“Pussy Liquor”
Eris tapped the magnification lenses on her mask to zoom in on the grounds of the old mansion, carefully noting the location and patrol patterns of the guards. They were pretty spread out—the estate had seen better days, but it still sprawled across nearly fifteen acres of overgrown, tangled thickets and encroaching forest. They had a lot of ground to cover, which was good for Eris. She didn’t have any margin of error tonight; if even a single guard managed to raise an alarm, the best-case scenario was that she was potentially signing her best friend’s death warrant. The worst-case scenario involved the end of free will as humanity knew it. But hey, no pressure, right? She slipped down from the weeping willow she’d been using as a perch and began to move in.
Eris wished she could call for backup, but she hadn’t heard from Doctor Phobos in over a week now, and his sidekick Deimos had his hands full keeping order in San Delfino in his absence. She wasn’t worried about Doctor Phobos—a few years of dealing with superheroic weirdness had made her almost distressingly casual about friends who vanished in fiery explosions while fighting genocidal madmen—but she couldn’t take the chance to wait for him. The longer she waited, the worse things could get for Julia, from torture to brainwashing to...Eris clamped down on that train of thought hard. It didn’t do any good to lose herself in worry like that.
And calling in an outside superhero was out of the question. They were all...Eris squirmed uncomfortably away from the thought, glad there were no telepaths in the vicinity. But it was true. They were careless. They were brash and loud and they relied on their superpowers to keep them safe and they didn’t train and they blew things up and they were always impossible to get in touch with and they disappeared for days or weeks without warning and they came up with crazy plans on the fly and they took ridiculous chances and and and...Eris let out a tiny sigh of frustration, careful not to make a sound that could be heard by the guard she was approaching but unable to fully suppress her annoyance with the community she’d joined. It wasn’t that she thought she was better than other superheroes, it was just...she really thought they could improve their results with a little more diligence. But the only person who seemed to agree with her was Sharpe, and most of the other heroes out there didn’t even know she existed.
So even though Eris knew that in a lot of ways she was the absolute worst person for the job, she made herself continue toward the mansion. Doctor Zoltanus (her mind seamlessly inserted the disclaimer, ‘Not a real doctor’) had forced her hand by kidnapping Julia; she couldn’t take the risk that even a relatively competent hero like WildRose or Adventure Girl would make a mistake that could endanger her friend, let alone calling in a loose cannon like Harrier or Azure. She knew Zoltanus was laying a trap for her, and she knew she was walking right into it, but all the alternatives were even worse. Eris couldn’t take the chance of leaving her childhood friend to become one of Zoltanus’s drugged slaves...or tortured, or brutalized, or—CLAMP. Eris had to do this on her own, that was all there was to it.
Especially since it was Eris’s fault that Julia had gotten involved in this whole mess. Julia didn’t even know that Tara Tate was secretly Eris, partner and confidante to San Delfino’s protector of the night. She probably had no idea why the Blood Cult of Doctor Zoltanus kidnapped her. (Okay, he didn’t actually call it ‘The Blood Cult of Doctor Zoltanus’. People didn’t tend to sign up for anything involving the words ‘blood cult’. But Eris was the one writing the casefile, and she didn’t see any reason to mince words.) Julia was probably terrified right now, and that was assuming she could think at all.
Eris slipped in behind the first guard, drifting as lightly as a cloud through the unkempt grass, and dropped him with a swift chop to the cluster of nerves at the base of his head. She couldn’t afford to use her fear gas, not tonight; if one of Zoltanus’s men got twitchy, they might sound a full-scale alert. Eris couldn’t afford that. She’d already slipped up once, the last time she put Zoltanus behind bars, and it had disastrous consequences. She couldn’t let herself make another error, not with so much at stake.
Not that she was wound a little tightly or anything, she thought ruefully. Eris pulled the guard into the underbrush and secured his hands and feet with zip ties, then gagged him just in case he woke up. One down, five to go. Perhaps another six more inside at most—if Zoltanus stuck to his usual M.O., he probably chose three or four of those for the wealth they brought, not for their physical prowess. He probably had one that was purely there to use for his pleasure, too. Eris hoped that wasn’t Julia. That left no more than two or three that could handle themselves in a fight.
Of course, it didn’t take much skill to put a knife to Julia’s throat. Dammit, she should have been more careful! But Eris had underestimated Zoltanus—she hadn’t thought that her casual comment about ‘neutralizing’ Zoltanus’s mind control toxins would have sent his twisted mind down the path it did. She was normally more careful about describing her power as an immunity to toxins around anyone who might pick up on the implications of her abilities; if anyone ever realized she produced the counter-agents to harmful drugs and poisons in her own body, they might decide that Tara Tate was more valuable as a living pharmaceutical lab than as a human being. But she always thought of Doctor Zoltanus as a jumped-up quack who used his mutant power to drug starlets and heiresses, not as an actual threat. He was making her pay for that now.
He must have been planning this for months before he made his move, indoctrinating people in San Delfino and commanding them to secretly observe her nightly activities. Anybody could have been under his spell—the thugs she fought down at the docks, the soccer mom she saved from the Harrison Park Killer, even the police who normally helped her clean up after the criminal rings she and Doctor Phobos busted. Sooner or later he must have found something that led him back to her. And then...
Eris dropped the next guard with a kidney punch that was probably a little bit harder than strictly necessary, but she had some stress to work off. Two down. She consoled herself with the knowledge that she didn’t have to beat Zoltanus; she only needed to find Julia, get her safely out of the mansion Zoltanus was using as a base of operations, and then she could call down the entire Liberty Squad on the oily little jerk. Without Julia, he had nothing to hold over her, and she could instinctively neutralize his mind-control drugs without even needing to try. She just needed to do things carefully, that was all. Stealth and silence, just like the Monks of New Sheduo had taught her. Be at one with the night, strike from the shadows, and—
The stillness of the night was broken by a stuttering drone, the sound of the very air itself being whipped to near supersonic speeds. Eris turned to see the vegetation swaying violently back and forth as it was pulled in the direction of a vast, erratically moving dust devil that shredded the foliage into a whirling cloud of splinters as it approached. High above it, floating on the breeze, she could see a figure dressed all in white, sparkling like a gem in the dark sky.
Oh, Eris thought, her heart dropping into the pit of her stomach. Oh shit. She broke into a run, all thoughts of stealth forgotten as she moved to intercept the last people she expected to see tonight.
She half-expected them to simply charge right past her—this particular duo was known for their subtlety, caution and delicate handling of tense situations like Victor Frankenstein was known for his ethics and deference to laboratory protocol. But thankfully, the dust cloud subsided to reveal a person slowly spinning to a halt, a person wearing a tuxedo top decorated in red sequins and a pair of fishnet stockings that went all the way up to zir waist and all the way down to a pair of black leather tap shoes. “Airy!” ze chirped, in a Brooklyn-accented squeal. “Well, fancy meeting you here!” Ze snickered derisively. “We didn’t expect to see any Girl Scouts tonight!”
The other person descended partway to earth, although Eris had heard that ze never truly let zir feet touch the ground. “We are surprised by the presence of royalty, indeed,” ze said, affecting the plummy tones of a Cambridge don. Zir eyes gleamed with a cruel beauty that seemed to chisel all zir pale features in icy majesty. Eris was really glad she wore a mask that hid most of her face; she didn’t like to admit it, but that callous and indifferent sensuality always made her blush a little.
“The Sequined Ragestorm,” Eris said, trying to keep her voice light and friendly. “And Iridescent Killing Machine. I...really didn’t expect to see you here tonight, either.” She felt herself wanting to babble nervously, her usual response to stress, and bit back a thousand things she wanted to say. “Um, could we maybe take this conversation somewhere else? Maybe somewhere out of sight?”
She knew she was probably wasting her breath—this particular duo absolutely did not do ‘out of sight’. They literally made their living livestreaming their assaults on society’s most infamous supervillains, treating the fight against evil as a kind of avant-garde performance art and themselves as proud, pansexual, non-binary social justice vigilantes who defied the staid conventions of the superhero scene and embraced their cult celebrity status. They even had their own Patreon page.
Eris didn’t really mind them, although she knew more than a few superheroes who did, and she at least respected them and the good they frequently did in the course of their ‘art’...but they were the absolute worst people to show up here, at the absolute worst time. Even if Eris could get them to restrain their lackadaisical attitude toward collateral damage, a show of force could lead to Zoltanus bugging out the back with Julia in tow. Or worse.
Sure enough, Ragestorm let out a cackle that probably carried all the way to the mansion. “Out of sight!” ze said, zir voice filled with scorn. “Do I look like a church mouse to you, girlie? Did you see whiskers on this pretty face?” Zir mouth tightened into a rictus grin, making zir broad cheeks and squared-off jaw look disconcertingly like ze was about to go for Eris’s jugular. “Out of sight, she says. Like she’s ashamed of us.”
“She’s one of the nobility,” Iridescent Killing Machine said, zir body radiating a gentle coruscation even when at rest. “You can’t expect her to be thrilled by the prospect of the nouveau riche showing up at her private party.” Ze tossed back zir head, allowing zir mane of platinum hair to swirl haughtily. “The hoi palloi are unwelcome at these private soirees of silent brutality.”
“Now, wait, I didn’t mean it like that,” Eris said, her hands out in a gesture that she wasn’t sure counted as placation or warding. “I just mean that there’s a hostage in there, and she’s someone who means a lot to me, and I need you to tread lightly here—”
But it was no good. They ignored her, continuing their banter as if she wasn’t even there. “Oh, so it’s a party!” Ragestorm said, twirling around before moving into a mocking curtsy. “Well, you should have said, sweetie-pie! Because you know there’s only one thing I like to do to parties...”
Eris winced, already beginning to feel the shape of how very badly this could go for her and for Julia. “Now wait, please, let’s just talk about this for a second...”
Ragestorm only smiled even tighter, zir jaw muscles pulsing with manic excitement. Ze began to spin again, even faster this time, zir constant anger fueling the whirling revolutions of zir super-speed until zir feet raised a tornado of dust despite the thickness of the humid summer air. “When I see a party,” ze shouted over the rising din of the rapidly increasing wind, “I just gotta...CRASH IT!”
With that, ze was off, moving past Eris in a wash of blowing debris that smacked her right onto her butt. By the time she staggered to her feet, the duo was already three-quarters of the way to the mansion, Iridescent Killing Machine swooping along in zir partner’s wake like a drunken hummingbird. Eris had barely covered ten steps before they reduced the double doors to a shower of splinters with the combined force of their attack.
Eris’s heart sank. She knew the disaster was already well underway, now. All she could do now was try to limit the catastrophe. She sprinted through the track of barren earth left behind by the Sequined Ragestorm’s tornadic progress, passing chunks of wood dotted with razor-sharp discs smaller than her fingernail. She tried not to think about them, but every single one stood out like a dagger in her mind. Eris knew from watching the duo’s exploits that those same sequins, hurled by gale force winds, could penetrate flesh and bone just as easily as they did the mansion’s doors, and she tried not to think of Julia caught in the middle of one of the Ragestorm’s destructive whirlwinds. Of all the ways her friend could go, somehow Eris never thought it would be death by self-replicating sequined jacket technology.
She burst into the foyer to see the two vigilantes easily mopping up Zoltanus’s guards. Iridescent Killing Machine blasted one of them with a rainbow bolt of light that left him frantically slapping at his own clothing in an attempt to put out a sudden blaze, while Ragestorm spun around the room like a whirling dervish, knocking men over like bowling pins. Eris didn’t see Julia, thankfully, but she didn’t see Zoltanus either. The mansion was huge, they could be anywhere, and that was if they weren’t already making for a getaway van. She had to find them quickly before this got out of hand.
The guards from the mansion grounds burst into the room, leveling sub-machine guns at all three of them. Eris made a leap for the banister of the massive staircase that led to the upper level, then pushed off of it and dropped onto a guard with an axe kick that sent him crumpling to the floor with a shattered collarbone. She felt a little bad about beating up someone who was probably mind-controlled, but he’d probably be fine after a few weeks in the hospital and she had to incapacitate them to keep them from getting back into the fight. Zoltanus’s control made them virtually impervious to pain.
She took out a second guard with a throw that dislocated his shoulder and a kick that broke his leg, and just past him she saw the Sequined Ragestorm grab one another one of the guards for a few moments and then let him go. At the speeds ze was spinning, centrifugal force did the rest. That left only two, and Iridescent Killing Machine finished them off—ze swooped between them, aiming a blinding flash of light directly into their eyes, then made for the rafters as the disoriented men fired at the threat they could no longer see. Eris winced, hoping the bullet wounds weren’t as lethal as they seemed to the casual eye.
Still, she couldn’t argue with results. With the guards out of the way, perhaps there was still a chance to salvage something from this disaster. Zoltanus couldn’t have that many men left; his powers were limited, and there was no way he could be enslaving more than a dozen or so people without draining—
The doors that led deeper into the mansion burst open. Dozens of men came out, each of them wearing body armor and holding a sub-machine gun. They had the hardened look of professional mercenaries, and Eris had a moment of horror as she realized what would have happened to her if she had come alone. This was the trap Zoltanus must have been ready to spring. He’d supplemented his mind-controlled slaves with guns for hire, more than she could possibly fight off. If the Sequined Ragestorm and Iridescent Killing Machine hadn’t arrived when they did...she glanced over at them, suddenly grateful for their presence.
That gratitude lasted all of a tenth of a second, right up until the Sequined Ragestorm shouted, “Incoming, Killer! Time to put ’em down for the count! Hit me with a Hypnostorm!”
Before Eris could say anything, Iridescent Killing Machine directed a beam of blinding light directly onto the Sequined Ragestorm’s spinning form. The sequined jacket caught the light, breaking it up into a million rainbow pulses that swirled across the vision of Eris and the guards faster than their minds could process. Eris tried to reach for her goggles, hoping to activate her polarizing filter and block out at least some of the overwhelming light show, but her hand lost momentum midway to her head and she found herself tottering to a stop without even realizing it. Her mind felt like all her thoughts were breaking up into fragments before they could even finish forming, the dazzling light so intense that her senses simply couldn’t handle it.
She tried to close her eyes, but the rainbow patterns simply strobed across her eyelids in a dizzying whirl that threatened to topple her. She tried to turn, to look away from the vision of scattered light that was pounding her thoughts to mush, but she felt sickeningly off-balance. “Stop!” she shouted, desperate to escape the waves of sensory overload, but if either the Sequined Ragestorm or Iridescent Killing Machine heard her, they didn’t respond. If anything, they seemed to intensify the hypnotic dance of colored light. Eris thought she heard the sound of the guards’ guns clattering to the floor, but she couldn’t see anything. Moments later, she forgot even what she was thinking about looking for.
She knew she was drifting into a fugue state, and she struggled to make herself speak. “Got to...stop,” she mumbled, unsure whether the duo could hear her over the roaring wind. “Julia, Zoltanus...getting away...” She trailed off into silence, the effort of moving her lips too much in the face of the sensory assault. Her mind retreated into numbness, silence, a haze of confusion as her brain simply shut down from the intensity of the mesmerizing light show that played over her. She closed her eyes again, this time from simple mental fatigue, but the strobing patterns were too much for her exhausted brain. She fell to her knees, helpless to even move. All she could do was whisper one last time. “...getting...away...”
“Of course I’m not, dear,” a voice behind her said. Even as her blood ran cold at the sound of it, Eris couldn’t escape the artificial calm the hypnotic strobes brought. “Why would I go anywhere when I finally have everything I need right here?” She felt a hand peel away her mask with trembling fingers, then caress her cheek. She knew exactly who it belonged to.
“Zoltanus,” Iridescent Killing Machine said, zir voice filled with an erotic reverence that Eris recognized all too well. Zoltanus must have slipped zir some of his mind-control drugs at some point, ze and the Sequined Ragestorm both. That had been his plan all along, Eris realized distantly. The trap within a trap. He knew he couldn’t coerce her, not even with Julia as a hostage, but she was just as vulnerable as anyone else to this kind of brainwashing. He had her in his power, now, and that meant he could do the same to anyone else. Everyone else.
“You can open your eyes,” Zoltanus said, his voice sweet like poisoned honey. “I want you to see this.” Eris fluttered her eyelids open to see the world through a rainbow-washed haze—Iridescent Killing Machine was glowing with a gentle swirl of rainbow hues, and zir beams of light continued to play over Eris’s face. It lulled her into an obedient stupor, one no less irresistible than the pounding assault that had ensnared her. Through the sparkling patterns, she could see both the Ragestorm and Iridescent Killing Machine kneeling in front of a frail bald man with a long, salt-and-pepper beard who wore only an indigo cloak. His arms, legs and chest were a map of scars.
“This is the last time,” he said, his voice quavering. He pressed a razor-sharp knife against his left wrist, then again against his right. “Soon, I will have your gift to sustain them instead of my own. I love my children so, but I can only keep so many in the fold this way. My blood is never enough.” He presented his bloodied wrists to the two vigilantes, and they suckled at him eagerly, lovingly.
“But you...you know what chemicals are in my blood, don’t you?” Helplessly, Eris found herself nodding. She’d analyzed it on more than one occasion, studying his mutant blood chemistry and breaking down exactly what elements it concealed that turned it into a perfect mind-control drug. She could recite the formula in her sleep...and in a sense, she was doing exactly that. “And if you know it, if you can conceive of it in your dazed and drowsy mind, then you can create it. You can will my gift to life within yourself, and share it with so many more than I ever could. Yours is the means by which the human race shall know the perfection of my love.”
He sighed, his legs quivering with the effort of standing. The effort of feeding blood to a dozen people at a time left him in an almost-constant state of anemia, but right now Eris couldn’t fight off a drunken hedgehog. She tried to will her muscles into motion, to fight the lazy dance of swirling patterns that numbed her thoughts into obedience, but the effort only exhausted her further. She couldn’t resist the hypnotic strobes. She couldn’t resist Zoltanus.
“Oh, my dear,” he said, his voice shaking with strain but somehow sickeningly alive with glee. “Come with us. I will show you where the way is to be prepared.”
He turned and left. Helplessly, Eris rose to her feet and followed.
Eris had difficulty piecing things together for a while after that. She kept drifting in and out of deep trance, her mind sinking into blank, rainbow-colored fog for long periods as she stood and stared into Iridescent Killing Machine’s lights and passively waited for instructions. Occasionally, she would surface just enough to follow complex commands—she remembered handing her emergency homing beacon off to one of Zoltanus’s followers, explaining how to activate it and watching him leave for an unknown destination. But other things eluded her. When she lay down on the bed, she was nude. She didn’t remember taking her costume off.
She remembered spreading her legs obediently, staring up at Iridescent Killing Machine with a tiny smile of peace and pleasure curling the corners of her lips. But somehow it seemed like no time passed at all before the first man was kneeling between her thighs, his tongue lapping at her slit with an almost sacred devotion. He was simply there, pleasuring her with his mouth, and Zoltanus was watching with an erection that had to be taking up almost all the blood he had left in his veins.
“It’s time, my beautiful girl,” he said, stroking her forehead with his pale fingers. “Go into the place in your mind, the place where you keep your formulas and incantations of chemical sorcery. Picture my gift, secreted from the cells of your very body and dripping out into your arousal. And you are so very aroused, my sweet child. The pleasure deepens your trance, the trance intensifies your pleasure. The better you feel, the more your desire builds and builds, and the wetter you become. And that transcendent musk contains my gift now, doesn’t it?”
Eris sighed, her eyes still captivated by Iridescent Killing Machine’s slender features. “Yes,” she sighed, her hips gently rolling as the tongue between her legs dipped between her labia and licked away her juices. She could feel her body responding, both to the pleasure and to Zoltanus’s commands; ever since the lab accident that gave Eris her powers, her every cell was a living chemical distillery that could manufacture any drug, any medicine she willed them to produce. Her blood, her saliva, her sweat, she could secrete Zoltanus’s mind-controlling essence through any of them. But this was pleasing him.
Eris wanted to please him now.
The man at her feet stepped away after a timeless time, but there was another waiting to replace him. Eris could see them out of the corner of her eye, during those times when she realized her eyes were actually open. All of Zoltanus’s mercenaries, the first recruits in his drugged army of mind-controlled drones. Did they know that they were being indoctrinated into his service? Or did he simply tell them that this was a reward for their hard work? Eris felt the question crumble into fragments of light in her head as she came, her body releasing a thick gush of fluid onto her suitor’s tongue. He would be so obedient, she realized, without ever managing to connect the thought back to its implications.
Zoltanus played with Eris’s nipples as his slaves knelt to worship her pussy, idly stroking his cock as he watched her writhe under the onslaught of pleasure. “This is your reward, my darling girl,” he whispered to her. “This is the gift that obedience to my will brings.” Eris knew he was programming her, using the hypnotic lights and the constant pleasure to associate obedience with arousal and orgasm, but knowing it didn’t stop it from working. She sighed and whimpered with helpless desire, feeling that sense of passivity deepen into a thick, mindless lassitude that kept her pinned to the bed. Her clit throbbed with ecstasy as she felt warm lips pursing around it and suckling.
She remembered her third orgasm. The second was lost in a drifting haze of blank and mindless acceptance, but when she came a third time it was while chanting, “Yes Master”, over and over while her fingers teased her breasts. She didn’t even know what she was agreeing to—the words had simply been placed in her consciousness, and she repeated them like a broken record, the mantra wearing a groove into her mind that became a channel that became an inescapably deep valley. She was compliant and docile and tame, and all she wanted to do was agree.
Not every mouth made her come. Some of the slaves were clumsy and inexperienced, their tongues merely gathering her fluid and leaving with a blank smile of obedience. Even then, though, she was so immersed in sensation that she could only drift from one peak of pleasure to the next, hovering in mindless bliss as her nerves vibrated with afterglow that shaded so gradually into arousal again that she stopped being able to tell the difference. She was lost in pleasure, saturated with it. She couldn’t escape it anymore, and she didn’t want to try.
Somewhere around her fifth climax...or possibly her sixth...she felt a thick, wet splatter of semen splash onto her chin and realized that she had finally driven her Master to orgasm. A few tiny droplets dripped into her mouth, and Eris felt her body automatically compensating for the mind-control drugs in his cum, neutralizing them before they could get into her bloodstream. Another part of her body was continuing to make those same chemicals, pumping them into the mouths of one person after another. The irony was lost on her. She could only smile in reverent bliss at the thought of pleasing her Master so thoroughly.
Another while later, and Zoltanus was gone. She didn’t remember him leaving. One moment he was there, and the next moment there was a different man standing next to her, giving her cool water to keep her hydrated and warm soup to keep up her strength. She ate and drank obediently, still floating in hypnotic bliss. She didn’t know how many people had come to drink her Master’s sacrament, but she felt sure that it was almost everyone in the mansion by now. Her pussy felt incredibly sensitive from all the stimulation, as if merely breathing on it would trigger another climax, and she felt like she might have even slept a little in the depths of her trance.
Eris remembered when the Sequined Ragestorm came to kneel before her, reinforcing zir earlier dose of Zoltanus’s drugs by drinking deep from Eris’s cunt. Zir tongue lashed fiercely at Eris’s clit, somehow conveying a furious passion even in the depths of zir drugged haze, and Eris found herself moaning and thrusting her hips into the air as she felt the pleasure tugged out of her. She came, then came again as the Ragestorm drank greedily of her juices, pushing her body to new limits of pleasure. Finally, ze broke the sensual seal of lips on lips and gave Eris’s pussy a gentle pat. “You don’t taste half-bad for a Girl Scout,” ze said, almost affectionately, before departing.
It took a little bit of positioning to make sure that Iridescent Killing Machine could continue zir light show while licking Eris’s pussy, but the care that Zoltanus’s slaves took told Eris that they didn’t feel at all confident in her brainwashing. If it only stopped, she could perhaps throw off the mantras that Zoltanus programmed her with, break free of the chains in her mind and escape...but the lights sapped away the strength from those thoughts, turning them into idle daydreams that she sank into while Iridescent Killing Machine’s precise and careful tongue found just the right spaces to lick to send Eris spiraling into deeper ecstasy. She whimpered, knowing she would fantasize about this moment for months.
And then, finally, they brought Julia to her. Her friend struggled in the arms of the guards who held her, kicking and screaming when they removed her gag. “Tara!” she shouted, the words echoing in the emptiness of Eris’s blank mind. “Tara, oh God, what have they done to you? Come on, wake up, please wake up! You...you need to, what, what are you doing, no, please!”
Eris watched through a haze of colors as they forced her oldest friend to her knees, pressing Julia’s face to Eris’s pussy and smearing Eris’s musk onto her lips. It was in that instant that Eris knew she had truly lost, that there was no escape and no resistance to be had in the face of Zoltanus’s power. If she could have resisted, then surely it would have been then. If her will wasn’t completely broken, she would have forced her friend’s head away instead of passively watching as Julia’s eyes went blank and her tongue began to willingly, eagerly lap at Eris’s slick labia. But she didn’t. She was completely, helplessly obedient now.
It was embarrassing how hard that made her come.
They took away Julia then, walking the unresisting girl out of the room. They fed her a little more, gave her more water, helped her to use the bathroom. Then they brought her back to the bed. “Rest now, little one,” Zoltanus said, his color already improving. “Soon I will have more suitors for you to meet.”
Eris’s eyes sank shut. When she slept, she dreamed of rainbows.
She woke to the sound of a door slamming very, very loudly, followed by a scraping sound that turned out to be Zoltanus pushing a dresser in front of the door. He grabbed a chair and propped it behind the dresser, then picked up the end table from beside the bed and put it on top of the dresser. “Oh shit,” he muttered, as he worked on his improvised barricade. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit you gotta help me you gotta save me what the fuck did you DO to them?”
Eris rolled over onto her side, still feeling a little too wobbly to sit up. Her whole body felt like she’d been doing isometric exercises for hours; all that clenching up in ecstasy was apparently great for her abs, at least. “What’s going on?” she mumbled, pushing back the foggy part of her brain that wanted to end that sentence with ‘Master’. The light show was gone, she realized. Iridescent Killing Machine was gone. The only person apart from her in the room was Zoltanus, and his face was a mask of sweaty panic. His sunken eyes darted rapidly back and forth like a hunted animal, and he had thankfully pulled on a pair of boxers under his cloak.
“I don’t fucking know!” he exclaimed, desperately grabbing the last few pieces of furniture in the room and piling them in random locations in front of the door. “One second everything was fine, I was taking fucking iron supplements and enjoying a little floor show with one of the girls, and suddenly everyone’s looking at me like I pissed in their coffee! I barely made it up here before the Ragestorm chick...guy...whatever...woke up, and I don’t know where the fucking Bowie-looking dude is!”
Eris restrained herself from giving a lesson on respect for gender identity, and instead focused on getting to her feet. She had a hunch she knew exactly what happened, and she was going to want to be in her costume in a few moments. She probably had an angry mob to fend off. “Okay, where did they...oh. Right.” She staggered over to the dresser and pulled out her neatly-folded Kevlar armor.
“Well?” Zoltanus snapped, watching her get dressed with mounting and incredulous fury. “I’m your Master, bitch! Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Yes,” Eris replied, pulling on her gloves and boots. She had practice in getting her costume on in a big hurry even when sore and uncomfortable, and she was definitely glad of it now. “I am.”
Then she hauled off and decked him as hard as she could. He crumpled to the floor, motionless.
She secured him with zip ties and dragged him behind the bed, then began to disassemble the barricade. She almost had the dresser out of the way when she heard a droning roar get louder and louder and decided that it really wasn’t a good idea to be standing too close to the door when Ragestorm decided ze wanted it open, and flung herself behind the bed just as it exploded in a cloud of sawdust. “Knock knock, wakey wakey, rise and shine!” ze said, spinning to a halt just past the threshold. “Someone’s got some ’splaining to do!”
Eris popped up. “That’d be me, probably. Zoltanus is out cold.” She paused, feeling like she needed to give a little information. “Um, because I hit him.” Another pause. “Really hard, if that helps.”
Ragestorm shrugged. “Yeah, kinda. What the heck happened to us? One second I remember trying a drink at this bar, and then it was just like I was all over tingles for some creep! And then bam, it was over and all I wanted to do was tear him limb from limb!”
Eris raised a finger. “Okay, let’s not do any tearing, or burning or slicing or flensing or anything really permanent and...um...murdery.” She knew she was babbling again, just like she always did, but Iridescent Killing Machine had come into the room and ze was looking at her with those eyes of zirs, and Eris suddenly realized that she had a really vivid memory of certain specific parts of that trance that was making her knees wobble in a way that really wasn’t due to the exertion. Her therapist was going to need to put in a little overtime next week.
Out loud, she just said, “I agree he’s too dangerous to just put in jail, but there are alternatives. I’m going to get in touch with the Utopians, and Professor Psyche can see about deleting anything sensitive or dangerous from his brain so he can just go peddle stuff on Goop or something. If he doesn’t know his blood is a mind-control drug, it’s not something he’s likely to find out by accident.”
Eris decided not to explain why his scheme failed—he might be unconscious, but her last slip of the tongue around him got Julia kidnapped, brainwashed, and forced to have sex with her best friend. (Eris made three rapid mental notes—extra therapy appointment for her this week, therapy appointment for Julia, and also she needed to do her usual ‘Don’t worry, I got your friend Tara to safety’ performance piece.) She wasn’t about to give him any hints on how to improve his sinister plan for a potential repeat performance.
It was kind of hard, though, figuring out the answer to a mystery and keeping it to herself. She wanted to say, ‘Oh, you see, his fatal mistake was in dosing you all directly through my bodily fluids, instead of merely forcing me to secrete them and then distilling it into a pill in the lab. When you all licked me out, you ingested some of my body’s cells from my skin and mucous membranes, and a few of those cells were still alive and capable of manufacturing chemicals. And instinctively, they produced neutralizing counter-agents to the foreign substance in your bloodstream, causing Zoltanus’s drug to wear off much quicker than he expected. A temporary effect, but a timely one. Aren’t I clever for figuring that out?’
Then she imagined saying to the growing crowd of confused people, ‘When you all licked me out...’ without blushing like a schoolgirl, and her desire to speak shriveled up and died pretty much entirely.
She half-expected Ragestorm and Iridescent Killing Machine to argue with her about the virtues of mercy, but the Sequined Ragestorm simply shrugged and said, “Eh. You want him, you got him. Beating up a scrawny guy in his underwear doesn’t get a lot of hits on YouTube, y’know? Come on, Killer, we’ve got some quality violence to dish out somewhere.” Ze darted out the door, a rush of wind announcing zir departure.
Iridescent Killing Machine paused in the doorway. “You have everything handled?” ze said, zir face trying and failing to hide a slight amount of concern. “Feeling yourself again, no ill effects?”
The words ‘Yes Master’ still played on a loop in the back of Eris’s head, but she was pretty confident she could ignore them at this point. “I’m fine,” she said, nodding to emphasize her words. “It’s just mop-up, I do this kind of thing all the time. You, um...you should probably catch up to your partner.” In the distance, there was a loud crashing sound, like a group of fleeing mercenaries was being chewed up by a walking tornado fueled by zir incomparable fury.
“Oh, I will,” Iridescent Killing Machine said, zir lips quirking in a crooked smile. “But I did want to say...ze was right. You were...quite delicious.” And then ze swooped away, leaving Eris once again incredibly glad that nobody could see her blush.