The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

March 7th, 2024. Amed Younis.

The sculpted curvature of Julie Lambert’s inner thighs drew Amed after her with an inexorable force. Fuck Thanos — those thighs were true inevitability. Her loosely pleated purple cheerleader skirt bounced around her toned legs as she strode through the oddly deserted, fog-curled corridors of Magnolia West Academy — a purposeful, aggressive gait. Amed was dragged after her as if bound by an invisible thread — the red string of fate. The decisive purpose in her steps perfectly mirrored the utter lack of agency he felt in his own pursuit. His heart thundered in his chest, and his palms were slick with sweat.

It still amazed Amed that even in a woke world, the school allowed its cheerleaders — the Magnolia Angels — skirts that short. They were all technically adults — the school’s Diversity and Equity Office had ruled that the COVID lockdowns had disproportionately affected under-represented demographics, so to avoid bias the whole school ended up held back a year. The seniors were eighteen or nineteen accordingly. Even given that, it still came off as delightfully spicy for small-town Arkansas.

He had enough exposure to anime to be familiar with the term zettai ryōiki, and this was some definite Grade A. The loose, light and bouncy fabric of the skirt flip-flip-flipped as her purple sneakers clip-clip-clipped on the tile floor. The inside of the pleats was grey, contrasting with the rich purple of the skirt overall. When it bounced up enough to show the thin white cotton of the panties covering her pale, sculpted cheeks, Amed’s breath caught and he staggered, almost falling on his face. Julie’s steps did not lose their rhythm.

Julie was Amed’s dream girl. There was nothing exceptional about that — she was probably the dream girl of more than half of the male student body even before she started her subtly sexual campaign to become prom queen. Now, with the swishing skirts, subtle flirting and general niceness, Amed would be surprised if she hadn’t transfixed every cock in a twenty-mile radius.

But they weren’t here. The whole school seemed deserted save for him and her. The corridor smelled like its usual mix of Lysol, sweat, perfume and spilled fruit juice. They passed by the school’s crest, prom campaign posters, AFHU recruitment posters, crimson and gold school pennants, the Stallions’ trophy case, social distancing signs and a corkboard clustered with student social notices — but no students or faculty. A peculiar, coiling fog obscured the tiled floor from his sight.

She stopped abruptly at the door to the Social Studies classroom, trying the handle. It was locked. She turned to face Amed. “You wouldn’t happen to have the key, would you?”

He stared. She was six feet exact, a few inches taller than he was. Her long, fiery red-brown hair was tied back in a ponytail with a purple satin hair ribbon matching her uniform. The tightly swept-back hair highlighted her perfect oval face, making her features look intense, sensual and alluring. Her lips were bright red and glossy, her cheeks blushed, her lashes long and curled. She wore the kind of makeup one associates with a centerfold, and was more than capable of staring down any teacher who tried to tell her it was inappropriate.

She had an athletic body with a toned midriff and elegantly curved hips that swayed sensually as she walked. Her cheer-uniform left her toned midriff bare — the top was styled like a miniature suit-jacket covering the same area as a sports bra. A single coat-button graven with the school crest held the two sides together, emphasizing the enticingly pale flesh of her upthrust cleavage.

He realized he was staring — and not into her wide green eyes, either — when she finally cleared her throat. She didn’t seem offended, though — if anything, she reveled in the attention. Amed knew that about her. Everybody knew that about her.

“You have the classroom key,” Julie told Amed. “It’s in your jeans pocket. You stole it to impress me, so we could hook up. I’m sure it was all very thrilling, and made you feel quite clever and macho. Guys will be talking about your caper for ages.”

Amed failed to contextualize the simple oddity of Julie’s oneiric genre savviness, but did manage to get the classroom key out of his pocket and hand it to her. She unlocked the door and sashayed in, her hips swiveling in a way calculated to make his cock twitch. The classroom was empty. Late afternoon sunlight filtered in through frosted windows, giving the classroom an ethereal blue glow.

Mist coiled around Julie’s feet as she strode purposefully up to Mrs. Loomer’s desk, sweeping the papers, books, office supplies and globe on it to the floor imperiously. The globe rolled across the checkerboard floor almost comically, coming to rest beside a grimy-looking trashcan near the door. A shocked feral hamster hissed, and scuttled away from behind the trash can into the shadows with lightning speed. Julie ignored it (as all the students did by this point), and sat on the side of the desk — legs spread in an insouciant but casual pose. She bit a cherry red fingernail playfully.

“Well?” she finally asked. “What are you waiting for? We both know what we’re here for, so let’s get the party started.”

Julie reached inside her skirt with both hands and pivoted her hips in a way that made Amed’s heart skip a beat. Two seconds later, the enticing cotton panties that has so transfixed his gaze a minute or two earlier slid down her long, silky legs. She stepped out of them, flashing more delicious upper thigh in the process, then twirled them on her finger saucily like a veteran stripper before tossing them aside.

Amed walked up to her, his heart thundering. He stepped inside her personal space for the first time, and looked in her eyes — and just choked, finding himself unable to do anything. Some neurotic part of his mind warned him that he had a really visible, really embarrassing boner. Any worry about this, however, was obliterated from his mind when she leaned forward to kiss him. It wasn’t a romantic good-girl kiss, either. Julie was a lewd and aggressive kisser, her tongue probing into his mouth. He could taste the oil in her lip gloss. He felt light-headed, and struggled not to faint. His boner problem did not get any subtler.

Amed had never kissed a girl, even in his dreams. He wasn’t ugly, with his short, neat black hair, slender build, olive skin and chiseled Lebanese features — but he was a criminally shy recent immigrant, only semi-confident in his English skills and uncertain of American social dynamics. His parents would kill him if he got a girl in trouble, or got in trouble because of a girl. He knew that all too well. So he stayed on the sidelines and focused on his grades.

“This... this has to be a dream.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I mean, duh!”

“Right.”

“So, you’re having a dream about the head cheerleader everyone at your school wants to nail. What do you do next? Any answer that doesn’t parse out to making it a wet dream is categorically incorrect, by the way.”

“So. Um. Would you... would you be willing to go someplace a bit more intimate with me?”

“Nope!”

His face fell.

“Oh, don’t give me that. If you wanted to go some place intimate, we wouldn’t be here right now. We’re exactly where you want us to be and you know it, so don’t chicken out now!”

She grabbed his boner through his jeans for emphasis, and he jumped. “You want to do it right here. I mean, sure, we could find some place all intimate and secluded and have boring vanilla sex, but who wants that? You want to be able to say you plowed the head cheerleader right on Mrs. Loomer’s desk, don’t you?”

Her hands were working at his belt. His jeans fell to the ground. He heard laughter, and saw shadows move. He flinched. His boxers stayed tented, though. His shirt was gone. He didn’t take it off — it just vanished somewhere along the way. “You’re cute, you know. The shy guys so often are. I’m weird that way. I actually like vulnerable — sometimes, at least. It’s better than arrogant, anyway. You’re actually pretty impressive downstairs, too. I can tell you don’t exaggerate it here like some guys do in their dreams. I’ve seen enough by now to know authenticity when I see it.”

Her delicate hand slid inside his boxers to grip his erect shaft. Her fingers felt teasingly cold. Red-lacquered fingernails brushed against his pubic hair, and he struggled not to come.

“I’ve... I’ve never done this before,” he stammered.

“You won’t come until I do,” she told him confidently. “I know it.”

He finally steeled himself and kissed her again, this time with the aggression, the need, on his side. She seemed to like it — and she looked spectacularly dirty and lewd with smeared lipstick on her face. They kissed more, and Amed slid his hands up her toned thighs to feel her firm, flat and very conspicuously bare ass. His hard cock brushed against her pleated skirt — somewhere amidst all the tongue action, his boxers had unwound into an ethereal grey mist. Julie ground her body against his almost animalistically, the fabric of the skirt scraping the head of his cock.

“So,” Julie whispered moistly in his ear as she guided his hand between her legs from behind to cup her vulva, “you know why they call it a wet dream, right? Cause I sure do!”

Her juices slicked his fingers. He squeezed her pussy. She moaned, and clawed his back. After a few more minutes of wordless but hardly silent grinding and not-at-all-dry humping, Julie heaved herself up on Mrs. Loomer’s desk and lay down on her back, spreading her legs. Her ponytail had become unbound at some point in the makeout, and her long, silky red hair lay splayed around her head like a fiery corona.

“Yeah,” Duke Stangrove said from the front row. “Nail her! Go for it, dude!”

Amed looked out in shock. Suddenly the classroom was normally colored and full of people — his fellow students. What the fuck! Holy fucking shit!

“I’m so jealous,” Marjorie Watkins said. “Fuck Julie Lambert.”

“That seems to be the idea,” Laurie Xiu, the class clown, observed dryly.

“Pull up her skirt,” Donny Broekner shouted out. “I wanna see that grade-A cheerleader rump!”

“You will not panic,” Julie told him, making odd gestures with her left hand. Her voice was oddly resonant, almost choral or harmonic. “You will have no doubts. Your confidence is immutable.”

She spoke and it was so. The class giggled and cat-called — but he just didn’t care. He glanced out at friends, tormentors and strangers — then back at Julie. Then he strode forward and shoved his cock into her eager, slippery opening.

Yeah, now he knew why they called it a wet dream. Julie was incredible inside — both slippery and tight, moist and wanting. She was hungry, possessive on an autonomic, muscular level. She clutched him, massaged him and egged him on — vocally as well as vaginally. “Yeah, Amed! Pound me! I know you’ve seen people do it so hard and raw you can hear the skin slapping — don’t you want to feel that?”

He remembered seeing videos like that. The image filled his mind, and a second later he was experiencing it in the first person. Slap! Slap! Slap! Julie squirmed and moaned under his locomotive assault, clutching at her breasts through the mini-jacket cheerleader halter. His classmates cheered and hollered raucously, and some started clapping. Minutes of rhythmic motion etched themselves into his memory as the perfect alloy of pleasure and vindication. Faintly, in some far distant realm, he heard an older lady shouting in Arabic. Julie apparently did too, as she heightened the pace of their already kinetic fornication with the kind of intoxicating hip-pivots only a trained cheerleader could manage.

“Go on, show them,” she goaded him playfully. “Prove you’re a man. Earn your peers’ respect. Make me come — right here, right now!”

Her hands clenched around her halter, tearing it open and sending the single purple suit-jacket button flying. Amed’s eyes gleefully devoured her exposed breasts, sloshing about back and forth. She tugged and pinched her own nipples roughly for that extra little bit of stimulation. “Nail me!” she shouted. “All the way! I want it all! Gimme! Sheathe it! Go deep!”

Her thighs were starting to tremble, and she lowered one hand from her tortured nipple to rub her clit for all of ten seconds before Amed felt her vaginal walls clench and spasm around his cock. “Fuck yeah! You did it, Amed! I’m coming! Oh, god, I’m coming!”

It was like she said the magic words. As soon as she told him she was coming, his own seed started spraying out in pulses so forceful as to be almost painful — yet so overwhelmingly much more pleasurable. Nothing he had ever experienced before in his short life was quite as perfect as that one prolonged eruption. The whole classroom cheered. Confetti rained down and the Star-Spangled Banner started playing as Amed stood rigid, balls-deep in Julie Lambert as the head cheerleader lay splayed out on Mrs. Loomer’s desk.

The dream would have collapsed into incoherency shortly after his orgasm even if his mum hadn’t been screaming at him about homework, prayer service and a loaned bicycle. He came back to consciousness slowly, dimly aware that he had a rather shocking quantity of semen running down his legs and smeared all over his sheets — and probably less time than usual to get ready for school. He was just thankful he’d locked his door last night!

The dream stuck with Amed over the next several days. He remembered it with an unusual vividness. The cleanup was a big nuisance, but he thankfully didn’t get caught. He assumed (incorrectly, as it happens) that his parents could never understand. He had no realistic aspirations of hitting on or dating Julie Lambert. He thought of the dream as a secret treasure, a memory to cherish. It was oddly personal to him — which was part of the reason he found the locker room conversation after football practice so disconcerting.

“You had one too?” Brett Tollard asked, laughing.

“Yeah,” Duke Stangrove said sheepishly. “I sure did. Just last week.”

“What happened?”

The Stallions’ quarterback laughed. “It’s a dream. What do you think happened?”

“You nailed her, right? And you remember it. And it kicked ass. At least, it did for me.”

“Man,” Donny said. “That chick. It’s like she’s the erotic fever dream of this whole school!”

Brett laughed. “Well, she is the head cheerleader, right? That’s what they’re for — to give us that little extra motive to nail the final touchdown, right?”

Amed felt oddly defensive, suddenly. He was only a reserve linebacker, but it had nothing to do with that. He felt weirdly possessive, protective toward Julie. “Isn’t that a bit sexist?”

Troy snorted, bristling. “If we can’t be a bit sexist in the locker room, I think it’s a sign Armageddon is actually here.”

Duke nodded slowly and spoke with an odd introspection for the sort of meathead he normally was. “It’s not really sexist. That’s literally what the cheerleaders do. And I think Troy’s right. If we can’t talk about wanting to bone a hot girl anywhere, it actually does lead to Armageddon. Haven’t you heard the joke about sexual repression and getting Hitler a hooker back in 1935? That’s as good a reason as any to not want diversity officers in our locker room!”

It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment. The DEO’s decision to hold the school back a year had created a lot of resentment among both students and parents, and their imperious dismissal of any criticism didn’t especially help de-escalate the tensions. Now it simmered constantly, just below the surface at MWA.

“Nah,” Troy jibed. “It’s the cocks, man. Cocks scare them, at least when they’re attached to guys.”

Everyone laughed nervously — even Amed. Being from Lebanon didn’t make the thought police any less scary to him, even if they were in ideological theory there to champion immigrants like him. If anything, they reminded him of home in deeply unpleasant ways. He wished he hadn’t said anything. Fortunately for his social standing, though, Amed was actually a pretty transparent guy.

“He’s not offended,” Donny said, grabbing Amed by the waist and sloshing him about, thrusting his arm in the air triumphantly. Donny weighed twice what Amed did, and it was all muscle — but there was no threat in the contact, just a jovial camaraderie and lack of boundaries. “He’s jelly!”

Everyone laughed again — this time, loudly and without fear.

“Tell us,” Troy said hungrily. “What happened?”

Stark terror gripped Amed’s heart. He couldn’t; it was too personal. Besides, how could he tell his classmates he railed Julie in front of them, all but cuckolding them? But a surge of the same confidence he felt in the dream came back to him then, and he just spoke what he felt. “I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s too personal.”

“Chill,” Duke said. “Most guys don’t talk about this shit. We’re just pervs.”

Troy shrugged. “Sorry, dude. I didn’t mean to be weird. I’m just...”

Brett grinned. “Horny?”

“Yeah, that. Lots of that. We good?”

Amed nodded in relief. “Yeah, for sure.”

“Wicked!”

Amed laughed in spite of himself. They all just had such... enthusiasm. There’s worse things in the world that meatheads, sometimes.

“It’s not just us, though. I heard she visited Derek van Worten from the Anime Club last week. He’s... not shy about sharing his fantasies. Honestly, that kid has no filters at all.”

“And?”

“Well, let’s just say Julie can fill out Mokoto Kusanagi’s latex bodysuit nicely and apparently looks really hot when pissed off and firing a rail gun.”

Everyone laughed. Troy looked fascinated. There were other stories too — guys having spicy dreams about Julie Lambert. Donny floated the theory that it was some kind of synchronicity event based on collective groupthink.

“So,” Brett said, “translated into non-geek, what you mean is Julie’s really hot, some guy has a wet dream about her, he talks about it, dreaming about fucking her sounds really fun, so everyone’s subconscious decides to get in on the act.”

Donny — well-known for his love of conspiracy lore and Fortean events — looked annoyed. “Well, yeah, but when you put it that way it sounds so mundane!”

Everyone but Donny laughed, and eventually even he joined in too.

“You had one?” Donny asked Brett.

“Already told y’all. Julie looks great squeezed into a retro 50s diner uniform. She got off shift, and I nailed her rough and hard right in the diner parking lot while her preppie Canadian boyfriend waited impotently for her out front in his lime green Studebaker.”

Inwardly, Amed sighed. It was Brett Tollard, so of course he had to be fucking over some other guy in order to fuck Julie. Life was a zero-sum game to him, all winners and losers.

Troy turned back to Duke. “So, you wanna keep yours private as well?”

“Nah,” Duke said. “You guys know I love those old pulps, right? Well, as it happens I was catching up on my Raymond Chandler before bed...”

February 28th, 2024. Duke Stangrove.

The dame was trouble. Gumshoe Duke “Roustabout” MacLain knew that the second she sashayed into his office, those glorious crimson locks spilling down her shoulders in perfectly styled finger curls. She was dressed all in black — a very figure-hugging black. Her suit jacket’s broad shoulderpads gave her an imposing air, but the tight black pencil skirt and narrowed — possibly even corsetted — waist radiated raw sexuality. Her circular steel glasses had tinted black lenses, and the netting of her birdcage veil hung down over her eyes. Her full-fashioned sheer black stockings all but worshipped her long, elegant legs, being perfectly fitted — their seams like the trails on a treasure map pointing the way to paradise.

The crimson of her fingernails perfectly matched the crimson of her lips. Black lace encased her hands, and her cured leather purse with brass trim had an avant-garde look to it. The bulbous signet ring on her right hand bore the ornate crest of a very wealthy and influential Boston family. She did not wear a wedding band on her left.

Duke couldn’t help but stare at her as she walked. The way her hips pivoted was almost hypnotic, enslaving his eyes. Bands of light and darkness slithered over her body like stroking hands as the ceiling fan above her carried on its languid rotation. She sat down in a green leather armchair beside his desk, crossing her legs in the fashion of a women who has spent time specifically practicing crossing her legs. Stockinged ankle rubbed against stockinged ankle intoxicatingly, and Duke even imagined he caught a glimpse of her garters. “Mister MacLain, I presume?”

“That’s what it says on the door, I’ve heard.”

“I’m Julianna Lambert. I’ve got a problem, and I’ve got money. You’re good and solving problems, and could very clearly use some money. Let’s work something out.”

She glanced around the office. Beer cans lay strewn about, there were two broken fans, the ashtray was overflowing and the west wall was dominated by a bulletin board covered with newspaper clippings. The green-lidded banker’s lamp on the desk cast surreal shadows from the memorabilia of many of his older cases. Julie seemed both intrigued and faintly amused. When she spoke, there was no contempt in her voice. “Well, isn’t this all so very Dixon Hill? Still, I must say, I love your taste in clothes.”

Duke frowned. His suit-shirt was rumpled, suspenders misaligned and the stains on his tan trenchcoat weren’t exactly marinara. Broads found lots of things to love about him, but clothes weren’t usually the first thing they mentioned. “I get by.”

Julie sketched out her situation. Her language was elliptical, but it all felt very familiar to Duke. Troubled marriage. Dead husband. Suspicious circumstances. Investigation. A family of vipers with brittle philanthropic masks. A desperate need to avoid scandal. Couldn’t he find the real killer, before indiscreet police tainted her reputation in Boston high society? He didn’t believe her, obviously. She wore an aura of untrustworthiness the way Coco Chanel wore a little black dress. By the time she finished her story, the duo found themselves standing opposite each other. “Can’t you help me, Mister MacLain? I’m desperate. So desperate.”

He should have said no, but of course he couldn’t — not with those wide green eyes staring up at him, with those lace-gloved hands pressing against his firm torso. “Well, perhaps I can—”

She cut him off. “Mister MacLain, there must be something I can do to persuade you to help me, some... informal exchange that we can work out together, in this office, now. As I’ve said, I’m desperate — in more than one sense.”

Duke was suddenly glad he hadn’t agreed too quickly. “Persuade me.”

She didn’t beat around the bush. A lace-covered hand wrapped around his head and their mouths pressed together, her tongue invading his. Julie kissed Duke in a way Duke was pretty sure 1930s women wouldn’t be caught dead doing, but he wasn’t about to complain. He loved it.

She finally pulled back from him, unbuttoned her suit-jacket and tossed it onto his coatrack. Beneath it she wore a tight, button-up pinstripe vest that stopped halfway up her chest like a torch singer’s dress. She’d be arrested in a second if she walked like that outside — it thrust up her half-exposed breasts in an utterly obscene manner, and its body-conformant tightness only highlighted the perfect hourglass shape of her body. Thick strands of pearls hung around her neck, dangling into her decolletage suggestively. Her black lace opera gloves reached up past her elbows, but her shoulders and upper chest were delightfully bare and flushed. Duke’s pants suddenly felt painfully tight, and Julie’s sharp green eyes picked this up immediately.

“Sit down and unzip,” she ordered him. “A man shouldn’t stay that tense for too long. I’ll help you relax. Don’t worry; I’ve heard it’s very therapeutic. Keep the fedora on, though. I like it.”

He walked over to the ornate wooden swivel chair that had been behind his desk — somehow the desk itself was just gone, and the room was big and empty without it — and sat down after tossing his trenchcoat on the coat rack beside her jacket. What he pulled out of his trousers was likely more inspired by John Holmes than Mickey Spillane. She glanced at it, then at him — not awed the way he’s secretly hoped she would be, but annoyed, amused and perhaps slightly intrigued. “Well, well, big boy. We’ll have to see what I can do with that.”

Julie got down on her hands and knees and crawled over to the chair slowly and sensuously. Duke felt a sudden surge of ambivalence. On one hand, the posture and the tight vest conspired to do starkly breathtaking things to her tightly-constrained breasts. On the other, though, he suddenly felt faintly shameful. “Ma’am, you don’t have to do that. I hate the sight of a classy broad on her hands and knees.”

Her sharp green eyes told him she didn’t believe a word he just said. He wasn’t really sure whether he believed it or not either.

“That’s a shame,” she said, making no move to stand up. “I rather like the position myself.”

Then she reached him, and faintly scratchy black lace opera gloves began stroking up and down his turgid shaft; raw stimulation obliterated all thoughts of chivalry in Duke’s mind, and a faint smile played over Julie’s features. He could come from the gloves alone, but when her moist velvet tongue started tracing its way up and down his monolithic shaft he had to struggle to control himself.

“Don’t worry,” Julie told the gumshoe. “I know a veteran dick like you wouldn’t have survived this long without some excellent trigger discipline. There’s no chance you’ll come before I do.”

He found he believed her, strangely, and thus it was so. Time seemed to dilate as she continued to work him for long blissful minutes, skillful little fingertips moving in perfect synchronicity with that wet, lecherous tongue. Duke relaxed, luxuriating in the sensation, the overwhelming pleasure only a truly skilled woman can provide a man. After a time she slipped off her black-furred marabou mules and massaged his shaft using only her stocking-clad feet — meeting his gaze with a slight, enigmatic smile as she did so, teasing him with her eyes and feet at the same time. Before too long, however, she returned to the oral pleasure, seeming to take an amused, almost fetishistic delight in his immense member once she had acclimated herself to its presence.

“So,” Julie asked. “You wanna dip your quill in my ink so we can get this work agreement signed and sealed?”

“Damn straight, little lady!”

She hiked up her black pencil skirt, revealing a very ladylike black lacy garter belt, and the very unladylike absence of any form of panties. Had she been commando under there from the beginning? The idea excited Duke even more, which given his current state was an impressive feat.

Before he had time to contemplate, though, she was upon him — straddling him, the crimson fur of her bush tickling the head of his throbbing cock. And then he felt that specific, distinctive ecstasy a man always feels, when he sheathes himself inside a woman’s warmth for the first time. No words can ever truly capture the exact feeling of that one coveted moment, though poets and perverts alike have struggled to for time immemorial and will continue to do so until the very stars in the sky gutter out.

Her fingers interlocked with his. She leaned forward, then backward. Their rhythm started slow, but this suited both of them. Julie seemed pleased she had managed to swallow his impressive length. She leaned back, then pulled herself forward, then back, then forward. Soon neither of them had their feet on the floor; the antique swivel chair creaked and groaned as it served them like a rocking cradle. She controlled the pace. It was an aching, teasing, shivering kind of intercourse wholly divorced from the rapid, impatient and brief thrusting he had known and perpetrated previously. It was like she was massaging his cock with her interior, gentle but firm.

Sitting in his lap, facing him, Duke found the statuesque redhead’s tightly-packed cleavage came within inches of his face every time she leaned forward. She soon clued in to how much this excited him, and made a point of crushing his face right into her breasts on each backswing. Strings of pearls scraped over his eyebrows and nose. Their motion gradually became more rapid, yet never frantic. Both bodies soon grew slick with sweat — his French-cuffed dress shirt clung to his marbled torso, and the sheen on her pale shoulders and deep, heaving bosom made her look even more radiant. She pulled the pins from her hair and shook it out, taking on a resplendently disheveled visage. Her grunts were no longer ladylike — they were as deep, rough and carnal as his own, and that thrilled him.

Back and forth, back and forth. Duke felt Julie’s natural juices drip down from his shaft to run across his testicles. The slow, teasing rhythm kept pumping their mutual sexual pressure up until it reached a level normally associated with a stellar interior. Not only had Duke never experienced anything like that, he never even imagined such an intensity could even exist. The creaking from the chair started to get bad enough that he wondered if—

“No,” Julie said decisively. “We’re not going to break the chair and fall down. We’re just going to fuck each other’s brains out until we reach mutual mind-blowing orgasms.”

He stared at her and nodded slowly as they pumped each other with growing vigor and speed. It was only when the anticipatory shivers started to ripple through her body that her face broke out in a mischievous grin and she batted her eyelashes. “By the way, I totally whacked my husband,” she said. “Went at him with a steak knife like Amber Heard on a meth streak. Man, you should’a seen it — plastered the bed, the walls, even the ceiling with blood. Actually, it was during sex so I guess it was more like Sharon Stone, y’know? You’ll help me cover that up, won’t you, baby? Maybe even take the fall for me?”

He stared up at her — simultaneously alarmed, aroused, intimidated and amused. “Uggh! Gaah! What?!”

“So, will you help me? I do swallow, by the way. If you ever wondered about that. I love anal, too!”

“Uh...”

She never lost her rhythm or stopped pumping. “Well?”

“What even...”

“It would feel so good to come right now, wouldn’t it? Imagine it — like a balloon bursting, a volcano erupting, a champagne bottle popping, a battering ram plunging through the very Gates of Heaven...”

“Gaah! Fuck! Yes, yes, I’ll do it! I’ll take the fall! Just —”

“Good boy!”

She winked at him playfully. Her cute, scary little smile pushed him right over the edge, and he moaned and smacked her naughty little ass even as he erupted, uncontrollably painting her innards with jet after jet of his hard-boiled sperm. She grabbed his hair and pulled his mouth to her own, locking their lips together in a passionate French kiss even as she rode him through the apex of her own ecstasy like a world-class steer-breaker.

March 12th, 2024. Duke Stangrove.

“Just one thing I still don’t understand, though,” Duke said later, after sharing a rather abbreviated and crass version of his dream. “I mean, I thought I was up on all the old pulps, but one name stuck out. Who the fuck is Dixon Hill?”

“That’s from old Star Trek shows,” Troy supplied. “Picard pretending to be a private eye on the Holodeck. It’s the only exposure lots of people have to your kind of stories now.”

“Hmm,” Duke said thoughtfully. If I never heard of this Hill fucker, then what’s he doing in my dreams?

March 21st, 2024. Bonnie Liu.

“You’d better be careful,” Bonnie Liu told Julie at cheer practice two weeks later. “I hear guys have been having dreams about you — it’s some weird viral thing — and DB has been talking about that... and sometimes leaving off the dream part in deniable ways.”

It’s not actually a universal statistical anomaly that statistical anomalies happen in the general case, Julie had once explained to Bonnie Liu. When they happen, it’s notable and amusing. When they don’t, it’s life as usual and you just don’t notice. They fail to happen a lot more than they occur; that’s tautological. So it wasn’t that weird that the Magnolia Angels had only eight girls — her, Julie Lambert, Julie’s best bud Nora, ‘80s-hair’ Bonnie Conkler (a.k.a. 8HB), ‘Pink Highlights’ Bonnie Díaz (a.k.a. PHB), ‘Wallflower’ Jen, ‘Rich’ Bonnie Lowenthal (RB) and ‘Decepticon’ Bonnie Kellerman (DB). (Bonnie Liu herself was ‘Chinese’ Bonnie, or CB — Decepticon Bonnie started that, but she liked and owned it; she was proud of her heritage and her family’s history in Bentonville.)

Everyone called Decepticon Bonnie ‘Dope Bonnie’ to her face (and she bought it) but whenever she or her minions weren’t around it was Decepticon Bonnie, or just DB to be sneaky. Pink Highlights Bonnie, who was a bit of a geek (and just a tad neurotic), had come up with it — but it stuck because it really just fit. Rich Bonnie tended to call her ‘Dopey’ to her face, but she put up with that — Rich Bonnie was a ditz and had a tendency to baby-talk. Chinese Bonnie suspected DB was milking Rich Bonnie — the latter’s parents were philanthropists who had funded a bunch of flashy charity stuff that Decepticon Bonnie’s prom campaign was riding the tails of, and DB herself took credit for organizing.

She’d more than earned the nick, Chinese Bonnie reasoned. The petite, busty bottle blonde desperately wanted to be a Regina George or Blair Waldorf, but just ended up a Starscream. She presented herself as a warm, cheerful friend and good citizen, but was always eager to spread vicious rumors about others. Julie said she expected a certain level of Machiavellianism around the prom court, but Decepticon Bonnie also lacked strategy, class, dignity and common sense — she lived up to her cartoon namesakes in her hunger for power and her willingness to betray people even when it was really, self-evidently stupid to do so.

DB was Julie’s primary rival for the prom title. Spreading rumors that Julie dealt crack was mean and venomous, but also pretty silly — Julie was hardly ‘street’. It didn’t stop there, though — the rumors started going around that Julie funneled drugs to the principal and the student council. That... not only offended the people DB really didn’t want to offend, it rated about a negative twenty-eight on a one-to-ten scale of believability. Not only did Julie not get in trouble, Decepticon Bonnie narrowly dodged a mandatory psych evaluation after telling a teacher she sincerely believed the stories.

Excluding maybe Tana and her weird non-school friends, nobody did hard drugs at Magnolia West Academy. They were townies. Their school was too boring for hard drugs. The rumors eventually metastasized into a running joke with new students being dared to approach Julie in the corridors and ask her if she had really had a cameo in an episode of Better Call Saul. Julie said she knew Decepticon Bonnie wasn’t responsible for it, though, because it was fun and witty — things DB wasn’t capable of. Well, not intentionally at least. Julie seemed to like the game — she was always eager to meet new people, especially boys. She did flirt widely, Chinese Bonnie had to admit, but why not? They were both young, beautiful, smart and blessed with raging hormones — Chinese Bonnie wished she could be as outgoing and clever as Julie was.

Decepticon Bonnie was a splendid brown-nose, though, and a world-class shit-stirrer. She managed to ingratiate herself in all the school’s social causes, side projects and hobby clubs. Nobody ever seemed to notice how all these endeavours dissolved into hissing nests of venomous, ineffectual acrimony shortly after she got involved with them. Fuck, she somehow managed to start a fistfight among the nerds in the Debate Club — something about the merits of different editions of Dungeons and Dragons. Blood, chipped teeth, death threats and concussions in the school library! Intervening librarians getting suplexed into bookshelves! Assault charges for dweebs shaped like the Pillsbury Dough Boy! Film at eleven!

They... violent just wasn’t the first word that came to Chinese Bonnie’s mind when she thought of those guys. Or the tenth, or the ten-thousandth. Whatever else she thought of Decepticon Bonnie, she had to admit that was an accomplishment. She was a schismatic presence, and for all her frequent stupidity she had a natural sanctity — a talent for appearing innocent and blameless even when common sense was losing its voice screaming that she was anything but.

Rich Bonnie worshipped Decepticon Bonnie. Rich Bonnie wasn’t evil, per se — just a bit dumb and eager for acceptance. And also a klutz. Being a klutz wasn’t the worst problem a girl could have, unless she was in the Magnolia Angels — at which point it absolutely was, for self-evident reasons. Julie was the captain of the Angels, and that alone gave Decepticon Bonnie a motive to talk Rich Bonnie into trying out. Of course, since her parents were the source of about a third of the school’s budget, she got in easily. Now Julie not only had to manage Rich Bonnie, she had to manage all the resentment Rich Bonnie’s role in the dance squad created. Julie said she actually enjoyed management challenges, but that one was apparently not her favorite.

“Decepticon Bonnie wants a reaction,” Julie told Chinese Bonnie calmly. “Deny her that. Do not defend me; simply act as though the topic is not interesting. This will entice her to make it more interesting. Stoicism and a grounded sense of self counters her most effectively. When she cannot see immediate reactions to her stratagems, she escalates them — and can be baited into doing so to the point of farce. The ideal way of foiling her is to encourage her to foil herself.”

It occurred to Chinese Bonnie once again how weird Julie was. She talked like Sun Tzu, like a political strategist. When she was campaigning, it was all giggles, pouty poses and clever, brassy double entendres — or a crisp ‘good girl’ enthusiasm, as suited the audience. But when she spoke to her close friends in sincerity, she became oddly formal and faintly pompous. Chinese Bonnie felt there was still so much that was hidden about her, so much she did not choose to share. Julie fascinated her — maybe a little too much. Was it a girl-crush? It would be PHB’s fault if it was. She’s the one who pointed her to all the adult video sites. Those videos... sure, MetArt had hot guys and that drew her in, but the girls — the cameras lingered on their every curve, all but worshiping them. It put thoughts in a young lady’s head, squirmy thoughts, and Chinese Bonnie wasn’t sure if those thoughts actually belonged there or not yet.

Unaware of Chinese Bonnie’s rapidly derailing thought-train, Julie continued speaking. “Do you not recall when she spread rumors that you were an illegal immigrant? And then that you were doing espionage for the PRC? And then that you were a Maoist radical plotting to assassinate Governor Sanders with an RPG? That did not end well for her, and with only the slightest of nudges from us.”

Chinese Bonnie grinned in spite of herself. “That was awesome. I sure remember the game of telephone that somehow led to me being an assassin using MMORPGs to arrange my hits! You know, though, I bet I’d look wicked hot in a black leather catsuit...”

Julie smiled too. “Our ‘dope’ rival has a great gift for speaking and acting like a credible and trustworthy person, yet no talent at all for creating credible narratives. She has charisma but not intellect. She will not prevail.”

“What about Rich Bonnie?”

Julie shrugged. “Show her only kindness. She has no malice in herself, only a corrupt vizier guiding her. In time she will come to recognize that her true interests are better served by us than by her current coterie.”

Chinese Bonnie rolled her eyes. “Lotta good that’ll do me if she accidentally pitches me into the bleachers the next time we’re doing a basket toss. I just saw Senior Year last week and let me tell you — when you’re on the same squad as Rich Bonnie, that’s not a comedy. It’s a goddamn soul-chilling horror film!”

“We’ll keep her as a floater and front-dancer. That was already decided last week; I just wasn’t overt about it.”

“Right, so she gets to float more because she can’t be trusted to base? That’s fair.”

“Life’s not fair. It’s just what it is. Let’s try to cope and not have drama, okay? I promise I’ll get you in as a floater for at least one big routine, and Rich Bonnie won’t base or spot for it.”

Chinese Bonnie nodded slowly. “Yeah, okay. I trust you, Julie. You’re good people.”

April 1st, 2024. Julie Lambert.

It was nine PM by the time Julie got home. Her parents were out of town on business, as they were most of the time these days. She wasn’t complaining — it was useful, and they very much wanted her campaign to succeed, and their absence gave her more leeway in her more... esoteric activities. An aspiring prom queen had so many obligations, so many volunteer groups. She’d driven food from the canned food drive to the city’s homeless shelter for the Key Club, delivered a petition on bike lanes from the school’s Bicycle Club to the City Council in person (and looked very fetching doing so in a short-skirted business suit), chatted with a few small business owners near the school about cross-promotions for her campaign, worked on the web page for the school yearbook and handed out fliers for an environmental protest.

Homework was quick. She didn’t need to study. The courses were all silly-easy even without an extra year to study. She maintained a very careful 3.4 GPA — enough to show academic focus and professionalism, without drifting overly close to the social peril of being associated with the nerd cliques. She’d chat with them, mind you — part of being popular was outreach to all the cliques; she’d even joined them as a guest for a D&D session a few times, asking questions and learning politely. Similarly, she’d gone to a concert with the metalheads, helped the eco-nuts get permits for a protest, designed a recruitment poster for the MMORPG kids’ guild, sat in on the Young Investors’ stock seminars and attended a few glee club recitals. But she couldn’t be seen as actually being one of any of them. Especially not the glee twits.

Work done. Time to play. Time to dream.

In reality, Julie wasn’t just a smart cheerleader. She was an Adept — a high ceremonial magician of the Western Esoteric Tradition. Decepticon Bonnie was actually the reason Julie got into dream-walking to begin with. Julie reveled in her own sex appeal. It defined her. Part of her had really wanted to use it to win the tiara — heck, before her current scheme she might even have been willing to go all the way with a guy in the real world to win it. When she was honest with herself, she could even force herself to admit the thought excited her far more than any conventional romance.

But there were practical reasons she couldn’t just do that. It was a stupid, short-sighted strategy at the best of times, one that ruined a would-be seductress’ life more often than it netted any practical reward. Julie was level-headed enough to understand that — her recent dream-adventures aside, she didn’t glorify the femme fatale as anything beyond a pleasant fantasy. Bonnie Kellerman’s adeptness at, and affinity for, slut-shaming made what would normally be an unwise strategy into outright social suicide — in terms of high school popularity contests at least.

But dreamwalking was the perfect crime — she could fuck as many boys as she wanted and have a lot of fun doing it, and it was all totally deniable. If people started talking about dream magick like it was real, they’d end up being certified. She could capture hearts and minds (and cocks) every night, and anyone trying to accuse her of any impropriety would sound perfectly bonkers. She was effectively fucking a new stud every night, all while keeping her reputation perfectly pristine. The mere thought drove her let out a brief but maniacal giggle.

Her cover story was that she had a long-distance boyfriend at the University of Toronto. It amused her — the whole girlfriend in Canada trope, and no one ever ‘got’ it because it’s not like she’d have any problem finding a steady boyfriend if she wanted one. But claiming a long-distance relationship let her mildly flirt with and tease everyone, and then say it was all just joking around for fun — not serious. Really, though, it was about the makeup, the hip-swinging fashion walks through the corridors, the trendy but slightly edgy risqué outfits. At least, that’s how she got on the popularity ladder to begin with. Now it was all about the dreamwalking, but the flirting was still a necessary first step. The guys needed to dream about her for her to get into their dreams.

“You have a self esteem problem,” her last real boyfriend had once told her. “As in, you have way too much of it for your own good!”

She wasn’t sure if it was a diss or a weird compliment. However he meant it, though, she took it as the latter. Not that she really cared what he thought. That’s probably why the relationship didn’t last. Then again, did Juniors dating ever last?

It wasn’t like she’d started this for the sex. The original plan had just been to dream-tease a few popular boys in the big cliques. Get all the social luminaries talking about her before the prom. But her subconscious mind had tricked her — she chose the hottest guys, and they had the temerity to tease her back. Dream scenes change so quickly. One second you’re fully dressed, albeit in a delicious cheerleader getup, necking with Nick Donnely — a tight end for the Stallions who had a rather nice tight end of his own — then suddenly, things shift and you’re naked, and struggling to resist a raging libido that really, really wants a good dicking. And it’s not like guys are going to slow down and take it at your pace in their own wet dreams, you know?

Well, Julie lost the struggle with the unexpected strength of her own libido. An hour later, she was struggling to wash her sheets and air out her room before guests arrived the next day — she’d never gotten so wet or come so explosively as that first night, grinding back and forth, pumping and thrusting like a woman possessed, held in bondage by tangled, sweat-soaked bedsheets. She had to do it again, of course. She discovered in one night like a thunderbolt that her whole prior sex life had been mediocre. Now, it was... not that. At all.

At one point, there had been an information-gathering plan. She’d talk to the guys in dreams, ask them questions about gossip and secrets before she let them make out with her. Private things they’d only tell in dreams. You know — for leverage. For the prom queen campaign. That had kind of fallen off her radar early on, though. She wasn’t quite the cinematic black widow ideal. She found herself uncomfortable exploiting people’s openness in their own dreams. There was an intimacy there, something she felt compelled to respect. So the carefully-guided pillow talk and subtle probing suggestions were forgotten about.

Ultimately, this didn’t bother her. It was something to be proud of, in a sense, and regardless it wasn’t like she needed it — the tiara was basically locked in at this point. Heck, some cautious part of her mind told her, she ought to be slowing down. The school already all but worshipped her. She didn’t want to accidentally turn it into some kind of weird cult of personality focused on her. That would be creepy, harmful and worst of all: conspicuous.

Julie understood herself. She actually possessed a fairly remarkable capacity for introspection and self-analysis, given her age. She knew there was a problem — well, at least there might be a problem, based on how she decided to form her own values and ethos. The sex had started as a means to an end, an instrument in her campaign to claim the title of prom queen. Certainly, it was enjoyable, but that was just a perk. Now it was obscuring her thoughts, clouding her mind. She struggled to focus, spending each day longing for the next night’s dream-fantasy. It became less a tool and more an end unto itself. Was that bad? She had to decide that for herself.

Ultimately, she reasoned, pleasure was fine as long as it didn’t get in the way of her objectives. Julie was a very pragmatic, goal-oriented young lady. She wanted that tiara — the glittering symbol that would cement her standing as the very epitome of desirable womankind. It would be as if she had strode out of the very Cavern of the Archetypes itself, deigning to walk amidst mere mortals in the corridors of Magnolia West Academy. It had become her personal vision of Tiphereth. It was an important goal — she could afford to have some fun along the way, though, as long as it didn’t impact her self-discipline or her longer-term plans. Objectives before orgasms. That had to be the criteria, the fundamental line she wouldn’t cross.

She’d done all the volunteer work, the chores and obligations. The sun wasn’t even down yet. That meant there nothing wrong with another night of fun.

The secret to having amazing sex in dreams seemed to be as simple as suggesting to the guys that they look the way they wished they could look, and making them feel confident in their masculinity and ability to keep it up. She wondered idly if there might be something to that in real life, but decided she just didn’t care — she had dream-sex, and wasn’t about to risk her rep on any more decidedly inferior material dalliances. Keep the confidence up, keep it a wet dream instead of a nightmare, and everything else got idealized by the dream-reality — in some ways, the inexperienced guys (and the narcissistic macho guys) were the most fun, because they were totally unfamiliar with all the ways that sex could be bad. She was learning to evaluate boys less by their looks, personality or any other assets in the waking world, and more by their creativity and the needy, vivid immediacy of their fantasies about her.

Inexperienced wasn’t always great, mind you. She’d learned never to ask for dream-cunnilingus from guys who’d never done the real thing. At best, it was unsatisfying. Often, it got surreal. At worst, well... she’d had to look up ‘unbirthing’ on the Internet after unexpectedly experiencing it first hand. Yikes! Not enough yikes to stop her rampage of wanton dream-sluttery, mind you, but still definitely a marked level of yikes. She set up clear bail-out systems and safety protocols after that.

In spite of this, she liked the uncertainty of it, the novelty and variety, and tried to stick out the semi-weird dreams. Sure, sometimes she got a sadist, a scat fan, a furry or a pedo and bailed out of the dream as quickly as possible. She also bailed on the dreams of anyone who she knew to be in a committed relationship — and, keeping an eye on gossip the way any popular girl would, she was pretty sure she knew about all of those. Not many seniors were actually going steady — her generation was a lot more open about that than prior ones had been. What she did in dreams wasn’t exactly like real sex, but she still thought it might qualify as some kind of cheating, like sexting another girl — definitely something to avoid.

But the novelty of the rest thrilled her. She was willing to deal with guys that wanted to suck on her toes, tie her up or re-imagine her as a Twilek if it meant she got a really intense pounding for her cooperation. That it was their fantasy gave the whole experience a passionate kind of intensity. She wondered if she was ruining real sex for the boys. She hoped not, but she didn’t think too much about it. Julie did not possess the kind of mind that agonized over decisions already made.

One of the weirder dreams to date had been Donny Broekner, the jock-clique conspiracy nut. She’d gone in for his militia-uprising fantasy at first — she liked how badass-sexy she looked braless in a tight, ripped-up action-girl tank top and mirrored aviators with an AR-15, and it was just a dream after all. Then it got weird, politically and physically — among other things, Donny was apparently into kissing and licking women’s scars. As a result, she had some and learned about that first-hand. She played out the fantasy script as it came into her mind, letting Donny reassure her that the scars didn’t make her ugly, and he loved her anyway, and all the other usual cliché-lines from a LiveJournal scar-fic.

She almost bailed, but she was actually really glad she didn’t. Donny was fucking her in a luxury suite atop the Space Needle — surprisingly tenderly, actually, given everything else in his fantasy life — when his drunken father unexpectedly burst into the scene and started whipping him with a belt. It was too real, too detailed, to be fictional — and the things he said came out of nightmares, not fantasies. But she was consciously aware she was in a dream, so she gave herself the strength and endurance of a superhero, walked up to the fat, abusive fucker and just tore his throat out with her bare hands. Donny apparently watched a lot of rather violent cinema, as his imagination was able to provide a lot of vivid, realistic and disturbing details about what it looks and feels like when someone gets their throat ripped out, and what a human body does immediately after death.

The dream never quite got back to sexy territory after that, but Julie did hold Donny as he shivered and cried, and did listen to his story, and did say the things her psychology textbook had suggested one ought to say in that sort of situation. Really, he just came off as a kid with a desperate deficit of affection in his home life. When she saw him around in school in the weeks after the dream, he seemed less into the macho posturing and desperate need for friends, and more able to just chat normally.

She even went up and talked to him in realspace a bit — he told her about the Scratches on Saturn and Robert Gulf’s found footage of Heaven (and, if she was being honest, proved himself a really decent storyteller). She, in turn, dropped a few subtle NLP-enhanced suggestions she hoped would give him the needed confidence to report his father to the police — while being careful not to hint at anything she knew about him.

She didn’t pursue any further contact in the physical world — being a dream girl was one thing, but stringing people along in real interactions felt like it was crossing a very different line. A few weeks later, though, she caught him wearing a brightly-colored Green Lantern shirt a few times instead of his trademark black ensembles. She wished she could find his dreams again — she’d love to finish the guns-scars-and-tenderness fantasy on a more positive note with him for motives both carnal and altruistic. But she couldn’t select specific dreamers yet, and while she mourned the lack of repeat visits, the uncertainly of it all did still thrill her.

April 1st, 2024. Julie Lambert.

The first thing to do was to make sure the house was locked, no one was home, the blinds were drawn and so forth. Julie did it each night she planned to do anything esoteric. She was meticulous, as she knew the potential prices of exposure. The rites were almost habitual at this point, but she focused her mind with Qabalist centering techniques to make herself consciously aware of every step. Magick was not a force to be taken lightly, and she would not let herself get complacent.

First, she consecrated her ritual space. She kept all her ritual implements secreted away in a big, locked antique chest — and the key in her wallet at all times. She hung the eight-cornered Daoist shield-mirrors in each of the cardinal directions (and slid a fifth one under her bed), called out to the protector Chesed-angels of the Four Watchtowers and pinned hand-painted prayer strips in each corner of her bedroom.

Next it was time to check and tune her existing spells. She went to her bathroom and rubbed the Ochre Kohl of Hatshepsut (or as close as you can get to the original recipe with ingredients from the world’s largest DalMart, rare stones she’d nicked from the school’s geology lab and herbs scavenged from Hobbs State Park) on her eyelids, then chanted Blavatsky’s third eye mantra from Isis Unveiled until her view of the world split up into a kaleidoscopic rainbow mess of symbolic surrealism reminiscent of the depiction of cyberspace in a late 80s anime. She examined, carefully massaged and realigned her chakras (which showed up to her astral sight as rotating, interlocking neon runic circles etched with Hebrew and Sanskrit glyphs), making sure they were bearing up under the weight of the longer-lasting self-augmentation spells she currently had active.

Nothing too extravagant — a health blessing to make her exercise routines super-effective, a skin-care dweomer, your garden-variety precognitive danger sense, a blessing of preternatural poise, gravitas and emotional equilibrium, a bit of boosted agility, muscle memory and overall stamina to help with the cheerleading. And of course, the centerpiece of the set, more powerful and taxing then all the rest combined — the spell that jacked her intelligence up into the low transhuman range, only slightly above the theoretical human maximum.

She’d thought about adding a bullet ward, given the school shootings splashed over Vox News every second week, but resisted the temptation. No matter how wrenching they were to hear about, they were still vanishingly rare statistically — and she needed all the capacity her chakra matrix had these days for the campaign.

No enhanced charisma, either — not yet, at least. Charisma drew attention, scrutiny and jealousy. It was Decepticon Bonnie’s path, and it had weaknesses. Besides, the raw sex appeal she was working on gave her most of the advantages anyway, and a lot of students still thought of her as “approachable” that might not if she radiated awe and grandeur like a bargain-basement Saint Michael. Depending on how things went, she might pop it out for the prom proper to target some last-minute swing voters — people would be a lot less likely to question the apparent change if she showed up in a really pimped-out prom dress. (She wanted to do that. A lot.)

She’d figured out by pure accident that the boosted stamina was her secret MVP. It was meant to help with cheer practice back during tryouts, but it turned out that stamina gave you energy, and energy was basically extra hours in the day; it let her stay peppy for all the volunteer work and hob-nobbing she needed to do day after day.

If she wanted the charisma, she figured, she could drop the dream sending she had on that metalhead creep, Harold Lansing. When she met him in his dreams, he’d bragged that he’d date-raped like five girls at MWA — and then gleefully tried to force himself on her, too (not that she’d judge him for anything he did in dreams). He came off as a real psycho, though — a headcase. After a bit of detective work she’d confirmed it wasn’t just fantasy — he’d drugged at least three of the girls he claimed to have in reality. So she set up a nightmare-caster for him.

She pulled the sinister sandalwood box out from a hidden panel under her sink. It was hand-carved with the astrological glyph for Aries, Harry’s birth-sign, and with the geometry of his natal chart. Being on the school yearbook committee was useful, if you wanted to know when your fellow students were born! The box was bound shut with black ribbons covered in golden Enochian glyphs; she untied these and examined the unpleasant materials within it. Still looked good to her astral sight, so she re-tied the ribbons and put it back in its hiding place.

Tonight would be the seventy-ninth consecutive night he would dream of dozens of bloody hands pinning him down naked while a winged, fang-mawed giant maggot with Nancy Pelosi’s face slowly gnawed off the head of his cock. (Hey, if you’re going to send someone soul-scarring nightmares, you really ought to also make them too embarrassing and inane for your victim to want to talk about!) She hadn’t seen Harry at school after the first month or so, and assumed he’d dropped out.

She needed to check on her other hand-carved curse-box as well. Less sinister and brutal, perhaps, but ultimately far more important. The mesmeric binding she’d put on Decepticon Bonnie — the Barbie doll with a cutting of Bonnie’s hair, wrapped in newspaper clippings from the National Inquirer, which served to make her oblivious to the difference between credible and far-fetched slander. Julie had actually been very careful with the wording of that dweomer — as long as DB didn’t try to slander anyone, it wouldn’t have any effect. Of course, she would, and hilarity would ensue — just as it had so many times before. Julie liked poetic justice.

She set Bonnie’s curse-box back beside Harold’s in the secret compartment under her sink. She took her nightly shower. Once her oxidizing treatment was done, her lashes recurled and retinted, her chakras realigned and her nail polish redone, the most exciting time of her days was once again upon her: it was time to get ready for bed. She winked playfully at herself in the mirror. Her skin shone with a moist, post-shower glow. Damn, my curves look fine wrapped in just a towel.

She thought about the implications of having thought that. Okay, I’m either bi or a narcissist. Maybe both. Probably both, actually. Neither really struck her as a negative thing. She tossed the towel back on the rack before leaving the washroom.

Julie did all her positive ceremonial magick and pathworking naked — though not the darker, more serious curse-workings. Her sexuality gave her confidence, and the thought of godforms, aethyrs, celestial intelligences and planetary rulers ogling her nubile young figure as she made supplications to them thrilled her natural vanity. She wasn’t sure which side of the big Hermetic debate she came down on — were they actual, discrete beings with will and volition, or just symbolic archetypes given anthropic forms in the Jungian universal unconscious? As long as they can appreciate pert teenage boobies, either one works! She had developed the oneiromantic rites she used for dream-walking on her own, through gradual experimentation and refinement. She was proud of them in the same sense she was of her toned body, so it made sense for her to associate them.

Finding the antique brass basin graven with the iconography of Hypnos at a garage sale had been either a staggering stroke of luck, or more likely a mystic signpost from her True Will in disguise as a coincidence — she’d only been developing her dream-walking ritual for a month or so when she stumbled on to it as if through sympathetic attraction. It cost her four dollars; she’d have paid four hundred easy. It wasn’t actually ancient Greek — she was pretty sure normal people weren’t allowed to own actual artifacts like that. It was a Victorian replica, though, from the period when Victorian England was really into the nitty-gritty of classical mythology.

In it she set a stuffed Pikachu with a packet of ketchup masking-taped to its belly. Then she plunged the wavy-bladed dagger down through the mock sacrifice’s gut as she chanted a ritual invocation to the Lord of Dreams in Attic Greek. Her pronunciation was getting better. If the universe was karmic, it was possible a fake (she’d prefer to say symbolic) sacrifice could have some consequences. Then again, if the universe really did operate on some system of karma Julie thought it probably wise not to be on the side with the ritual animal torture.

She also hoped she’d never have to explain to her parents why there was a stack of thirty identical Pikachu plushies (buy in bulk, it’s cheaper!) still in their packaging in her closet, and another twenty or so in a garbage bag torn up and covered in ketchup. It would just be a weird conversation. She’d take another load out to Hobbs soon, and make true burnt offerings of them in Hypnos’ name.

After the supplications to Hypnos came the Aramaic ritual prayers to thousand-eyed Dumah, the angel of dreams, and the legions of loyal Memunim who served him. Her Aramaic pronunciation was still shit on crackers, but at least she didn’t need the script-sheet anymore.

Invocations complete, she opened her closet and pulled back a curtain on the upper shelf to reveal a large, ornate antique — an Edwardian clockwork orrery. This one had not cost four dollars, or four hundred — she’d had to beg her parents to help her purchase it. They weren’t against it as much as baffled that she was willing to give up a promised car upgrade for it. She insisted that it was a far classier sort of status symbol than a new car, and would show off not only her station but also how much more refined her character was than that of the stereotypical Valley Girl. She’d had to add an astronomy elective to her already busy course schedule to make the cover story make sense. They’d agreed, reluctantly. It was a godsend — the dreaming spell worked without it, but the orrery was the key to getting the dreams to go the way she needed them to.

Julie traced her finger along the metal ring of Jupiter’s orbit, taking a moment to quietly appreciate the antique before her. Even distinct from its utility to her, it was strikingly beautiful. Even if she never cast another spell, she’d rather have it than some chintzy car! The Edwardian dating was important — it had the modern as well as classical planets, including the all-important Neptune that Hermeticism had decided governed dreams back in Crowley’s time. The planets moved on metal rings representing their orbits in response to the tiny clockwork cranks on the base. Using a model of the solar system wasn’t nearly as potent as waiting around for actual astrological conjunctions, but for her relatively low-key spellcasting it was more than sufficient — and it sure was more convenient!

She set Mercury (governing connections and communications) in a perfect conjunction with Neptune (governing dreams), thus opening the way for connection and communication between minds through dreams. She set Mars and Venus, the masculine and feminine powers, in trine with each other to evoke the erotic energy of a harmonious union — a dream that would fulfill both her own and the dreamer’s desires. She moved Luna into the second Decan of the House of Taurus, her own birth sign, to deepen her ties to magick while she slept.

Finally, she moved Saturn, the governor of all things consumptive, into the third Decan of the House of Cancer to represent insecurities, and then set a much tinier eight-cornered mirror on a telescoping stand directly between Saturn and Mars — thus giving the male dreamers confidence by reflecting away Saturn’s influence and preventing their insecurities from transforming erotic dreams into self-mocking neurotic nightmares as was so typical in the dreamscapes of adolescents.

She smirked. Confident guys are hot, but why bother competing for the few that happen naturally when you can just make your own? Sometimes the boosted confidence even persisted in the waking world after the dream, which was a gift she was more than happy to bestow in exchange for a nice spot of cock and some status-boosting gossip. In some cases, like with Donny, it pleased her far more — but even in the general case it had utility. Increased confidence, she found, made it less likely for guys to make false claims about having done things with her in real life. Definitely useful to her reputation, and logical as well.

Satisfied, she kissed the base of the model reverently and drew the curtains closed over it once again.

Now the sleep area proper. Julie pulled her bed two feet away from the wall. She pinned the Six of Swords — the “Lord of Earned Success”, in Hermetic parlance; the card she had chosen to represent herself — to the footboard of her bed, and set the Four of Cups (the “Lord of Pleasure”, that which she wished to attract to her in dreams) under the lower-left bedpost. She set out decals in a neat circle around the bed, then poured out mercury sulfate and powdered cinnabar over them. When she pulled the decals back up, the symbolic chemical powders were left etching the names of the Tetragrammaton around her bed.

Just outside the powder circle, she scattered hawthorn shavings to create a barrier against unclean spiritual influences. A few inches beyond the hawthorn circle, she made a third circle of magnolia petals to symbolize bounding the spell to Magnolia West Academy. Inside the circles, she walked widdershins around her bed three times, then lay down.

The scent of her pillows was like nothing else in this world. She’d rubbed the interior of her pillowcases with crushed damiana, jasmine and calea zatechichi — oneirogenic herbs that both enhanced lucid dreaming and acted as aphrodisiacs — mixed with petroleum jelly to form an unguent base. Then she put the pillowcase on a pillow and left both under a humidifier for several hours each weekend to allow the psychedelic herbals to permeate. She’d so treated both several normal pillows and a full-length, foot-wide cylindrical body pillow.

She saw no point in dancing around the concept — she was definitely angling for the kind of dreams where it would be most satisfying to have something to grind her lady-bits on, to pump and thrust against. Her nipples hardened just thinking about it. Sensuality aside, straddling the body pillow also helped her avoid terminating the spell involuntarily by rolling off the edge of her bed when things got steamy. It had been a great purchase.

Julie centered her mind and focused her will. Without the centering and focus, everything else was just theatrics. Mental discipline, emotional equilibrium and self-centering was pivotal to the practice of Hermetic magick — a magician imposes his will on reality, after all. That only goes as far as the magician’s own willpower can take him — or her, in Julie’s case. She repeated her statement of intent in her mind again and again, like a mantra: let me connect to the dream of one who desires me there, and let me fulfill that desire, and let us both gain a pleasure incorruptible by the thorns of reality from that fulfillment.

Julie slid easily into a deep sleep, and dreamt with an acuity the majority of dreamers would never come within a fraction of.

April 1st, 2024. Julie Lambert.

The first thing Julie noticed was the dress. She felt it on her body and saw portions of it before she got a good look at it when passing by a mirrored wall. It was absolutely breath-taking, and it looked even better with her ripe curves stuffed inside it. It was a very fancy, light lavender number with a white ostrich-feather trim on the hem and neckline. It had lacy sleeves but left her shoulders fully exposed, with a level neckline and trailing diaphanous contrails, leaving her back bare as all its lines converged on a kind of ornate virtue bow just above her ass.

The skirt reached to her ankles but was slit all the way up to her upper thigh, letting her flash as much or as little smooth, bare leg as she wanted for as long as she wanted. The front was lacy, embroidered and layered, almost treading a line between a formal dress and a lingerie bodystocking. It would be more scandalous without the ostrich-trim to distract the eye from the lingerie subtext.

Even beyond the dress, she was done up spectacularly — tasteful glamour-girl makeup, glossy nude lipstick, equally glossy white opera pumps, white leather Gucci purse and white nail polish. Her red hair was the only blast of loud color, and it was swept up in an ornate, poofy updo. Glittering ruby earrings dangled from her ears. She could stare at that mirror for hours, but wasn’t permitted to — the constant inflow of guests pressed her forward involuntarily, and she took her registered seat in the front row. She was at an awards show. No, she realized as she listened to the announcer crack jokes, not just any award ceremony. She was an actress, a renowned one, and she was at the Oscars!

Julie scanned the audience, wondering if she could find a dream-image of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Benedict Cumberbach or Harry Styles she could turn into a compliant fucktoy. Man, wouldn’t that be something! Heck, she’d even give Priyanka Chopra, Anne Hathaway or Duo Lipa a try — it’s just a dream, right? Why not experiment? Sadly, though, the audience was all off-brand, ‘generic’ celebrities lacking real detail — she doubted the dreamer had invested close to the required amount of time in TMZ for even basic cultural literacy. Philistine! It was his dream, though — as fun as a spot of celebrity nookie might be, it would be pretty rude to come into someone else’s dreams only to cuck them. Besides, it was looking like the most basic appeal of this dream (for her, at least) might not even be sexual.

Julie knew she would win an Oscar. She and the dreamer were the only real people present, after all — of course she would win. What other point would there be to this scenario? Still, though, she savoured the fantasy, even if the back of her mind wondered what the Oscars were doing in some dude’s wet dream. Sure enough, it seemed like only a moment passed before she was called up on stage to receive the Best Leading Actress for her role in some Marvel flick. Her mind rebelled more against the idea of a Marvel movie winning an Oscar than Julie herself winning one, but she pushed that aside.

She squeed inwardly. She was about to get an imaginary Oscar — which, all things considered, was probably actually better on the risk/reward balance than getting a real one; just ask Will Smith! She took to this like... well, exactly like the sort of teen girl that would be willing to leverage the foundational power and spiritual majesty of the Western Esoteric Tradition in a bid to become prom queen would.

She did her glamour walk up to the luminous stage buoyed by clapping and cheers from the crowd, flashing her long bare legs with every wide step until she reached the tall glass podium. Her eyes were inevitably drawn to her own face on the Jumbotron above the crowd seating, looking unimaginably alluring and glamourous in that unearthly gown. The announcer handed her the tiny golden statuette, and she began a formula acceptance speech filled with the typical vacuous platitudes of the Hollywood glitterati. “And, above all else, I need to tell you all what I big fan I am of —”

And that’s when the spunk hit the fan. Literally, in this case.

She felt the warm wetness splatter on her face, and wasn’t quite sure what had happened at first. The crowd had abruptly gone deathly quiet, and she felt a shiver of icy dread climb up her spine. She had a terrible hunch about what she was going to see, even before her eyes rose to meet her own gaze on the obscenely huge Jumbotron: her own face and features, looking perfect save for the expression of shock, and the huge, pearly white strand of sticky cum stretching all the way from her forehead down across her nose to finish near the bottom of her rapidly-blushing cheek.

How?! She was alone at the podium. There was no one in any direction within ten meters of her. Then, as if by magic, another sticky white ballistic missile of love shot out of empty air to splatter across her full, glossy lips and down her lush, perfectly formed neck. A third sticky white lance lodged itself in her fluffy hairdo and just stayed suspended there, dangling lewdly. Her heart was hammering madly in her chest as an anxiety attack overtook her. She made the mistake of opening her mouth in scandalized shock, and a second later salty, sticky fluid sprayed right down her throat, choking her.

Boys’ cum tastes great in dreams. Makes sense, right? I mean, they usually imagine it tasting great until someone tells them off about it. In dreams, well, imagination is reality and swallowing her nightly dose of bonus protein was usually anything but a chore for Julie. This wasn’t the usual scenario, though — her gulp looked as awkward on the Jumbotron as it sounded on the amplified audio rig. It proved to be just the right note to jostle the audience out of their shocked, scandalized silence — and into riotous, belly-clutching laughter. Even more jets of sticky white sperm followed — one striking the curve of her neck and making her shiver, and another dangling from her chin.

In just fifteen seconds, she had been involuntarily changed from a prestigious actress to a debased porn star. Her gaze was drawn back to the Jumbotron, and she found herself both sickened and oddly fascinated by the image of her own face so thoroughly glazed like the cheap whores in a bukkake video.

Julie was, as always, remarkably level-headed. Her mind was built to cope with trauma through decisive, rational action. She swung her arms out in a wide arc around her striking her invisible, naked assailant in what she assumed was the thighs around her shoulder-level. Then she kicked at where she imagined the invisible stool or platform would have to be for his cock to be level with his face — and something unseen came crashing to the ground. The illuminated glass of the stage floor cracked with the impact.

The invisible man scrambled to his feet quickly, though, and a second later his location was again unknown to her. She looked back and forth, trying not to focus on how vulnerable and humiliated she looked on the Jumbotron with a brilliant crimson blush on her cheeks and bare neck. The whole Oscars audience was jeering and chortling at her sticky white misfortune.

When she spoke, the words that came out of her mouth were not chosen by her — they were a scripted part of the fantasy she was involved in. “This couldn’t possibly be more humiliating!”

Then she felt an invisible hand grasp the virtue bow on the back of her dress and tug at it — and it unwound like the neatly-tied ribbon on a Christmas present. The whole dress unwound with it, sliding off her and falling in a pile at her feet. It wasn’t the kind of dress one wore underwear with, apparently. She now stood before the audience of the Oscars, buck naked and well-glazed. She tried to scream, but it ended up more a pathetic wail, and struggled futilely to cover herself up against the veritable army of cameras all pointed at her exact position. Why, by all that was holy, were her nipples so hard and so sensitive now of all times?! It made it a perversely sensual struggle to keep a hand covering both her breasts from the cameras and the audience.

An invisible hand smacked her ass, and she yelped. On the Jumbotron, with the state her face was in, it looked more like a pornographic moan. It also distracted her, making her throw up her hands in shock. Her insurgent nipples, clearly visible and mockingly upright, taunted her from the giant screen. And then she felt the invisible hand again — this time sliding in between her cheeks to give her a firm, rude goosing. Her slit was inexplicably wet, though, and her lower lips surrendered, spreading far too easily as probing fingers inevitably slid inside...

And right then Julie awoke with a sudden start, back in material reality, her eyes wide and her heart hammering back and forth in a terrible staccato rhythm.

Julie’s initial instinct was to feel an overwhelming sense of outrage and a vengeful fury. Violation didn’t even occur to her until later. Station mattered to her. She wouldn’t have put so much effort into becoming prom queen if the esteem of her peers wasn’t pivotal to her very being. So being taken to the very height of prestige and then tossed down into utter degradation as a crowd of luminaries laughed, pierced to the very center of her psychology. She had rarely before wanted to hurt, to kill, with magick — but now, that was where her initial instincts led her. And there were ways to do it, too, that she was at least casually familiar with — malicious sendings of fatal ill luck, or spells that induced a terror so great as to stop the human heart. That was without even considering the variegated and unlawful sciences of necromancy and diablerie...

But Julie was also a disciplined and analytical thinker. She forced herself to deconstruct what had actually happened. She used a spell to enter the dreams of boys attracted to her. People can’t control their own dreams, and even if they could, they didn’t know the ‘her’ in the dream was a real person. Indeed, she took active precautions to prevent exactly that sort of realization. If anyone was guilty of some kind of violation here, it... wasn’t the dreamer. He had no real agency in what went down, and was guilty of nothing more than having perverted fantasies. And really, Julie had entertained a few less-than-PC fantasies herself recently.

It was about two AM. Lots of time before school, and she knew she wasn’t getting back to sleep. Before anything else, Julie pulled out a notebook and drew detailed sketches of the dress she had worn, struggling to remember all the little details and intricacies it had. Whatever else had happened in the dream, that dress was fantastic and she wanted it. She wondered if it existed in real life — it didn’t seem like something a perverted teenage boy would be able to imagine whole-cloth. The detailed pencil-work helped to calm her stormy emotions.

She wondered if the dreamer was a misogynist who hated women, or a psychopath who hated her specifically for some reason — probably because she’d refused to date him in tenth grade. Or he was a nerd that hated her because he never had a chance with girls like her. But that didn’t fully ring true to her. The whole Joss Whedon misogynerd-radfem pop psych paradigm seemed a lot less credible to her ever since Whedon himself had got back in the news in some rather hypocritical ways. The dreamer was probably just some fat but harmless rando with perverted dreams who thought humiliating attractive women was hot. She didn’t really know anything else about him.

Julie worked to dissect her own reaction to the dream. She could have bailed, but she didn’t. Why? Being knocked off a pedestal rattled her, certainly, but it wasn’t real. She had experienced utter humiliation, but she hadn’t actually lost any standing back in reality. She could learn from the experience, use it to temper her own mind. Nothing imaginary can kill you, and anything that doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, right? If I fully digest and internalize this experience now, I will be inured, and better able to react with poise and equanimity if people try to humiliate me in real life. And eliciting an emotional intensity like that from her was compelling in itself. Knowing it wasn’t real let her relive it vicariously, to savour the sheer intensity of the experience. But she soon figured out that wasn’t all. She had to accept all of it.

When she first woke up from the Oscars dream, she thought she had peed the bed in fright — not entirely, but just a little bit. At least, that’s what she had needed to believe at the time. Now, two hours later, with time to introspect and process her own feelings, she went back and touched the stain on the bed, smelling her fingers. Yeah. Not urine, not remotely. Face it, girl: you apparently think humiliating women is pretty hot too. At least, your body sure does! Amidst everything else she had felt, the dream had turned her on — not just a bit, but wildly, wantonly and lasciviously. She glanced at the clock. Four AM. Three and a half hours before she had to start getting ready.

Fifteen minutes later, she was naked, sweating and grunting on her bed with a dildo she so rarely found need for since her dream-adventures had begun, watching facial compilations on PornHub. The... the simple mess of it, combined with the nastiness and the humiliation factor, thrilled her. She edged, forcing herself to let her heat cool before building it up again several times. Finally she lost all control, watching that pearly white glop splatter over beautiful women’s faces. She tossed aside the dildo and forced three fingers into her wet cunt and a fourth into her ass, pumping and grinding against her bedsheets until her feminine heat burst like a corked champagne bottle.

She wasn’t usually multi-orgasmic, but she knew in her gut that one just wouldn’t be enough right now. No way in hell. She flexed and unflexed her hands, waiting agonizing minutes for the oversensitivity in her pussy to pass so she could play with it again. Then she gave up and just bulled past any slight pain the sensitivity might cause — if anything, she reveled in it for that extra little bit of sensation. No more PornHub, though. She was done with that. She didn’t want to watch strangers, no matter how pretty they might be, get hosed down. She wanted it to be her, Julie Lambert — simultaneously shocked, horrified and unspeakably delighted as some deranged, invisible pervert came on her in front of a laughing crowd. She replayed the dream in her mind, again and again, now wholly comfortable with it and reveling it it.

She let it go further, too, inside the safety of her own mind. The sneaky little bastard not only glazed, groped and goosed her, he grabbed her by the hair, bent her roughly over the Oscar podium and plunged inside her desperate swollen cunt, gleefully violating her in front of a crowd of thousands, pounding and pounding and pounding. He slapped her, called her a whore and a wanton and even choked her. Best of all, he forced her head up by tightly-held hair — she pulled her own hair roughly to simulate that — to look at her own cum-splattered face on that giant screen even as the crowd laughed and jeered. Julie Lambert pumped and thrust her hips against the body pillow again and again, eyes closed, body slick with sweat, grinding her way through another three orgasms as she imagined, dissected and savoured her own utter debasement.

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024 was the only day Julie was late in her whole senior year. She got to school for 11:30 AM, missing first period and soiling an otherwise perfect attendance record. And she completely failed to give a fuck. It certainly wasn’t the only thing she’d soiled that morning, after all.

April 4th, 2024. Alison Dikscheide.

The reporter from the local news followed Alison leaving the assembly hall, with students milling about all around them. She held out her microphone.

“With the shutdown of the school newspaper, a lot of people are saying students feel intimidated by the way you’ve run the DEO, that it’s crushing school spirit and free speech. How would you respond to that?”

It was exactly the kind of question Alison longed for. She tried (and failed, hideously) to deliver her response in a conversational tone, as if it was simply obvious. “It’s still Trump’s America, even if he’s out of office. There’s a lot of bigots out there. I imagine bigots do feel intimidated by the DEO. That doesn’t particularly bother me.”

Behind her, a petite student with sharp pink ‘money piece’ highlights in her black bowl-cut was whispering with her leggy Asian friend. “Are you now or have you ever...”

The mike caught it. Alison was not amused.

April 5th, 2024. Bonnie Liu.

“Suspended? For snark?”

Chinese Bonnie nodded. She and Nora were alone, behind the equipment racks in the locker room. “Just three days. ‘Contributing to the disenfranchisement of fellow students by mocking the plights of oppressed peoples.’ At least, that’s what the Principal told her parents. I think the DEO’s on edge thanks to the AFHU situation.”

“Geez,” Nora said. “Is she in trouble?”

“Nah. PHB’s family knows the game. They don’t care. Apparently they even said Principal Hardin sounded sheepish and ironic when he gave them the reason. He just rubber-stamps whatever Dikscheide says to avoid her Twitter mob and keep his job. I’m going to take notes for her in Bio, and Julie said she would in History. Can you do Chem?”

“Yeah, sure. Absolutely.”

“I’m just... I was right there. I’ve been having little anxiety attacks ever since it happened. If I got suspended, my parents wouldn’t get it. Sorry to be racist and all but Tiger Moms are a real thing. I would know; I was raised by one. My parents don’t really get the woke culture war stuff. They’d think it was something I actually did wrong. I can’t be, I mean...”

Chinese Bonnie was starting to tremble. Nora hugged her, but didn’t say anything. She already had an idea what was coming. CB just needed a minute to get it out. “Nori, I was the one who said it. PHB knows how my parents are. She took the blame because I shot my mouth off. Because I... I just can’t listen to people spew bullshit like that. I talk up, all the time, because I can’t at home. She took the rap. I sold her out, but I can’t speak up. I can’t afford to. I don’t know how I’ll ever look her in the face again...”

Nora held Chinese Bonnie as she started crying. “She obviously gets it, babe. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have taken the rap...”

April 9th, 2024. Julie Lambert.

“Oh, look. It’s Miss Entitlement.”

Julie frowned. It was Tana, the maladjust who made herself an outcast from the outcasts’ clique. Julie made every effort to avoid dealing with her. So did everyone else. They were alone in the girls’ washroom during morning recess; Julie had just been fixing her makeup. Damn it. “What do you mean?”

“You think you’re born better than us. You’re so desperate to prove it with the posters and the smarmy civil service and all your other endless bullshit.”

Julie was actually glad it was Tana that said that specific thing to her, because it was easier to refute with her. “We’re the same gender and ethnicity, and our parents are in the same income bracket. How could I possibly be born better than you?”

This was slightly duplicitous. Sure, Julie was upper middle class... now. She’d learned about that Robin Hood app from the Young Investors, though, and mapped out some hypothetical investments starting with a thousand dollars capital. Turns out when you mix transhuman intellect and stock markets, entertaining things happen. She’d be a millionaire right now if those investments were real. She wasn’t, though, because the 2020s had a mad hate-on for self-made millionaires and most of her classmates wouldn’t vote for a newly rich girl as prom queen. After graduation, though, she didn’t have to stay middle class if she decided it wasn’t beneficial to her. Still, staying out of the media’s notice had advantages to an Adept.

Tana, conversely, had ratty clothes because her parents cut off her finances after she beat up her twelve-year-old kid sister in a fit of rage. She was currently couch-surfing with various death-metal dorks and dopies after being kicked out of her house.

“Then you admit it! You’re just putting on airs.”

“Look. Decide if you support the class system or not. I don’t actually care what you decide, but it has to be one or the other. If you like it, you can’t accuse me of being born better. If you don’t like it, you can’t accuse me of trying to reach above my birth station. You can’t change the position you’re arguing from just to keep attacking me.”

Julie’s words confused Tana, so she didn’t bother to even try to parse their meaning. “Can’t I? Just watch me!”

“What is your beef with me, anyway?”

“Do you even have to ask? Everyone treats me like shit, and it’s because you and your in crowd have it out for me!”

“Look, Tana. You’re not an outcast because other people are elitist, and you’re not above cliques because you decided to join an especially antisocial one and then alienate even them. You’re an outcast because you bit off a fellow student’s ear, have a conviction for animal cruelty, ran around licking other students’ lockers during a pandemic, advocated for forced sterilization as your Social Studies class project and have a two inch barbell stuck through your nose. All of those things were your own choices, and they had consequences.”

“No they weren’t! I have Histrionic Personality Disorder, and I have a doctor’s note to prove it! If you don’t give me the leeway to be who I am, you’re stigmatizing mental illness! You’re nothing but a neurotypical bigot, and I’ll break your head open for it!”

“HPD isn’t neurological. Also, your doctor’s notes are kinda sus after the ‘medicinal cocaine’ one.”

Honestly, Julie believed her about the HPD — she’d have been expelled by now if she didn’t have a legit mental illness. Nobody with a psychiatric diagnosis got expelled in 2024. It would be like catnip for the Twitter mobs.

“Don’t contradict my lived experiences!”

“Maybe don’t parrot progressive jingoism when you don’t even understand what it means and everyone’s seen you try to cozy up to alt-right shitheads anyway.”

“Fuck you, ginger trashbot!”

Julie sighed. She felt a headache coming on. “Look, can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How many hours a day do you devote to becoming popular?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, you come after me like you deserve to have everything I have, so I ask you: have you worked as hard to earn it as I have?”

“You just don’t get it! The licking thing was for YouTube. It’s supposed to make you popular if it goes viral. A girl I know who once met Jake Paul said it would!”

Tana looked like she was going to cry, or rend someone in twain, or both at the same time. Don’t comfort her. It will just make her angrier.

“A ‘devious lick’ doesn’t mean literally licking things, Tana. It also only makes you popular in really weird edge cases. It’s like trading pink sheet stocks. It doesn’t work unless you know exactly what you’re doing, and even then it still makes you an asshole. If you want to be more popular, or at least accepted, just try just being nice to people — and stop dressing like a school shooter.”

“Oh, sure, suck up to fagbots not worthy of my time and dress up all Sheeple Barbie like you? Fuck that noise. You really worked on this, huh, with all the campaign posters? You think all this clique and popularity bullshit really matters? What a sad, deluded loser. You’re gonna become the very definition of peaked-in-high-school. Fuck you forever, you vanilla-scented cuntwaffle! Bleed and die!”

Tana fiddled with her switchblade. This would have scared Julie, but she had seen Tana try to pull it before. It took her about two minutes to get it open. Still, she was angry, and mercurial, and she had about two hundred pounds on Julie. There was danger here, physically — Julie sensed it. But it was better to goad it out now than have Tana try to sucker punch her at some other random time — or worse still, go after one of her friends who didn’t have danger sense, boosted stamina and agility. So Julie played it cavalier. “Laugh at the people in the popularity contests all you want. Just remember this: the popularity contests in May are just the tryouts. The really big ones happen in November, and they determine the fate of the world.”

Tana was confused again, and her anger got the better of her. She roared and lunged, but Julie saw it coming for multiple reasons and sidestepped. Slipping behind Tana, she pushed her into the corridor wall, both hands on her shoulder blades. “Listen to me. I know the school is letting you get away with shit because of the DEO, but the town won’t. If you ever get violent with me or my friends again, I’ll tell Mrs. Andercleft what you did to her prized Clydesdale, and why, and who you sent the pictures to.”

Tana turned white and went limp. Information supremacy is fun!

“Okay,” she finally said quietly. “I, uh... I won’t hassle you anymore. Promise.”

“Great. And my friends?”

“Yeah, them too.”

“Awesome. Since I’m trying to get everyone to be my friend right now, maybe just don’t bully, punch or lacerate anyone, mmmkay?”

“That’s really pushing it, Basic Bitch Barbie.”

“Mrs. Andercleft will push harder.”

“Fine, fine, okay!”

“Wonderful. One other little thing, and then we can both forget any of this ever happened.”

“What?”

“I’d like to know what Bonnie Kellerman said to you to get you so riled up at me.”

Tana’s answer was long, convoluted and deeply surreal. By the time she finished, all Julie could do was shake her head in pity — marveling that even someone like Tana would actually believe it. Of course, that’s likely exactly why DB sought Tana out to begin with.

April 22nd, 2024. Julie Lambert.

Marvin wasn’t Julie’s first Dorn.

In reality, he was a short, plump, gawky little nerd with a serious acne problem. He’d taken to wearing an eyepatch, recently, to cover his black eye. He thought it made him look badass; it didn’t. He had been one of the more influential voices in the school’s nerd clique, especially after keeping a level head in the apocalyptic library brawl — he was the DM for their tabletop RPGs. After his central role in the big hamster controversy, though, everyone was shunning him like a leper.

His fantasy seemed to be tutoring her in algebra; undoubtedly she would desperately need his fatherly explanations in order to pass her next exam — and he’d exploit that desperation. Well, maybe. Hopefully. Julie wasn’t sure if he’d actually go there — maybe all he wanted was for her to fawn and act all impressed with him. Boring. Julie’d take degrading and exploitative over boring any day of the week. Honestly, given everything he’d gone through recently, he desperately needed a self-esteem boost — and Julie would have been willing to put up with a bit of condescension to give it to him. There was a way to do it, though, that would be more fun for both of them.

She’d used a fairly blunt variation of her usual line to get dorky guys to re-visualize themselves as total snacks in their dreams. “Imagine yourself being a stud worthy of me,” she whispered breathlessly in his ear as he leaned over to help her with a problem, “and it will be so, and you may actually get what you really want as a result.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it, pudgy five-two Marvin Stockman the alleged math wiz melted away, being replaced with a tall, bald, brown-skinned barbarian avatar of masculinity bearing mighty thews and a mighty something else, too. He radiated a thick, almost tangible aura of erotic machismo and raw virility. The eyepatch actually looked badass on him. Yeah, it wasn’t surprising that film was the first thing to come to mind with a certain class of boys who had exposure to, and love for, retro-cinema. She actually knew the script at this point — she’d looked up the film after her second Dorn to see what it was all about. Pretty entertaining, honestly, and such gorgeous line art. She’d been big into sketching back in Junior High herself, so the artistry of it wasn’t lost on her.

The study buddy fantasy also melted away, and Julie wasn’t sad to see it go. She hated pretending not to understand algebra just so Marvin could feel smart coaching her. It didn’t help that, nerd stereotypes aside, he wasn’t actually any good at algebra. Nor could either of them read a textbook (or anything else) in a dream. What replaced it, though, took her breath away. A spectacularly vivid alien landscape — angled piping weaving like cobwebs across a desert wasteland, exotic walled cities with incredibly beautiful if far-fetched architectural wonders, ringed gas giants hanging behind thin, flowing clouds in a polychromatic, marbled alien sky. It wasn’t even all copied from the film — there were original elements, and transplants from sci-fi and fantasy franchises too obscure for Julie to recognize. The artistry of it clearly wasn’t lost on him, either!

Julie hugged Marvin, making him shiver with arousal, even as her eyes picked out all the ornate little details in the landscape and setting. She already knew he was going to be her best Dorn. It wasn’t just a hyper-macho fantasy for him — it was a completely different world, a chance to live and experience something wholly other to her daily high school life. She guessed that’s why guys like Marvin played D&D that way, but she could never have understood the appeal of it until she saw that landscape. He’s not just a sad-sack loser — he could be the next Boris Vallejo or Julie Bell! She took his hands in her own, looked him in the eye, and willed herself to change in turn.

She grew a good four inches taller. The red bled out of her hair, and even as it grew more lustrous and full-bodied it took on a steely grey pigment. Her features remained fundamentally her own, but her cheekbones grew sharper and more pronounced — giving her the look of a formidable, take-no-shit warrior. She had purple eyeshadow in neat, almost ritual stripes, and her lips were dyed a rich magenta to match the ornate sword-tattoo on her neck. She was clad in a strappy black leather bikini and ornate, thigh-high crimson bitch boots with matching arm-guard and sheathe. Deep scars formed on her belly and forearm, and subtler thin white whip-scars all along her body. She didn’t need to look down to know she’d picked up two cup sizes and the expansion had been quite visibly cinematic — the expression on Marvin’s face told the whole story.

She felt powerful. An indomitable protector, last of the Tovaarian defender-race who, fittingly enough, empowered other women in their dreams.

Tonaara was the strong, silent type, but fuck that. Julie knew she’d have to speak to be able to guide the dream and prevent it from going off the rails. Might as well start now. She fixed Marvin with a slight, coy smile. “If any part of me pleases your senses...”

Dorn’s face lit up with an almost comedic flash of gleeful, boyish delight. “Ohmigod! You saw it! We really are made for each other, just like Dorn and Tonaara!”

“Dorn and Tonaara never met,” Julie observed dryly, but it fell on deaf ears.

“So, uh, you... you cosplay?”

At least it was Marvin’s voice (albeit deeper), and not John Candy. When that happened, it just felt weird.

She grinned. “Only in your dreams, kid!”

And everyone else’s, but there’s no need to get into that right now.

The cartoon aesthetic projected onto live-action bodies, combined with the look of uncynical, wide-eyed excitement on Dorn’s face brought an entirely different character to Julie’s mind. Am I really going to fuck Bull Shannon?! It was a very macho, ripped and rugged Bull, mind you — but the childlike sincerity made the unwanted connection in her mind, making Julie giggle. Yes, she decided. I am, and I’m going to enjoy the hell out of it.

They were out behind the cantina, Julie realized. She looked around. No one was nearby, but people were milling about in the distance. So — public enough to be thrilling, but discreet enough they might actually get away with it. Cool night air flowed over her exposed flesh, exciting her — Julie had worn a lot of sexy things before, but she’d never been outdoors in anything as scandalously skimpy and overtly kinky as Tonaara’s getup. It excited her. She felt like a stripper — a brazen, naughty stripper that was allowed to casually decapitate overly boorish clientele. Fuck yeah — she wanted that life for longer than just one dream.

Her hand circled around the improvised loincloth Dorn wore, and tore it loose with an impish smile. “I have no problem with your dork hangin’ out, by the way...”

Dorn’s hand on her shoulder guided her down, and she got on her knees. Tonaara’s armored bitch boots gave her kneepads, which was great — the city was a monolithic morass of smoothly-hewn stonework, carven with ancient, mythic murals. She loved looking at it, but didn’t especially want to crawl on it. Dorn’s cock was huge, but in the way a real man’s cock could be — not blown up to grotesque proportions the way her other Dorns had been. Oddly, that made Julie respect Marvin a bit more. It was a cock made to be used and enjoyed, not to massage a wounded ego. It was also currently only semi-chub rather than constantly erect. She could fit it in her mouth, she realized, and that was more than enough reason to do so.

She leaned forward, engulfing it without hesitation, magenta lips locking around the shaft like a vacuum seal. She pulsed her cheeks in and out and stroked the semi-chub with her tongue vigorously. She could feel the veins pulse with Dorn’s excitement, feel the flesh grow firm and hard inside her mouth. It excited her, that she could feel the effect of her ministrations on his body on a tactile level. After half a minute, she might as well have been sucking on a dildo, so rigid, long and hard was Dorn’s shaft.

No, she thought. Not a dildo. You can’t feel the veins pulse as blood flows through a dildo. You can’t taste the tang of your partner’s sweat. You can’t feel the warmth of their flesh swell against the back of your throat. You can’t slide the tip of your tongue around in the little groove between the head and the foreskin, and feel your partner’s whole body shiver in response. Dildos don’t do any of that. Dorn’s hand slid into Julie’s voluminous grey hair, cupping the back of her head to guide her as she sucked him off. It was a dominant gesture, and that excited her. Marvin would never do that when awake, but in dreams he was Dorn, and Dorn would and did.

Julie’s head bobbed up and down on Dorn’s rod, slowly and gracefully. She was happy — profoundly so, and consciously focused on taking in all the details of the moment, savoring and experiencing it to the fullest. She remembered the jokey conversations the cheerleaders had in the locker room, about the heights a girl was expected to make a hot guy jump — in terms of gifts, attention, foot-rubs and general romance — before it was permissible to blow them. Julie was certainly not immune to the delightful pleasures of making boys work for their treats — but she couldn’t imagine a blowjob as a chore, unless it was for a guy she didn’t want to be dating to begin with. She wondered if those conversations were as performative for her friends as they were for her — did the other girls enjoy the act of fellatio as much as she did, or was she just a sexual freak? She was okay with either answer, honestly.

The duo’s mutually savoured sex act was brutally interrupted, however, as a crossbow bolt charged with some kind of malign energy whizzed past Tonaara’s head, slicing off a lock of silver hair and embedding in a greenstone wall behind her in a shower of sparks. Danger! Julie’s heart rate shot into the stratosphere — it wasn’t the first wet dream she’d been in that had actual violence in it, but Marvin’s imagination was powerful and vivid, making it much more immersive and detailed than most. Dorn kept his wits, pulling her to her feet quickly. There was a mob of slime mutant raiders coming around from the front of the cantina.

“Fuck!” Dorn shouted, still comedically erect. “Goons! I’ll protect you!”

“Wait,” Julie shouted, drawing Tonaara’s sanctified brass arming sword. “There’s too many of them. Did you bring a ride?”

“I parked my giant wasp out front,” Dorn told her. “The mutants are all over that area now.”

“My flyer is just over there,” Julie told Dorn, willing it to be true. She liked that bird, and felt for it — it was one of her favorite parts of the movie.

They got ahead of the raiders by the time they reached the flyer, but only barely — and glowing crossbow bolts arced through the sky after them. The noble bird was the size of a school bus, resembling nothing so much as a hybrid splice of a pterodactyl, turkey and anteater. It was covered in smooth golden fur, and its wide eyes were a pure emerald green — remarkably expressive despite being devoid of pupil or iris. The saddle, stirrups and pouches were all still in place. Julie cut the cord tying it to a railing with a swift slice of her brass sword.

Her flyer cooed warmly and nuzzled her when she touched its neck, carefully avoiding the flyer’s own mottled scars. She heard the clamour of Dorn fighting the raiders as she prepped the mount; glancing back, she saw the mighty-thewed warlord heft one raider above his head and toss him into the rest of his gang, knocking them all down in a pile. It looked awesome. I mean, of course it did. This whole dream ran on awesome. Dorn glanced at her and grinned gleefully.

Julie made a point of bending over deeply as she untangled the reins. She felt a thrill as the thin strip of black leather pulled tight against her vulva, massaging it. Tonaara had the kind of tight, fantastic little ass that made men hard and made Julie question her own sexuality — she’d always aspired something similar with her aggressive workout regimen, and Tonaara sure wasn’t afraid to show it off. Well, no reason to break character, right? Dorn’s awkward gasp behind her thrilled her sense of vicarious vanity. She found she could still taste him in her mouth, and licked her lips.

No more time to dally. Dorn had a proton blaster, now — he must have grabbed it while fighting the slime raiders. Otherwise, though, he was still buck naked — which excited and amused Julie. She shoved him into the saddle, but facing backwards. “You shoot, I’ll fly!”

He nodded. Marvin had left the house — Dorn was just Dorn at this point, a towering slab of muscle and fury blinded to fear by the power of his righteous rage and survival instinct. Julie pulled herself up after him, straddling him face to face like she was a stripper giving him a lap dance as she pulled the reins. The flyer squawked and they took to the air. Julie gasped — again shocked by the beauty, detail and vivid otherness of the psychedelic landscapes Marvin’s mind was able to render.

A brief moment of panic seized Julie — it was all so vividly real. She’d never ridden an animal in her life, let alone flown a sci-fi beast, and the ground suddenly seemed sickeningly far away. But she disciplined her mind and, girded with the self-awareness that it was only a dream and she was safe in reality, savoured the adrenaline thrill with the same hedonistic verve she had savoured Dorn’s cock.

My life needs a Bon Jovi soundtrack, Julie thought. Being in a dream, her idle wish was immediately granted. Marvin apparently approved, headbanging vigorously in time to Livin’ on a Prayer.

Sinister, dark-colored enemy flyers rose up in pursuit of them like mounted Nazgûl. Tiny dots looking like nothing so much as flying severed heads joined the pursuit party. The area the enemy forces streamed from glowed and pulsed with the malevolent green iridescence of the Vok-Tal. One of the flying head creatures — Julie’s mystic connection to the dream-reality told her they were apparently called “vargouilles”, and were a kind of undead horror native to the lower planes — rushed up to snap at her mount’s wings. Up close, it was horrible — a decaying head, face stretched into a rictus grin, severed neck and hair replaced by thrashing tentacles, ears distorted into giant bat-wings, unclean green light spilling from it’s mouth and eyes. One swing of her mighty sword split it neatly in twain, and she watched the two halves trail gore as they tumbled away into the cityscape so far below them now.

“Got one!” Dorn shouted triumphantly as a bolt from his blaster took down one of the pursuing sky-riders. His eyepatch didn’t seem to interfere with his aim at all.

Julie looked into the barbarian eye and understood — Marvin believed. In that moment he really was Dorn, streaking through the polychromatic skies of an alien planet as he straddled the warrior-priestess Tonaara and stayed one step ahead of the evil orb. It made sense — he’d probably spent the best nights of his life in richly-detailed, far-away worlds. He had the experience to back it all up. Then again, maybe she believed a bit too — not in the flyer-beast and the orb, but in the overpowering, erotic machismo of a guy she had previously only known as a scrawny, brutally emasculated nerd. It was, all things considered, a pretty fun fantasy to buy into.

Dorn and Julie fought tenaciously, but their foes were many. It was easy to get distracted — with her straddling him, it was impossible for either to really maneuver without grinding and dry humping the other. Inwardly, Julie giggled — she had foreseen that when positioning him, even if it was also tactically sound.

The great malevolent green circle of the Vok-Tal itself rose up behind its contaminated aerial army. Julie saw its radiance pulse a second before it shot out, and pulled her mount’s reigns sharply aft. The mount responded intuitively, streaking forward and turning ninety degrees until it was almost horizontal. Julie and Dorn clutched at each other and the barding, struggling not to fall off. Julie had to lunge forward to keep a hold, crushing Dorn between her and the mount. She ended up motorboating him rather aggressively.

Suddenly the air felt like molasses; Dorn’s shouts and the mount’s squawking were two octaves deeper. An oddly slow-moving shaft of evil emerald light tore through the space they had been in a second earlier, narrowly missing them. One it passed, time snapped back to normal. Ah, Julie thought, bemused. So that’s what it feels like when someone visualizes something in slow motion and you happen to be part of that something. Neat.

Once the mount righted itself, Dorn and Julie also struggled back to a vertical position. Dorn was still buck naked and his cock was ragingly hard; his erection dug into her thigh impudently. For a second or two he ground himself against her on pure carnal instinct — until he realized what he was doing.

“Sorry. I... uh, just wanted to get more comfortable,” Dorn told her awkwardly.

“Let me see if I can help with that,” Julie said, wrapping her hand around that wonderful shaft, lifting one leg and sliding it into her slick vag with a Mona Lisa smile.

“Yeah,” she said conversationally. “Definitely feels more comfortable to me that way. Don’t you agree?”

He didn’t have a chance to reply — he twisted around to blow away a vargouille lunging toward her leg, and in so doing thrust himself deeper into her. She couldn’t reply right away — all she could do was quiver and moan, and focus all her mental discipline on not dropping the sword. Dorn tore away Julie’s leather bra, squeezing her ample chest with a rough hand and suckling her sensitive nipples with a surprisingly tender tongue.

Julie found her fingertips tracing the many scars on Dorn’s body, much like she had in Donny’s dream. Dorn in turn at least noticed the ones on her shoulder and belly. It wasn’t as weird as it had been with Donny; she felt she understood the fetish a bit better now. It also seemed like it fit here, more than it had in Donny’s dream. The nipple-sucking still did way more for her, though.

For a span of minutes they soared through the sky, clutching each other as they blew away and hacked apart their pursuers in a glorious interplay of sex and violence. Their bodies were slick with sweat. Their breathing was ragged and eerily in synch with each other, as if they had become a single organism built only for fighting and fucking. Each could hear the other’s heart hammering like a dynamo in their respective chests, far faster than hearts should naturally beat. His cock slid around inside her creamy interior in a giddily haphazard way as he blew away enemy fighters; her whole body shivered as her sexual heat built toward a climax she could not hope to avert.

Okay, Julie thought deliriously. Anyone who says juvenile male fantasies have no inherent worth has clearly never fucked a bald giant while riding a pterodactyl and dodging green lasers made of pure evil.

One vargouille managed to get past their cooperative defenses and snare the wrist of Dorn’s gun-hand with its slippery tentacles. Julie drove the brass sword forward, impaling it through the mouth. It sank down on her sword to the hilt, mouth still spewing green light and head-tentacles still thrashing. Holy Tovaarian power pulsed through the blade, and the unholy monstrosity roared, bubbled, swelled and smoked as it was burned alive from within. Then it blew apart with a sickening pop, showering Julie’s face and bare tits — and Dorn’s marbled torso — with ichor and brains.

It probably doesn’t say good things about my psychiatric stability, Julie thought, to admit how incredibly hot I find this. But she did — it made both her and her lover seem so incredibly badass, and it was all imaginary anyway. Her nipples were incriminatingly erect as the gore slid down her chest, teasing them. Her last boyfriend had once told her there were only two kinds of Sword and Sorcery flicks in the world — the R-rated ones and the lame ones. Only now did she actually understand what he had meant. Well, we can officially add a third type now, she thought as Dorn’s cock throbbed and twisted with bloodthirsty ecstasy inside her. The X-rated ones are pretty kick-ass too!

His hand now freed, the last of their material pursuers fell swiftly before Dorn’s blaster-bolts — leaving only the Vok-Tal itself. It crowded out the sky like a malevolent artificial sun.

“What now?” Dorn asked. Being too badass to sound nervous, he just came off as peevish instead.

“Fuck me,” Julie said. “Literally. I can cleanse that thing. I just need the energy, the sexual power. Get me off and I’ll crush it with the power of the old Tovaarian race!”

They thrust against each other tirelessly in midair. Their mount cooed. Their many bleeding scratches, the punishing aches in their bodies, only seemed to make the copulation more rewarding and intense. Julie struggled to absorb and memorize every detail and every sensory element of these perfect, thrilling moments so she might relive them again and again, at her leisure.

“Just lean into it,” Julie finally said slyly to Dorn, the fingers on their free hands woven together.

He leaned back slightly, almost like they were on a see-saw — and his cock ground right against her g-spot, sending shivers of ecstasy through her whole body, making the hair stand up on her neck and raising up a veritable army of goosebumps on the ample expanses of open flesh.

She felt him burst, spraying into her like a firehose — and it was only when he did she realized she hadn’t needed the usual suggestion to delay him. Her whole body was starting to shiver and tremble too, and she held her mighty brass sword aloft and screamed — a raw, throat-stretching howl of undiluted sexual ecstasy and primal fury. Clean white lightning struck, arcing through her, Dorn and her mount and stretching out from them to pulverize and consume the Vok-Tal. The world burned away in a literal thunderbolt of all-consuming sexual passion and transcendent feminine power.

Julie awoke straddling her body-pillow — bruised and sore, with a puffy vagina again swollen red from over-stimulation, painfully sensitized nipples and a dark sweat-stain on her bedsheets spreading out from her body by a full foot. This didn’t alarm her — she’d already accepted abnormally frequent linen-based laundry trips as one of the costs of her strange new lifestyle. It was several minutes before she could even breathe properly, let alone think. She hoped she hadn’t screamed in reality as loudly as she had in the dream — or if she had, that the neighbours weren’t home. She’d already used the “stepped on a LEGO brick” excuse once, after all.

Between this, the LEGO brick dream and the Oscars thing, she thought, my imaginary sex life may be getting a wee bit too intense. Well, she’d sort it out. Somehow. She always did, after all.

No regrets, though. Totally worth it!

April 26th, 2024. Dwight Pendelaro.

All last week, the boys had been lingering in the locker room after Phys Ed. It wasn’t just the asshole jock clique — Brett, Duke, Troy, Amed and the rest. Dwight knew there were a bunch of other seniors there from the nerds, the metalheads, the preppies, the e-sports jackoffs that thought they were so far above the regular nerds, the theatre-geek stoners, the weeaboos, even the Evangelical kids and the general weirdos and losers that didn’t have an actual clique. It felt weird and unnatural to Dwight to see them all talking together — like some kind of breakdown in the natural order of things. They did all have something in common to bond over, mind you — he knew they were all simps, losers and perverts.

Dwight knew what they were talking about — their dream girl, Julie Lambert. More specifically, their wet dream girl. There was some weird viral thing where all the senior guys in school were having wet dreams about her — no one knew why. It seemed like some kind of hoax. They had even started calling it the “Sweet Dreams Club”. Other guys wanted to know how to make it happen — it sounded exciting to them. Inwardly, Dwight snickered. You wanna know how to have a wet dream? Seriously? Just be a dickless momma’s boy, stare at Julie like a creep, watch a lot of hentai and keep workin’ that virgin-grade sexual frustration! I’m sure you’ve all got it down pat and she’ll come visit you soon...

Dwight had snuck into the locker room early, getting there before the rest of them. They couldn’t see him — he was hidden at the far side of one of the locker rows, watching them from a distance. He listened carefully to their banal chatter. It just went on and on, interminably, and he found he was only catching snippets.

“She was wearing just the blazer from her school uniform, with nothing on underneath...”

“...so then Randy and I put the aphrodisiacs in the shower-heads in the girls’ locker room —”

“Dude! I was in your wet dream? Eew!”

“Just as, like, a bro, man!”

“The referee explained to us that the losing team’s cheerleaders would have to service the players from the winning team...”

“Dude, Twileks are so last year. Asari are where it’s at.”

“She circumcised me with a box cutter. It was hot.”

“God, Ken, stop edgelording. It just makes you come off as a shock jock desperate for attention.”

“She looked fantastic, all tied up in her lingerie with duct tape over her mouth. I teased her with the edge of the knife — my god, words can’t convey how amazing she looked squirming and helpless in rope and sheer lingerie...”

“You see, Jim knows how to do freaky authentically.”

“Speaking of shock jocks, in mine Stern had wine from my grandfather’s vinery, and after she had a few glasses he was able to talk her onto the Sybian together with Adria Rae...”

“Oh, geez, dude. Julie and Adria, together on a Sybian? So hot. I’m gonna need to whack off tonight for sure.”

“You know that makes it less likely you’ll have a dream, right?”

“...and that’s how Julie killed Vladimir Putin using only duct tape, superconducting wire and heightened nipple sensitivity.”

“Julie was the secretary, but she was only wearing fuck-me pumps and post-it notes. Around the office we were all working together to think of tasks she would have to remember, so she gradually had fewer and fewer notes to cover herself...”

“I heard she pegged Kevin Solentino in a dream. They were both in the school band, and they did it right in the middle of a band march in public! Yeah, seriously — dreams can be like that.”

“No, no, I’m not making fun of Kev. I like him. But he’s into that. I’m not making it up; check his FetLife profile!”

“I thought he was gay.”

“He’s bi, and he’s had more for-real cheerleader pussy than most of us ever will!”

“Seriously?”

“Bonnie Liu and Nora Alders, man. Threesome at Deke’s party. That’s the rumor, at least.”

“Wait, we’re allowed to have FetLife?”

“When Julie caught me peeping on the girls’ showers, I felt the whole world start to grow around me — rather, I guess, I was shrinking, and I kept shrinking under her withering gaze. And when I was no taller than her index finger she grabbed me and she shoved me in her... well, you know. And then she pulled those spankies up and ran out to cheerlead at the big game in front of hundreds of people — with me, still, you know. In there.”

“Did she actually...”

“Oh, yeah, man. Totally. Three or four times. By the end it was like trying to tread water in a giant jar of Noxzema! And she sure gave some enthusiastically guttural cheers for the Stallions...”

“Yikes, man! I mean, major bro-fist on popping her off three times, but still... eew!”

“You can’t fear the pussy, man. So many good things happen when you stop fearing the pussy...”

“I had no idea what she was doing in the shower in my home, but I was already naked — so when she asked me if I could get in and help her with her back, well, I was hardly going to complain. I was so nervous at first, but weirdly she seemed to really like that. She said vulnerability is sexy...”

“She loved the new latex uniforms I designed for the cheerleaders! It clung to her like a second skin, all shiny and black, conforming to cup and outline her breasts and give her a wicked cameltoe. She kept asking me to help adjust the crotch, guiding my hands down so I could touch and squeeze her kitty-kat, and she got so wet...”

What a bunch of morons and simps. It strained Dwight’s patience to wait so long, but finally the deluded collective got tired of their fantasies, gathered up their stuff and left. He was looking forward to tearing their worlds apart. Once he was sure they were gone, he ran up to the old locker row opposite where they had been talking, opened a disused locker and picked up his iPhone where he had hidden it under an old jock strap. He checked the recording app and shut it off. Seventy-two minutes those chucklefucks babbled about Julie Lambert and wet dreams — and he had it all.

When Bonnie Kellerman heard it, she’d be ecstatic. He’d make very sure, though, that she didn’t get a copy of it until after her lips had wrapped around his cock and her pretty little blonde head had bobbed up and down until he was ready to give her a mouthful of salty joy — just like she promised. He couldn’t help but laugh — all those guys, even the hotshot handsome jocks like Brett and Duke, were such total chumps when you knew about this. They were all so worked up about a cheap thot and wet dreams. Meanwhile, here he was, about to lose his blowjob virginity, and there was nothing dreamlike about that at all!

April 29th, 2024. Merjan Younis.

Merjan Younis had just turned eight. She was glad her Grade 2 block was getting a new math teacher — Mrs. Kemmler had been really strict. The new guy seemed interesting, if a bit weird — a scruffy dude with his hair in a bun. He spoke and moved the way she imagined she must sometimes speak and move — the way that had caused her mum to stop buying Fruit Loops.

“Hello, everyone! Isn’t it an amazing day today? I sure think it’s an amazing day today! I’m George Havelock, your new math teacher, and we’re all going to work together to make math fun again! Did you know there are secret Nazis all around you every day, in your daily lives? Well, for today’s special exercise, we’re going to count them! You can all count, right?”

Merjan frowned. She had a feeling this class was going to be weird...

April 29th, 2024. Julie Lambert.

The DEO hijacked Julie’s first-period Social Studies to show a film — “The Problem of Whiteness”. Julie listened carefully to the narrator’s choice of words and condescending tone, and found she couldn’t help but believe he felt it was a problem that merited a final solution. Wait, that’s a fucked-up far-right conspiracy theory now, isn’t it? Did it come from films like this? If it didn’t, Julie thought, the film could only serve to strengthen it.

The film was hysterical. Not funny, mind you — hysteria-inducing. So many interviews with Proud Stoic Black People You Are Supposed To Admire, slowly breaking down as they’re asked to relate stories of microaggressions and the emotional impact of being exposed to ethnic slurs. So many tight close-ups of black faces starting to cry, or almost-cry. It was like watching a weird, low-key version of a torture porn film. It didn’t want to let you think about the ideas it was presenting — it was too concerned with emotions. It was an ordeal to sit through, like nails on a chalkboard. It was kind of funny if you knew what a dutch angle was and why cinematographers use them, mind you — about half of the film was shot that way.

It made Julie feel sick. She glanced around the classroom. Other students looked sick or dizzy too. She closed her eyes, and listened very carefully. There was a very low, almost imperceptible rhythmic bass thrum in the background of the film’s audio track. Infrasound! It was hard to pick out unless you knew what it was — but it was there. What a sleazy trick. Low-frequency sounds could make people feel nauseated or induce anxiety — or forcibly make them more emotionally involved with what they were seeing. The French rape-revenge shock film Irréversible had made use of it to make the audience more viscerally repulsed by what they were seeing — so it was legal, even if it really shouldn’t be. Since then it had shown up in several especially intense horror films. Spotting it in an alleged documentary was a bit of an eye-opener, though.

This really was brushing up against actual brainwashing tactics! Julie had better mental discipline than mundanes, though. She wondered if some kind of accusation could be made against the DEO or the film’s director. She’d probably sound like a kook if she tried, though — and it wasn’t like she could record the film easily. Diversity trainers were notoriously secretive with their class materials. She mentally recited an exorcism chant from the Eleusinian Mysteries to drive back the film’s evil influence on her psyche. Hekas, Hekas, Este Bebeloi! Hekas, Hekas, Este Bebeloi! Her composure improved and the nausea faded. She was a lot more worried about the less psychologically self-actualized members of the class, however, and vowed to try to do some damage control when class let out.

Julie learned things watching the DEO’s films, though. She learned that white supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when the focus is put on getting the ‘right’ answer. She remembered Bhopal, and really hoped engineers in African nations didn’t take the film’s message to heart. Pressure vessel ratings were one of the many, many cases where math does, in fact, have right and wrong answers. Julie decompiled the logic in her mind. They... were they actually saying black kids couldn’t do math? Anti-racism training — now with 57% more old-fashioned, honest-to-god racism!

This film wasn’t even the most ill-considered stunt-class the DEO had set up. At least high school students had some level of emotional defenses and critical thinking skills. The DEO had drag queens in to tell stories to Grade 3 students back in January. Based on how the queens presented themselves visually, they must have wanted to teach them a very important lesson about tolerance and understanding — namely, that gender-bending turns you into a scary demon clown. Undoubtably this would help support trans rights in some esoteric manner that one needs to have a queer studies doctorate (and be a registered Democrat) to truly understand. Transwomen the world over must have felt so grateful to them.

MWA was talking about segregating classes now, like they did in Cali. They called it “racial affinity groups”. It was scary shit. The likely reason they hadn’t to date was insufficient black students — Bentonville was really white, demographically. If they did, it wouldn’t be so bad for Julie, mind you — she’d miss chatting with Brock Ellis in Physics 30 and Chinese Bonnie in her English — but it would be a nightmare for the elementary students.

Think about it: the black kids and the white kids get separated, and get given teachers of their own ethnicity. (What about the biracial ones? Are they seriously bringing back the One Drop Rule?) The black teachers would tell the black pupils about all the terrible things white people did to their kin throughout history, and how whites were responsible for their poverty now. Everything bad in their personal lives could ultimately be blamed on whites, on oppression. There would be great short-term results in terms of minority solidarity, activist engagement and apparent indoctrination.

But the black kids, being elementary students with elementary maturity levels, would go beat up the white students at recess. Kids are kids, after all. That’s what they do when authority figures tell them someone is responsible for everything wrong with their lives. The faculty would ignore it. Bad optics. So the white kids would learn that they have to rely on each other, creating mutual association groups by race at an age when their brains were still forming. They would learn to always be polite verbally, of course. Slurs and racist jokes would vanish, but much worse things would quietly grow up in their place. And when this generation of elementary students came of age ten to fifteen years from now, well...

The woke education system was building exactly the world the alt-right wanted to live in. Julie didn’t think you needed a transhuman intellect to predict that, either. They’ll stay compliant and intimidated by dogma and white guilt until they don’t. By then, it will be too late to fix it. Didn’t these idiots understand that black nationalism and white nationalism are intrinsically comorbid? You cannot foster one without fostering the other! For that matter, had they even heard of reactance? Hell, these chucklefucks probably still thought those DARE commercials saved hordes of kids from the perils of drug addiction!

It didn’t matter. It was good PR and boosted activist momentum. That was all the DEO cared about. Of course, activism was innately biased toward action over ethics or critical thinking — it’s right there in the name. Racism is horrifying! Something needs to be done about it! Well, this sure is something, so let’s do it!

Didn’t anyone else see how fucked up this was? Julie glanced around the classroom awkwardly. Actually, lots of people seemed to. Everyone was just too scared to speak up — including, on some level, Julie herself. At least, she knew how stupid and unproductive it would be. Some white students looked upset, timid or guilty — the intended response, Julie assumed. More, though, either looked seethingly angry or self-consciously bored and jaded. Brett Tollard was white-knuckled with rage, and even blond jokester Troy maintained a contemptuous slouch-pose that seemed brittle and forced to Julie’s careful gaze. Pink Highlights Bonnie looked like she was struggling not to throw up.

Julie glanced over at Deon, the only black student in the class. She’d always thought he was seriously cute — he had a flat top, 70s-style circular wire-rimmed glasses, smooth dark skin and deep hazel eyes. Deon dressed nicely, and often wore a bow-tie to class as an eccentric fashion statement. He was both thoughtful and somewhat athletic — she’d seen him working out shirtless once, and enjoyed the view. He was slender and wiry, with a subtle rather than bulky kind of musculature, and the ever-popular designer stubble.

He was apparently into sculpting and sketching, which grouped him loosely into the arty kids’ clique — and he wasn’t into theatre, glee club or drama (in either sense) which insured he’d never be too popular even in that clique. Pity; he was in the 90th percentile for common sense, self-discipline and personal dignity by the standard those brats set. Deon and Julie had talked about pencil-work in the past; it was how she got to know him — though her own sketches were painfully amateur compared to his work. It gave them something in common, though. Julie pegged him as semi-woke, with at least somewhat nuanced views of different issues — he pretty much had to be a bit woke. Black kids enforced it on each other.

Usually, he had a quiet confidence and poise Julie really admired. Now, though? No so much. He looked starkly terrified. After they’d shown other films similar to this, or done a privilege walk, Craig Hoskins — one of the more macho, gangsta-idolizing black kids — looked really smug and walked with a swagger. He was a moron, though. Deon was right to be nervous. It was the rational response to anything that served to heighten racial tensions to this degree from anyone of any color. We’re townies, damn it! This isn’t Chicago! We don’t need hate crimes here!

Julie felt her heart pound and tried to center herself. As superior as she thought she was at times, she wasn’t immune to the tension in the classroom. Atah Malkuth ve-Geburah ve-Gedulah le-Olahm. Thou art the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, forever unto the ages. Maybe something more blunt. Hod over Netzach. Hod over Netzach. It didn’t do much good — her rational-analytical Hod-mind was just as disturbed as her passionate Netzach-essence.

Damage control needed to be done. Julie approached Deon in the corridor after the class. Her tone was carefully conversational — casual and airy. “You seemed as nervous during that as I felt.”

“Yeah, uh... I think everyone was. That film was pretty whack.”

Julie laughed. “No kidding, right? Deeply manipulative. I knew it was fucked up, though. I mean, you’re way better at math than I am — among lots of other things.”

Deon laughed nervously, looking around to see if there were any DEO sympathizers around before speaking more quietly. “It kinda insulted your entire race with the whole ‘be less white’ thing. I just wanna make sure everyone knows I’m not on board with that. I don’t protest ’cause of shit like that video — I just want cops to stop killing us.”

He seemed really jumpy. Julie felt just as tense, but she had a way better poker face. She waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, god, yeah. Everyone knows, and if they don’t I’ll make sure they do. You’re too sane for that video. And I thought it was pretty insulting to you too, honestly — it’s hard to assign traits like ‘individualism’ and ‘punctuality’ by skin color without being like super racist to both sides of the equation. I just wanted to make sure you know we’re not angry at you for that film, and we hope you aren’t angry at us either. We’re good, aren’t we?”

“Yeah! Oh, god, yeah! So good! Let’s forget we ever saw it!”

Her voice took on a more playful, breathy tone, and she stepped into his personal space. At five seven, he had to look up to hold her gaze — he did avoid looking other obvious places; she wouldn’t have minded but still admired his discipline. “Although, if you do think there’s anything students like me need to atone for, any appropriate kind of service we could perform for students like you...”

Deon blushed furiously — she could see it in the body language, even if not on his dark skin — and stammered. Julie thought there was some ineffable quality about him that suggested he would be an insightful, patient and sensual lover. She’d gotten into his dreams once, early in her adventures, but had bailed right away. He’d been going steady with Samantha Osei back then, but they broke up in February. She hoped he’d dream of her again some night she did the spell. “Oh, Deon. I’m just playing around. Sorry to embarrass you.”

They both laughed. He had a boner; she pretended not to notice, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re sweet, Deon. Come hang out with the Angels any time. We shouldn’t let DEO bullshit wreck our normal social lives.”

Flirting was good. In addition to sowing more dreams, it defused tensions. Now she just had to go talk to the Stallions; especially Brett — make sure they knew who they should be angry at, and more importantly who they shouldn’t. Christ, knowing Troy I’ll need to explain that ‘be less white’ does not constitute permission to come to school in blackface!

Julie still felt faintly nauseous two and a half hours later when she sat down with her friends (and Jen, who kept trying to play both sides of the DB/Julie schism) for lunch. It wasn’t because there were apparently hamsters running amuck in the cafeteria again, either. At least, not entirely. She came into the conversation mid-way.

Jen frowned. “You’re hanging out with Toshia now?”

The cheerleaders, minus DB and Rich Bonnie, sat together at their usual table in the lunchroom. 80s-hair Bonnie shrugged. “She knows lots of places to get wicked clothes cheap. I like her fashion sense.”

8HB was being uncharacteristically nice. Everyone thought Decepticon Bonnie was nice; her outward demeanor was all sugar and social conscience. No one outside the Angels would suspect that about 80s-hair Bonnie. She was the ice queen — gorgeous and glamourous, but also famous for her brutal, sassy putdowns and always acting above others.

Yet she was rarely genuinely cruel to people — it was a subtle thing to notice, but it was there. The only guys she wouldn’t dish a brutal rejection at were the ones that seemed to be genuinely emotionally vulnerable. She had cutting appearance-based put-downs for most of her fellow Angels, yet never pulled that with obese or depressed students. Rather than being an actual bitch, she was in love with the image of bitchiness itself. She was the Ice Queen, the smug fashion-plate, the arrogant one. She was a total Veronica.

Julie could see her chatting with Toshia about fashion, though, even if their aesthetics were really different. 8HB’s eponymous feature was her high-volume mane of frizzy, platinum blonde hair with the whale-spout on top. She tended to tight pink sweaters, pearl necklaces and expensive blazers — when she got to university, Julie was sure everyone would assume she was in a sorority regardless of any inconvenient facts on the matter.

“Isn’t she in with the DEO?”

“Don’t do that,” Chinese Bonnie said sharply. “Don’t judge Toshia — don’t judge any minority — by the gratuitous dipshittery pulled by narcissistic activists claiming to represent them.”

Julie flinched slightly at the mention of narcissists, but nobody noticed.

Pink Highlights Bonnie looked wired. She’d seemed that way since about a week after she got back from her suspension — she was always a bit high-strung, but this was a new level. “It’s not about Toshia as a person. Would any of you want to socialize with a student who carried a loaded handgun everywhere they went? Of course not. It’s dangerous; you’d feel unsafe. Toshia may not have asked for a gun, but she has one — metaphorically, at least. Sure, she seems like a nice person. Then some stupid girl-clique drama happens that everyone would just get over next week in a sane world, and she makes a complaint to the DEO, and one of us gets expelled. Worse, they get mobbed on social media, ending their career prospects. Toshia may not want to be dangerous to us, but she is anyway.”

One typically expects school wokeness to flow up from radical activists to pressure more conservative or cautious administrators — as it tended to in big coastal schools, where around a third of the student body was woke and another third feigned it for social status or due to peer pressure. But MWA, and Bentonville overall, didn’t work like that. Ensconced in a veritable womb of woke capital, it was a blue-led company town in a deeply red state; even much of the Gen Z student body was either apolitical or mildly conservative. Wokeness flowed downhill from Alison Dikscheide and her DEO, an imposed and unwanted ideology. Due to both the lost year and her overall heavy-handedness, resentment positively seethed. It disappointed Julie to see innocents like Toshia suffer blowback from that, but she knew it was pretty much inevitable.

Julie reached out and touched PHB’s hand, trying to use body language to soften her words. “You’re suggesting that people shun the school’s only openly trans student. That’s actual and overt discrimination.”

Julie didn’t think of Toshia as in with the DEO, as ‘one of them’. She didn’t dye her hair some neon color, ramble about oppression, vandalize corner stores to get anarchist cred or pick some post-modernist pronouns designed to make her identity the center of every conversation. She was just a shy student that wanted to live life as a girl, and that was no skin off Julie’s back. Julie talked to her every now and then, but they weren’t close friends. Julie talked to everyone; Toshia was fairly withdrawn and kept to herself.

She still had presence and style, though. In spite of being a bit plump, she could turn heads on her dress sense alone. She once wore a Jeff Hamilton Ridge Street lambskin jacket with H&M pinstripe dress pants and an Isabel Marant baseball cap to school — and carried it off. Julie wasn’t exactly a fashionista, but she couldn’t help but respect any girl who could pull that off. It wasn’t even like her parents were loaded — she searched for second hand high-label clothes on eBay and in thrift stores. They shared a love of antiques and had trawled garage sales together. Toshia’s fashion statements made her aloof and unapproachable, which is what Julie suspected Toshia wanted. People still left her alone, but there was a strand of respect to balance the contempt and discomfort.

PHB winced. “I’m... I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just saying, we have to be so careful. It isn’t about Toshia really. They have it out for us specifically. A quiet trans girl doesn’t really advance Dikscheide’s ‘smash the gender binary’ thing, so they’re zeroing in on us. I mean, the Stallions and Angels. We’re some of the most beautiful and traditionally feminine girls in this school. You know — patriotic, sweet, as American as apple pie. And we’re popular. Really, the only serious prom contenders are Julie and DB. We would be laughing stocks in a modern Cali school, but here we’re still popular. The Stallions are... well, the name pretty much covers it. Macho. Masculine.”

80s-hair Bonnie shot a fiery glance at a group of Stallions across the cafeteria, licked her glossy lips and grinned. “You could even say deliciously masculine.”

Much giggling and footsie ensued. PHB waited patiently for it to die down before she continued speaking. “The purple-haired freaks don’t like that. It’s not like this is either hypothetical or secret, either — you can read Dikscheide’s wordy editorials about how both names are oppressive and archaic on the school website. She shut down the paper that rebutted them. Feminists were talking strong social constructionism long before the word ‘transgender’ entered common parlance. Anyone remember back when it was ‘transsexual’ instead?”

“Yes, yes,” Julie said, trying to calm PHB. “I’ve read Gender Trouble too—”

PHB grabbed Julie’s arm, given her some Grade A crazy eyes. “Then you know! You understand the roots of this... this Butlerian Jihad! It isn’t really about the 1.6% of the population that’s trans. It never was. They’re just the excuse — a wedge issue to frame it as being about human rights and bigotry instead of forced cultural change. Think about it. It’s just too big to be. I mean, Puerto Rico is 1% of the American population and those guys aren’t even allowed to vote. Look at the amount of time they get in the news cycle, compared to this gender shit.

“It’s about changing the concept of gender in society overall — and I sure as fuck don’t mean in a ‘marketplace of ideas’ kind of way! They want to establish themselves as the Cultural Authority that disseminates ideas to the proles and enforces them with terror and groupthink. The Stallions and Angels basically are the gender binary, and our popularity is a threat to their worldview and their agenda, so we’re slated to be canceled. They just need to find an excuse. I’m not actually joking about this.”

Julie found it ironic that PHB had apparently taken up a crusade on behalf of girly-girls, given that of the core Angels she fit the role the least. The winsome cheerleader was strikingly beautiful, but hardly as conventional in her look as DB, 80s-hair Bonnie, Nora or even Julie herself. She was a slender five-two featherweight, with A-cups and a neatly coiffed, raven-black bowl-cut offset by her eponymous neon pink ‘money piece’ highlights. She had pierced nipples, a square face, thin sensual lips and crystal blue eyes that flashed with cleverness.

She always dressed in black, and it was usually full-covering — though when her confidence was up, it could be a really tight full covering, and occasionally even faintly fetishy with a gratuitous misuse of black leather belts. She’d told Julie she modeled her look on Quorra, from Tron Legacy (sans the highlights, obviously), but Julie’d never seen the flick. To Julie’s eyes, her presentation was more ‘hot raver chick’ than ‘all-American sweetheart’. The fact that she was so jumpy and energetic, and interested in so many eclectic and offbeat things, only added to that impression.

When PHB finally finished, 80s-hair Bonnie fixed her with a slow stare. “You think about weird shit way too much. I mean, it’s 2024. Who the fuck actually reads books anymore? Pinkie, if you keep this up, you won’t be cool enough to sit at this table any more. So don’t do that. Just chill and forget about it. Pretend it isn’t there. Focus on enjoying life — the world will fix itself.”

Julie rolled her eyes at 8HB, hating the ‘ostrich approach’ — but she didn’t actually say anything. PHB seemed a bit unhinged, but she also had a point — Julie knew the DEO had it in for the Angels and Stallions. More saliently, though, her spiel was (despite being desperate and paranoid) very well thought out — it clearly wasn’t something that was coming to her just now. Was she involved with Marvin and the AFHU controversy? PHB and Marvin did chat occasionally, Julie knew. Of the Angels, she was by far the most ‘in’ with the geek clique. But she didn’t want to discuss that now, in the public cafeteria with all the other Angels around. Especially not with Jen around. She’d corner her friend later and discuss it privately — and figure out how it might impact both her own campaign and the Angels as a team.

PHB stared at Jen with increasingly agitated contempt. “I wish things were headed toward a temperate center, but face it: that’s not the reality on the ground. Instead of any kind of rational compromise, we’re letting each side have all their worst ideas. We already have a world where having a miscarriage gets you 1-4 while abortion gets you SuperMax, and taxpayer-funded drag queens teach six-year-olds how to pole dance! Because why not build the stupidest of all possible worlds? Compromise is for those wussy sane people! We’re DUH-merican! We can have all the bad ideas, all the time! 24/7 culture war lunacy, motherfuckers! It’s not just coming, it’s HERE!”

Chinese Bonnie winced, looking around for DEO collaborators in a faintly paranoid manner. Pink Highlights Bonnie had raised her voice and gestured wildly near the end of her rant, and now a good portion of the cafeteria had stopped to stare at the cheerleaders’ table. She ‘got’ it now, and looked sheepish.

80s-hair Bonnie glared. “Pinkie? Decaf. Seriously. And if I catch you watching Crowder or Maddow on your phone at school again, I swear to god I will put you over my knee and spank you.”

Chinese Bonnie grinned. “Now that I want to see.”

Everyone laughed.

80s-hair Bonnie took PHB’s hand. “Just because Donny seems less... whatever the fuck he was before, it doesn’t mean we need someone else to fill in and take up Old Donny’s slack, kay?”

Julie nodded. “I like manly men and soft women myself. That doesn’t stop me from coexisting with people into androgyny or gender subversion. It just means I don’t want to date them. I even helped them set up that metrosexual enby-fashion show thing back in January, because why not?”

Pink Highlights Bonnie glared, but spoke softly. “I don’t care when people are non-binary; I care when they want all of society to be non-binary with them! They want to force us and the Stallions out of prominence because we’re a bad example, we are binary, our gender isn’t fluid! That’s the point of drag queens in classrooms — Butler said as much back in 1990, and society finally got radicalized enough to actually do it! It’s mocking femininity, attacking our identity.

“And it’s why Title IX says cheerleading isn’t a ‘real’ sport! They don’t want girls to learn to be sex symbols, and they can’t comprehend that it can be simultaneously skillful, ornamental and athletic! They wanted to make sure cheerleading didn’t become the most popular women’s sport, and they were willing to put girls in hospitals to achieve that! Tell me you think anyone associated with the DEO wants any kind of ideological coexistence! They assimilate! They want everyone to believe what they believe, speak as they speak, value what they value!”

The atmosphere at the table suddenly got sharp. Before it was just the squad’s quirky girl having a quirky freakout, but Title IX is not a topic one mentions casually among cheerleaders.

“I don’t disagree,” Julie said, trying to sound calming. “I feel the same anger, dread and anxiety you do. Really, believe me, I do. But you need to master it and direct it with care and wisdom. Dikscheide wants us to pick a side. She profits as much from binary politics as she does from non-binary genders. You know that — you got suspended for pointing it out. To her, the world is black and white; the woke versus the bigots. It’s insidious. We can’t be goaded into playing out her script. We don’t have to pursue a cultural hegemony just because they are. We don’t have to control the narrative. We can work toward an uncontrolled narrative.”

PHB was shivering, then, rocking back and forth. When she replied, it was a soft whisper. “The system is coming apart, Julie. Entropy always wins in the end. The center cannot hold. It wears away beneath the momentum of a Cyclopean pendulum-blade swinging left and right, left and right, lower and lower each time until it slices into flesh below it and blood sprays out everywhere. It’s not stopping just ’cause the blood starts sprayin’, either. It’ll just keep going until we get our mountain of skulls, driven back and forth day after day by mobs of narcissists with smart phones and the dopamine economy they’ve built. That is the legacy our generation will leave to this world.”

Julie flinched. That was the second mention of narcissism in the conversation. She remembered admiring herself in a towel in her mirror, jokingly thinking she might be a narcissist. It didn’t seem as funny now. Am I part of the problem? Am I causing this, just by pursuing my dream of being popular?

Before Julie could respond, the tense conversation was interrupted by a cute little kid tugging on Chinese Bonnie’s skirt. Julie blinked. She was Amed’s little sister, wasn’t she? Grade Two. Sure, in theory, Magnolia West Elementary was technically in the same big brutalist brick cube as MWA, but the younger kids weren’t supposed to wander the high school area. There were big fire doors that were normally kept locked.

“Hi! I’m Merjan Younis. You hang out with Amed, right?”

“Yeah. Nice to meet you, Merjan. I’m Bonnie Liu.”

They shook hands, Bonnie kneeling down to reach eye-level with the diminutive second grader.

“Okay, so you count as friends or family then,” Merjan said promptly. “Are you a secret Nazi?”

“Well, I... uh... what?”

“Mr. Havelock, our new math teacher, gave us an assignment to count secret Nazis among our friends and family and write a report on them to give to him. Then we’ll all get together and denounce them in class.”

“How, uh... innovative and modern. Did he tell you how to recognize Nazis?”

“Yeah. He said they vote for evil politicians like Donald Trump, think women should obey men, say bad words, burn mosques and support the police. And Israel! Nazis support Israel because it’s an apartment state. Howie Dorsell asked Mr. Havelock what the bad words are, but he got really uncomfortable and wouldn’t answer. He said nobody was allowed to say them...”

Merjan leaned in to whisper conspiratorially to Chinese Bonnie. “I think it’s like Voldemort’s name, you know? Like, you say it and they know you said it, and they know where you are. I asked, and Mr. Havelock said Voldemort was a Nazi allergy —”

“Allegory.”

“Yeah, that. Voldemort was a Nazi allergory, but J.K. Rowling is also a secret Nazi. That seems weird, though. I thought that Voldemort was the bad guy. So I don’t actually know what the bad words are.”

“Uh... neither do I,” Chinese Bonnie said awkwardly.

“So, are you a secret Nazi?”

“No.”

“Aw, shucks. This assignment’s really hard. When I find one, do you think I can talk him into giving me one of those cool blue energy ray guns from Captain America?”

“Those are imaginary, Merjan. They’re just in the movie. They don’t actually exist.”

“Oh. Okay. Uh, Bonnie?”

“Yeah?”

“Do the secret Nazis actually exist? Are they really everywhere?”

Chinese Bonnie flinched visibly. “Umm... uh... I’m going to decline to answer those questions on fear of disciplinary action...”

April 30th, 2024. Julie Lambert.

Julie was just hangin’ out at the mall with her friends, DB and Chinese Bonnie. They’d decided to stop for some chow at the food court. Except Bentonville didn’t have a mall on this scale — it was like some Los Angeles shit. Actually, Julie was pretty sure Earth didn’t have malls like this since Amazon and the pandemic, and teen girls didn’t hang out in them like this since Facebook and TikTok came along. And DB sure as fuck wasn’t her friend!

She knew right away this was a guy’s dream. DB was dressed in a crazy-tight, skimpy pink spaghetti strap halter top and a red leather miniskirt. She actually owned a shirt like that, with the snarky-looking Tinkerbell and the “Sorry, not Sorry!” girly-cursive motto, but it had actual sleeves and a veneer of subtlety in its intended purpose of showing off her rack. Julie was in her cheerleader uniform, since that seemed to be an icon of the MWA zeitgeist at this point — except she had glossy purple fuck-me pumps on in place of her normal cheerleader sneakers. I can walk safely and gracefully in fuck-me pumps, Julie imposed on the dream narrative, as she doubted the dreamer’s fantasies included her faceplanting and splitting her head open on some gross mall garbage can.

Chinese Bonnie was the least glam of the trio — yoga pants and a sports bra. But it was a really skimpy sports bra, and tight, thin yoga pants, and Julie could tell she was commando — she was sporting an absolutely wicked camel toe. In real life, that would scratch and chafe like a bitch! It didn’t seem to in the dream, however — though CB was still walking a bit strangely in a way Julie found intriguing. The odd gait, and the way she pursed her lips as she walked, suggested that if someone were to talk CB into doing thirty jumping jacks in this outfit, they would also end up getting some bonus pornographic moaning and crotch stains out of her as a package deal. Julie was tempted to try that — just a bit, but still. CB’s skin glowed, like she’d just finished a workout and shower at the gym.

Beyond even the outfits, though, everyone was glammed up well beyond what they could normally get away with in school — or their parents would allow anywhere else. It was Bratz grade makeup, like they were prepped for a centerfold photoshoot despite her and CB having their hair in tight ponytails. Decepticon Bonnie had pink lipstick and eyeshadow, and Chinese Bonnie actually looked pretty glam in russet lip gloss and silver eyeshadow. Julie tasted her own lips with her tongue, and somehow knew they were very full, very glossy and a brilliant cherry red. It was skeevy. Really skeevy. Honestly, though, she found she didn’t mind that. She was in the right mood for skeevy. It excited her.

DB suggested they hit the mall’s built-in Scorchin’ Tartan — a Scots-Irish themed sports pub/breastaurant outlet — and the other two girls quickly agreed. Right, because that’s totally a franchise groups of hot single teen girls just decide to eat at on a whim every now and then without any kind of external impetus. But Julie let it happen, curious where it would go — and boy would it go places!

The trio took their seats at an empty table, and a waitress in the standard Scorchin’ Tartan mock-Celtic uniform — a very short tartan skirt, black pumps and a very skimpy white tie-off Catholic schoolgirl shirt with a tartan pushup bra clearly visible underneath — came to take their order. To put in bluntly, Scorchin’ Tartan girls made Hooters look family friendly. Given the attire, it’s understandable it took Julie’s eyes a second or two to reach the waitress’ face — but when they did, she gasped. Mrs. Vanderbilt!

Yes, the waitress was none other than the strikingly beautiful but primly unattainable lady who taught Block Three History and English. Julie didn’t actually have her for any courses, but she had still heard the guys joking and fantasizing about her. She was a stacked native Hawaiian with a fitness model figure and silky black hair long enough to reach her belly who wore skirts at school. Seeing her stuffed into a breastaurant uniform thrilled Julie’s sense of the naughty and inappropriate.

When asked for an order Julie stammered a bit, settling on chicken wings. These kinds of places always have chicken wings, don’t they?

Vanderbilt wasn’t the only familiar face, though. It wasn’t too long before the dreamer himself walked in. He was wearing tight slacks, a wine dress shirt open to the waist and expensive, dressy dockers — and was doing a peacock walk. His hair was gelled and slicked up like a caricature player. The dream went into slow-motion as he stepped on the scene, and triumphal orchestral music played. Julie struggled not to giggle. He was hot, though. Really hot. Probably not hot enough to carry off that level of overblown guy-bod flaunting, but still hot — and the case could be argued.

He carried with him an aroma that intoxicated the three girls, making their pussies tingle. Julie couldn’t quite place the scent, but it was in some way familiar to her. Pleasant surface strands — patchouli, driftwood, old leather, freshly cut pine — mixed with something subtle but grotesque and repellent just below the surface. Julie’s mind finally made it past the dual assault of the scent and the man-candy to study his face. Holy shit! Amos Larkin, the Stallions’ coach!

Coach Larkin was a multi-faceted person. As with Mrs. Vanderbilt, Julie didn’t interact with him a lot in person, but she heard all about him when talking to the jocks. On one hand, he could be real douchebag disciplinarian, being harsh bordering on abusive to players he felt weren’t giving their all for the Stallions or letting personal problems get in the way of performance. He was also a legit alpha, though — when he told someone to do something in that barking, hard voice, they obeyed. Many guys in the jock-clique seemed to find that really inspiring.

There was also scuttlebutt that he had a double life as a kind of inept, pretentious player at nightclubs — Bentonville was too small for anyone not to know what anyone else did at those clubs, after all. What she just saw definitely bore that out. Julie wondered how he could be so legit-macho and commanding at school, yet totally inept at being alpha in his off-hours. He certainly never hit on students, though, and (unlike a few faculty members) Julie had never even caught him staring creepily at her squad. He clearly got a few looks in, though, since he had her and her friends dead to rights physically. Well, good for him — you’re allowed to look as long as you don’t creep people out, and if the only way to figure out you did it is dream-scrying, well, I’ve got no problem with it.

He also had a gruff but nurturing side he’d never admit to until recently. He didn’t have much choice, after helping Donny Broekner file charges against his dad and even letting the kid live with him for a while when his home wasn’t safe. For that alone, he’d earned Julie’s eternal respect. She wasn’t sure how learning how silly and cheesy his internal fantasy life was affected her opinion of him, but given everything else it seemed more adorkable than truly pathetic.

He’d earned Julie’s pussy’s respect, conversely, by being a ripped, goatee-bearing alpha with a rough commanding voice who vaguely resembled Xena’s Ares and had Situation-grade abs. Yeah, that would work for Julie even without the history or the kinky student/teacher stuff.

She briefly considered the ethics of a dream-tryst between student and teacher, and realized the power imbalance that made the taboo so exciting absolutely paled before the mundane-Adept imbalance and, well, dream-celibacy was simply not a thing she was going to consider happening to her life. Ever. So she just didn’t think about that any more.

Coach Larkin sat down at a booth, a good ways across the restaurant from the trio but with a clear line of sight to them. As he walked past their table, a new wave of the scent assailed Julie and the orchestral soundtrack hit a climax. Julie shivered, and felt herself start juicing — and forced down a strong instinct to follow the scent like a poodle chasing raw sausages. She glanced at CB and DB, who were both openly staring and all but drooling.

Mrs. Vanderbilt went up and took Coach Larkin’s order. Flirting ensued. He smacked her ass as she turned to leave — and she laughed, delighted! Something about that thrilled Julie. It was so un-PC, so not-woke that it was transgressive and taboo — filled with the allure of the forbidden. Not just the groping itself, but it being playful flirtation instead of assault in this particular dreamspace — that made Julie squirm.

Once Vanderbilt left, the coach stretched out in his booth, miming a yawn and running his fingers through his hair.

The three girls, in unison, reached up and ran their hands through their own hair. It was not a voluntary motion — something in the very nature of the dream compelled them to mimic his action as if their bodies were mere puppets. Upraised hands stretched already tight clothes and thrust bustlines out lewdly. As hair-ties slid aside, hairdos preternaturally morphed from tight, plain ponytails into sensual, fluffed-up glamour model coronas that in reality would have required a few hours, a pro stylist and a full can of hairspray to achieve. There was even a convenient breeze (and a burst of slow motion) to flair the silky unleashed hair. Julie could only imagine she looked great, because it made Chinese Bonnie utterly mouthwatering.

Next Coach Larkin reached out to an antique radio beside his booth, tuning both dials at the same time to find the station. As soon as he started turning those knobs, Julie felt sensual electricity shoot through her breasts as a phantom sensation teased her nipples in the most delightful way. She wasn’t alone, either. DB squirmed. CB sighed and cupped her chest. Julie moaned. Everyone was tenting like crazy — sure, it might be a neat beer commercial sight gag, but to experience that kind of instantaneous arousal and nipple erection so quickly, and in public... yeah, it’s way more intense — almost primal — when you live it from the inside!

Julie suddenly caught on to what was going on — and struggled not to burst out laughing. Coach Larkin’s erotic dream is one of those old Max Body Spray commercials! Julie knew those — she and Nora had discovered them on a YouTube retro channel one day when they were about fourteen, and killed a Saturday afternoon just mainlining them, laughing at how very silly and stupid they were. This was back when they thought male fantasies, and men in general, were really very silly and pointless in general. Julie had grown up a lot since then, but that didn’t really help with taking this seriously. Still, she wanted to not disrupt the dream by laughing at it — probably the quickest way to deflate any erotic fantasy. Let’s see where it goes. It will either by very sexy or a completely hilarious lark — and maybe both. As silly as it must have looked, the nipple sensation transfer had been unironically erotic to experience.

She realized the intoxicating scent was an odd fusion of what Max Body Spray smelled like to her, and what the kind of guy who wore it thought it smelled like to women. She edited her own sense-imprint out of the dream, and was pleased that the decaying cat piss and rancid bacon fat strands of the scent vanished, leaving only the patchouli, sandalwood, musk and raw maleness. Yeah, that was much better for what she knew was going to ensue.

The coach leaned down to unzip his leather tote-bag. As he did, DB’s miniskirt unzipped on both sides, not falling off but revealing more of her upper thighs. Julie didn’t care, though — she was far more interested in Chinese Bonnie, whose sports-bra had also unzipped in the back. CB yelped, clutching it before it could fall off, and burst into a fit of blushing giggles trying to refasten it.

Something else hit Julie then — CB was so acerbic and sharp-witted in real life. Here, in the dream, she was just giggly, vacuous and compliant — a dumb bimbo. Guys always looked at her, Julie knew, but they rarely hit on her because of how brutally she was able to cut them down. Here, though, in Larkin’s dreams she had been made safe, sweet and compliant. On one level, that was massively creepy to Julie — but on another, it also excited her with the same un-wokeness as Vanderbilt getting groped.

Larkin took a book out of his bag and teased opening it. Julie felt her Angels halter tighten and stretch — and gasped as fabric scraped against her already erect nipples and effectively groped her sensitized breasts. Yeah, she knew exactly what was going to happen here, and she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the TV-safe version either. She fixed Coach Larkin with her sexiest intense stare from across the restaurant, and then winked at him saucily.

He smiled back and spread the pages of his book — and Julie’s halter tore open explosively, popping aside and exposing her perky C-cups and erect pink nipples to the whole restaurant. They even bounced about a bit from the momentum of her denudation. She wasn’t sure if her little gasp resulted from the shock of chill air on her private regions, or the exhibitionistic thrill of every patron in the restaurant turning to stare at her exposed boobies. Why pick only one?

There were only three kinds of patrons in the restaurant — hot waitresses in tartan fetish-wear, model-perfect glamour girls and the kind of paunchy, rough, jovial older guys you typically found in a sports bar. Coach Larkin was the only certified stud among a bunch of losers. All the guys had these dopey smiles as they got an eyeful of her unleashed chest — it was almost cute, in a way.

“Jesus, Julie, you are such a slut! Can’t you even keep your clothes on when out in public?”

DB’s voice was nasally and shrill, and her face was twisted into a scowl. The words actually pleased Julie immensely, though — the dream imago of DB acting like this, being the ‘mean girl’ instead of the ‘sweet innocent one’ meant even adults like Larkin were finally starting to catch on to what kind of person Decepticon Bonnie really was. Julie’s curse box was working! Or maybe her insignia’s just showing through in that outfit. Julie blushed as she tied her top back together in an improvised knot. She glanced around the restaurant, again noting the different types of patrons, and a plan began to form in her mind regarding what she wanted to go down in this dream and how she was going to bring it about.

Mrs. Vanderbilt brought Coach Larkin his order. He was a real health food nut, so this consisted of a glass of Diet Pepsi with a bendy straw and a big plate of long celery sticks — and a sampler-tray with tiny plastic cups of three dipping sauces in it: ranch, chipotle and honey mustard. Then she walked back to the girls’ table, setting down their own orders. Julie couldn’t help but ogle her cleavage — the Scorchin’ Tartan uniform presented it so very enticingly, and it felt amazingly fun to creep on the pretty teacher in a safe dream-fantasy.

Julie saw the coach hook his fingers just outside his belt and slide them down his outer thighs, like he was taking something off. As he did, Decepticon Bonnie mirrored his actions like a puppet. Her hands slid up her slender little thighs, hiking up the red leather miniskirt. When they slid back down, a pair of lacy white panties slid down with them. Clearly mortified at her own actions yet unable to stop, Julie’s nemesis stepped out of the panties and handed them to Mrs. Vanderbilt. The waitress nodded and put Decepticon Bonnie’s panties in the little black leather pouch all the Scorchin’ Tartan waitresses had. “Thank you so much,” she said. “We always appreciate tips here!”

The waitresses take panties as tips. Okay, fine, dreams are allowed to be surreal like that. Why not? In fact, Julie saw an opportunity here. She quickly reached under her own pleated skirt and slid her spankies off. Her heart thundered. Was she actually going to do this? Yes. Yes, she was. She didn’t hand the spankies to Mrs. Vanderbilt. Instead, she reach out and held the pretty, unattainable teacher’s shoulder with her free hand and used the other to tuck her undergarments inside the tartan bra — tipping her the way you tip strippers in some clubs. Julie didn’t stop there, though — her now-empty hand slid inside that racy uniform top and cupped one of the teacher’s big, succulent tits.

Mrs. Vanderbilt gasped in shock. Well, judging by how her hard little pebble dug into Julie’s palm it might not just be shock, but shock was definitely mixed in there. Wow, groping the breasts of unsuspecting and unconsenting women is really just amazingly fun! Not in reality, obviously — Julie had been groped, once or twice, and it definitely wasn’t fun. It left her feeling sickened, dirty and disquieted for hours after the relatively quick event.

But here in a fantasy, where no one was really being hurt... yeah, it was working for her hard enough she was worried about leaving stains on her seat. Mrs. Vanderbilt’s face flushed a brilliant crimson, and Julie juiced even harder seeing her expression. The teacher pushed her hand down, embarrassed but not traumatized or hurt — as playful as she had been with Coach Larkin. “Well, someone’s a naughty girl — but still, thank you so much for the generous tip!”

“It was my pleasure. Really.”

DB rolled her eyes. Mrs. Vanderbilt sashayed off to serve other tables.

Across the room, Coach Larkin picked up one of his celery sticks. He smiled at the three girls as he dipped it in the honey mustard sauce. It sank down into the inch-deep plastic cup like a magic trick — two inches, four, six, eight. Sauce spilled over the sides of the cup in a very suggestive visual. Chinese Bonnie gripped Julie’s hand tightly, her nails digging into Julie’s palm even as she blushed furiously. Coach Larkin spun the celery stick in a circle, still embedded in the dipping cup, and wiggled it back and forth. CB arched her back, flung her fluffy glamour-girl hair to and fro and moaned like she was auditioning for the world’s least subtle Herbal Essences commercial. Sweat glistened on her skin as she thrashed about.

Julie had no doubt whatsoever about what her friend had just experienced. She wasn’t disturbed or offended, though. Nobody who saw it would ever doubt that it had been a really, really fun experience. Do me next! Do me next! She assumed she was the chipotle sauce due to being a redhead, which left DB the ranch. Sure enough, the coach picked up another stick and slid it slowly into the chipotle. She caught and held his gaze as he did so; the eye contact and dueling cocky smirks just made it so much hotter. It didn’t feel like a celery stick sliding in, either — it felt like a big, fat cock, and her body was busy providing its own special blend of dipping sauce.

Julie didn’t go nuts the way CB had. She was probably a bit jaded at this point, certainly moreso than the dream imago of CB was. She’d dealt with enough oversize cocks in her dream-adventures already that this didn’t even phase her; she knew her dream-body would stretch to fit whatever was needed without any discomfort. It still felt great, though, and she sighed softly and squirmed about as she let herself enjoy it. DB looked really nervous at this point; smirking at her only made everything sexier.

A fork clattered to the floor, knocked down by Julie in her squirming. The celery pulled out of the dip, and Julie wilted in dismay. She hadn’t got off yet, though she’d gotten close. The coach pulled the straw out of his soda, and Julie stood up obediently and involuntarily as he did so. She felt every patron’s eyes on her expectantly, devouring her lush body in anticipation. The coach bent the bendy straw ever so slightly, and Julie’s body tilted to mirror it perfectly. The crowd started laughing and egging the coach on. She felt cool air flow over her wet, bare vag under the short, pleated cheerleader skirt. She caught Larkin’s gaze, licked her lips and gave him her most sultry “I dare you” stare.

The coach bent the straw a hundred and eighty degrees, and Julie moved accordingly. A large, slow cheer echoed through the restaurant. Welp, okay, that just happened. I just flashed beaver to a whole breastaurant. At least I trimmed downstairs this week! Honestly, though, it exhilarated her. Julie always loved being the center of attention, after all.

Julie sat back down. DB looked ready to deliver some cutting commentary on her recent exposure, but Julie cut her off. She set a hand atop DB’s own and spoke in a motherly tone, as if giving sage advice. “Just remember: when you feel something start to slide between you legs, don’t think about horse cock — and also, try not to clench.”

“What are you even talking abo—GAAAAAAH!”

DB’s eyes went so very wide. Julie watched her nemesis squirm, gasp, moan and thrash about as Larkin tried the ranch sauce. So satisfying. By the time Larkin finished with the ranch, DB looked like a sweaty, disheveled wreck and she’d knocked the salt and pepper, two sets of cutlery, a plate and a napkin dispenser on the floor. Looks like Decepticon Bonnie’s going to be spending way longer bending over than I did!

Sure enough, the coach again used his straw to puppet DB, making her bend over lewdly to pick up the items one by one. Her leather miniskirt, already unzipped on both sides, fell fully off halfway through — leaving her bottomless. Julie had no desire to see her rival’s privates. Her furious, embarrassed blush as she involuntarily flaunted her ass and pussy, though? That was like nectar to Julie. She was just enjoying the comeuppance, as a matter of fact, when the coach dipped a finger in the chipotle sauce and licked it off. Julie felt a phantom tongue stroke her hard clit. Okay, the coach is a man — not a boy — and he clearly knows how cunnilingus should work and feel! A knife clattered to the ground. Julie wondered if she got lost enough to actually do that, or if it was just a scripted event in the dream.

Regardless, she wasn’t averse to a bit more flaunting — though at this point she was more than ready to kick the dream into higher gear. Under the coach’s symbolic puppetry, she again stood up, swiveling her hips in a seductive way before bending over to pick up the knife. The pub cheered her jovially as she flashed her secret garden a second time. She flaunted, winking playfully at the coach from between her own wide-spread legs. She jumped up in shock, however, as she unexpectedly felt something cold, sticky and slimy splatter messily over her spread cunt.

Did someone seriously just... No, that was a different dream. Well, not exactly, at least. Her nemesis, Decepticon Bonnie, grinned at her, still holding the cylindrical plastic squirty mayo dispenser she’d just unloaded on Julie’s crotch. “Oh, don’t act so offended. We all know it’s not the first time you’ve gotten something white and sticky unexpectedly sprayed between your legs.”

Julie was furious. She felt a dream-impulse to grab a bottle of squirty mustard and unload on Bonnie, but her natural discipline made her resist the rash action for a brief second as she processed. It didn’t matter. Chinese Bonnie grabbed the bottle of mustard and unloaded it right into DB’s face. DB retaliated, grabbing a plate of nachos dripping with melted cheese from a nearly table and pouring it right inside CB’s yoga pants. The pretty Asian’s eyes went wide as she tried to process the very odd sensation she was feeling. DB took advantage of her distraction, unloading dual-wielded ketchup and mayo containers right into her face.

“Catfight! Catfight! Catfight!”

Responding to the audience’s rousing chorus, the three schoolgirls did in fact end up rolling around on the floor, pulling each others’ hair, screaming insults at each other and grinding their bodies against each other ineffectually. Experiencing it firsthand while also being aware of all the tropes was an odd but mostly amusing experience for Julie. It was, at least, pretty exciting when CB got her yoga pants briefly pulled down, exposing her cheese-smeared bubble butt. Being a real person, Julie saw several ways to maim DB if she stepped out of the rules of male fantasy catfights. She didn’t take them, though, even if it was really tempting to do something as simple as land a solid gut-punch. Real violence in the fluffy fantasy reality might wake the coach up, and Julie was still seriously horny.

CB finally got the upper hand, though, pinning DB. Julie grabbed a plate piled high with spaghetti from a random table and poured it right over Decepticon Bonnie’s petite blonde head. Her nemesis spat out a meatball and glowered at her.

“Sorry, not sorry,” Julie quipped, quoting DB’s shirt back at her.

Mrs. Vanderbilt walked over to them and dispersed the leering crowd. She helped the girls to their feet. She looked angry, though.

The food fight was totally and solely Decepticon Bonnie’s fault, Julie thought, imposing her will on the dream. Everyone will blame her for it and treat me and CB as totally innocent. Kellerman needs to be punished for what she just did! The dream didn’t resist much, and Julie even wondered if that’s where the coach’s mind was going anyway.

“Miss,” the waitress said to DB “You started this. I saw you spray that young lady with mayonnaise. If you don’t want to be on the hook for all the damages, you’re going to do everything I say!”

DB nodded reluctantly, po-faced. “Yes, Ma’am.”

Mrs. Vanderbilt grabbed DB by the arm and led her to a shower stall in the center of the restaurant. Why was there a shower on a stage in the middle of a Scorchin’ Tartan? Because dreams do that kind of shit. As Coach Larkin watched in interest, the buxom waitress shoved the petite blonde bitch under the shower and turned it on. This is gonna be good!

Decepticon Bonnie looked good wet, angry and humiliated, Julie thought, even though it made it even more obvious her tits were fake. Mrs. Vanderbilt covered a sponge with foamy shower gel and started rubbing DB all over with it to clean off the spaghetti, mustard and other assorted food. In the process, Mrs. Vanderbilt got wet herself — and Julie thought the waitress uniform looked even better when soaked down. When DB kept complaining, seeming both miserable and vulnerable, Mrs. Vanderbilt just handed her the sponge, reached down, took off her own panties and stuffed them in Decepticon Bonnie’s mouth! Yeah, I can totally enjoy sharing an erotic dream with Decepticon Bonnie — as long as I make sure she CAN’T enjoy it!

Watching Chinese Bonnie squirm about trying to clean cheese dip off her intimates was oddly titillating to Julie for a minute or two, especially with her in this weird, giggly bimbo state — but it was also likely to mess up the continuity of the rest of the dream, so Julie willed both herself and CB fully clean again. The coach didn’t seem to notice — his eyes, like everyone else’s, were on DB.

It was going full strip club lesbian shower show — not that the influence wasn’t there from the beginning. A rude patron grabbed a handful of mashed potatoes and threw them at DB’s exposed coosh. Splat! Well, that meant Mrs. Vanderbilt had to scrub there. Extensively and sensually. “I’m not some lesbo,” DB tried to say indignantly as she moaned in involuntary pleasure, but it was pretty muffled by the panties stuffed in her mouth.

Time to push this dream where I want it to go! “You know,” Julie said loudly, “I heard a rumor that Bonnie Kellerman will do anything for two dollars and nine cents.”

Well, that definitely got the attention of the paunchy sports pub men. DB stared at her, outraged, and she winked back playfully. You wanna play with rumors and slut-shaming, bitch, you’d better be ready to get slutty yourself! Soon someone tossed that exact, paltry amount of money on stage and told DB to take off her top. Sure enough, Kellerman’s hands unhesitatingly stripped off her green top, leaving her in a lacy black bra even as her face made it obvious she wanted them to be doing anything but that. More money landed on stage, and DB’s bra hit the floor.

Julie was immensely pleased to note that Decepticon Bonnie’s big hard D-cups had implant scars under them. They didn’t in real life, but Julie was still sure they were fake — and the coach apparently agreed with her. Julie had nothing against cosmetic surgery in general, but it was inarguably skanky to have it done in high school.

Coach Larkin was no longer focused on DB, however. He moved his arms to play with something invisible on his chest. Julie felt her own hands rise involuntarily to the knot at the center of her purple halter — and all the Scorchin’ Tartan waitresses also reached for the knots on their scandalous Scottish schoolgirl tops as well, in perfect unison. Larkin mimed untying the knot slowly, and everyone started to follow him... until Mrs. Vanderbilt laughed and shook a finger at him, scolding him for being naughty.

He just shrugged, though — and then reached down and pulled his own shirt off over his head in a single smooth gesture. Every woman in the restaurant, Julie and CB included, mirrored his action involuntarily. Julie had never seen so many bare breasts in a single location before — and they were just fantastic breasts, too; Larkin was probably pulling the background waitresses out of his memories of bikini girl calendars and Victoria’s Secret catalogues. It was incredibly cheesy, but Julie had to admit to herself she thought it was also pretty sexy. After a long second to give everyone an eyeful, the waitresses all got self-conscious, covering their chests with their arms and ducking down, blushing furiously with scandalized, shocked looks on their faces. Like me at the Oscars. Yeah... definitely hot!

But, to Julie, they were also competition. Julie had known how the dream was going to end from the second she figured out its inspiration. They’d walk up to Coach Larkin, smell the Max Body Spray and go absolutely bugfuck nuts with lust, losing all self-control and dignity in their desire to possess Larkin carnally. Julie had been contemplating that. She’d already set some programmed mental limits — don’t do anything occult, and don’t reveal anything you wouldn’t reveal normally while lust-crazed.

She had to wonder what it would be like, though. She’d never actually been truly out-of-control with lust. Her masturbation-fest after the Oscars dream was pretty intense and driven, and made her late for school — which crossed a personal line for her. But it wasn’t quite the same thing. In the commercials, women sprinted through cities in their underwear, tore through plate glass windows, showed off their urban parkour skills and pounced on men from above, ripping their clothes off like rabid hyenas. The nipple tuning had been a silly sight gag when she saw it in the commercial, and viscerally erotic when she experienced it in first-person. Would the same hold true for the lust-madness? Well, if she didn’t act now, the waitresses would take over the dream and she’d be forced out. Time to find out!

“Come on,” she said to Chinese Bonnie. “Let’s get to the coach before the Scottish Bimbo Armada steals him from us!”

CB nodded, grinning eagerly. They got up and walked over to Coach Larkin. Well, they walked part of the way in convenient slo-mo, fluffed out hair blowing in a convenient breeze, bare breasts bouncing visibly with every step. The rest, they ran. Julie felt her heart rate spike as she walked into the psychotropic scent-wall, and her pussy started juicing hard. Need. NEED! Real man! Hard man! Cock! NOW!

CB got there before Julie did. She grabbed the booth table, tearing it out of the floor and tossing it across the sports pub to strike a plasma TV screen in a shower of sparks and debris like she was the Hulk. The padded leather booth area was now open in the center, making it look suspiciously like the private dance area of a luxury strip club. Coach Larkin just fixed her with a bold stare and raised an eyebrow suggestively. CB got one hand around his throat and shoved him back against the wall. With the other, she grabbed his belt, slacks and briefs and tore all three off in a single ferocious gesture, swinging them over her head like a drug-crazed stripper and roaring like a lion before tossing the scent-soaked garments at the mob of oncoming topless waitresses.

Julie — still clad only in her cheerleader skirt and pumps — jumped forward, landing on her hands for a perfect cartwheel, spreading her legs as she came back down to land right on the coach’s groin. His cock slammed into her hard, jolting her skeleton. (There was no rational part of her mind left to wonder how she pulled that off in pumps.) Julie rode the coach in a rough, desperate cowgirl, pumping her hips as hard as she could and sending her breasts flying every which way. She grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up to roughly, messily kiss him, driving her tongue into his mouth and enjoying the scratchiness of his goatee on her cheeks. She inhaled deeply, taking in the exotic scent of musky maleness that obliterated her conscious mind and enslaved her will. Her vaginal walls clenched around his cock as she thrilled in her own aromatic enslavement.

Bonnie was just behind Julie. Her hands wrapped around Julie’s gyrating breasts and squeezed hard. Julie roared in furious delight, clenching her muscles in an effort to drive that fantastic rod even deeper inside her. Larkin’s mouth tore away from Julie’s, but only so it could wrap around CB’s. That was fine — it meant Julie could sniff his magnificent hair as he drove his hard cock in and out of her tight young body. She drove her fingernails into the enticing muscles of Larkin’s back and drew long red lines with them, thinking of nothing but how she could motivate him to pound her harder. As it happened, her motivation worked.

Hands pulled the animalistic threesome vertical. A dozen gorgeous, topless waitresses clustered around the trio, exploratory feminine hands stroking every part of Larkin’s body as they sighed, quivered and got strikingly wet strikingly quickly. Julie wrapped her legs together around Larkin’s waist and did everything she could to increase the tempo of their fucking until it was like a jackhammer in her cunt. There were feminine hands and tongues stroking Julie and Chinese Bonnie’s bodies now too, as the glamour-model waitresses, now mostly fully nude, sighed, moaned, touched themselves and lost their minds to the scent-frenzy.

It was all a bit of a blur to her from there. At one point she squeezed Chinese Bonnie’s cute bubble butt, really hard — the sensory impression of her hands digging into those firm, feminine and very forbidden glutes seared itself into her memory. Beyond that, though, everything was a blur of pounding cock, intoxicating scent and myriads of exploratory, naughty, stroking hands and tongues. She came at least twice, yet never felt sated.

At one point, Larkin thrust her face-down on a table and fucked her from behind. Her sweat-slicked body slid over the cool varnished surface like she was oiled down, and scratches and pock-marks teased her furiously erect nipples, sending shivers throughout her body and making her clench even more tightly around Larkin’s rod. He seemed to like that. It got even better when he sank a hand into her tangled, sweaty red hair and started pulling it. The act itself excited her a great deal, but it also held her head in the exact position to witness something else she found very, very appealing.

The room was totally polarized now, with all the attractive women save one clustered around Larkin. All the paunchy sports-pub guys, conversely, were clustered around Decepticon Bonnie. Stubby fat cocks pumped in and out of her mouth, cunt and ass. She’d been thoroughly glazed with a thick layer of semen, her eyes glued shut. Paunchy naked guys slapped, pinched and prodded her. She did not look at all happy — and that made Julie’s own experience with the gorgeous coach all the sweeter. She came for her third and final time as he buried himself balls-deep inside her and dozens of feminine hands stroked her most secret, sensual spots. Once the orgasm finished, she slumped exhausted to the floor.

The compulsion of the aftershave faded from her mind now that she was truly sated — or at least, too sore to continue. The dream wasn’t over, though. She watched the coach rail a lust-crazed Chinese Bonnie in half a dozen positions. Her long, lanky legs looked fantastic splayed out at every odd angle as he fucked her. Several waitresses still stroked both the couple and Julie herself, but others, realizing they weren’t going to get a shot at Larkin, turned to each other to satisfy their needs. A lesbian orgy gradually spread out around Larkin and CB like a mossy carpet — ever growing, ever flourishing. Julie was surprised by how it kept capturing her gaze with sexy little details.

The climax seemed like it would be oral, though. Julie thrilled at watching her friend’s head bob up and down, up and down, up and down on that magnificent cock. The normally snarky CB looked so desperate, needy and helpless now. Julie was faintly disturbed to admit how much the sight thrilled her.

The turgid cock left Chinese Bonnie’s yearning mouth with an audible popping sound. One of the coach’s hands held her head in position, while the other gripped his own cock. Julie knew what was going to happen, and it thrilled her. Oh, god, yeah, I need to see this, he’s going to —

Thick ropes of sticky white seed shot out of Larkin’s rigid cock to splatter against her friend’s classically beautiful Asian features. Julie moaned and gripped her own vulva, sore as it was, with a needy squeezing hand. Chinese Bonnie giggled in girlish delight and held her mouth open, tongue out, as Larkin painted her tonsils and then added a bit extra to her sweaty, tangled hair. She swallowed audibly, cum dripping from her cheeks, left earlobe and eyebrows. There was none on her lips, though — she licked all that off with a playful grin.

All the waitresses stood up and applauded Larkin like he was a theatre performer. Julie couldn’t help but giggle — like its source material, the dream was just so overblown, so transparent in its Freudian motives. Well, either Freud or Evangelion, at least. As usual, the dream started to break apart and dissolve almost immediately after the dreamer’s orgasm. Julie stole one final look at the used and degraded Decepticon Bonnie before she awoke with the wide, contented smile of a housecat basking in the noonday sun.

May 1st, 2024. Julie Lambert.

Julie had a good idea where she’d find PHB if she wanted space to think — and she expected to catch her sooner or later. Girl’s clearly holding something inside. She needs to talk to a friend, but doesn’t feel she can. The only sort of high schoolers who went up on the roof of their schools when they wanted to be alone were anime characters. When a kid from the anime club tried that in real life at MWA, they mistook him for a sniper and called the police. Man, was that a memorable day! But there were a lot of unused rooms on the fourth floor, and currently Pink Highlights Bonnie huddled in an alcove beside a locked janitor’s closet that everyone avoided because it smelled faintly of cat piss, rocking back and forth.

Julie sat down beside her. “Pinkie? Are you okay? Wanna talk?”

PHB jolted as Julie broke her introspection. “I’m so sorry I made a scene in the cafeteria. I know I made the squad look weird. I won’t do it again, I promise. Please don’t kick me off.”

“That is one thing you absolutely don’t have to worry about. I’m your friend, Bonnie. Everyone is. Well, except DB and Jen; make you own judgements about Rich Bonnie. Also, you’re our best floater. We can’t kick you off.”

PHB laughed, but didn’t respond.

“Are... are you okay?”

She looked torn and kept her mouth shut.

“I am your friend, I am in your corner and I will not judge your belief system. If you need to take confidence with me, I give you my oath I won’t betray it.”

“Who even says shit like that in high school?”

“People that are speaking to a friend in sincerity and don’t feel worried about putting on their public face or seeming normal.”

PHB broke down. “I’m fucked, Julie. I’m totally fucked. Please don’t tell anyone — especially Chinese Bonnie. If I tell you this, it can’t get back to her, do you understand? She’s always been so nice to me! I don’t want her to feel guilty.”

“I give you my word. I already figured out you took the rap for CB.”

“I had to take the rap. As bad as this is for me, it would be worse for her by far. And my parents did understand, but it didn’t stop there. Julie, my parents are Ivy League alumni. Two different universities. I had legacy admissions lined up. My grades are fantastic. Last week, my parents went to an alumni function. They were told, off the books, not to even bother sending in an application at my dad’s school. Someone at their admissions office requested my current transcripts from MWA, and got them — including the suspension, and Dikscheide’s stated reason for the suspension. I’d have to explain it before some kind of social justice tribunal that’s apparently a total drumhead. The universities do that, now, to weed out any students they think will provoke aggressive activist mobs capable of fully shutting down the campus and damaging the university’s reputation.”

“Wait, the university proactively requested your transcripts? You haven’t even graduated yet!”

“Yeah, well, obviously Dikscheide made some off-the-records calls to friends. Maybe she was watching me personally even before the suspension. I’ve been really quiet about it, but I’ve been skeptical of their ideology for a while now, and I’ve talked about it here and there in confidence.”

She held up her left-side ‘money piece’, the neon pink face-framing highlights that were the root of her nickname. “You know, kind of a stealth joke. The woke dye their hair neon colors, so I did it to superficially blend in, but I chose pink for traditional femininity.”

“Were you involved with Marvin and the AFHU?”

“Oh, god. Please don’t ask me about that. Never talk about it. Very few people know. I don’t think the DEO does. I’m shocked Marvin kept his mouth shut.”

“Then silence shall be my watchword on this matter as well.”

“Uh... okay. But the admissions stuff. That matters, Julie. My parents confirmed with an old friend that the other university is aware, too. I had a prestigious future ahead of me, and for one momentary comment, it’s now all fucked. I’m angry. I have a right to be angry. Even if the school rescinded the suspension on some kind of appeal, both universities already have copies of the current transcript. I can’t even sue Dikscheide, because she used weasel words and opinion so carefully in the suspension rationale. I’m... I mean, I can still get a decent degree somewhere and a middle class job, but I’ve lost so much for doing so little. And I’m having panic attacks constantly, seeing the DEO’s little narcs everywhere.”

Julie nodded slowly. “You’re not imagining it. Nor are we alone. Most students resent the DEO, and what’s happening is not normal, and most people are too scared to speak up. And you aren’t the only one having culture war-induced anxiety attacks. Our whole generation apparently reports anxiety disorders at a rate way above any previous one. The media won’t admit it’s due to woke zealotry, even though it very obviously is.”

PHB ran her hands through her hair in frustration. It seemed like she wanted to cry, but for whatever reason wasn’t able to do so. “What gets me is that Dikscheide even knew my parents were alumni! It’s like a political party’s opposition research, except on high school students. What kind of person does that?!”

Well, honestly, I would. That’s really not the answer PHB wanted to hear right now, though, so Julie kept it to herself.

“I just... I keep thinking about how this all has to work. It’s not just Dikscheide. There’s all these people, and they’re both meticulously detail-oriented and psychopathically petty — and they network, they’re organized and in our pathologically online era that’s allowed them to literally take over the world! And these people spend hours doing pedantic detail work unpaid, because they truly think it makes the world a better place!

“Searching through decades-old Twitter and Usenet archives for an off-color comment that can be used to ruin someone’s career. Writing long rambling essays about how their favorite TV show isn’t progressive enough. Skim-reading steamy romance novels on Amazon just to report the non-con scenes to their moderators. Brainstorming new, bizarre kinds of micro-aggressions. Organizing mob protests against a white guy wearing dreadlocks. And, obviously, proactively requesting the transcripts of students not even out of high school yet based on an anonymous tip. It’s so much effort for no concrete profit — just the vindictive satisfaction of ruining others’ lives. And the really tragic thing is that as a social movement, it’s working. They have so very much power.”

PHB waved her hands around as she spoke. When she finished, Julie didn’t say anything. She just waited for a few seconds, then hugged her. The tinier cheerleader finally started to shake and sob, crying into Julie’s sweatshirt. Breaking down the brittle tension was a necessary aspect of surviving this, Julie suspected. She just held her for several minutes and didn’t say anything else.

Then she explained what infrasound was, and how the DEO used it in their film to disturb the class. She hoped this would help PHB cope with her anxiety by attributing it to an objective, external influence. It did improve her mood, but not in the way Julie expected — she was horrified, but also fascinated by the topic, showing a typical geekish enthusiasm for understanding weird ideas. Julie didn’t actually know much about the technical details of it, but PHB could surely research those herself. Time was ultimately limited, though, and after about half an hour Julie pointed out they had to leave, or they’d end up explaining to security why they were on the school grounds after hours.

“You did a good thing,” Julie finally said. “You were a real friend. The unfortunate truth is, in real life being a hero doesn’t usually lead to a happy ending for everyone. I wish it did, but the world just doesn’t work like that.”