The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I should backtrack and explain a bit more I guess...

Caltas Vearok is a trade station run by the Gythen; they make up about 60% of the population. It’s just off the Bismoth trade spine and is a convenient route to take if you’re trying to get to Austian, Capara, or the Cormal Cloud, but not for much else. So far I haven’t actually saved enough to buy passage elsewhere, so I only know what I’ve read about those places.

It acts as a dock for ships coming through; they can restock on food and breathable air, visit the bazaar or Trader’s Alley, and partake of some local entertainment.

Entertainment comes in a variety of forms: there are cinemas, the arboretum, bars and the like. The internet connection is shoddy at best; long range communications being what they are we can just about get the interstellar news service in real-time, assuming that there aren’t priority transmissions hogging the bandwidth. Internet queries to another planet, even one of the neighbouring ones, can take a couple of days. The local net is fine, but limited if you want any kind of information that isn’t related to the needs of the station or stuff that people have looked up before.

Oh, and of course most captains on the trade ships that come through insist on their crew being on duty anywhere near Caltas Vearok, so we end up with entire crews turning up needing a drink and to shag something...

For the more discerning customer there is Maxwell’s House of Leisure on the upper tier; it’s run by a Gythen who prides herself on providing excellent service. Whatever particular fetish or interest you have, they will try to meet it given enough notice. Complimentary drinks and snacks are as much a part of the decor as the mood lighting and background music. Occasionally we see some of their workers ‘slumming it’ when they visit the bazaar, but generally that’s all; they have to keep themselves clean for when they get High Family visitors.

The hubward end of the west pier is where you will find the Ebon Star Path. No one seems to understand the reference, but it’s run by a Uurak as a brothel disguised as a fitness club. You can book private sessions with ‘personal trainers’ and get very hot and sweaty with their exercise plans. Just reputable enough to serve High Family occasionally, it also caters for the general populace as well.

Orrin runs his establishment out of the rimward end of the south pier. You can’t call it even a brothel without giving it more class than it actually has; those of us working there are basically sex workers who can’t get a job in either of the better places or buy ourselves out to get a proper job.

I arrived on Caltas Vearok via what they called a crack-shatter. That’s a hole in reality that tears itself open and spits stuff out; they’re a side effect of the FTL drives that ships use, but are rare enough that the only rule is to make sure ships pull back out of FTL a sensible distance away from planets or stations to minimise them. Generally they spit out nothing much; occasionally they spit out gases or something solid. As far as anyone can tell without spending a fortune on a long-range internet query, I’m the only person to ever come out of one. It’s also the only time so far that Caltas Vearok has experienced one.

Legal precedent is that someone has to pay for these things. Normally that would be the captain of whatever ship is believed to have caused it. In this case though someone decided that I had caused it, so I got landed with the bill for wrecking about thirty cubic metres of the station. I also got medical treatment because I wasn’t in a good way when I arrived; that got added to the bill.

And of course you need to pay for things...

I woke up, coherently which was something new at this point, in a darkened room. I was on a bunk of some kind, but that was about all that I could tell immediately given how dark it was. The covering on the bed was thin but it seemed reasonably warm at the moment.

The past few... Wakenings... Had been painful. I remembered that much. But not much more. It filtered back to me slowly, until part of me wondered where exactly I was.

I shuffled around a bit, and then it began to occur to me that I really didn’t know where I was.

“You’re awake then,” a voice from the darkness said.

I nearly jumped at the sound of it. I hadn’t even been aware of anyone breathing nearby, but the voice sounded very close. It sounded female, though I wasn’t entirely sure about that, but the accent was strange.

“Who’s there?” I asked, realising as I did that my throat was very dry.

“My name is Else,” the voice replied. “Are you up to having the lights on?”

“I... I think so...” I looked around, not seeing anything at all. “Where am I?”

She made a chuffing noise and apparently decided to ignore my question for the moment. “Room, lights to ten percent.”

Overhead lights came on, dimly and thankfully not too suddenly. I shielded my eyes anyway, not handling even that minimal light too well. When my eyes adjusted enough for me to look around again I did so, trying to take in my surroundings.

They were minimalist. The room was only marginally longer than the bunk, with only slightly more floor space than the bunk took up. Given my height from the floor I guessed that I was on the top bunk, which appeared to be little more than a shaped hole in the wall; the panels that walled it were the same as the ones making up the wall opposite the bunk, but a bit smaller. Some discoloured patches suggested that something had been stuck on there; posters or photos or something, I wasn’t sure as it was blank now.

The panels making up the walls were a mismatching collection of the pale grey ones that I later found were manufactured for walls all over the station. Unexciting, even drab, they were designed by someone with the intention of not provoking anything aggressive or excited. The mismatching nature in this case came from, as I later found, the occasional replacement of individual pieces rather than wholesale redecorating.

Testing my arms a bit I decided that I probably had the strength to risk it, and pushed myself to the edge of the bunk so that I could look down to the bunk below.

It was basically the same as mine, but lower. I couldn’t see who was in it aside from their legs; they were evidently sitting with their back to the wall facing out into the room, their knees drawn up enough that only their feet and lower legs were visible. They were at least dressed; the clothing was a deep red with black trimming, and the boots that went with it looked solid enough to make me think that this might be a boiler suit of some kind rather than regular trousers.

“Who are you?” I asked, not entirely satisfied with the answer that I had had before. “And where are we?”

“As I said, my name is Else,” she replied. “As for where... You’re in my room, which is now your room as well. You’re lucky; there isn’t space in the communal bunkrooms at the moment and my roommate left a few weeks ago. If that bunk had still been occupied you’d probably have been sleeping on the floor in the main room.”

“Anything more general about where we are?” I asked, wondering if she was doing this deliberately.

“South pier, level seven, rimward three of Caltas Vearok. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Never heard of it,” I admitted. “How did I get here?”

“Apparently you came through a crack-shatter. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before. How did you manage it?”

“I came through a what?” I frowned, tried leaning out a bit further to get a better look, and then thought better of it when my arms weren’t quite up to it.

“A crack-shatter,” she repeated as if I should know what this meant. “You must have heard of them; you get them anywhere that people use FTL drives too close to inhabited places.”

“FTL drive?” I realised that this was getting more surreal the more I heard and pulled back a bit into the bunk.

“You must have heard of that at least. How else do you think people get around? Enough from me,” she added before I could reply. “What’s your name?”

“James,” I admitted, not sure how much to trust her.

“James what?” she persisted.

“James Ingram,” I replied after a moment’s hesitation.

“James Ingram,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Sin... That could be in your favour.”

“What could?” I asked, a bit baffled.

“Your core name: Sin.” When I didn’t immediately reply she sighed. “My full name is Marel Seller, so my core name is Else. Your core name is Sin. Where do you come from that they don’t know about core names?”

“A long way away apparently,” I said slowly. “Far enough away that I’ve never heard of FTL drives being used...”

There was silence from the lower bunk for a moment. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “no one actually knows where crack-shatters open from... I suppose that explains why you are here if you are that out of touch.”

“And where’s here in that sense?” I asked.

“When you came through the crack-shatter it did a lot of damage. Normally the ship captain responsible for causing it would have to pay for the damages, but there was no ship, and you turned up. So you’ve got to pay. On top of that I understand there were some medical costs. So you’re in debt, and you’ve been sent here to work off your debt.”

I tried not to sigh in annoyance. “And where is here..?”

“Orrin’s whore house,” Else said with a degree of satisfaction as she slid forwards, giving me my first look at her. “You weren’t coherent enough to answer questions so this was what they decided was suitable for you.”

I’ll skip a bit here, so that I can focus on Else. The bit I’m skipping wasn’t that exciting; disbelief, mild horror at my situation, frantic consideration of options, major horror at how few there were...

Else is a Lor’talp. At a glance they look something like anthro cat people; not just cat ears but full face, light fur covering most of their bodies, that kind of thing. The fur comes in anything from plain black to tabby to ginger to grey; Else is a half-tabby-half-ginger. She’s also lithe to go with it, which not all Lor’talp are.

On closer inspection, there are differences with the normal picture of cat people: the face isn’t quite the right shape, the fur is closer to being hair, that kind of thing. You get used to it after a while, and it’s hard to tell which bits I’m looking for now; it isn’t like I’ve seen a cat to compare them to since I got here...

She was patient with me, up to a point; she had been lumbered with me as a roommate against her wishes, and was basically taking the whole thing as a kind of joke rather than complaining. I think she found the questions I was asking amusing to answer, and in truth she didn’t have much else to do so I was probably a major source of non-sexual entertainment for her at that point.

“There’s no way out?” I asked for what must have been the tenth time at least.

“Unless you can prove your worth to someone else who is willing to buy you up,” she replied. She had ended up standing up, leaning against my bunk while we talked. The maroon jumpsuit was the same style as the one that she had pointed out for me to wear; a standard issue jumpsuit in a specific colour, with markings showing who we... Belonged to.

“Haven’t you tried that?” I asked.

“I did try a couple of times shortly after I got here,” she admitted. “I was already too heavily in debt and didn’t have any skills that would buy me a place in preference to someone else. Here I can at least earn a living quietly and save up. One day... Hopefully soon, I’ll have paid off my debt and I can work on buying myself out.”

“How did you end up in debt?”

“Our colony was evacuated,” she said simply. “I paid for transport to a nearby colony, but they had already taken evacuees from another disaster. I had enough set by for one extra jump. It took three more jumps to get here,” she ended with an air of finality. There wasn’t even a sense of resignation about it: this was just a fact of life that she was apparently stuck with.

Not sure how to carry that line of conversation on I investigated my options of clothing a bit more. It was basically a boiler suit with some sets of underwear to go with it. All were in the same shade of maroon, though Else’s suit had different markings on the sleeves.

“They show how much you’re worth,” she explained as I looked at the markings. “Right now you’re charitied, so you’re costing money rather than earning it, so you’re not going to cost much for someone to spend time with. I’ve got some skills,” she continued, gesturing to her own sleeve and the greater number of markings on it, “so I’m worth more. A few good reviews and your price goes up. Orrin takes his cut of your price, plus some extra for expenses and taxes, and the rest goes into paying off your debt.”

I later found out how much “expenses and taxes” actually was. Orrin covered food, clothing and cleaning, and accommodation with no problem; that was his legal duty as our owner. But taxes had to cover the station’s expenses...

You’re on a space station three days’ travel from the nearest habitable world, even by FTL. Even air and gravity aren’t free: even if the station used rotational gravity that would need engines to keep it turning on centre, and the air supply requires circulators, processors, scrubbers, and the hydroponics bays to keep it fresh, all of which need people and materials to keep them going. Three strategic circulators going down in the right place can leave the air in a tenth of a pier immobile and going stagnant, which will suffocate the inhabitants in a couple of hours.

So yeah, taxes have to pay for the air you breathe, the gravity keeping your feed on the deck, and everything else.

“And it’s... Just sex,” I asked uncertainly. I wasn’t exactly body shy, but I’d never even had sex before, which isn’t a good state to be going into something like this. “There’s nothing else?”

“You can’t expect too many options in something like this,” she replied casually, as if this was totally normal. “Orrin will probably start you off with someone easy to get you used to things, but... You’re charitied, so he can’t exactly keep you for free.”

“I don’t... I’ve never even had sex before,” I told her, blushing a bit as I did.

She merely raised an eyebrow. “Law of charity, Sin. They took you on, you’ve got to pay them back. Law doesn’t say that they have to find you something that you’ll like, just that they find you somewhere.”

The next few minutes were basically me swinging between various emotions and trying not to start crying. I know, some people would look on the chance to be paid to have consensual non-obligational sex as a major opportunity to be grabbed. But I wasn’t in that frame of mind; I’d never thought of it that way, so the whole thing felt... Wrong.

Eventually it burnt itself out of me and I pulled myself together enough to try to get dressed so that I could look around at least. When I tried to pull the sheet up to get changed behind, Else decided to give me a lesson by pulling it sharply out of my grasp.

“You were naked when they brought you in Sin,” she told me. “I’ve seen everything of you that I need to already. And by the sounds of things you need to get used to the idea of being naked around other people.”

I looked around, but there didn’t seem to be much to do aside from going with what she said. Hesitantly I pulled out some underwear and, trying to minimise things as much as I could, slipped them on. Else watched me the entire time, a bit clinically I thought, and I think that I managed to avoid going bright red only by a lot of effort.

“Boots are in there,” she told me, indicating what turned out to be a draw in the wall next to the head of my bunk, just below the level of the bunk. The boots fitted, just, and were padded presumably to avoid the need for socks.

The section of wall immediately above the boot draw turned out to be a cupboard of sorts. It didn’t have much in it: a black card a bit larger and thicker than a credit card that hung from a chain and some toiletries was all that was it.

“That’s your bank card,” Else explained when I pulled the card out to look at. “You’re the only one who can use it. That doesn’t stop people trying to steal them, and getting them replaced is an easy way to end up deeper in debt.”

I looked at the card doubtfully, then hung the chain around my neck and tucked the card inside my suit. The whole thing felt horribly uncomfortable, and was only made worse by the overall situation.

Else looked me over critically, then gave a one-shouldered shrug. “You’ll do. Come on, let’s show you around.”