Jaynin
4th Level Red Feather
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2003
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Hyperkek, omegalel.
I feel like I should say something, but nothing particularly comes to mind.
---
With a grunt, Zyl whooshed through the air, lifting her feet up this time to avoid the bog full of tentacles ready to snare her ankles. The previous attempt at clearing this trap had ended ignominiously when her feet had dragged through the bog, letting the vines tangle and snare her ankles, and the momentum of the vine she had been swinging from tore it out of her grasp, leaving her face-down in the shallow, boggy water and splashing madly as vines exploited her barely-clothed body. Fortunately, as she had discovered, the vines were magically animated but otherwise just vines, and could be torn and pulled apart with brute strength, so she had been able to free herself, scramble out of the bog, and back up the hill to attempt this obstacle again without having to invoke the charm of surrender on her necklace.
Zylinde had learned the hard way that invoking this easy escape too readily could cause problems of its own, because it sent her all the way back to the beginning, and forced her to go through the traps a second time, or third time, or fourth time. While some traps became easy to pass once she knew what to look for, like the first island’s vine snares or the fourth island’s pollen-spewing flowers, the ones that were a challenge of physical ability, like the slippery, mossy log between the second and third islands, had to be conquered anew with each surrender. Some traps, like these grabby vines, could be escaped and the trap attempted again without giving up, but others could put her in an inescapable situation, or cause lasting effects that returning to the beginning seemed to dispel. While she would never admit this to Arishna, the floating projection of the succubus who followed her everywhere and offered very irritating commentary to the onlookers, the traps were annoying, embarrassing, and infuriating, but they were not outright unfair or unbeatable. So far, anyway.
“Fantastic!” Arishna proclaimed, as Zyl cleared the bog, landed on the other side, and dropped to her hands and knees to inspect the underside of the wooden bridge that linked this ninth island to the tenth and final island. One of the twin bridges that spanned islands six and seven had no support underneath of it, gave way when she stepped on it, and forced a restart just as she’d felt momentum starting to gather, plunging her towards the water full of its wholly unfair tickle fish and aquatic tentacle bullshit. “After a rough start, our challenger is making excellent time towards clearing the lake area, and might come away from Day 1 with a course clear under her belt!”
“Aside from the stupid trap in the water, none of your crap has been all that hard to get past. Just sneaky,” Zyl snorted, seeing nothing suspicious under the bridge, but bouncing on her toes, taking a few deep breaths, and clearing the wooden span with three quick, light steps.
“The water is supposed to be a penalty,” Arishna replied with a grin, floating over the gap to join Zyl on the tenth island. “You aren’t supposed to go in it. That’s why it’s designed to be unbeatable. The longer you stay in there, the more ticklish you get until you get out~ there’s no point in letting you cheat past the obstacles, now is there?” The succubus cleared her throat and flung her arms to the sky, spread out wide, and proclaimed: “And now, onto the final island! If Zyl can get through this trap without giving up, that will be a stage clear for her! Everyone, show her how much support she’s got when she makes it out the other side!” In response to Arishna’s words, dozens of the sparkling little scrying spheres that floated near-invisibly in the air gathered around the final obstacle, while Zyl appraised it with a frown.
It was a sheer face of dark brown rock, polished artificially smooth, that took up the entire island’s width and most of its length. An experimental touch to its surface also revealed that it was slick, as if coated in some kind of oil, to discourage climbing. The only apparent way through was a small, half-circular opening cut into the very bottom of the cliff, through which Zyl would need to crawl. Small enough that she’d have to crawl on her belly, all but pulling and pushing herself along with fingertips and toes. She got down and peered into the opening to inspect it, and it seemed to be just a straight tunnel with light showing through from the other side. “Something’s going to come and tickle me while I’m in here, isn’t it?” It was hardly a question, but Arishna answered anyway:
“Of course~” she replied with that sweet giggle, a giggle that Zyl was quickly learning indicated malicious anticipation, but it was no lie. The truth-detecting jewel set into the leather bracer on her left arm pulsed a gentle blue, although Zyl hardly needed confirmation of that. With a sigh, Zyl stretched her shoulders, arms, and upper back, knowing that she was going to need her upper body strength to pull herself along through here, and positioned herself belly-down on the grass, slowly starting to inch her way into the tunnel.
The grass at least continued through the tunnel, making a soft and vaguely ticklish swish-swish sound on her front as Zyl slowly inched her way through. First her arms went all the way in, and Zyl paused for a few seconds when her shoulders were at the entrance. It was thankfully wide enough to fit her frame through without squeezing, but she was waiting to see if something was going to try and grab her wrists and pull them in. Nothing yet. Next her shoulders, and shortly after her head. Then her torso, and her butt, then her thighs, the backs of her knees, and calves all slowly disappeared into the tunnel. From inside the tunnel, Zyl judged it was roughly three times her body length, so she’d spend a good deal of time completely hemmed in and probably completely vulnerable. What was most concerning here was that her position made it very hard to leverage her strength in pretty much any direction, so if she got tied up somehow, it was going to be hard to break the --
Her train of thought stopped abruptly. She had dug her toes into the grass and pushed forward at the same time she had pulled with her fingers, the same way she had been moving forward this whole time, but her feet seemed to get stuck on the entrance to the tunnel. “Oh, come on,” she hissed into the tunnel, unable to look back. “My feet can’t be THAT big. Goddess be damned --!” No, it wasn’t that her feet were too big. It was that something had wrapped around her ankles while she wasn’t paying attention, making them too wide to fit, and trapping her feet outside for the vines that she could not see growing out of the rock face, and headed directly for the lighter skin on the bottoms of her feet, conveniently stretched out by the pose she had adopted to push herself through the tunnel. These vines didn’t have floppy, fuzzy tips like the others, no. The tips of these vines were woody, scratchy. And they congregated on the spot just above the heel, tracing the curve where it met the sole.
“It’s time to give these big kickers of Zyl’s the love they deserve!” Arishna declared, and her commentary was barely affected by the indignant howl of laughter that filled the tunnel. “Perfectly framed by coiling vines, they’re helpless targets for these vine tips now scratching along her sensitive soles - ooh, look at her wriggle! I wonder how she’s doing in that tunnel, mm? I bet she’s absolutely hysterical~!” Some of the scrying crystals had gathered around Zyl’s trapped feet, watching closely the work of the vine tips. Like long, spindly wooden fingers, they scratched in random lines along her wide soles, tracing the lines of her feet at random, or focusing on one spot and going back and forth over it. Though it had started with just a few strokes around her heels, the sensation was growing, covering more of her feet as additional vines sprouted from the smooth rock face and added their scratchy strokes.
“I bet that’s just sooooo unbearably ticklish, isn’t it? Dark elves really do have some terribly sensitive feet, so I can’t tell you how much everyone has been anticipating you going through this trap! Look at how those strokes tease the very center of each sole, so taut and helpless with those toes dug into the soil. Right up along the spot just under the ball of your foot, too! Isn’t that maddening? Can’t do a thing to get your precious feet safe into that tunnel, look at them wiggle!” Zyl’s feet were indeed moving slightly. What was wrapped around her ankles was actually a single vine that had wound around them many times and was holding tight, although not impossibly so - her feet separated slightly, pulled against the opening in the rock face, kicked slightly up and down. “Let’s see how she’s dealing with this~!”
Arishna was able to simply float around the side of the obstacle and appear on the other side, looking down the exit tunnel. From here, Zyl’s laughter was more clearly audible, and her face shifting between hysterical giggling, teeth-gritted frustration, and brow-furrowed determination. “FUHHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHACK THIS SHIIIHHIHIIIIITTTT!” she screamed, her fingertips dug into the soil, squeezing handfuls of grass in frustration and shaking her head back and forth. Not being able to move seemed to be frustrating her immensely, and the glittering, sparkling scrying spheres lined the tunnel, getting close-up images of her expression, while the others behind her examined the ticklish torment of her feet in excruciating detail. “NYHHEHHEHEEHEHHEEHEH FUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHAHAA!!!” Zyl’s head shook back and forth, even going face-down into the surface for a few seconds as her body shook with ticklishness!
The only thing that Zyl could see as a positive out of this situation was that the scratchy fingerlike projections tickling her feet weren’t actual fingers. They didn’t have the accuracy nor ticklish pressure that an actual thinking being would -- “FUCKKKKKK!” she howled, trying to turn her head out of reflex and finding it stuck against the side of the tunnel, preventing her from looking back as… “WHAAAHAHAHAAHHAAHHAH WHAT THE SHIT ISHEHEHEHAHHAH THAT?!”
Something was sliding in between her toes. It was ticklish as hell, of course, like everything else crawling all over the sensitive skin on the bottoms of her feet, but there was something more to this. The ticklish-tingly feeling was covering up something else, which started out as muted, but quickly grew in intensity. It itched. It fucking itched. Her toes squirmed against one another to try and squeeze out that sensation, but it didn’t work, just spreading whatever oily bullshit that had been rubbed in between her toes further. Fuck. FUCK. “FUCK THAT SHIT IIIIHIIHIIITCHES!” Her hands clawed at the soil in a frenzy, but the only effective means of escape she had discovered so far was a painfully slow one. Slowly but surely, Zyl had been rubbing the vine around her ankles against the edge formed by the tunnel entrance, and she managed to feel the subtle snap, the slight lessening of the tension around her ankles, using it as a makeshift blade to cut the vines and get her feet inside of this goddess-damned hole.
“Ooooooh!” Arishna had gone back to comment on the state of Zyl’s feet, now veritably covered in stroking, scratching wooden vine tips, except for the one which positively dripped the poison ivy-like concoction being spread between her toes, resulting in a fierce itching which was noticeable in the way her toes flexed uncomfortably against one another. “Looks like Zyl has found a way to possibly break free and escape the foot tickle trap! Yes, looks like - ooh, there goes another one -- she’s in!” Arishna proclaimed, as the suffering feet slid inside of the tunnel a good six inches and then came to a stop, as the dark elf sought to catch her breath. “Let’s see how she fares against the rest of the trap now that she’s past the first part!”
Zylinde just barely caught what Arishna was saying, but it wasn’t terribly surprising. Of course there would be more than -- “Fucker! Off! Get…. GAH!” The vines, apparently able to burrow through the stone with ease, had turned their attention to the rest of her body, and the first touch was an annoying stroke against one of her long ears, followed by one that slipped beneath her bottoms and tickled into the crack of her ass. A sharp jerk forward resulted in a satisfying crack, as the spindly wooden projection snapped against the forward pressure and the tight waistband of her clothing, although it did result in the wooden part remaining caught between her ass cheeks, and it kind of… “Oh fuck no, no. No. You fucking FUCKKKKSSS rrrrrrghhhh!!!” That horrible, itchy, oily feeling was spreading in her sensitive crevice, and there was absolutely no amount of flexing or rubbing that would itch that place. There wasn’t even the option of embarrassingly scratching her own ass in front of goddess knew how many smirking demons - all she could do was endure it and -- “GYHEEEEEE!”
A sudden wiggle from below had brought the wooden, scratchy, itchy tip of another plant into her bellybutton, another place she couldn’t do anything about, and the ticklish ‘fingers’ of the plants were starting to stroke against her muscled sides and abs. Thankfully, not every one of the vine tips was coated in that itching oil, but the few that she had gotten already were driving her mad. Her toes squirmed against one another, and the itching feeling was spreading to her feet, still tingling from that horrible tickling, and although Zyl realized that the fastest way to end this horror was to get out of the tunnel, she’d only made it about a third of the way through. “This is… just… fucking itching!” she growled, biting her lower lip, squeezing her eyes shut in an expression of ticklish itching agony that instantly drew tons of attention from the scrying crystals, and starting to pull herself forward again. Inch by inch. All while the tickling persisted, making it hard to coordinate her movements. The tickling seemed to come in waves, falling off when she was actually moving forward, but intensifying if she tried to rest, or especially when she stretched her arms out and started to tense her muscles in preparation for moving. More than a time or two, she let out her breath in a squeal of laughter and wasted effort as scratchy vine-tips wiggled around in her underarms, squirming in that just barely-open gap between her bicep and ribcage.
Zyl was sweating from the exertion of having to move this way. The tickling wasn’t as intense as it had been when her feet were trapped, but it was extraordinarily distracting. The itching had her body moving in awkward ways - her ass kept trying to somehow itch itself against the smooth ceiling of the tunnel, which didn’t help her move forward at all, and the strokes in her armpits made her keep pulling her arms back to protect them, which opened up the vines to start playing with her sides once more. The fierce itching in between her toes made it hard to coordinate digging them into the grass and pushing forward, and her muscles were beginning to complain from the effort it took to crawl through. It seemed as if the tunnel’s exit was not growing any closer at all, and turning her head around to check how far she’d come was impossible. After a particularly exhausting bout of ticklishness in her armpits, resulting in a muffled squeal of laughter and a reflexive pulling back of her arms, elbows resting on the ground, Zyl put her face down into the grass and breathed heavily for a few seconds.
A few seconds only, for she suddenly felt an odd tickle at her nose, one that spread like wildfire up into her sinuses and - “ACHOOOO!” The sudden and completely unexpected sensation caused her face to adopt a silly, dopey expression, lips pressed together, cheeks puffed out, eyes unfocused but vaguely crossed, that was instantly captured and distributed among the viewers, an almost instant ‘caption contest’ springing up in response to the image. Zyl knew none of this, shaking her head to try and clear it, then gasping as the motion let wooden protrusions from either side of her head caress her sensitive ears. “Fuckkkkhhhhh fuckfuckfhhhahhahaa…. Shihhehhhahah shit dammit fuhhahah-AHHAHAHA…!” A desperate burst of energy filled her muscles, and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to ignore her body’s responses and simply power forward. Though her inchworm progress increased in pace, its efficiency decreased drastically with her desperation to escape, and the fact that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel seemed close enough to actually grasp kept her going, trying to summon her willpower for this one last, final push!
When Zyl’s hands burst out the other side, she felt a sense of hope well up within her. It wasn’t until her head and shoulders passed through the opening that she could plant her palms flat on the ground and exert every muscle in her upper body to quite literally pull herself free of the accursed tunnel, moving with such speed that she felt something brush against and then slip off of her ankle as it cleared the tunnel. Turning around, she saw an empty ring of vines coiled at the tunnel’s exit, a clear attempt to repeat what had happened at the entrance, and she spat at it, then jabbed a finger in exultation: “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! HA! Fuckers!” Then she stuck out her tongue in a most undignified manner and turned on her heel, placing her hand on the large, floating silver crystal that hung in the air in the empty space at the end of the tunnel, back out in the sunshine and fresh air after what felt like an eternity.
“STAGE CLEAR!” Arishna exulted, and what passed for fireworks started to burst in the air just a short distance away, although fireworks in broad daylight were far less impressive, especially when their light was scattered by the hundreds of scrying crystals gathered around Zyl to take in her appearance. “Congratulations on clearing the Lake Area! Now it’s time for the winner’s interview! Zyl, how do you feel right now on clearing the first stage within a day?” The crystals gathered around Arishna and Zyl, and though her hand was empty, the succubus pantomimed holding something towards Zyl’s lips in an indication for her to speak, something that quite baffled the amazonian dark elf.
Zyl was sweaty from her exertion, her formerly white top and bottom stained from being wet, then dried, then covered in pollen, then gotten wet again, and dried, and dragged through muddy water before being pulled over grass. Her hair was an absolute mess, and she was standing on one foot, trying to scratch between her toes with one hand, reaching back behind her to pull out the wooden vine fragment that was still stuck in her asscrack, throw it in the water surrounding the island, and -- she almost scratched, before she realized what was happening, and swatted wildly at the glittering crystals all around her. “What the fuck? What the shit is this? Fucking interview? Fuck this! You said I could have a shower and food when I was done!” Her ineffective flailing was akin to trying to punch mosquitoes out of the sky, and when she realized the futility of it, she stopped, and put her foot down. Her tight body language and clenched fists spoke volumes of the effort she was putting in to NOT scratch all the itches blooming around her body in embarrassing places.
“Of course you can! But the winner’s interview is tradition, it’ll just be a few questions -- “ Arishna broke off with an amused grin as Zyl directed her frenzied swatting at the succubus’ projection.
“No! No questions! Just fucking take me back to… wherever it is I can have a rest and wash this goddamn itchy BULLSHIT off of my body!” Zyl’s eyes were wide, her teeth clenched, almost frantic as she hissed out each breath. She was dancing from foot to foot, rubbing her toes against the calf of each leg as she did so. Arishna considered her for a moment, then…
“According to our statistics, you gave up four times in this first course before completing it. That’s counting the incident in the water off the first island as only a single submission, even though you technically said ‘I give up’ twice. Our statisticians have decided to count that as one submission, since technically giving up is supposed to get you out of the obstacle that you submitted to. Given that, how does that square with your earlier attitude of never giving up?” The succubus’ smirk was wry as she pestered Zyl with the question anyway, despite her discomfort, and the dark elf’s expression was first shocked, then infuriated, but she realized, not for the first time, that she was subject to Arishna’s whims, no matter how embarrassing or frustrating they were...
---
“And now, the part everyone has been waiting for: the After Dark portion of our entertainment~!”
Arishna - the real Arishna this time, not a projection - stood just outside the closed door of Zyl’s “private” quarters, giving a suggestive wink and a grin to the transmission crystal she had following her. “Tonight’s entertainment will be a bit of an appetizer. Technical Advisor Felin has said there’s still some fine-tuning to be done on the Absolute Tickle Dream equipment and wouldn’t let me deploy it tonight because she’s a fun-killing meanie. But that’s okay, everyone~ we’ve gotten the top-ranked questions you submitted, and now I’m going to see how many of them I can get our contestant to answer. Wish me luck!” With a gesture, Arishna cloaked the presence of the transmission crystal so that its sparkle wouldn’t give away to Zyl that she was still being recorded, and touched the door gently with a fingertip, causing it to swing open silently. Then she paused, and listened.
Zyl’s quarters were basic, but comfortable. A small place to prepare and cook food, if she felt so inclined. Magical meals already prepared if she did not. None of these had been taken out, and as Arishna had guessed, her two pieces of clothing made a sparse but distinct trail in the direction of the shower - this first room had chairs, a sofa, and a table for eating, lit softly by magical lanterns hung from the walls. A short corridor linked this room to the bathroom, where the sound of running water made it quite clear where Zyl had chosen to go first, and Arishna carefully gathered up the stained white garments, placing them on the floor beside the door, and then stripped off her own insignificant clothing before silently opening the door to the bathroom and creeping in, masking her presence with magic as well.
The steel-strong bonds wrapped around Zyl’s wrists at the same moment the glass door to her stall shower opened, which of course provoked a strong reaction. “Fucking -- fucking --” she hissed, teeth clenched, but Arishna slid up against her strong, muscled back, large breasts squishing against the dark elf rather significantly, and soothingly murmured into her ear.
“It’s all right. I didn’t come here with the purpose of tickling you. I just did this because I know your first response to being surprised is to throw a punch, and as I’m sure you can tell by now, I’m actually here, not just projecting my image. I’m sure it would hurt quite a bit if you hit me~ so I just wanted to protect myself from your initial flare-up. See?” Arishna ran her hand along Zyl’s left forearm, showing her the gentle blue pulse of the truth jewel, and she felt the dark elf relax slightly, although not completely.
“So, what, you’re here to feel me up or something?” Zyl murmured as the restraints fell away, and her arms returned to their sides. She seemed indifferent to Arishna’s hands stroking gently against her abdomen, even after they ran up over her breasts and lightly played with her nipples, which caused a slight stir in the dark elf, quickly quieted. She couldn’t see the succubus smile, of course. Arishna knew that her little truth jewel was a powerful accessory, but Zyl was too impetuous to make full use of it. A vague question like that was child’s play to talk around~
“No, I thought you could use a bit of refreshing and a bit of physical contact after today’s ordeal. I bet you’re all bunched up and sore from your exercise today.” Arishna ran her fingers up along Zylinde’s collarbone, channeling a bit of magic through them, and slowly spread her fingers out towards the shoulders, sliding down over them and through her underarms - earning another squirm - before sliding down to her sides, and letting her fingers trail over the muscles in the dark elf’s stomach. “Although I can see that if I’m not careful, I’m going to tickle you anyway, hehe…”
“I’m really, REALLY fucking ticklish,” Zyl snapped, though not with so much force as she had earlier in the day. Truth be told, she was quite worn out after the day’s ordeal, and as much as she wanted to hate and deny it, the succubus’ touch was very relaxing and soothing, un-knotting the muscles she’d used so much. Arishna, shorter than the dark elf, had her lips pressed into the back of Zyl’s shoulder, able to peek out from behind her, and gave a stealthy wink to the invisible scrying crystal hovering in the air. ‘Can you get Zyl to admit she’s ticklish?’ had been the number 3 request, a funny thing really. It was screamingly obvious that she was terribly ticklish, but having the words come out of her own lips held a surprisingly broad appeal. Arishna’s fingertips flitted softly over the elf’s firm stomach, relaxing the muscles which had quite literally carried her through the final trap.
“That much was obvious,” she said with a wry grin, and then decided to be daring. “But the bigger question is where you’re ticklish. We can tell you’re ticklish on your feet, and in your bellybutton, and under your arms, but where would you say you’re mooooooost ticklish~?” That was the number one question, and almost certainly the hardest one to get her to answer because it was difficult to approach stealthily. As Arishna had expected, the first response she got was rather… uncooperative.
“Why the hell would I tell you that? So you can make all your traps focus there?” Zyl retorted, her eyes closed. Physically, Arishna’s hands had done a marvelous job of putting her in a state of unwitting submission, but her mind was still hers. Her mouth was a flat line of resistance, and so Arishna changed tack a little bit, sliding one hand up to cup Zylinde’s breast again, while the other slid down, gently tracing her fingertips on the sensitive little triangle between bellybutton, hips, and groin. That got another soft hiss of breath and a slight reaction from the dark elf, and Arishna’s cheeky wink at the broadcast crystal sent it sliding downward slightly to get a better look at what was going on below the belt.
“The traps have already been designed and what parts of you they target is basically decided already. It’d actually be a huge pain in the ass to reconfigure them - in some cases, we’d actually have to rebuild certain parts of the course to accommodate a change, and there’s honestly not any time for that at this point.” Zyl opened one eye and glanced down, making sure her gem glowed blue, and then let out a harrumph and refused to respond any further, so Arishna continued, stroking her fingernails against Zyl’s sensitive mound slowly and gently. It seemed as if she was at least a little ticklish down here, but in keeping with her current clammed-up mood, refusing to react to that either - even to object to the light tickling.
“I was only curious because we got your brother to talk about quite a lot today, and he has a few very interesting little sensitive spots. Don’t worry, we didn’t ask him anything about you, so he hasn’t spilled the beans about anything.” That made Zyl shift slightly, and make a rather peremptory demand:
“That reminds me. I want proof you’re treating my brother well, too. I only saw a bit of what you were doing to him, but you’d better be keeping your promise.” Arishna nibbled on Zyl’s ear slightly, and blew on it, giving her a momentary wide-eyed and open-mouthed expression of surprised pleasure. In that very moment, the hand which had been so gently rolling the dark elf’s nipple around made a brief gesture, and right there, in front of the dark elf and succubus in the shower, an image of Erialen appeared before them, lounging comfortably in a bed. Lounging comfortably in a bed with a nude succubus pressed up against his arm. A succubus who was, at that very moment, sliding her hand up and down the dark elf’s shaft, as the two siblings made eye contact with one another.
Immediately, Zyl’s expression turned into a mild scowl, and Erialen blushed, trying to cover his erection with both hands. With a giggle, the succubus latched onto him nibbled and sucked on his ear, her purple, leathery devil’s tail wrapping around one of his arms, pulling it away from his shaft, making him place it behind his head. Her other hand intervened to push his other arm back to his side and press it, as if telling him to keep it there, and then returned to slowly stroking him up and down, up and down… while her fingernails danced in a delicate, slow walk from his ribs into his underarm and back down again, barely touching. “Ihehh… uh… hhhe--heee… hi, Sis…” the blushing dark elf male muttered.
“I… see,” Zyl replied, trying to keep her expression a scowl, even as Arishna’s fingers played way too close to pleasure than they ought to. “Here I am concerned about you, but I suppose I needn’t have worried. Though I did think I hear that this was a promised period of rest, mm? Aren’t you breaking that promise by tickling him now?”
“Nononono,” Erialen jumped in quickly, a giggle in his voice. “Really, Sis, it’s okay. I got to eat, ta-hake a shower, and now Seli he-here is just helping meh-ehehe me relax, it’s really fine, not… like what happened earlier today.” If anything, his blush deepened, but the words continued to tumble out as the succubus’ gentle ministrations - the one he had called Seli - continued. “I got tickled… a lot today, but when they sah-hahaid it would be over, it ended, and I’ve beh-eheen relaxing for the past while. No problem at all. The nurse even came by and made sure to heal mehehe - hehe when I tripped and fell jumping to try and get the relic back.” He squirmed under Seli’s touch, but despite his sister’s cool gaze, the succubus’ hand made it quite obvious that the dark elf male was enjoying himself as much as he said he was.
“If I can get back the relic and escape the room they have me in, the demons promised that it would instantly free you from the, um, whatever you have to do,” Erialen went on. “So I’m gonna keep trying to do that, even if it’s hard.” The image showed Seli’s fingertips lightly swirling in his underarm, making him fight back giggles. “I… hehe… unhhh… hehehe… I, um…”
“Never mind,” Zyl said with a slight huff. “You’re fine. That’s mostly what I wanted to check up on. That and the relic is still safe.” She paused, the warmth in her own cheeks entirely due to the hot, steamy water of the shower. “Stay safe.” Then she turned her head slightly, addressing Arishna. “All right. That’s fine.” The image of Erialen winked out, and the succubus smiled against the back of the amazonian elf’s shoulder. For a moment, there was silence, then Arishna murmured another question.
“Seems like you care about your brother a lot. I heard that a lot of dark elves kind of treat the males in their family like tickle toys.” The comment brought a snort, and a slight smile to Zyl’s face as she closed her eyes again, finding herself starting to sink into the pleasant sensations coming from Arishna’s fingers. They’d moved on from teasing her lewdly, and were gloriously pressing into her upper back and shoulders, causing the muscles to almost visibly shudder and relax. Arishna was enjoying this as well; she’d just flawlessly maneuvered Zyl into answering the fourth most popular question: ‘Has Zyl ever tickled Eri?’
“I tickled the shit out of him growing up. Still do, sometimes, but he’s usually a good sport about it. Doesn’t cry like a bitch when you catch him. I guess you got lucky picking him up for your sick game, because he’ll probably play along with your bullshit rules and stuff. He’s a dutiful little brother, even if he is a bit hopeless sometimes.” Zyl seems to sink back into memory for a moment. “I used to sit on his back and tickle his underarms until he tried to cover them, then I’d tickle the spot just above his asscrack. It drove him nuts, and I told him if he wanted me to stop tickling there, he’d have to stretch his arms out in front of him again. We’d go on like that for a while.” Arishna spared a moment from kneading Zyl’s back with both hands to give a V-for-victory sign and a wink to the transmission crystal picking up every word and image. Zyl seemed wholly unaware of what she’d just done, and when Arishna’s voice suddenly flowed into her ear, it seemed… powerful, somehow. No, more like it crept into her mind and resonated. A resonance that seemed to fuzz out Zyl’s own thoughts, make everything murky, steamy like the shower she was standing in.
“Put your hands up behind your head for me, Zyl.”
When the dark elf complied, her eyes were half-lidded, her motions slow and almost dreamlike, the succubus’ powerful charm taking effect on her. Charms could be a tricky business, as to force someone to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do was more akin to mind control, which had its own, entirely different set of issues and challenges. Charms were more like… increasing the chance that someone would take an action they might have taken anyway. If the chance was effectively zero, as if Arishna had told Zyl to put her hands up so she could be tickled, then the charm would fail. But, she’d promised not to tickle, and the truth jewel had confirmed that… “Wha…?” she breathed, the words soft, breathy, without conviction. The fog in her mind clouded her thoughts, made it impossible for her to track down the reason for why she’d done this, hid the reason not to do it from easy access. While Zyl’s mind flitted about, lost, trying to figure out why her body had moved… it had moved anyway.
Arishna’s fingers rested motionless on Zyl’s ribs, just a few short inches away from those upturned armpits, helplessly exposed. She strongly suspected that the dark elf’s underarms were desperately, excruciatingly ticklish. She’d wanted to know just as much as all the respondents to the poll where Zyl’s worst spots were. Right now, she even wanted to move her fingers up, just those few inches, and slaughter those armpits without mercy. Arishna knew she could do it - could lock those wrists in place, and mercilessly scribble her expert fingernails in those hollows which just cried out for attention.
Zyl’s mouth worked silently, still lost in the fog. Had Arishna tickled her, of course, the jolt would have broken the charm, dissipated its effect like so much smoke before the wind. But there was no sound, aside from the soft hiss of water washing over Zyl’s body, having cleansed it of the pernicious itching oil, sweat of exertion, dirt and grass stains from crawling through the tunnel, of falling off the vine swing and ignominiously scrambling up the grassy bank to escape. There was no movement, either, just the flow of water from the top of her body down to the bottom, dripping off of her, flowing over her muscles, her breasts, her ribs, and Arishna’s fingers. Nothing happened.
Arishna could have destroyed Zyl there, but she didn’t. No, as she had spoken truthfully upon her arrival, her purpose in coming tonight wasn’t to tickle the dark elf silly. It hadn’t even entirely been to get answers to the poll questions - numbers three and four had gone off without a hitch, number one had been flatly refused. She hadn’t been able to work in number two, ‘Has Zyl ever had an orgasm while being tickled?’, or number five, ‘What is Zyl’s most memorable tickling experience before this?’. No, strange as it sounded, Arishna had come to start building a tiny little thread of trust with Zyl, a project she knew would be challenging with the dark elf’s suspicious, aggressive nature. “I promised you I wouldn’t tickle, see?” she finally said softly into Zyl’s ear, relaxing the charm slowly, letting her arms come back down over a few seconds. When Zyl fully regained her sense of self, she took a step forward and turned, narrowing her eyes at Arishna, arms wrapped around her chest as she breathed hard.
“What the hell did you just…?” she demanded, anger tightening her features again, but Arishna beat her to the proverbial punch:
“I wanted to show you that, as strange as it sounds… you can trust me, just a little,” the succubus replied. “I came in here and said I wasn’t going to tickle you. I COULD have, very easily. But I promised I wouldn’t, and I didn’t, even though it would have been very, very easy for me to.” Zyl frowned, her mouth pressed into a tight line. It wasn’t always very nice to hear that she was telling the truth, when the truth was effectively a declaration of Arishna’s power over Zyl. But, the dark elf reasoned, it could have been far worse. Like if Arishna had simply declared she was going to make the elf’s life a living hell, pinned her to the bed, and tickled the crap out of her all night. Zylinde had had to grudgingly admit that the succubus’ magic was extraordinarily strong and in a class of its own, and that breaking it might have been… impossible.
Annoying, infuriating, and overall pain-in-the-ass that she was, Arishna at least had shown her that her brother was okay, massaged the knots out of her shoulders, and kept her promise. The succubus was clearly messed up in the head, but maybe that was just how demons were. Maybe just not able to express stuff like that in a normal, not-fucked-up way. “Yeah, fine, sure, whatever.” The words left Zyl’s lips in a slight exhalation. “I think I’m about done with showering anyway. So what are you gonna do? Stick around all night like that whatshername succubus was doing with my brother?”
“Only if you wanted,” Arishna said, “and somehow I doubt that your trust in me extends that far yet. You know how boys are. It’s very easy to get them to think with their dicks.” Zyl snorted amusement at that. “No, I’m just going to collect your clothes and wash them for you. You’ll have them back by tomorrow. Unless, that is, you wanted to keep going with the same dirty clothes?” Zyl glanced at her bracer. Still the truth. Since that first lie, Arishna had been completely straight with her. Which was almost more annoying than having her lie all over the place or twist the truth.
“No, fine, whatever. I sleep naked most of the time anyway.” Zyl’s eyes tracked Arishna as she gave a short little bow, breasts bobbling, and stepped out of the shower, somehow dry the instant she stepped out of the stall. Zyl waited until she had left completely, then turned off the water, dried herself, and wrapped a towel around her body in lieu of clothing. As expected, her clothing was gone, but a hot meal had been left on the table for her, and she plopped gratefully down into a seat and started to devour it, not even realizing how hungry she’d been until she smelled the food. It wasn’t much longer until she fell onto her bed and collapsed into a deep, deep sleep.
---
“Well, that didn’t go sooooooooooo badly,” Arishna stage-whispered to the transmission crystal, just outside of Zylinde’s door. “Seems like we only got two questions out of the five submitted, but don’t worry~ there’s more chances to pry! Plus… tomorrow night’s After Dark broadcast will feature something I knooooow a lot of you have been waiting for. Professor Felin’s Absolute Tickle Dream will be installed in her bed tomorrow while we’re working on the second course, Slime Land, and she’ll be none the wiser! We’ll get a chance to tease our sleeping beauty thoroughly tomorrow night… until then, have fun and dream naughty dreams, you perverts~!”
With that, Arishna ended the day’s transmission, leaned against the door, and grinned wickedly. Poor, naive little Zylinde, thinking her truth gem worked as straightforwardly as she seemed to believe it did. Once Arishna had realized how it worked, it actually made her job easier in a sense, made it easier to have Zylinde trust in some of the things she said. Poor little Zyl had no idea.
The most fun part of building trust was the opportunities to abuse it~
I feel like I should say something, but nothing particularly comes to mind.
---
With a grunt, Zyl whooshed through the air, lifting her feet up this time to avoid the bog full of tentacles ready to snare her ankles. The previous attempt at clearing this trap had ended ignominiously when her feet had dragged through the bog, letting the vines tangle and snare her ankles, and the momentum of the vine she had been swinging from tore it out of her grasp, leaving her face-down in the shallow, boggy water and splashing madly as vines exploited her barely-clothed body. Fortunately, as she had discovered, the vines were magically animated but otherwise just vines, and could be torn and pulled apart with brute strength, so she had been able to free herself, scramble out of the bog, and back up the hill to attempt this obstacle again without having to invoke the charm of surrender on her necklace.
Zylinde had learned the hard way that invoking this easy escape too readily could cause problems of its own, because it sent her all the way back to the beginning, and forced her to go through the traps a second time, or third time, or fourth time. While some traps became easy to pass once she knew what to look for, like the first island’s vine snares or the fourth island’s pollen-spewing flowers, the ones that were a challenge of physical ability, like the slippery, mossy log between the second and third islands, had to be conquered anew with each surrender. Some traps, like these grabby vines, could be escaped and the trap attempted again without giving up, but others could put her in an inescapable situation, or cause lasting effects that returning to the beginning seemed to dispel. While she would never admit this to Arishna, the floating projection of the succubus who followed her everywhere and offered very irritating commentary to the onlookers, the traps were annoying, embarrassing, and infuriating, but they were not outright unfair or unbeatable. So far, anyway.
“Fantastic!” Arishna proclaimed, as Zyl cleared the bog, landed on the other side, and dropped to her hands and knees to inspect the underside of the wooden bridge that linked this ninth island to the tenth and final island. One of the twin bridges that spanned islands six and seven had no support underneath of it, gave way when she stepped on it, and forced a restart just as she’d felt momentum starting to gather, plunging her towards the water full of its wholly unfair tickle fish and aquatic tentacle bullshit. “After a rough start, our challenger is making excellent time towards clearing the lake area, and might come away from Day 1 with a course clear under her belt!”
“Aside from the stupid trap in the water, none of your crap has been all that hard to get past. Just sneaky,” Zyl snorted, seeing nothing suspicious under the bridge, but bouncing on her toes, taking a few deep breaths, and clearing the wooden span with three quick, light steps.
“The water is supposed to be a penalty,” Arishna replied with a grin, floating over the gap to join Zyl on the tenth island. “You aren’t supposed to go in it. That’s why it’s designed to be unbeatable. The longer you stay in there, the more ticklish you get until you get out~ there’s no point in letting you cheat past the obstacles, now is there?” The succubus cleared her throat and flung her arms to the sky, spread out wide, and proclaimed: “And now, onto the final island! If Zyl can get through this trap without giving up, that will be a stage clear for her! Everyone, show her how much support she’s got when she makes it out the other side!” In response to Arishna’s words, dozens of the sparkling little scrying spheres that floated near-invisibly in the air gathered around the final obstacle, while Zyl appraised it with a frown.
It was a sheer face of dark brown rock, polished artificially smooth, that took up the entire island’s width and most of its length. An experimental touch to its surface also revealed that it was slick, as if coated in some kind of oil, to discourage climbing. The only apparent way through was a small, half-circular opening cut into the very bottom of the cliff, through which Zyl would need to crawl. Small enough that she’d have to crawl on her belly, all but pulling and pushing herself along with fingertips and toes. She got down and peered into the opening to inspect it, and it seemed to be just a straight tunnel with light showing through from the other side. “Something’s going to come and tickle me while I’m in here, isn’t it?” It was hardly a question, but Arishna answered anyway:
“Of course~” she replied with that sweet giggle, a giggle that Zyl was quickly learning indicated malicious anticipation, but it was no lie. The truth-detecting jewel set into the leather bracer on her left arm pulsed a gentle blue, although Zyl hardly needed confirmation of that. With a sigh, Zyl stretched her shoulders, arms, and upper back, knowing that she was going to need her upper body strength to pull herself along through here, and positioned herself belly-down on the grass, slowly starting to inch her way into the tunnel.
The grass at least continued through the tunnel, making a soft and vaguely ticklish swish-swish sound on her front as Zyl slowly inched her way through. First her arms went all the way in, and Zyl paused for a few seconds when her shoulders were at the entrance. It was thankfully wide enough to fit her frame through without squeezing, but she was waiting to see if something was going to try and grab her wrists and pull them in. Nothing yet. Next her shoulders, and shortly after her head. Then her torso, and her butt, then her thighs, the backs of her knees, and calves all slowly disappeared into the tunnel. From inside the tunnel, Zyl judged it was roughly three times her body length, so she’d spend a good deal of time completely hemmed in and probably completely vulnerable. What was most concerning here was that her position made it very hard to leverage her strength in pretty much any direction, so if she got tied up somehow, it was going to be hard to break the --
Her train of thought stopped abruptly. She had dug her toes into the grass and pushed forward at the same time she had pulled with her fingers, the same way she had been moving forward this whole time, but her feet seemed to get stuck on the entrance to the tunnel. “Oh, come on,” she hissed into the tunnel, unable to look back. “My feet can’t be THAT big. Goddess be damned --!” No, it wasn’t that her feet were too big. It was that something had wrapped around her ankles while she wasn’t paying attention, making them too wide to fit, and trapping her feet outside for the vines that she could not see growing out of the rock face, and headed directly for the lighter skin on the bottoms of her feet, conveniently stretched out by the pose she had adopted to push herself through the tunnel. These vines didn’t have floppy, fuzzy tips like the others, no. The tips of these vines were woody, scratchy. And they congregated on the spot just above the heel, tracing the curve where it met the sole.
“It’s time to give these big kickers of Zyl’s the love they deserve!” Arishna declared, and her commentary was barely affected by the indignant howl of laughter that filled the tunnel. “Perfectly framed by coiling vines, they’re helpless targets for these vine tips now scratching along her sensitive soles - ooh, look at her wriggle! I wonder how she’s doing in that tunnel, mm? I bet she’s absolutely hysterical~!” Some of the scrying crystals had gathered around Zyl’s trapped feet, watching closely the work of the vine tips. Like long, spindly wooden fingers, they scratched in random lines along her wide soles, tracing the lines of her feet at random, or focusing on one spot and going back and forth over it. Though it had started with just a few strokes around her heels, the sensation was growing, covering more of her feet as additional vines sprouted from the smooth rock face and added their scratchy strokes.
“I bet that’s just sooooo unbearably ticklish, isn’t it? Dark elves really do have some terribly sensitive feet, so I can’t tell you how much everyone has been anticipating you going through this trap! Look at how those strokes tease the very center of each sole, so taut and helpless with those toes dug into the soil. Right up along the spot just under the ball of your foot, too! Isn’t that maddening? Can’t do a thing to get your precious feet safe into that tunnel, look at them wiggle!” Zyl’s feet were indeed moving slightly. What was wrapped around her ankles was actually a single vine that had wound around them many times and was holding tight, although not impossibly so - her feet separated slightly, pulled against the opening in the rock face, kicked slightly up and down. “Let’s see how she’s dealing with this~!”
Arishna was able to simply float around the side of the obstacle and appear on the other side, looking down the exit tunnel. From here, Zyl’s laughter was more clearly audible, and her face shifting between hysterical giggling, teeth-gritted frustration, and brow-furrowed determination. “FUHHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHACK THIS SHIIIHHIHIIIIITTTT!” she screamed, her fingertips dug into the soil, squeezing handfuls of grass in frustration and shaking her head back and forth. Not being able to move seemed to be frustrating her immensely, and the glittering, sparkling scrying spheres lined the tunnel, getting close-up images of her expression, while the others behind her examined the ticklish torment of her feet in excruciating detail. “NYHHEHHEHEEHEHHEEHEH FUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHAHAA!!!” Zyl’s head shook back and forth, even going face-down into the surface for a few seconds as her body shook with ticklishness!
The only thing that Zyl could see as a positive out of this situation was that the scratchy fingerlike projections tickling her feet weren’t actual fingers. They didn’t have the accuracy nor ticklish pressure that an actual thinking being would -- “FUCKKKKKK!” she howled, trying to turn her head out of reflex and finding it stuck against the side of the tunnel, preventing her from looking back as… “WHAAAHAHAHAAHHAAHHAH WHAT THE SHIT ISHEHEHEHAHHAH THAT?!”
Something was sliding in between her toes. It was ticklish as hell, of course, like everything else crawling all over the sensitive skin on the bottoms of her feet, but there was something more to this. The ticklish-tingly feeling was covering up something else, which started out as muted, but quickly grew in intensity. It itched. It fucking itched. Her toes squirmed against one another to try and squeeze out that sensation, but it didn’t work, just spreading whatever oily bullshit that had been rubbed in between her toes further. Fuck. FUCK. “FUCK THAT SHIT IIIIHIIHIIITCHES!” Her hands clawed at the soil in a frenzy, but the only effective means of escape she had discovered so far was a painfully slow one. Slowly but surely, Zyl had been rubbing the vine around her ankles against the edge formed by the tunnel entrance, and she managed to feel the subtle snap, the slight lessening of the tension around her ankles, using it as a makeshift blade to cut the vines and get her feet inside of this goddess-damned hole.
“Ooooooh!” Arishna had gone back to comment on the state of Zyl’s feet, now veritably covered in stroking, scratching wooden vine tips, except for the one which positively dripped the poison ivy-like concoction being spread between her toes, resulting in a fierce itching which was noticeable in the way her toes flexed uncomfortably against one another. “Looks like Zyl has found a way to possibly break free and escape the foot tickle trap! Yes, looks like - ooh, there goes another one -- she’s in!” Arishna proclaimed, as the suffering feet slid inside of the tunnel a good six inches and then came to a stop, as the dark elf sought to catch her breath. “Let’s see how she fares against the rest of the trap now that she’s past the first part!”
Zylinde just barely caught what Arishna was saying, but it wasn’t terribly surprising. Of course there would be more than -- “Fucker! Off! Get…. GAH!” The vines, apparently able to burrow through the stone with ease, had turned their attention to the rest of her body, and the first touch was an annoying stroke against one of her long ears, followed by one that slipped beneath her bottoms and tickled into the crack of her ass. A sharp jerk forward resulted in a satisfying crack, as the spindly wooden projection snapped against the forward pressure and the tight waistband of her clothing, although it did result in the wooden part remaining caught between her ass cheeks, and it kind of… “Oh fuck no, no. No. You fucking FUCKKKKSSS rrrrrrghhhh!!!” That horrible, itchy, oily feeling was spreading in her sensitive crevice, and there was absolutely no amount of flexing or rubbing that would itch that place. There wasn’t even the option of embarrassingly scratching her own ass in front of goddess knew how many smirking demons - all she could do was endure it and -- “GYHEEEEEE!”
A sudden wiggle from below had brought the wooden, scratchy, itchy tip of another plant into her bellybutton, another place she couldn’t do anything about, and the ticklish ‘fingers’ of the plants were starting to stroke against her muscled sides and abs. Thankfully, not every one of the vine tips was coated in that itching oil, but the few that she had gotten already were driving her mad. Her toes squirmed against one another, and the itching feeling was spreading to her feet, still tingling from that horrible tickling, and although Zyl realized that the fastest way to end this horror was to get out of the tunnel, she’d only made it about a third of the way through. “This is… just… fucking itching!” she growled, biting her lower lip, squeezing her eyes shut in an expression of ticklish itching agony that instantly drew tons of attention from the scrying crystals, and starting to pull herself forward again. Inch by inch. All while the tickling persisted, making it hard to coordinate her movements. The tickling seemed to come in waves, falling off when she was actually moving forward, but intensifying if she tried to rest, or especially when she stretched her arms out and started to tense her muscles in preparation for moving. More than a time or two, she let out her breath in a squeal of laughter and wasted effort as scratchy vine-tips wiggled around in her underarms, squirming in that just barely-open gap between her bicep and ribcage.
Zyl was sweating from the exertion of having to move this way. The tickling wasn’t as intense as it had been when her feet were trapped, but it was extraordinarily distracting. The itching had her body moving in awkward ways - her ass kept trying to somehow itch itself against the smooth ceiling of the tunnel, which didn’t help her move forward at all, and the strokes in her armpits made her keep pulling her arms back to protect them, which opened up the vines to start playing with her sides once more. The fierce itching in between her toes made it hard to coordinate digging them into the grass and pushing forward, and her muscles were beginning to complain from the effort it took to crawl through. It seemed as if the tunnel’s exit was not growing any closer at all, and turning her head around to check how far she’d come was impossible. After a particularly exhausting bout of ticklishness in her armpits, resulting in a muffled squeal of laughter and a reflexive pulling back of her arms, elbows resting on the ground, Zyl put her face down into the grass and breathed heavily for a few seconds.
A few seconds only, for she suddenly felt an odd tickle at her nose, one that spread like wildfire up into her sinuses and - “ACHOOOO!” The sudden and completely unexpected sensation caused her face to adopt a silly, dopey expression, lips pressed together, cheeks puffed out, eyes unfocused but vaguely crossed, that was instantly captured and distributed among the viewers, an almost instant ‘caption contest’ springing up in response to the image. Zyl knew none of this, shaking her head to try and clear it, then gasping as the motion let wooden protrusions from either side of her head caress her sensitive ears. “Fuckkkkhhhhh fuckfuckfhhhahhahaa…. Shihhehhhahah shit dammit fuhhahah-AHHAHAHA…!” A desperate burst of energy filled her muscles, and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to ignore her body’s responses and simply power forward. Though her inchworm progress increased in pace, its efficiency decreased drastically with her desperation to escape, and the fact that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel seemed close enough to actually grasp kept her going, trying to summon her willpower for this one last, final push!
When Zyl’s hands burst out the other side, she felt a sense of hope well up within her. It wasn’t until her head and shoulders passed through the opening that she could plant her palms flat on the ground and exert every muscle in her upper body to quite literally pull herself free of the accursed tunnel, moving with such speed that she felt something brush against and then slip off of her ankle as it cleared the tunnel. Turning around, she saw an empty ring of vines coiled at the tunnel’s exit, a clear attempt to repeat what had happened at the entrance, and she spat at it, then jabbed a finger in exultation: “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! HA! Fuckers!” Then she stuck out her tongue in a most undignified manner and turned on her heel, placing her hand on the large, floating silver crystal that hung in the air in the empty space at the end of the tunnel, back out in the sunshine and fresh air after what felt like an eternity.
“STAGE CLEAR!” Arishna exulted, and what passed for fireworks started to burst in the air just a short distance away, although fireworks in broad daylight were far less impressive, especially when their light was scattered by the hundreds of scrying crystals gathered around Zyl to take in her appearance. “Congratulations on clearing the Lake Area! Now it’s time for the winner’s interview! Zyl, how do you feel right now on clearing the first stage within a day?” The crystals gathered around Arishna and Zyl, and though her hand was empty, the succubus pantomimed holding something towards Zyl’s lips in an indication for her to speak, something that quite baffled the amazonian dark elf.
Zyl was sweaty from her exertion, her formerly white top and bottom stained from being wet, then dried, then covered in pollen, then gotten wet again, and dried, and dragged through muddy water before being pulled over grass. Her hair was an absolute mess, and she was standing on one foot, trying to scratch between her toes with one hand, reaching back behind her to pull out the wooden vine fragment that was still stuck in her asscrack, throw it in the water surrounding the island, and -- she almost scratched, before she realized what was happening, and swatted wildly at the glittering crystals all around her. “What the fuck? What the shit is this? Fucking interview? Fuck this! You said I could have a shower and food when I was done!” Her ineffective flailing was akin to trying to punch mosquitoes out of the sky, and when she realized the futility of it, she stopped, and put her foot down. Her tight body language and clenched fists spoke volumes of the effort she was putting in to NOT scratch all the itches blooming around her body in embarrassing places.
“Of course you can! But the winner’s interview is tradition, it’ll just be a few questions -- “ Arishna broke off with an amused grin as Zyl directed her frenzied swatting at the succubus’ projection.
“No! No questions! Just fucking take me back to… wherever it is I can have a rest and wash this goddamn itchy BULLSHIT off of my body!” Zyl’s eyes were wide, her teeth clenched, almost frantic as she hissed out each breath. She was dancing from foot to foot, rubbing her toes against the calf of each leg as she did so. Arishna considered her for a moment, then…
“According to our statistics, you gave up four times in this first course before completing it. That’s counting the incident in the water off the first island as only a single submission, even though you technically said ‘I give up’ twice. Our statisticians have decided to count that as one submission, since technically giving up is supposed to get you out of the obstacle that you submitted to. Given that, how does that square with your earlier attitude of never giving up?” The succubus’ smirk was wry as she pestered Zyl with the question anyway, despite her discomfort, and the dark elf’s expression was first shocked, then infuriated, but she realized, not for the first time, that she was subject to Arishna’s whims, no matter how embarrassing or frustrating they were...
---
“And now, the part everyone has been waiting for: the After Dark portion of our entertainment~!”
Arishna - the real Arishna this time, not a projection - stood just outside the closed door of Zyl’s “private” quarters, giving a suggestive wink and a grin to the transmission crystal she had following her. “Tonight’s entertainment will be a bit of an appetizer. Technical Advisor Felin has said there’s still some fine-tuning to be done on the Absolute Tickle Dream equipment and wouldn’t let me deploy it tonight because she’s a fun-killing meanie. But that’s okay, everyone~ we’ve gotten the top-ranked questions you submitted, and now I’m going to see how many of them I can get our contestant to answer. Wish me luck!” With a gesture, Arishna cloaked the presence of the transmission crystal so that its sparkle wouldn’t give away to Zyl that she was still being recorded, and touched the door gently with a fingertip, causing it to swing open silently. Then she paused, and listened.
Zyl’s quarters were basic, but comfortable. A small place to prepare and cook food, if she felt so inclined. Magical meals already prepared if she did not. None of these had been taken out, and as Arishna had guessed, her two pieces of clothing made a sparse but distinct trail in the direction of the shower - this first room had chairs, a sofa, and a table for eating, lit softly by magical lanterns hung from the walls. A short corridor linked this room to the bathroom, where the sound of running water made it quite clear where Zyl had chosen to go first, and Arishna carefully gathered up the stained white garments, placing them on the floor beside the door, and then stripped off her own insignificant clothing before silently opening the door to the bathroom and creeping in, masking her presence with magic as well.
The steel-strong bonds wrapped around Zyl’s wrists at the same moment the glass door to her stall shower opened, which of course provoked a strong reaction. “Fucking -- fucking --” she hissed, teeth clenched, but Arishna slid up against her strong, muscled back, large breasts squishing against the dark elf rather significantly, and soothingly murmured into her ear.
“It’s all right. I didn’t come here with the purpose of tickling you. I just did this because I know your first response to being surprised is to throw a punch, and as I’m sure you can tell by now, I’m actually here, not just projecting my image. I’m sure it would hurt quite a bit if you hit me~ so I just wanted to protect myself from your initial flare-up. See?” Arishna ran her hand along Zyl’s left forearm, showing her the gentle blue pulse of the truth jewel, and she felt the dark elf relax slightly, although not completely.
“So, what, you’re here to feel me up or something?” Zyl murmured as the restraints fell away, and her arms returned to their sides. She seemed indifferent to Arishna’s hands stroking gently against her abdomen, even after they ran up over her breasts and lightly played with her nipples, which caused a slight stir in the dark elf, quickly quieted. She couldn’t see the succubus smile, of course. Arishna knew that her little truth jewel was a powerful accessory, but Zyl was too impetuous to make full use of it. A vague question like that was child’s play to talk around~
“No, I thought you could use a bit of refreshing and a bit of physical contact after today’s ordeal. I bet you’re all bunched up and sore from your exercise today.” Arishna ran her fingers up along Zylinde’s collarbone, channeling a bit of magic through them, and slowly spread her fingers out towards the shoulders, sliding down over them and through her underarms - earning another squirm - before sliding down to her sides, and letting her fingers trail over the muscles in the dark elf’s stomach. “Although I can see that if I’m not careful, I’m going to tickle you anyway, hehe…”
“I’m really, REALLY fucking ticklish,” Zyl snapped, though not with so much force as she had earlier in the day. Truth be told, she was quite worn out after the day’s ordeal, and as much as she wanted to hate and deny it, the succubus’ touch was very relaxing and soothing, un-knotting the muscles she’d used so much. Arishna, shorter than the dark elf, had her lips pressed into the back of Zyl’s shoulder, able to peek out from behind her, and gave a stealthy wink to the invisible scrying crystal hovering in the air. ‘Can you get Zyl to admit she’s ticklish?’ had been the number 3 request, a funny thing really. It was screamingly obvious that she was terribly ticklish, but having the words come out of her own lips held a surprisingly broad appeal. Arishna’s fingertips flitted softly over the elf’s firm stomach, relaxing the muscles which had quite literally carried her through the final trap.
“That much was obvious,” she said with a wry grin, and then decided to be daring. “But the bigger question is where you’re ticklish. We can tell you’re ticklish on your feet, and in your bellybutton, and under your arms, but where would you say you’re mooooooost ticklish~?” That was the number one question, and almost certainly the hardest one to get her to answer because it was difficult to approach stealthily. As Arishna had expected, the first response she got was rather… uncooperative.
“Why the hell would I tell you that? So you can make all your traps focus there?” Zyl retorted, her eyes closed. Physically, Arishna’s hands had done a marvelous job of putting her in a state of unwitting submission, but her mind was still hers. Her mouth was a flat line of resistance, and so Arishna changed tack a little bit, sliding one hand up to cup Zylinde’s breast again, while the other slid down, gently tracing her fingertips on the sensitive little triangle between bellybutton, hips, and groin. That got another soft hiss of breath and a slight reaction from the dark elf, and Arishna’s cheeky wink at the broadcast crystal sent it sliding downward slightly to get a better look at what was going on below the belt.
“The traps have already been designed and what parts of you they target is basically decided already. It’d actually be a huge pain in the ass to reconfigure them - in some cases, we’d actually have to rebuild certain parts of the course to accommodate a change, and there’s honestly not any time for that at this point.” Zyl opened one eye and glanced down, making sure her gem glowed blue, and then let out a harrumph and refused to respond any further, so Arishna continued, stroking her fingernails against Zyl’s sensitive mound slowly and gently. It seemed as if she was at least a little ticklish down here, but in keeping with her current clammed-up mood, refusing to react to that either - even to object to the light tickling.
“I was only curious because we got your brother to talk about quite a lot today, and he has a few very interesting little sensitive spots. Don’t worry, we didn’t ask him anything about you, so he hasn’t spilled the beans about anything.” That made Zyl shift slightly, and make a rather peremptory demand:
“That reminds me. I want proof you’re treating my brother well, too. I only saw a bit of what you were doing to him, but you’d better be keeping your promise.” Arishna nibbled on Zyl’s ear slightly, and blew on it, giving her a momentary wide-eyed and open-mouthed expression of surprised pleasure. In that very moment, the hand which had been so gently rolling the dark elf’s nipple around made a brief gesture, and right there, in front of the dark elf and succubus in the shower, an image of Erialen appeared before them, lounging comfortably in a bed. Lounging comfortably in a bed with a nude succubus pressed up against his arm. A succubus who was, at that very moment, sliding her hand up and down the dark elf’s shaft, as the two siblings made eye contact with one another.
Immediately, Zyl’s expression turned into a mild scowl, and Erialen blushed, trying to cover his erection with both hands. With a giggle, the succubus latched onto him nibbled and sucked on his ear, her purple, leathery devil’s tail wrapping around one of his arms, pulling it away from his shaft, making him place it behind his head. Her other hand intervened to push his other arm back to his side and press it, as if telling him to keep it there, and then returned to slowly stroking him up and down, up and down… while her fingernails danced in a delicate, slow walk from his ribs into his underarm and back down again, barely touching. “Ihehh… uh… hhhe--heee… hi, Sis…” the blushing dark elf male muttered.
“I… see,” Zyl replied, trying to keep her expression a scowl, even as Arishna’s fingers played way too close to pleasure than they ought to. “Here I am concerned about you, but I suppose I needn’t have worried. Though I did think I hear that this was a promised period of rest, mm? Aren’t you breaking that promise by tickling him now?”
“Nononono,” Erialen jumped in quickly, a giggle in his voice. “Really, Sis, it’s okay. I got to eat, ta-hake a shower, and now Seli he-here is just helping meh-ehehe me relax, it’s really fine, not… like what happened earlier today.” If anything, his blush deepened, but the words continued to tumble out as the succubus’ gentle ministrations - the one he had called Seli - continued. “I got tickled… a lot today, but when they sah-hahaid it would be over, it ended, and I’ve beh-eheen relaxing for the past while. No problem at all. The nurse even came by and made sure to heal mehehe - hehe when I tripped and fell jumping to try and get the relic back.” He squirmed under Seli’s touch, but despite his sister’s cool gaze, the succubus’ hand made it quite obvious that the dark elf male was enjoying himself as much as he said he was.
“If I can get back the relic and escape the room they have me in, the demons promised that it would instantly free you from the, um, whatever you have to do,” Erialen went on. “So I’m gonna keep trying to do that, even if it’s hard.” The image showed Seli’s fingertips lightly swirling in his underarm, making him fight back giggles. “I… hehe… unhhh… hehehe… I, um…”
“Never mind,” Zyl said with a slight huff. “You’re fine. That’s mostly what I wanted to check up on. That and the relic is still safe.” She paused, the warmth in her own cheeks entirely due to the hot, steamy water of the shower. “Stay safe.” Then she turned her head slightly, addressing Arishna. “All right. That’s fine.” The image of Erialen winked out, and the succubus smiled against the back of the amazonian elf’s shoulder. For a moment, there was silence, then Arishna murmured another question.
“Seems like you care about your brother a lot. I heard that a lot of dark elves kind of treat the males in their family like tickle toys.” The comment brought a snort, and a slight smile to Zyl’s face as she closed her eyes again, finding herself starting to sink into the pleasant sensations coming from Arishna’s fingers. They’d moved on from teasing her lewdly, and were gloriously pressing into her upper back and shoulders, causing the muscles to almost visibly shudder and relax. Arishna was enjoying this as well; she’d just flawlessly maneuvered Zyl into answering the fourth most popular question: ‘Has Zyl ever tickled Eri?’
“I tickled the shit out of him growing up. Still do, sometimes, but he’s usually a good sport about it. Doesn’t cry like a bitch when you catch him. I guess you got lucky picking him up for your sick game, because he’ll probably play along with your bullshit rules and stuff. He’s a dutiful little brother, even if he is a bit hopeless sometimes.” Zyl seems to sink back into memory for a moment. “I used to sit on his back and tickle his underarms until he tried to cover them, then I’d tickle the spot just above his asscrack. It drove him nuts, and I told him if he wanted me to stop tickling there, he’d have to stretch his arms out in front of him again. We’d go on like that for a while.” Arishna spared a moment from kneading Zyl’s back with both hands to give a V-for-victory sign and a wink to the transmission crystal picking up every word and image. Zyl seemed wholly unaware of what she’d just done, and when Arishna’s voice suddenly flowed into her ear, it seemed… powerful, somehow. No, more like it crept into her mind and resonated. A resonance that seemed to fuzz out Zyl’s own thoughts, make everything murky, steamy like the shower she was standing in.
“Put your hands up behind your head for me, Zyl.”
When the dark elf complied, her eyes were half-lidded, her motions slow and almost dreamlike, the succubus’ powerful charm taking effect on her. Charms could be a tricky business, as to force someone to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do was more akin to mind control, which had its own, entirely different set of issues and challenges. Charms were more like… increasing the chance that someone would take an action they might have taken anyway. If the chance was effectively zero, as if Arishna had told Zyl to put her hands up so she could be tickled, then the charm would fail. But, she’d promised not to tickle, and the truth jewel had confirmed that… “Wha…?” she breathed, the words soft, breathy, without conviction. The fog in her mind clouded her thoughts, made it impossible for her to track down the reason for why she’d done this, hid the reason not to do it from easy access. While Zyl’s mind flitted about, lost, trying to figure out why her body had moved… it had moved anyway.
Arishna’s fingers rested motionless on Zyl’s ribs, just a few short inches away from those upturned armpits, helplessly exposed. She strongly suspected that the dark elf’s underarms were desperately, excruciatingly ticklish. She’d wanted to know just as much as all the respondents to the poll where Zyl’s worst spots were. Right now, she even wanted to move her fingers up, just those few inches, and slaughter those armpits without mercy. Arishna knew she could do it - could lock those wrists in place, and mercilessly scribble her expert fingernails in those hollows which just cried out for attention.
Zyl’s mouth worked silently, still lost in the fog. Had Arishna tickled her, of course, the jolt would have broken the charm, dissipated its effect like so much smoke before the wind. But there was no sound, aside from the soft hiss of water washing over Zyl’s body, having cleansed it of the pernicious itching oil, sweat of exertion, dirt and grass stains from crawling through the tunnel, of falling off the vine swing and ignominiously scrambling up the grassy bank to escape. There was no movement, either, just the flow of water from the top of her body down to the bottom, dripping off of her, flowing over her muscles, her breasts, her ribs, and Arishna’s fingers. Nothing happened.
Arishna could have destroyed Zyl there, but she didn’t. No, as she had spoken truthfully upon her arrival, her purpose in coming tonight wasn’t to tickle the dark elf silly. It hadn’t even entirely been to get answers to the poll questions - numbers three and four had gone off without a hitch, number one had been flatly refused. She hadn’t been able to work in number two, ‘Has Zyl ever had an orgasm while being tickled?’, or number five, ‘What is Zyl’s most memorable tickling experience before this?’. No, strange as it sounded, Arishna had come to start building a tiny little thread of trust with Zyl, a project she knew would be challenging with the dark elf’s suspicious, aggressive nature. “I promised you I wouldn’t tickle, see?” she finally said softly into Zyl’s ear, relaxing the charm slowly, letting her arms come back down over a few seconds. When Zyl fully regained her sense of self, she took a step forward and turned, narrowing her eyes at Arishna, arms wrapped around her chest as she breathed hard.
“What the hell did you just…?” she demanded, anger tightening her features again, but Arishna beat her to the proverbial punch:
“I wanted to show you that, as strange as it sounds… you can trust me, just a little,” the succubus replied. “I came in here and said I wasn’t going to tickle you. I COULD have, very easily. But I promised I wouldn’t, and I didn’t, even though it would have been very, very easy for me to.” Zyl frowned, her mouth pressed into a tight line. It wasn’t always very nice to hear that she was telling the truth, when the truth was effectively a declaration of Arishna’s power over Zyl. But, the dark elf reasoned, it could have been far worse. Like if Arishna had simply declared she was going to make the elf’s life a living hell, pinned her to the bed, and tickled the crap out of her all night. Zylinde had had to grudgingly admit that the succubus’ magic was extraordinarily strong and in a class of its own, and that breaking it might have been… impossible.
Annoying, infuriating, and overall pain-in-the-ass that she was, Arishna at least had shown her that her brother was okay, massaged the knots out of her shoulders, and kept her promise. The succubus was clearly messed up in the head, but maybe that was just how demons were. Maybe just not able to express stuff like that in a normal, not-fucked-up way. “Yeah, fine, sure, whatever.” The words left Zyl’s lips in a slight exhalation. “I think I’m about done with showering anyway. So what are you gonna do? Stick around all night like that whatshername succubus was doing with my brother?”
“Only if you wanted,” Arishna said, “and somehow I doubt that your trust in me extends that far yet. You know how boys are. It’s very easy to get them to think with their dicks.” Zyl snorted amusement at that. “No, I’m just going to collect your clothes and wash them for you. You’ll have them back by tomorrow. Unless, that is, you wanted to keep going with the same dirty clothes?” Zyl glanced at her bracer. Still the truth. Since that first lie, Arishna had been completely straight with her. Which was almost more annoying than having her lie all over the place or twist the truth.
“No, fine, whatever. I sleep naked most of the time anyway.” Zyl’s eyes tracked Arishna as she gave a short little bow, breasts bobbling, and stepped out of the shower, somehow dry the instant she stepped out of the stall. Zyl waited until she had left completely, then turned off the water, dried herself, and wrapped a towel around her body in lieu of clothing. As expected, her clothing was gone, but a hot meal had been left on the table for her, and she plopped gratefully down into a seat and started to devour it, not even realizing how hungry she’d been until she smelled the food. It wasn’t much longer until she fell onto her bed and collapsed into a deep, deep sleep.
---
“Well, that didn’t go sooooooooooo badly,” Arishna stage-whispered to the transmission crystal, just outside of Zylinde’s door. “Seems like we only got two questions out of the five submitted, but don’t worry~ there’s more chances to pry! Plus… tomorrow night’s After Dark broadcast will feature something I knooooow a lot of you have been waiting for. Professor Felin’s Absolute Tickle Dream will be installed in her bed tomorrow while we’re working on the second course, Slime Land, and she’ll be none the wiser! We’ll get a chance to tease our sleeping beauty thoroughly tomorrow night… until then, have fun and dream naughty dreams, you perverts~!”
With that, Arishna ended the day’s transmission, leaned against the door, and grinned wickedly. Poor, naive little Zylinde, thinking her truth gem worked as straightforwardly as she seemed to believe it did. Once Arishna had realized how it worked, it actually made her job easier in a sense, made it easier to have Zylinde trust in some of the things she said. Poor little Zyl had no idea.
The most fun part of building trust was the opportunities to abuse it~
