Rucksacks

By Pan

Chapter 1

Lisa scratched the side of her face. Her sweat was mixing with her hair, held in place by the tourist glasses she was forced to wear.

The city of Bes had many strange customs, but none quite as unusual as the goggles.

Like something out of The Wizard of Oz, the town was surrounded by walls, and there was only one entrance in. Before she was permitted entry into the city, she’d had to disclose the purpose of her visit (research) and answer a number of increasingly personal questions. When she’d finally met whatever inane standards they used to determine who could come into the city, they’d placed the glasses over her head, and firmly attached them.

She’d planned to remove them once she got to her hotel, but to her surprise, they were permanently affixed. Apparently the only way to remove them was to use a key, and only city officials held the keys.

In The Wizard of Oz, the glasses had simply been tinted green, to hide the fact that Emerald City wasn’t, in fact, Emerald. Lisa wondered what secrets Bes was trying to hide...

The purpose she’d given for her visit had been technically accurate, but Lisa had withheld one vital piece of information: she wasn’t researching for a dissertation or a travel piece on Bes. She was researching to see whether it was viable to start up a local chapter of the Femme, the nation-wide feminist group that Lisa was a part of. Bes was the only city on the north coast—and the only city in the world with more than ten thousand inhabitants—that didn’t have one.

The official word from the city was that it was “because people were happy” here, but Lisa wasn’t born yesterday. She’d been around long enough to know that if there was no feminist group within city bounds, then something was fishy. Perhaps the women were scared, or indoctrinated to believe that they didn’t deserve one.

Now that she’d entered the city, however, she wasn’t so sure. She’d been surprised to discover that unlike regions of the world known for their oppression, the women of Bes weren’t kept inside or obviously disrespected. In fact, three things had immediately struck her as odd:

Firstly, the women seemed to outnumber the men. By far. For every four or five women she saw, Lisa had only encountered one or two men. Clearly the women weren’t the ones being locked up and told not to roam the streets.

Secondly, unlike every other city that she’d ever visited, Bes seemed to be completely free of harrassment. Standing at five and a half feet, with dark skin and short hair to match, Lisa was accustomed to men calling out after her, giving her all kinds of unwanted attention. It had reached the point where she rarely left the house in anything other than pants, just to avoid the cat-calls and constant stares at her toned (and rather nice, she was happy to admit) legs.

The third strange thing Lisa had noticed (and while this was the most peculiar, it had also taken her the longest to spot) was that every woman she’d met was wearing a rucksack.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The other tourists—young women like her, easily identifiable by the goggles—were unencumbered as well. But each and every woman who lived in the town of Bes, they were saddled with a rucksack, what looked like an incredibly heavy carrying-bag on their back, held on by two shoulder straps.

Lisa had brought her notebook—she’d been intending to use it to note down the contact details of women who might be interested in joining the cause, and to keep track of potentially useful addresses and the like. Instead, she opened it to the first blank page, and started making notes about her experiences so far.

Women seem happy, she wrote, jotting down thoughts in fragments that she knew she’d understand later. Too happy? No. Just happy. So many of them—why? So few men. Men respect women. Because...outnumbered? Why rucksacks?

After a few seconds thought, she added one final note before closing the book. Only women tourists? Keep eye out for men in glasses.

Scratching again at the areas where the plastic of her tourist goggles made contact with her face, she wished she could just rip them off and throw them away. They were starting to give her a headache.

After a few minutes of scratching, she decided to get out of her small hotel room, and see if she could get a bite to eat.

Chapter 2:

“Of course, ma’am,” the waiter said politely, and with a half-bow, left to prepare her food.

It was starting to get frustrating. Every man she encountered seemed to be treating her with the utmost respect. There hadn’t been a hint of flirtatiousness from any of them. They were treating her...well, they were treating her like a man.

Why? What are they trying to hide? Lisa asked herself in frustration, before shaking it off. She was starting to get paranoid now. Wasn’t this what she wanted, after all? Wasn’t she fighting for a world where men treated her like an equal, instead of ogling her cleavage (or, in Lisa’s case, lack thereof) and acting like she was good for nothing but sex.

Maybe that was why Bes didn’t have a feminist chapter. Maybe it didn’t need one.

She laughed at the conflicted thoughts running through her mind; it was this strange town, it was starting to play tricks on her. She’d been surprised at how little she could find about Bes before coming here—it was only a few years old, but seemed to have popped up overnight, quickly becoming one of the country’s largest cities, immediately attracting a huge number of the world’s best minds.

Unlike most townships, it hadn’t just been a smaller town that had grown. If the maps that Lisa had dug up from before the war were to be trusted, this had just been a patch of desert. Now it was a centre of commerce, a huge player in the economic market...and the most secretive place that she’d ever come across.

Lisa tried to relax and enjoy her meal, but her brain wouldn’t stop ticking, questioning everything. Why had she been required to let the town guards know of her diet? Her marital status? Her cup size? Who had built the giant walls that closed Bes off from the rest of the world, and who paid for them to be kept in good repair? What was the point of these damned itchy glasses? Why was that woman sitting so far away from her table?

That last question stirred Lisa out of her thoughts, and she looked closely at the woman sitting two tables over. She wasn’t wearing glasses, and she’d taken her rucksack off to eat, but she was sitting a good two feet away from her meal, leaning quite far over and being very careful not to spill any of her soup as it made the long journey from the bowl to her mouth.

Lisa watched her for several minutes before noticing that the woman on the other side of her was engaged in similar antics. In fact, every woman in the restaurant (outnumbering the men four-to-one, just as they did on the streets) was sitting a foot or two away from their tables, keeping their backs straight up against their chairs, barely able to reach their food.

No one else seemed to have noticed—the men were sitting normally, and chatting to their dining partners as if nothing was amiss. Lisa stood up, suddenly alarmed, and after dropping a few bills on her table, ran out of the hotel, and headed straight back to her hotel.

It was only a few blocks, but on the way Lisa passed ten, twenty, maybe thirty women: all of which were wearing huge, obviously heavy rucksacks, as if there was nothing strange at all about it.

Throwing herself on the bed, Lisa wanted nothing more than to get out of Bes, but she knew that the city gate had closed, and even if she were to get out, it was more than five hour’s walk to the nearest town. She lay there, trying to breath steadily, trying not to panic, trying to ignore the headache that her glasses were giving her.

What the hell was going on??

Chapter 3:

She only got a few hours of sleep, but when the sun came up, Lisa felt immeasurably better. Her headache was mostly gone—it had turned into more of a dull cloud, a fuzziness that made it a bit harder to think, but wasn’t causing any actual pain—and she realized that her behaviour the previous night had been a bit of an overreaction.

Her hotel was booked for a full week, and there was no point in fleeing the town and losing that money, so Lisa decided to put her odd observations that she’d made yesterday aside, and get started on the mission she’d come to Bes for—to see how viable it was to open a new branch of Femme here.

First step: interviews, she noted in her brown book, and made a list of questions that she wanted to ask the local women.

Opening her suitcase, Lisa frowned at the dowdy selection of clothes that she’d brought. If yesterday’s experiences were anything to go by, she could dress more daringly than she would back home without fear of being judged, and the young woman was keen to take advantage of the opportunity to let her legs get a bit of sun.

She squeezed into the one dress that she’d brought (a classy shoulderless number, in case of any formal events) and realized that she’d have to go without a bra.

After staring at herself in the mirror for several minutes, Lisa shrugged. Her breasts weren’t large enough to need the support, and as long as a cold spell didn’t suddenly hit (which, in the middle of the desert, seemed unlikely) no one would even be able to tell she was hanging free.

The first woman that Lisa ran into after leaving her room was Carol, the receptionist at the fancy hotel that Femme had booked for her.

“Hey Carol,” Lisa said, “do you have a minute?”

“Sure thing,” Carol said with a grin, and Lisa spent the next few minutes interviewing her about her working conditions, the nature of her employment, and various other useful but uninteresting questions.

Lisa didn’t want to risk running a cultural faux pas, especially not with someone that she’d see every day that she was in town, but after she’d run through all the prepared questions she was unable to resist adding just one more.

For the course of the interview, Carol had been standing behind the desk (a few feet behind the desk, of course), a huge brown rucksack on her back all the while.

“Doesn’t that get...annoying?” Lisa asked, relieved when Carol seemed to take no offense at the question.

“Oh, no!” she laughed. “I don’t know what I’d do without it!”

Before Lisa could follow up on the bewildering reply, the phone rang, and Carol leaned over to answer it (despite there not actually being anything to lean over.) Lisa was left with more questions than she started with, but her fuzzy brain didn’t let her reflect on them for too long.

She sat down on a bench outside the hotel, and pulled out her notebook once more. Jotting things down always helped clear her head, but after half an hour all she had was a page of confused note and no answers in sight.

Smuggling? was at the top of her page of scribbles, immediately crossed out. Nowhere to go to; nothing to smuggle. So why? Heavy?? Weigh them down? Keep them here? ...fashion statement? What’s in them? What’s in them??

She stood up to continue her line of questioning, and suddenly her headache returned in full force—it seemed twice as strong as it had been earlier, and Lisa’s vision blurred as the pain intensified, a steady pulse of agony from her pain to the rest of her body.

“Are you okay ma’am?”

Chapter 4:

She tried to look up at the deep voice, but for a few seconds, everything was white. Her vision slowly returned and she realized that she was being offered help by the most attractive man she’d ever seen.

“Uh, no!” Lisa replied, feeling more nervous than she’d felt since she was a teenager with a crush on the boy who had lived next door. “I, uh, I’m...fine.”

And as soon as she stammered out the awkward sentence, she realized that it was true. She suddenly felt absolutely fine, except for the butterflies in her stomach from being so close to such a hunk.

“No worries,” he replied casually, and strolled away before Lisa could say anything more. She managed—barely—to resist the urge to call something out to him, get him to return and pay attention to her. She had never been so attracted to a man in all her life.

Lisa stood up and dusted herself off. She felt calmer—still aroused, but the storm had passed.

At least, until she turned around.

For a second she thought that it was the same man again, simply by her body’s reaction. Her nipples hardened, her head swam, and she almost blurted out a sexual offer on the spot, as a thanks for his concern. Before she could, however, she realized that while equally attractive, this was a different man—he was clean-shaven, and the previous man had been bearded.

No, this was a different man. Just as mind-bogglingly attractive, built of just as much pure charisma, but clearly a different man.

Before she could embarrass herself, Lisa sat back down, shut her eyes and tried to clear her mind. For the first minute, all she could think about was trying to remember as much about the two men’s physical features as she could, even if only to store away the knowledge for the next time she was lonely and wanted to play with herself, but soon she was calm and able to collect her wits once more.

What’s happening to me? she asked. What have they done?

When she was sure the temporary insanity had passed, Lisa took several deep breaths, and allowed herself to open her eyes.

Immediately, her head began to swim again. Everywhere she looked, she saw one of two things: a woman carrying a huge rucksack…or an impossibly attractive male, going about his business.

This doesn’t make sense, her mind warned her. These men weren’t here yesterday—they were just ordinary men. Polite, yes, but ordinary. Now…

As her eyes whipped from one man to another, the tourist’s heart-rate quickened, and her breathing became shallower and shallower. She was getting turned on, against her will—every man she saw forced sexual thoughts into her brain, every time a guy made eye-contact with her, it shot bolts of arousal straight into her pussy.

Soon, irrational though she knew it was, all she wanted to do was fuck. All she needed was one of these men to kiss her, take her by the hand, use her however he wanted…

Fighting through the fog of arousal, Lisa got up and ran back to her hotel room. By pure luck, she didn’t make contact with a single man on the way—had she been spoken to one, been touched by one perfect hand, she didn’t know what she would have done…but she managed to return to her room, head throbbing, breasts heaving, wetter than she could ever remember being.

As soon as she got back to her bed, she turned the radio on, wildly changing the channels until she found a male voice. Just as looking at them had filled her with desire, every syllable that came out of the newscaster’s mouth was a drop of sexually-charged velvet, deep and sensual and so masculine she couldn’t stop herself from stripping out of her clothes, plunging one hand between her legs, and bringing herself off as the man reported on the day’s weather.

When she was done, Lisa lay there, breathing heavily, panting in confusion. The meteorologist was still informing anyone who would listen of the upcoming storms, but where just a few minutes ago his voice had been the epitome of sexy, now it just sounded old and slightly nasal. Her orgasm seemed to have broken the spell, somehow, and as Lisa lay naked on the bed, she found herself able to think clearly once more.