod became satiated. Its tickling tentacles went limp, but its ribbon-like tendrils continued to hold the victim helpless. She gasped and wept and relief as the manipulator unit whirred over, plucking her from her couch and taking her away. A minute later, another tee-pod relaxed its tickle-tentacles and another victim was removed. And another, and another. At 65 minutes and 27 seconds, the manipulator removed the last victim from her couch.
"You damn civvie witch," Kathy cursed her cellmate wearily. She and Emily lay on two narrow bunks, too exhausted to stand, almost too exhausted to drink the water and nutrient solutions dispensed by the tubes hanging near their heads. The tickling hadn't ended with the satiation of the first set of tee-pods: The tickle-creatures had fallen away when sprayed with a vitamin/sedative mixture, and the women were released to stretch, drink water, and relieve themselves. But then a fresh set of tee-pods had splatted against their nude bodies, and had wrapped their ribbon-tendrils to render the women helpless once again. The manipulators returned them to their restraint-couches, and the tickling had resumed. It was only after the eighth set of tee-pods that the women had finally been allowed to stumble to their bunks, and locked in two to a cell.
"Hey, I'm going through the same thing," Emily answered with equal weariness. "If you want to wish your troubles on me, you've already got it."
"But you knew. You knew what was going to happen."
"Yes. For all the good it's done me here."
"Still, you know what this 'special project' is all about. The rest of us don't. So give."
"All right." With an effort, Emily raised her head and took a swallow of water. "All right," she repeated. "As you probably have guessed, this is a squidcat ship. In fact, it's the prison transport that the navy recently captured. We went through all the hardware on board, but that didn't get us much closer to figuring out how the squidcat alliance manages to break down the human prisoners it captures. And figuring that out was a high priority down at earth-side headquarters. So they authorized this little experiment, where we volunteers go through the squidcat prisoner treatment in order to find out just how it works."
"It's obvious 'how it works,'" the sergeant said derisively. "It's tickle-torture."
"Yes and no," the black woman answered. "Tickling, your 'tickle-torture,' can't produce the effects we've seen in the squidcat prisoners we've recovered. That was one of the first theories tested. No, there's another factor involved, probably psionic since we know that the tee-pods are psi-active organisms. So we volunteers are given to the tee-pods, and then monitored. The data is recorded, cross-referenced, analyzed, and sliced, diced, and deep-fried. Hopefully we'll be able to figure out just what's going on, and how to counter it."
"Lovely. But what I want to know how long this experiment of yours is going to last. You did say this was your own idea, didn't you?"
"For my sins, my own personal brainstorm. But I don't know how long its going to last. When I volunteered, I was cut out of the planning, and the duration hadn't been decided yet. It could be three days, it could be two weeks, or it could be...even....longer..." And with those words, Dr. Emily Harkess fell asleep.
"Longer." Sergeant Kathy Smith cursed for the length of three whole breaths, dredging up foul vocabulary from marine traditions stretching back to salt-water navies. "Longer," she repeated with her fourth breath. And then she too fell asleep.
The next morning the ten women lined up, still nude, with ten tee-pods lying inert on the deck before them. "Now hear this," the announcement boomed. "Marines and space-crew who wish to opt out may do so without prejudice."
"Yeah, right," one of the women said.
"An opportunity to opt out will be given before the start of each day's investigations," the booming voice continued. "Those who are willing to continue will now step forward and pick up the tee-pod before them." Then a new voice came over the speakers:
"Dr. Emily Harkess," it said. "The Admiral wishes to inform you that you will not be permitted to opt out unless all the other volunteers have done so as well."
Emily clasped her hands behind her to keep them from shaking, and called out: "I'm not quitting. This study is too important to discontinue now." But she made no move toward the tee-pod in front of her.
Silence hung in the air as the ten nude females shifted uneasily. Finally a woman with a strongly oriental appearance spoke up: "Navy may be too chicken to go on," she said as she stepped forward. "But Marines are too tough to wimp out." When she picked up the tee-pod, it immediately unraveled, wrapping her in its ribbon-tendrils. A manipulator whirred forward and carried her off to the restraint couches. One by one, the other women then followed suit, and within three minutes all ten were lying in their couches, squirming and laughing as the tee-pods tickled them.
END OF PART ONE.
Part 2 to follow...
Edit: here
A Secret Military Experiment
by Sablesword
As the prison transport crossed the Moraxian Limit, a silent groan of disappointment went through the command center of the pursuing Terran destroyer.
"Check weapons," the captain ordered, stone-faced. She had been willing to risk casualties among the human prisoners in an attempt to rescue them, but she wasn't willing to kill them just to stop the squidcats from escaping.
"There she goes," someone whispered as the hyperspacial vortex formed in front of the fleeing transport. But this vortex was unsteady - and too small to for the transport to pass through. Instead, a dozen small spheres detached from the crippled ship and fled, disappearing as they fell into the vortex.
"Ma'am, she's launching escape pods. They're abandoning ship!"
"Launch the marines!" the captain rapped out.
Several minutes later, the marine lieutenant's face appeared in a comm screen. "We have the ship, Ma'am. The scuttling charges have been disarmed. No prisoners, though. It looks like the ship had both kraken and leotaurs on board, as well as some human prisoners, but they all got away."
"Well done," the captain answered. "Too bad about the prisoners, but the brass will be glad enough to get their hands on a squidcat ship. Tell your people 'well done.'"
#
"You want to do what?" the admiral asked.
"We've already learned everything we can from the hardware side," Dr. Harkess explained. She was lean and dark as a panther, and annoyingly civilian. "We need to learn how the squidcats manage to break our people down. You've seen the reports: They're not prisoners anymore, once the kraken and the leotaurs have worked them over. They're," she shrugged. "Harem slaves."
"I know." The admiral leaned back in his chair, frowning. Humanity was barely holding on against the unlikely alliance of the cat-like centauroids and tentacled things that humans had dubbed 'leotaurs' and 'kraken.' And low morale was the worst problem of all - precisely because the squidcat alliance did take prisoners - and then turned them into 'harem slaves.' This female mad scientist was right on that point, at least.
"We'll have to ask for volunteers, of course," Dr. Harkess went on.
"Volunteers?! You want to ask my people to volunteer for that?" he waved his hand at the datachip inserted in his desk's reader.
"It's the only way, Admiral," Dr. Harkess told him softly.
The admiral frowned more deeply than before. A minute passed, and then a small evil smile tugged the corners of his mouth. "You may have ten volunteers for your experiment," he told the waiting scientist. "Provided that you yourself are one of them."
The ebony face of Dr. Harkess could not turn purple, but her eyes bulged as a horde of emotions migrated across it. Anger. Fear. Horror. Disgust. And finally, a grudging acceptance.
"Agreed," she said.
#
Marine Sergeant Kathy Smith shut the locker and sealed it. Like the nine other volunteers for "a special project," she now stood nude in the locker chamber. Eight of the other women she already knew, and she held out her hand to the ninth. "Sergeant Kathy Smith," she introduced herself.
"Dr. Emily Harkess," the dark woman answered. "Civilian, not navy or marines. In fact, this whole crazy project was my idea, so you can blame me for what's going to happen."
"What is going to happen?" Kathy asked.
"You weren't told? You should have been briefed before you volunteered. Anyway, it's - "
At that moment the bosun-buzzer sounded, drowning out all conversation. "Now hear this," an equally loud male voice announced. "All volunteers will form a line at the indicated airlock." A green light flashed over one hatch. "Exit the chamber one at a time, and proceed down the corridor. Now hear this. All volunteers..." The voice repeated its message as the ten nude women, ranging in size and color from short and blonde like Sergeant Kathy Smith to tall and black like Dr. Emily Harkess, formed a line and stepped one by one through the hatch.
#
Sergeant Kathy Smith went through the airlock first. By the time she had taken three steps past the hatch, she realized that she was now on board a squidcat ship. "Great," she muttered under her breath, keeping a wary eye on the manipulator unit that hung inert from the ceiling in front of her. She took a fourth step and the tee-pod hit her, squelching against her back. On contact with her skin, the basketball-sized alien creature unraveled, wrapping ribbon-like tendrils around her body. It pinned her arms to her side, and held her legs together, with more and more tendrils winding around her until she was encased like a mummy. Only her head, her bare feet, and the skin around her navel were left exposed.
Kathy tottered, but before she could fall, the manipulator whirred to life. Its grabbers seized her and it carried her off, following the track set in the ceiling. As it left, another manipulator moved into position.
Half a minute later, Dr. Emily Harkess emerged from the airlock. She knew what to expect in general, but not in specific: Once she had 'volunteered' for the project she had been cut off from the planning sessions. So when she stepped forward, looking around nervously for the tee-pod projector that she knew was there, she didn't see it until too late. In moments the second tee-pod had Emily wrapped up, and the second manipulator was carrying her away.
Emily also knew just what a tee-pod was: A psi-active alien creature, first discovered by the leotaurs and then genetically engineered by the kraken for the purpose of restraining and subduing human and humanoid prisoners. The first function was accomplished by the ribbon-tendrils that were now tightly wrapped around her body, and the second function was accomplished by tickling.
Already Emily could feel the tee-pods thicker tentacles wrapping around her toes and probing the soles of her feet. Another set of tentacles began to explore the exposed patch on her stomach. Emily began to giggle.
In the same way, the other eight volunteer-victims were captured. One by one they stepped through the hatch and took a few steps down the corridor before being trapped by the tee-pods. One by one the manipulator units whirred into action, carrying them into a hold where ten restraint couches waited. The manipulators placed Kathy at one end of the row, and Emily at the other, then filled the places between with the other eight women.
Each couch had a camera attached, focusing on the bare and vulnerable soles of the female occupants. Each couch also had a pair of black restraint-straps that clicked automatically into position across the ankles and chest. And each couch was equipped with a sensor-net that monitored and recorded the responses of the female captives as the tee-pods performed the task for which they had been bred.
Once the victim was lying on a firm surface, a tee-pod would secrete an adhesive, gluing the victim into place. This helped restrain the victim further as she squirmed and bucked - and the victims did squirm and buck, as hard as they could, but to no effect. For the tee-pods heavier tentacles probed and stroked and tickled the naked skin left exposed around the victim's navel as well as the helpless soles of the victim's bare feet. A victim might try to shield one foot with the other, but the tee-pod would then just grab the two large toes with one tentacle, while others applied a gentle and fiendishly effective tickling.
Most of the ten volunteer-victims were already giggling when the manipulators lowered them into their couches, and as the tickling progressed, the laughter grew louder and more frenzied: "Hahahaha...ohno...hehe not the belly but..eeeehehehehahahah!" "My haheehaheeehahaha feeeet!" "Ohahahohohoho eeeeee! hahahahaha!" "T- hahaheeheeha...t-tehehehohahaha...toes! Toehaheeheehahahahahahaha!" Tears started in the eyes of the victims as the tickling went on, and sweat slicked their skin as the tentacles touched and stroked and wiggled. They tickled the twenty bare soles, heel and ball and instep, the pads of the toes, and between them as well. They tickled the ten navels and the sensitive belly-skin around those navels. Guided by the psionic senses of the tee-pods, those tentacles knew just where, when, and how to tickle for optimum effect. They could not be avoided. They could not be resisted. The women might strain their utmost, might buck as hard as they could, but the confining tendrils and restraint-straps, and the tee-pods secreted adhesive, prevented more than the slightest squirming wiggle. And that squirming did not interfere with the tickling at all.
Time went by. To the ten volunteer-victims, suffering through the tickle torments of the tee-pods, it seemed like an eternity, but by the chronometers it was 57 minutes and 12 seconds when the first tee-pod became satiated. Its tickling tentacles went limp, but its ribbon-like tendrils continued to hold the victim helpless. She gasped and wept and relief as the manipulator unit whirred over, plucking her from her couch and taking her away. A minute later, another tee-pod relaxed its tickle-tentacles and another victim was removed. And another, and another. At 65 minutes and 27 seconds, the manipulator removed the last victim from her couch.
#
"You damn civvie witch," Kathy cursed her cellmate wearily. She and Emily lay on two narrow bunks, too exhausted to stand, almost too exhausted to drink the water and nutrient solutions dispensed by the tubes hanging near their heads. The tickling hadn't ended with the satiation of the first set of tee-pods: The tickle-creatures had fallen away when sprayed with a vitamin/sedative mixture, and the women were released to stretch, drink water, and relieve themselves. But then a fresh set of tee-pods had splatted against their nude bodies, and had wrapped their ribbon-tendrils to render the women helpless once again. The manipulators returned them to their restraint-couches, and the tickling had resumed. It was only after the eighth set of tee-pods that the women had finally been allowed to stumble to their bunks, and locked in two to a cell.
"Hey, I'm going through the same thing," Emily answered with equal weariness. "If you want to wish your troubles on me, you've already got it."
"But you knew. You knew what was going to happen."
"Yes. For all the good it's done me here."
"Still, you know what this 'special project' is all about. The rest of us don't. So give."
"All right." With an effort, Emily raised her head and took a swallow of water. "All right," she repeated. "As you probably have guessed, this is a squidcat ship. In fact, it's the prison transport that the navy recently captured. We went through all the hardware on board, but that didn't get us much closer to figuring out how the squidcat alliance manages to break down the human prisoners it captures. And figuring that out was a high priority down at earth-side headquarters. So they authorized this little experiment, where we volunteers go through the squidcat prisoner treatment in order to find out just how it works."
"It's obvious 'how it works,'" the sergeant said derisively. "It's tickle-torture."
"Yes and no," the black woman answered. "Tickling, your 'tickle-torture,' can't produce the effects we've seen in the squidcat prisoners we've recovered. That was one of the first theories tested. No, there's another factor involved, probably psionic since we know that the tee-pods are psi-active organisms. So we volunteers are given to the tee-pods, and then monitored. The data is recorded, cross-referenced, analyzed, and sliced, diced, and deep-fried. Hopefully we'll be able to figure out just what's going on, and how to counter it."
"Lovely. But what I want to know how long this experiment of yours is going to last. You did say this was your own idea, didn't you?"
"For my sins, my own personal brainstorm. But I don't know how long its going to last. When I volunteered, I was cut out of the planning, and the duration hadn't been decided yet. It could be three days, it could be two weeks, or it could be...even....longer..." And with those words, Dr. Emily Harkess fell asleep.
"Longer." Sergeant Kathy Smith cursed for the length of three whole breaths, dredging up foul vocabulary from marine traditions stretching back to salt-water navies. "Longer," she repeated with her fourth breath. And then she too fell asleep.
#
The next morning the ten women lined up, still nude, with ten tee-pods lying inert on the deck before them. "Now hear this," the announcement boomed. "Marines and space-crew who wish to opt out may do so without prejudice."
"Yeah, right," one of the women said.
"An opportunity to opt out will be given before the start of each day's investigations," the booming voice continued. "Those who are willing to continue will now step forward and pick up the tee-pod before them." Then a new voice came over the speakers:
"Dr. Emily Harkess," it said. "The Admiral wishes to inform you that you will not be permitted to opt out unless all the other volunteers have done so as well."
Emily clasped her hands behind her to keep them from shaking, and called out: "I'm not quitting. This study is too important to discontinue now." But she made no move toward the tee-pod in front of her.
Silence hung in the air as the ten nude females shifted uneasily. Finally a woman with a strongly oriental appearance spoke up: "Navy may be too chicken to go on," she said as she stepped forward. "But Marines are too tough to wimp out." When she picked up the tee-pod, it immediately unraveled, wrapping her in its ribbon-tendrils. A manipulator whirred forward and carried her off to the restraint couches. One by one, the other women then followed suit, and within three minutes all ten were lying in their couches, squirming and laughing as the tee-pods tickled them.
END OF PART ONE.
Part 2 to follow...
Edit: here
Last edited:
