This isn't as long as I originally intended, but all in all, I'm happy with the tradeoff I made.
Part 1: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...-Part-1-Michelle-s-Crucifixion-m-f-Upper-Body
Part 2: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...Jenna-s-Physical-Therapy-mf-f-Upper-Body-Feet
-------------------
“Give me the purse, sweetie, and you won’t get hurt.”
Bella stirred on the floor of the white room, her fingers twitching.
“That’s it, slowl―kkkk!” The non-descript mugger cut off as a fist smashed into his Adam’s apple.
Bella’s eyes fluttered half-open as the memory began to slip away.
Knuckles still stinging, she took a chance and aimed a high kick, thankfully connecting with the man’s nose. The inside of her throat tore with a scream she hadn’t remembered making. And then….
Bella sat up and touched the side of her neck. There’d been a prick there, though she didn’t feel it now. She’d felt weightless, spiraling into unconsciousness, into someone’s arms….
Oh no. She quickly drew in her legs and stood. It was…extremely white around her. It was difficult to tell dimension, but the floor seemed to be about 10’ by 15’. Nothing special. It was the height that daunted her. She couldn’t tell where the ceiling was for sure, but a single window was easy enough to spot, high up as it was. Figures stood at the window, but she couldn’t make out any of their details.
But they could probably see her. In response, she slapped at her legs and felt denim. Upper body, cloth. She was still fully clothed. Good. That was very good.
And now. With that aside.
“HEY!!” she yelled up at the ants behind the glass. “MOTHERFUCKERS! LET ME OUT OF HERE!”
The echo was minimal. Bella remained staring up, no less defiant in her demeanor, but her heart picked up its pace. There was some sound control, there had to be. Which probably meant, even if there were anyone outside the walls, they wouldn’t be able to hear a goddamn thing she said.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” she continued. “IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING, COME DOWN AND I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU, GOATFUCKERS!!”
Nothing. She wasn’t even sure if they moved up there. Bella growled in frustration and started shoving at the walls. She definitely had some muscle on her, but there were no tricks to these walls. They felt like plaster, if a little stronger. They weren’t going to give, and she was only going to hurt herself if she tried to punch or kick through them. Tae Kwon Do would not help her here.
She clutched the roots of her frizzy brown hair and paced the room, trying to think. The drugging, the tall and clean room―this didn’t seem like some random rapist or murderer. What, then? Had she been targeted? Were they after her father’s business secrets? That’s all she could think. There was nothing special about her. She was just a poor law student. She considered yelling that she would never talk, but then thought better of it. No need to clue them in on something they didn’t know.
Then they had to tell her what they wanted! Some angle she could use! Bella started kicking at the walls anyway, making sure to use the balls of her feet, while cursing some more for good measure. That was, until she heard a clang.
She stopped. Kicked again. Clang. Her heart leaping, she squatted and ran her hand over the area. Yes…even down here, it was hard to see, but there was an arch-shaped plate at this point in the wall. If she were standing, it would come up to her knees. Nowhere near large enough for her to fit through, even if it led anywhere. Still, it was the best lead she had so far.
Before she could put much thought into opening it, it did on its own. The plate slid up into the wall with a whine, startling her back onto her ass. Instinct propelled her to her feet, but she never took her eyes from the opening. Something was standing in the entryway.
A little person waddled into the room…or a cross between a person and a toy. It was certainly the size of a toy, only taking up a portion of the small archway. Bright yellow in color and rail-thin, it wore a little shirt, a pair of shorts, and a silly expression on its face. Its wide, iris-less eyes faced two random directions, and a pink tongue stuck out from its smiling arc of a mouth. The panel slid shut, leaving only the visitor for Bella to regard.
That’s kinda cute… she thought, though not without wariness. It could be a bomb or something to gas her. So, she placed her hands on her knees and smiled toothily. If nothing else, this would satisfy anyone watching if they were looking for some benign reaction. “Hey, there,” she said with far more cheeriness than was characteristic of her.
It didn’t respond, might not even have a mouth to open, but it continued to approach at an easy pace. When it got close, she still didn’t move. If this was a big enough bomb, then it didn’t matter where she was in the room. And why gas her if they’d already kidnapped her?
Once it was right at her feet, it jumped onto her shin. Bella yelled in surprise and kicked her leg, but it held on and even launched itself further upward onto her knee. At that point, it was near enough her hand that she swatted it. In the short moment she made contact, the little body felt like rubber but with a lot more give. As soon as she hit it, the thing blinked to blue, and she swore that its smile changed to a frown. It seemed to fold in on itself, then disappeared with a POP. Bella just stood there with arms out, confused but crestfallen despite herself. She hadn’t meant to kill it…she’d just been caught off guard.
Then the same panel slid open again, louder than before, revealing an identical little person. It traipsed the same path with the same speed. Were these…copies? Machines? In any case, this time, Bella reached down and picked it up, bringing it to her face. It had basically no weight whatsoever. “Hey, little guy. What―?”
She yelped again as something clutched her calf. Her fist tightened in her surprise, which caused the thing in her hand to turn blue and POP like the last one. She craned her neck to look at her calf just in time to spy a third figure leap from there to the back of her thigh. “Ahhh!” Her leg buckled entirely outside her control, and she grabbed the thing, sending it the way of its siblings. POP.
Bella backed up to one of the narrower walls, which was perpendicular to the fifteen-foot-wide wall that had the panel built in. This allowed her the perspective to see a second panel open directly across from the first. The panel hadn’t opened more loudly before. Rather, two of them had opened at the exact same time. And now, two little figures came out of each aperture.
What the fuck was she supposed to do? How many of these were they going to send in? She could just stomp on them all, sure, but what was the goal here, exactly? What would they do if she were to just let them climb on her? She wasn’t sure if it was wise to find out. So, when the quartet got close, she took a small leap over them and jogged to the other side of the room. When she turned, she found that they were still coming for her, but they had turned blue! They plodded along until she could see their faces again, which confirmed that they did indeed frown when they were blue. They seemed so sad. Well, that was too bad. Getting crawled on was just…weird.
Bella did the same trick as before, jumping over them to avoid them. They all turned again…then sped up. Unfair. She picked up her pace as well, no longer taking the care to jump. If they didn’t want to get stepped on, then they shouldn’t be chasing her. Ultimately, she did step on all of them, except for the one that made it to her leg, from which she swept it away.
“WHAT IS THIS SICK GAME?” she shouted up at her spectators. Seriously, this was like a really goofy horror movie. Their only answer was the movement of the panels, from each of which four little men poured this time―already blue, already fast. With eight of them total, they were on her in no time, hiking up her legs like they were gym ropes. One glommed onto each of her hamstrings at the same time, and just like that, she was on her knees. Her legs had simply put her there, and in so doing squashed the two figures as though in a vise.
As she tried to process the shock of the impact, several of them hooked onto the waist of her jeans. When they latched onto her own waist and her elbows jerked in instinctively (popping the offenders), she finally understood what was happening. The circumstances were so out-of-the ordinary that she hadn’t realized just what these sensations were.
Though pain was beginning to pulse in her knees, Bella smirked. And turned off the “switch.”
They kept crawling on her (even making her wince when one hung from her tit), but she didn’t jerk in response again. She wasn’t sure how long she had been able to pull this trick. It definitely hadn’t been in her arsenal a decade ago. But at some point, she’d just learned how to…turn off her ticklishness.
“Well, well,” she said as they continued to explore her body, tiny fingers wiggling in a far more explicit way. She chuckled, though not the way they obviously wanted. This didn’t give her the heebie-jeebies so much, now that she knew what they meant to do.
It didn’t take long for them to turn blue, one by one. Of course. They had one purpose, and it wasn’t going the way they thought it would. Damn it if she didn’t know what that was like. Slowly, they stopped moving again and curled up atop and next to her, as if they needed the heat from her body. Who knew? Maybe they did.
Bella looked up at the window again. She could feel their eyes from up there. They wanted something to happen here. She shouldn’t give them what they wanted. But if she held herself to that, wouldn’t they be dictating her actions anyway? “Fuck off,” she muttered. “It’s my choice.”
The “switch” went back on, and she giggled and jerked to signal to the little guys. And boy, did it work. They leapt at her immediately. Poking around for more weak spots on her legs. Grabbing at her fleshy sides. Scaling up her back and shoulders and into her hair. It all sent her into a tizzy, genuinely writhing and struggling to keep open access to her body. But it was because she chose to. That made all the difference.
With difficulty, Bella reached out to her feet as her sides were under attack and unlaced her shoes. “M-might ahahas well save y―kkk―you the trouhouble!” she said as she painstakingly bared her feet. Once she’d finished, they soon discovered there were buttons on her soles to make her kick, which did cost some of them their lives. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t keep her arms out, either, and other intrepid pioneers, especially those who ventured into her armpits, soon met their end as well.
“Sahahaharry!” she laughed. Her involuntary motions were depleting her new friends fast. But they were replaced with more. And more. They swarmed over her legs in packs, slowing down her kicks bit by bit. They swelled into the spaces between her arms and sides and spilled onto her arms themselves. They were so light, it didn’t make much of a difference. But that little difference compounded. Dozens, maybe a hundred piled onto her legs, gifting a few lucky members with her gradually immobile soles. A similar line of front-seaters frantically clutched at her upper body while others in the crowd kept her arms far and splayed.
Held down. Now this, she loved. Bella began to laugh heartily and buck, pounding her fists. The plucky soldiers seemed to sense which of them were causing that reaction the most, because they quickly came to concentrate on her worst spots. They scoured her feet as though for gemstones, sifting through her arches and performing excavation in her toes. They flooded into her shirt as the appeal of her bare, lightly browned skin beckoned so that it eventually gathered around her neck anyway. They pressed deep into her flanks and hollow underarms, massaging into the muscles. It was actually prompting her to try and move her arms above the crowd and to her sides for some respite, but this prompted them in turn to charge more of their number with lying on her arms directly.
“Nooohohohoho!!” she cried helplessly, though she hardly meant it. Short of breath and blushing furiously, Bella struggled fitfully but relished the pressure on her limbs. The laughter poured out, keeping a smile plastered on her face. Not only were her ticklers bright, bright yellow, but the ones directly on her heaving sides and bouncing belly had their eyes closed in simple downward arcs. Content and happy.
Bella caught sight of the window again. They’d wanted a show, and they’d gotten it. But she suspected they also wanted to dismantle her. Bring her down, physically and otherwise. Break her.
In this, she had won.
--------------
“Well…this is unexpected,” admitted Jed.
He and his allies stood observing the unironically happy woman squirming below them. She had resisted when they took her, so they thought her well suited to the Gradual Physical Dominance Chamber. But in order to be truly suited, candidates needed to be inclined to fight to the bitter end. They had to have their vaunted ability slowly stripped away, all while too sensitive to surrender of their own accord.
“I don’t understand,” Kitty said, wearing something between a smirk and a pout on her face. “Her levels were just fine. She should have been losing it from the very start.”
“Your technology is incredible,” Jed answered. He sounded detached as he watched the subject. “But as much as we’d like to believe the brain is only the central cluster of nerves in the body, the person matters. Will matters. Mind over matter, as they say.”
Kitty glanced over at Ken. “Now what do you have to say about that, slugger?”
Ken didn’t answer. He stood bent next to them, having smushed his face and palms against the window. “I love her,” he croaked, his words muffled from the glass.
Kitty nodded sagely. “I know you do.” To Jed, she said, “If we can’t torture her, could we recruit her? I mean, she does like it.”
“‘Liking’ stimulation is one thing,” Jed replied. “Having an appreciation for the artistry is quite another. Not to mention a penchant for cruelty. We’ll continue our observations and decide accordingly.”
With that, Jed left them to their latest experiment and strolled down the adjoining metallic corridor. Window upon window arrayed both sides of the hallway, giving a birds-eye view of the trials being conducted (and endured) down below. It was much like walking on the upper level of a racquetball facility, except the rooms went considerably deeper and held far from uniform environments.
One, a dark cavern with only feeble, flickering lights. Without turning on the sound from the appropriate console, it seemed without activity except when a large arm or three would emerge to slap the cave wall, as though to stabilize a body just as large. Another held a desert with the illusion of infinite scope and horizon where a curvy, naked brunette ran from two robots, each of which held out a dozen winding tenacles with clamps on the ends. A third was plain with only a smattering of writhing limbs on the floor.
His contemplation was interrupted by a gliding figure intersecting with his path. “Ah, Konstantin!” he said brightly. “How go the sessions with Miss Neumann?”
The tall monk paused, momentarily deterred from whatever subject he had been intending to raise and trying to regain his bearings. Supremely focused and dedicated, this one, even to a fault. “Yes…yes, the ‘anime’ enthusiast,” he muttered. “Very well. Her cynicism is formidable, but given the opportunity to work uninterrupted, I believe I’ve all but eradicated it. Her assurances of faith are already frenetic, but they will soon be genuine.”
Jed gave a small bow of respect. He didn’t exactly peddle in the same beliefs, not even close…but to each his own. It was the cause they shared that mattered.
“That does bring me to another matter on my mind,” Konstantin went on.
“And that is?”
“When I received your call. I had been departing from some…unfinished business. I thought I might arrange to finish it, and that you could assist.”
Jed smiled. “I wondered when you would ask,” he said.
Part 1: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...-Part-1-Michelle-s-Crucifixion-m-f-Upper-Body
Part 2: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...Jenna-s-Physical-Therapy-mf-f-Upper-Body-Feet
-------------------
“Give me the purse, sweetie, and you won’t get hurt.”
Bella stirred on the floor of the white room, her fingers twitching.
“That’s it, slowl―kkkk!” The non-descript mugger cut off as a fist smashed into his Adam’s apple.
Bella’s eyes fluttered half-open as the memory began to slip away.
Knuckles still stinging, she took a chance and aimed a high kick, thankfully connecting with the man’s nose. The inside of her throat tore with a scream she hadn’t remembered making. And then….
Bella sat up and touched the side of her neck. There’d been a prick there, though she didn’t feel it now. She’d felt weightless, spiraling into unconsciousness, into someone’s arms….
Oh no. She quickly drew in her legs and stood. It was…extremely white around her. It was difficult to tell dimension, but the floor seemed to be about 10’ by 15’. Nothing special. It was the height that daunted her. She couldn’t tell where the ceiling was for sure, but a single window was easy enough to spot, high up as it was. Figures stood at the window, but she couldn’t make out any of their details.
But they could probably see her. In response, she slapped at her legs and felt denim. Upper body, cloth. She was still fully clothed. Good. That was very good.
And now. With that aside.
“HEY!!” she yelled up at the ants behind the glass. “MOTHERFUCKERS! LET ME OUT OF HERE!”
The echo was minimal. Bella remained staring up, no less defiant in her demeanor, but her heart picked up its pace. There was some sound control, there had to be. Which probably meant, even if there were anyone outside the walls, they wouldn’t be able to hear a goddamn thing she said.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” she continued. “IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING, COME DOWN AND I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU, GOATFUCKERS!!”
Nothing. She wasn’t even sure if they moved up there. Bella growled in frustration and started shoving at the walls. She definitely had some muscle on her, but there were no tricks to these walls. They felt like plaster, if a little stronger. They weren’t going to give, and she was only going to hurt herself if she tried to punch or kick through them. Tae Kwon Do would not help her here.
She clutched the roots of her frizzy brown hair and paced the room, trying to think. The drugging, the tall and clean room―this didn’t seem like some random rapist or murderer. What, then? Had she been targeted? Were they after her father’s business secrets? That’s all she could think. There was nothing special about her. She was just a poor law student. She considered yelling that she would never talk, but then thought better of it. No need to clue them in on something they didn’t know.
Then they had to tell her what they wanted! Some angle she could use! Bella started kicking at the walls anyway, making sure to use the balls of her feet, while cursing some more for good measure. That was, until she heard a clang.
She stopped. Kicked again. Clang. Her heart leaping, she squatted and ran her hand over the area. Yes…even down here, it was hard to see, but there was an arch-shaped plate at this point in the wall. If she were standing, it would come up to her knees. Nowhere near large enough for her to fit through, even if it led anywhere. Still, it was the best lead she had so far.
Before she could put much thought into opening it, it did on its own. The plate slid up into the wall with a whine, startling her back onto her ass. Instinct propelled her to her feet, but she never took her eyes from the opening. Something was standing in the entryway.
A little person waddled into the room…or a cross between a person and a toy. It was certainly the size of a toy, only taking up a portion of the small archway. Bright yellow in color and rail-thin, it wore a little shirt, a pair of shorts, and a silly expression on its face. Its wide, iris-less eyes faced two random directions, and a pink tongue stuck out from its smiling arc of a mouth. The panel slid shut, leaving only the visitor for Bella to regard.
That’s kinda cute… she thought, though not without wariness. It could be a bomb or something to gas her. So, she placed her hands on her knees and smiled toothily. If nothing else, this would satisfy anyone watching if they were looking for some benign reaction. “Hey, there,” she said with far more cheeriness than was characteristic of her.
It didn’t respond, might not even have a mouth to open, but it continued to approach at an easy pace. When it got close, she still didn’t move. If this was a big enough bomb, then it didn’t matter where she was in the room. And why gas her if they’d already kidnapped her?
Once it was right at her feet, it jumped onto her shin. Bella yelled in surprise and kicked her leg, but it held on and even launched itself further upward onto her knee. At that point, it was near enough her hand that she swatted it. In the short moment she made contact, the little body felt like rubber but with a lot more give. As soon as she hit it, the thing blinked to blue, and she swore that its smile changed to a frown. It seemed to fold in on itself, then disappeared with a POP. Bella just stood there with arms out, confused but crestfallen despite herself. She hadn’t meant to kill it…she’d just been caught off guard.
Then the same panel slid open again, louder than before, revealing an identical little person. It traipsed the same path with the same speed. Were these…copies? Machines? In any case, this time, Bella reached down and picked it up, bringing it to her face. It had basically no weight whatsoever. “Hey, little guy. What―?”
She yelped again as something clutched her calf. Her fist tightened in her surprise, which caused the thing in her hand to turn blue and POP like the last one. She craned her neck to look at her calf just in time to spy a third figure leap from there to the back of her thigh. “Ahhh!” Her leg buckled entirely outside her control, and she grabbed the thing, sending it the way of its siblings. POP.
Bella backed up to one of the narrower walls, which was perpendicular to the fifteen-foot-wide wall that had the panel built in. This allowed her the perspective to see a second panel open directly across from the first. The panel hadn’t opened more loudly before. Rather, two of them had opened at the exact same time. And now, two little figures came out of each aperture.
What the fuck was she supposed to do? How many of these were they going to send in? She could just stomp on them all, sure, but what was the goal here, exactly? What would they do if she were to just let them climb on her? She wasn’t sure if it was wise to find out. So, when the quartet got close, she took a small leap over them and jogged to the other side of the room. When she turned, she found that they were still coming for her, but they had turned blue! They plodded along until she could see their faces again, which confirmed that they did indeed frown when they were blue. They seemed so sad. Well, that was too bad. Getting crawled on was just…weird.
Bella did the same trick as before, jumping over them to avoid them. They all turned again…then sped up. Unfair. She picked up her pace as well, no longer taking the care to jump. If they didn’t want to get stepped on, then they shouldn’t be chasing her. Ultimately, she did step on all of them, except for the one that made it to her leg, from which she swept it away.
“WHAT IS THIS SICK GAME?” she shouted up at her spectators. Seriously, this was like a really goofy horror movie. Their only answer was the movement of the panels, from each of which four little men poured this time―already blue, already fast. With eight of them total, they were on her in no time, hiking up her legs like they were gym ropes. One glommed onto each of her hamstrings at the same time, and just like that, she was on her knees. Her legs had simply put her there, and in so doing squashed the two figures as though in a vise.
As she tried to process the shock of the impact, several of them hooked onto the waist of her jeans. When they latched onto her own waist and her elbows jerked in instinctively (popping the offenders), she finally understood what was happening. The circumstances were so out-of-the ordinary that she hadn’t realized just what these sensations were.
Though pain was beginning to pulse in her knees, Bella smirked. And turned off the “switch.”
They kept crawling on her (even making her wince when one hung from her tit), but she didn’t jerk in response again. She wasn’t sure how long she had been able to pull this trick. It definitely hadn’t been in her arsenal a decade ago. But at some point, she’d just learned how to…turn off her ticklishness.
“Well, well,” she said as they continued to explore her body, tiny fingers wiggling in a far more explicit way. She chuckled, though not the way they obviously wanted. This didn’t give her the heebie-jeebies so much, now that she knew what they meant to do.
It didn’t take long for them to turn blue, one by one. Of course. They had one purpose, and it wasn’t going the way they thought it would. Damn it if she didn’t know what that was like. Slowly, they stopped moving again and curled up atop and next to her, as if they needed the heat from her body. Who knew? Maybe they did.
Bella looked up at the window again. She could feel their eyes from up there. They wanted something to happen here. She shouldn’t give them what they wanted. But if she held herself to that, wouldn’t they be dictating her actions anyway? “Fuck off,” she muttered. “It’s my choice.”
The “switch” went back on, and she giggled and jerked to signal to the little guys. And boy, did it work. They leapt at her immediately. Poking around for more weak spots on her legs. Grabbing at her fleshy sides. Scaling up her back and shoulders and into her hair. It all sent her into a tizzy, genuinely writhing and struggling to keep open access to her body. But it was because she chose to. That made all the difference.
With difficulty, Bella reached out to her feet as her sides were under attack and unlaced her shoes. “M-might ahahas well save y―kkk―you the trouhouble!” she said as she painstakingly bared her feet. Once she’d finished, they soon discovered there were buttons on her soles to make her kick, which did cost some of them their lives. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t keep her arms out, either, and other intrepid pioneers, especially those who ventured into her armpits, soon met their end as well.
“Sahahaharry!” she laughed. Her involuntary motions were depleting her new friends fast. But they were replaced with more. And more. They swarmed over her legs in packs, slowing down her kicks bit by bit. They swelled into the spaces between her arms and sides and spilled onto her arms themselves. They were so light, it didn’t make much of a difference. But that little difference compounded. Dozens, maybe a hundred piled onto her legs, gifting a few lucky members with her gradually immobile soles. A similar line of front-seaters frantically clutched at her upper body while others in the crowd kept her arms far and splayed.
Held down. Now this, she loved. Bella began to laugh heartily and buck, pounding her fists. The plucky soldiers seemed to sense which of them were causing that reaction the most, because they quickly came to concentrate on her worst spots. They scoured her feet as though for gemstones, sifting through her arches and performing excavation in her toes. They flooded into her shirt as the appeal of her bare, lightly browned skin beckoned so that it eventually gathered around her neck anyway. They pressed deep into her flanks and hollow underarms, massaging into the muscles. It was actually prompting her to try and move her arms above the crowd and to her sides for some respite, but this prompted them in turn to charge more of their number with lying on her arms directly.
“Nooohohohoho!!” she cried helplessly, though she hardly meant it. Short of breath and blushing furiously, Bella struggled fitfully but relished the pressure on her limbs. The laughter poured out, keeping a smile plastered on her face. Not only were her ticklers bright, bright yellow, but the ones directly on her heaving sides and bouncing belly had their eyes closed in simple downward arcs. Content and happy.
Bella caught sight of the window again. They’d wanted a show, and they’d gotten it. But she suspected they also wanted to dismantle her. Bring her down, physically and otherwise. Break her.
In this, she had won.
--------------
“Well…this is unexpected,” admitted Jed.
He and his allies stood observing the unironically happy woman squirming below them. She had resisted when they took her, so they thought her well suited to the Gradual Physical Dominance Chamber. But in order to be truly suited, candidates needed to be inclined to fight to the bitter end. They had to have their vaunted ability slowly stripped away, all while too sensitive to surrender of their own accord.
“I don’t understand,” Kitty said, wearing something between a smirk and a pout on her face. “Her levels were just fine. She should have been losing it from the very start.”
“Your technology is incredible,” Jed answered. He sounded detached as he watched the subject. “But as much as we’d like to believe the brain is only the central cluster of nerves in the body, the person matters. Will matters. Mind over matter, as they say.”
Kitty glanced over at Ken. “Now what do you have to say about that, slugger?”
Ken didn’t answer. He stood bent next to them, having smushed his face and palms against the window. “I love her,” he croaked, his words muffled from the glass.
Kitty nodded sagely. “I know you do.” To Jed, she said, “If we can’t torture her, could we recruit her? I mean, she does like it.”
“‘Liking’ stimulation is one thing,” Jed replied. “Having an appreciation for the artistry is quite another. Not to mention a penchant for cruelty. We’ll continue our observations and decide accordingly.”
With that, Jed left them to their latest experiment and strolled down the adjoining metallic corridor. Window upon window arrayed both sides of the hallway, giving a birds-eye view of the trials being conducted (and endured) down below. It was much like walking on the upper level of a racquetball facility, except the rooms went considerably deeper and held far from uniform environments.
One, a dark cavern with only feeble, flickering lights. Without turning on the sound from the appropriate console, it seemed without activity except when a large arm or three would emerge to slap the cave wall, as though to stabilize a body just as large. Another held a desert with the illusion of infinite scope and horizon where a curvy, naked brunette ran from two robots, each of which held out a dozen winding tenacles with clamps on the ends. A third was plain with only a smattering of writhing limbs on the floor.
His contemplation was interrupted by a gliding figure intersecting with his path. “Ah, Konstantin!” he said brightly. “How go the sessions with Miss Neumann?”
The tall monk paused, momentarily deterred from whatever subject he had been intending to raise and trying to regain his bearings. Supremely focused and dedicated, this one, even to a fault. “Yes…yes, the ‘anime’ enthusiast,” he muttered. “Very well. Her cynicism is formidable, but given the opportunity to work uninterrupted, I believe I’ve all but eradicated it. Her assurances of faith are already frenetic, but they will soon be genuine.”
Jed gave a small bow of respect. He didn’t exactly peddle in the same beliefs, not even close…but to each his own. It was the cause they shared that mattered.
“That does bring me to another matter on my mind,” Konstantin went on.
“And that is?”
“When I received your call. I had been departing from some…unfinished business. I thought I might arrange to finish it, and that you could assist.”
Jed smiled. “I wondered when you would ask,” he said.
