waterman
TMF Regular
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2006
- Messages
- 218
- Points
- 43
The Caribbean Sea glittered under the morning sun, but Grinoa Island did not smile.
Its white beaches and wind-bent palms were a deceptive shell: behind the postcard façade, the island—known to the natives as Isla Risas—was a world of tension and fear.
Colonel Alejandro Moduño, a man of iron, ruled with a regime sustained by three pillars: Soviet support, ruthless intelligence, and terror. In the plazas of the capital, Puerto Grinoa, his uniformed effigy smiled from propaganda posters, surrounded by slogans of loyalty. But among the people, in the markets and in the villages hidden in the jungle, that smile twisted into murmurs of hatred.
The Souriants had been fighting for years, striking military installations, sabotaging convoys, terrorizing the regime’s loyalists. Their symbol was the grinning purple mask of their leader, Masque Solange. No one knew her face, and that made her more powerful. She was a laughing shadow, a phantom who appeared and disappeared, leaving behind the marks of fire and blood.
One humid night, while crickets screamed in the jungle and dogs barked along the military perimeter, the phantom fell. A tip, a betrayal well paid, and Masque Solange was captured.
They brought her in chains to Puerto Grinoa, into the underground prison the locals called La Boca del Diablo. It was a massive building, raised on colonial foundations, where sweat dripped along the walls and the air reeked of rusted iron.
When the military technicians tried to force open the mask, they discovered the trick: a mechanism linked to the jaw, primed to explode and reduce the prisoner’s face to ash if tampered with. A cruel yet ingenious device. Only a natural jaw movement, one not born of pain—like the act of laughter—could disarm the trap.
But laughter, for the Souriants, was sacred. It was never wasted. It was said to be a gift of the ancient god Chat Souriant, who had taught the island’s natives to laugh even in the face of death. The rebels guarded the secret cultivation of the “flowers of laughter,” a rare species whose pollen produced powerful euphoric effects. Moduño’s regime had turned it into a lucrative trade, smuggling the substance as a recreational drug to wealthy Western countries. The money had flowed directly into his coffers, but the Souriants had struck back, destroying the main crops and inflicting heavy financial losses on his rule.
Moduño understood at once that ordinary methods would not suffice. He needed to know who Masque Solange was, in order to strike not only at her, but at her family and her friends. She had to become a symbol, not a martyr. Yet the rebel was infamous for her iron will.
He needed someone capable of profaning the sacred, of bending a will through paradox. So he summoned a silent ally.
She arrived two days later on an old Soviet cargo plane. Her name was Bondarenko, but no one ever called her that. For the Americans she was a ghost, for the Soviets a weapon: for all, a woman with no face and no homeland. Her nickname, Agent Bondage, traveled through embassies and intelligence offices like a whisper. Not because she used chains, but because she bound the souls of her prisoners as well as their bodies.
She was tall, lean, her straight black hair falling neatly over her shoulders. She wore black gloves and carried a leather case. When she set it down on the interrogation table, the metallic thud echoed like a gunshot.
Inside were instruments that at first glance looked harmless: feathers, thin brushes, bamboo sticks, silk cords. Toys. But Moduño, watching from behind the interrogation room’s glass wall, felt at once that in her hands they were anything but innocent.
Bondarenko spoke little. Only one sentence, in a calm, steady voice:
— Pain can be mastered. Laughter cannot.
The interrogation chamber was small, with peeling walls and a flickering neon light. A steel table stood in the center, two chairs, chains at the wrists and ankles. The air smelled of mold and smoke.
Masque Solange sat motionless, the purple mask grinning under the cold light. Her face was immutable, but her body betrayed the tension: rigid shoulders, clenched hands, slow, deliberate breaths.
Agent Bondage entered without looking at her directly. She took her time to light a cigarette, inhaled, blew out the smoke. Then she opened the briefcase and pulled out a feather. White, soft, she twirled it between her fingers as if it were a blade.
“It looks ridiculous, doesn’t it?” she said. “But this is how walls crumble.”
She bent down and brushed the tip of the feather against the prisoner’s neck, just beneath the edge of the mask. A barely perceptible touch.
Masque Solange made no sound, but her shoulders stiffened, a tremor running down her spine. It was an involuntary reflex, impossible to suppress.
Bondarenko tilted her head, like a doctor taking notes. She continued, slowly, passing the feather under the chin, then along the arm. Every movement was measured, never excessive, never violent. Only constant, insistent, inevitable.
The woman held her breath. Every fiber of her body screamed to react, to jerk away, to resist. But she knew that admitting her opponent’s dominance would be her downfall.
Time stretched. Seconds became minutes, minutes seemed like hours. Bondarenko never stopped, alternating the rhythm: sudden quick strokes followed by long pauses, during which the prisoner could only wait, tense, for the torment to return.
The silence was broken only by the sounds of her restrained spasms: a ragged breath, a cough trying to mask a sharper sound.
Masque Solange’s body began to betray her. Her wrists bent against the cuffs, her feet tapped weakly against the floor. Her tightly pressed lips vibrated, while a thin stream of compressed air slipped between her teeth.
Each brushstroke accumulated inside her like water behind a dam.
Finally, it happened. A short, high-pitched sob escaped before she could stifle it.
Bondarenko raised an eyebrow. She didn’t speed up, didn’t show impatience. She only changed position: this time she slid the feather beneath the armpits, with quick, intermittent movements.
The combat shirt, already torn in several places, offered no protection to her vulnerable zones. Agent Bondage knew every point on human skin where a simple touch could not be controlled. The feather was just a scout, a tool to identify where the body lost its grip over itself. But it would not end there.
Bondarenko never took off her gloves during work, and for a reason. Their surface was rough, with countless micro-grooves designed to attack the hollows of the armpits with targeted, light but relentless touches. No wounds, only a tickling ready to erupt.
The woman twisted, spasms coursing through her arched body. Her legs jerked in the straps, her muscles trembled.
“Feel free to laugh, my masked friend,” Bondarenko told her with her thick Eastern accent. “It might be the last time you ever do.”
“You’d like that, slave of the military swine,” the prisoner replied with disdain. But that was exactly what Agent Bondage expected to hear. If Masque Solange needed to distract herself with defiance, it meant her body was not as made of steel as they claimed.
Bondarenko was in no hurry. Silence was her ally. She let her gaze travel slowly over the prisoner and bent down toward her feet, her gloved hands moving with surgical calm.
“Would you like to get more comfortable, dear?” she whispered with a syrupy voice, while without waiting for an answer she proceeded to unlace and pull off her leather boots, worn from years of marches in the jungle, night escapes, and ambushes. The acrid smell of sweat-soaked leather mixed with the stale air of the cell.
Masque Solange clenched her jaw beneath the mask. Despite the fury surging inside her, she uttered not a word. She longed to kick, but bound as she was to the chair, she could do nothing but endure that display of power.
Bondarenko laid her fingers on the bare feet with an almost affectionate delicacy. It was not a violent gesture, but a calculated one. The fingers moved slowly at first, hesitantly, as if to gauge sensitivity. Then they began to move more decisively, exploring the lines of the sole, the curves of the arch, the edges of the toes.
Masque Solange’s body stiffened. A tremor ran through her legs, her shoulders jolted. She could not stop the reflex; it was pure nervous instinct. A thread of compressed air escaped her throat, half-choked, half-strangled.
Bondarenko stopped, as if studying the reaction, then resumed. This time with more rhythm, alternating light strokes with quicker pressures, until the gesture turned into a crescendo that shredded the prisoner’s concentration.
Solange bent backward in the chair, spasms shaking her body. A strangled moan burst from her clenched lips. Her breathing grew irregular, broken.
Then came the coup de grâce: Agent Bondage withdrew her fingers and pulled a thin feather from the briefcase. She rolled it between her fingertips, studying it like a surgeon studies a scalpel. And without delay, she slid it along the already tormented feet.
“Ahaha… gasp… is that all you’ve got?”
Bondarenko was not satisfied. The laugh she had pried from Masque Solange was only the beginning, a taste of the collapse she was seeking. She pulled from her briefcase a fine-bristled brush, long and flexible, like one a painter would use for detail work. She spun it between her fingers, pleased, and leaned down again toward the prisoner’s feet.
The feather had already left fertile ground: reddened skin, nerves in flames, sensitivity exposed. The brush, barely touching, unleashed an even more violent reaction. Solange jolted, the veins in her neck swollen, her breath shattered. The laughter came quickly this time, a mix of rage and despair that echoed against the walls.
“Resist, if you can,” murmured Bondarenko with glacial calm. The brush slid beneath her fingers, across the folds of skin, into the most hidden and vulnerable points. Each stroke was a strike delivered with surgical precision. Solange threw her head back, hair cascading over the chair, her torso shaken by uncontrollable convulsions.
“A-ahhh! N-no… ahahahah—hahhh! Stop! Ahahahah—!”
Her mind splintered between two extremes: fury, pure hatred toward her tormentor, and the impossibility of halting her body’s reflexes. Each new burst of laughter was like a betrayal of her own strength, a signal that the discipline forged through years of guerrilla warfare and faith was crumbling.
“Nnnhhh—ahahahhahahhh! Bitch! I… I won’t… ahahhhhhh—!”
When Agent Bondage sensed the woman’s body nearing its limit, she changed tools. She drew out two thin bamboo rods, polished, producing a sharp crack when she struck them together. She used them as extensions of her fingers, tapping and scratching along the sides of the feet, climbing up toward the calves. The results were immediate.
“AAAAhhhhh—hahahahhhhhh! My God! Don’t—ahahhhhhh! I can’t—ahahahhh!”
Masque Solange screamed out a laugh that tore from her throat, high-pitched and almost unnatural. She writhed in the chair, the ropes binding her creaking under the strain. Every fiber of her body sought escape, but there was none: the tickling was an invisible net tightening from within, against which there was no physical resistance.
Her eyes, behind the violet mask, overflowed with tears. She could no longer distinguish pain from laughter, rage from surrender. Everything fused into a chaotic whirlwind that shredded her nerves.
“No—ahhhhHHHHhh—ahahahhahhh! Never! You’ll never—ahahhhh! Go to heh heh heh heh!!”
Bondarenko spoke almost no more. She only observed, studied, as though deciphering a secret code etched in Solange’s bodily reactions. When at last she set aside the rods, she produced from the briefcase a slender cord with tiny silk tassels at the end. She twirled it slowly, making it whistle through the air, then let it glide along the feet and ankles with a touch so faint it was almost imperceptible.
The effect was devastating. After the brutal assault of the bamboo, that gentle contact was like a spark in a field already drenched in gasoline. Solange let out a broken, sobbing laugh that shifted into a strangled cry of helplessness. Her body trembled, chest heaving, hands clenched into desperate fists.
“Ahhhh! Ahahhhhhh—hahhhh! I hate you! I haaaate youuu—ahahhhhhh!”
The mask reacted: a faint glow ran along its edges, as though sensing that the tension in her jaw was collapsing. Just one more step, one more minute of this torment, and the secret of Masque Solange would be revealed.
The violet shell fell onto the table with a metallic clatter, rolling to the edge. The artificial grin remained fixed, but the real face emerged.
Moduño turned pale.
The woman convulsing with laughter, doubled over, eyes swollen with tears, was Angela—his daughter.
Angela, the child he had watched grow in the halls of the military villa. Angela, who had listened to his lessons of discipline. Angela, who had turned her back on her father to become the face of a revolution.
“Angela! You… you…” exclaimed the colonel, bursting into the cell.
“Hff, hff… surprised, Father? How do they say it… raising a viper in your breast?”
“This… this changes nothing. You’ll be treated like any other prisoner. You will reveal the location of those Souriant swine. We will be the ones to… ah aha… to laugh last.”
“You seem ah… ah ah… in a good moo—oh oh ho!” says Angent Bondage.
“Did it never occur to you, Colonel, that I wanted to be captured? To have you and your junta all in one place? The ‘flowers of laughter’ we hid—we’ve made good use of them. I only needed to stall you, while they gained access to the ventilation ducts…”
She spoke slowly, even as masked figures with violet feline visages, clearly like her immune to the sacred flowers’ effluvium, slipped into the cell to free her.
But the colonel, Agent Bondage, and the others were in no condition to listen, too busy laughing uncontrollably as the mystical blossoms’ particles flooded their lungs. And the worst of it was that they found the situation anything but funny.
