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What follows is a canonical story set in the Enhancegirl universe. It is set following the events of Enhancegirl 16.
We've all had those days. We've stepped out of the shower, looked in the mirror and thought: "Yeesh." We've got fat, or old, or bald or all three. Or nothing has changed, and we just look at ourselves. See all the pores and imperfections. See the nosehair, the funny-shaped earlobes, the cracked lips - whatever. Our frailty, and inevitable, up-close human ugliness all come rushing at us and we find ourselves disgusting.
Now how exactly, you might be wondering, did Yumi Tae-Yeong of all people have any business feeling this way? She was one of the most flawlessly attractive people one could ever encounter: years of being put through intensive dance drills, exercise regimes, and skincare routines of sufficient complexity that they were beginning to verge on alchemy had made sure of that. Her pale skin was so pristine, so cool and smooth and soft that it was like silk. It was not that it was 'silky' - many could say that of themselves. It was that it was so like silk that it almost didn't feel like skin. Skin +. Like you, only better. It contrasted delightfully with the dark of her hair: black, with a hint of brown in certain lights, long enough to tickle the bottoms of her shoulder blades, but most often tied up into a faintly elaborate bun. It, too, was impossibly soft, glossy and shimmering. The keratin gods had been kind.
Her face, too, was delightful. She had a delicacy to her, a wholly unthreatening, but dignified allure. A button nose, high but not prominent cheekbones, a rosy mouth and large, open, vulnerable brown eyes. She looked innocent, pure - but not sexless. A spotless, delightful beauty. And her body? Her body would get the other kind of "Yeesh." All those years of dancing and training, since she'd been scouted by Sunray Records at twelve years old, had sculpted her fantastically. She had a waifish, pixieish quality to her, with those elfin features and her slim figure, but she was too much woman to be just cute. A gentle curve from her slender neck to her slim, supple shoulders, eliding downwards to a small, but perky and substantial bust. Her stomach was flat, as taut as a rubber band being pulled from both ends, her figure slipping outwards to the gentle curves of her hips, before flowing downwards into Yumi's lovely, lily-soft legs, slender and shapely and hogging fully half of what height the 5'3" maiden possessed. In her whole life, that body had made love to four people, and each of those four had had the same thought when they'd seen that body naked:
"No-one looks that good." But she did. So no, it was not her appearance that was giving Yumi any consternation. It was how she sounded.
When Yumi had started, even as a teenager she'd been under no illusion that she was an artist: she was a feature of a product. She'd been paired up with a bunch of other girls she hadn't known, given a band name that she honestly couldn't remember anymore, and just handed songs and routines to perform. She and her bandmates hadn't even received a cut of record sales: they were given fixed salaries, just like the sound engineers and graphics artists and managers. The salaries were perfectly generous, but it made it clear that being a K-Pop idol was a job before it was anything else.
Years of practice. Years of training. Years of 18 hour days and touring and lip-synching and watching her bandmates get eating disorders or nervous breakdowns. One of them, a gorgeous girl with a Singaporean mother, who Yumi had always thought was the prettiest of all of them, get plastic surgery to look more Korean because the oppas didn't think she looked hot enough. Years of being but one in a group, years of strict looks and angry managers and angry parents whenever they caught her looking at the other girls for too long. Years of feeling like music - which she'd loved since she was old enough to know what it was - was the least romantic thing in the world. It had choked her. It had stifled her. And though she bore it all patiently, and reminded herself how lucky she was in so many ways, her heart refused to listen. It screamed from within her, and from that scream, three stars were born.
When Sunray Records realised they had a superhuman in their ranks, and not just a superhuman, but a superhuman who appeared to break all the rules ("Born superhumans are only ever supposed to have one power!") they began to understand what fools they had been. Powers or no powers, Yumi was much more talented than her colleagues had been. Alone, the three-pointed star shone far more brightly. She was a much better dancer. A much more charismatic performer. She had a much better voice - a much more powerful voice - than anyone on their books. And now she was a superhuman. A superhero, it turned out, when she made her dramatic debut by shattering the power of the Neup-ui Ju-in with the mighty scream of the White Star when the stinking, slimy villain had tried to... eat the visiting Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Stardom. Celebrity. Victory. Adulation. These things had fallen so easily in Stellar's lap from the moment her powers manifested, and so for a time she'd thought that she had what she wanted. She'd renegotiated with her record label, been given much more creative control over her music, and had begun to expand her fame outside of Korea. The Americans, bless them, had discovered her after her performance at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics and heaped yet more wealth and love upon her. But it still wasn't enough.
Coming out had helped. In retrospect she'd basically always known she was gay, but many Koreans - including her own parents - were pretty viciously intolerant of LGBT people. Even Yumi herself hadn't had the confidence to acknowledge and embrace this side of herself until she'd moved to America. Her record label had been furious. Only the prospect of a protracted legal battle, and the fact that the owner of the label was himself much more egalitarian than he pretended to be, had saved Yumi's contract. She'd lost a lot of fans, too. As many female as male, which had surprised Yumi a little at the time. But the Americans continued to embrace her. The controversy surrounding the homophobic reactions to Stellar's coming out had thrown a little more Western spotlight on her - and the whole incident with Hades, horrible as it was, had drawn attention to her as well. So, when the time to renew her contract with Sunray had come up, Yumi had walked away, and signed with an American label instead.
Never had she had more creative freedom. Never had she been able to make manifest her vision of what she wanted out of an album to a greater extent. She'd collaborated with half a dozen other artists - some Asian, some Western - so that every track on her new album had a 'featuring' credit attached. Her producers were thrilled. Her new manager was thrilled. Everyone she'd asked to collaborate with her was thrilled, and sure of huge dividends. And indeed, now that "First Flash" had released it was doing very, very well. Her new contract was based on sales, and her bank balance was in the process of swelling to quite vast sums. But in amongst all her new success, the freedom of being able to date women openly, and the pleasures of wealth, Yumi realised that she'd never really sat down and listened properly to her new album, not for pleasure. So, one warm, quiet evening, that was exactly what she did.
The thing was, it didn't give her any pleasure. Oh, everything was there: production value, good instrumentation, good audio balancing, talent from every guest on the album, and of course talent from its main star. She could hear that she could sing well. But the album itself? The quality and value of the music?
"It's just... pop," Yumi said aloud. "This isn't any good at all!" The most creative endeavour of her life, where she'd had complete licence to do basically whatever she'd wanted, and she'd made something that was dressed up in eccentricity and charm, but at its core was just a simple pop album. A couple of ballads. Some peppy dance numbers. Some really catchy hooks here and there, for Stellar had long ago learned how to make her music marketable, but it was achingly forgettable. And the problem was, in her heart of hearts, Yumi knew that this was the best she could do. Years of working in the music industry had made her an excellent producer. But she was a mediocre creator. At best.
With a kind of mania, she began rifling through her back catalogue. Seven albums in total she'd produced under the name 'Stellar', and she listened to them all, one after another. It took her six hours, but she couldn't stop. Each one was fun, yes; peppy, yes; creative in some small way even, yes - but never in the slightest degree approaching art. The early stuff wasn't even that fun - her first album was half okay-ish pop and have genuine drivel. In fact, when she listened to a rejected work print of "First Flash", one principally arranged by one of the D.J.s she'd collaborated with, she realised that it was much, much better than the version of which Yumi herself had been the principal architect.
By god, where the hell had she got the idea that she was some kind of latter day Bowie? When had she started imagining that she was a real artist? She wasn't. She was a performer, and a good one, but she wasn't that imaginative, or creative. She knew that fame corrupted people, made them arrogant or conceited or spoiled, but she thought she'd guarded herself against that. But she hadn't. She'd thought she was a good musician because people had told her that she was. Bowie, indeed! She wasn't even Cher.
"I'm such a spoiled brat," Yumi said, aghast at how blind she had been. "Spoiled and - and greedy!" She wanted, as people do, to be special, but she already was special. How dare she ask for more? She was a powerful superhuman. She was famous. She was an excellent dancer, and although she wasn't Maria Callas or anything she had a fine, strong voice. And she was beautiful. Did she really need to be a gifted songwriter as well?
She felt itchy. She felt uncomfortable. She felt... she felt like she'd fallen into a tar pit, and had pulled herself out, but only three-quarters of the way. She thought of herself, thought of the way she'd allowed others to see her for so long. Posing for calendars and promotional images and album covers that were designed to make her look cute. A faux-shy, "whoops, didn't mean to!" kind of sexuality that she found distasteful now. Even Stellar - even her three stars, expressions of three different sides of herself, had manifested themselves with contemptible marketability. Desirable but completely non-threatening. Girlish. She thought of the others, too. The rows and rows of identikit bands, of girls and boys being cut and shaped and massaged and bullied into products the same way she had been. Her powers had given her a lucky escape, while the others were still thrashing in that tar.
Some had been swallowed completely.
But Yumi was not going to be swallowed. The realisation that she would never be a great, or even very good artist was immensely disheartening to her, but she did not stay disheartened for long. She was a positive person, positive to the point that that confidence was something very like a religious faith. All was well, and all would be well, and all manner of things would be well. She would serve out the terms of her contract, tour the new album, fulfil her obligations. And then she would be... well, that she didn't yet know. But she would be something. A performer: yes, her heart needed to sing to an audience, whatever that song might be, but it would be different. She would be different.
And she would shine, as she had always been meant to.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
For six months, no-one really knew what Stellar was doing. Once her Australian tour had ended, the songstress had virtually disappeared from public life. The average schlub might not have even noticed this anomaly in the world of celebrity, ("I mean, really, who watches E! these days?") but for those who did care it seemed very strange. "First Flash" sold well in the States, taking into account that Stellar was a 'foreign' act. It could well have been the beginning of a bit of a Korean new wave if a follow up album built on this initial success. But she'd followed it up with nothing. If it hadn't been for a few sightings of her battling alongside the slayer of Imperion - she was still a superhero, after all - she would have appeared to have vanished from public life completely.
And then something really weird happened. There was to be a recital at the Jordan Hall in Boston in late October, a sort of mix-and-match of some famous soloists who all happened to be in the area at the same time. There would be some Brahms, some Tchaikovsky, some Benjamin Britten. Someone at some point would probably bust out Pachelbel's Canon. You know, nothing too obscure. Keeping the punters happy, yeah? The kind of thing you'd want to bring your kids to if you were hoping they'd turn out to be genuinely musical. That wasn't the weird part. The weird part was that, at the bottom of the programme, playing Chopin’s “Etude in G# minor, Op.25; No.6”, was Yumi Tae-Yeong.
There had been no publicity. There had been no statement from Stellar's agent, or her record label. It was all very mysterious, and people began to suspect that that might be part of the point. Some sort of badly thought out viral marketing tactic, perhaps. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe Yumi had had an early mid-life crisis and suddenly had pretensions of being a real musician, hence dropping her stage name. Like that time Joaquin Phoenix had done a hip hop album; only that, thankfully, had basically been an elaborate joke. Was this? Was Stellar going to come out with a piano, but then magically transform into some new persona and announce a new album? That would be a bit tasteless, given the venue, but at least it would make sense.
So on October 30th, the night of the concert, the crowd was a little unusual. There were some rather bemused Stellar fans feeling out of place with the classical devotees. Some journos for Hello! and Wow! and a few other of the sorts of establishments that thought it necessary to yell their titles at their apparently inattentive readers. There was even a little scuffle at the door when some photographers of the less savoury variety tried to bring in their cameras, only to be told politely that flash photography was forbidden. Some didn't take the hint. There was a little shouting, and some dignified harrumphing from audience members who didn't take kindly to that sort of thing.
All this meant that when everyone sat down, there was a strange atmosphere. People felt uncomfortable, confused, even a bit annoyed with Stellar for bringing all this nonsense with her. There was even more confusion when the conductor appeared to introduce the Boston Philharmonic, who would play the first half of the concert before the visiting soloists took over. He introduced himself as Michael Jackson, which was quite understandable because that was, in fact, his name. But some people in the audience, mainly the ones there only for Stellar, thought that it was some kind of joke, felt that they were supposed to laugh, and out of politeness did. The conductor didn't understand, thought he was being laughed at, and being a sensitive soul his face went bright red, and he excused himself briefly to calm down. This ended up causing a nearly ten minute delay.
The weirdness didn't stop there. During a rousing rendition of Holst's Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity, the lights went out for a few seconds. Naturally, the orchestra stopped, waited for the all clear that the problem would not repeat, and then went on. But they just couldn't find their timing again. The trombones raced ahead of the tubas, the clarinets totally lost time with each other and the string section started in the wrong key. When interrogated, each in turn would later insist that they were keeping time with the conductor exactly, and that it was all the others who had made a mistake. Years-long friendships were ruined.
Even the visiting soloists weren't immune. A world famous cellist, who had top billing on all the publicity, seemed to have restored order with his breathtakingly vivacious interpretation of an old Bach favourite, until his bow snapped. Not the hairs - that would have been awful luck, but not unheard of - but the wood. Good humoured, the cellist had bowed apologetically to the audience, received light applause, and asked for another. That, after two minutes, snapped as well, and the cellist walked off in a kind of daze.
The next two performers did their music without incident, but by now everyone in the audience felt almost nauseated. It should have been funny or cringeworthy, but it wasn't. It was unsettling, and engaging. Like seeing someone get out of a wrecked car without a scratch, but with all their limbs severely dislocated. A few people fainted. But no-one would leave.
One attendee, a retired airline pilot named Cliff, felt the compulsion very keenly. He had never been interested in music, and he'd gone along because he was treating his younger sister, who was turning 60 the next day. The music bored him, the failures bemused him, and more than once he'd considered just getting up and leaving. Even his sister had fallen asleep during Brahms' Clarinet Sonata No. 2. So when the first violin virtuoso finished her piece and then, on bowing, just sort of kept going until she was flat on her face, Cliff thought: "Life's too short" and elected to get the heck out of Dodge.
But as he rose from his seat, he felt a hand grasping his right wrist. Strong fingers closing around it like tiny, slim pythons.
"Oh, gimme a break, Marjorie!" Cliff hissed as quietly as his irritation would let him. "This is like watching elementary school kids doing The Miracle Worker. I'm out of here!"
It was only because of the darkness that Cliff did not realise his mistake more quickly. Marjorie was not holding his right wrist. It would have been quite difficult for her to have been doing so, because she was sitting on his left.
"Sit down, please." Her voice was low, husky, and soft. Her grip was about twice as hard as the strongest grip Cliff could have exerted with all the strength in his body. Her fingernails were sharp, and dug into his wrist hard enough to make him bleed.
She wore silk gloves.
She wore a cloak of red.
Her eyes were full of blood.
Cliff wanted to cry out, couldn't. Ice caught in his throat. He raised his old, milky eyes to look at her, and found that he didn't understand what he was seeing. She was quite a normal looking person. But he couldn't... he couldn't see her. There was nothing frightening or bizarre or hellish about her appearance, but his mind wouldn't let him process it. If you'd asked him to describe her he wouldn't have been able to tell you anything. He only knew she was a woman because of her voice.
"You can't leave yet," she said. She reached over, wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck, and though Cliff thought she was about to cut his throat, instead she only kissed him, hungrily twisting her fingers in his thinning, white hair. She pulled away, leaving him cold, shivering with fright, and convinced that he was going to die. He wanted to throw up but he felt as though his stomach had frozen solid.
"You can't leave," the woman repeated. "Stellar hasn't performed yet."
Yumi had never had stage fright. Not as a little child doing school plays. Not as a teenager doing recitals. Not as a young adult in her first band. And certainly never as Stellar. Nor indeed had she been frightened, exactly, that night either. There were butterflies in her stomach, and she had put a great weight of expectation on her performance, but she was not, at first, afraid. But she happened to venture out to go to the toilet, and she overheard a few stagehands talking about the procession of disasters that had taken place on stage.
"I've never seen anything like it," one of them said. "It's not even funny. It's just weird."
"It's like being on a ship," the other said. "Like there's a Jonah on board, cursing us with bad luck."
Both stagehands suddenly fixed their gazes on Yumi, making the slender Korean almost yelp with fright. She stumbled, and made her way to the bathroom like a little child in the middle of the night, afraid of shadows on the wall and eager to get back into the imagined safety of their bed.
She relieved herself, washed her hands, let the water run over her wrists, with a sort of feeling that if she could cool her pulse she could calm down. Why had the stagehands' words alarmed her so much? Why was her heart now racing? Why was she now panting and almost sweating? She could do it. She knew she could do it. She had done it a dozen dozen times in practice. Why the fear now? Why the paralysis?
"I can do it," she said to herself, looking in the mirror and trying to smile, to encourage herself. She had such a bright, pretty smile, like she was opening up the little sun of positivity inside her whenever her lips parted. But it seemed so dishonest when she looked at it this time that it quickly faded. A pit was opening beneath her, sucking out all her self-belief, all idea that she could be and deserved to be more than she'd been. She couldn't shake the feeling that she would not buck the trend of the night of bad luck: rather, she would bring its apex. She would make a fool of herself. She would have cast off the life of a pop singer, much of which she did really enjoy, for nothing.
"It's not as if this is what I really want to do," she thought. "Not for the rest of my life. I just - I just want to show them that I've grown up!"
She looked into the mirror again, dropped the peppy smile, and stared down her own reflection with brass focus. That was better. Once she cut away the peppiness and the practised, instinctive posing and winking and giggling. There was Yumi Tae-Yeong the person. The adult, who wanted to express herself through her art. Her confidence surged back into her, filling her limbs and her chest with warmth. She stood as tall as her petite frame would allow, and she turned towards the bathroom door. She opened it, and stepped back through, her self-belief restored.
She was standing on the stage.
"What?" Yumi exclaimed, loudly enough for the audience members in the first two rows to hear. She looked back over her shoulder, saw on the curtain through which she supposed she must have walked. She blinked her brown eyes several times, looking back at the stage. It was real. It was set up for her, too, with her Mason & Hamlin grand piano set up under a direct spotlight, Yumi herself still in darkness. She was meant to be there.
"But - but I was in the bathroom... it must be more than a hundred metres away from the stage." And it wasn't just that. As far as she'd known there were three more acts before she was to go on - another twenty-five minutes at least. How had she got here? How was it time? She genuinely wondered if she had fallen asleep and was dreaming, and made a conscious mental effort to awaken so that she didn't miss her real performance. Or - or was the whole concert a dream? Had she, in fact, been dreaming since she'd listened to "First Flash"? Only the murmurs from the audience, murmurs of decreasing patience, cajoled Yumi into realising that she was faced with reality. She began to step forward.
Before she appeared, though, before she entered the spotlight which was hers by right, there was a ripple through the audience. All the impatient murmurs stopped. All the whispers stopped. It almost felt like all the breathing had stopped. Somehow each one of them knew, their attention pushed by an outside force towards the stage, that she was about to arrive. And when she did, when she stepped into the light, no outside force was necessary for the soft gasps that her appearance elicited.
Even those in the audience who did know her had been caught off guard. For those who didn't know her, they were simply amazed to see such a ravishing woman in a little Boston concert hall.
Yumi looked, simply, beautiful. Her hair ran straight and long down her back, feminine and aesthetically pure, reaching past her shoulder-blades, tickling her slender neck and her shoulders, contrasting delectably with her pale, smooth skin. Her dress was not very revealing, but was immensely tantalising. It was made of a smooth, high quality linen, black, with a low, wide v-cut. It didn't dip low enough to show Yumi's cleavage, but it was just low enough to bare most of the skin of her shoulders and elegant decolletage. The dress' pleated, swaying hem fell well below Yumi's knees, but still showed enough of her calves for any onlooker to imagine well how silky and shapely her legs were. A pair of beige high heels made her legs look longer, made her look even more ladylike, and tastefully sensuous.
Despite Yumi's confusion, she moved gracefully towards the padded stool of her piano, tossing her hair back when some strands fell in front of her eyes. She didn't think to bow. She just sat straight down, and beheld the keys in front of her.
"Okay," she whispered to herself. "You can do it, Yumi." She tried to throw off the disorientation, tried to let her skill flow naturally to her. Tried to be meditative. Tried not to think at all. She lifted both her hands, placed her feet on the pedals. Then, with sudden energy, the piece began.
The piece she'd chosen was very short; that was how she'd been able to persuade Jordan Hall to allow her on the programme at all, despite having never done a classical performance before. But despite the piece's shortness it was immensely complex, played in thirds, which was annoying in itself, and trilling between them at high speed, a test in dexterity more than anything else. Yumi's slim fingers danced with frantic speed in an effort to keep pace with Chopin's ostentatiously fiendish piece.
But she was doing it. She was doing it. This popstar, this novelty act who had been added to the billing just for the sake of attracting a bit of attention was tackling one of the most technically demanding piano pieces ever written and she was handling it well. And it wasn't just that she was hitting all the notes in the right order: she was playing it interestingly. Was it the greatest version of the Etude of Double Thirds that had ever been heard? No, it was not. But it was, at worst, professional. And Yumi added something to it by her very presence. She poured passion into it; even the greatest philistine in the audience could tell that. Her bosom thrust hard in and out in support of the effort of her fingers; her neck and her cheeks flushed a vigorous red; her bare shoulders heaved, and she was heard to gasp with effort. It was thrilling.
But there was something wrong. Yumi felt a twinge in her right hand, almost lost her pace. But the twinge persisted, and Yumi realised that she was about to become yet another of the evening's disasters. Her hand was about to cramp, and cramp badly. She could feel the painful tension spreading into her palm, could feel her fingers beginning to pull inward as every fibre in her hand contracted against her will.
"No," she whispered, softly pleading. "Not now. Not yet!" But it was inevitable. Not only that, but the pain on its own was enough of a distraction that Yumi felt the automation that any practiced pianist had to some extent was slipping from her. She hit a wrong note, and another. It all seemed as if it was to end in humiliation.
And then, Yumi was quite well. Her hand felt fine. Her body felt cool, relaxed. Her shoulders eased, her breathing slowed. Not only that, but she had passed the most difficult section of Chopin's etude. She'd glided over it, over the whole thing. Time had jumped again: she wasn't even playing Chopin's piece anymore, she was - she was improvising. She was improvising on Chopin's general theme, playing with it, going faster, and faster, and faster. Her hands were moving of their own accord, or at least that's how it felt.
"But... but I don't know how to do this," Yumi thought. "I'm not this good - I've never been close to being this good!"
Apparently she was mistaken, because she went on, with a riff so complex and so technically demanding that it made Chopin's etude sound like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by comparison. This was some of the greatest piano playing that anyone in the audience had ever heard - perhaps the best. From a popstar! It was remarkable. It was incredible. It was completely undeserved. Yumi was well practiced, and technically proficient, but she was no genius. This was beyond her.
Yumi knew that. She felt a sob in her throat, because she knew she would receive adulation for this, adulation that she had not earned. It was too much. She tried to stop, but she - she couldn't. As her will rose up against her hands she began playing only faster. Beads of sweat ran down her neck and her calves, that fetching flush warmed her chest as she strained against herself, and she heard murmurs of distinct approval from the audience. Even in her distress she was lovely.
With a cry, however, she broke the spell that had been cast over her, and pulled away her hands, almost leaping away from the piano, her momentum carrying her forward to the very front of the stage. She stared out into the darkness of the audience, eyes wide and frightened, the young beauty like a slim hare cornered by wolves. But the wolves seemed just as startled, staring back at her, a sea of dark, astonished shapes held utterly in the sway of Yumi's effortless charisma. She opened her mouth to apologise, but no words came out. This was just as well, because a few seconds later they burst into rapturous applause.
"No," Yumi said, "please don't!" But her words were completely drowned out by the applause. She tried to shout louder, but her voice would not go above a loud whisper. It was like a dream. And then, as in a dream, her senses began to dull. She could no longer hear the applause, just a soft ringing in her ears. No, not a ringing - more like the sound of string instruments tuning. And though she could still vaguely see the dark shapes of the audience members, they began to fade from her focus. There was only one thing she could see clearly. One person right in the centre of the auditorium. One person that she could see as though she were spotlit, but of whom Yumi could tell nothing.
She wore silk gloves.
She wore a cloak of red.
Her eyes were full of blood.
She brought her hand to her black lips, and blew a kiss. A kiss which Yumi felt on her smooth, warm neck. A kiss which Yumi felt on her soft, bare shoulders. A kiss which Yumi felt pulsing - pulsing between her silky, slender thighs.
"Oh!" Yumi gasped. "OH!" A jolt of electricity shot up her body. Her cheeks flashed crimson, a blush which washed down her neck, her chest, a warmth that seized her, that held her. "I... I feel... so..." she thought, trying to put into words the strange sensation which had wrapped itself around her. It turned out, however, to be quite easy to articulate. "So... weak..."
She was losing her balance. The world was beginning to swim, to fade. She stumbled forward, right to the edge of the stage, her breathing deep and slow, the sound of it filling her ears. She felt eyes fixing on her, not the audience's but hers - the eyes of the cloaked one. In their sight, Yumi's strength could not hold. She was wilting like a lily. Her milky legs trembled, her head swaying from side to side as her consciousness began to desert her.
"Help," she murmured quietly, her voice still drowned by applause. "Help me, I... something's wrong with me, I can't... I can't..."
Yumi found herself quite overwhelmed. Hot and panting, Yumi found her sparkling brown eyes were beginning to flutter, batting coquettishly as she grew weaker and weaker. She was poised right at the very edge of the stage, now, but could not tell, could not see it. She was like a pretty, white feather held aloft in a breeze - a breeze which now died.
"Oooohhhhhhhhnnnn..." Yumi moaned, her hand flying to her forehead as she swooned. "This isn't... isn't right... not what I wanted... not what I... I..." She couldn't finish the thought. She tumbled off the side of the stage, her beautiful, slender body completely limp as she fell.
But no hard, wooden floor came to meet her. There were no bruises or cuts when she landed. She dropped with such perfect, gentle precision that it looked as though it had been staged, into a pair of waiting arms. With a soft, fluttering sound she was rescued from injury, a gloved hand curling around her naked shoulders, tightening around her linen-covered thighs. Yumi's head fell back, her long, dark hair falling behind her so far that it almost touched the floor. Her pale calves bounced from the impact of her landing, dangling in the air. Even in this she looked flawless, a perfect personification of fetching, feminine vulnerability.
She was not quite unconscious. As she was pulled tighter against her saviour's body, her head flopping against their chest as Yumi was held close, she managed to look up with her fading vision. The helpless, delicate damsel in distress looked up at her dashing rescuer who had caught her in powerful arms. Yumi was as fragile and as beautiful as a butterfly, and she blushed as she felt herself held fast and safe. She opened her mouth, but she was hushed.
"Don't try to talk," came a soft, cold whisper. "You're too weak now. But don't feel ashamed: you were wonderful, Stellar. You were wonderful."
"Unhh..." Yumi whimpered, held captive by a pair of bloody eyes.
"Rest. You've done so well. They'll never forget this night. Never forget you." The voice was like a frigid wind, filling Yumi's mind completely, shutting down all thought. "Rest now," Yumi's rescuer said. "Rest now... rest now..."
Yumi could not but obey. With a shiver, and a sigh, she faded, and fainted.
Nobody at the auditorium had seen her fall. Nobody had realised that anything was amiss. Nobody, that is, apart from Cliff, and even he did not connect the strange thing he noticed with Yumi Tae-Yeong. It was simply that, when the lights came up, Yumi's sudden disappearance unremarked upon by all, the woman in the red cloak was gone as well.
A Stellar Hallowe'en
-
Damselbinder
"It's alright. You're safe now. You're alright, Stellar."
These were the first words that Yumi heard as she awoke, and they did give her comfort. She felt warm. She felt very weak, but she felt safe, too. She felt a comfortable leather couch beneath her, like a therapist's, supporting her head and her neck. One of her arms lay by her side, the other with its hand resting on Yumi's stomach. Neither were limp, exactly, but Yumi felt very feeble, and though she could have moved them if she'd really tried, she lacked the will to make that attempt. She was in a bright, airy room. The light was soft, natural. It was probably morning, but it could have been late afternoon's light also. A high ceiling. Off-white walls. Bookshelves. Pine, wood floors. It was a very nice place, wherever it was.
"Where am I?" Yumi asked.
"It doesn't matter where you are," her rescuer said. "All that matters is that you're alright."
"Oh..." Yumi said, still feeling strangely pliant. "The - the concert..."
"The concert was a complete success," the cloaked one said. "You were brilliant. Truly brilliant. I've never heard such piano playing in my life."
Yumi blushed at the compliment, but there was a little shame in the rosiness of her cheeks as well. "But it wasn't me," she said. "I know I can't play that well. The best... the best pianist in the world couldn't have done that. All that applause... I didn't earn it... I - I wanted them to see what I am, not -"
"Shhhhhhhhh," the cloaked one breathed. "You did it, didn't you? What's to complain about?"
"Unnnhhhhhhhhh..." Yumi felt silk-covered fingers running through her long, dark hair, and she sighed softly.
"There now," the cloaked one cooed, "don't you worry..." She teased the strands of Yumi's hair between her fingers, plunging them into the depths of her lovely guest's cool, black tresses. She wrapped both sets of fingers around Yumi's head, and gently pressed them into her scalp, before pulling her fingers outward, running the length of the maiden's long hair.
Yumi found it immensely relaxing. The repetitive motion, the sound of the silk gloves against her hair, the way it gently tickled as her rescuer stroked her. She felt like a cat, purring happily as its master ran their hand over her fur, sleepy and contented. Her eyelids fluttered prettily. She really did feel as if she might fall asleep again - but she resisted.
"I need to get up," she said, quietly. Her voice sounded... scratchy, but it wasn't like there was anything wrong with her throat. It was her ears: like she was hearing through a gramophone. "I need to... explain, need to... make them understand it wasn't me. I -"
"No." The cloaked one's voice pushed over the volume of a whisper for the first time. Her hands glided down Yumi's cheeks, and neck, until they were resting on Yumi's naked shoulders. "You deserve every drop of adulation you've received. Just enjoy it. Just enjoy knowing how much they love you, Stellar." She pressed her thumbs into Yumi's trapezoid muscles, and wrapped her fingers around Yumi's shoulders. She squeezed, and Yumi gave a soft little squeak of pleasure.
"Ooh... ooh..." Yumi mewed, feeling the cloaked one's thumbs working the outlines of her shoulder blades, finding every point of tension and rubbing it out, while her silk-covered fingers traced the edges of Yumi's collarbones. It felt like she was floating on the surface of a warm lake. "No," she thought. "More like... a sea of poppies..." There was something more than just pleasure in what was happening to her, and the fair maiden for the first time thought to ask: "Who are you?"
The cloaked one didn't answer. She took her fingers off Yumi's shoulders, and carefully took hold of both sides of her lower jaw, tilting Yumi's head a little further back.
Yumi opened her eyes, but all they told her was that her rescuer was there, like getting a text readout from her senses instead of actually seeing through them. Her head was tilted further back. Her hair was trailing against the floor.
"Close your eyes," the cloaked one commanded.
Yumi obeyed. She felt her head tipped back further. Felt the warmth of another body near her. Felt the cool of the woman's breath tickling her wet, pink lips.
"Did you hear how they cheered, Stellar? Even the wizened old fools who scoffed at your entrance? Even the fatuous, squealing children who called themselves your fans? They were enraptured. They finally saw you - and that was what you wanted, wasn't it? That's why you dispensed with the personae. That's why you tried not to draw too much publicity. You wanted them to see you. And they did. They did, and they loved you... Yumi." She brought her face closer to Yumi's, which was leaned back so far that it was upside-down relative to the cloaked one's. She brushed her nose against the starlet's own. "They loved you, as I love you."
"As you - mh!" Yumi felt the cloaked one push their lips together, and her eyes flashed wide, and then faded back closed again. "Mhhhh... mhhh... mffhh..." Yumi whimpered, as the cloaked one's tongue pushed into her mouth, stroking Yumi's own tongue, warming her and cooling her at the same time. Yumi's legs tensed with pleasure, her toes pointing as the cloaked one kissed her. It made the slender maiden feel fragile, and beautiful. Her chest heaved, but the rest of her body stayed absolutely still, awaiting whatever her rescuer might do with it.
The cloaked one broke the kiss, tipped Yumi's head back up, and circled round her.
For the first time, Yumi got a good look at her. Her face, uncovered, was still strangely obscured to Yumi's vision, but Yumi could now see much of the rest. She had thrown back her cloak over her shoulders like a cape, revealing an outfit something like a Georgian highwayman: with a white cravat, leather trousers, tall riding boots, and a silk, red waistcoat. The cloak gave an impression of height, but she wasn't actually very tall: only about two or three inches taller than the petite Yumi. But all the same, with her clothing, her tightly pulled back, blonde hair, and her obviously impressive muscles, she cut a dashing, almost masculine figure. Compared with her rakish saviour, Yumi felt especially feminine. She was the vulnerable, helpless, beautiful damsel in distress. The other was powerful, handsome, commanding. Yumi looked up at the cloaked one with wide, innocent eyes, all defence melted away. The cloaked one had saved her. Taken her.
The cloaked one sat down next to Yumi, slipped her hand to Yumi's lower back, lifted her up so they were face-to-face.
"You're so pure," the cloaked one said, and stroked Yumi's cheek.
Yumi meant to speak, but the cloaked one silenced her with her lips, and Yumi found herself moaning softly into her saviour's mouth. A silk-gloved hand fell onto Yumi's supple calves, and began stroking them, running up and down the skin of her legs. Yumi did not resist. Even when that hand began to rise a little higher, pushing the hem of Yumi's elegant dress past her pretty knees, even when Yumi felt the silk of her saviour's hand grasping her warm, milky thighs, she was completely meek. Completely yielding.
"I knew," the cloaked one said, "I knew that you would give yourself to me. I knew that it was worth it." She pulled back slightly, still keeping her face close to Yumi's, still with her hand roving over Yumi's smooth legs. She took her sweet maiden by the chin, looked her in the eye. "Say it. Say what you know is the truth of your heart."
The words almost came to Yumi's lips. She very nearly said: "I love you. I need you. Take me and have your way with me. I belong to you." But - but there was something... something in the way the cloaked one had spoken just then. Something of the charisma had faltered. A note of... of desperation had entered her voice, almost like another voice entirely. Yumi looked again at her captor's face - yes, not her saviour, her captor! - and for a moment she could see her face, and it was... it was familiar, she knew it was. She pushed the cloaked one's hand off her legs, and twisted out of her grip completely, standing on her own two feet.
"Who are you?" Yumi asked again, this time with strength. "How did you cause the events at the concert? Why have you brought me here? Answer me!"
The cloaked one stood. She regarded Yumi with her blood-filled eyes. "This isn't right," she said. "I won't hurt you, Yumi. I want only to give you what you want, to make you more. And I wish to love you."
Her eyes flashed, and Yumi felt the warm cloud again. She swayed, her eyes fluttering. She felt dulled. "What... what is this?"
"It doesn't matter," the cloaked one said. "Let it wash through you. Let it wash through you, Yumi and entwine us together absolutely."
The cloaked one had not even asked her to, but Yumi felt a sudden instinct to kneel. She felt weak again. Swooning and feminine and powerless. The cloaked one approached her, and Yumi felt herself drawn towards her. She couldn't help herself.
Where had it gone? Her strength - her fortitude? Where was the resolve she had created? It was happening again. This woman's notion of what Yumi was - it wasn't what Yumi wanted. It wasn't what Yumi was. She was being moulded. Being shaped to fit the wishes of others just like her producers had done, just like her parents had done, and just like she had done to herself. She had to bring it back. She had to revive her strength. No - not revive. It was not dead. It just awaited. What Yumi had to do - what Stellar had to do - was summon it.
"A Black Star!"
In a flash of light Yumi was transformed. Her slender body was filled with raw, physical power, enough to lift an SUV over her head with one arm. Her appearance had changed from the Black Star her devotees had once known. For as much as she'd trained for that night's concert and for throwing off the shackles of the popstar, she'd trained her powers too. She'd trained to master her passions and the might that came with them, under the tutelage of the strongest heroine she knew, and with that mastery had come a change in the way that strength showed itself.
A tight, black corset wrapped itself around her torso. A high choker around her neck. Bare biceps, bare shoulders, but forearms wrapped in strong leather, with deadly, sharp spikes at her knuckles. Leather stockings, leaving only a glimpse of bare thigh between themselves and Yumi's short, flanged skirt. Spikes on her knees. Spikes on her elbows. Even her hair was shorter, and blacker. Aggression, and speed and ferocity burned into Yumi's mind. It was the opposite, the very opposite of what the cloaked one was forcing on her, and she broke through the spell with an angry, shrieking shout.
She swung her fist, and the cloaked one - astonished - barely stepped out of the way. But Stellar had had an instructor in the martial arts far more agile than the cloaked one. Stellar stepped forward, splintering the pinewood floor beneath her with her vicious stomp, and then drove her forehead directly into her enemy's. The blow was hard enough to break the skull of a rhinoceros. The cloaked one, astonishingly, did not go flying, but she was not uninjured. Her legs trembled, and she seemed to crumble, before dropping to her knees.
"YES!" Stellar shouted, shaking her hands, feeling her selfhood restored, stronger than ever. Her power surged through her, filling her limbs with lightness and crushing, devastating force. She lifted the cloaked one by the scruff of her neck, and clobbered her directly across the jaw, sending her flying, crashing into - almost through - the nearest wall. "It's always the same, isn't it?" Stellar said. "Evil is always the same thing. It's greed. It's 'I want'!" She strode towards her fallen adversary, her eyes burning. They had changed colour: the irises were pure black, her pupils a glowing white. "You dress it up with charisma and charm, but you're just as bad as the worst, most..." She hesitated, unable to find the English word for 'venal'. "The most low villain," she settled on. "This is over now," she said. Seeing that the cloaked one was still conscious, she drew back her arm, preparing to knock her unconscious once and for all. She struck.
But her blow hit empty air. No, not empty, exactly. Stellar's fist did not meet flesh or bone. It met mist.
"What?!" Stellar cried, as the cloaked one's body faded into dark grey vapour swirling around her, formless and intangible. Stellar swung two, three times, but she could not touch it. She could not harm it. The vapour danced around her mockingly, until, suddenly, it took distinct shape once again, behind Stellar.
Stellar swirled around, fist raised, but something stopped her. She saw the cloaked one's face again - but it was cloaked no longer. Stellar saw it. Stellar knew it. Stellar did not understand it.
"You?" she breathed. "But - but you can't -"
"I can," the cloaked one said, and she struck first. She lunged forward, and planted her lips on Stellar's once more - but this time it was not just a kiss.
"MMMMMMMPHHHHH!!!" Stellar cried out, as she and the cloaked one both began to glow red. She raised her hands to attack, but the cloaked one grabbed them both, forced her against a wall. "She's overpowering me... she's stronger than me!" Both hands held above her head, Stellar moaned as the kiss continued. It was forceful this time, her mouth not willingly yielding, but the kiss was taken from her nonetheless. And not just the kiss - but Stellar's strength.
She felt it in the pit of her stomach. She felt it in the shaking of her arms. She felt it in the quivering of her legs. She was being drained. She moaned, and writhed, but she could not escape the iron grip of the cloaked one, who pinned Stellar's tight body between herself and the wall. And her power was the price, as Stellar felt herself being plundered.
"Nnmmmhhh... nhhhhhmmmhhhh!!" Stellar moaned, as her star began to fade, the energy sucked right out of her. It was not that she was being robbed of her powers, not like with Adrienne, but her vigour was being drained away, and in that situation it more or less amounted to the same thing. Already it now took only one of the cloaked one's arms to pin both of Yumi's. Already Yumi's legs were no longer kicking, but rubbing sensuously against her captor's, too weak to do anything else.
And as Yumi grew weaker, the cloaked one grew stronger. She kissed Yumi more and more forcefully, pushing herself against the mewing damsel harder and harder, almost growling with lust as she kissed her and drained her, charisma replaced with bestial rapaciousness.
"Mh..." Yumi squeaked, as her soft shoulders sagged, her arms grew too weak to move. The cloaked one seemed to sense the change, because she released Yumi's wrists, and her arms fell by her sides, limp. The cloaked one seized Yumi's shoulders, squeezing and pressing them inwards, feeling Yumi's pert, soft breasts writhing against the confines of her corset. She pulled away from Yumi's lips, and began roughly kissing her neck and her shoulders instead, apparently just as able to draw strength from her like this.
"No..." Yumi whispered, unable to do much else. If only. If only she hadn't hesitated! If only that face hadn't shocked her so much, that last blow would have ended it with her as the victor. She still didn't know how it was possible. She still didn't understand why this was happening, kept expecting it to be a dream. But it was real, and she was vanquished. She was vanquished, and so she faded.
The corset vanished. The spikes vanished. The glow in her eyes vanished, and so did the last dregs of Yumi's superhuman strength. She did not have the energy to remain transformed, and so her power had deserted her. She was again in the elegant dress, the feminine heels. Her hair again was long, and straight. She was again the meek, blushing, sighing damsel, her attempt at resistance quashed. She was right back to what she had been before.
But the other was different. When she forced Yumi to look into her eyes again, the cloaked one's eyes were a deeper, darker red. There was a viciousness in her now. It was more familiar.
"Don't!" she hissed. "Don't fucking test me like that! Don't make me go back to...!" She caught herself, turned away for a moment. She was glowing red, and hot. She breathed hard. She settled herself. She cooled. She looked up at Yumi again, and the cloak had refallen. Control was restored. So what she did next was not done out of anger, or intemperance. When she tore Yumi's dress from her body, she did it because she wished to.
"Ah!" Yumi gasped, looking down in shame at her beautiful body. She was almost naked, her flimsy bra torn away along with the dress. Her legs, her hips, her stomach, her arms, her shoulders - her small, soft breasts, with their delicate, light pink buds; all were exposed. Only her panties and her heels were left to her by her captor. She was shocked into complete stillness, so that as her captor began tearing her dress into rough strips, Yumi did not even try to move away. Not that she could have: even leaning her back against the wall, on her naked, trembling legs Yumi could barely stand.
She was turned. Her arms were pulled behind her back. She heard the soft 'swish' sound as the dark fabric of her tattered dress was twisted around her wrists, first pushing her wrists together by simply being wrapped around them; then being slipped between them, securing the knot and cinching them inescapably together.
"Don't do this," Yumi mumbled, barely able to speak. "Don't... tie me up..." She felt the cloaked one's hands on her moist legs, roughly caressing her fine, almost glowing skin. An equally simple bind around Yumi's dainty ankles, as had been tied around her wrists, but the sheer strength of her captor made the knot a fiendish one: Yumi might have tried for hours and never undone it.
Yumi's bondage, the sight her rendered helpless with two simple strips of fabric, only made her look lovelier. Only made her look more desirable. The sumptuous shock of her nakedness contrasted with the perfection of her makeup and her hair only made her look more thrillingly beautiful. And when her soft lips were parted by black cloth, and her beautiful voice stifled with a thick, tight cleave-gag, well that only added to her charm. She knew it, too. She knew even in captivity she looked perfect. Even beaten in battle, she had been made to... perform.
She was turned to face her captor. Her eyes, brown, wet and sparkling, seemed to beg her captor to stop. A forlornness came with her dismaying physical weakness, and her eyes pleaded with her captor. But it was not for mercy, not exactly. It was... it was for her captor's sake.
"You're better than this," Yumi's eyes seemed to say.
"Yes," answered the defiant stare of the cloaked one. "I am better. So do not presume to know my limitations."
The cloaked one seized her bound, stripped captive by the hips. With a single arm she lifted her, easily tossing the defeated heroine over her shoulder. She clutched her warm thighs. She felt the pleasing bounce as the limp, drained beauty dropped over her, her legs swinging slightly from side to side as she was put in her place.
"I thought you understood, Yumi," the cloaked one said. "It is a shame that I'll have to use more forceful methods, but needs must. If you thought a little thing like your will was going to get in the way of my doing what is best for you, then you were mistaken. You will accept me," she said. "You must accept me," her heart cried.
And Yumi heard her words, and was filled with fear over what those methods might be, knowing how close she'd come to giving in completely. Ensorcelled, and then defeated, shame filled her heart - but not just shame. She felt she knew, at least mostly, why her captor was doing what she was doing. She just didn't understand the powers. Didn't understand the change in her speech. Didn't understand what seemed like a massive increase in her captor's intellect.
She couldn't fathom how Arachna had been so radically transformed.
These were the first words that Yumi heard as she awoke, and they did give her comfort. She felt warm. She felt very weak, but she felt safe, too. She felt a comfortable leather couch beneath her, like a therapist's, supporting her head and her neck. One of her arms lay by her side, the other with its hand resting on Yumi's stomach. Neither were limp, exactly, but Yumi felt very feeble, and though she could have moved them if she'd really tried, she lacked the will to make that attempt. She was in a bright, airy room. The light was soft, natural. It was probably morning, but it could have been late afternoon's light also. A high ceiling. Off-white walls. Bookshelves. Pine, wood floors. It was a very nice place, wherever it was.
"Where am I?" Yumi asked.
"It doesn't matter where you are," her rescuer said. "All that matters is that you're alright."
"Oh..." Yumi said, still feeling strangely pliant. "The - the concert..."
"The concert was a complete success," the cloaked one said. "You were brilliant. Truly brilliant. I've never heard such piano playing in my life."
Yumi blushed at the compliment, but there was a little shame in the rosiness of her cheeks as well. "But it wasn't me," she said. "I know I can't play that well. The best... the best pianist in the world couldn't have done that. All that applause... I didn't earn it... I - I wanted them to see what I am, not -"
"Shhhhhhhhh," the cloaked one breathed. "You did it, didn't you? What's to complain about?"
"Unnnhhhhhhhhh..." Yumi felt silk-covered fingers running through her long, dark hair, and she sighed softly.
"There now," the cloaked one cooed, "don't you worry..." She teased the strands of Yumi's hair between her fingers, plunging them into the depths of her lovely guest's cool, black tresses. She wrapped both sets of fingers around Yumi's head, and gently pressed them into her scalp, before pulling her fingers outward, running the length of the maiden's long hair.
Yumi found it immensely relaxing. The repetitive motion, the sound of the silk gloves against her hair, the way it gently tickled as her rescuer stroked her. She felt like a cat, purring happily as its master ran their hand over her fur, sleepy and contented. Her eyelids fluttered prettily. She really did feel as if she might fall asleep again - but she resisted.
"I need to get up," she said, quietly. Her voice sounded... scratchy, but it wasn't like there was anything wrong with her throat. It was her ears: like she was hearing through a gramophone. "I need to... explain, need to... make them understand it wasn't me. I -"
"No." The cloaked one's voice pushed over the volume of a whisper for the first time. Her hands glided down Yumi's cheeks, and neck, until they were resting on Yumi's naked shoulders. "You deserve every drop of adulation you've received. Just enjoy it. Just enjoy knowing how much they love you, Stellar." She pressed her thumbs into Yumi's trapezoid muscles, and wrapped her fingers around Yumi's shoulders. She squeezed, and Yumi gave a soft little squeak of pleasure.
"Ooh... ooh..." Yumi mewed, feeling the cloaked one's thumbs working the outlines of her shoulder blades, finding every point of tension and rubbing it out, while her silk-covered fingers traced the edges of Yumi's collarbones. It felt like she was floating on the surface of a warm lake. "No," she thought. "More like... a sea of poppies..." There was something more than just pleasure in what was happening to her, and the fair maiden for the first time thought to ask: "Who are you?"
The cloaked one didn't answer. She took her fingers off Yumi's shoulders, and carefully took hold of both sides of her lower jaw, tilting Yumi's head a little further back.
Yumi opened her eyes, but all they told her was that her rescuer was there, like getting a text readout from her senses instead of actually seeing through them. Her head was tilted further back. Her hair was trailing against the floor.
"Close your eyes," the cloaked one commanded.
Yumi obeyed. She felt her head tipped back further. Felt the warmth of another body near her. Felt the cool of the woman's breath tickling her wet, pink lips.
"Did you hear how they cheered, Stellar? Even the wizened old fools who scoffed at your entrance? Even the fatuous, squealing children who called themselves your fans? They were enraptured. They finally saw you - and that was what you wanted, wasn't it? That's why you dispensed with the personae. That's why you tried not to draw too much publicity. You wanted them to see you. And they did. They did, and they loved you... Yumi." She brought her face closer to Yumi's, which was leaned back so far that it was upside-down relative to the cloaked one's. She brushed her nose against the starlet's own. "They loved you, as I love you."
"As you - mh!" Yumi felt the cloaked one push their lips together, and her eyes flashed wide, and then faded back closed again. "Mhhhh... mhhh... mffhh..." Yumi whimpered, as the cloaked one's tongue pushed into her mouth, stroking Yumi's own tongue, warming her and cooling her at the same time. Yumi's legs tensed with pleasure, her toes pointing as the cloaked one kissed her. It made the slender maiden feel fragile, and beautiful. Her chest heaved, but the rest of her body stayed absolutely still, awaiting whatever her rescuer might do with it.
The cloaked one broke the kiss, tipped Yumi's head back up, and circled round her.
For the first time, Yumi got a good look at her. Her face, uncovered, was still strangely obscured to Yumi's vision, but Yumi could now see much of the rest. She had thrown back her cloak over her shoulders like a cape, revealing an outfit something like a Georgian highwayman: with a white cravat, leather trousers, tall riding boots, and a silk, red waistcoat. The cloak gave an impression of height, but she wasn't actually very tall: only about two or three inches taller than the petite Yumi. But all the same, with her clothing, her tightly pulled back, blonde hair, and her obviously impressive muscles, she cut a dashing, almost masculine figure. Compared with her rakish saviour, Yumi felt especially feminine. She was the vulnerable, helpless, beautiful damsel in distress. The other was powerful, handsome, commanding. Yumi looked up at the cloaked one with wide, innocent eyes, all defence melted away. The cloaked one had saved her. Taken her.
The cloaked one sat down next to Yumi, slipped her hand to Yumi's lower back, lifted her up so they were face-to-face.
"You're so pure," the cloaked one said, and stroked Yumi's cheek.
Yumi meant to speak, but the cloaked one silenced her with her lips, and Yumi found herself moaning softly into her saviour's mouth. A silk-gloved hand fell onto Yumi's supple calves, and began stroking them, running up and down the skin of her legs. Yumi did not resist. Even when that hand began to rise a little higher, pushing the hem of Yumi's elegant dress past her pretty knees, even when Yumi felt the silk of her saviour's hand grasping her warm, milky thighs, she was completely meek. Completely yielding.
"I knew," the cloaked one said, "I knew that you would give yourself to me. I knew that it was worth it." She pulled back slightly, still keeping her face close to Yumi's, still with her hand roving over Yumi's smooth legs. She took her sweet maiden by the chin, looked her in the eye. "Say it. Say what you know is the truth of your heart."
The words almost came to Yumi's lips. She very nearly said: "I love you. I need you. Take me and have your way with me. I belong to you." But - but there was something... something in the way the cloaked one had spoken just then. Something of the charisma had faltered. A note of... of desperation had entered her voice, almost like another voice entirely. Yumi looked again at her captor's face - yes, not her saviour, her captor! - and for a moment she could see her face, and it was... it was familiar, she knew it was. She pushed the cloaked one's hand off her legs, and twisted out of her grip completely, standing on her own two feet.
"Who are you?" Yumi asked again, this time with strength. "How did you cause the events at the concert? Why have you brought me here? Answer me!"
The cloaked one stood. She regarded Yumi with her blood-filled eyes. "This isn't right," she said. "I won't hurt you, Yumi. I want only to give you what you want, to make you more. And I wish to love you."
Her eyes flashed, and Yumi felt the warm cloud again. She swayed, her eyes fluttering. She felt dulled. "What... what is this?"
"It doesn't matter," the cloaked one said. "Let it wash through you. Let it wash through you, Yumi and entwine us together absolutely."
The cloaked one had not even asked her to, but Yumi felt a sudden instinct to kneel. She felt weak again. Swooning and feminine and powerless. The cloaked one approached her, and Yumi felt herself drawn towards her. She couldn't help herself.
Where had it gone? Her strength - her fortitude? Where was the resolve she had created? It was happening again. This woman's notion of what Yumi was - it wasn't what Yumi wanted. It wasn't what Yumi was. She was being moulded. Being shaped to fit the wishes of others just like her producers had done, just like her parents had done, and just like she had done to herself. She had to bring it back. She had to revive her strength. No - not revive. It was not dead. It just awaited. What Yumi had to do - what Stellar had to do - was summon it.
"A Black Star!"
In a flash of light Yumi was transformed. Her slender body was filled with raw, physical power, enough to lift an SUV over her head with one arm. Her appearance had changed from the Black Star her devotees had once known. For as much as she'd trained for that night's concert and for throwing off the shackles of the popstar, she'd trained her powers too. She'd trained to master her passions and the might that came with them, under the tutelage of the strongest heroine she knew, and with that mastery had come a change in the way that strength showed itself.
A tight, black corset wrapped itself around her torso. A high choker around her neck. Bare biceps, bare shoulders, but forearms wrapped in strong leather, with deadly, sharp spikes at her knuckles. Leather stockings, leaving only a glimpse of bare thigh between themselves and Yumi's short, flanged skirt. Spikes on her knees. Spikes on her elbows. Even her hair was shorter, and blacker. Aggression, and speed and ferocity burned into Yumi's mind. It was the opposite, the very opposite of what the cloaked one was forcing on her, and she broke through the spell with an angry, shrieking shout.
She swung her fist, and the cloaked one - astonished - barely stepped out of the way. But Stellar had had an instructor in the martial arts far more agile than the cloaked one. Stellar stepped forward, splintering the pinewood floor beneath her with her vicious stomp, and then drove her forehead directly into her enemy's. The blow was hard enough to break the skull of a rhinoceros. The cloaked one, astonishingly, did not go flying, but she was not uninjured. Her legs trembled, and she seemed to crumble, before dropping to her knees.
"YES!" Stellar shouted, shaking her hands, feeling her selfhood restored, stronger than ever. Her power surged through her, filling her limbs with lightness and crushing, devastating force. She lifted the cloaked one by the scruff of her neck, and clobbered her directly across the jaw, sending her flying, crashing into - almost through - the nearest wall. "It's always the same, isn't it?" Stellar said. "Evil is always the same thing. It's greed. It's 'I want'!" She strode towards her fallen adversary, her eyes burning. They had changed colour: the irises were pure black, her pupils a glowing white. "You dress it up with charisma and charm, but you're just as bad as the worst, most..." She hesitated, unable to find the English word for 'venal'. "The most low villain," she settled on. "This is over now," she said. Seeing that the cloaked one was still conscious, she drew back her arm, preparing to knock her unconscious once and for all. She struck.
But her blow hit empty air. No, not empty, exactly. Stellar's fist did not meet flesh or bone. It met mist.
"What?!" Stellar cried, as the cloaked one's body faded into dark grey vapour swirling around her, formless and intangible. Stellar swung two, three times, but she could not touch it. She could not harm it. The vapour danced around her mockingly, until, suddenly, it took distinct shape once again, behind Stellar.
Stellar swirled around, fist raised, but something stopped her. She saw the cloaked one's face again - but it was cloaked no longer. Stellar saw it. Stellar knew it. Stellar did not understand it.
"You?" she breathed. "But - but you can't -"
"I can," the cloaked one said, and she struck first. She lunged forward, and planted her lips on Stellar's once more - but this time it was not just a kiss.
"MMMMMMMPHHHHH!!!" Stellar cried out, as she and the cloaked one both began to glow red. She raised her hands to attack, but the cloaked one grabbed them both, forced her against a wall. "She's overpowering me... she's stronger than me!" Both hands held above her head, Stellar moaned as the kiss continued. It was forceful this time, her mouth not willingly yielding, but the kiss was taken from her nonetheless. And not just the kiss - but Stellar's strength.
She felt it in the pit of her stomach. She felt it in the shaking of her arms. She felt it in the quivering of her legs. She was being drained. She moaned, and writhed, but she could not escape the iron grip of the cloaked one, who pinned Stellar's tight body between herself and the wall. And her power was the price, as Stellar felt herself being plundered.
"Nnmmmhhh... nhhhhhmmmhhhh!!" Stellar moaned, as her star began to fade, the energy sucked right out of her. It was not that she was being robbed of her powers, not like with Adrienne, but her vigour was being drained away, and in that situation it more or less amounted to the same thing. Already it now took only one of the cloaked one's arms to pin both of Yumi's. Already Yumi's legs were no longer kicking, but rubbing sensuously against her captor's, too weak to do anything else.
And as Yumi grew weaker, the cloaked one grew stronger. She kissed Yumi more and more forcefully, pushing herself against the mewing damsel harder and harder, almost growling with lust as she kissed her and drained her, charisma replaced with bestial rapaciousness.
"Mh..." Yumi squeaked, as her soft shoulders sagged, her arms grew too weak to move. The cloaked one seemed to sense the change, because she released Yumi's wrists, and her arms fell by her sides, limp. The cloaked one seized Yumi's shoulders, squeezing and pressing them inwards, feeling Yumi's pert, soft breasts writhing against the confines of her corset. She pulled away from Yumi's lips, and began roughly kissing her neck and her shoulders instead, apparently just as able to draw strength from her like this.
"No..." Yumi whispered, unable to do much else. If only. If only she hadn't hesitated! If only that face hadn't shocked her so much, that last blow would have ended it with her as the victor. She still didn't know how it was possible. She still didn't understand why this was happening, kept expecting it to be a dream. But it was real, and she was vanquished. She was vanquished, and so she faded.
The corset vanished. The spikes vanished. The glow in her eyes vanished, and so did the last dregs of Yumi's superhuman strength. She did not have the energy to remain transformed, and so her power had deserted her. She was again in the elegant dress, the feminine heels. Her hair again was long, and straight. She was again the meek, blushing, sighing damsel, her attempt at resistance quashed. She was right back to what she had been before.
But the other was different. When she forced Yumi to look into her eyes again, the cloaked one's eyes were a deeper, darker red. There was a viciousness in her now. It was more familiar.
"Don't!" she hissed. "Don't fucking test me like that! Don't make me go back to...!" She caught herself, turned away for a moment. She was glowing red, and hot. She breathed hard. She settled herself. She cooled. She looked up at Yumi again, and the cloak had refallen. Control was restored. So what she did next was not done out of anger, or intemperance. When she tore Yumi's dress from her body, she did it because she wished to.
"Ah!" Yumi gasped, looking down in shame at her beautiful body. She was almost naked, her flimsy bra torn away along with the dress. Her legs, her hips, her stomach, her arms, her shoulders - her small, soft breasts, with their delicate, light pink buds; all were exposed. Only her panties and her heels were left to her by her captor. She was shocked into complete stillness, so that as her captor began tearing her dress into rough strips, Yumi did not even try to move away. Not that she could have: even leaning her back against the wall, on her naked, trembling legs Yumi could barely stand.
She was turned. Her arms were pulled behind her back. She heard the soft 'swish' sound as the dark fabric of her tattered dress was twisted around her wrists, first pushing her wrists together by simply being wrapped around them; then being slipped between them, securing the knot and cinching them inescapably together.
"Don't do this," Yumi mumbled, barely able to speak. "Don't... tie me up..." She felt the cloaked one's hands on her moist legs, roughly caressing her fine, almost glowing skin. An equally simple bind around Yumi's dainty ankles, as had been tied around her wrists, but the sheer strength of her captor made the knot a fiendish one: Yumi might have tried for hours and never undone it.
Yumi's bondage, the sight her rendered helpless with two simple strips of fabric, only made her look lovelier. Only made her look more desirable. The sumptuous shock of her nakedness contrasted with the perfection of her makeup and her hair only made her look more thrillingly beautiful. And when her soft lips were parted by black cloth, and her beautiful voice stifled with a thick, tight cleave-gag, well that only added to her charm. She knew it, too. She knew even in captivity she looked perfect. Even beaten in battle, she had been made to... perform.
She was turned to face her captor. Her eyes, brown, wet and sparkling, seemed to beg her captor to stop. A forlornness came with her dismaying physical weakness, and her eyes pleaded with her captor. But it was not for mercy, not exactly. It was... it was for her captor's sake.
"You're better than this," Yumi's eyes seemed to say.
"Yes," answered the defiant stare of the cloaked one. "I am better. So do not presume to know my limitations."
The cloaked one seized her bound, stripped captive by the hips. With a single arm she lifted her, easily tossing the defeated heroine over her shoulder. She clutched her warm thighs. She felt the pleasing bounce as the limp, drained beauty dropped over her, her legs swinging slightly from side to side as she was put in her place.
"I thought you understood, Yumi," the cloaked one said. "It is a shame that I'll have to use more forceful methods, but needs must. If you thought a little thing like your will was going to get in the way of my doing what is best for you, then you were mistaken. You will accept me," she said. "You must accept me," her heart cried.
And Yumi heard her words, and was filled with fear over what those methods might be, knowing how close she'd come to giving in completely. Ensorcelled, and then defeated, shame filled her heart - but not just shame. She felt she knew, at least mostly, why her captor was doing what she was doing. She just didn't understand the powers. Didn't understand the change in her speech. Didn't understand what seemed like a massive increase in her captor's intellect.
She couldn't fathom how Arachna had been so radically transformed.
-
Damselbinder
It all seemed so retrograde. After everything she had done, after everything she had become, after all her efforts to be more, to be stronger, to be better, she had been reduced to this. Bested. Stripped. Her own dress ripped up for bindings, used to tie her wrists and ankles. To gag her. To stifle her. Her strength sucked out of her body, kissed out of her, leaving her like... like this. Limp. Soft and powerless.
"Weak... so... so weak..."
Yumi wore heels. She wore thin, cream-coloured panties. Beyond that, she wore nothing. She was naked, lying over the shoulder of the woman who'd defeated her, who'd drained her and stripped her and tied her up tight. Actually no, she wasn't even tied up that tightly: just two strips of cloth wrapped around her wrists and ankles, and another thrust between her lips. Her supple, slender frame was drained of almost every drop of strength, so such light bondage was all that was needed to keep her safely secured in her captor's clutches. She couldn't even really writhe. Her limbs were warm, and heavy, and still. Her arms rested flat on her back, her legs hanging suspended in the air.
Something smooth was rubbing against Yumi's bare thighs. A silk glove, wrapped around a strong hand, a hand which held Yumi's supple legs with a painless, but threateningly firm grip. Its owner held one of the most beautiful women one might ever meet over her shoulder, smooth and creamy and vulnerable. She could have pawed at Yumi as much as she'd liked. She could have kissed her thighs, squeezed and smacked Yumi's small, tight behind, could have bit and clutched and grasped and taken whatever she wanted. The question was: why didn't she?
It is not that Yumi imagined herself so irresistible that any captor would be compelled to have their way with her. It was this captor in particular. It was years ago now, but Yumi still remembered. Remembered being snatched from the stage of her own concert. Remembered the grasping hands roving all over her, the numbness of the venom, the paralysis that followed - and the webs. Smothering, binding, oozing webs that haunted her nightmares for months afterwards. Yumi didn't think of it often, but whenever she did it was frighteningly vivid. Stellar's first defeat had imprinted itself indelibly on her mind, as had the woman who had handed that defeat to her. What Yumi remembered of Arachna was almost all bad. She was thuggish, brutish, bullying, rapacious, slow-witted, violent, unpleasant, obsessive, manipulable, and really rather stupid. Yet for all the humiliation that Arachna inflicted on Yumi, her last memory of her tormentor was one of courage.
Two years ago, now. Yumi, along with Valora, Spectra and half a dozen others, had been kidnapped by the arch-villain Hades. Even now it was still difficult for Yumi to believe that their shadowy nemesis had really been Jackson Morrow all along, but only mad conspiracy theorists had any doubt at this point. As well as being a megalomaniac of such brazen purity that it defied all reason, Morrow had been a charismatic, skilled manipulator. Many had fallen under his sway: it was only natural that a mid-carder thug like Arachna should have been in his employ. But, when all hope had seemed lost, when Stellar, Spectra and Nova were being displayed as captive trophies to cement Hades' reputation and cement Jackson Morrow's Machiavellian scheme, they had been rescued. Valora, and the Starlight Squadron, and the woman who would eventually end Morrow's evil by plunging a sword through his stomach, had saved the day. But they in their turn had been imprisoned, they in their turn had been freed. By Arachna.
So why was it like this? Why - how - was Arachna so self-possessed? So dashing and articulate? And these new powers: illusions, turning into mist, the strangeness in space and time at the concert, and this... draining that had left Yumi's power in such a moribund state. Only her strength was explicable, but even that was altered. When they'd last fought, Arachna had been, perhaps, a little weaker physically than Yumi's Black Star form. But this time she'd been significantly stronger, so strong that she'd wrestled Yumi against a wall and -
" - and kissed my strength away..." A soft shiver travelled up and down her back, and she gave a heavy sigh.
"I know," Arachna said, and for the first time Yumi's captor touched her with more vigour, stroking Yumi's legs with the back of her hand. "I know, Yumi. It is... difficult to cast aside one's pride. It is difficult to admit that what we need we cannot give ourselves. That is the situation in which I found myself. That is the situation that you are in now."
In truth, Arachna did not take Yumi very far. Up two flights of stairs, to the highest floor of her lair. No - 'lair' was the wrong word. It wasn't a musty crypt or ironclad fortress - it was just a tastefully decorated penthouse apartment. The room she was taken to was not a chamber, or dungeon, but a loft bedroom. The ceiling was low, but the furniture was all short, so there was an impression of space. The bed rested only a few inches from floor, seemingly built into the floor itself, with a thin mattress laid on top of it. And on top of that, Yumi herself was laid
Arachna gripped her captive more tightly, lifting her delicate frame off her shoulder, and tossing her down onto the bed.
"UMPHH!" Yumi cried out, hitting the mattress with an audible thud. Her hair spread in a dark wave over the pillows behind her, her bosom trembling from the force of her landing. She felt her hands pressing into the small of her back, held there by the strip of cloth binding them. It should have felt uncomfortable, but it didn't. Nothing did. She felt warm, and somnolent, and it disturbed her. She was lying, naked and helpless, on her captor's bed, and her first feeling was not of terror. Why?
She looked away. Away from Arachna. She didn't want to see her old enemy's eyes roving over her, did not want to see the face of the woman who had beaten her yet again. Claimed her. Yumi ended up looking at the room itself, and almost found herself admiring the tastefully opulent decor.
"You like it?" Arachna said, noticing Yumi's pretty eyes roving around. "I've come to prefer this sort of style. Rich without being too extravagant." She strode, holding her head high with poised dignity, to where a painting was hanging on the wall. It depicted a man in a thick blue cloak examining a globe. "It's a Vermeer," Arachna explained. "Not a real one, of course. I suppose I could afford one, but I've never seen the need. Even if I could tell the difference between the real thing and a reproduction, I wouldn't feel the need to possess the real thing. That would be mere avarice."
She strutted back to the centre of the room. There was - yes there was something there, Yumi realised, that was familiar. Arachna's thuggish swagger, her unearned arrogance, had been rarefied into something altogether more... elegant. She put Yumi in mind of an English ship captain, swaggering and perhaps even a little bullying, but refined.
"You might be wondering how I acquired all this," Arachna said. A playful smile flitted on her face. "Perhaps you think I murdered the owner. Perhaps you think I swindled some poor soul into parting with it. But no. It was all quite legal. Acquiring money is easy when one has the... insight I've come to possess. But I won't bore you prattling on about the stock market. It's bad enough that one of us should have to force her way through the Financial Times, don't you think?"
She sat down on the edge of the bed. She supported herself with one hand. The hand was very close to Yumi. Her skin. Her tight, supple limbs. Her warmth.
"Here," Arachna said, softly. "Let me take this off you." She reached towards Yumi's head, slowly burying her fingers in the maiden's dark, smooth locks. With a skilful flick of her fingers, she undid the knot keeping Yumi's gag in place. "Better?"
"Yes," Yumi said, quietly. "Thank you," she found herself saying, and she shuddered. "No I - I didn't mean to say that, I -" She shook her head, remembered herself. Remembered who she was. "Get away from me...! A... a White Star!"
She felt it. She felt the power within her. The power of the White Star was optimism, hope, brightness. It was there, but... she just didn't have the strength. The kiss had sapped her so terribly that she couldn't call on her powers. Dismayed, she sank back into the bedclothes. She couldn't even bring herself to try again.
"Shhhhhhhh..." Arachna placed a finger gently on Yumi's lips, making her captive tremble and mew. "Look at me, Yumi."
Yumi tried not to obey. But her resistance was... feeble. The hushed quality of Arachna's voice, combined with a strange pressure she felt on her mind was strangely compelling. The pressure was not crushing or painful - it was like a massage on her temples, drawing out all ache, all tension. It made it hard to remember that she was a bound captive. It made it hard to remember that she was in terrible danger.
Still, she resisted enough that Arachna had to cajole her a little, turning Yumi's head towards her with minimal force.
The naked songstress tried to lower her eyes, hoping that humility would be enough to satisfy her captor. But it wasn't, and she found herself looking with wet, doe-like eyes into her abductor's blood-red gaze. Webs or no webs, Yumi was trapped like a butterfly in the jaws of a spider.
"Why... why are you doing this to me?" Yumi asked, meekly.
"Don't you know?" Arachna replied, brushing Yumi's cheek, making her blush.
"Please don't do that," Yumi said, struggling against an alien impulse to capitulate.
"Why not?"
"Because... I don't want it..." She closed her eyes, finding it hard to think straight with Arachna's gaze on her. "You did something to me... made me faint, made me weak... you took me against my will, Arachna..."
For a moment, for just a split second, something happened to Yumi's captor. She sort of squirmed, like her skeleton was uncomfortable in its muscles. With a sudden frenzy she wrapped her fingers around Yumi's bare shoulders, and the songstress gave a cry. She expected Arachna to spring upon her with frantic lust - but she didn't. She just sort of stared at her, clenching her jaw, her neck tensing painfully, like something was pulling at her.
And then a cold wind blew. The room grew dark. The sun was no longer visible through the windows. Yumi exhaled. White mist formed from her breath. There was an instant that was red: everything was the colour of blood. And in Arachna's face, Yumi saw a second set of features. But it was only for an instant, so small a space of time that Yumi truly thought it was a trick of the light.
"Don't," Arachna said, "use that name."
"W-what?"
"'Arachna'," she said. "Don't call me by that name." She didn't sound angry, or irritated, however. She was calm. Serene, even. "I mean... it's a little on the nose, don't you think? Just call me..." She laughed, lightly. "Just call me Emily."
It was almost like Arachna's - like Emily's - moment of mania had never happened. She was entirely in control of herself. Entirely in control of Yumi.
"You're wrong, Yumi," Emily said. "I didn't take you to... gratify myself. I took you because we are the same, Yumi."
"We're not the -"
"Oh hush," Emily whispered. "Let's not recite the old clichés." Her voice was a shawl of snow, wrapping around Yumi's shoulders, enveloping and cooling. Slowing. Calming. Tranquilising. "I know we two are very different in many respects, but there is something that we share."
She was no longer sitting on the side of the bed. She was lying next to Yumi, her right arm curled underneath her slender captive. Yumi found her head flopping against Emily's shoulder, felt fingers strumming through her long, dark hair.
"I always used to enjoy your music, Yumi," Emily said. "I suppose in a way I still do. But then I... woke up." An unsettling smile flitted across her face as she said this. "And now.. I find that I hate listening to your music. Seeing you perform. Seeing you fight crime," she added with an ironical laugh.
"Are you insulting me?" Yumi replied. To her embarrassment she felt a little tear welling in the corner of one eye.
"Oh no, my darling," Emily said, wiping the tear away. "It's not that I think there's anything wrong with you. Think of it more like... watching a bear being forced to dance at a circus." She rested one hand on Yumi's smooth neck. Her captive felt her fingernails pressing ever so slightly against her skin. They were sharp as talons. "It's degrading. It's cruel. And even if weren't cruel, it would be wrong because that's not what a bear should be doing."
As she'd spoken, her voice had grown as sharp as her nails. She would have been screeching, but she spoke with such verve, and authority that there was nothing shrill in it. Yumi found herself feeling overwhelmed by Emily's presence, overwhelmed by this alien charisma and forceful, passionate strength. She echoed too well what Yumi herself had been thinking, her words sliding through Yumi's weakened resistance, and pulsing at the core of her.
"I have elevated myself," Emily said. "But the thought of standing above you was too foul to endure. You deserve greatness far more than I." She kissed Yumi's neck, her supple cheek, her small, well-shaped ear.
Yumi trembled. It was so different to what Emily had done to her before. No more stifling, enveloping, bullying lust. This Emily complimented her, touched her pleasantly and softly. She spoke with grace. She was commanding. Refined. Handsome. The Emily that had abducted her before was the villain of a horror story, with Yumi as her terrified victim. This one was more like the hero of a Harlequin Romance, commanding the tremulous, maidenly object of her desire with raw sexual charisma, tearing her clothes and taking her - conquering the maiden, who blushed meekly and sighed with tender passion.
Emily was on top of Yumi now, powerful legs astride her, fixing Yumi in place with her scarlet gaze. Yumi lay flat beneath her, straight and still, but for the rapid rising and falling of her lovely, dainty bosom. She was slender and tight and smooth, and she felt as though the fabric tying her wrists and her slim ankles was wholly unnecessary now. She could not help but lie still under Emily's gaze. Red. Red flashed in her mind - red and sudden clarity.
"No," she said. "You're doing something to me. These aren't my thoughts. I - mhhph!"
Yumi hadn't seen her move, but Emily's hand was on her mouth. Her wiry, strong fingers and the heel of her palm pressed into Yumi's delicate cheeks. Yumi felt herself moan, but couldn't hear it: her voice was completely taken from her by Emily's neat application of her strength. The silk gloves felt so soft against Yumi's mouth. She felt the cool smoothness of the gloves, the hard strength behind them. Felt her own breath hot against Emily's hand. Her whole body felt hot, her cheeks going red, her naked thighs tingling with sweat.
"I want to fight," she thought, but she was so drained, so fragile.
"I want to run," she compromised, but her body lay still, helpless.
"I want to hate her," she insisted, but her feelings were not in her control. Emily - thuggish, stupid Emily - was playing Yumi like a delicate, finely tuned violin. She could make whatever music she liked.
"Don't you understand, Yumi?" Emily asked, with sincere distress. "There's no point resisting. I want for you only what you want for yourself. I want you to shine. I can make you so much more than you are - more than I could ever be!" She placed her second hand between Yumi's pretty breasts, spreading her fingers carefully around them, only skirting their soft edges. Yumi seemed so passive, so enraptured, that it seemed as if she was only breathing because Emily was pumping her. With every breath Emily pumped into her Yumi's gentle mews heightened a little in pitch. With every stroke of her thumb on the side of Yumi's breasts the maiden blushed a little redder. It was like trying to resist sleep after two days of wakefulness, in a pitch black room under thick, warm blankets. Will was irrelevant. Your body would override you, and that was what was happening to Yumi. For all she was repelled, for all she found Emily's transformation terrifying, she could feel that wish to surrender pressing into her.
"You can be more. You can be everything. Remember what I was, and look at what I am now... now look at yourself. You tasted what I can do for you tonight, you felt yourself... elevated."
Yumi did remember. That spectacular talent that had flowed from her with but the smallest effort. It had been bewildering, frightening. She'd known it was alien, felt shame at being applauded for what was not her own doing. Yet thinking back on it now, imagining such beauty coming from her own fingers, Yumi could not help but find it strangely bewitching.
"Mmmhhhhhh," she moaned, finding herself nuzzling against Emily's hand. "Mhhh...mhh... - NO!"
The effort it took simply for Yumi to wrench her head free of Emily's hand was heroic. For her not only to do that, but to wriggle out from underneath her captor, and roll herself off the bed when every passion in her was screaming at her to stay still was nothing short of Herculean.
"D... don't touch me!" Yumi gasped, wriggling herself up against a wall and pulling her legs up to her chest, defending the last shreds of her modesty. "You're doing something to me," she said, trying to focus on the cold of the wall against her back, trying to let it shock her into alertness. "You're - you're telepathic now, or something - you're putting your thoughts in my head! The feelings you want me to... to have... they are not mine!!"
Emily stood, moving with the muscular grace of a panther. She stood over Yumi, shook her head ruefully like an old schoolmistress with a troubled pupil.
"I do understand, Yumi," she said, with patience. "I know why you fight against this. But, consider." She squatted down about a foot away from Yumi, making a show of keeping her distance. "What were you trying to achieve tonight? At the concert. What was it that you wanted to do?"
"I don't need to explain myself to you!" Yumi spat, forcing herself to stand. She held her arms over her breasts. She was naked, vulnerable. She looked so very fragile, wilting in the face of her kidnapper's power.
But she wasn't fragile! This weakness was one that had been forced on her: she was not made of glass as she seemed to be now. She had had her share of battles, and coiled around her aesthete's soul was a hard, iron bar. She held onto that, and tried to throw aside the spell being cast over her. Tried to summon up the red of her anger. She'd been kidnapped - stolen. Stripped and molested. Bound and gagged. She should have been furious - but she'd been stultified too much to burn red. The fire would not come.
But then, fire had never been Yumi's greatest weapon.
"A Blue Star!"
"Weak... so... so weak..."
Yumi wore heels. She wore thin, cream-coloured panties. Beyond that, she wore nothing. She was naked, lying over the shoulder of the woman who'd defeated her, who'd drained her and stripped her and tied her up tight. Actually no, she wasn't even tied up that tightly: just two strips of cloth wrapped around her wrists and ankles, and another thrust between her lips. Her supple, slender frame was drained of almost every drop of strength, so such light bondage was all that was needed to keep her safely secured in her captor's clutches. She couldn't even really writhe. Her limbs were warm, and heavy, and still. Her arms rested flat on her back, her legs hanging suspended in the air.
Something smooth was rubbing against Yumi's bare thighs. A silk glove, wrapped around a strong hand, a hand which held Yumi's supple legs with a painless, but threateningly firm grip. Its owner held one of the most beautiful women one might ever meet over her shoulder, smooth and creamy and vulnerable. She could have pawed at Yumi as much as she'd liked. She could have kissed her thighs, squeezed and smacked Yumi's small, tight behind, could have bit and clutched and grasped and taken whatever she wanted. The question was: why didn't she?
It is not that Yumi imagined herself so irresistible that any captor would be compelled to have their way with her. It was this captor in particular. It was years ago now, but Yumi still remembered. Remembered being snatched from the stage of her own concert. Remembered the grasping hands roving all over her, the numbness of the venom, the paralysis that followed - and the webs. Smothering, binding, oozing webs that haunted her nightmares for months afterwards. Yumi didn't think of it often, but whenever she did it was frighteningly vivid. Stellar's first defeat had imprinted itself indelibly on her mind, as had the woman who had handed that defeat to her. What Yumi remembered of Arachna was almost all bad. She was thuggish, brutish, bullying, rapacious, slow-witted, violent, unpleasant, obsessive, manipulable, and really rather stupid. Yet for all the humiliation that Arachna inflicted on Yumi, her last memory of her tormentor was one of courage.
Two years ago, now. Yumi, along with Valora, Spectra and half a dozen others, had been kidnapped by the arch-villain Hades. Even now it was still difficult for Yumi to believe that their shadowy nemesis had really been Jackson Morrow all along, but only mad conspiracy theorists had any doubt at this point. As well as being a megalomaniac of such brazen purity that it defied all reason, Morrow had been a charismatic, skilled manipulator. Many had fallen under his sway: it was only natural that a mid-carder thug like Arachna should have been in his employ. But, when all hope had seemed lost, when Stellar, Spectra and Nova were being displayed as captive trophies to cement Hades' reputation and cement Jackson Morrow's Machiavellian scheme, they had been rescued. Valora, and the Starlight Squadron, and the woman who would eventually end Morrow's evil by plunging a sword through his stomach, had saved the day. But they in their turn had been imprisoned, they in their turn had been freed. By Arachna.
So why was it like this? Why - how - was Arachna so self-possessed? So dashing and articulate? And these new powers: illusions, turning into mist, the strangeness in space and time at the concert, and this... draining that had left Yumi's power in such a moribund state. Only her strength was explicable, but even that was altered. When they'd last fought, Arachna had been, perhaps, a little weaker physically than Yumi's Black Star form. But this time she'd been significantly stronger, so strong that she'd wrestled Yumi against a wall and -
" - and kissed my strength away..." A soft shiver travelled up and down her back, and she gave a heavy sigh.
"I know," Arachna said, and for the first time Yumi's captor touched her with more vigour, stroking Yumi's legs with the back of her hand. "I know, Yumi. It is... difficult to cast aside one's pride. It is difficult to admit that what we need we cannot give ourselves. That is the situation in which I found myself. That is the situation that you are in now."
In truth, Arachna did not take Yumi very far. Up two flights of stairs, to the highest floor of her lair. No - 'lair' was the wrong word. It wasn't a musty crypt or ironclad fortress - it was just a tastefully decorated penthouse apartment. The room she was taken to was not a chamber, or dungeon, but a loft bedroom. The ceiling was low, but the furniture was all short, so there was an impression of space. The bed rested only a few inches from floor, seemingly built into the floor itself, with a thin mattress laid on top of it. And on top of that, Yumi herself was laid
Arachna gripped her captive more tightly, lifting her delicate frame off her shoulder, and tossing her down onto the bed.
"UMPHH!" Yumi cried out, hitting the mattress with an audible thud. Her hair spread in a dark wave over the pillows behind her, her bosom trembling from the force of her landing. She felt her hands pressing into the small of her back, held there by the strip of cloth binding them. It should have felt uncomfortable, but it didn't. Nothing did. She felt warm, and somnolent, and it disturbed her. She was lying, naked and helpless, on her captor's bed, and her first feeling was not of terror. Why?
She looked away. Away from Arachna. She didn't want to see her old enemy's eyes roving over her, did not want to see the face of the woman who had beaten her yet again. Claimed her. Yumi ended up looking at the room itself, and almost found herself admiring the tastefully opulent decor.
"You like it?" Arachna said, noticing Yumi's pretty eyes roving around. "I've come to prefer this sort of style. Rich without being too extravagant." She strode, holding her head high with poised dignity, to where a painting was hanging on the wall. It depicted a man in a thick blue cloak examining a globe. "It's a Vermeer," Arachna explained. "Not a real one, of course. I suppose I could afford one, but I've never seen the need. Even if I could tell the difference between the real thing and a reproduction, I wouldn't feel the need to possess the real thing. That would be mere avarice."
She strutted back to the centre of the room. There was - yes there was something there, Yumi realised, that was familiar. Arachna's thuggish swagger, her unearned arrogance, had been rarefied into something altogether more... elegant. She put Yumi in mind of an English ship captain, swaggering and perhaps even a little bullying, but refined.
"You might be wondering how I acquired all this," Arachna said. A playful smile flitted on her face. "Perhaps you think I murdered the owner. Perhaps you think I swindled some poor soul into parting with it. But no. It was all quite legal. Acquiring money is easy when one has the... insight I've come to possess. But I won't bore you prattling on about the stock market. It's bad enough that one of us should have to force her way through the Financial Times, don't you think?"
She sat down on the edge of the bed. She supported herself with one hand. The hand was very close to Yumi. Her skin. Her tight, supple limbs. Her warmth.
"Here," Arachna said, softly. "Let me take this off you." She reached towards Yumi's head, slowly burying her fingers in the maiden's dark, smooth locks. With a skilful flick of her fingers, she undid the knot keeping Yumi's gag in place. "Better?"
"Yes," Yumi said, quietly. "Thank you," she found herself saying, and she shuddered. "No I - I didn't mean to say that, I -" She shook her head, remembered herself. Remembered who she was. "Get away from me...! A... a White Star!"
She felt it. She felt the power within her. The power of the White Star was optimism, hope, brightness. It was there, but... she just didn't have the strength. The kiss had sapped her so terribly that she couldn't call on her powers. Dismayed, she sank back into the bedclothes. She couldn't even bring herself to try again.
"Shhhhhhhh..." Arachna placed a finger gently on Yumi's lips, making her captive tremble and mew. "Look at me, Yumi."
Yumi tried not to obey. But her resistance was... feeble. The hushed quality of Arachna's voice, combined with a strange pressure she felt on her mind was strangely compelling. The pressure was not crushing or painful - it was like a massage on her temples, drawing out all ache, all tension. It made it hard to remember that she was a bound captive. It made it hard to remember that she was in terrible danger.
Still, she resisted enough that Arachna had to cajole her a little, turning Yumi's head towards her with minimal force.
The naked songstress tried to lower her eyes, hoping that humility would be enough to satisfy her captor. But it wasn't, and she found herself looking with wet, doe-like eyes into her abductor's blood-red gaze. Webs or no webs, Yumi was trapped like a butterfly in the jaws of a spider.
"Why... why are you doing this to me?" Yumi asked, meekly.
"Don't you know?" Arachna replied, brushing Yumi's cheek, making her blush.
"Please don't do that," Yumi said, struggling against an alien impulse to capitulate.
"Why not?"
"Because... I don't want it..." She closed her eyes, finding it hard to think straight with Arachna's gaze on her. "You did something to me... made me faint, made me weak... you took me against my will, Arachna..."
For a moment, for just a split second, something happened to Yumi's captor. She sort of squirmed, like her skeleton was uncomfortable in its muscles. With a sudden frenzy she wrapped her fingers around Yumi's bare shoulders, and the songstress gave a cry. She expected Arachna to spring upon her with frantic lust - but she didn't. She just sort of stared at her, clenching her jaw, her neck tensing painfully, like something was pulling at her.
And then a cold wind blew. The room grew dark. The sun was no longer visible through the windows. Yumi exhaled. White mist formed from her breath. There was an instant that was red: everything was the colour of blood. And in Arachna's face, Yumi saw a second set of features. But it was only for an instant, so small a space of time that Yumi truly thought it was a trick of the light.
"Don't," Arachna said, "use that name."
"W-what?"
"'Arachna'," she said. "Don't call me by that name." She didn't sound angry, or irritated, however. She was calm. Serene, even. "I mean... it's a little on the nose, don't you think? Just call me..." She laughed, lightly. "Just call me Emily."
It was almost like Arachna's - like Emily's - moment of mania had never happened. She was entirely in control of herself. Entirely in control of Yumi.
"You're wrong, Yumi," Emily said. "I didn't take you to... gratify myself. I took you because we are the same, Yumi."
"We're not the -"
"Oh hush," Emily whispered. "Let's not recite the old clichés." Her voice was a shawl of snow, wrapping around Yumi's shoulders, enveloping and cooling. Slowing. Calming. Tranquilising. "I know we two are very different in many respects, but there is something that we share."
She was no longer sitting on the side of the bed. She was lying next to Yumi, her right arm curled underneath her slender captive. Yumi found her head flopping against Emily's shoulder, felt fingers strumming through her long, dark hair.
"I always used to enjoy your music, Yumi," Emily said. "I suppose in a way I still do. But then I... woke up." An unsettling smile flitted across her face as she said this. "And now.. I find that I hate listening to your music. Seeing you perform. Seeing you fight crime," she added with an ironical laugh.
"Are you insulting me?" Yumi replied. To her embarrassment she felt a little tear welling in the corner of one eye.
"Oh no, my darling," Emily said, wiping the tear away. "It's not that I think there's anything wrong with you. Think of it more like... watching a bear being forced to dance at a circus." She rested one hand on Yumi's smooth neck. Her captive felt her fingernails pressing ever so slightly against her skin. They were sharp as talons. "It's degrading. It's cruel. And even if weren't cruel, it would be wrong because that's not what a bear should be doing."
As she'd spoken, her voice had grown as sharp as her nails. She would have been screeching, but she spoke with such verve, and authority that there was nothing shrill in it. Yumi found herself feeling overwhelmed by Emily's presence, overwhelmed by this alien charisma and forceful, passionate strength. She echoed too well what Yumi herself had been thinking, her words sliding through Yumi's weakened resistance, and pulsing at the core of her.
"I have elevated myself," Emily said. "But the thought of standing above you was too foul to endure. You deserve greatness far more than I." She kissed Yumi's neck, her supple cheek, her small, well-shaped ear.
Yumi trembled. It was so different to what Emily had done to her before. No more stifling, enveloping, bullying lust. This Emily complimented her, touched her pleasantly and softly. She spoke with grace. She was commanding. Refined. Handsome. The Emily that had abducted her before was the villain of a horror story, with Yumi as her terrified victim. This one was more like the hero of a Harlequin Romance, commanding the tremulous, maidenly object of her desire with raw sexual charisma, tearing her clothes and taking her - conquering the maiden, who blushed meekly and sighed with tender passion.
Emily was on top of Yumi now, powerful legs astride her, fixing Yumi in place with her scarlet gaze. Yumi lay flat beneath her, straight and still, but for the rapid rising and falling of her lovely, dainty bosom. She was slender and tight and smooth, and she felt as though the fabric tying her wrists and her slim ankles was wholly unnecessary now. She could not help but lie still under Emily's gaze. Red. Red flashed in her mind - red and sudden clarity.
"No," she said. "You're doing something to me. These aren't my thoughts. I - mhhph!"
Yumi hadn't seen her move, but Emily's hand was on her mouth. Her wiry, strong fingers and the heel of her palm pressed into Yumi's delicate cheeks. Yumi felt herself moan, but couldn't hear it: her voice was completely taken from her by Emily's neat application of her strength. The silk gloves felt so soft against Yumi's mouth. She felt the cool smoothness of the gloves, the hard strength behind them. Felt her own breath hot against Emily's hand. Her whole body felt hot, her cheeks going red, her naked thighs tingling with sweat.
"I want to fight," she thought, but she was so drained, so fragile.
"I want to run," she compromised, but her body lay still, helpless.
"I want to hate her," she insisted, but her feelings were not in her control. Emily - thuggish, stupid Emily - was playing Yumi like a delicate, finely tuned violin. She could make whatever music she liked.
"Don't you understand, Yumi?" Emily asked, with sincere distress. "There's no point resisting. I want for you only what you want for yourself. I want you to shine. I can make you so much more than you are - more than I could ever be!" She placed her second hand between Yumi's pretty breasts, spreading her fingers carefully around them, only skirting their soft edges. Yumi seemed so passive, so enraptured, that it seemed as if she was only breathing because Emily was pumping her. With every breath Emily pumped into her Yumi's gentle mews heightened a little in pitch. With every stroke of her thumb on the side of Yumi's breasts the maiden blushed a little redder. It was like trying to resist sleep after two days of wakefulness, in a pitch black room under thick, warm blankets. Will was irrelevant. Your body would override you, and that was what was happening to Yumi. For all she was repelled, for all she found Emily's transformation terrifying, she could feel that wish to surrender pressing into her.
"You can be more. You can be everything. Remember what I was, and look at what I am now... now look at yourself. You tasted what I can do for you tonight, you felt yourself... elevated."
Yumi did remember. That spectacular talent that had flowed from her with but the smallest effort. It had been bewildering, frightening. She'd known it was alien, felt shame at being applauded for what was not her own doing. Yet thinking back on it now, imagining such beauty coming from her own fingers, Yumi could not help but find it strangely bewitching.
"Mmmhhhhhh," she moaned, finding herself nuzzling against Emily's hand. "Mhhh...mhh... - NO!"
The effort it took simply for Yumi to wrench her head free of Emily's hand was heroic. For her not only to do that, but to wriggle out from underneath her captor, and roll herself off the bed when every passion in her was screaming at her to stay still was nothing short of Herculean.
"D... don't touch me!" Yumi gasped, wriggling herself up against a wall and pulling her legs up to her chest, defending the last shreds of her modesty. "You're doing something to me," she said, trying to focus on the cold of the wall against her back, trying to let it shock her into alertness. "You're - you're telepathic now, or something - you're putting your thoughts in my head! The feelings you want me to... to have... they are not mine!!"
Emily stood, moving with the muscular grace of a panther. She stood over Yumi, shook her head ruefully like an old schoolmistress with a troubled pupil.
"I do understand, Yumi," she said, with patience. "I know why you fight against this. But, consider." She squatted down about a foot away from Yumi, making a show of keeping her distance. "What were you trying to achieve tonight? At the concert. What was it that you wanted to do?"
"I don't need to explain myself to you!" Yumi spat, forcing herself to stand. She held her arms over her breasts. She was naked, vulnerable. She looked so very fragile, wilting in the face of her kidnapper's power.
But she wasn't fragile! This weakness was one that had been forced on her: she was not made of glass as she seemed to be now. She had had her share of battles, and coiled around her aesthete's soul was a hard, iron bar. She held onto that, and tried to throw aside the spell being cast over her. Tried to summon up the red of her anger. She'd been kidnapped - stolen. Stripped and molested. Bound and gagged. She should have been furious - but she'd been stultified too much to burn red. The fire would not come.
But then, fire had never been Yumi's greatest weapon.
"A Blue Star!"
-
Damselbinder
She did not, as she transformed, bring with her a bitter, torrential chill. Hers was the cold of the crisp, still air, the cold that awakens, that sharpens. The cold of winter at its loveliest. Once, the Blue Star had made Stellar come across as distant and ephemeral, and transformed her appearance more radically than the other stars. For Yumi had not known herself before, and the sensuality that the Blue Star represented had been something far from her, unknown. But she had accepted herself now. She was homosexual, and that no longer felt like something hidden and alien. It was just her.
So the change was more subtle, now. Her skin seemed to sparkle slightly, like snow suddenly exposed to a cold, bright sun. A thin, crystal blue shawl was wrapped around her slim shoulders, snaking delicately around both her arms. From hip to neck her body was wrapped in a figure hugging, silver-blue dress, a dress whose folds seemed to refract and reflect and confuse the eye like it was made of a million shards of ice. To soothe and satisfy the eye, a plunging gap was at her chest, revealing the inner halves of her bosom and the tempting channel that ran between them. The skirt of the dress flowed freely about her legs, thin and translucent, and split at left and right, so her shimmering, sweet-smelling legs were naked, an all too generous helping to the roving eye that danced over the splendour of the Blue Star. Short, heeled boots, so short they didn't quite cover the joints of her ankles, covered her delicate feet. Her hair was midnight blue, flowing as if in a breeze behind her. Her eyes radiated cobalt light. This was Stellar at the zenith of her power.
And yet, as the cold wind billowed lovingly against its mistress' skin, Stellar could feel that that power was not as it ought to have been. Barely had she drawn upon enough strength to move, much less access her powers. She took a step, and she moved with flawless elegance, but she felt the fatigue gnawing at her, the desire to fall, to faint. To surrender. But she didn't. With a grunt of effort, she waved her hand. With this wave she wrapped a leash around the neck of the laws of thermodynamics, and bid the air around Emily's body to snap-freeze.
"Ahh!" Emily gasped, and for the first time since her capture Stellar saw alarm in her kidnapper's expression - as she was shackled in a thick prison of ice. It had simply appeared around her in an instant, covering Emily from neck to foot in frozen air and water, as thick as a tree trunk on all sides.
Stellar was wary of Emily's newfound strength, but she seemed genuinely trapped. Was victory to be achieved so easily?
She took a step towards her enemy, and the effort made her feel stronger. The second step had the same effect. She felt refreshed, and as her skirt lightly tickled her thighs, she felt... well, she felt sexy. Her passivity, her meekness, they were melting from her as she cooled, and as she cooled she felt her power returning. Stellar's power was an expression of her selfhood, and as she remembered herself, that power flowed back to her.
"Remarkable," Emily said. There was a flash of something on her face, perhaps irritation, perhaps confusion. "I didn't - I wasn't aware that you could do that." She smiled, too widely. "You are special, Yumi, you really are."
"Explain," Stellar commanded. Her power gave her calm, gave her authority. "Explain how you have become like this."
Emily did not answer. Her smile faded into a serious frown, but that was all.
"Answer me," Stellar demanded. "I could make a sheath of ice over your face and smother you. I could turn the prison I've made into a thousand needles and tear you to pieces."
"You won't," Emily said, gently. "You have never killed, Yumi, nor could you." She flexed the muscles of her powerful body: there was an ominous creak, but the ice prison did not give way. Not then, at least. "You are a delicate soul. An innocent soul."
"Stop it," Stellar said, afraid of the weakness returning, shrinking reflexively from Emily's honeyed words. She moved close to her abductor, close enough to touch. "What you say means nothing. Everything about you is a lie. Everything... false."
Stellar would have been well within her rights to leave it there, with anger and insult. Surely Emily had earned it. But with the spell lifted, Yumi began to think more clearly.
"Whatever has happened to you," Stellar said, "it is unnatural. The new powers, the new... you. I've never heard of any superhuman being able to change someone like this. I'd fear any that could!" Her eyebrows furrowed in deep concern, her gravity only adding to the gentle coldness of her beauty. "Emily," she said, her tongue alighting on each syllable as softly as a snowflake. "Do you need help?"
Emily smiled. She laughed quietly, shook her head as if what Yumi had said was foolish. Her blood-red eyes glittered. But Yumi could have sworn that she'd seen her mouth the word 'yes'.
"What? Emily, did you -" She resisted an instinct to put her hand on her Emily's face, still wary of a trap. But stirred to compassion, she looked openly and deeply into her abductor's eyes.
They were so red, weren't they? Brighter on the outside, more definitely the colour of blood. Emily's irises were darker, closer to burgundy. Her pupils were almost black, but even they were a dark, deep red. So deep, like an ocean lay within her eyes, dark and warm and never-ending. Yumi just... kept on looking. She tried to look away, but whether she moved her eyes, or her head, or turned around completely, it seemed like she was always looking into Emily's eyes.
"What I said is true." Emily's voice took on a different tone. More forceful. "You are delicate, you are innocent... but I see you now. I see you fully. I used to think you were perfect in every way. But that was... shallow childishness. That is not love as I love you now. I saw you, Yumi. I saw you at the concert. Your determination, yes. Your talent, yes. But your egoism, too."
"My...?"
"Your egoism, Yumi. You have such talent, so much respect and adoration from so many. As a hero, as a performer, you are loved so much, but you're still not satisfied."
"I just... I just wanted to make something more of myself."
"No, Yumi, my darling. Or you wouldn't have had to participate in a public event, would you? You could have honed your craft in private. You could have satisfied yourself or your friends with your growth. But you had to display it. You had to have everyone applaud it. You had to go up in the estimation of others. Even your powers, Yumi, even they are performance. Even your transformations exist to charm, to captivate others. You are sweet, and kind, and gentle-hearted, Yumi - but you are deeply, deeply vain."
She was right. Yumi had been trying to be modest, trying to accept that she would never be an excellent musician and that she should be happy with the many talents she did possess. But she'd had to show off, again. She'd had to prance about in front of an audience, again. What did it matter if her dress had been more demure? What did it matter if she was playing a difficult piano piece rather than executing a difficult dance routine? And to think, she'd been distressed that the talent Emily had forced on her. But not because of the disturbing, sinister implications of being affected so profoundly - it was just because the applause hadn't really been for her.
"It's like I don't exist unless someone's looking at me," Yumi thought.
"I'm looking at you," Emily replied.
As they'd spoken, Emily had shattered her icy prison, but Yumi hadn't noticed. She'd put her hands on Yumi's glistening shoulders, but Yumi hadn't noticed. She only really noticed when Emily wanted her to.
"Do you see now?" Emily asked. "Do you see that I was only trying to help you, Yumi? Why shouldn't you be vain? Why shouldn't you be an egoist? You are different. You are better."
"Stop it!" Yumi cried. She stumbled away from Emily. She felt danger here, danger that no amount of physical strength could overcome. She felt an urgent need to get away from her captor, that even if she could overpower Emily physically she would still be in peril.
The bedroom no longer seemed tasteful, and comfortable. It seemed small, and cramped, and cold. The walls were stained. The bed was rickety, and dirty. The wallpaper was peeling. Emily did not seem dashing and charismatic anymore. As Yumi looked into her captor's eyes, eyes that followed her wherever she turned, she felt the unmistakable impression that she was in the jaws of a predator. The jaws were closing shut, squeezing, piercing, invading -
"NO!" Yumi screamed, at once defiant and as frightened as a child. She turned and ran, hurling a flurry of dagger sharp icicles behind her. She froze the door in front of her as she reached it, and it crumbled to dust as she pushed through it. Another wave of her hand made a slope of ice down the length of the stairs leading up to the bedroom. She threw herself down it, shoes cutting into the ice, leaping from it, running for the front door, throwing it open, panting, heart pounding, desperate for the relief and the safety of the night air. It would have been harder for her to have been more utterly thwarted.
Emily was on the other side of the door. The bedroom was on the other side of the door. The same bedroom that Yumi had just escaped from, the same one that was, as far as Yumi knew, still two flights of stairs above her. She looked back over her shoulder, and saw the door that she had destroyed, saw the bedroom through it. She looked in front of her, and saw the same bedroom.
"Wh... what?" Yumi gasped. She thought she was going mad. What was happening? This wasn't like a superpower, this was like magic. How could the same room be in two places at once? How could Emily have gained such power? In fact, Yumi would much rather have been going mad, for if Emily truly could do this then how could she possibly escape?
And yet as confusion swirled about her, Yumi could not help but feel as if there was something... familiar about all this. Nothing that she herself had experienced, but something someone else had told her... but what, and when? She could almost picture it: someone smiling, wryly, and stretching their arms over their head. Yumi remembered the smell of sweat. Whoever it was had answered a question. Yumi even remembered what they'd said.
"Technically, he wasn't the first."
But Yumi couldn't remember what the context was, couldn't even remember who it was that had said it. She knew it was important, but it just wouldn't come to mind. A fearful thought arose within Yumi that the memory wasn't just inaccessible: it was being kept from her.
"Stop now," Emily said. She approached the doorway, taking long, deliberate strides.
Yumi looked up to the top of the stairs, and saw - impossibly - that Emily was visible in that doorway as well.
"I have to confess," Emily said, her voice coming both from in front of Yumi and above her, "I am beginning to get a little irritated with you, Yumi. I have proved, haven't I, that you want to be elevated. You know that I read your heart rightly. You accuse me of putting thoughts in your head, but I am only telling you what I find there. Denying me is hypocrisy."
From both doorways she lunged, but only one pair of hands seized Yumi by her upper arms.
"I don't want to use forceful methods. I don't want to do what Arachna would have done, Yumi. But though I have exceeded the pitiful state I was once in, that part of me is still there. Shall I unleash it? Shall I do that, Yumi? I know how that first night we met has haunted you, and I do regret it - but I will do it again if I must."
Once more, Yumi was drowned in the blood red of Emily's eyes, but she couldn't escape them this time. She could not argue. She could not reason. Her resistance felt... childish now, foolish. Emily's words rang hard and strong in her mind and Yumi could not escape them. She opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn't. She stood still, with her arms by her sides, helpless. Her only reply to what Emily had said was a meek, soft whimper.
She could not move as Emily circled her. She could not move as Emily prised from her arms and shoulders her long, blue shawl. When her arms were taken and crossed at right angles behind her, the rest of Yumi's body remained still. When the shawl was wrapped, slowly, around her forearms she did not move then either. Even as the coils tightened, binding her arms, box-tying the petite beauty, she could not shake off the spell that had been cast over her. Even as she screamed internally, even as this second bondage made her moan with humiliation and distress, she did not fight. She did not even beg Emily not to tie her up this time, for she knew that it made no real difference one way or the other.
"I don't mean to mock you," Emily said, and stroked Yumi's blue-tinted hair, her silk-covered hands colder than those of Blue Star. "But you must know that you can't just... out-muscle me. I respect your strength. I'm not boasting of my own might... but we are in different categories, aren't we? Like..." She laughed, slightly. "Your powers trying to overcome mine would be like trying to solve a differential equation by cooking. It's just not how things are." She leaned in closer, and Yumi felt Emily's teeth close gently around her right ear, eliciting a mousy little cry of protest from the slender maiden. "Don't you remember how I took you at the concert, Yumi?" She thrust her hand through one of the slits of Yumi's dress, and onto one of Yumi's shapely, beautiful legs. She wrapped her fingers around it, enclasping almost half the circumference of Yumi's thigh. She squeezed it as she moved her hand over its length, and a deep red began to form in the cheeks of the Blue Star.
"Do you recall? You stood, so elegant, so exquisite beneath the spotlight, Yumi. I found your eyes in the darkness, didn't I?" She began to move her hand inward, the outsides of her fingers brushing against Yumi's other thigh.
"Oh!" Yumi intoned, staring into space with wide, wet eyes and an open mouth, captured by pure, sensual surprise. "OH!" she gasped, trembling as she felt Emily's index finger moving against the edge of her panties. To her shame, steam began rising from her skin. The blue glow in her eyes was fading. The power of the Blue Star was dimming as Emily mastered her, as sensual pleasure took hold of her like iron shackles.
"You saw me," Emily whispered, tracing along the border of Yumi's underwear with a silken glove. "You were caught in my eyes at once. So did you really think you could fight me, physically? With just my eyes I made you swoon."
"Ohh..."
"With just my eyes I made you fall."
"Oh!"
"With just my eyes," Emily whispered, pressing an open hand against Yumi's womanhood, "I made you pulse."
"OH!" Yumi cried. "OH! Oh... OHHH!!" Her body trembled, convulsing with pleasure like she was being struck by lightning. It poured into her, and through her, and the helpless maiden shook as waves of ecstasy travelled up and down her body, shooting and throbbing through her, in every pore, in every cell. "I - I can't - I can't... OOHHHH!!" Yumi screamed, as a second wave, even more intense, fired through her, the sound of her screams almost as sensuous of the sight of her writhing and gasping, sweat running between her breasts, over her shoulders and her naked legs. The damsel looked helplessly into Emily's gaze with wide, innocent eyes, open mouthed in disbelief that Emily could do this to her.
"Do you want it to stop?" Emily asked, slipping her other hand into the window of Yumi's dress, clutching her ripe bosom, massaging it, teasing her soft pink bud with her thumb, feeling the supple bounce of Yumi's breasts, their feminine firmness. "Say 'yes'," Emily whispered, "and I'll stop right now."
"No," Yumi replied, the shame in her voice overwhelmed by the almost agonising pleasure. "I - I want to s-say 'yes' but I - I - can't! It's... you're - you're so strong and I - I can't - I can't - I can't - OOHHHH!!!" There was an explosion within her. She felt her body surrender utterly, felt a rush of heat between her thighs. Her silky legs shuddered, and gave way, and Yumi fell moaning to her knees. Surrendered, humbled, quivering, and soaked in defeat.
For a while she just knelt there, shuddering as the sensuous aftershocks travelled through her. She looked down at the ground, feeling the steam rising from her skin as her powers continued to fade. It idly occurred to her that, when she'd first been taken by Emily, far less than what she'd just experienced had been enough to rob the Blue Star's powers from her completely, connected as they were to her control of her own sensuality. So, there was that. She wanted to laugh at herself. She'd tried to become stronger, yet the result had been the same. She'd tried to be less greedy for adulation, yet the result had been the same. She'd tried to be more, yet Emily had brought her so very, very low.
"A star... fades," Yumi said, almost inaudibly. It was somehow shameful to clothe herself in strength when she was so very powerless. Her clothing vanished as dust in a breeze, the cerulean glow of the Blue Star vanishing completely. Her transformation reversed, the shawl binding her arms vanished too: but all they did was drop to her sides. Yumi left herself as she had been before, as she truly was now: stripped.
"There now, my darling," Emily said, "that was hardly so unpleasant, was it?" She ran her fingers through Yumi's dark hair, her captive feeling sweet tingles running over her scalp and down her neck. "I think a little... aftercare wouldn't go amiss, don't you?"
"Alright," Yumi said, dully. "Whatever... you wish."
Emily lifted Yumi's slim, light body from her knees, but did not allow her to stand for long. With one arm she hooked both of Yumi's flawless, moist legs. With the other, she took Yumi by her back, and lifted the damsel into her arms.
"Uhhhhnnhhhhh..." Yumi sighed, as she flopped limply into Emily's embrace, her body still warm and twitching with pleasure. Her calves swayed in the air, light as feathers, her heel-clad feet pointing down, continuing the graceful curve of her legs. It made Yumi seem all the more feminine. All the more delicate.
Adding still more to this impression, Yumi's head fell back as she was lifted, falling slightly to the side as well as bending backwards, drawing emphasis to the finely sculpted musculature of her neck. Looking down at her, Emily could see the pale smoothness of that neck - and the throbbing pulse within it. The maiden's whole body throbbed. She blushed heavily: red filled her cheeks; red washed over her neck; red swelled in her bosom. She smelled - of sweat, and more besides. It was a sharp, almost sweet smell, and Emily drank deep of it as she carried the fallen, naked beauty in her arms.
"Ooohhhhnnnn..." Yumi mewed, breathily, as Emily set her down on a soft, plush couch, propping up her head with a thick, purple cushion. Yumi fell back against it, her hands fallen limply in her lap. Her thighs were pressed tightly together, her calves splayed girlishly apart.
Emily sat next to her captive, lifting one of Yumi's legs over the other, making her cross them, before beginning to stroke Yumi's calves with her foot.
Yumi did not resist. Nor did she resist as Emily pulled her closer and kissed her breasts, flicking her buds with her tongue, and licking the channel between her captive's breasts. It gave Yumi pleasure, even, but it was at a distance from her. She felt as though she'd been thrown in a cage, and all her emotions were happening outside it.
"Say you want this," Emily commanded, in between forceful, lustful kisses on Yumi's slim, warm neck.
"I want this..." Yumi replied, almost tonelessly.
"Tell me you want me," Emily said.
"I want you," Yumi replied.
"Use my name."
"I want you, Emil - mhhhphhh?" Before she could even finish the name, Emily had plunged her tongue into her mouth, pulling the naked beauty onto her lap, her hands roving all over her body, so wet and tight - so pristine.
"Mhhh..." Emily moaned, clutching Yumi's delicate shoulders and pulling her close, pressing the maiden's tender breasts against her own chest, squeezing and stimulating them with her own bosom as she kissed her deeply, so deeply, so longingly. She felt Yumi's sensuous frame yielding utterly to her, heard her cry out into Emily's mouth as the damsel's body rewarded her again for her defeat, her thighs quivering as another set of throbbing waves of pleasure taking hold of her. But it was, still, her body that was giving in, and that was not enough.
"Tell me," Emily said. "Tell me that you love me."
"I - love you," Yumi replied, between her panting, looking meekly into her captor's eyes.
"Tell me that you're mine."
"I am yours," Yumi replied.
But there was something different in her last reply. A subtle crinkle in her eyebrows. A slight curl of her lip. For a moment Emily could have sworn that she saw something red flashing in Yumi's eyes. With a strange tone, she said:
"I'm here, Emily. This is how you've always wanted me."
"Yes," Emily replied, and bent down to run her tongue over Yumi's slim, milky legs.
"Unhh..." Yumi sighed. "Your lover..."
"Mmmhh..."
"Your slave-girl..."
"Mhhhhhhhhh...!"
"Your pet."
Emily jerked upwards. "No. What? No! Not my pet. Not my pet! You've seen how powerful I am, Yumi. If I wanted some pretty slave I could take one!"
"Like... you took me," Yumi said. She smiled, but Emily found no pleasure in it. "You didn't need to convince me. You didn't need to seduce me. You should have... should have just started like this. You just... took my will away. It was easy, wasn't it? To take me. To make me your pretty puppet... . Tell me to surrender and I'll surrender. Tell me to...come...and I'll do it. I'll want whatever you tell me to want. You can even make me love you. I'm empty, and you can fill me with whatever you like, my master..."
"Don't call me that!" Emily said, trying to sound firm, but letting just a little desperation creep into her voice. "Don't you understand? I don't want to - to just take you. I want to elevate you. I want you to stand at my side, Yumi, as you were always meant to! Elegantly. Gratefully. Beautifully!"
"Mhh..." Yumi mewed. "Whatever you want. What I want... doesn't matter, does it?" She touched herself, stroking her own breasts and her own legs, moaning with pleasure. But her voice... something in her voice wasn't meek anymore. It was sharp. It was almost cruel. And her eyes met Emily's and answered their red gaze with a kind of strange strength. "I'm so beautiful, aren't I, Emily? That's all that matters. That's all you really want... and now you have it. Always." She pushed herself closer, took Emily's hands and placed them onto her breasts. "Have me. Use me. Debase me. Cast me aside when you're bored of me and keep me bound and gagged until you want me again, Arachna. Drain me. Paralyse me. It's the flesh you want, and you can pour anything into it, anything you like. Ignore the woman, take the flesh! Take the flesh! Spit the rest of me out! Just take the -"
Both women jerked sharply away from each other. Yumi did not know where her words had come from. They did not sound like her own, but they must have been, for they were not Emily's, surely? What had come over her?
"This house... there is something evil happening here. To both of us...!" Yumi shrank timidly from Emily, weakly holding her hands over her breasts, fearful of a power she could not see, a power at once red and cold.
But Yumi was hardly affected at all by her words, not when comparing her reaction to that of Emily. She had leapt up from the couch, and was groaning, covering her eyes with her hands, stumbling and shrieking.
"No!" she moaned. "No, I don't... this wasn't what I wanted! This wasn't what you promised me!" She turned to Yumi with desperation in her eyes. "I didn't mean... none of this... not to hurt you... not even to meet you... I tried to be... to be... AGHHH!!" she howled. "This isn't what we agreed!" she shouted into the air. "I'll kill you!"
In Yumi's sheer, mystified confusion, a memory flickered again. Something in Emily's words had made her remember... what was it?
"Technically he wasn't the first." That sentence came into her mind again. But who had said it, and why? And why did it matter?
"Oh yes," Yumi thought, the hold on her mind relaxed somewhat as Emily convulsed and shouted. "I remember now." Yumi had asked someone about a question. 'What was it like killing a man?'
"Technically he wasn't the first," had been the answer. "Jackson Morrow was the first man I actually, like... went out of my way to kill," she had said, with a weary gravity. "But I've killed before him. I guess I didn't mean to? I wasn't too fucking sad about it either." She'd smiled, but it was forced, and tired. "Two Hallowe'ens ago. That seems like a whole other life, now. Jesus. Bet you'll never guess how I spent it. Kidnapped again!" she'd laughed before Yumi could answer. "This was one to remember, though. Lady thought she was a vampire. Like... I mean maybe she was right; she could definitely do some weird shit. She could do a sorta Mysteria-thing, only, like... more. You know, she could mess with space... make corridors go on forever, that kinda thing. She could suck energy out of people, do a mind control thing on people, turn into..." She'd scratched her chin. "I was gonna say a bat, but I think I'm making that shit up. Mist! She could turn into mist, that was it!" She'd snorted with laughter. "Freaky shit, right? But I uh... kinda made her explode? So there's one nemesis that isn't coming back for a rematch!"
What did it mean? It was true, Emily had displayed every power on the list she remembered, but that gave many more questions than it did answers. Yumi tried to gather her thoughts, tried to throw off the shackles that were still on her, but she was not given time. Emily had recovered.
She turned, slowly. She strode from where she stood to where Yumi sat, still weakly writhing. She knelt down near her.
"I'm very sorry," she said, speaking smoothly, and softly, and in a disconcertingly altered tone. Even her accent was different. "I had... an internal disagreement. Needed to reorder my priorities." She shook her head, as if trying to get something out of her hair. "It's strange... as I am now, I really do care for you. So much so that - well things, got very confused, little one."
Yumi pulled back. Something had happened to her, something beyond the transformation that Yumi had already seen. She was naked, and drained of her power, but... knowing that it had been Emily at least made it familiar somehow. But now? The woman in front of her had Emily's face, but she felt entirely like a stranger. "...Emily?" Yumi said, with tentative fear.
"Yes," she replied. "I suppose so. And yet... the name rings a little hollow now, doesn't it?" She smiled, slowly. Yumi saw in her mouth a pair of slowly growing, sharpening fangs. "I think," she said, "I prefer 'Erin'." She laughed, and the room grew cold. "You know," she said, "you were right. You are beautiful." She looked down at Yumi's helpless, naked body with deep, red lust.
Yumi whimpered in fear.
So the change was more subtle, now. Her skin seemed to sparkle slightly, like snow suddenly exposed to a cold, bright sun. A thin, crystal blue shawl was wrapped around her slim shoulders, snaking delicately around both her arms. From hip to neck her body was wrapped in a figure hugging, silver-blue dress, a dress whose folds seemed to refract and reflect and confuse the eye like it was made of a million shards of ice. To soothe and satisfy the eye, a plunging gap was at her chest, revealing the inner halves of her bosom and the tempting channel that ran between them. The skirt of the dress flowed freely about her legs, thin and translucent, and split at left and right, so her shimmering, sweet-smelling legs were naked, an all too generous helping to the roving eye that danced over the splendour of the Blue Star. Short, heeled boots, so short they didn't quite cover the joints of her ankles, covered her delicate feet. Her hair was midnight blue, flowing as if in a breeze behind her. Her eyes radiated cobalt light. This was Stellar at the zenith of her power.
And yet, as the cold wind billowed lovingly against its mistress' skin, Stellar could feel that that power was not as it ought to have been. Barely had she drawn upon enough strength to move, much less access her powers. She took a step, and she moved with flawless elegance, but she felt the fatigue gnawing at her, the desire to fall, to faint. To surrender. But she didn't. With a grunt of effort, she waved her hand. With this wave she wrapped a leash around the neck of the laws of thermodynamics, and bid the air around Emily's body to snap-freeze.
"Ahh!" Emily gasped, and for the first time since her capture Stellar saw alarm in her kidnapper's expression - as she was shackled in a thick prison of ice. It had simply appeared around her in an instant, covering Emily from neck to foot in frozen air and water, as thick as a tree trunk on all sides.
Stellar was wary of Emily's newfound strength, but she seemed genuinely trapped. Was victory to be achieved so easily?
She took a step towards her enemy, and the effort made her feel stronger. The second step had the same effect. She felt refreshed, and as her skirt lightly tickled her thighs, she felt... well, she felt sexy. Her passivity, her meekness, they were melting from her as she cooled, and as she cooled she felt her power returning. Stellar's power was an expression of her selfhood, and as she remembered herself, that power flowed back to her.
"Remarkable," Emily said. There was a flash of something on her face, perhaps irritation, perhaps confusion. "I didn't - I wasn't aware that you could do that." She smiled, too widely. "You are special, Yumi, you really are."
"Explain," Stellar commanded. Her power gave her calm, gave her authority. "Explain how you have become like this."
Emily did not answer. Her smile faded into a serious frown, but that was all.
"Answer me," Stellar demanded. "I could make a sheath of ice over your face and smother you. I could turn the prison I've made into a thousand needles and tear you to pieces."
"You won't," Emily said, gently. "You have never killed, Yumi, nor could you." She flexed the muscles of her powerful body: there was an ominous creak, but the ice prison did not give way. Not then, at least. "You are a delicate soul. An innocent soul."
"Stop it," Stellar said, afraid of the weakness returning, shrinking reflexively from Emily's honeyed words. She moved close to her abductor, close enough to touch. "What you say means nothing. Everything about you is a lie. Everything... false."
Stellar would have been well within her rights to leave it there, with anger and insult. Surely Emily had earned it. But with the spell lifted, Yumi began to think more clearly.
"Whatever has happened to you," Stellar said, "it is unnatural. The new powers, the new... you. I've never heard of any superhuman being able to change someone like this. I'd fear any that could!" Her eyebrows furrowed in deep concern, her gravity only adding to the gentle coldness of her beauty. "Emily," she said, her tongue alighting on each syllable as softly as a snowflake. "Do you need help?"
Emily smiled. She laughed quietly, shook her head as if what Yumi had said was foolish. Her blood-red eyes glittered. But Yumi could have sworn that she'd seen her mouth the word 'yes'.
"What? Emily, did you -" She resisted an instinct to put her hand on her Emily's face, still wary of a trap. But stirred to compassion, she looked openly and deeply into her abductor's eyes.
They were so red, weren't they? Brighter on the outside, more definitely the colour of blood. Emily's irises were darker, closer to burgundy. Her pupils were almost black, but even they were a dark, deep red. So deep, like an ocean lay within her eyes, dark and warm and never-ending. Yumi just... kept on looking. She tried to look away, but whether she moved her eyes, or her head, or turned around completely, it seemed like she was always looking into Emily's eyes.
"What I said is true." Emily's voice took on a different tone. More forceful. "You are delicate, you are innocent... but I see you now. I see you fully. I used to think you were perfect in every way. But that was... shallow childishness. That is not love as I love you now. I saw you, Yumi. I saw you at the concert. Your determination, yes. Your talent, yes. But your egoism, too."
"My...?"
"Your egoism, Yumi. You have such talent, so much respect and adoration from so many. As a hero, as a performer, you are loved so much, but you're still not satisfied."
"I just... I just wanted to make something more of myself."
"No, Yumi, my darling. Or you wouldn't have had to participate in a public event, would you? You could have honed your craft in private. You could have satisfied yourself or your friends with your growth. But you had to display it. You had to have everyone applaud it. You had to go up in the estimation of others. Even your powers, Yumi, even they are performance. Even your transformations exist to charm, to captivate others. You are sweet, and kind, and gentle-hearted, Yumi - but you are deeply, deeply vain."
She was right. Yumi had been trying to be modest, trying to accept that she would never be an excellent musician and that she should be happy with the many talents she did possess. But she'd had to show off, again. She'd had to prance about in front of an audience, again. What did it matter if her dress had been more demure? What did it matter if she was playing a difficult piano piece rather than executing a difficult dance routine? And to think, she'd been distressed that the talent Emily had forced on her. But not because of the disturbing, sinister implications of being affected so profoundly - it was just because the applause hadn't really been for her.
"It's like I don't exist unless someone's looking at me," Yumi thought.
"I'm looking at you," Emily replied.
As they'd spoken, Emily had shattered her icy prison, but Yumi hadn't noticed. She'd put her hands on Yumi's glistening shoulders, but Yumi hadn't noticed. She only really noticed when Emily wanted her to.
"Do you see now?" Emily asked. "Do you see that I was only trying to help you, Yumi? Why shouldn't you be vain? Why shouldn't you be an egoist? You are different. You are better."
"Stop it!" Yumi cried. She stumbled away from Emily. She felt danger here, danger that no amount of physical strength could overcome. She felt an urgent need to get away from her captor, that even if she could overpower Emily physically she would still be in peril.
The bedroom no longer seemed tasteful, and comfortable. It seemed small, and cramped, and cold. The walls were stained. The bed was rickety, and dirty. The wallpaper was peeling. Emily did not seem dashing and charismatic anymore. As Yumi looked into her captor's eyes, eyes that followed her wherever she turned, she felt the unmistakable impression that she was in the jaws of a predator. The jaws were closing shut, squeezing, piercing, invading -
"NO!" Yumi screamed, at once defiant and as frightened as a child. She turned and ran, hurling a flurry of dagger sharp icicles behind her. She froze the door in front of her as she reached it, and it crumbled to dust as she pushed through it. Another wave of her hand made a slope of ice down the length of the stairs leading up to the bedroom. She threw herself down it, shoes cutting into the ice, leaping from it, running for the front door, throwing it open, panting, heart pounding, desperate for the relief and the safety of the night air. It would have been harder for her to have been more utterly thwarted.
Emily was on the other side of the door. The bedroom was on the other side of the door. The same bedroom that Yumi had just escaped from, the same one that was, as far as Yumi knew, still two flights of stairs above her. She looked back over her shoulder, and saw the door that she had destroyed, saw the bedroom through it. She looked in front of her, and saw the same bedroom.
"Wh... what?" Yumi gasped. She thought she was going mad. What was happening? This wasn't like a superpower, this was like magic. How could the same room be in two places at once? How could Emily have gained such power? In fact, Yumi would much rather have been going mad, for if Emily truly could do this then how could she possibly escape?
And yet as confusion swirled about her, Yumi could not help but feel as if there was something... familiar about all this. Nothing that she herself had experienced, but something someone else had told her... but what, and when? She could almost picture it: someone smiling, wryly, and stretching their arms over their head. Yumi remembered the smell of sweat. Whoever it was had answered a question. Yumi even remembered what they'd said.
"Technically, he wasn't the first."
But Yumi couldn't remember what the context was, couldn't even remember who it was that had said it. She knew it was important, but it just wouldn't come to mind. A fearful thought arose within Yumi that the memory wasn't just inaccessible: it was being kept from her.
"Stop now," Emily said. She approached the doorway, taking long, deliberate strides.
Yumi looked up to the top of the stairs, and saw - impossibly - that Emily was visible in that doorway as well.
"I have to confess," Emily said, her voice coming both from in front of Yumi and above her, "I am beginning to get a little irritated with you, Yumi. I have proved, haven't I, that you want to be elevated. You know that I read your heart rightly. You accuse me of putting thoughts in your head, but I am only telling you what I find there. Denying me is hypocrisy."
From both doorways she lunged, but only one pair of hands seized Yumi by her upper arms.
"I don't want to use forceful methods. I don't want to do what Arachna would have done, Yumi. But though I have exceeded the pitiful state I was once in, that part of me is still there. Shall I unleash it? Shall I do that, Yumi? I know how that first night we met has haunted you, and I do regret it - but I will do it again if I must."
Once more, Yumi was drowned in the blood red of Emily's eyes, but she couldn't escape them this time. She could not argue. She could not reason. Her resistance felt... childish now, foolish. Emily's words rang hard and strong in her mind and Yumi could not escape them. She opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn't. She stood still, with her arms by her sides, helpless. Her only reply to what Emily had said was a meek, soft whimper.
She could not move as Emily circled her. She could not move as Emily prised from her arms and shoulders her long, blue shawl. When her arms were taken and crossed at right angles behind her, the rest of Yumi's body remained still. When the shawl was wrapped, slowly, around her forearms she did not move then either. Even as the coils tightened, binding her arms, box-tying the petite beauty, she could not shake off the spell that had been cast over her. Even as she screamed internally, even as this second bondage made her moan with humiliation and distress, she did not fight. She did not even beg Emily not to tie her up this time, for she knew that it made no real difference one way or the other.
"I don't mean to mock you," Emily said, and stroked Yumi's blue-tinted hair, her silk-covered hands colder than those of Blue Star. "But you must know that you can't just... out-muscle me. I respect your strength. I'm not boasting of my own might... but we are in different categories, aren't we? Like..." She laughed, slightly. "Your powers trying to overcome mine would be like trying to solve a differential equation by cooking. It's just not how things are." She leaned in closer, and Yumi felt Emily's teeth close gently around her right ear, eliciting a mousy little cry of protest from the slender maiden. "Don't you remember how I took you at the concert, Yumi?" She thrust her hand through one of the slits of Yumi's dress, and onto one of Yumi's shapely, beautiful legs. She wrapped her fingers around it, enclasping almost half the circumference of Yumi's thigh. She squeezed it as she moved her hand over its length, and a deep red began to form in the cheeks of the Blue Star.
"Do you recall? You stood, so elegant, so exquisite beneath the spotlight, Yumi. I found your eyes in the darkness, didn't I?" She began to move her hand inward, the outsides of her fingers brushing against Yumi's other thigh.
"Oh!" Yumi intoned, staring into space with wide, wet eyes and an open mouth, captured by pure, sensual surprise. "OH!" she gasped, trembling as she felt Emily's index finger moving against the edge of her panties. To her shame, steam began rising from her skin. The blue glow in her eyes was fading. The power of the Blue Star was dimming as Emily mastered her, as sensual pleasure took hold of her like iron shackles.
"You saw me," Emily whispered, tracing along the border of Yumi's underwear with a silken glove. "You were caught in my eyes at once. So did you really think you could fight me, physically? With just my eyes I made you swoon."
"Ohh..."
"With just my eyes I made you fall."
"Oh!"
"With just my eyes," Emily whispered, pressing an open hand against Yumi's womanhood, "I made you pulse."
"OH!" Yumi cried. "OH! Oh... OHHH!!" Her body trembled, convulsing with pleasure like she was being struck by lightning. It poured into her, and through her, and the helpless maiden shook as waves of ecstasy travelled up and down her body, shooting and throbbing through her, in every pore, in every cell. "I - I can't - I can't... OOHHHH!!" Yumi screamed, as a second wave, even more intense, fired through her, the sound of her screams almost as sensuous of the sight of her writhing and gasping, sweat running between her breasts, over her shoulders and her naked legs. The damsel looked helplessly into Emily's gaze with wide, innocent eyes, open mouthed in disbelief that Emily could do this to her.
"Do you want it to stop?" Emily asked, slipping her other hand into the window of Yumi's dress, clutching her ripe bosom, massaging it, teasing her soft pink bud with her thumb, feeling the supple bounce of Yumi's breasts, their feminine firmness. "Say 'yes'," Emily whispered, "and I'll stop right now."
"No," Yumi replied, the shame in her voice overwhelmed by the almost agonising pleasure. "I - I want to s-say 'yes' but I - I - can't! It's... you're - you're so strong and I - I can't - I can't - I can't - OOHHHH!!!" There was an explosion within her. She felt her body surrender utterly, felt a rush of heat between her thighs. Her silky legs shuddered, and gave way, and Yumi fell moaning to her knees. Surrendered, humbled, quivering, and soaked in defeat.
For a while she just knelt there, shuddering as the sensuous aftershocks travelled through her. She looked down at the ground, feeling the steam rising from her skin as her powers continued to fade. It idly occurred to her that, when she'd first been taken by Emily, far less than what she'd just experienced had been enough to rob the Blue Star's powers from her completely, connected as they were to her control of her own sensuality. So, there was that. She wanted to laugh at herself. She'd tried to become stronger, yet the result had been the same. She'd tried to be less greedy for adulation, yet the result had been the same. She'd tried to be more, yet Emily had brought her so very, very low.
"A star... fades," Yumi said, almost inaudibly. It was somehow shameful to clothe herself in strength when she was so very powerless. Her clothing vanished as dust in a breeze, the cerulean glow of the Blue Star vanishing completely. Her transformation reversed, the shawl binding her arms vanished too: but all they did was drop to her sides. Yumi left herself as she had been before, as she truly was now: stripped.
"There now, my darling," Emily said, "that was hardly so unpleasant, was it?" She ran her fingers through Yumi's dark hair, her captive feeling sweet tingles running over her scalp and down her neck. "I think a little... aftercare wouldn't go amiss, don't you?"
"Alright," Yumi said, dully. "Whatever... you wish."
Emily lifted Yumi's slim, light body from her knees, but did not allow her to stand for long. With one arm she hooked both of Yumi's flawless, moist legs. With the other, she took Yumi by her back, and lifted the damsel into her arms.
"Uhhhhnnhhhhh..." Yumi sighed, as she flopped limply into Emily's embrace, her body still warm and twitching with pleasure. Her calves swayed in the air, light as feathers, her heel-clad feet pointing down, continuing the graceful curve of her legs. It made Yumi seem all the more feminine. All the more delicate.
Adding still more to this impression, Yumi's head fell back as she was lifted, falling slightly to the side as well as bending backwards, drawing emphasis to the finely sculpted musculature of her neck. Looking down at her, Emily could see the pale smoothness of that neck - and the throbbing pulse within it. The maiden's whole body throbbed. She blushed heavily: red filled her cheeks; red washed over her neck; red swelled in her bosom. She smelled - of sweat, and more besides. It was a sharp, almost sweet smell, and Emily drank deep of it as she carried the fallen, naked beauty in her arms.
"Ooohhhhnnnn..." Yumi mewed, breathily, as Emily set her down on a soft, plush couch, propping up her head with a thick, purple cushion. Yumi fell back against it, her hands fallen limply in her lap. Her thighs were pressed tightly together, her calves splayed girlishly apart.
Emily sat next to her captive, lifting one of Yumi's legs over the other, making her cross them, before beginning to stroke Yumi's calves with her foot.
Yumi did not resist. Nor did she resist as Emily pulled her closer and kissed her breasts, flicking her buds with her tongue, and licking the channel between her captive's breasts. It gave Yumi pleasure, even, but it was at a distance from her. She felt as though she'd been thrown in a cage, and all her emotions were happening outside it.
"Say you want this," Emily commanded, in between forceful, lustful kisses on Yumi's slim, warm neck.
"I want this..." Yumi replied, almost tonelessly.
"Tell me you want me," Emily said.
"I want you," Yumi replied.
"Use my name."
"I want you, Emil - mhhhphhh?" Before she could even finish the name, Emily had plunged her tongue into her mouth, pulling the naked beauty onto her lap, her hands roving all over her body, so wet and tight - so pristine.
"Mhhh..." Emily moaned, clutching Yumi's delicate shoulders and pulling her close, pressing the maiden's tender breasts against her own chest, squeezing and stimulating them with her own bosom as she kissed her deeply, so deeply, so longingly. She felt Yumi's sensuous frame yielding utterly to her, heard her cry out into Emily's mouth as the damsel's body rewarded her again for her defeat, her thighs quivering as another set of throbbing waves of pleasure taking hold of her. But it was, still, her body that was giving in, and that was not enough.
"Tell me," Emily said. "Tell me that you love me."
"I - love you," Yumi replied, between her panting, looking meekly into her captor's eyes.
"Tell me that you're mine."
"I am yours," Yumi replied.
But there was something different in her last reply. A subtle crinkle in her eyebrows. A slight curl of her lip. For a moment Emily could have sworn that she saw something red flashing in Yumi's eyes. With a strange tone, she said:
"I'm here, Emily. This is how you've always wanted me."
"Yes," Emily replied, and bent down to run her tongue over Yumi's slim, milky legs.
"Unhh..." Yumi sighed. "Your lover..."
"Mmmhh..."
"Your slave-girl..."
"Mhhhhhhhhh...!"
"Your pet."
Emily jerked upwards. "No. What? No! Not my pet. Not my pet! You've seen how powerful I am, Yumi. If I wanted some pretty slave I could take one!"
"Like... you took me," Yumi said. She smiled, but Emily found no pleasure in it. "You didn't need to convince me. You didn't need to seduce me. You should have... should have just started like this. You just... took my will away. It was easy, wasn't it? To take me. To make me your pretty puppet... . Tell me to surrender and I'll surrender. Tell me to...come...and I'll do it. I'll want whatever you tell me to want. You can even make me love you. I'm empty, and you can fill me with whatever you like, my master..."
"Don't call me that!" Emily said, trying to sound firm, but letting just a little desperation creep into her voice. "Don't you understand? I don't want to - to just take you. I want to elevate you. I want you to stand at my side, Yumi, as you were always meant to! Elegantly. Gratefully. Beautifully!"
"Mhh..." Yumi mewed. "Whatever you want. What I want... doesn't matter, does it?" She touched herself, stroking her own breasts and her own legs, moaning with pleasure. But her voice... something in her voice wasn't meek anymore. It was sharp. It was almost cruel. And her eyes met Emily's and answered their red gaze with a kind of strange strength. "I'm so beautiful, aren't I, Emily? That's all that matters. That's all you really want... and now you have it. Always." She pushed herself closer, took Emily's hands and placed them onto her breasts. "Have me. Use me. Debase me. Cast me aside when you're bored of me and keep me bound and gagged until you want me again, Arachna. Drain me. Paralyse me. It's the flesh you want, and you can pour anything into it, anything you like. Ignore the woman, take the flesh! Take the flesh! Spit the rest of me out! Just take the -"
Both women jerked sharply away from each other. Yumi did not know where her words had come from. They did not sound like her own, but they must have been, for they were not Emily's, surely? What had come over her?
"This house... there is something evil happening here. To both of us...!" Yumi shrank timidly from Emily, weakly holding her hands over her breasts, fearful of a power she could not see, a power at once red and cold.
But Yumi was hardly affected at all by her words, not when comparing her reaction to that of Emily. She had leapt up from the couch, and was groaning, covering her eyes with her hands, stumbling and shrieking.
"No!" she moaned. "No, I don't... this wasn't what I wanted! This wasn't what you promised me!" She turned to Yumi with desperation in her eyes. "I didn't mean... none of this... not to hurt you... not even to meet you... I tried to be... to be... AGHHH!!" she howled. "This isn't what we agreed!" she shouted into the air. "I'll kill you!"
In Yumi's sheer, mystified confusion, a memory flickered again. Something in Emily's words had made her remember... what was it?
"Technically he wasn't the first." That sentence came into her mind again. But who had said it, and why? And why did it matter?
"Oh yes," Yumi thought, the hold on her mind relaxed somewhat as Emily convulsed and shouted. "I remember now." Yumi had asked someone about a question. 'What was it like killing a man?'
"Technically he wasn't the first," had been the answer. "Jackson Morrow was the first man I actually, like... went out of my way to kill," she had said, with a weary gravity. "But I've killed before him. I guess I didn't mean to? I wasn't too fucking sad about it either." She'd smiled, but it was forced, and tired. "Two Hallowe'ens ago. That seems like a whole other life, now. Jesus. Bet you'll never guess how I spent it. Kidnapped again!" she'd laughed before Yumi could answer. "This was one to remember, though. Lady thought she was a vampire. Like... I mean maybe she was right; she could definitely do some weird shit. She could do a sorta Mysteria-thing, only, like... more. You know, she could mess with space... make corridors go on forever, that kinda thing. She could suck energy out of people, do a mind control thing on people, turn into..." She'd scratched her chin. "I was gonna say a bat, but I think I'm making that shit up. Mist! She could turn into mist, that was it!" She'd snorted with laughter. "Freaky shit, right? But I uh... kinda made her explode? So there's one nemesis that isn't coming back for a rematch!"
What did it mean? It was true, Emily had displayed every power on the list she remembered, but that gave many more questions than it did answers. Yumi tried to gather her thoughts, tried to throw off the shackles that were still on her, but she was not given time. Emily had recovered.
She turned, slowly. She strode from where she stood to where Yumi sat, still weakly writhing. She knelt down near her.
"I'm very sorry," she said, speaking smoothly, and softly, and in a disconcertingly altered tone. Even her accent was different. "I had... an internal disagreement. Needed to reorder my priorities." She shook her head, as if trying to get something out of her hair. "It's strange... as I am now, I really do care for you. So much so that - well things, got very confused, little one."
Yumi pulled back. Something had happened to her, something beyond the transformation that Yumi had already seen. She was naked, and drained of her power, but... knowing that it had been Emily at least made it familiar somehow. But now? The woman in front of her had Emily's face, but she felt entirely like a stranger. "...Emily?" Yumi said, with tentative fear.
"Yes," she replied. "I suppose so. And yet... the name rings a little hollow now, doesn't it?" She smiled, slowly. Yumi saw in her mouth a pair of slowly growing, sharpening fangs. "I think," she said, "I prefer 'Erin'." She laughed, and the room grew cold. "You know," she said, "you were right. You are beautiful." She looked down at Yumi's helpless, naked body with deep, red lust.
Yumi whimpered in fear.
-
Damselbinder
Yumi wanted to scream, but she didn't have the energy. She wanted to fight, but she didn't have the strength. She wanted to spit in her captor's eyes, but she didn't have the fire. She stared up at the un-person that bore down on her, stared with wet, innocent brown eyes, and she felt the stars within herself winking out. She was powerless.
It was Emily, the one standing over her. It was Arachna, a woman who had made Yumi feel fear more than once in her life. But Yumi feared Arachna as one might fear a lion, or an oncoming car. She was unmistakably physically dangerous, but she was not unsettling. She was not the kind of woman who left Yumi quivering, almost paralysed with fright. So it was not, could not be, Emily standing over her. No-one could change that much. Even a telepath could not alter someone as much as Emily had been altered, not without reducing them to a mindless drone. She'd called herself 'Erin', now, and Yumi did not doubt that this was someone other than Arachna, for it seemed almost that she was something other than human.
"Such a beautiful girl... such a sweet girl..." Erin said, sitting next to her panting, silky captive. She had Emily's face. She had her voice. But she had them in the sense that one had a tool, or a weapon. She controlled them, wielded them. She possessed them. And she possessed Yumi, too, curling her fingers around Yumi's shoulder, and pulling her into a cold embrace.
"Don't... touch me..." Yumi said, her voice trembling. Her words were drained of defiance: she could do nothing but plea.
"Sweet Yumi," Erin whispered in Yumi's ear. "So... maidenly. So pure." She twisted her fingers in Yumi's hair, pulled her head to the side. She slid her tongue slowly over Yumi's shoulder, up her neck, to her cheek. Her victim shivered, but did not struggle. "You taste... of youth..." Erin said. "You taste... of struggle. You taste... of pleasure."
A jolt of shame was pumped into Yumi's fear and confusion, and meekly she lowered her eyes. Emily - or Erin, or whoever she was - had made her feel such pleasure, such intense pleasure that it still made her knees weak. She felt invaded, subverted, and totally unprepared to defend herself against this creature. She tried to summon up some kind of strength, but Erin seemed to sense this attempt, and pressed her hand over Yumi's small, soft mouth.
"Mmhhh...?" Yumi whimpered, staring into Erin's red eyes. The hand, the silk over it, felt cool and pleasant against her mouth.
"Do not fight," Erin said, holding Yumi's gaze. "Do not resist, little lily. My company can give such delights..." She took her hand off Yumi's mouth, and when her sweet captive remained tame, she pulled Yumi's light body onto her lap, began caressing her slim thighs.
Yumi wanted to stop her. She willed herself to lift her arms, to strike Erin in the face or at least pull Erin's hand off her legs. But she couldn't. Had her physical strength not been so drained, she could have done it. Had her will not been so drained, she could have done it. Had she not been so frightened, and cold, and naked, she could have done it. But all she had power for was to watch as Erin stroked her, to watch and to moan.
"Who are you?" Yumi asked.
"I am Erin," Yumi's captor replied, gently.
"I... I thought you were dead."
Erin seemed confused. Like a fox or a dog she tilted her head from one side to the other in curious inquiry.
"Oh of course," she said, with dark amusement. "You're a friend of... her, aren't you? You know of me. You know of what was done to me." A hint of something other than poise and control flickered on her face. "Even bodiless I persist. That is all you need know."
Yumi felt a powerful instinct to let that be the end of it, to close her mouth and obediently yield. But she resisted.
"What has happened to... what have you done with Emily?"
Erin smiled softly, kissed Yumi's forehead. "What a sweet little lily you are," Erin said. "You speak of a woman who has done horrible, horrible things to you. You've no need to care about her welfare. She's a vicious, snarling animal, my Yumi. A beast."
"Have you killed her?" Yumi insisted, every syllable an effort.
"... No," Erin replied. "She and I are intermingled now. Like milk in tea," she added with a small laugh. When Yumi did not laugh in return, Erin looked genuinely concerned. With her index finger she tilted Yumi's head to look into her eyes. "Do not worry, my dear one. Do not despair. She accepted me. She invited me. As you will invite me now. Won't you, Yumi? Won't you, my delicate little lily?"
Yumi opened her mouth to say 'no'. But no refusal escaped her lips.
Yumi was being drawn into a deep, red pool. She could feel the water lapping at her ankles, and climbing only higher the longer she looked into Erin's eyes. She remembered well what she had been told of Erin's powers, that she could not only hypnotise as a mortal magician might, but exercise a greater mastery - true mind control, as she had done to a young woman named Kirsten not all that long ago.
"That's what's happening to me," Yumi realised. "She's turning me into her puppet." This realisation brought no new fear. No flight. No battle. As she gazed into Erin's endless eyes, as she felt herself softly stroked, she just breathed deeply and quietly - and stared. There was only the merest hint of dismay in her sensuous whimpers.
"Poor little lily, with your petals all exposed," Erin said, tracing the back of her hand over Yumi's naked bosom. "Let me shield you, little flower." She lifted Yumi to her feet, stood behind her. Yumi felt cold hands in silk gloves against her the small of her bare back, and she shivered. And then the cold feeling began to spread, as though sheets of silk were curling around her torso, her hips, her breasts. Weakly she looked down, and she saw that the feeling was no illusion. Erin had - dressed her. Clad her in a thin, silk negligée, pure white, translucent. Its hem was barely any lower than her panties. Its bodice barely covered the bottom half of her breasts. Yumi felt it tightening slightly against her, cool and comfortable and a little wet. Inasmuch as she could think at all, it seemed to her like Erin had conjured Yumi's skimpy little garment like a magician. But no: she had weaved it.
"She has Emily's powers..." Yumi realised.
Erin turned her sweet captive, holding her lightly by the chin. She caught the maiden in her gaze, embraced her slender figure in her muscular arms, enfolding her in cold shadow. Yumi did not need to be told, turning her head to the side to expose her neck, a gentle throbbing faintly visible beneath her flawless skin. Erin nuzzled Yumi's neck, stroked it with her tongue, nibbled playfully at it, kissed it.
"Are you... going to drink my blood?" Yumi asked, shyly. She flushed a little. The question made her feel silly, and small.
"No, little lily," Erin replied. "It's just that the neck... is so... " Her eyes flashed with excitement. "So erotic," she concluded, and with a rush of cold wind she descended upon her pristine victim.
"Auuuuhhhh!!" Yumi moaned, as she felt teeth at her neck, and the last vestiges of her strength flowing out of her. Her body shone with a faint red light, a light that swirled about her, before draining into her captor, siphoned away. With every thump of her pulse, more and more of her power fled her, sucked greedily into Erin's maw. Her body began to tingle, a heady, narcotising euphoria swirling through her. Her sweet-smelling, naked legs trembled, gave way. A strong arm caught her by the small of her back, and though her knees buckled, Yumi did not fall.
"Mmhhh... mhhh..." Erin moaned with pleasure as she drank, as her lily wilted in her dark embrace. "There," she said in a loud, almost awed whisper. "Oh, you have no idea how long I've waited for this!" She lowered her head again, drinking deep of Yumi's power, as the maiden's arms flopped limply downward, swinging slightly as they dropped.
"Unhh..." Yumi mewed, her eyes fluttering. She felt not only drained, but somnolent, her body sinking into a deep relaxation, her mind and her will fading into shadow. It was not just that she was sleepy - she felt a will to yield herself up, to shut down her mind and let Erin have her way with her beautiful body. 'Take the flesh!' Yumi had screamed, and that was exactly what Erin was doing. The scarlet scream rang hot and sharp in Yumi's memory, the fury that had bubbled up like poison in her throat, poison that she'd spat in Emily's face. Emily had recoiled from it in shame; Erin, Yumi realised, wouldn't even have noticed it.
"Such sweet strength," Erin whispers. "There is nothing unnatural in it... nothing dangerous..." She smiles. She tilts Yumi back like the two are dancing, the captive flopping limply back, her shoulders sagging, strands of her dark hair catching on her ears as gravity tugs it gently downward. A shiver as she feels a cold tongue sliding between her breasts.
"Why - unh! - why are you doing this to me?" Yumi gasps.
"I told you, my darling," Erin says, nuzzling Yumi's neck. "Emily and I are intermingled. She desires you, so I desire you. She adores you, so I adore you. She has wanted to possess you, utterly... so I will grant myself her wish. You will sigh tenderly at my side... forever..."
Her teeth descend again, and Yumi moans as she yields up her essence, throbbing with shameful pleasure, quivering as Erin drains her, absorbs every quantum of resistance. She's pulled back up, forced into the harsh light of Erin's gaze, and she stares back, swaying, sighing, letting herself fall deep into her master's hypnotic control. She feels dread, dark delight running through her, and she almost smiles. Erin kisses her, and Yumi returns the kiss: meek, tame and panting. She is surrendering. She is giving in, giving up, giving herself to her vampiric captor, and though in her heart she moans in dismay as her will is shackled and she is enslaved, she just doesn't have the strength to fight back. She is lost, and she will pulse with ecstasy as she is forever imprisoned.
She is standing, and she is gazing, and she is sinking. There are hands on her shoulders, and lips on her lips, and though Yumi's eyes are closed she still sees the eyes boring into her, excising what little there stands left in the way of Erin's will. It isn't even really resistance anymore, just inertia. And how can she resist? How can she resist when she has condemned everything inside her that could fight?
"I could fight with ego. But ego is evil. Ego is just vanity. Vanity that's dominated my life.
I could fight with sheer resolve. But resolve is evil, because it's just pride and stubbornness, insisting that I know best, when I know nothing at all.
I could fight with indignation, and rage, and hatred. But they are evil too. They're violent, and ugly and red. I am blue, and white, and black. They have never been part of me."
So what was left to her, in the face of the overwhelming pressure from above, and the rapturous, forbidden pleasure from below? She didn't have the right to object. She didn't have the right to resist. She had no rights at all. Any pleasure, any joy that she experienced from that moment on was grace: an undeserved gift.
"Sleep," Erin said, and Yumi felt her mind go blank. She did not want to obey, but she could not find the thoughts to do otherwise.
"Sleep," Erin said, and Yumi felt herself falling. She could not feel the ground beneath her, but she knew that she was on her knees.
"Sleep," Erin said, and Yumi felt a hard floor against her front, pressing against her bosom, her lithe legs askew, her hair forming a curtain over her sweet face, darkening her sight even before her eyes fell shut, her arms against her sides, her face peaceful, her expression meek, somnolent, and blank. She lifted her eyes to see the familiar, alien face of Erin. Yumi saw her, and she gave a little cry of anguish, for Erin's face - Emily's face - was so frighening. As she fainted, as her consciousness submitted to Erin's command, she imagined that she could hear a scream, but she was already deeply asleep before she could realise that the scream had been Emily's.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It was Emily, the one standing over her. It was Arachna, a woman who had made Yumi feel fear more than once in her life. But Yumi feared Arachna as one might fear a lion, or an oncoming car. She was unmistakably physically dangerous, but she was not unsettling. She was not the kind of woman who left Yumi quivering, almost paralysed with fright. So it was not, could not be, Emily standing over her. No-one could change that much. Even a telepath could not alter someone as much as Emily had been altered, not without reducing them to a mindless drone. She'd called herself 'Erin', now, and Yumi did not doubt that this was someone other than Arachna, for it seemed almost that she was something other than human.
"Such a beautiful girl... such a sweet girl..." Erin said, sitting next to her panting, silky captive. She had Emily's face. She had her voice. But she had them in the sense that one had a tool, or a weapon. She controlled them, wielded them. She possessed them. And she possessed Yumi, too, curling her fingers around Yumi's shoulder, and pulling her into a cold embrace.
"Don't... touch me..." Yumi said, her voice trembling. Her words were drained of defiance: she could do nothing but plea.
"Sweet Yumi," Erin whispered in Yumi's ear. "So... maidenly. So pure." She twisted her fingers in Yumi's hair, pulled her head to the side. She slid her tongue slowly over Yumi's shoulder, up her neck, to her cheek. Her victim shivered, but did not struggle. "You taste... of youth..." Erin said. "You taste... of struggle. You taste... of pleasure."
A jolt of shame was pumped into Yumi's fear and confusion, and meekly she lowered her eyes. Emily - or Erin, or whoever she was - had made her feel such pleasure, such intense pleasure that it still made her knees weak. She felt invaded, subverted, and totally unprepared to defend herself against this creature. She tried to summon up some kind of strength, but Erin seemed to sense this attempt, and pressed her hand over Yumi's small, soft mouth.
"Mmhhh...?" Yumi whimpered, staring into Erin's red eyes. The hand, the silk over it, felt cool and pleasant against her mouth.
"Do not fight," Erin said, holding Yumi's gaze. "Do not resist, little lily. My company can give such delights..." She took her hand off Yumi's mouth, and when her sweet captive remained tame, she pulled Yumi's light body onto her lap, began caressing her slim thighs.
Yumi wanted to stop her. She willed herself to lift her arms, to strike Erin in the face or at least pull Erin's hand off her legs. But she couldn't. Had her physical strength not been so drained, she could have done it. Had her will not been so drained, she could have done it. Had she not been so frightened, and cold, and naked, she could have done it. But all she had power for was to watch as Erin stroked her, to watch and to moan.
"Who are you?" Yumi asked.
"I am Erin," Yumi's captor replied, gently.
"I... I thought you were dead."
Erin seemed confused. Like a fox or a dog she tilted her head from one side to the other in curious inquiry.
"Oh of course," she said, with dark amusement. "You're a friend of... her, aren't you? You know of me. You know of what was done to me." A hint of something other than poise and control flickered on her face. "Even bodiless I persist. That is all you need know."
Yumi felt a powerful instinct to let that be the end of it, to close her mouth and obediently yield. But she resisted.
"What has happened to... what have you done with Emily?"
Erin smiled softly, kissed Yumi's forehead. "What a sweet little lily you are," Erin said. "You speak of a woman who has done horrible, horrible things to you. You've no need to care about her welfare. She's a vicious, snarling animal, my Yumi. A beast."
"Have you killed her?" Yumi insisted, every syllable an effort.
"... No," Erin replied. "She and I are intermingled now. Like milk in tea," she added with a small laugh. When Yumi did not laugh in return, Erin looked genuinely concerned. With her index finger she tilted Yumi's head to look into her eyes. "Do not worry, my dear one. Do not despair. She accepted me. She invited me. As you will invite me now. Won't you, Yumi? Won't you, my delicate little lily?"
Yumi opened her mouth to say 'no'. But no refusal escaped her lips.
Yumi was being drawn into a deep, red pool. She could feel the water lapping at her ankles, and climbing only higher the longer she looked into Erin's eyes. She remembered well what she had been told of Erin's powers, that she could not only hypnotise as a mortal magician might, but exercise a greater mastery - true mind control, as she had done to a young woman named Kirsten not all that long ago.
"That's what's happening to me," Yumi realised. "She's turning me into her puppet." This realisation brought no new fear. No flight. No battle. As she gazed into Erin's endless eyes, as she felt herself softly stroked, she just breathed deeply and quietly - and stared. There was only the merest hint of dismay in her sensuous whimpers.
"Poor little lily, with your petals all exposed," Erin said, tracing the back of her hand over Yumi's naked bosom. "Let me shield you, little flower." She lifted Yumi to her feet, stood behind her. Yumi felt cold hands in silk gloves against her the small of her bare back, and she shivered. And then the cold feeling began to spread, as though sheets of silk were curling around her torso, her hips, her breasts. Weakly she looked down, and she saw that the feeling was no illusion. Erin had - dressed her. Clad her in a thin, silk negligée, pure white, translucent. Its hem was barely any lower than her panties. Its bodice barely covered the bottom half of her breasts. Yumi felt it tightening slightly against her, cool and comfortable and a little wet. Inasmuch as she could think at all, it seemed to her like Erin had conjured Yumi's skimpy little garment like a magician. But no: she had weaved it.
"She has Emily's powers..." Yumi realised.
Erin turned her sweet captive, holding her lightly by the chin. She caught the maiden in her gaze, embraced her slender figure in her muscular arms, enfolding her in cold shadow. Yumi did not need to be told, turning her head to the side to expose her neck, a gentle throbbing faintly visible beneath her flawless skin. Erin nuzzled Yumi's neck, stroked it with her tongue, nibbled playfully at it, kissed it.
"Are you... going to drink my blood?" Yumi asked, shyly. She flushed a little. The question made her feel silly, and small.
"No, little lily," Erin replied. "It's just that the neck... is so... " Her eyes flashed with excitement. "So erotic," she concluded, and with a rush of cold wind she descended upon her pristine victim.
"Auuuuhhhh!!" Yumi moaned, as she felt teeth at her neck, and the last vestiges of her strength flowing out of her. Her body shone with a faint red light, a light that swirled about her, before draining into her captor, siphoned away. With every thump of her pulse, more and more of her power fled her, sucked greedily into Erin's maw. Her body began to tingle, a heady, narcotising euphoria swirling through her. Her sweet-smelling, naked legs trembled, gave way. A strong arm caught her by the small of her back, and though her knees buckled, Yumi did not fall.
"Mmhhh... mhhh..." Erin moaned with pleasure as she drank, as her lily wilted in her dark embrace. "There," she said in a loud, almost awed whisper. "Oh, you have no idea how long I've waited for this!" She lowered her head again, drinking deep of Yumi's power, as the maiden's arms flopped limply downward, swinging slightly as they dropped.
"Unhh..." Yumi mewed, her eyes fluttering. She felt not only drained, but somnolent, her body sinking into a deep relaxation, her mind and her will fading into shadow. It was not just that she was sleepy - she felt a will to yield herself up, to shut down her mind and let Erin have her way with her beautiful body. 'Take the flesh!' Yumi had screamed, and that was exactly what Erin was doing. The scarlet scream rang hot and sharp in Yumi's memory, the fury that had bubbled up like poison in her throat, poison that she'd spat in Emily's face. Emily had recoiled from it in shame; Erin, Yumi realised, wouldn't even have noticed it.
"Such sweet strength," Erin whispers. "There is nothing unnatural in it... nothing dangerous..." She smiles. She tilts Yumi back like the two are dancing, the captive flopping limply back, her shoulders sagging, strands of her dark hair catching on her ears as gravity tugs it gently downward. A shiver as she feels a cold tongue sliding between her breasts.
"Why - unh! - why are you doing this to me?" Yumi gasps.
"I told you, my darling," Erin says, nuzzling Yumi's neck. "Emily and I are intermingled. She desires you, so I desire you. She adores you, so I adore you. She has wanted to possess you, utterly... so I will grant myself her wish. You will sigh tenderly at my side... forever..."
Her teeth descend again, and Yumi moans as she yields up her essence, throbbing with shameful pleasure, quivering as Erin drains her, absorbs every quantum of resistance. She's pulled back up, forced into the harsh light of Erin's gaze, and she stares back, swaying, sighing, letting herself fall deep into her master's hypnotic control. She feels dread, dark delight running through her, and she almost smiles. Erin kisses her, and Yumi returns the kiss: meek, tame and panting. She is surrendering. She is giving in, giving up, giving herself to her vampiric captor, and though in her heart she moans in dismay as her will is shackled and she is enslaved, she just doesn't have the strength to fight back. She is lost, and she will pulse with ecstasy as she is forever imprisoned.
She is standing, and she is gazing, and she is sinking. There are hands on her shoulders, and lips on her lips, and though Yumi's eyes are closed she still sees the eyes boring into her, excising what little there stands left in the way of Erin's will. It isn't even really resistance anymore, just inertia. And how can she resist? How can she resist when she has condemned everything inside her that could fight?
"I could fight with ego. But ego is evil. Ego is just vanity. Vanity that's dominated my life.
I could fight with sheer resolve. But resolve is evil, because it's just pride and stubbornness, insisting that I know best, when I know nothing at all.
I could fight with indignation, and rage, and hatred. But they are evil too. They're violent, and ugly and red. I am blue, and white, and black. They have never been part of me."
So what was left to her, in the face of the overwhelming pressure from above, and the rapturous, forbidden pleasure from below? She didn't have the right to object. She didn't have the right to resist. She had no rights at all. Any pleasure, any joy that she experienced from that moment on was grace: an undeserved gift.
"Sleep," Erin said, and Yumi felt her mind go blank. She did not want to obey, but she could not find the thoughts to do otherwise.
"Sleep," Erin said, and Yumi felt herself falling. She could not feel the ground beneath her, but she knew that she was on her knees.
"Sleep," Erin said, and Yumi felt a hard floor against her front, pressing against her bosom, her lithe legs askew, her hair forming a curtain over her sweet face, darkening her sight even before her eyes fell shut, her arms against her sides, her face peaceful, her expression meek, somnolent, and blank. She lifted her eyes to see the familiar, alien face of Erin. Yumi saw her, and she gave a little cry of anguish, for Erin's face - Emily's face - was so frighening. As she fainted, as her consciousness submitted to Erin's command, she imagined that she could hear a scream, but she was already deeply asleep before she could realise that the scream had been Emily's.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
-
Damselbinder
Yumi dreamed, as she languished in sleep. She dreamed that she was dancing in front of a faceless crowd, all of whom applauded quietly, and in perfect sync. The applause didn't sound like applause - just like a low hum. It was a dream, in fact, that Yumi had had many times in the past, but though it was normally unsettling, this time it was frightening - and lonely. Yumi herself felt as if she were made of air, and when she looked down at her body, she saw that the colour had been drained out of it. She was grey, and empty, and though this was very distressing, she couldn't think of anything to do about it. There was someone in the middle of the auditorium, someone drenched in blood, in armour that looked like exposed muscle, who caused the others to clap along, and who prompted Yumi's endless dance. For her, Yumi would dance forever. Beautiful. Obedient. Pure.
In that strange way that dreams have, Yumi found herself both able to dance the endless rondo that was demanded of her, and to stop and look behind her at the same time.
There were three women standing against a wall. Except they weren't three women - they were the same woman three times. And they weren't standing. They were fixed against the wall. Shackled with their slim arms above their heads. Steel brackets over their wrists, and their mouths, and their ankles, their toes not quite reaching the floor. Yumi took more time than you would have expected to realise that each of these women was her.
First, the Black Star, comfortably, aggressively sexy in her leather stockings and her corset and her tiny little skirt, struggling and screaming and writhing. She would have been spitting if her lips had not been shut up tight. Through her Yumi felt the raw, simple indignity of captivity, of having something done to her to which she did not consent. The fury of caged strength, of willpower frustrated. Her bosom heaved against her corset, her stockings creaking as her thighs rubbed together. But she could not escape.
Second, the White Star, awash with peppy, sweet optimism and unshakeable self-belief. Sparkling, silver hair; a white, ornately ribbon-covered leotard; sheer, white stockings. She cried out, and even her muffled shouts hint at the raw power in her voice. Through her Yumi felt her outraged self-belief, her assurance that hers was not a life that was meant to serve, to submit to the will of others, her knowledge that she had the right to find new ways to express herself. She screamed against the cruel steel locked over her sweet mouth. But she could not escape.
Third, the Blue Star, elegant and ephemerally beautiful. A shimmering, dark blue dress, a tint of blue in her smooth locks, and intimate touches of frost over her skin. Even in her bondage she had artistry to her, a graceful rhythm in the struggles she made against her shackles. Through her Yumi felt her sensuality, her creativity itself, the hidden core of herself of which she would give only fleeting, tantalising hints, that recoiled from being made to display itself so openly. Her wispy clothing fluttered about her as she fought against her humiliating helplessness. But she could not escape.
Fourth, the -
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yumi awoke, but did not awake. She was standing. She was moving. Her eyes were open. But something like sleep was heavy on her slim shoulders, and she could not shift its weight. Indeed, Yumi thought she might still have been dreaming, because she was still dancing. But there was no stage this time. Just an empty, dark room, and the smell of silk. A dress wrapped around her: ruffled, sensuous. Long sleeves, a plunging neckline. A long train, a thick slit that flashed her milky legs with every swirl. Black heels. The dress itself was blood-red, and Yumi herself felt her own blood hot within her, pressing against her skin at her cheeks, her neck, her breasts, her thighs. She felt... primed. Every pleasure receptor on the verge of surging, the anticipation of her master's touch almost too much to bear. And in the empty dark room, and two glinting rubies watching her from the shadow.
"The world is suffused with power," Erin said, her voice not apparently attached to anything in particular. "It is everywhere now. So many have so much of it. But you don't understand it, do you? No idea where it comes from, why it exists - and least of all what it is for."
Yumi realised that Erin was dancing with her now, their bodies close. Erin's hand was at her back, pulling Yumi in. They were dancing some strange, sensual waltz, to the music of thin, strangled pipes. Yumi did not know the steps, but she followed them perfectly. When Erin spun her around, Yumi knew to put her arms above her head like a spinning top, and then to fall back faithfully into her master's arms. Her back supported by a single hand, Yumi kept one leg straight, resting her heel against the floor, and slowly crossed the other over it, caressing herself with her own flawless skin. She batted her eyelashes, an obedient coquette, inviting touch, and receiving it, as strong fingers grasped her bare thigh.
"This is what power is for," Erin said. "For the attaining, and giving of pleasure."
Indeed, as Erin's fingers edged up her thigh, Yumi felt pleasure racing through her. She laughed, and blushed, even though the experience felt wholly evil.
"That is all that it has ever been," Erin continued. "Why did the emperors of ancient days send armies to conquer lands they would never see?" She stroked Yumi's midriff, brushing her navel through the thin fabric of her dress, and making her eyelids flutter as pleasure tingled through her. "They did this," Erin said, "is so that they could eat their meals and lay with their whores with greater peace of mind."
She swung her dance partner with easy strength, and Yumi's body assented to its new master's will, pirouetting splendidly, before gripping Erin's right shoulder tightly, and thrusting her own right knee up against Erin's flank, waiting for the strong fingers that would close around it, and press waves of forbidden delight into her elfin body. She smiled when she felt the hand, and bit her lower lip, and gracefully submitted to her red sovereign. She knew that she was enslaved, knew that it was not what she wanted, but Erin's desires were in her as well now, and they were - simply - stronger.
"So do you see," Erin said, "there is no guilt to be in using power, provided it is used for what is right. Apprehend." She made a place for Yumi in her arms, and Yumi melted into the power of Erin's embrace. She was cradled, the skirts of her dress stroking the black floor as gloved hands lifted her legs and pulled her tight against Erin's cold chest, and cold lips kissed her peach-soft mouth, and an unspoken command rang in Yumi's ears and she screamed raw, blood-hot ecstasy into Erin's kiss, and fell limp and shivering and moaning from it.
"Do you see now?" Erin said. "Do you see the pleasure in it? Do you see what power can bring? Do you see now that what you wanted was never wrong?"
Insofar as Yumi was capable of thought, she had to own that she did not quite understand what Erin meant by all this. Yumi had wanted higher respect, further accolades - her captor had spoken to her before of these things, yes, but what that had to do with power Yumi did not know. Her mind toyed with this problem as though with a difficult riddle, unable to grant importance to it in her addled state. She found herself drawn back into Erin's dark eyes. She willingly drowned herself in them. And yet, behind the layers of warm, surging pleasure in her slavery, an answer to her little riddle flashed briefly into her mind, and brought with it surge of much less comfortable emotions - but it was all suppressed in an instant.
"See?" Erin laughed. "There is no suffering in it. Pleasure only, and pleasure is what justifies. Pleasure means any means are worthy. That is what has made this long life bearable - that is what I will give to Yumi, forever."
"To... 'Yumi'?" Again, the answer to the riddle flashed into Yumi's mind. "She's speaking about me," Yumi realised, "not to me. So... who is she...?" She felt as though the answer were blindingly, stupefyingly obvious, but she could not make herself grasp it.
"'Immoral'?" Erin said, in response to a side of the conversation that Yumi could not hear. "My dear girl, don't you think that's a little silly? You and I, in our own way, are creatures of the shadow. Such ideas mean nothing to us. Especially when the alternatives are so much sweeter," she added, and punctuated her point by twisting her fingers in Yumi's hair and licking her neck.
Yumi quivered with pleasure as her mistress intended, but even as she did this she could not help but feel something was wrong. But it was not enough for her to disobey. And so, when Erin kissed her way from the nape of her neck to the edge of her slim jawline, and whispered "Kneel" in her left ear, that was exactly what Yumi did.
She dropped slowly, stroking her master's body lovingly as she fell, until she reached the level most appropriate for her subservience. At the wordless bidding of her master the kneeling beauty lovingly kissed Erin's leather-clad legs, purring with pleasure as Erin stroked her hair. The enslavement was sinking deeper into Yumi. Permeating every pore. Burrowing into her. Weakening the foundations of her.
"Do you like this, my sweet little lily?" Erin asked.
"Yes," Yumi replied, "very much." It was true. Erin had made it true.
"'Not really her'?" Erin laughed, responding to the one Yumi could not perceive. "What nonsense. The lips are hers, the mouth is hers, the voice is hers. The body is hers. The fact that our power has caused her to want it is immaterial. She does want it." To Yumi she said: "Don't you?"
"Yes," Yumi answered, her dark eyes flashing.
"Good." Erin smiled, stroked Yumi's hair. She stroked the top of her head. And then she descended, with naked lust.
The world went by in a hazy, rapid blur. Indeed, the world seemed to have turned on its head before Yumi realised that she had. She was over Erin's shoulder, letting herself go limp as Erin carried her, her thin fingers squeezing tight into Yumi's shapely legs, the train of Yumi's red dress swishing from side to side as Erin bore her away. She wanted Erin to squeeze tighter, to reach higher. She was being made to want it, made to feel the thrill of expectation. She writhed, snakelike and sinuous, pushing herself into Erin, wanting to melt into her, wanting to fade into to vapour and be breathed in by her, to be reduced to nothingness in the joy of self-annihilation, and pulse - pulse - pulse with the physical ecstasy of it and yield herself absolutely to her master.
Of course, these emotions were not Yumi's. Of course in her unconscious mind she still moaned in fear and horror at her shackles and her imprisonment; but Erin had chosen her victim well. Yumi's ego had been dangling on a precipice, challenged and questioned and undermined by her deep distaste for her own creativity, her shame at her vanity, and her confusion and anguish about how - and if - she could express herself had made her deeply vulnerable to Erin's control. Emily had driven in the wedge, and Erin had forced the gap wide open.
"Oh!" Yumi gasped, as Erin threw her down, her skirt billowing about her as she fell. Erin pushed the skirt aside, gripping Yumi's legs and running her long fingers up and down them, so tightly that she left momentary grooves whenever she moved her fingers away. She moved up Yumi's body - seeming to glide over her. Her fingers tenderly entwined with Yumi's, and the thuggish features of the face Erin wore were softened by her obvious affection for the tender damsel she had subjugated. She thrust her tongue into Yumi's mouth, roughly stealing the kiss and drinking greedily of yet more of the supple maiden's essence. Her eyes flashed as Yumi's fluttered; her strength waxing as Yumi's waned. Yumi went limp beneath her, and for this latest theft whispered a blissful "thank you" to her looming master.
With stolen strength Erin thrust Yumi's arms above her, and with a weaver's skill she tangled Yumi's wrists in shimmering ribbons. They were so thin that a child could have snapped them, but Yumi was so weak in mind and body that they may as well have been thick, steel manacles. She watched Erin tie her hands to the railing at the top of the bed, yanking on the loose end of the ribbon like a pulley, forcing Yumi's arms out straight. Her hands were bound with each palm facing outwards, her fingers curling inwards. She was helpless, and she had a distant awareness that this was wrong, but could find nothing in it but humiliated pleasure.
"Such a darling captive," Erin cooed. "I have always had such admiration for talented women. Writers, fencers, dressmakers, advocates, mayoresses - and musicians. And all this in such beautiful flesh... and all this with such doelike gentleness... " Her hands danced over Yumi's softly writhing, bare legs. She felt the flower-petal suppleness of Yumi's skin, the satisfying firmness in her dancer's thighs as Erin squeezed them both, wrapping five fingers around each and pressing, drawing obedient moans from the star who had fallen into her arms. "Such a demure maiden," Erin said. "Not like the last one. She was a viper - wriggling and spitting and hissing and thrashing - but you're so... genteel. So feminine. It's such a delight, little lily, such an absolute delight..."
Yumi felt a sharp tug on her ankles, pressure around them cinching them together, and then an almost painful, but satisfying, pulling sensation through her whole body. Her feet were bound to one end of the bed, her hands to the other, her petite body drawn tight, fixed in place. She looked up at the bonds around her wrists, down to the ones around her ankles. She felt delicate, feeble, helpless, all that one might expect a woman bound hand and foot to feel, but these were pleasant emotions in her subjugated state.
A ribbon was thrust between Yumi's lips, gagging the supple songstress, pushing down on her tongue and repressing her sonorous voice. For even her voice, Erin was saying, was no longer her own. She would be a mute until Erin said otherwise. And it was true, Yumi felt a terribly overpowering urge to assent - and she did assent, purring and smiling and batting her eyelashes and writhing so temptingly in her fragile bonds, so weak and soft and ripe for the plundering. There was just a tinge of emotion that Erin had not ordered: a tiny drop of shame on Yumi's mental pallet, otherwise subsumed in colours poured by her captor, at allowing herself to be defeated, bound and hypnotised, alongside simple dislike of the sensation of being tied up, which she had never found pleasurable. But she did now. Erin commanded it, and so she would obey.
Erin swept Yumi's skirt aside, exposing her legs, pulled tight and pushed tight and warm. She licked the groove that formed between Yumi's thighs, all the way up to her thin panties, against which Erin brushed her nose. A happy cry of pleasure rang out from Yumi's sweet, gagged lips, and she shuddered even from this relatively modest stimulation. Erin rose from Yumi's hips to kiss and tease and bite her throbbing neck, to coil her muscular arms around Yumi's slender frame.
"Feel her," Erin said, to her unseen counterpart. "Feel the thrust of her bosom against yours. She is a droplet of water hanging from the edge of a leaf, so heavy, her borders so weak, desperate for the little push that will make her burst. Aren't you, my darling lily?"
"Yhhhhhss..." Yumi mumbled through her gag, primed to be taken, to accede to Erin's overpowering will and yield her astonishing body to whatever dark pleasures Erin could conjure.
So when Erin undid the clasps of her dress, Yumi did not protest. When Erin pulled the dress from her body, denuding her midriff, her breasts, her hips, Yumi did not protest. When Erin curled both her index fingers in the elastic of Yumi's panties, and slowly pulled them down her moist thighs, over her knees, leaving them crumpled at Yumi's ankles, when her womanhood was completely exposed - even at this Yumi did not protest. She lay, bound, gagged, and naked, meekly waiting for Erin to plunder her.
But in Erin's eyes, Yumi saw more than one kind of longing. Not just the eyes of the predator, the vampire, who had hypnotised her and laid claim to her body. No - there was desperation here of a far more earthly sort. Yumi could almost feel it, beneath her haze of coquettish submission, feel a desperate, twisted obsession with her in the eyes that bore down on her naked body. Oh, there was simple lust in this obsession; for who could look upon the sensual grace of Stellar without desire? But there was more. For in this obsession, Yumi was all that was fine and beautiful, all that was high and good and noble, everything that the obsessor was not. For the obsessor was ugly, and stupid, and craven, and thuggish, and Stellar stood so high above her. At once there was the desire to fall worshipfully at the feet of her idol, to prostrate herself, even annihilate herself in rapturous love. But this grotesque, overgrown love had hatred in it too. Hatred of Yumi Tae-Yeong for being so beautiful, so pure and so perfect and so loved by so many. With a shock of clarity, Yumi felt that hatred for her, felt the wish to pull her down, to shackle her idol, to violate her purity and her goodness, to dirty her, as the obsessor - as Emily - was dirtied.
Through her mesmerised, stupefied pleasure, Yumi felt a stab of horror at the soul that was suddenly so bared to her, a nauseating revulsion for what she found in Emily's heart. She did not understand how she peered through it so easily, but she did, and she found that every wretched form of avarice was to be found within. Emily was an ugly person. A bad person. Alongside Erin Emily wanted so badly to take Yumi, who lay naked and bound before her, to sully her as she had always longed to, when with her own voice and her own body Yumi seemed to yield herself willingly. She couldn't resist. Except, she did, didn't she?
"NO!" Erin shouted, her voice deepening and coarsening into that of the Arachna that Yumi had once known. She wrenched herself away from her captive's body, clutching at her head, screaming in rage. "I won't! Even at my worst... even at my worst I never did this! Y - AAGHHHHH!!" Her hands wrapped around her own throat, and from the vicious pressure on her neck it looked like she was making a sincere effort to strangle herself.
And then, as quickly as it had begun, the storm passed. Erin released herself. She calmed. Her composure was restored and she fixed Yumi with a gentle smile. Gliding like a slow, icy breeze she descended on Yumi again. Sat down next to her.
"Alright," Erin said, with just a little less ease in her voice than before. "All is well. No fear, little lily," she said, seeing that Yumi was alarmed by her self-destructive outburst. She reached out to stroke her face, to comfort her.
But Yumi did not, as she had before, purr contentedly at her master's touch. She did not meekly offer her flawless body, nor languish humbly in her paper-thin bonds. She snapped them, in fact. Then she slapped Erin hard across the face.
"Don't you touch me!" Yumi screeched, trying to wrap the bedclothes around her, to cover herself up. "She's... Emily's still inside... still fighting you. She was trying to change before you got your claws into her! How dare - how... how dare... unnhh... " The pressure was immense. She felt so weak, so ready to yield herself again to her master's will. She looked within for strength and found nothing. She called upon the Blue Star, the Black and the White, and found nothing. Her muscles ached with exhaustion from all the strength that Erin had drunk from them. Yumi was holding onto her selfhood by her fingernails - but she was holding on. This composite of Erin and Emily was at war with itself, and that war had drawn her strength away from dominating Yumi just enough for her to be herself.
Erin did not seem hurt by the slap. Again she tilted her head in that animal way of hers, and looked at Yumi with profound puzzlement.
"This is very strange," she said. "With all the energy that I've taken from you, I should have been able to keep you... " She searched for the right word. "... keep you calm indefinitely. I did not think that she had such tenacity." She lifted her head, and her blood-red eyes flitted back and forth, like she was reading. "You said something, yes? You said she was still fighting me. 'Still' is wrong." She twisted her neck from side to side. "She has only now begun to fight. Everything of our bargain she accepted joyously. Everything I gave her she accepted."
She lowered her eyes again. She fixed her gaze on her captive, and for the first time Yumi saw wrath in those bloody eyes.
"You reject the peace and bliss I offer... because of her? You are too gentle, Yumi. Do you understand the baseness of the one you lament, the one who was born into this flesh? She is vile. She is evil!" Erin laughed, with a hint of savagery. "I have been with her, and in her. I know what she has done. I know what she has done to you! But you are so sweet. You forgive the years of depravity and degradation. You forgive the bestial lusts and sickness in her. You forgive because there is no hatred in your heart. You are innocent. So I will teach you!"
Erin took the form of mist and swept over Yumi, but when she descended on her she was quite solid. Baring her fangs and with a giddy thrill she grabbed both of Yumi's wrists, and hauled the slender girl to her feet.
"N-no..." Yumi whimpered, naked and helpless in Erin's grasp. Her mind had some freedom, yes, but her petal-soft body was still powerless. Emily's rebellion had bought her little more than torment.
"Do you know what she wants, little lily?" Erin said. "Despite her feeble protests that buzz in my mind like swollen, fat flies, do you know what she wants to do to you?" She thrust her fingers into Yumi's hair, turned her head and lowered her head to whisper in the maiden's ear. "She wants... what she has always wanted. To smother you."
Yumi heard a familiar sound: a gurgling in Erin's wrists. She smelled a familiar scent: the odour of silk being churned. She saw a familiar look on Erin's face, a face that now seemed to belong more to Emily than to Erin. Yumi whimpered fearfully as she saw that the vampire was letting the spider out to play.
With manic delight, Erin let fly a thick, white jet from the squamous gland in her wrist. It struck Yumi with enough force to make her gasp. Hot, gooey silk burst all over Yumi's breasts, oozing on and around and between them, casting a wide net that began to cover her whole torso. Yumi cried out, and tried to pull away, but the threads clung fast to her, spreading around her, curling like warm fingers around her upper arms, pulling them against her sides, as more silk was poured onto her, hardening and tightening as it cooled against her body.
"Ugh! Ugh!" Yumi groaned, looking down as the silk spread over her, her forearms flapping uselessly as her upper arms were drawn tighter and tighter against herself. She tried to run away, but before she could even turn around another jet shot out onto her. It splashed messily against her pale thighs, and Yumi gasped as she felt the silk constrict, pulling her thighs together, stretchy but too strong to break, inhibiting her movement too much for her to walk, much less run.
"No escape," Erin said, with a low growl. "Never any escape from the spider. Never any escape from the silk!" she laughed, and let fly another glob of webbing.
"No! No, n - MMMMMPPHHHHH!!" With a wet slap the webbing struck Yumi's mouth, sealing her voice behind warm, white glue, threads grasping at her cheeks, her jaw, her chin. Yumi threw her head from side to side in a vain effort to dislodge her gag, her dark, soft hair swishing from left to right. Yumi's cheeks flashed a deep crimson, for the silky gag had an all-too intimate, an organic warmth. It was like a kiss. A wet, forceful, overpowering kiss that Yumi could not help but allow.
Her eyes were drawn upwards, and she saw that Erin was - attached, somehow, to the ceiling above her. It was just the sort of thing a spider might do. As far as Yumi had known, Arachna's powers had never allowed her to cling to surfaces, but that hardly mattered to this monster. Whatever was the most terrifying was possible for her. She loomed above her, a bestial, lustful smile on her face.
"Come to me. Let me tangle you up, my sweet little moth." She pointed her palms at Yumi, and two thick lines of webbing shot forth. They added to what was already there, securing themselves to the silk on Yumi's chest and her thighs, thin as a finger, but as strong as a steel cable. Erin pulled, and Yumi was yanked into the air.
"Mhh... mhhhphhh!!" It was like a nightmare. Not in general - it was exactly like a specific nightmare that Yumi had had in the past, probably three or four times since Arachna had first captured her. Naked, and helpless, a predator with dripping fangs hanging above her, white silk pouring over her, and raw, physical terror claiming her.
Shooting down line after line of webbing, and pulling Yumi at just the right time and with just the right force, Erin started spinning her, revolving her over and over, spraying gossamer sheets of silk over her, teasing them around Yumi's sumptuous, smooth body and gleefully tying her up.
Yumi was swiftly disoriented as she revolved, feeling herself entombed, her arms and back and shoulders and her legs drenched in oozing, white silk so wet and hot and strong - tightening, constricting, binding. Her breasts were pushed in against her chest as layer after layer of silk was wound over them. Her naked legs, silkier even than the material binding them, were forced into one useless, feebly kicking limb, their milky-white loveliness disappearing beneath the off-white her bonds. Her slinky, wriggling hips were constricted, squeezed - no, it felt like they were being groped, like hot hands were grabbing, pawing at her hips - and not only her hips but her waist, her navel, and her trim, tight, rear. She even felt a threatening pressure between her legs as the silk tightened over them, and the warm seal over her lips stifled a sensual moan.
Around and around and around and around, and every moment Yumi's bondage grew tighter, and deeper, as layer after layer was slathered over her naked perfection. Around Yumi's smooth, supple, shifting shoulders Erin spun her web, seeking to subsume every square inch of the shockingly lovely woman in her clutches.
And she was subsumed. As threads were drawn around her throat and her jaw, Yumi could feel Erin's webs covering everything from her neck down, her bonds growing ever tighter, ever more intimately constricting as they cooled, suppressing her meagre struggles. The webs began to cover her nose, and her cheeks, and her long, dark hair, and though she cried out for aid, she could not hear her own voice, could hear nothing but the squelching and churning of the webs being wrapped around her. She could smell nothing but the thick, musty scent of the silk, almost enough to make her pass out. She could see nothing but an ever darkening gauze over her eyes. She could do nothing but hang there, mewing softly as Erin mummified her in webs. For Yumi, whose first loss as Stellar had been to Arachna that day that she and Cybelle abducted her, there was nothing that could have screamed "You are defeated" more loudly in her ears.
Slowly, gradually, the revolutions began to stop. The churning and gurgling began to stop. And finally, Yumi stopped spinning, suspended from threads anchored to the ceiling, wiggling and whimpering and twitching in the dozens of metres of silk which entombed her. She was completely covered in webbing, webbing which was thick and strong enough to restrain a superhuman of twice Yumi's strength, and tight enough that every sensual curve of Yumi's body was still perfectly displayed. A lock of dark hair peeked out from the threads around her forehead, lightly grazing Yumi's cheek, but outside of that, she was covered. Gagged, bound and blindfolded in spider-thread, completely immobilised, and throbbing with humiliation.
"Oh, her protests are quieter now," Erin hissed. "I know that you have dreamed of this, Yumi. I know that being seized and cocooned as I have done to you has haunted your nightmares. Well it's been in her dreams too, Yumi, and it was not fear that held sway over her when she dreamed it. You feel the webs against your naked skin, don't you? It isn't just rope, or chain, or shackle. It's her. It's part of her. Part of me, now. That is what she wants, that is all she wants: to take you, the fairest, loveliest creature under our thin, blue sky, and smother you in her ugliness."
"Mh? Mh-mhh?!" Yumi could hear movement, and squirmed in her cocoon, trying to work out whether it was coming from above or below her. She began to think it was below, but then above her something snapped - and she fell.
There was only time for a squeak before she fell into Erin's waiting arms. Falling into them she wanted to cry out again, but there was a chill in the strong fingers that curled around her mummified, helpless body, and it choked her cry before it could leave her throat. Wrapped in bride-white threads she was carried like a bride, clutched close against Erin's bosom. Yumi felt Erin's mouth against her neck, felt the pressure of her teeth, and quivered - but Erin did not bite. Rather, she closed her teeth above Yumi's cheek, and pulled - ripping the silk from over her eyes.
"Mhhh!!" Yumi mewed, recoiling from the sight of Erin's face. It was not just frightening now. It was ugly. She looked away, but the only other thing to look at was herself, and seeing herself all wrapped up in vile, glue-like silk was even worse a thing than her captor's face.
"If only you could hear her," Erin said, with a guttural bark of mirth. "'Ohh, don't hurt her! Ohh, don't be cruel to her, please!' When all the time she pants with lust, the dog."
"She's... changed again..." Her mind bandied this way and that, from confusion to terror to mesmerised pleasure to helpless humiliation, it was difficult for Yumi to understand what was happening to and around her. Had she been more timorous she would not have understood the significance of this new change that had come over her bipartite captor.
Until Emily's inner rebellion, until she had snapped Erin's evidently fragile tethers on Yumi's mind, Erin had been just that - Erin, the soft-spoken, chilling vampire of whom Yumi had heard tell, almost exactly as Yumi had imagined her. But before that, when Yumi had first been captured, when Emily had been the one in control, it hadn't just been Emily, had it? It had been Emily suffused with Erin, with her power and her intellect and manner. And now this third version of their fusion, it was the reverse of the first Yumi had seen. This was Erin - her will, her desires - suffused with the brutish, animal savagery of Arachna. Their union was becoming more complete.
And now Yumi began to understand the meaning behind this ordeal, behind Erin's treatment of her, behind her bewildering captivity. It was probably the case that Erin's wish to have her way with Yumi was genuine, for there was a touch of the divine in the beauty of Stellar, and it was not vanity that made her think herself desirable. But there was more to it than that. Erin was trying to push herself and Emily closer together, to mix them truly into one being. She needed something that the two shared. And Emily's twisted obsession with Stellar was, at least, similar enough to Erin's almost universal, thoroughgoing lust that it pulled them closer. Trying to force herself onto Yumi had been too much; but cocooning her, doing to her what Arachna had dreamed about so often, that was working. That was pulling them together. Emily was being digested.
"So villainous, isn't it?" the Erin-Arachna entity said. "So cruel of me to wrap you up like this, Yumi, but - oh, you struggle so sweetly, don't you?" She put Yumi down, but did not allow her to stand - she pushed her up against a wall, and pushed her own body against the bundled maiden, grinding up against her.
"Nmmhhhh! Nmmmhh-mmmhhphh!" Yumi whimpered through her gag, feeling Erin's hands cupping her breasts, squeezing them, the wet silk squelching as Yumi was fondled. She felt her captor's fingers tighten, curl - and then tear. "NNMMHHH!!" Yumi moaned, looking down with tearful brown eyes as she saw her breasts bared, their tender softness exposed just for Erin to abuse.
"You'll learn to enjoy this as much as I do," Erin said, kissing Yumi's small, pert bosoms, flicking her tongue against their sensitive buds. "More, even. Why did she have to break you out of all that pleasure I was giving you, huh? Stupid bitch." Barking happily, she ripped messily at the threads around Yumi's head, tearing them away from her hair and her cheeks and her mouth, and greedily, forcefully pressed her lips against Yumi's, even while silk still clung to her captive's face.
"Mhhhhhhh... mmhhhhhhhhhhh!!" Yumi moaned as, discarding all her subtlety for Emily's brutishness, Erin took her pleasure of her slender captive. Yumi's helplessness was all the more bitter to her, because it was not just her in danger anymore. For every moment that she lingered in bondage, Emily sank deeper into oblivion. As Erin's lips parted from hers, and returned to the enviable burden of kissing Yumi's naked breasts, Yumi tried to think of something - anything - she could do to save Emily from this dreadful fate, and without thinking she whispered: "Have me instead."
Erin blinked. She was about to laugh, but stopped herself. Then she seemed not to know why she'd bothered stopping herself, and laughed openly, a frightening, hollow sound.
"Oh, you are sweet. Oh, dear little Yumi, you are the absolute end." She stroked Yumi's face, playfully pinching her cheek. "Don't insult yourself. I could not merge my essence with you. You are a person! You have thoughts and loves and sorrows and miseries and joys. You are shallow and profound and beautiful, within and without. You would crowd me out with the merest whiff of effort." She smiled. Sighed, wearily. "But Emily? She is a brutish, stupid animal. There was so much room for me within her that, for a time, it has been possible for us to co-exist. And even then, I had to strike a bargain. No, no, Yumi, my love, don't be absurd."
"B-bargain?" Yumi said. "What bargain?"
"There must be a bargain," Erin said. "Unity of purpose for the merging to begin."
"You... you offered her me?" Yumi asked, almost afraid to know.
"Do you know, the thought did occur to me." She laughed again, snorting derisively. "But she insisted on - well, why don't I let her tell you herself?"
And she shuddered, and contorted, and her facial muscles loosened and slackened, her lips curling and her eyes narrowing with senseless viciousness. It was Emily's face. Her own face, unclouded with Erin's influence.
"NO!" she screeched. "No, I don't want her! I don't want to be what I was! I just... I just want to be smarter..." Tears welled up in her eyes. She began sobbing, inelegantly. "I want to be smart, and cultured, and interesting! I want to be... I want to be good! But I'm too weak and... and stupid to do it myself, okay? Okay?! I want to be... I want to be the kind of person she would want - but, not to have her because - because then I wouldn't be good, right? Is that how it works? Just - just do that, please!"
And then the moment was over. With a little squirm, Erin resurfaced, unflappable and lusty and cruel. She hadn't let Emily out: she'd just - just played back a recording, basically. Shown an echo of a rapidly fading person.
"Isn't it ridiculous?" Erin said. "As if she could be anything but base."
"...you lied."
"Hm?"
There were tears in Yumi's eyes, tears of deep and sincere emotion.
"You lied," she repeated, her voice quiet, and calm. "She wanted to be a better person, for its own sake, and you used that against her. The best thing - in her own strange way the best thing she has ever tried to do - and you used it against her! You poisoned her! You made her... capture me, and you let her think it was her decision, but you just wanted - you just wanted her body for yourself! When she drank my strength that was for you, wasn't it? To let you destroy her!" She felt an itch. She felt a squirming, burning itch all over her body. She began panting, almost. Spots in front of her eyes. Heat smouldering in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to throw up.
"Oh!" Erin clasped her hands to her chest, kissed Yumi on the cheek even as she disgustedly tried to wriggle away. "Such passion. Such mercy and sweetness and gentleness in you, dear little lily! Even after all she's done to you, you cannot see how filthy she is. Come, now, dear one," she said, and moved to lift Yumi into her arms again. "Let's not waste another drop of emotion on that thing."
Yumi had not heard a word of what Erin had said. She could not detach herself from the emotion that had taken hold of her, could see nothing except that feeling. Her mind wandered in a curious way, and she realised that there was still one unsolved mystery in this foul affair.
It was before. When Emily had held her, and forced pleasure into her, still vainly trying to convince Yumi that it was good for her. And Yumi had been filled with such spite - blood red words spat out from her throat like knives. At the time she'd thought that it was the spell that had been cast over Emily affecting her as well, but now that she understood that spell better - how and why would Erin have drawn such bile from her. No. It hadn't come from outside. It hadn't come from Erin's evil.
"It was mine."
Erin knelt down to wrap her arms around Yumi's pretty legs, to lift her over her shoulder and carry her off. But as she knelt, she saw Yumi looking down at her. Saw fury in her eyes.
"Did you think I was all softness?" Yumi hissed. "Did you think I was some gentle, spotless little girl? Did you think I was some meek, simpering virgin for you to impose your own wants on? Just your - your masturbation fantasy made flesh?!" She shuddered, and shook, and her cocoon began to tremble, as something caged within for far too long began to burst from its shell. "Did you think I was so weak," Yumi said, "that I could not know hatred?!" She looked inside, and found something frightening, and selfish, and unpleasant. But it was hers. She took a deep breath. And she screamed.
"A Red Star!!"
A fiery explosion burst from Yumi's body. Erin was thrown onto her back, and Yumi's cocoon was thrown open, disintegrated. The vampire stared open mouthed as she looked upon what emerged.
Aglow with blood-red light, Stellar stood tall, suffused with strength. Her eyes burned red, but were cold with loathing. Her body was clad in an all-encompassing suit, its material one that did not exist, sort of fusion of metal and leather, clinging tightly to her flawless contours. It was dark, deep red, black at the shoulders and the inner thighs, her figure made more imposing with tall, tall heels. Her neckline plunged almost to her navel, the inner halves of each bosom on show. At her shoulders, flame-like crests, and around her forehead an obsidian crown. She had the strut of a peacock, sensual for her own sake, beauty that was not to be marketed or captured: everything about herself that she feared, her vanity, her self-regard, her resentment of those whom she felt did not understand, as well as the raw capacity for hatred and rage and violence that we all fear of ourselves. But it was hers, and it had power.
"What? What?" Erin spluttered, rising to her feet. "This - what is this? What - no! I -" She did not understand what she was seeing. Her shock was echoed by the one imprisoned within her, and she was all but paralysed. But only for a moment. She looked at Stellar, at the fiery crests at her shoulders, and - thinking of the Blue Star - she began to feel she had the measure of her captive again.
"Fire will not help you," she said. "Perhaps in stories of vampires, you have read -"
"Fire?" Stellar said, and her voice made Erin jolt. "Fire? That's all you think this is? A 'power-up'?" She fixed her eyes on Erin's, and she bared her teeth. "You think that hatred demands fire? No, monster - hatred demands pain!"
And pain was exactly what Erin felt.
"AIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!" the vampire screamed, shrieking with hideous, terrible violence. She tried to fight back, tried to use Arachna's powers and hers, but the pain blinded, burned red in her mind. She tried to escape it, tried to turn herself into mist. And she did - but the pain followed her anyway. It stabbed at the very heart of her, and she collapsed to the ground in solid form, writhing and shrieking. "Wh-what are you doing to me?!" she shrieked.
Yumi did not answer. She just stared down at her enemy, her eyes blazing almost white-hot. And, through pain, Erin understood, and she mumbled a single word.
"Telepath...!"
It was and was not true. The Red Star affected the mind. Saw through secrets. It could twist its invisible hands around the fibres of the mind, and it could pull. She had been giving Yumi hints, nudges, whispers, breaking in here and there, almost surfacing when Yumi's fear and disgust with Arachna, with the woman who'd twice kidnapped her, called the Red Star forth. But only real hatred could call her forth, and Yumi hated now.
"I see you," Stellar said. "I see you now for what you are, monster. You called Emily a dog. You called her a beast. Well if she's a beast then you're a virus. An accident. A parasite that latches onto other life, a relic of a real superhuman long dead, clinging pathetically to this... half-life, and entertaining yourself by using your powers in the basest way imaginable. You're a disease, Erin. You're no more a vampire than I am an ogre! You are unusual. You are unnatural. But let me assure you, Erin, you are mortal."
"You... you... you can't... Emily - will die...!" Erin moaned, the pain almost making her weep.
"Then she will die!" Yumi spat back. "Better that, better to give her peace than to let her become part of you! She knows it too: I can see her - I can feel her, and she begs me to destroy you both!" And she could have. She almost did. But something stayed her hand. Yes, she had castigated Erin for thinking her nothing but sweetness and mercy, and she had been right to - but they were part of her too.
But her mercy frustrated her. She grabbed Erin by the neck, and with a grunt lifted her to her feet.
"I cannot punish you as you deserve," Yumi hissed. "I cannot make you suffer as you should suffer. You make sport of terrifying people, of drawing them into your control through the terror of what you are - of what you claim to be. But you're the coward, Erin. You're the one who hides in your play-acting at vampire, who dissolves others from within to sustain herself. So you and Emily will share the pain I give you - but not the terror. Let us see, then," Stellar growled, hurling Erin back to the floor, "what you fear."
For a moment, Erin was gripped with desperate relief. The pain subsided, vanishing from her mind. She collapsed, shaking to the ground, but smiling with the sheer joy of pain relieved. She managed to stand, and she began to plot counterattack. Her ways were subtle. If this Red Star was a telepath, then perhaps there were ways, ways that this power could be turned against her. A mind that affected other minds was often open to attack itself. But then, behind Yumi, she saw something.
A figure. A vague, wavering figure. A figure which was human, but about whom Erin could tell nothing else. And yet, it made her frightened. There was something about it which was familiar, something which made her very nervous. It came closer, walking through Stellar, and it was now recognisably female. And then, familiar sensations began returning. Of overweening ecstasy, of an uncontrollable urge to gorge, to feed on poison that burned her from within. The feeling of her body splitting apart, dissolving, melting because of her own greed. Of a sensation that was worse than death, of years spent as an impotent, bodiless ghost, all because of one who had fooled her, and fought her, and killed her. The figure now became clearer still. She had a pretty, cunning, foxlike face. Long, lithe legs. Bare shoulders. Her hair was orange. Her warrant was golden, shimmering.
"Sophie Scott," Erin whispered with mortal dread, before the image descended on her, and Erin drowned in fear. And as fear shook the very foundations of her tenuous, wraithlike existence, the Red Star drove the nail in -
- and annihilated her utterly.
In that strange way that dreams have, Yumi found herself both able to dance the endless rondo that was demanded of her, and to stop and look behind her at the same time.
There were three women standing against a wall. Except they weren't three women - they were the same woman three times. And they weren't standing. They were fixed against the wall. Shackled with their slim arms above their heads. Steel brackets over their wrists, and their mouths, and their ankles, their toes not quite reaching the floor. Yumi took more time than you would have expected to realise that each of these women was her.
First, the Black Star, comfortably, aggressively sexy in her leather stockings and her corset and her tiny little skirt, struggling and screaming and writhing. She would have been spitting if her lips had not been shut up tight. Through her Yumi felt the raw, simple indignity of captivity, of having something done to her to which she did not consent. The fury of caged strength, of willpower frustrated. Her bosom heaved against her corset, her stockings creaking as her thighs rubbed together. But she could not escape.
Second, the White Star, awash with peppy, sweet optimism and unshakeable self-belief. Sparkling, silver hair; a white, ornately ribbon-covered leotard; sheer, white stockings. She cried out, and even her muffled shouts hint at the raw power in her voice. Through her Yumi felt her outraged self-belief, her assurance that hers was not a life that was meant to serve, to submit to the will of others, her knowledge that she had the right to find new ways to express herself. She screamed against the cruel steel locked over her sweet mouth. But she could not escape.
Third, the Blue Star, elegant and ephemerally beautiful. A shimmering, dark blue dress, a tint of blue in her smooth locks, and intimate touches of frost over her skin. Even in her bondage she had artistry to her, a graceful rhythm in the struggles she made against her shackles. Through her Yumi felt her sensuality, her creativity itself, the hidden core of herself of which she would give only fleeting, tantalising hints, that recoiled from being made to display itself so openly. Her wispy clothing fluttered about her as she fought against her humiliating helplessness. But she could not escape.
Fourth, the -
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yumi awoke, but did not awake. She was standing. She was moving. Her eyes were open. But something like sleep was heavy on her slim shoulders, and she could not shift its weight. Indeed, Yumi thought she might still have been dreaming, because she was still dancing. But there was no stage this time. Just an empty, dark room, and the smell of silk. A dress wrapped around her: ruffled, sensuous. Long sleeves, a plunging neckline. A long train, a thick slit that flashed her milky legs with every swirl. Black heels. The dress itself was blood-red, and Yumi herself felt her own blood hot within her, pressing against her skin at her cheeks, her neck, her breasts, her thighs. She felt... primed. Every pleasure receptor on the verge of surging, the anticipation of her master's touch almost too much to bear. And in the empty dark room, and two glinting rubies watching her from the shadow.
"The world is suffused with power," Erin said, her voice not apparently attached to anything in particular. "It is everywhere now. So many have so much of it. But you don't understand it, do you? No idea where it comes from, why it exists - and least of all what it is for."
Yumi realised that Erin was dancing with her now, their bodies close. Erin's hand was at her back, pulling Yumi in. They were dancing some strange, sensual waltz, to the music of thin, strangled pipes. Yumi did not know the steps, but she followed them perfectly. When Erin spun her around, Yumi knew to put her arms above her head like a spinning top, and then to fall back faithfully into her master's arms. Her back supported by a single hand, Yumi kept one leg straight, resting her heel against the floor, and slowly crossed the other over it, caressing herself with her own flawless skin. She batted her eyelashes, an obedient coquette, inviting touch, and receiving it, as strong fingers grasped her bare thigh.
"This is what power is for," Erin said. "For the attaining, and giving of pleasure."
Indeed, as Erin's fingers edged up her thigh, Yumi felt pleasure racing through her. She laughed, and blushed, even though the experience felt wholly evil.
"That is all that it has ever been," Erin continued. "Why did the emperors of ancient days send armies to conquer lands they would never see?" She stroked Yumi's midriff, brushing her navel through the thin fabric of her dress, and making her eyelids flutter as pleasure tingled through her. "They did this," Erin said, "is so that they could eat their meals and lay with their whores with greater peace of mind."
She swung her dance partner with easy strength, and Yumi's body assented to its new master's will, pirouetting splendidly, before gripping Erin's right shoulder tightly, and thrusting her own right knee up against Erin's flank, waiting for the strong fingers that would close around it, and press waves of forbidden delight into her elfin body. She smiled when she felt the hand, and bit her lower lip, and gracefully submitted to her red sovereign. She knew that she was enslaved, knew that it was not what she wanted, but Erin's desires were in her as well now, and they were - simply - stronger.
"So do you see," Erin said, "there is no guilt to be in using power, provided it is used for what is right. Apprehend." She made a place for Yumi in her arms, and Yumi melted into the power of Erin's embrace. She was cradled, the skirts of her dress stroking the black floor as gloved hands lifted her legs and pulled her tight against Erin's cold chest, and cold lips kissed her peach-soft mouth, and an unspoken command rang in Yumi's ears and she screamed raw, blood-hot ecstasy into Erin's kiss, and fell limp and shivering and moaning from it.
"Do you see now?" Erin said. "Do you see the pleasure in it? Do you see what power can bring? Do you see now that what you wanted was never wrong?"
Insofar as Yumi was capable of thought, she had to own that she did not quite understand what Erin meant by all this. Yumi had wanted higher respect, further accolades - her captor had spoken to her before of these things, yes, but what that had to do with power Yumi did not know. Her mind toyed with this problem as though with a difficult riddle, unable to grant importance to it in her addled state. She found herself drawn back into Erin's dark eyes. She willingly drowned herself in them. And yet, behind the layers of warm, surging pleasure in her slavery, an answer to her little riddle flashed briefly into her mind, and brought with it surge of much less comfortable emotions - but it was all suppressed in an instant.
"See?" Erin laughed. "There is no suffering in it. Pleasure only, and pleasure is what justifies. Pleasure means any means are worthy. That is what has made this long life bearable - that is what I will give to Yumi, forever."
"To... 'Yumi'?" Again, the answer to the riddle flashed into Yumi's mind. "She's speaking about me," Yumi realised, "not to me. So... who is she...?" She felt as though the answer were blindingly, stupefyingly obvious, but she could not make herself grasp it.
"'Immoral'?" Erin said, in response to a side of the conversation that Yumi could not hear. "My dear girl, don't you think that's a little silly? You and I, in our own way, are creatures of the shadow. Such ideas mean nothing to us. Especially when the alternatives are so much sweeter," she added, and punctuated her point by twisting her fingers in Yumi's hair and licking her neck.
Yumi quivered with pleasure as her mistress intended, but even as she did this she could not help but feel something was wrong. But it was not enough for her to disobey. And so, when Erin kissed her way from the nape of her neck to the edge of her slim jawline, and whispered "Kneel" in her left ear, that was exactly what Yumi did.
She dropped slowly, stroking her master's body lovingly as she fell, until she reached the level most appropriate for her subservience. At the wordless bidding of her master the kneeling beauty lovingly kissed Erin's leather-clad legs, purring with pleasure as Erin stroked her hair. The enslavement was sinking deeper into Yumi. Permeating every pore. Burrowing into her. Weakening the foundations of her.
"Do you like this, my sweet little lily?" Erin asked.
"Yes," Yumi replied, "very much." It was true. Erin had made it true.
"'Not really her'?" Erin laughed, responding to the one Yumi could not perceive. "What nonsense. The lips are hers, the mouth is hers, the voice is hers. The body is hers. The fact that our power has caused her to want it is immaterial. She does want it." To Yumi she said: "Don't you?"
"Yes," Yumi answered, her dark eyes flashing.
"Good." Erin smiled, stroked Yumi's hair. She stroked the top of her head. And then she descended, with naked lust.
The world went by in a hazy, rapid blur. Indeed, the world seemed to have turned on its head before Yumi realised that she had. She was over Erin's shoulder, letting herself go limp as Erin carried her, her thin fingers squeezing tight into Yumi's shapely legs, the train of Yumi's red dress swishing from side to side as Erin bore her away. She wanted Erin to squeeze tighter, to reach higher. She was being made to want it, made to feel the thrill of expectation. She writhed, snakelike and sinuous, pushing herself into Erin, wanting to melt into her, wanting to fade into to vapour and be breathed in by her, to be reduced to nothingness in the joy of self-annihilation, and pulse - pulse - pulse with the physical ecstasy of it and yield herself absolutely to her master.
Of course, these emotions were not Yumi's. Of course in her unconscious mind she still moaned in fear and horror at her shackles and her imprisonment; but Erin had chosen her victim well. Yumi's ego had been dangling on a precipice, challenged and questioned and undermined by her deep distaste for her own creativity, her shame at her vanity, and her confusion and anguish about how - and if - she could express herself had made her deeply vulnerable to Erin's control. Emily had driven in the wedge, and Erin had forced the gap wide open.
"Oh!" Yumi gasped, as Erin threw her down, her skirt billowing about her as she fell. Erin pushed the skirt aside, gripping Yumi's legs and running her long fingers up and down them, so tightly that she left momentary grooves whenever she moved her fingers away. She moved up Yumi's body - seeming to glide over her. Her fingers tenderly entwined with Yumi's, and the thuggish features of the face Erin wore were softened by her obvious affection for the tender damsel she had subjugated. She thrust her tongue into Yumi's mouth, roughly stealing the kiss and drinking greedily of yet more of the supple maiden's essence. Her eyes flashed as Yumi's fluttered; her strength waxing as Yumi's waned. Yumi went limp beneath her, and for this latest theft whispered a blissful "thank you" to her looming master.
With stolen strength Erin thrust Yumi's arms above her, and with a weaver's skill she tangled Yumi's wrists in shimmering ribbons. They were so thin that a child could have snapped them, but Yumi was so weak in mind and body that they may as well have been thick, steel manacles. She watched Erin tie her hands to the railing at the top of the bed, yanking on the loose end of the ribbon like a pulley, forcing Yumi's arms out straight. Her hands were bound with each palm facing outwards, her fingers curling inwards. She was helpless, and she had a distant awareness that this was wrong, but could find nothing in it but humiliated pleasure.
"Such a darling captive," Erin cooed. "I have always had such admiration for talented women. Writers, fencers, dressmakers, advocates, mayoresses - and musicians. And all this in such beautiful flesh... and all this with such doelike gentleness... " Her hands danced over Yumi's softly writhing, bare legs. She felt the flower-petal suppleness of Yumi's skin, the satisfying firmness in her dancer's thighs as Erin squeezed them both, wrapping five fingers around each and pressing, drawing obedient moans from the star who had fallen into her arms. "Such a demure maiden," Erin said. "Not like the last one. She was a viper - wriggling and spitting and hissing and thrashing - but you're so... genteel. So feminine. It's such a delight, little lily, such an absolute delight..."
Yumi felt a sharp tug on her ankles, pressure around them cinching them together, and then an almost painful, but satisfying, pulling sensation through her whole body. Her feet were bound to one end of the bed, her hands to the other, her petite body drawn tight, fixed in place. She looked up at the bonds around her wrists, down to the ones around her ankles. She felt delicate, feeble, helpless, all that one might expect a woman bound hand and foot to feel, but these were pleasant emotions in her subjugated state.
A ribbon was thrust between Yumi's lips, gagging the supple songstress, pushing down on her tongue and repressing her sonorous voice. For even her voice, Erin was saying, was no longer her own. She would be a mute until Erin said otherwise. And it was true, Yumi felt a terribly overpowering urge to assent - and she did assent, purring and smiling and batting her eyelashes and writhing so temptingly in her fragile bonds, so weak and soft and ripe for the plundering. There was just a tinge of emotion that Erin had not ordered: a tiny drop of shame on Yumi's mental pallet, otherwise subsumed in colours poured by her captor, at allowing herself to be defeated, bound and hypnotised, alongside simple dislike of the sensation of being tied up, which she had never found pleasurable. But she did now. Erin commanded it, and so she would obey.
Erin swept Yumi's skirt aside, exposing her legs, pulled tight and pushed tight and warm. She licked the groove that formed between Yumi's thighs, all the way up to her thin panties, against which Erin brushed her nose. A happy cry of pleasure rang out from Yumi's sweet, gagged lips, and she shuddered even from this relatively modest stimulation. Erin rose from Yumi's hips to kiss and tease and bite her throbbing neck, to coil her muscular arms around Yumi's slender frame.
"Feel her," Erin said, to her unseen counterpart. "Feel the thrust of her bosom against yours. She is a droplet of water hanging from the edge of a leaf, so heavy, her borders so weak, desperate for the little push that will make her burst. Aren't you, my darling lily?"
"Yhhhhhss..." Yumi mumbled through her gag, primed to be taken, to accede to Erin's overpowering will and yield her astonishing body to whatever dark pleasures Erin could conjure.
So when Erin undid the clasps of her dress, Yumi did not protest. When Erin pulled the dress from her body, denuding her midriff, her breasts, her hips, Yumi did not protest. When Erin curled both her index fingers in the elastic of Yumi's panties, and slowly pulled them down her moist thighs, over her knees, leaving them crumpled at Yumi's ankles, when her womanhood was completely exposed - even at this Yumi did not protest. She lay, bound, gagged, and naked, meekly waiting for Erin to plunder her.
But in Erin's eyes, Yumi saw more than one kind of longing. Not just the eyes of the predator, the vampire, who had hypnotised her and laid claim to her body. No - there was desperation here of a far more earthly sort. Yumi could almost feel it, beneath her haze of coquettish submission, feel a desperate, twisted obsession with her in the eyes that bore down on her naked body. Oh, there was simple lust in this obsession; for who could look upon the sensual grace of Stellar without desire? But there was more. For in this obsession, Yumi was all that was fine and beautiful, all that was high and good and noble, everything that the obsessor was not. For the obsessor was ugly, and stupid, and craven, and thuggish, and Stellar stood so high above her. At once there was the desire to fall worshipfully at the feet of her idol, to prostrate herself, even annihilate herself in rapturous love. But this grotesque, overgrown love had hatred in it too. Hatred of Yumi Tae-Yeong for being so beautiful, so pure and so perfect and so loved by so many. With a shock of clarity, Yumi felt that hatred for her, felt the wish to pull her down, to shackle her idol, to violate her purity and her goodness, to dirty her, as the obsessor - as Emily - was dirtied.
Through her mesmerised, stupefied pleasure, Yumi felt a stab of horror at the soul that was suddenly so bared to her, a nauseating revulsion for what she found in Emily's heart. She did not understand how she peered through it so easily, but she did, and she found that every wretched form of avarice was to be found within. Emily was an ugly person. A bad person. Alongside Erin Emily wanted so badly to take Yumi, who lay naked and bound before her, to sully her as she had always longed to, when with her own voice and her own body Yumi seemed to yield herself willingly. She couldn't resist. Except, she did, didn't she?
"NO!" Erin shouted, her voice deepening and coarsening into that of the Arachna that Yumi had once known. She wrenched herself away from her captive's body, clutching at her head, screaming in rage. "I won't! Even at my worst... even at my worst I never did this! Y - AAGHHHHH!!" Her hands wrapped around her own throat, and from the vicious pressure on her neck it looked like she was making a sincere effort to strangle herself.
And then, as quickly as it had begun, the storm passed. Erin released herself. She calmed. Her composure was restored and she fixed Yumi with a gentle smile. Gliding like a slow, icy breeze she descended on Yumi again. Sat down next to her.
"Alright," Erin said, with just a little less ease in her voice than before. "All is well. No fear, little lily," she said, seeing that Yumi was alarmed by her self-destructive outburst. She reached out to stroke her face, to comfort her.
But Yumi did not, as she had before, purr contentedly at her master's touch. She did not meekly offer her flawless body, nor languish humbly in her paper-thin bonds. She snapped them, in fact. Then she slapped Erin hard across the face.
"Don't you touch me!" Yumi screeched, trying to wrap the bedclothes around her, to cover herself up. "She's... Emily's still inside... still fighting you. She was trying to change before you got your claws into her! How dare - how... how dare... unnhh... " The pressure was immense. She felt so weak, so ready to yield herself again to her master's will. She looked within for strength and found nothing. She called upon the Blue Star, the Black and the White, and found nothing. Her muscles ached with exhaustion from all the strength that Erin had drunk from them. Yumi was holding onto her selfhood by her fingernails - but she was holding on. This composite of Erin and Emily was at war with itself, and that war had drawn her strength away from dominating Yumi just enough for her to be herself.
Erin did not seem hurt by the slap. Again she tilted her head in that animal way of hers, and looked at Yumi with profound puzzlement.
"This is very strange," she said. "With all the energy that I've taken from you, I should have been able to keep you... " She searched for the right word. "... keep you calm indefinitely. I did not think that she had such tenacity." She lifted her head, and her blood-red eyes flitted back and forth, like she was reading. "You said something, yes? You said she was still fighting me. 'Still' is wrong." She twisted her neck from side to side. "She has only now begun to fight. Everything of our bargain she accepted joyously. Everything I gave her she accepted."
She lowered her eyes again. She fixed her gaze on her captive, and for the first time Yumi saw wrath in those bloody eyes.
"You reject the peace and bliss I offer... because of her? You are too gentle, Yumi. Do you understand the baseness of the one you lament, the one who was born into this flesh? She is vile. She is evil!" Erin laughed, with a hint of savagery. "I have been with her, and in her. I know what she has done. I know what she has done to you! But you are so sweet. You forgive the years of depravity and degradation. You forgive the bestial lusts and sickness in her. You forgive because there is no hatred in your heart. You are innocent. So I will teach you!"
Erin took the form of mist and swept over Yumi, but when she descended on her she was quite solid. Baring her fangs and with a giddy thrill she grabbed both of Yumi's wrists, and hauled the slender girl to her feet.
"N-no..." Yumi whimpered, naked and helpless in Erin's grasp. Her mind had some freedom, yes, but her petal-soft body was still powerless. Emily's rebellion had bought her little more than torment.
"Do you know what she wants, little lily?" Erin said. "Despite her feeble protests that buzz in my mind like swollen, fat flies, do you know what she wants to do to you?" She thrust her fingers into Yumi's hair, turned her head and lowered her head to whisper in the maiden's ear. "She wants... what she has always wanted. To smother you."
Yumi heard a familiar sound: a gurgling in Erin's wrists. She smelled a familiar scent: the odour of silk being churned. She saw a familiar look on Erin's face, a face that now seemed to belong more to Emily than to Erin. Yumi whimpered fearfully as she saw that the vampire was letting the spider out to play.
With manic delight, Erin let fly a thick, white jet from the squamous gland in her wrist. It struck Yumi with enough force to make her gasp. Hot, gooey silk burst all over Yumi's breasts, oozing on and around and between them, casting a wide net that began to cover her whole torso. Yumi cried out, and tried to pull away, but the threads clung fast to her, spreading around her, curling like warm fingers around her upper arms, pulling them against her sides, as more silk was poured onto her, hardening and tightening as it cooled against her body.
"Ugh! Ugh!" Yumi groaned, looking down as the silk spread over her, her forearms flapping uselessly as her upper arms were drawn tighter and tighter against herself. She tried to run away, but before she could even turn around another jet shot out onto her. It splashed messily against her pale thighs, and Yumi gasped as she felt the silk constrict, pulling her thighs together, stretchy but too strong to break, inhibiting her movement too much for her to walk, much less run.
"No escape," Erin said, with a low growl. "Never any escape from the spider. Never any escape from the silk!" she laughed, and let fly another glob of webbing.
"No! No, n - MMMMMPPHHHHH!!" With a wet slap the webbing struck Yumi's mouth, sealing her voice behind warm, white glue, threads grasping at her cheeks, her jaw, her chin. Yumi threw her head from side to side in a vain effort to dislodge her gag, her dark, soft hair swishing from left to right. Yumi's cheeks flashed a deep crimson, for the silky gag had an all-too intimate, an organic warmth. It was like a kiss. A wet, forceful, overpowering kiss that Yumi could not help but allow.
Her eyes were drawn upwards, and she saw that Erin was - attached, somehow, to the ceiling above her. It was just the sort of thing a spider might do. As far as Yumi had known, Arachna's powers had never allowed her to cling to surfaces, but that hardly mattered to this monster. Whatever was the most terrifying was possible for her. She loomed above her, a bestial, lustful smile on her face.
"Come to me. Let me tangle you up, my sweet little moth." She pointed her palms at Yumi, and two thick lines of webbing shot forth. They added to what was already there, securing themselves to the silk on Yumi's chest and her thighs, thin as a finger, but as strong as a steel cable. Erin pulled, and Yumi was yanked into the air.
"Mhh... mhhhphhh!!" It was like a nightmare. Not in general - it was exactly like a specific nightmare that Yumi had had in the past, probably three or four times since Arachna had first captured her. Naked, and helpless, a predator with dripping fangs hanging above her, white silk pouring over her, and raw, physical terror claiming her.
Shooting down line after line of webbing, and pulling Yumi at just the right time and with just the right force, Erin started spinning her, revolving her over and over, spraying gossamer sheets of silk over her, teasing them around Yumi's sumptuous, smooth body and gleefully tying her up.
Yumi was swiftly disoriented as she revolved, feeling herself entombed, her arms and back and shoulders and her legs drenched in oozing, white silk so wet and hot and strong - tightening, constricting, binding. Her breasts were pushed in against her chest as layer after layer of silk was wound over them. Her naked legs, silkier even than the material binding them, were forced into one useless, feebly kicking limb, their milky-white loveliness disappearing beneath the off-white her bonds. Her slinky, wriggling hips were constricted, squeezed - no, it felt like they were being groped, like hot hands were grabbing, pawing at her hips - and not only her hips but her waist, her navel, and her trim, tight, rear. She even felt a threatening pressure between her legs as the silk tightened over them, and the warm seal over her lips stifled a sensual moan.
Around and around and around and around, and every moment Yumi's bondage grew tighter, and deeper, as layer after layer was slathered over her naked perfection. Around Yumi's smooth, supple, shifting shoulders Erin spun her web, seeking to subsume every square inch of the shockingly lovely woman in her clutches.
And she was subsumed. As threads were drawn around her throat and her jaw, Yumi could feel Erin's webs covering everything from her neck down, her bonds growing ever tighter, ever more intimately constricting as they cooled, suppressing her meagre struggles. The webs began to cover her nose, and her cheeks, and her long, dark hair, and though she cried out for aid, she could not hear her own voice, could hear nothing but the squelching and churning of the webs being wrapped around her. She could smell nothing but the thick, musty scent of the silk, almost enough to make her pass out. She could see nothing but an ever darkening gauze over her eyes. She could do nothing but hang there, mewing softly as Erin mummified her in webs. For Yumi, whose first loss as Stellar had been to Arachna that day that she and Cybelle abducted her, there was nothing that could have screamed "You are defeated" more loudly in her ears.
Slowly, gradually, the revolutions began to stop. The churning and gurgling began to stop. And finally, Yumi stopped spinning, suspended from threads anchored to the ceiling, wiggling and whimpering and twitching in the dozens of metres of silk which entombed her. She was completely covered in webbing, webbing which was thick and strong enough to restrain a superhuman of twice Yumi's strength, and tight enough that every sensual curve of Yumi's body was still perfectly displayed. A lock of dark hair peeked out from the threads around her forehead, lightly grazing Yumi's cheek, but outside of that, she was covered. Gagged, bound and blindfolded in spider-thread, completely immobilised, and throbbing with humiliation.
"Oh, her protests are quieter now," Erin hissed. "I know that you have dreamed of this, Yumi. I know that being seized and cocooned as I have done to you has haunted your nightmares. Well it's been in her dreams too, Yumi, and it was not fear that held sway over her when she dreamed it. You feel the webs against your naked skin, don't you? It isn't just rope, or chain, or shackle. It's her. It's part of her. Part of me, now. That is what she wants, that is all she wants: to take you, the fairest, loveliest creature under our thin, blue sky, and smother you in her ugliness."
"Mh? Mh-mhh?!" Yumi could hear movement, and squirmed in her cocoon, trying to work out whether it was coming from above or below her. She began to think it was below, but then above her something snapped - and she fell.
There was only time for a squeak before she fell into Erin's waiting arms. Falling into them she wanted to cry out again, but there was a chill in the strong fingers that curled around her mummified, helpless body, and it choked her cry before it could leave her throat. Wrapped in bride-white threads she was carried like a bride, clutched close against Erin's bosom. Yumi felt Erin's mouth against her neck, felt the pressure of her teeth, and quivered - but Erin did not bite. Rather, she closed her teeth above Yumi's cheek, and pulled - ripping the silk from over her eyes.
"Mhhh!!" Yumi mewed, recoiling from the sight of Erin's face. It was not just frightening now. It was ugly. She looked away, but the only other thing to look at was herself, and seeing herself all wrapped up in vile, glue-like silk was even worse a thing than her captor's face.
"If only you could hear her," Erin said, with a guttural bark of mirth. "'Ohh, don't hurt her! Ohh, don't be cruel to her, please!' When all the time she pants with lust, the dog."
"She's... changed again..." Her mind bandied this way and that, from confusion to terror to mesmerised pleasure to helpless humiliation, it was difficult for Yumi to understand what was happening to and around her. Had she been more timorous she would not have understood the significance of this new change that had come over her bipartite captor.
Until Emily's inner rebellion, until she had snapped Erin's evidently fragile tethers on Yumi's mind, Erin had been just that - Erin, the soft-spoken, chilling vampire of whom Yumi had heard tell, almost exactly as Yumi had imagined her. But before that, when Yumi had first been captured, when Emily had been the one in control, it hadn't just been Emily, had it? It had been Emily suffused with Erin, with her power and her intellect and manner. And now this third version of their fusion, it was the reverse of the first Yumi had seen. This was Erin - her will, her desires - suffused with the brutish, animal savagery of Arachna. Their union was becoming more complete.
And now Yumi began to understand the meaning behind this ordeal, behind Erin's treatment of her, behind her bewildering captivity. It was probably the case that Erin's wish to have her way with Yumi was genuine, for there was a touch of the divine in the beauty of Stellar, and it was not vanity that made her think herself desirable. But there was more to it than that. Erin was trying to push herself and Emily closer together, to mix them truly into one being. She needed something that the two shared. And Emily's twisted obsession with Stellar was, at least, similar enough to Erin's almost universal, thoroughgoing lust that it pulled them closer. Trying to force herself onto Yumi had been too much; but cocooning her, doing to her what Arachna had dreamed about so often, that was working. That was pulling them together. Emily was being digested.
"So villainous, isn't it?" the Erin-Arachna entity said. "So cruel of me to wrap you up like this, Yumi, but - oh, you struggle so sweetly, don't you?" She put Yumi down, but did not allow her to stand - she pushed her up against a wall, and pushed her own body against the bundled maiden, grinding up against her.
"Nmmhhhh! Nmmmhh-mmmhhphh!" Yumi whimpered through her gag, feeling Erin's hands cupping her breasts, squeezing them, the wet silk squelching as Yumi was fondled. She felt her captor's fingers tighten, curl - and then tear. "NNMMHHH!!" Yumi moaned, looking down with tearful brown eyes as she saw her breasts bared, their tender softness exposed just for Erin to abuse.
"You'll learn to enjoy this as much as I do," Erin said, kissing Yumi's small, pert bosoms, flicking her tongue against their sensitive buds. "More, even. Why did she have to break you out of all that pleasure I was giving you, huh? Stupid bitch." Barking happily, she ripped messily at the threads around Yumi's head, tearing them away from her hair and her cheeks and her mouth, and greedily, forcefully pressed her lips against Yumi's, even while silk still clung to her captive's face.
"Mhhhhhhh... mmhhhhhhhhhhh!!" Yumi moaned as, discarding all her subtlety for Emily's brutishness, Erin took her pleasure of her slender captive. Yumi's helplessness was all the more bitter to her, because it was not just her in danger anymore. For every moment that she lingered in bondage, Emily sank deeper into oblivion. As Erin's lips parted from hers, and returned to the enviable burden of kissing Yumi's naked breasts, Yumi tried to think of something - anything - she could do to save Emily from this dreadful fate, and without thinking she whispered: "Have me instead."
Erin blinked. She was about to laugh, but stopped herself. Then she seemed not to know why she'd bothered stopping herself, and laughed openly, a frightening, hollow sound.
"Oh, you are sweet. Oh, dear little Yumi, you are the absolute end." She stroked Yumi's face, playfully pinching her cheek. "Don't insult yourself. I could not merge my essence with you. You are a person! You have thoughts and loves and sorrows and miseries and joys. You are shallow and profound and beautiful, within and without. You would crowd me out with the merest whiff of effort." She smiled. Sighed, wearily. "But Emily? She is a brutish, stupid animal. There was so much room for me within her that, for a time, it has been possible for us to co-exist. And even then, I had to strike a bargain. No, no, Yumi, my love, don't be absurd."
"B-bargain?" Yumi said. "What bargain?"
"There must be a bargain," Erin said. "Unity of purpose for the merging to begin."
"You... you offered her me?" Yumi asked, almost afraid to know.
"Do you know, the thought did occur to me." She laughed again, snorting derisively. "But she insisted on - well, why don't I let her tell you herself?"
And she shuddered, and contorted, and her facial muscles loosened and slackened, her lips curling and her eyes narrowing with senseless viciousness. It was Emily's face. Her own face, unclouded with Erin's influence.
"NO!" she screeched. "No, I don't want her! I don't want to be what I was! I just... I just want to be smarter..." Tears welled up in her eyes. She began sobbing, inelegantly. "I want to be smart, and cultured, and interesting! I want to be... I want to be good! But I'm too weak and... and stupid to do it myself, okay? Okay?! I want to be... I want to be the kind of person she would want - but, not to have her because - because then I wouldn't be good, right? Is that how it works? Just - just do that, please!"
And then the moment was over. With a little squirm, Erin resurfaced, unflappable and lusty and cruel. She hadn't let Emily out: she'd just - just played back a recording, basically. Shown an echo of a rapidly fading person.
"Isn't it ridiculous?" Erin said. "As if she could be anything but base."
"...you lied."
"Hm?"
There were tears in Yumi's eyes, tears of deep and sincere emotion.
"You lied," she repeated, her voice quiet, and calm. "She wanted to be a better person, for its own sake, and you used that against her. The best thing - in her own strange way the best thing she has ever tried to do - and you used it against her! You poisoned her! You made her... capture me, and you let her think it was her decision, but you just wanted - you just wanted her body for yourself! When she drank my strength that was for you, wasn't it? To let you destroy her!" She felt an itch. She felt a squirming, burning itch all over her body. She began panting, almost. Spots in front of her eyes. Heat smouldering in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to throw up.
"Oh!" Erin clasped her hands to her chest, kissed Yumi on the cheek even as she disgustedly tried to wriggle away. "Such passion. Such mercy and sweetness and gentleness in you, dear little lily! Even after all she's done to you, you cannot see how filthy she is. Come, now, dear one," she said, and moved to lift Yumi into her arms again. "Let's not waste another drop of emotion on that thing."
Yumi had not heard a word of what Erin had said. She could not detach herself from the emotion that had taken hold of her, could see nothing except that feeling. Her mind wandered in a curious way, and she realised that there was still one unsolved mystery in this foul affair.
It was before. When Emily had held her, and forced pleasure into her, still vainly trying to convince Yumi that it was good for her. And Yumi had been filled with such spite - blood red words spat out from her throat like knives. At the time she'd thought that it was the spell that had been cast over Emily affecting her as well, but now that she understood that spell better - how and why would Erin have drawn such bile from her. No. It hadn't come from outside. It hadn't come from Erin's evil.
"It was mine."
Erin knelt down to wrap her arms around Yumi's pretty legs, to lift her over her shoulder and carry her off. But as she knelt, she saw Yumi looking down at her. Saw fury in her eyes.
"Did you think I was all softness?" Yumi hissed. "Did you think I was some gentle, spotless little girl? Did you think I was some meek, simpering virgin for you to impose your own wants on? Just your - your masturbation fantasy made flesh?!" She shuddered, and shook, and her cocoon began to tremble, as something caged within for far too long began to burst from its shell. "Did you think I was so weak," Yumi said, "that I could not know hatred?!" She looked inside, and found something frightening, and selfish, and unpleasant. But it was hers. She took a deep breath. And she screamed.
"A Red Star!!"
A fiery explosion burst from Yumi's body. Erin was thrown onto her back, and Yumi's cocoon was thrown open, disintegrated. The vampire stared open mouthed as she looked upon what emerged.
Aglow with blood-red light, Stellar stood tall, suffused with strength. Her eyes burned red, but were cold with loathing. Her body was clad in an all-encompassing suit, its material one that did not exist, sort of fusion of metal and leather, clinging tightly to her flawless contours. It was dark, deep red, black at the shoulders and the inner thighs, her figure made more imposing with tall, tall heels. Her neckline plunged almost to her navel, the inner halves of each bosom on show. At her shoulders, flame-like crests, and around her forehead an obsidian crown. She had the strut of a peacock, sensual for her own sake, beauty that was not to be marketed or captured: everything about herself that she feared, her vanity, her self-regard, her resentment of those whom she felt did not understand, as well as the raw capacity for hatred and rage and violence that we all fear of ourselves. But it was hers, and it had power.
"What? What?" Erin spluttered, rising to her feet. "This - what is this? What - no! I -" She did not understand what she was seeing. Her shock was echoed by the one imprisoned within her, and she was all but paralysed. But only for a moment. She looked at Stellar, at the fiery crests at her shoulders, and - thinking of the Blue Star - she began to feel she had the measure of her captive again.
"Fire will not help you," she said. "Perhaps in stories of vampires, you have read -"
"Fire?" Stellar said, and her voice made Erin jolt. "Fire? That's all you think this is? A 'power-up'?" She fixed her eyes on Erin's, and she bared her teeth. "You think that hatred demands fire? No, monster - hatred demands pain!"
And pain was exactly what Erin felt.
"AIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!" the vampire screamed, shrieking with hideous, terrible violence. She tried to fight back, tried to use Arachna's powers and hers, but the pain blinded, burned red in her mind. She tried to escape it, tried to turn herself into mist. And she did - but the pain followed her anyway. It stabbed at the very heart of her, and she collapsed to the ground in solid form, writhing and shrieking. "Wh-what are you doing to me?!" she shrieked.
Yumi did not answer. She just stared down at her enemy, her eyes blazing almost white-hot. And, through pain, Erin understood, and she mumbled a single word.
"Telepath...!"
It was and was not true. The Red Star affected the mind. Saw through secrets. It could twist its invisible hands around the fibres of the mind, and it could pull. She had been giving Yumi hints, nudges, whispers, breaking in here and there, almost surfacing when Yumi's fear and disgust with Arachna, with the woman who'd twice kidnapped her, called the Red Star forth. But only real hatred could call her forth, and Yumi hated now.
"I see you," Stellar said. "I see you now for what you are, monster. You called Emily a dog. You called her a beast. Well if she's a beast then you're a virus. An accident. A parasite that latches onto other life, a relic of a real superhuman long dead, clinging pathetically to this... half-life, and entertaining yourself by using your powers in the basest way imaginable. You're a disease, Erin. You're no more a vampire than I am an ogre! You are unusual. You are unnatural. But let me assure you, Erin, you are mortal."
"You... you... you can't... Emily - will die...!" Erin moaned, the pain almost making her weep.
"Then she will die!" Yumi spat back. "Better that, better to give her peace than to let her become part of you! She knows it too: I can see her - I can feel her, and she begs me to destroy you both!" And she could have. She almost did. But something stayed her hand. Yes, she had castigated Erin for thinking her nothing but sweetness and mercy, and she had been right to - but they were part of her too.
But her mercy frustrated her. She grabbed Erin by the neck, and with a grunt lifted her to her feet.
"I cannot punish you as you deserve," Yumi hissed. "I cannot make you suffer as you should suffer. You make sport of terrifying people, of drawing them into your control through the terror of what you are - of what you claim to be. But you're the coward, Erin. You're the one who hides in your play-acting at vampire, who dissolves others from within to sustain herself. So you and Emily will share the pain I give you - but not the terror. Let us see, then," Stellar growled, hurling Erin back to the floor, "what you fear."
For a moment, Erin was gripped with desperate relief. The pain subsided, vanishing from her mind. She collapsed, shaking to the ground, but smiling with the sheer joy of pain relieved. She managed to stand, and she began to plot counterattack. Her ways were subtle. If this Red Star was a telepath, then perhaps there were ways, ways that this power could be turned against her. A mind that affected other minds was often open to attack itself. But then, behind Yumi, she saw something.
A figure. A vague, wavering figure. A figure which was human, but about whom Erin could tell nothing else. And yet, it made her frightened. There was something about it which was familiar, something which made her very nervous. It came closer, walking through Stellar, and it was now recognisably female. And then, familiar sensations began returning. Of overweening ecstasy, of an uncontrollable urge to gorge, to feed on poison that burned her from within. The feeling of her body splitting apart, dissolving, melting because of her own greed. Of a sensation that was worse than death, of years spent as an impotent, bodiless ghost, all because of one who had fooled her, and fought her, and killed her. The figure now became clearer still. She had a pretty, cunning, foxlike face. Long, lithe legs. Bare shoulders. Her hair was orange. Her warrant was golden, shimmering.
"Sophie Scott," Erin whispered with mortal dread, before the image descended on her, and Erin drowned in fear. And as fear shook the very foundations of her tenuous, wraithlike existence, the Red Star drove the nail in -
- and annihilated her utterly.