In Which Eating Out Is Considered
My head started to hurt as soon as we left the student union and Amaranth and Two headed off to get ready for their classes. It throbbed worse and worse all the time, until without warning the pain disappeared and everything was right again.
At least, it seemed like everything was right. When I got to the elemental lab, I gave Ian a quick kiss and grope, and breathed in the heady scent of him. He’d masturbated that morning. I could smell it on him.
The kiss surprised him… the touch more so… but I couldn’t restrain myself. It was bad enough that I couldn’t have him in my mouth, or my cunt. It would be too much to ask me to keep my hands off him, too.
The first sign I had that something was very, very wrong came mere moments after Professor Bohd sat down at her desk. She glanced up from her notes, then just about jumped out of her skin. I mean, she literally jumped, scooting her chair back, and then stared at me… taking off her horn-rimmed glasses and rubbing her eyes before looking at me again.
“What?” I said, looking at my shirt. It had some bacon crumbs on it, but it was hardly dirty.
“Miss… ah, Ms. Mackenzie, what in the world have you been up to today?” she asked.
I looked at her, not sure what answer she was looking for.
“Um… I ate breakfast,” I said. “This is my first class, so really… nothing.”
“Are you feeling alright?”
“I had a headache,” I said. “It’s sort of been coming and going, but I feel fine now. Why?”
“Your energy is in a state of considerable disarray,” she said. “I cannot, in good conscience, allow you to perform magic. The results would be far too unpredictable.”
“You can’t allow me?” I repeated, feeling ire rising up within me. Yes, something was very, very wrong… there was no good reason for Professor Bohd to be speaking to me like this. I was easily the best student in her class, even with stupid shit like Ian to distract me.
“I’m afraid not, and watch your tone, young lady,” she said. “I’ll be giving the class a written assignment today. You’ll go to the library to work on that while the rest of the class stays here and does their invocations.”
I would, would I? It seemed to me that if she was going to dismiss me from her class, then her authority over me ended… it would be one thing if she’d asked me to work on the paper, or even politely suggested it, but the way she baldly stated that I would do this thing…
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, forcing a smile. “Of course I will.”
The hell I would. I could be reviewing that warrior book for Callahan, or better still, working on my Mecknights fic and looking for an idea for what to do with Steff.
Well, Steff probably had plenty of ideas about what to do… but I had promised her dinner first.
It occurred to me that Steff and I had a common interest, one which she’d only been able to indulge on her summer vacation with Viktor and which I, for some reason, had only availed myself of in tiny little bits and pieces. If she was serious about learning to appreciate ogre cuisine, there were some interesting possibilities there.
I didn’t think Steff would quail at free-range food, but apart from the risks it would involve, it might take too long to arrange. There were slavers in operation in Enwich, though… I probably couldn’t afford a whole slave for slaughter, but there might be a market in surplus parts, from people who needed a heart or liver or whatever.
It probably wouldn’t be cheap, but then, I was about to sue the pants off the school… and anybody trading in man meat would probably know a buyer for infernal blood.
While I was considering these things, Bohd was droning to the class about the paper and her requirements. It seriously took about half an hour. As soon as she was done, I was gone.
The library was pretty dead in the morning, so I grabbed two crystal balls that were next to each other. I recalled my Mecknights work in one and read through it. I read through it again, and wondered if I’d kept the wrong draft somehow… I couldn’t put my finger on it, but somehow it wasn’t quite as good as I’d remembered it being.
That bothered me. I felt like something was off… like something had changed in the world around me. Whatever the difference was, it was subtle… but at the same time it was jarring.
I’m a better writer than this. I know I am.
So why did the lines I was looking at look like shit?
I’d meant to pick up where I’d left off, but now I found myself wanting to scrap the opening of The Ratchet Chronicles and start over… and not having any idea how to make it any better.
It was even more disconcerting than Bohd’s disrespect had been.
I left it up and turned to the second ball. I could turn it over in my head while I worked on my other little project. My first attempt to divine out some slavers ran into a wall of fire, as did my searches for human meat and cannibalism. What the fuck? I had thought I was in a major university library, not an elementary school resource room.
Well, it wasn’t like I didn’t know how to get around that kind of thing… it would just take a while, since I wasn’t familiar with the school’s wards. While I threaded my way through the ball’s defenses, I let my mind turn over the possibilities.
A restaurant that specialized in the right type of fare would be ideal, but I’d settle for a do-it-yourself thing if it came down to it. If I could find the meat, I could look for inns that had kitchenettes. I couldn’t think why I’d objected to getting a room… my only class before three was thaumatology, and Professor Goldman had practically given us permission to skip on the first day. Yeah, Friday was quiz day, but I had a free grade coming.
That would be a date worthy of my love for Steff: a real meal, cooked and enjoyed together, and then a night of having my ass pillaged repeatedly… and whatever else her wonderfully twisted little mind could come up with.
Of course, if we had a whole night to enjoy ourselves, maybe the live food concept would be worth another look.
Once I was through the wall, I realized right away that self slaughter was going to be impossible, at least if I wanted to stay inside the bounds of law… that was probably a good idea for our first date. Steff was hotness incarnate, but she wasn’t worth getting arrested and destroyed for.
An adult female slave… and it would have to be female, I wasn’t that interested in male meat… of any attractiveness started at five platinum. A virginal one was worth twenty times more. If I wanted to feed my hunger along with my impulses, I’d have to get some blood separately.
It struck me as both stupid and horribly unfair that it was illegal to harvest from child slaves… an adult took eighteen years of feed and care to grow, but babies should be able to be churned out once a year without a problem. They would make for cheap food… and they’d probably be really tasty, too… if it was legal, but because it wasn’t legal to slaughter them or traffic in their flesh, they’d cost way more as food than a much larger and expensive-to-raise adult.
Going outside the bounds of law was starting to look more and more attractive.
Of course, there was always Two. Dear, sweet Two… she was almost as innocent as a baby, a bit meatier, and absolutely free for the taking… but if Steff had balked at torturing me, there was no chance she could be induced to cook and eat her precious “pseudowench.”
I’d have to prepare her in advance and make sure Steff didn’t know where her meal came from, if it came to that. I put that possibility on my mental “maybe” list. Two was begging to be eaten, but I’d really rather have somebody I could share completely with Steff, from beginning to end. We’d both denied ourselves for so long… we deserved a treat.
It seemed like slavers didn’t deal in parts… not directly, at least… so I tried a few different approaches. At first I just got articles about ogres and demons, and some moralizing weavesites decrying the brutality of the slave market and the traffic in flesh, but eventually I found strings that led me to “alternative” butcher shops that offered “unusual components for magic or other use.” I made a note of the ones that looked most interesting and kept pulling at the string.
Finally, I found what I was looking for: an advertisement for a restaurant that listed no name and had no menu selection, just the tagline, “We Serve All Races*”… and in smaller text, “*Subject to availability.”
I pulled the string, and found myself in heaven.
Looking at the pictures… the artfully arranged entrees, the recognizable cuts of meat… I could feel the great black pit yawning open within me, beneath me, sucking me down… I felt the most wonderful hunger stirring within me. Why had I denied myself the taste of human flesh for so long when I knew there were people in the world who even the law recognized as nothing more than property, the same as any other livestock?
Sure, it was expensive… I couldn’t afford to eat like this all the time… not legally, anyway… but there was no reason I couldn’t indulge some of the time.
Some of their selections were clearly designed to look like any other cut of meat, or were even ground up to totally disguise their nature, but some of them were designed and arranged to emphasize the fact that you were looking at a part of a human being. It all looked good to me, but those were the ones that really got my juices flowing… in my mouth and elsewhere.
I couldn’t see much particular appeal in eating a foot… the only feet I was interested in tasting belonged to the beautiful Ms. Suzune Hoshinotama, and that interest wasn’t culinary… but some of the other whole cuts were interesting, to say the very least.
I went a little crazy and started putting in a delivery order for whatever caught my eye. When I was finished going through their human menu… the most well-represented race, apparently… the total price was about ten times what I had available.
I also realized that I didn’t have an address to deliver to.
I cleared the story off of the other crystal ball and started looking for inns. I wouldn’t need kitchen facilities after all, but we’d definitely want more privacy than I could get in a dorm… both for the feast and what came after. I looked for one that was about medium price. Cheap rooms would mean thin walls, I figured, but I couldn’t afford to go too nuts. The food was expensive.
By the time I’d made all the arrangements for our night on the town… arrangements that would just about use up the rest of my remaining coins… it was just about time for lunch. I hadn’t had any time to try to fix my terrible Mecknights story, but I figured I just might have to face the fact that it was essentially unfixable. In any event, I was feeling fucking ravenous.
I really hoped against hope that I’d run into Two before any of the others.
If nothing else, it would be good to get some practice in. Steff had more experience in eating humans and near-humans than I did… if that wasn’t an embarrassing state of affairs, I didn’t know what was.
On my way back to Harlowe, I heard Two calling out her insipid greeting… a greeting that sounded more like “Eat me, please!” every single time I heard it… but I couldn’t spot her.
There was a nimbus of light that seemed to be moving towards me, and on top of making it hard to see, it was also doing something to my hearing. My ears were ringing… my whole head began to swim as the light drew closer and then the pain, oh fuck, the pain, burning me, tearing away from myself…
No, I won’t go back… I can’t go back!
“I said, ‘Hello, Mack!'” Two said, stamping her foot in that adorable way that she did. I had to smile at her little pout, even through my raging headache. It would have been unconscionable to provoke her on purpose, or else I probably would have done it all the time.
“Hello, Two,” I said, leaning into Amaranth’s welcoming… and welcome… embrace.
“Baby, put your hood up and zip up your coat,” Amaranth said. “You’re shaking like a leaf. Really, after that fuss you made this morning…”
“Oh, I must have been in a hurry?” I said, fixing my coat. I was freezing. It was amazing I hadn’t noticed it before… I guess I’d just been so excited about seeing Amaranth.
“Well, are you ready for lunch?” she asked.
“Yeah, I feel like I’ve been thinking about food all morning,” I said.
Amaranth frowned, biting her lip and digging her nails into her thigh.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But you seem… off… today.”
“I feel fine,” I said. “I’ve got a headache, but it’s fading.”
“Anything unusual happen in your lab class?”
“Nothing that I can remember,” I said.
Wow, that’s one of the creepiest chapters ever…
Rather rapid tonal shifts here…
Demon!Mack swings from ‘you can’t send me out to do your homework! I’ll read this other textbook instead!’ and ‘wow am I really this shitty of a writer?’ to…
scary.
It’s almost as if she’s a Fucking Demon who has no experience and not much idea of how to be evil.
idontlikescarymackidontlikescarymackidontlikescarymack!
I love scary Mack.
Did she just place an order costing ten times what she had?
And then forget about it?
To be delivered to the hotel room she reserved?
And also forgot about?
“They would make for cheap food… and they’d probably be really tasty, too… if it was legal,” should be subjunctive and use, “Were,” instead of, “Was.” Evil mind control is no excuse for bad grammar, Mackenzie.