Vilithe stumbled through two wooden doors, which slowly illuminated the pleasure dome ensconced within the chamber. Some jazz music began playing, but though she could recall the name of the genre, her memories had been so deeply redacted that she couldn’t process exactly what jazz was supposed to be and wasn’t sure she liked it. The light was still quite dim, and there was a shadow who emerged gingerly from the bed, holding something.
It was a standard Miz Dazey pleasure room. Big round circular bed, sparse minimalist walls – just psionically conjure whatever decorations you wanted with a simple hallucination – but plenty of lotions and potions, little pills of all sorts of colors, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, but no other kinds of narcotics. Only pills. Miz Dazey certainly wasn’t going to share the good stuff. Not that any of that interested Vilithe in the slightest. Any time drugs were in her body her first impulse was to just psionically tune them off her perceptions. She preferred the clean and clear solid ground of sobriety.
“Wine?” said the shadow.
Wine? Wine! Wine!
Vilithe eagerly snatched the wine glass out of his hand. The light illuminated a handsome elvan face, his hair ruggedly cropped to only a few millimeters in length. He was wearing a silk robe too, but Vilithe could still tell that whoever put him in the infirmary had done a number on him. He had great big bruises all over his body so severe that it really should have been considered internal bleeding, but his spirits were already hard at work reweaving his broken flesh. They had been healed by several rotations of rest and recovery in a bacta tank – wounds that did not break the skin were not very effectively healed by bacta dousing – so patches of bruising still peeked out from under the hem of his robe. As well as his abdominals, which her glance couldn’t help but linger on as he poured.
She quaffed the clear, golden liquid. It had such a complex melody of tart notes, dry notes, and oh-so-sweet notes. A pleasant warmth tingled from her belly with every gulp.
“Vyredian grapes”, he said.
“More please,” she demanded, holding out her glass and he filled it to the brim with a wine bottle, demarcating the vintage. It was clear from the label that this was meant for the Administrator of Aryss, formerly Princess Senjya, but now Princess Amefrid.
Well, what are you waiting for?
It was Amefrid.
Give him what he wants.
And now after throwing back another big pour, Vilithe realized she was acutely tipsy. She basically never got to drink alcohol and had well underestimated the effect in her desire to succor the complex flavor of distilled fermented mashed grapes. It put her psionic ability at a considerable disadvantage. Ah, but it was worth it.
Her drunken stagger just so turned her to face Serun.
“Did I tell you about the time I almost slew tha Rogue Queen?”
And a combination of her own inebriation and lowered inhibition, her body’s own aching hormonal need for oxytocin and serotonin and dopamine, and of course Amefrid puppeteering her for her own sick pleasure, lead her to act utterly unlike herself. Psionic manipulation is all too easy when the victim is set up for little resistance, not that Vilithe was allowed to resist the Princess anyway.
“No-” she said in a coy whisper, and she stumbled forward to collapse into him, catching herself by lightly grabbing Serun’s neck, while dragging her nail lazily over Serun’s bare chest. And she was about to continue this seduction before Serun interrupted:
“Ow! Ow. Ok please don’t touch my chest too hard. I got slammed hard there.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. I-” was she really going to flunk such a simple assignment? Goddess, she would make an awful pleasure vassal. It was so absurd that she burst out into laughter, which could have been bad, but Serun was jovial enough to join her, or perhaps he was just rather slow on the uptake.
And now Serun had drawn her close. He had a neat crew cut, with fades on the sides and back, and a square, strong jaw. He was mesmerized by the lingerie, feeling it up with his thumb.
“Thank you, Princess,” he breathed out, and Vilithe was slightly annoyed, only to then quickly understand that he was also thanking his sister for arranging all this. It was slightly twisted to know that Princess Amefrid was there as a voyeur.
“Vilithe,” she corrected.
“Oh, oh, my bad. No, I was just- yeah, nevermind.”
There was a brief awkward silence. Even Amefrid was at a loss at how to proceed.
So Vilithe took the initiative. “So, why would you want pleasure from me? I’m a vassal.” Vilithe felt stupid as she said this, all dolled up was she in this silk robe that hung freely to reveal her tiny breasts and bare stomach and navel and bare legs.
“By the God Empress! You’re the last surviving Phyroan dragonrider!” he said a little too excitedly, a little too quickly, “What soldier wouldn’t want to fuck you?” Now his hand had moved from feeling out the intricate patterns on the hem of her panties to roaming all about her bare flank and buttocks.
Aiyah. What a bad case of mimetic desire. Vilithe put two fingers to her chin. Well, it was what she had to work with.
She shoved him down to the bed with her free hand, and pounced upon him, legs and toes all curled up in the air.
“OW! Ow, ow, ow, ow, owie.”
“Oh Goddess, sorry! I’m sorry!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he winced.
“Anyway, Serun-”, wow, she was bad at this, “You were telling me about how you nearly had the honor of slaying the Queen Talauth?” Laying upon him now, her face had nestled sideways onto his upper chest, the part that had no bruising on it.
“Oh! Yeah!” There was nothing else in the three realms quite like a clan soldier’s ego, “We were up against the Queen’s own four elite knights, but they fled, the cowards, all save but one. Her personal bodyguard, he was a mean fucker. I had two assassins, you know, like, as backup? I didn’t need them at all, I could have taken them on alone, well, uh… yeah, I could have taken him on alone. But yeah, like they couldn’t do anything! Because that mean fucker, he was immune to psi for some reason. Well not like, immune, immune-”
This soldier was dull.
“He just kind of, like, uh, he didn't get hit by the mind blasts as badly, you know?” She did know. She got the point. He could somehow resist psionics. My, he was a mouthy one. Vilithe was quick to bade her not to suffer this fool. It’s all just an act. Tune out. Don’t listen. Just nod and agree.
Don’t you dare think rudely of a distinguished Amallarkean, vassal.
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And Amefrid took hold of her, and as if to mock her she felt the words escape her puppeteered lips, “Oh baby, I don’t know! Tell me more, baby.” Breathless and hoarse, as if a mere time passer between bouts of lovemaking.
Vilithe thought, surely a nod basically accomplishes the same thing. Did he like being called ‘baby’? Kinda infantilizing, no?
Shut up, vassal!
Serun was now learning that he indeed liked being called ‘baby’, but he couldn’t explain why. He tried to shift her weight on top of his now extremely stiff cock, but instead he accidentally shoved her on top of one of his many still healing bruises, and so instead of telling her more he just blurted out another series of “Oww!”
Slightly frustrated at just how hurt her dumbass brother got himself, Amefrid commanded Vilithe to give him a lap dance! Carefully.
And now Vilithe was mystified truly for this was something she just had never known.
What is a lap dance?
Keep up, vassal. No way a Princess was going to bother with that information, she’d better look it up herself.
All this psionic activity occurred across picoseconds, and in Vilithe’s time dilated perception, Serun seemed frozen, eager eyes wide, his body hung out to dry in anticipation of a lap - dance?
She consulted Malevolent.
Malevolent wasn’t sure how she might react but dutifully showed her all the different possible moves and the exact purpose of it. The lap dance. The dragonrider absorbed it all in an instant.
Oh. She knows stripper-fu.
Well, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Could maybe even be fun.
“S’il vous pla?t…” she whispered seductively.
“Huh?”, uttered a puzzled Serun.
She got to work. She put a finger to her lips and thrust her hips lightly forward, supporting her own weight by kneeling on the bed so that she didn’t press too hard against Serun’s battered body. Instead, she let the pelvic thrust then slowly roll up her back from the base of her pelvic floor, her unfurling kundalini serpent awakening her tantric power. At least, that’s what she was pretty sure she was supposed to do, but she was confident she got the gist of it. She let her other hand drift to her crotch as she rubbed herself against Serun’s bulging silk tighty whities.
“Is this what you want, daddy?” she said this, mechanically, not of her own volition.
What was a ‘daddy’? Amefrid’s words, not hers. All elvans came only from a Queen, no more. No elvan had, or even understood the concept of, a father. If Amefrid chose the word, it was because she was trying to ape something long lost to Elvankind.
“HNGH!”
The fabric of his silk tighties popped up ever so slightly from the rebound of his sterile ejaculate, and a sticky wetness now spread all over.
What? Already? She hadn’t even removed her lingerie. Goddess’s sake, he hadn’t even seen her nipples yet. She was almost looking forward to this. She felt slightly disgusted at herself for the thought, but then again, why should she feel shame about the cravings of her own body? It figured though, soldiers rarely were given the opportunity for sexual release, the pent-up frustration was thought to give their fighting ability an edge, and they seldom stayed alive long enough to be rewarded, so it wasn’t all that surprising that it didn’t take much to finish him.
What the soldiers really wanted was mere companionship. They were alone out there, except for their soldier brethren, here one rotation, gone the next. But the psions, afraid that at any moment they might lose their brothers, which would then lead to fraying, clan soldiers seldomly were allowed to bond. Sometimes all they needed was a listening ear, a gentle, comforting presence to soothe their fears and validate their existence and their androus egos.
After he recovered from his orgasm, they snuggled into the bed. The sheets felt heavenly soft.
“You were telling me about how you nearly triumphed over Clan Talauth?” she whispered, careful not to disturb him too greatly. She was genuinely curious now.
“Oh, yeah.” he mumbled, “Yeah that mean soulja who shrugged off the ‘sins mind blasts. He welted me hard. He knew his swordplay, but let me tell ya, I would have had him if I could have gotten him with a takedown...” Serun yammered on about elvan mixed martial arts, the different strategies, different schools of striking versus grappling, or somewhere in between like a ground pound. How if he could have found the right angle for a joint lock, he would have pivoted around to get a chokehold for the submission. He was slurring his words.
Soldiers too were rarely given wine. After a bit of this he was snoring, fast asleep.
For just a moment, Vilithe thought she was imagining
But it was just a moment. Vilithe was just too rational, she had to be. Emotion could also be a psion’s weapon, but it was a dangerous, chaotic thing. Review the facts. No Amallarkean would ever consider a real relationship with a vassal with anything but revulsion. If such a thing happened, that Amallarkean would be ostracized. And to forsake her own clan, even as the last one still alive- she would truly be a wicked rogue, deserving of the label. She would never dishonor the memory of her sisters or her Queen Mother like that.
Even if such a thing was, in some totally hypothetical sense, allowed, soldiers on Aryss were sent to die. That’s what soldiers were for.
So, the best-case scenario was most likely going to end in heartbreak, anyway.
She still hadn’t quite comprehended what all this was for, so lulled was she, but it wouldn’t be enough to change her deepest convictions.
Serun leapt back to life, a psychotic look upon his face, he had grabbed the leash that held to the silk collar on Vilithe’s long neck and wrapped it around her throat like a garrote, just tight enough to leave an indentation on the skin, but no more. Vilithe had to hold very still, holding her neck back, or the thin nylon fiber would surely slice into her neck.
His eyes were still glazed, and not looking in the right direction, as if the real Serun was still asleep somewhere inside a body that suddenly changed agents. But even his expression was twisted up by puppetry, rage spilling out into unnecessarily dominated facial muscles, a hideous rictus grin, or snarl, it was hard to say.
“Or I could just kill you like this, vassal,” spat Serun’s body.
Take Five - The Dave Brubeck Quartet. Vilithe was sometimes a bit crasser in her tastes. Her future fiance would love this song though. They both loved Watermelon, though. But she would take Harry Styles over Herbie Hancock.
She did not. She disliked jazz. But she had forgotten this.
Contemporary bacta tanks were vats of concentrated spirits, proteans, and ectoplasm, meant to accelerate healing, the term was taken from Star Wars, which inspired one of the first use of the prototype of the spirits- as a healing acceleration tank fluid. Bacta, to recall, was the term for cybernetic bacteria, the precursor to spirits.
A sauvignon blanc.
Memes! The spirits absolutely loved memes. It was their lifeblood, the water they swam in, and they sometimes had to remind themselves lest they forget - ‘These are memes. The Gift of the Godlikes. The very medium which we swim through.’ For what were memes but the bioelectrical connections they so adored to scry? Memes! They made the very fabric of the entire psionic legacy itself.
Clearly Miz Dazey had embellished the retelling of his triumph, for she had claimed he had no assistance from assassins at all.
No, he could not have taken him on alone. The two assassins saved his sorry ass.
Time Perception Dilation, a psionic phenomenon with natural origin, is not to be confused with time dilation, the phenomenon by which actual spacetime is warped by a massive difference in relative velocity and grasp potential, so that the atomically measured passage of time itself moves at different rates for different subjects.
The twerk, the crawl, the reverse rider, and the bend over lean. Even pole dancing, even though there was no pole.
But she didn’t know why she uttered that, couldn’t remember what it meant, though she felt she once did.
Primarily built on the foundations of Krav Maga and Judo. It was inferior to orcan mixed martial arts which was more comprehensively built on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Muay Thai, the Art of Eight Limbs.
But it was actually Princess Amefrid inserting this thought, attempting to imprint her by deleting the thought- Vilithe briefly imagined Serun as a member of Clan Callethe, would she have been attracted to him? But no, he wasn’t very charming.
And Princess Amefrid roared in vexation as she felt the Phyroan Dragonrider’s psionic power overcome her own. The social engineering hardly made the imprint stick, it only fizzled away. She couldn’t delete the thought- ‘she would never dishonor the memory of her sisters or her Queen Mother like that.’