Chapter 4: Arrest & Capture
There were no tenements or slums in the world of Gai, but there were less-than-desirable places to live. The Lambeth Terraces was one such location. Wedged into an odd-shaped lot, the majesty of the Thames shielded by greater buildings, it simply existed. The last two landladies had tried to spruce it up to little effect. Sometime in the future it would likely be razed.
For now, it was home to emigrant women, come-to-town gypsies and backpacking students. And, Chief Officer Drummond wryly reflected, to disgraced diplomats.
She stood on the worn pavement outside, arrest warrant in her hand, Officer Samantha at her back. With narrow lips pursed tighter than normal, she nodded her acceptance of what might come and stepped through the scuffed portal.
Inside, women-children rushed about in their games of slaver, skirts flaring, long legs pumping. At sight of the two policewomen, they abandoned the foyer, watching with lustrous eyes from dark corners, fingering their ropes, wondering if they should dare include these two grown women in their erotic-laced games.
Samantha smiled at the wolf-pack presence around them, her merry eyes flashing under the blonde ringlettes. It was Constance's scowl that kept them at bay, yet to her these wanton waifs were the lesser peril.
The diplomat they'd come for was rumored to have a strange oriental companion. According the reports, she'd scarf-pinioned half of the Unbound Pleasure's landing party during the resolution of the Japanese Crisis. Constance figured there was an even chance of finding herself helplessly snarled in the Japanese's bondage, Samantha similarly packaged at her side. It logically figured that their captors would require their clothing to affect an escape. She considered the sensations she would experience as she struggled, back to back with Samantha, while the cool fingers of her two captors striped them of her uniforms. Left with only her outrage (and bra and panties (and the similarly trussed-up partner nakedly wiggling against her)), she could only watch as the two woman coolly donned their clothing, giving them all the regard one would a piece of furniture. She'd struggle, of course, but it would gain her little advantage against the cunning and encompassing scarves of the oriental warrior.
They'd left word at the precinct house of their whereabouts. But who would find them first, the flying squad or the wild hallway girls? It all came down to that.
Constance attributed her quickening heart rate and respiration to the danger of the situation.
They ascended the stairs to the third floor landing where she rapped smartly at the door. A gray-eyed, brown-bunned woman opened it, looking out at them with an expression of weary acceptance.
"So you've come to arrest me," she said, stepping back to admit them, her long petticoat sweeping around her trim legs. "I suppose Queen Lilla has ordered me to the Tower."
"Not quite," Constance allowed, flashing the warrant. "Olivia Hammersmith, by Royal Decree, your services have been requested. Please turn around."
Samantha stepped up, guiding the mature women's hands high behind her back, cording them up between her shoulder blades, anchoring them with lines over her shoulders and betwixed her generous breasts. Olivia could only gasp as her arms were folded up like a dove's wings, locked neatly away before the sunny blonde's authoritive and insistent ropework. Constance found herself mesmerized by the diplomat's unnatural attitude, her arms twisted behind her back in reversed prayer, her breasts jutting amid their bindings, her face drifting in discomfort. She teetered on boot-toes as if floating in her trussings. The Chief Officer had to blink to recover her senses.
"Officer Samantha, that's hardly regulation binding."
"Well, no, it's not," the junior officer beamed, tucking away the loose cords. "When I heard we were coming to arrest these two, I checked out a book on oriental restraints. This is a mysterious Chinese way of tying someone up. It looked ever so delicious that I had to try it. Besides, I felt it would make the Ambassador feel at home."
"She was stationed in Greater Japan," Constance sighed. "Not China."
"There's a difference?"
Constance turned her attention to their captive. "Okay, where's your little friend? That orchid woman."
As if unable to speak because of the taunt captivity, Olivia simply nodded towards a small door at the far end of the room. With Samantha's hands firmly locked on her captive, they approached it. Constance took a quick breath and flicked open the door.
The room was done up in what she suspected was oriental style, its crude brick walls masked with delicate screens, the rough floors covered with straw matting. In the corner lay a futon, and on the futon, a low shape.
Constance took a step forward, her green eyes widening in surprise.
A flower of a woman, exotically beautiful, lay motionless on the bedding. She was naked, her dusky skin criss-crossed with a web of straining hemp cordage, her flesh bulging painfully around the uncaring bindings. Her breasts were crudely bound and forced out, her tight belly patterned, her legs laced up; even her toes corded taunt. Cruelly, a knotted line had been pulled upwards through her damp crotch, leaving her poised in a state of checked passion. Over the wide silk gag masking her lower face, fatigued eyes hardly fluttered, the pain of her imprisonment overshadowing the world.
"Why..." Constance stuttered. "How...?"
"It's our game," Olivia said with oiled smoothness. "Our game of courage." Smiling sympathetically into Constance's scowl, she furthered, "Cho-Han. Two dice are thrown. It is left to us to guess if they will fall even or odd."
"So the winner ties and uses the looser, I take it?"
Olivia laughed as if to a private joke. "The winner is bound. The loser performs the binding. Having lost, she is unlikely to give the winner any slack, especially in the literal sense."
"But why...?"
"Chief Officer, we are both disgraced women. I failed in my diplomatic mission and Kiyoko failed to keep me safely in Empress Nabuki's custody. To us, it is a relief to suffer the punishment of extended bondage. To walk free is a stain on our honor. To lay in painful solitude a balm to our souls. Both of us desire fitting captivity, but for one of us to experience it, the other must grant it. Until now, we could only play our game of dice, hoping for the freedom of the other's cruel ropes. This situation you now place us in..." She leaned forward, her long fingers fluttering as if in explanation, the ropes creaking around her like a tightening fist. "...might be the best outcome for the both of us."
Constance squinted at her. In her mind, she considered what it would be like to lay naked on this cool cushion, to feel the frustrated Ambassador kneel behind her. Cool hands would shove her pulse-racing wrists together, immediately followed by the snug bite of authoritive rope. The older woman would loop her endless coils around and around, perhaps setting her knee into the small of the back to gain leverage as she wrenched each knot fast. Slowly the ribs would compress, the bindings growing tighter and tighter as each loop trenched trembling flesh. And looking over one's shoulder, one would look into eyes as cold and gray as the sea, eyes that disregarded every respect due a prisoner, planting ropes without care to modesty or comfort. Encased in this living web of torment, one could only experience the dance of cruel fingers working the last knot home, the obscenity as the gag wadding was pushed in, the silence and indecency of the final inspection, the click of receding heels, the whisper of the door, the snick of the lock...
"Ma'am, are you okay?" asked Samantha.
"I'm just dealing with the inscrutable situation. I'll remove some of this girl's ropes..."
"Not too many," advised a hungry-eyed Samantha. "She's, uh, dangerous."
"I'm only making her comfortable but she stays tied. We'll carry them down to the lorry and transport them as ordered." Her green eyes met the older woman's gray ones. "Once you get to Willie Hall, you'll wish you'd gone to the Tower."
= < O > =
Catherine, the suburban shopkeeper, hung limply, her head lulling against her upraised arms, her limp red hair sticking to her sweaty flesh. Her arms were above her, locked. Her feet were above her, locked. She was trundling along, suspended naked from an overhead gantry like a captive missionary being pole-carried by lusty pagan natives.
Her flesh cooled from its recent tumultuous manipulations. She'd been suspended in an underground vault, worked over across ten thousand hammering heartbeats by pitiless machines. She'd been tickled, dildoed, pinched, stroked and molested while she screamed in disarmed frustration. She did not know why she simply couldn't orgasm, regardless that she craved to, that she lusted to, that she needed to. All she knew was when it finally did come, it shook her in her suspension, making her sway wildly in her bonds.
Three times she'd gone through this. She'd awoken in her padded box from lust-drugged sleep, her hands and ankles cuffed, linked by a loose wire. When the machines determined it was time, the wires would be drawn up, the cuffs' clever ratcheting mechanisms drawing her wrists together, then her ankles. With the lid's opening, she would be raised from the box, to be borne along squeaking overhead tracks to the lustful inquisitions.
She'd come to London for shopping. Why had she taken the last tube train home? Why had she stood at the dark end of the platform? What had been that thing that had snatched her up?
At least it was finished with her for now. Soon she would be lowered into her dark box, to the scarlet dreams awaiting her.
With a clatter, her overhead conveyance rattled over a switch track, going down a side tunnel. Catherine looked about in alarm. This was something new. The walls here looked older, no longer Piccadilly Line accessways. Perhaps Roman-era. She couldn't be sure. All she knew was this was a change, and she was not sure if she was ready for it.
The status quo had been intense enough.
She rumbled into a large room, muggy and misty. It was like some sort of perverse garden; the heads of women stuck out of holes in the ground like bulbs, their arms cuffed high over their heads like erect fronds. From some of the holes, steam shot upwards. From those holes came screams, not of pain but husky craving. And from others, limp pinkened women were lifted out and carried away.
There was no suggestion that Catherine had a say in this. Of course she was ungagged, but the tracks automatically set her route and forward she was carried, into the room, through the hanging clouds of steam. With worried eyes, she looked over the encased women, watching them struggle in their inexplicable discomforts, knowing full well that soon (and first-hand) she would directly experience their sensations. A clack, a rattle, and then she slowed. Below her yawned a hole. She craned to look down over her straining shoulder.
The vertical hole had been bored into the native stone. Metal rings had been installed along its circumference, cog-laden rings covered with endless banks of bristle-brushes. Behind these harsh pads, water nozzles stood at the ready, their rubber hoses pulsing under building pressure.
Hardly had she understood this when the line holding her ankles began to spool out, dropping her legs down until she hung vertically. Weakly she struggled, immediately stopping as her full weight settled across her shoulders. She leaned her head back, painfully gasping in the steamy air.
Yet the line to her feet kept reeling out, trailing down into the hole beneath her. At the bottom of the hole, a claw latched onto the trailing line, drawing it into a hole. A moment later, a small winch started, drawing Catherine's body tensely vertical. She shuddered a gasp, her buttocks tensed, her breasts jutting. A rivulet of sweat trickled down her back. Then both spools, high and low, whined in concert, lowering her slowly into the hole with its waiting ranks of eager brushes.
"No. Please," she pleaded, not sure if she was ready to be so foully used.
"Get used to it, dearie," an older woman with soap-crazed hair and wide lips laughed from the next burrow over. "You're about to be bombarded by sensations. It will drive you mad. Wickedly mad." And then she vanished in a bellow of steam and a crazed shriek.
Catherine's descent stopped with an abrupt shudder. The brushes swing into place, nestling against her flesh. Levered extenders raised additional prickly pads against her armpits and forearms. Long metallic fingers settled into her scarlet hair. From beneath her trembling feet, swirl-pads rose up, causing her to flinch in ticklish anticipation.
"Please. Don't..."
There came an obscene squirting noise. A second later, oily shampoo drizzled down over her scalp. The fingers moved closer as if in anticipation.
"I don't want to be...."
The cogs in the steel loops engaged in a chorus of clicks.
"Oh please..."
The world erupted in a flash of spray and spin.
Her body vanished into steam and sensation. The spray patterns of the jets alternated as they roamed her body. Brushes spun and swirled, agitating her skin as their bristles swept across her flesh. And at every tender touch-point, across her feet, behind her knees, her flanks, her armpits, these same brushes located and focused on every tender spot.
Catherine screamed and screamed, buffeting in vertical fixation from the sprays, the brushes, her convulsing muscles. She was hanging in an agony of torment, every nerve flaring, every sensation triggering. But not all tickled. Brushes spun against her hard nipples. And they feathered whispering kisses across her sex. So distracted was she by the horrific agonies that racked her trembling body, she simply overlooked the string of orgasms that popped like tiny firecrackers between her thighs.
Finally, somewhere between bliss and death, the cascade shut down, the bristles withdrew. The winches whined and she was lifted upward, water and tears tracing her steaming flanks and womanly concavities. She sobbed, her mental processes little more that the slow roll of an oil-coated sea.
She didn't even sense that she was maneuvered, as a puppeteer will its puppet, face down, her head hanging between her forward-thrust arms, her legs up and back, her spine curved, her belly hanging. The machines bore her from the chamber, its screams and steams fading behind her as the coolness of the corridor balmed her prickled flesh. She was overwhelmed, hardly able to bring two thoughts together, her mind loitering, her body limp as a rag.
Those same machines who had cleansed her, body and soul, knew this. They knew in their punch-card thoughts that while such a resetting of her passions were critical, it was also counter-productive. The listlessness she felt would deepen her sleep-patterns, throw off her body's erotic cycles. Her Orgasium output would drop. They knew she had to be grounded, returned to a state of higher awareness.
Catherine cracked open her eyes to see the small area she was carried into, little more than a natural bubble formed in the native rock. Bright lights bathed a strange padded bench, its lower half folded down. Wide metallic bands hung open like a spider's legs, waiting to receive her. With care, the MI's lowered her by her lines so she settled face down against this angle, her arms out in front of her, her feet pointed downwards, the angle catching her hips and raising her buttocks. The bands clicked down around her, pushing her into the soft padding. A moment later, a padded gag swung across her lips. She grunted, wiggling fingers seemingly a mile away across a half-dozen bands, unable to move an inch.
A round plate - a mirror - swung down in front of her, granting her the view of her locked down form. She could see her arms, her dazed face over the shiny gag, her cross-locked back, her hefted bum.
Then came a hiss of levers, the ratchet of gearing. Behind her rose an array of paddles in an assortment of widths and flexibilities. Carefully they lined up on their bulbous twin targets, drawing back.
Catherine grunted in gathering alarm, trying to shift clear yet quite unable to.
The crackling of paddles on taunt, helpless flesh and the muffled yips of desperation echoed a long way down the winding corridors...
05.12.09
story continues in Gai Shift - Pit 5: Packages
o0o