The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Discipline and Reward

A Love Story

Disclaimer: Standard “free porn” disclaimers apply. If you are too young, or don’t like pr0n, or just aren’t into my kinks ... go away.

Chapter 18. In which the dominoes fall

A week after our little tête-à-tête with Blake Warren, the Majestic Woman “sex tape” hit the Internet. To say that it was a popular download would be a bit of an understatement, any site on which the video appeared, any site on which the video was rumored to appear, almost immediately crashed under the weight of eager clicks from all over the world.

After several days of this churning chaos Google decided to host the damned thing themselves, just to get things back to normal. All these site crashes were not good for their business either. Even though there was hardly a second in the whole seven hours that didn’t violate the company’s “Terms of Usage”, they made an exception.

And what an exception. The video showed the powerless superheroine being stripped, beaten, fucked, and mind-fucked by her nameless, faceless tormentor, ending with a blow to the face that looked as if it might have broken her jaw.

There had been a brief text statement that had accompanied the video wherever it had popped up, and eventually, Google provided access to that as well:

What you are about to see is a sample of the enslavement and degradation of Majestic Woman, who was once one of the most powerful people to walk the face of the earth. But here she is anything but powerful. She is anything but majestic. She is a slave.

Her master whores her out to anyone that can pay the price. The only thing that saves her from suffocating under a mountain of male flesh is the asking price that her pimp has set:

  • One Hundred Million Dollars
  • One Hundred Million to have Majestic Woman completely at your mercy.
  • One Hundred Million to have Majestic Woman grovel at your feet.
  • One Hundred Million to fuck that “Majestic” cunt.
  • Or any other orifice you desire.
  • All. Night. Long.

So if you have a hundred great big ones to spare, and you happen to be passing through Dubai, why not stop by and let her show you a “super” good time.

* * *

“This is ‘Action-9 News at 10’ the ‘Desert Jewel’s’ most award-winning news source. Good evening, I’m Dan Simpkins along with Gloria Morales, Gloria?”

“Thanks, Dan. At the top of the news again tonight are the shattering revelations about Portal City’s own Majestic Woman. Just hours ago Portal City Police released a series of nine-one-one and other calls related to Majestic Woman that all have a common theme. Here is a typical one:”

“... um, officer, so I was watching the, uh, the tape ... I’m not proud of that ... but ... anyway, when she took off her uniform I recognized her immediately. It was my neighbor, Cynthia Royal. Um, I mean, not that I’ve seen Cynthia naked or anything ...”

Gloria was annoyed. She had specifically told the sound engineer to cut out that last bit. But she was a professional. She maintained her cool and continued to read the script.

“There are literally dozens of calls like this, all pointing to this ‘Cynthia Royal’ as Majestic Woman’s secret identity. Police have cordoned off Ms. Royal’s house and have been questioning neighbors. It is apparent that no one in the neighborhood has seen Ms. Royal since shortly before Majestic Woman’s disappearance. Dan?”

“Thanks, Gloria. After the break we will share some interviews with some of those callers, including the woman who may have taught Majestic Woman how to ‘shake her booty’.”

By the time the “On Air” light had switched off, Gloria was on her feet and boiling mad.

What the fuck was that, Dan? ‘Shake her BOOTY’? What are you trying to pull, you sick sonofabitch?”, Gloria shouted.

Producer Bill Crestly ran onto the set to intervene, actually jumping in between them.

“Don’t blame Dan, Glory. It was on the teleprompter. I allowed it.”

“Well then, fuck you all!” Gloria shouted, “If there is not an apology after the break, and I mean right after the break. I will not be sitting in that chair!” She pointed to her familiar place behind the on-set news desk.

Now Dan unwisely piped up, “Look, Glory, c’mon, sex sells. Majestic Woman herself figured that out months ago. I don’t see the prob—”

“The problem, Dan, is that I won’t sell it. Besides, the very point of that interview that you mocked is that Majestic Woman may be acting under duress. Ah, fuck it, I’m out of here.” She walked off set and began to remove her mike.

Bill headed her off. “Look, Glory, you’re right. We’ll apologize. But not right after the break. That would cut into the interview time, right? You don’t want us to have to cut the interview, do you?”

The main interview was done by Gloria’s protégée, the woman Glory had groomed to replace Glory herself as anchor when she retired. And the interview was good, really good, a scoop that could go national! But that would only happen if the whole ten-minute segment got air-time.

“Alright, Bill. But tomorrow night’s newscast starts with a lengthy apology out of Dan’s fat, smarmy mouth, or I swear I’ll walk off the set on-air. Got it?“

“Sure, Glory, got it. And we’ll do it, I promise. It was a mistake. We’ll fix it, okay?”

Gloria’s grudging acquiescence was lost to Bill as his assistant tapped him on the shoulder.

Shit! Time. Thirty seconds, everyone!“

Back at the desk, Gloria waited for the cue and began, “Some of those Majestic Woman police callers agreed to talk to us on-camera. Tonight we’ll start with a local dance instructor who may have a stunning revelation. Our own Stephanie Jenkins has this report.”

“Thank you, Gloria. Today I sat down with local dance instructor Yasmin Shadid, who wanted to share details of her encounters with the mysterious Ms. Royal:”

“So, Ms. Shadid—”

“Yasmin, please.”

“Yasmin. How do you know Cynthia Royal?”

“Last fall she was a student in one of my dance classes.”

“And what class was that?”

“Um, Erotic Belly Dancing.”

“This woman, a woman who you believe is Majestic Woman, was taking a class called ‘Erotic Belly Dancing’.”

“Um, that’s, that’s right, Stephanie.”

“And how exactly did you come to believe your, ah, student was Majestic Woman?”

“One of my other former students called me after she saw the Majestic Woman sex tape on the web. She asked me to watch to see if I thought it was Cynthia. So I did. It happened in the first 3 minutes. It’s weird, but before she took off the uniform I would have laughed at anyone who said that Cynthia was Majestic Woman.”

“So in your ‘Erotic Dance’ class, you’ve seen Ms. Royal naked?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not the point. It’s like there is something about the uniform itself that changes the way she looks.”

“I see. So what were your impressions of Ms. Royal?”

“She was one of the most naturally talented students I’ve ever had, even though she missed the last class. At the time I put it off to body shyness, since her final dance would have involved, well, ‘taking it all off’. But now I’ve gone back and compared the times. That last class was just after the last time anyone saw Majestic Woman, the same day she went missing! But really, none of that is important, since she almost didn’t make it into the class at all!“

“Why is that?”

“Stephanie, for this class I always conduct screening interviews with the students. There are lots of reasons for that, but one of the most important is to try to identify abuse victims who are being forced to take a ‘sexy’ class by their abuser. At first Cynthia came off exactly like one of those poor girls.”

“You thought she was being abused?”

“I thought it was a possibility. She told me that she signed up for the class because ‘her boyfriend wanted her to’. That is a big red flag to me. A lot of times that means she’s being forced. Between that and the metal collar she had locked around her neck, I had a really bad feeling.”

“Was it the same metal collar that Majestic Woman was wearing in the video? The one that was used to chain her to the floor?”

“It looked the same to me, Stephanie.”

“But you let her in the class anyway. Why?”

“She told me it wasn’t like it sounded, so I gave her another chance to convince me. She gave a better answer the second time. But Stephanie, after seeing that video I think I made a mistake. I think somehow she really was being abused. I think if the ‘hundred million dollar prostitute’ stuff is right, then she is being forced into it. I think this ‘boyfriend’ who wanted her in my dance class was abusing her then ... and now.”

* * *

Gloria’s hunch about the interview had been dead on. The story went viral, then national, then global. It seemed that anyone anywhere who had ever had dealings with Ms. Cynthia Royal immediately recognized her from the Majestic Woman video.

There was even an oddball report from a sex shop owner in Nez Pierce, Washington, identifying Cynthia Royal as Majestic Woman. It would have been discounted as self-promotion, except that his nine-one-one call turned out to have been the very first, predating all the Portal City calls. He had made the call only minutes after Google posted the sex tape at two am Pacific Time. He too claimed that Ms. Royal fit the classic profile of a sexual submissive, although he hesitated to call it abuse.

“Hey, live and let live, right? Look, she came into my shop to buy something that would help her learn how to deebleep! a massive bleepck. I’d say she got what she wanted and then some. On the video it looks like she passed that test with flying colors ... several times, if you know what I mean. Oh yeah, she’s acting like a battered woman, but I think it’s all an act. Hell, I’d take all that abuse and more for a hundred mil a night. More power to her, I say.“

In the wake of these and other reports, there were more interviews with “experts”, with most debate centering around whether or not Majestic Woman was acting as a free agent in the video. Was she in true bondage against her will? Or was she merely the world’s foremost—and most expensive—willing BDSM prostitute.

A smaller circle of experts was called upon to comment on the curious effect caused when Majestic Woman removed her uniform. This issue was less satisfying to debate. There was no “victim or whore” angle, and besides that, it was all wild speculation. The most cogent among the so-called experts freely admitted this.

“Look, she can lift a diesel locomotive. How does she do that? Not with the physical body she appears to have! She flies through the air. How? Are there invisible strings holding her up? So now you are asking me why she looks so different in the uniform when the best facial recognition programs can’t find a difference in the before-and-after faces to eight decimal places? I don’t know! And anyone who tells you that they do know is full of it.“

Of the two stories, though, the “slave or slut” angle was clearly causing the most buzz. It was having an effect everywhere.

For example, in the Legion of Heroes. Here they knew Cynthia. And they knew that she would never do something like this willingly. In just days the members of the Legion were a frothing mob, ready to storm Dubai and free their friend, whatever it took. In order to stop that, Blake had to reveal that Majestic Woman was acting undercover. In order to convince them of that, he had to reveal that he himself had been the source of the video, as well as being the male subject of the video, the abuser.

They all knew how close Blake and Cynthia were, so that mollified most of them. Sadie in particular relaxed, determined to let the sting play out. Her cousin Claud, though, was still seething about it. Powerhouse might not have been blaming herself for Cynthia’s disappearance any longer, but Power Man knew that if he had been closer to Earth, the world would not have had to wait for over a month to find out that Majestic Woman was truly missing. He wanted to go on “stake out” duty over Dubai. He wanted to watch over her, to protect her, to guard her back. Blake convinced him not to do it. He argued that Power Man’s radar signature would be too hard to hide, that he would not be stealthy enough. So Claud agreed to stay away.

* * *

Of course, no one was trying to prevent the Amazons from storming Dubai. Themiscyra went onto a full-scale war footing overnight. After the video broke, Hippolyta asked her military Chief of Staff, her sister Antiope, to come up with a plan to take Dubai and perform a massive search and rescue operation. It was General Kalliope and her commando team who came up with the amazing blitzkrieg battle plan to move all seventy-five thousand Amazon warriors across some of the most sensitive airspace in the world in a matter of hours.

And damn if it wasn’t doable, too. I was amazed. Kalliope’s battle plan was a work of art, and I would almost love to see them execute it. Almost.

All the Amazon Queendom needed was the “Go” order from Hippolyta, but Hippolyta was not convinced yet. This operation would blow the lid off of the existence and location of the Amazons. She would do that for her daughter—and gladly!—but only if her daughter was really in danger. She had visions of confronting her angry daughter in the smoking ruins of Dubai, and finding out that her Kynthia had actually been living happily as the world’s most expensive harlot.

Hippolyta needed a sign. I was going to give her one.

* * *

“Good evening, this is Newshour on the BBC World Service, I’m Rachel Hawthorne. Tonight we will be devoting the entire programme to an unprecedented live telephone interview with Majestic Woman, who will be calling us from Dubai. Our BBC production staff are just waiting on the signal that she is on the line ... There.”

“Hallo, Majestic Woman, are you there?”

“Yes, Rachel, good evening from Dubai.”

“Good evening, Majestic Woman, and welcome to the programme. Or ... may I call you Ms. Royal?“

“Ha! Call me Cynthia. I guess the lid is pretty thoroughly blown off of my secret identity by now.”

“Then are you admitting to the legitimacy of the so called ‘sex tape’ as well?”

“Um, yes, Rachel. It’s legitimate. That’s really me, folks.”

“And the rest? The text that accompanies that video claims that you are now one of the millions of women involved in the worldwide sex trade.”

“At the very high end of it, yes.”

“One hundred million American dollars per night, if the text is accurate.”

“Yes. That is the asking price ... a hundred million.”

“Cynthia, the video is ... disturbing ... to say the least. I am sure that you know that most women in the sex trade perform under duress. Most prostitutes are forced into prostitution. Are we to believe that you are actually consenting to do the things that you are seen to do, or, I should say, have done to you, in that video?“

“... Rachel, I’m ... I’m a pretty tough broad. I can take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.”

“Cynthia, I am not asking if you can take the abuse. I am asking if you are consenting to this of your own free will. I am asking if you are doing it willingly. As you must know by now, there are reports out of your old hometown of Portal City in the US that raise serious questions about whether or not you are under some sinister influence. What do you have to say about all that?”

“... Um ... Rachel ... Of ... Of course not! N-n-n-no one is ... is ffforcing me ... to ... to do anything. Remember ... I’m, I’m banking m-millions here.”

The subject was rattled. Rachel’s instincts took over. She moved in for the kill.

“That raises an important point, Cynthia. So you are claiming that this ... endeavour is an equal partnership between yourself and your, ah, handler, a Mr. Ibrahim Beg?”

“Um ... sure ... equal ... fffifty-fifty.”

«Got her! Forgive me, Ms. Royal. This is for your own good.»

“Then perhaps you can explain reports from our sources that show nine staggeringly large deposits, ranging in size from fifty million to one hundred million dollars, all to numbered accounts around the world, all traceable to Mr. Beg, but no such deposits traceable to yourself. It doesn’t seem, Cynthia, as if you are making any money out of this at all.”

A pause. A long one. Finally, Cynthia answered, “Maybe ... maybe I’m just ... b-b-better at c-c-covering my tracks?”

“Ms. Royal, are you alright? You sound very nervous, almost distraught. Are you in fact a free agent and equal partner in the, er, actions we all saw on this video?”

“I’m not ... nobody’s making ... Oh no! No! Please! Not that!

There was an audible dial tone. The connection had been cut. The sound was quickly cut off and replaced by stunned silence.

Rachel, shaken to her core, finally filled the dead air by stating the obvious.

“Our telephone connection with ’Majestic Woman’ Cynthia Royal has been disconnected. Our staff are working to reestablish the call now.“

But they never did.

* * *

Eleven AM the next day in Themiscyra, all was organized chaos. Operation Angels’ Vengeance was scheduled to execute in only fourteen more hours. Soon the whole world would know that the Amazons weren’t just a myth. Their eons of hiding from the world would be over. But none of them were thinking about that. One of their own was in trouble. They were, to a woman, ready to give their all to rescue Kynthia.

I knew that the “Gods” couldn’t let that happen. They couldn’t let the Amazons announce themselves and Themiscyra to the modern world. So the “Gods” were coming out into the open instead. They would have to take action, and I thought I was ready. But even I couldn’t have guessed how sudden and violent their action would be.

At that same moment, it was noon in Dubai. It was going to happen, G-day Number Two. Annette and Greg were, again, making whoopie during what was supposed to be their sleep time. Annette was wearing the bike lock and cable to dampen the Majestic Woman powers, but was nonetheless using Cindi’s athletic Amazon body to great advantage in her efforts to please her man. Suddenly the cable snapped and Majestic Woman’s powers flowed back into that body. Before either of them could think, the Shield of Athena expelled Greg’s Ibrahim Beg penis from Annette’s Majestic Woman vagina. They looked into each other’s eyes for just a second wondering what the hell had happened. It was their last second together.

The two-story apartment and everything in it exploded. Majestic Woman’s naked, invulnerable body was awash in gore, all that remained of the body that had been housing Greg Wolfe’s consciousness. As Annette realized her husband was dead, her face contorted into a mask of terror. As she began to scream, I swapped Cindi back into her own body. There was no time to give Cindi any warning, so now the “Chosen of the Gods” would face the “Wrath of the Gods”, alone and unprepared.

In Falkirk, Annette was curled up into a small, shivering, screaming, sobbing ball. She was a wreck, as well she might be. She had just watched the love of her life explode in her arms. “Traumatized” didn’t even begin to cover the shock, the grief, the overwhelming pain that Annette was experiencing. I had to get her together fast. Soon it would be time to swap her back. Annette would have to be ready to act.

In broad daylight, one hundred sixty-three stories above the streets of Dubai, Majestic Woman was being drawn out to meet her “Gods”. Unlike their last meeting, seventy-three years ago in Themiscyra, the “Gods” were not happy with her. They were not in a giving mood. They were angry and they most certainly wanted her to know it.

I was trying to do too many things at once, from too many places. First I was trying to get everyone in Dubai, every businessman with a smartphone, every tourist with a camera, every news crew in the city, everyone, to record the spectacle that was taking place in the air above them. Remember, my first objective was to bring these bastards out of hiding.

Besides that, I needed to help Annette get her act together, she was the only person other than Cindi who knew how to operate as Majestic Woman in that body. And Cindi was already lost in the “Glamour of the Gods”. She couldn’t help it. If it were me I would have been just as awestruck. I couldn’t even communicate with her anymore. Oh sure I could ride along and hijack her senses. I could even read her thoughts, such as they were. But I couldn’t get her to acknowledge me, much less talk to me. I had been afraid this would happen, just like it happened to my slave villagers back when I first discovered these alien bastards.

Annette would be the only one who could act now, but I couldn’t rely on her to do anything while she was screaming and crying in horror about poor Greg.

And then, on top of all that, I had to keep track of where all the players were on the board. I had to figure out a way for everyone (except the “Gods”) to survive. I couldn’t think about that now, but the more the “Gods” drew her out into the open sky with them the worse it looked for Cindi.

I was looking at the scene now through a news cameraman with a zoom lens. I almost felt as if I were right below Cindi and the “Gods”. I was also touching Cindi’s mind, lightly, lightly. I couldn’t afford to get swept into the secondhand glamour spell.

Oh shit! The bastards were talking about taking her powers away! Time was up. This shit was going down now.

“Annette, baby, you have to pull yourself together. You have to do it now, or Greg will have died for nothing!“

That sobered her up pretty quickly. But I didn’t have time for a pep talk. Instead I absolutely flooded her with warmth and love and confidence. It was something I would not have known how to do nine months ago. It was just one more reason to be thankful that I had Cindi in my life, now that I was on the verge of losing her.

Annette was doing better. She knew what the plan was. She knew what she had to do. She would have a two-second window before the glamour overtook her. But with super-speed, super-strength, and flight, one might accomplish amazing things in two seconds. That’s what I was counting on. Annette was gonna rip these pretenders to shreds.

A dazzled, frightened Cindi was still being lectured by the “Gods” for the way she had disgraced them. They hadn’t started removing her powers yet.

So. Swapping Annette back into Cindi’s body. Here goes nothing!

* * *

And ...

Nothing.

Annette began frantically mentally calling «Mayday!», so I swapped her and Cindi back into their own bodies. Picking Annette’s memory I could see that she had found herself completely unable to act in Majestic Woman’s body. Not only was she physically paralyzed, but she couldn’t call on Majestic Woman’s power of flight either. She could tell that the power was still there. She just couldn’t get to it, like that part of Cindi’s mind was blocked off somehow.

Meanwhile I was also back listening in on Cindi. The “Gods” were asking her, “Who are you, child?”

She immediately answered, as she had to Ares, as she had to Heracles, as she had to Circe, as she had to all the Greek immortals she had met in her adventures, “I am Kynthia, Daughter of Hippolyta, Royal Princess of the Amazons!”

Looking out through Cindi’s eyes, the “Gods” looked ... surprised? Then it hit me. They were expecting someone else to answer! So they knew someone else had been swapped into Cindi’s body, but somehow they didn’t know that she had been swapped back out again.

I had to figure out what was going on, and fast, or this whole operation was going down the tubes! Okay, first, they somehow knew that I was involved with turning their Kynthia the Demigod into my Cindi the Prostitute; they were trying to trap me with my own trap. Second, they knew that I operated by swapping minds and bodies; they expected someone other than Cindi to answer them. Third, they waited out the two-second window before they asked the question, so they knew that important limit of their own mind control tech. Third, They knew when someone had swapped into Cindi’s body, but not when the same person swapped back out again. But how? They’d never shown even the hint of an ability to read minds before. How did they know?

«Shit. Of course.» I thought. «Her facial expression probably changed when Annette swapped in, but Cindi was still blissed out when I swapped her back in a second or so later. They probably thought the second change of expression was just the mind control coming online.»

Okay, now I’ve got a good hypothesis going for that mystery. Now, what’s next? Fourth, they now knew that I could swap a mind in and out in less than their two-second time limit. If I were them I’d be pretty freaked about that!

So now I took a second to get some status and ... Oh Holy Shit! They were gone! At least that’s the way it had seemed to all the observers on the ground. To them it looked like they had all just vanished. However, Cindi was still out there and I could still access her senses. They were on the move and dragging Cindi with them. Cindi was looking in one fixed direction, and it wasn’t the direction of travel. I’d have to get lucky and ... there. That’s the airport in the distance. So given the way she was facing... Okay they’re headed sorta to the northwest.

I tried to get people on the ground to look up and find them again. But ... nothing. Wait! One guy, an American pilot on vacation, noticed something in the sky that looked like the wave front of a sonic boom. But there was no noise and no airplane. It must be them. An experienced observer, the pilot figured that the phenomenon must be at about five thousand feet and moving at about eight hundred miles per hour. Cindi’s top flight speed. It was too much of a coincidence not to be meaningful.

Okay, so now I had a rough course heading, altitude, and speed. Good. I also had a pretty good idea where they were going, too.

Look. I’ve already told you that I’m not a genius. I toyed with the idea of calling in Blake or the other heroes, but Cindi was more powerful than almost any of them, and they had whammied her so good that I couldn’t even talk to her now, but also, well, there were parts of the endgame that I hadn’t told him about. I didn’t want him to know them now either. So I did the next best thing. I’m not a genius, but I have Ten Thousand very smart people at my disposal. I laid out the problem and let them work it.

Things started happening almost immediately. One of my women in Russia worked out a great circle route based on the start and endpoints I had provided. Others took that flight path and began looking for likely observation points along the way. It was a good thing too. There were big stretches of “nothing” along that path, the Persian Gulf, big stretches of desert in Iraq and Syria, not to mention the eastern Mediterranean Sea. If my guess about the destination were wrong I might lose them completely, so the lookout points were going to be very important.

Luckily, my enemies aren’t geniuses either. Out over the Persian Gulf they finally must have realized the Cindi might be giving their position away. They made her close her eyes. Now let’s hope they didn’t change their flight path too.

We had about two and a half hours total now before they got to where they were going. Every few minutes I sent Annette in to check on Cindi’s “status”. She would try, and fail, to move, and then send me a «Nope», and then I would swap her back out again.

Landfall in Kuwait was about twenty-five minutes into the journey. I had lots of unwitting observers on the ground, looking for that sonic shockwave. There! Right on schedule. Next lookout point, an air base in Syria, in about an hour. Then Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey ... and Greece.

It seemed to take forever, but at least our tracking strategy was still working. As our lookouts saw them passing over the southeastern coast of Turkey, I thought ahead to the next set of lookouts, and noticed ... Mikonos. The Greek island was a popular tourist spot, but it caught my attention because it was so near a much smaller island that was very important to the Olympian “Gods” ... Delos. The mythology claimed that Mount Kynthos on Delos was the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, the twin god and goddess. But again, I knew that to be just so much bullshit. However, Delos and Mount Kynthos do seem to be important to these alien imposters for some strange reason. It is true that Heracles spent days and days praying on that hill for the “Gods” to take him to Themiscyra and the Amazons, and eventually, Aphrodite actually did show up and did do just that.

Idly curious, and with a few minutes to burn I let my mind wander to Delos and Mount Kynthos, just to see what was going on, and found ... Heracles. Oh, how surreal! He was praying to the Gods to watch over his daughter Kynthia. And in just a few minutes Kynthia and those very “Gods” were about to fly right past him.

I wondered why he was even here, but as I checked his memories that question answered itself fairly quickly. Over the last sixty years, whenever Kynthia was in the news and in peril, Heracles had come here to pray for his daughter. His devotion was actually kind of inspiring ... if only he had picked more worthy “gods” to worship.

Again, I toyed with the idea of bringing him into the Plan, of trying to enlist his help, as I had with Blake and the Legion of Heroes, but again I discarded the idea. I imagined him trying to intervene. He would have just been turned into another of their puppets.

Then I noticed another of his memories popping to the surface. He was thinking about that night in Themiscyra when Kynthia was conceived. When he made love to Hippolyta. I knew that Hippolyta had always thought that Heracles had crept off in the middle of the night, that he had abandoned her. Heracles’s memories revealed the truth. Aphrodite had taken him to Themiscyra, in answer to his prayers, but she had put him to sleep first, awakening him when they arrived. Then, later, when Heracles fell asleep again, he was happy, sated, deeply in love. Leaving Hippolyta was the furthest thing from his mind. He was dreaming of a bright future with his beautiful-but-fierce lover, believing they would live together literally forever. But when he awoke, he was back on Mount Kynthos. All those millennia ago, he fell into despair, knowing that the capricious “gods” would never let him find his lover. She was lost forever.

Okay, I couldn’t bring him into the fight, but I could at least help him with the great sorrow of his life. Well, at least a little bit. I didn’t have much time. I seeded him with the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of Themiscyra City Hall. I told him to seek out “the Mayor”. He believed the seed. He was dressed for climbing, but still had a notepad that he carried in his backpack. So he wrote down the coordinates while they were still fresh in his mind. Good.

I turned my attention back to the flight path and saw that I had missed Cindi and the aliens flying over Mikonos and Delos, but they still hadn’t reached the Greek mainland yet, where I was ready to pull in thousands of lookouts. Sure enough, they passed over Athens, Only very slightly south of the projected flight path. Almost instantly my Russian hacker recalculated the destination. Stinky Pond. They were going to the one place in Themiscyra that no one ever goes? And then the tumblers in my head finally clicked into place. Of course no one ever went to Stinky Pond. The “Gods” didn’t want them there. I began to wonder what was behind the glamour at the pond. What was that ever-present column of steamy, sulphurous air really? What were the “Gods” hiding?

It didn’t take me long to find out.

* * *

“Open your eyes, Kynthia,” an impossibly beautiful female voice commanded. Apparently they no longer thought I was connected to her. They must have believed their barrier around Themiscyra was still keeping me out. Little did they know that I had crossed that barrier with Cindi so frequently now that it was almost effortless. I didn’t even need Cindi’s help, which was a good thing, since she was in no shape to help me.

In any case, Cindi did open her eyes at the “Goddess’s” command, and I saw them approach the steaming convection column over the pond. And then suddenly the glamour dissipated. There was no pond. There was no stench. Instead, there was an immensely tall, silvery, cylinder of a skyscraper. Well. It would appear that I had found the “Gods” base of operations. Just not soon enough to do anything about it. Beyond the edge of the tower, I could see through Cindi’s eyes the city laid out to the east. I guestimated the angle between the horizon and the nearest landmark in downtown Themiscyra and fed the information to my herd. This time one of my South African men got the answer first. Cynthia was about a kilometer up in the air. And the building was much taller than that, soaring up out of Cindi’s sight. Of course, she couldn’t turn her head to look up, but still.

The lone male “God”, Hermes, I guess, waved his hand toward the building and something began to extend from the smooth, shiny wall. As we got closer I could see what it was. It was an abattoir in a box. There was a human-shaped cut-out in the middle of the box, with catch-basins for the blood, all surrounded with dozens of robotic arms, each tipped with something sharp and deadly: axes, knives, saws, cleavers. It was clearly a slaughterhouse. It was clearly intended for Cindi. She had outlived her usefulness. Her time was up.

Cindi began to turn so that she was floating on her back. They laid her down in the depression. I began to scream into her mind for her to fight, to move, to do something. Nothing happened. I tried swapping in Annette one more time. She still couldn’t move. I swapped her back out.

A huge ax came down on her throat ...

... and broke off at the joint. The “Shield of Athena” was still there, Even though “Athena” was right there too and clearly wanted her dead. I could hear various of my Ten Thousand trying to get my attention, Julia and Fred loudest among them. I didn’t realize that I had stopped breathing.

The “Gods” seemed stymied. At least they weren’t any smarter than I was, thank goodness. After a bit “Hermes” drifted off toward the building. A few minutes later he reappeared, carrying a replacement ax, and ... steel restraints.

Oh Shit! She was about to lose her powers, “trapped in bonds of metal by a man”.

As the “God” began to chain her down to the box, I screamed at her. «“Cindi! Goddammit, He’s not really a man! He’s an alien! He can’t really sap your powers like this!“»

I hoped that she heard me but I had no idea. In fact I had no idea if it would even make a difference. I only assumed that the weakness was based on her perception of the gender of her captor. I had no idea ... until the ax came down, again. And broke against her invincible neck, again.

The “Gods” were clearly frustrated. This was not going according to plan, theirs or mine. Suddenly in Cindi’s head there was a strange feeling, a release of pressure. The box they had trapped her access to her powers in? They had opened it. I’m only guessing now, long after the event, but apparently they had to open the box to tinker with the powers inside it, in order to remove them. Whatever. The box was open. I knew it was now or never.

When I swapped Annette back into Cindi’s body she wasted not a second, not a millisecond, before acting. Faster than human eyes, or apparently even alien eyes, could follow, she broke their invisible grasp. She wrenched loose a knife big enough to be a short sword. She flew out across the open sky and swung her blade through five scrawny alien necks. She got them. She got all five of them.

Now, suddenly, the “invisible strings” were cut. Covered in alien gore now as well as human, Annette was plummeting to her death. Cynthia’s body no longer had any super-human strength, any invulnerability, any ability to fly. I had always seen this as the most likely scenario after the death of the bastard “gods”, but the original plan had called for me to swap “the tool of the gods”, Cindi, back into her now-helpless body and to let her die.

Clearly that wasn’t going to work for me now. Since I had stopped living in denial, since I had fallen in love, since I had brought Cindi into the plan, I had done this calculation a thousand times, from dozens of different hypothetical altitudes: square root of two-times-d-over-a. Thank you, Isaac Newton. For one kilometer, that came out to about fourteen seconds. I had fourteen seconds to decide between Cindi and Annette, who would live and who would die.

But, sadly, it didn’t take nearly that long. “Submissive” Annette demanded, with all the firmness of a Roman emperor, to be allowed to join her husband in death. What else could I do? I didn’t have any other choice, did I?

I know that you only have my word on that, that she begged me ... no, that she compelled me to let her die. But it’s true whether you believe me or not. At the end, we were in Falkirk. Cindi in Annette’s body; I in Greg’s.

* * *

In Falkirk, Australia, after the “Gods” had met their doom, at the end of blood, and gore, and destruction, and the death of those we held dear, my report, my observations went out to my Herd of Ten Thousand. Suddenly my head was filled with emotion: cheering, joy, relief. We had won! Yes, of course, there was sadness too. We had lost two of our own. Two very important and beloved members of our “tribe”, but ... WE WON!

But more than the other powerful emotions that came at the end of this long struggle ... the emotion of love somehow found a way to expand its foothold. A twelve-thousand-year-old immortal spirit pledged his literally undying adoration to a twenty-five-hundred-year-old homeless mind. I begged—begged—her to marry me, to make me the happiest immortal spirit in the world, never to part throughout all eternity. After the briefest of heart-stopping pauses, she answered by leaping into my arms and tackling me to the ground with a scorching kiss. Ten Thousand witnesses cheered our engagement with wild abandon.

That night, for the first time in many millennia, I did not swap bodies at the end of the day. I stayed in Falkirk with my true love. Yes, yes, we made love, but more importantly, we held each other, we talked, we shared true intimacy, not just bodily fluids. As sleep overtook her, I suddenly decided not to leave. I just couldn’t. I had to be with her. Not just in her head, but physically present. Connected. Even if that meant losing consciousness. But actually, for the first time since my fateful discovery of “Zeus” and the rest of the Olympians, I had no fear of losing consciousness. So, for the first time since long before there was an English language in which I could compose these words ... I slept.

* * *

Meanwhile in Themiscyra, hundreds of delivery drivers, construction workers, repairmen, and others suddenly noticed that everyone around them was a young, athletic, attractive woman. And that they were all dressed in desert camo and jump boots, all busily preparing for something ... big. The city was literally filled with them. «How could I not have noticed before?» The outsiders all seemed to wonder to themselves at once. Somewhat more slowly, most of those outsiders were starting to notice that they had not been paid for the goods or services they were delivering.

The women of Themiscyra were not yet paying attention to this growing hubbub. Instead they were amazed by the giant silver cylinder that had suddenly appeared in the midst of the southwest quadrant of the city. A giant skyscraper? On the site of ... Stinky Pond? But ... there was no pond. There was no stink. There was no ever-present column of shimmering, steamy air. In its place there was only this. It was easily the tallest building in the world, almost two kilometers high, and none of them had ever seen what was really there at all. The “Glamour of the Gods” had hidden the “Tower of the Gods” just as it had hidden Themiscyra itself. But now that glamour, like the “Gods” themselves, was no more.

Today would be the beginning of a hard, treacherous, painful time for the Amazon Nation. But few people who have ever lived had the inner strength of an Amazon. They would persevere. They would survive. They would find a way.

* * *

As the weeks went by, teams of scientists descended on the Themiscyra Tower, trying to unlock its secrets. In no time at all they found the remains of the gray-skinned aliens, and of the heroine last seen in the air over Dubai. So now the exploration of the tower was put on hold. The place became a crime scene and they had been shut out. Most were indignant about the interruption, but eventually they understood that the criminal investigation had to take precedence. And they all knew that it would be the work of hundreds of years, but still they couldn’t wait to begin.

Equally eagerly, teeming hordes of lawyers descended on Themiscyra City Hall, demanding back payment for dozens of years, if not centuries of unpaid bills. They were at least somewhat surprised to find Hippolyta ready for them. She took them to a huge library of accounting ledgers dating back literally thousands of years, detailing every single item that had ever been delivered or provided to Themiscyra without payment. They were equally shocked by her impossible promise to find some way to pay it all back.

“Now if you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I am mourning the loss of my only daughter. I will leave you to your ... research.” Only then did they notice that the Mayor/Queen was dressed in black from head to toe. Only weeks later did was it revealed that the apparently-mid-twenties-aged Queen/Mayor of the “Hidden City” was the mother of the apparently-mid-twenties-aged superheroine who had martyred herself at the Themiscyra Tower.

And speaking of the “Tower”, crime scene investigators there—led by the Wraith himself!—had an amazing amount of video evidence of the events from Dubai to Greece, as I had intended. All the video footage clearly showed the five “gods slash aliens” that Majestic Woman had killed. They all had that classic “Roswell Gray” shape: hairless, gray skin, childlike bodies, huge heads, and huge dark eyes. The photographers and cameramen in Dubai swore that they were looking at “Greek Gods”. Along the flight path, observers swore there was no one at all, just a strange atmospheric phenomenon. But the pictures, now freed from the glamour spells of the “Gods”, told the real truth.

Not surprisingly a great deal of the video footage made it onto the internet. So the “Greek Gods” were real! So the “Roswell Gray Aliens” were real! So they were really the same thing!

Eventually the press stopped calling them “Greek Gods” and just called them “Alien Gods”, as if that were really any better.

The investigators were puzzled by the bloody remains at the base of the Tower in Themiscyra. There was a great deal more blood, bone, and tissue than could be accounted for just by Majestic Woman’s body. That was not the puzzler since six bodies fell to the ground. The puzzler was that all the tissue was human, at least according to the DNA analysis. Yes, there were strange mutations in five of the seven strains, but they were still human.

The sixth strain was clearly normal human and female: Majestic Woman. The seventh, found only in trace amounts, was also clearly human, but male: Ibrahim Beg, the “pimp” who was helping Majestic Woman run the secret operation that killed them both in a blaze of heroic glory. Not surprisingly, that same strain was found throughout the wreckage of the penthouse in Dubai where he had died.

But what about the other five sets of mutated human tissue? The investigators, including the Wraith, began to believe that these were not aliens at all, but some far future offshoot of humanity. The press stopped calling them “Alien Gods” and started calling them “Time Travelling Gods”. I still cringed at the “God” appellation, but that wasn’t to last much longer.

* * *

Eventually, after almost a month, the crime scene restrictions at the Themiscyra Tower were lifted and the teams of scientists returned, only to have the Tower become a crime scene again just ten days later. The first of hundreds of sets of the gruesome half-eaten human remains were found in the building. It was apparent to the researchers that the partially-consumed bodies had been held in some sort of time-freezing stasis field that had failed, like all the time travelers’ other technology, when they died. In the coming weeks, many more sets of remains were found. Quite often they were discovered to be Amazons who had gone missing through the ages and were identified by others who had known them. But there were many, many others as well, found with clothing and artifacts that covered four millennia of humanity from every corner of the Earth.

After that story broke, no one called the bastards any kind of “Gods” anymore. It was just a matter of days before someone came up with the name that stuck. Small gray human-like creatures from the future with a taste for human flesh? H.G. Wells once had a name for them. He called them “Morlocks”. That is what we call them even today.

The End ...

... although you may wish to read the Epilogues: In which the players take their final bows