The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Chapter 1 — End Of An Era

Cara looked down at the papers her solicitor had pushed across the old, worn oak of his desk, an expensive pen resting impatiently on top of them.

“I know Cara... I wish I could do more, but it’s for the best.” Reginald said, a small glimpse of sympathy momentarily crossing his weathered face before it returned to its usual stern look.

She let out a sigh before picking up the pen between her rough fingers and starting to sign the dozens of places the little yellow stickies indicated.

It had never occurred to her that all of her good work could be undone by something as simple as a lawsuit. Perhaps if she’d paid more attention to the family business...

No, she admonished herself, she’d left it in good hands as she had more important things to do. The Guild was a blight on the planet and she was determined to stop them, though with this set back she was no longer certain how she might accomplish that.

She had been fighting them since the day she had emerged from the jungle, the plane she and her parents had been in crashed when she was only 14. Her parents had died instantly upon impact, her own survival a fluke of luck as her mother had held her tightly and lessened the impact upon her.

It had taken her the almost a year to fight her way out of the jungle and it had taught her the skills that she’d used for the better part of a decade to track down and defeat The Guild every time she could.

Of course, the media had had a field day with the story, “Lady Loft fights her way out of Jungle!”, “Lady Loft, Jungle Warrior!” and so on and so on.

She’d become a celebrity overnight, well more so that she already was having grown up as the only daughter of the Lord Loft, the Duke of Norfolk. He had taken the crumbling title of his father and re-created it as a high-tech dynasty in the making.

She’d taken over the company, at least legally, when she’d turned 18, but her mind wasn’t on the family business. Instead, she was focused on the mystery around the plane crash that had claimed her parents’ lives. By the time she was twenty, she’d tracked the clues back to The Guild, a shadowy group that moved in the background, seemingly directing every major event in global commerce over the last 100 years.

Her research had taken her across the globe, to the darkest, deepest parts where no one went willingly. The papers had followed along, dubbing her “Cara Loft, Crypt Detective”, because of a single mishap in a graveyard. But she paid it little attention, she had accomplished what she needed to at the time and thwarted yet another plot by The Guild to send the countries economy into a downward spiral.

Finishing off the last of the signatures she brushed a stray strand of her dark brown hair back around her ear and leaned back in the thickly padded chair and let herself slouch there as she pushed the documents back to Reginald.

“Thank you Reginald, I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“My pleasure Lady Loft, I am always at your service.”

She smiled and pulled herself upright, her taught muscles showing through the skin-tight fabric of her riding jersey. He had been there for as long as she could remember for her family, working with her father in her youth and then he had been there for her when she came back from the dead. She felt a small pang of loss at the idea she wouldn’t be seeing him as much anymore.

As the primary shareholder and the chairwoman of the board, the lawsuit had bankrupted her company as well as herself. Gone was her mansion and her homes across the globe, as well as the support staff she used to help track down The Guild, as she could no longer afford to pay them.

All that was left was a small condo that she had used when she was going to university as well as just enough money to live off of. She hadn’t even had enough to pay Richard, her trusty sidekick for the last several years, his final paycheck let alone provide him with any kind of golden parachute. At least Carson, her family’s loyal butler for many years, had the trust that had been set up by her father before the plane crash. Cara regretted not doing something for Richard before it was too late, but she had never thought it would come to this.

The lawsuit had the markings of The Guild all over it, but no matter how much she investigated it, she could find nothing to link them to it. Instead, all she found was a series of incompetent staff, managers and executives that had lead to a cascade of failures in the safety testing. When the product was finally released, and became a worldwide success, those failures finally caught up to the company and while no one had died, there had been several injuries as the product caught fire.

The recall had nearly been the death of the company, to begin with, but the civil class action lawsuit had done them under. Even if it hadn’t the fines the government was sure to levy against them would have finished the job one way or the other. The only option had been to file for bankruptcy and liquidate the company to pay off it’s debt.

And now, with the paperwork finalized, she had nothing left of her parents’ legacy but her family title.