Tales of MU

In Which They Call It Puppy Love

Inside the double doors, we immediately found ourselves in front of a set of stairs leading down. At the bottom of them, there were a pair of hobgoblins who looked more like what I might have imagined S&M club bouncers looked like, had I ever tried. They were wearing tight black leather shorts and were covered in piercings… not really of anything in particular, they just sort of had metal implanted in their skin.

Two pieces of parchment slid out of a slot on the wall and one of the hobgoblins flipped them around and held them out, along with a pen. Amaranth took them. They were liability waivers with a bunch of disclaimers, a signature line, and check boxes in a section labeled “Privacy” at the bottom. One of them said “Miss Mackenzie Blaise” at the top and the other one said “Miss PVFC Nymph #4I.”

Amaranth scowled at the form but didn’t say anything about it.

“What’s the difference between image privacy and identity privacy, please?” she asked.

“Image privacy means you won’t appear in any pictures, illusions, or memory transfers of tonight’s event,” the hobgoblin told her. “Identity privacy means you may appear but your face will be blurred.”

“Is the whole event being captured?”

“There are scrying orbs throughout the premises for your safety, Madame,” the hobgoblin said. “Selected images from them may be used on the members’ weavesite or for publicity purposes.”

“Is there a fee for the privacy services?”

“No, there is not, Madame,” the hobgoblin said. “A private atmosphere is an essential club function.”

Amaranth looked at me sideways.

“I’m going to put image privacy for you, baby, considering,” Amaranth said. She glanced up at the hobgoblin. “Um, also, there’s a mistake here… up at the top, under status, your autoscribe checked ‘wholly owned creation/construct’.”

“Yes, Madame,” the hobgoblin she was talking to said. “That’s not a problem as long as your companion is your owner or an authorized representative.”

I tried to catch Amaranth’s eye to let her know that what she was about to do was a really, really bad idea, that if ever there was a time when it would be necessary to bend the truth, we’d found it, but I could already feel the umbrage rising.

“Well, she isn’t my owner because I don’t have an owner,” Amaranth said. “I am wholly my own creation, and even though it might not seem like a big deal to you, I’d appreciate it if I could get a form that has the right status.”

“I’m afraid it is a big deal, Madame,” the hobgoblin said. “I cannot allow you to enter the club without the permission of your owner.”

“This is ridiculous,” Amaranth said. “Look, here’s my student ID card,” she said, holding it out to him.

“Your identity is not in doubt,” the hobgoblin said. “It’s already been verified, along with your legal status. Whatever personal relationships and arrangements our guests may have, legal chattel is not…”

“I am not chattel!” Amaranth yelled, stomping her foot. “Look, only free persons are allowed a university education, so the fact that I even have a student ID card proves your stupid form wrong.”

“Madame, university admissions are not ours to decide, and neither is admission to our private club a matter for a university to decide,” the hobgoblin said as laughter and footsteps echoed down the stairs from the entrance. He glanced past us. “If you would care to step into the security office, we do have a mirror you can use.”

“Oh, bother… you go on ahead, baby,” Amaranth said to me. “If I can’t get in, I’ll have them take a message to you… you’ll have to manage without me in that case. Just see if you can find that helpful man from the leather store, I’ll bet he’s a member. If you can’t find him, I’m sure you can find loads of people who’d like a chance to flog you or something… stress that you’re invulnerable and have no hard limit on force. Look for somebody tall. A woman would be better than a man, now that I think about it… you know, if all else fails, you can just challenge people to come up and smack your butt as hard as they can. It won’t be very refined, but it’ll be something nobody else can match.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, a lump in my throat at the prospect of facing the club alone.

“Oh, Mack… chances are this won’t take more than a minute to get this taken care of,” she said. “This is just in case… just try to stay out of trouble and don’t do anything rude or wild or crazy. Look, watch… don’t speak or touch. Okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get somebody from home to straighten this out,” she said. She gave me a kiss on the forehead. It was a sadly numb gesture, with the black rubber mask between my skin and her lips.

“Amaranth?” I said quietly, in a tone that I hoped worked both for asking permission to speak and apology for not having it in the first place.

“Yes, baby? You can say what you need to say.”

“Thank you, ma’am… tonight, it’s more important that you get to go inside then it is that you prove a point,” I said.

“Of… of course, baby,” she said, her eyes fluttering. “You’re right… you’re absolutely right. Tonight’s not about what’s fair or right. I’ll just get someone from the village in the mirror and tell them I need permission.”

She gave my form, and I signed it. After making sure that her neat little x was in the image privacy box and that the “Free” box was filled in, I handed it to the other hobgoblin, who touched my hand with a wand. The rune of youth appeared on it.

“See you in a bit, baby,” she said.

I didn’t want to break out of my submissive mindset any more than I had so I just waved in acknowledgment, then turned my attention to the Tomb of Horrors.

The first thing I noticed was that there was blood in the air… it was faint and it was distant, but it was there.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised… not everybody who shared my turn-ons had invulnerable skin. It wasn’t a lot, but it was everywhere. I was surprised to note that some of it was clearly virginal… surprised that I could recognize it and surprised that somebody would have their skin broken at a bondage club before they had their hymen broken.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath… it had been a reflexive action to steel myself, but in retrospect it wasn’t the wisest idea.

I could also tell that most of the blood was human, and that it was overwhelmingly female. The thought made me a weird mixture of hungry and horny… horny because I could taste arousal.

Also scared… if I lost control, the best case scenario would be getting maced in the face by security and thrown out, and even that would be a life-ending disaster under the circumstances.

My eyes were still shut, but I couldn’t shut out the scents, nor the sounds that reached my ears: murmured conversation, clinking glasses… leather hitting flesh, metal hitting flesh, restraints creaking and clanking, people moaning and screaming and crying out.

I decided to stand there with my eyes closed a bit longer. It seemed safest… or at least it did until somebody bumped into me from behind and I realized I was standing in the doorway.

“Excuse me,” I said, and I stepped aside. My eyes snapped open just long enough to catch a glimpse of a bit of smooth skin showing through a cut-out in a tight black sleeve.

It looked… yummy.

I made sure I was positioned well out of the way of traffic and closed my eyes again. I breathed in again, but this time I did so consciously, focusing on what Dee had taught me.

I should have been practicing this all along, I thought.

My afternoon under Amaranth’s stern directions helped make up the deficit a bit, though… she had given me my orders, to stay out of trouble, to not touch, to not get thrown out. I couldn’t do anything about the appealing scents and sounds, but I could cling to that. I could stand in meditative silence, listening to my own breath and denying my desires.

I started to worry about how weird I looked, standing there rigidly with my eyes closed, controlling my breath… then I remembered where I was. Wasn’t the D in BDSM for “discipline”? Or maybe it was domination. Either way, it really was nobody’s business why I was standing out of the way and breathing, and I was in one of the few places where that would probably be acknowledged.

The only problem was that I had no way of knowing how long I stood there… the longer I did it, the more disconnected I felt from everything. Had it been a minute? Five minutes? Fifteen? Amaranth had said she’d send word in to me if things didn’t work out for her, but there was the possibility that something would happen to prevent that… like she might lose her temper and be thrown out without a chance.

It was time to open my eyes to the world, I decided… Amaranth had told me to look around, and I’d probably cope better with being on stage if I had some idea of what all that entailed. I let out a breath and opened my eyes slowly.

The first thing I noticed were the skeletons carrying drink trays, as a pair of them were crossing right in front of my field of vision. I wondered if they were a usual fixture at the Tomb or if it was a Veil thing. I supposed it was better in one way than using intelligent automata, though there was the issue of where the bones came from.

As they moved out of my focus, I saw just beyond them. There was a circular stage with naked girl… woman, really… on it, with her arms and legs lashed to the legs of a sawhorse. A man was cracking a whip thing with a bunch of knots across her ass. Her face was red and streaked with tears. Her ass and thighs were both kind of big… meaty. I looked away from her, and there was another woman suspended upside down in a magical web that had been strung between two poles. There was a person wearing a black leather mask with big exaggerated elf ears prodding at her with a wand. That was just tasteless.

Taking my eyes off the stage, I looked around at the crowd. There were a lot of people in corsets, both male and female… a lot of masks, too, but as with the skeletons I didn’t know how much of that was because it was the Feast of Veil and how much of it was just to be expected. The fact that they had a face-blurring service suggested that not everybody wore masks.

I noticed the collars, too… my neck kind of itched when I saw them, maybe in the way that some girls’ fingers itch for rings. Fuck Caron, I thought. I wanted one. Maybe something tasteful and discreet, something that didn’t scream out my kinks to everybody who saw it, but if we made it through this I wanted to wear Amaranth’s collar.

Maybe our relationship was pretty new, but we’d earned the right to decide how to handle it.

Even some of the people who weren’t currently in the spotlight were in some kind of restraints or being led around on leashes. I was kind of surprised to see that a lot of the people there, in fetishy clothes or not, were actually just kind of standing around and talking. There were some couples where I could see one of them was sort of standing quietly and politely at attention and being really deferential, but there were also ones where if somebody was a submissive, you couldn’t tell by looking.

And then there were the ones like the woman who had a man wearing nothing but a net of leather straps down on the floor, licking her boot.

I saw at least three people with black wizards’ robes on… three more than I’d ever seen in person in real life, assuming they weren’t Veil costumes or fetish roleplaying outfits. I got chills looking at them.

I didn’t see Caron, but I was on one side of a fairly large space that had a bunch of raised stages in the center of it. There were almost sure to be private rooms, too.

Well, if she missed the performance, that was her fault… we’d be sure to have plenty of witnesses.

Then I saw someone that made my heart freeze.

Mercy was in the club.

She was wearing an outfit made of some kind of glistening black carapace stuff that covered half her body… her left foot was bare up to the ankle, then her left leg was covered up to the top of her thigh while her right leg was exposed. Her left hip and pelvic region were exposed, though she had full coverage in the middle. The pattern continued above the waist, with a corset-like structure coming up to just below her left breast, which was completely exposed. Her right breast and shoulder were covered. She was wearing a half-mask over the left side of her face.

She saw me, too.

“Puppy!” Mercy called, gliding towards me. “Well, this is a happy surprise.”

“My name is Mackenzie,” I said.

“Your name is Puppy,” she said. “I had planned on coming up with another one, but honestly, after even a week of thinking of you as ‘Puppy’, nothing else sounded right… and of course, I couldn’t very well call you Lulu now. Anyway, if I wanted to be snapped at by lower animals, I’d sign on with the Imperial Army again. I don’t tolerate it when my boys bark or growl at me, and I won’t put up with it from you at this stage in your adoption.”

“‘Adoption’ is a funny word for what you have in mind,” I said.

“I don’t have any illusions about anything I do,” she said. “But I am allowed my cute little affectations. It amuses me, and I think it’s a better reflection of my feelings towards my pets than the nomenclature I use in my business dealings. Anyway, as I say, I won’t tolerate it… I’m giving you three strikes, just like in rapier dueling… you’ve already used two of them. If I hear anything from you that isn’t fond, appreciative whimpering, I will have you shown to the door. You have to start learning now, Puppy, that if you misbehave, you don’t get to do the things you want.”

I froze, willing my lips to lock together. It seemed she didn’t know about my deal with Caron, but if she really could have me removed… and as a wealthy member of the club, it seemed very likely that she could… then she had me dead to rights and she didn’t even seem to know it.

My only hope was to get things over with as quickly as I could.

I tried to figure out if it would be safer to excuse myself politely, or if Mercy would be insulted by even the attempt at courtesy from a “lower animal”.

“Oh, don’t slink off yet, Puppy,” Mercy said. “Come with me. Come!”

Reluctantly, I followed her to where there were leather-upholstered benches lining part of the wall, with little peninsulas jutting out to form u-shaped seating areas. She sat down on one of them and pointed at the floor in front of her.

“Sit,” she said. “Stay.”

Seeing no other choice, I sat down on the floor.

“There’s someone I want you to meet… she’s off being exercised right now, but she should be back presently. Anyway, since you’re here, I thought we might as well have a little chat… well, I’ll have a little chat and you’ll listen. I’m rational enough to know you aren’t capable of holding an actual intelligent conversation, even if I do enjoy talking to you. Oh, look!”

I turned and saw a man… the same stubble-headed, wiry man who had made the delivery from Mercy to the suite I’d shared with Steff… was heading towards us, leading a naked blonde girl by a leash. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and she appeared to be moving automatically.

She looked scared completely out of her wits, was probably a good thing to be for one of Mercy’s slaves.

I had a horrible thought about where this was going. Mercy had said she wanted me to meet her… she’d also said she intended to give me “treats”. Was she going to try to teach me some kind of horrible lesson about my “true nature”?

The worst thing was that the thought that should have turned my stomach instead made it growl. I had to admit that my mouth watered at the sight of the slave girl… I could smell her skin… her sweat, her fear… from where I was sitting, and it smelled good.

Had Mercy done something to make her more appetizing?

Or was it just the faint tang of blood in the air?

The man took the leash off her collar and made a silent bow to Mercy, who didn’t even look at him. She reached out and grabbed the girl around the waist, pulling her onto the bench and squeezing her tight.

“This is my new little darling, my Lulu,” she said, stroking the naked girl’s stringy hair… “Lulu II, honestly, but I don’t want her to feel second-best to anyone. Isn’t she precious?”

This is what I smell like to Feejee, I realized. I didn’t have any words for it, but the other half-demon… I refused to think of her by the absurd pet name Mercy had foisted upon her… smelled absolutely irresistible. I couldn’t look at her and not see meat.

I didn’t look at her, but I could still smell her.

“I swear, if I had any doubts about my long-term plans, they’ve flown out the window since I met you, Puppy… I won the freaking half-demon lottery. My buyers found four of them, born in a town that was the site of a rampage forty or fifty years ago,” she said. “On some little speck of rock off the coast of the Mother Isle… all the males of the litter were put down when they turned, but the bitches were shipped off to an institution. There were more of them, but sadly, only the ones who could be fed the most easily were kept… anyway, the island’s got a new proconsul who wanted the place shut down, and so I found myself with four bitches for my breeding program. They were just gated in yesterday morning… that actually cost me more than they did, but I wasn’t going to risk sending my precious babies on a long voyage before I even met them.”

Mercy with four female half-demons was a terrifying thought, but less terrifying to me personally than Mercy with no female half-demons.

“Oh, don’t despair, Puppy… Mama Mercy hasn’t given you up for them,” she said. “I’ve been busy, I admit… I found out about this opportunity just two days after our first little encounter, and overseeing the deal’s kept my hands pretty full. But now that it’s all taken care of… well, I have to confess, I’ve fallen a little in love with you. You’re just so stupid and awkward and helpless… maybe not the best breeding stock after all, pedigree aside, but an adorable pet. Anyway, it’s not like I could afford to pass up on breeding you… not after what happened with the rest of the bitches.”

She laughed ruefully, shaking her head the way she had when she’d told me about the last female half-demon she’d procured. My stomach found a lower floor to sink to than ever before, and I suddenly didn’t feel quite so hungry.

Okay, that was a lie… I felt even hungrier. Sick at mind and heart, but hungry in mouth.

“My boys… if I could stay angry at my boys, I’d be furious now,” she said. “I learned my lesson with Lulu, so for their new sisters, I had reinforced crates built for them, with pain and lightning wards on the bars… magic, of course. I’ve tried using holy wards, but they wouldn’t have been good for the new arrivals, and anyway, sanctity never lasts very long, does it? I don’t know why so many people swear by it.”

That made perfect sense to me… if someone as relatively innocuous as Steff could de-sanctify a place, there was no way a holy ward could survive around Mercy… at least not the run-of-the-mill kind that anybody who’d deal with her in the first place could make.

“So, once the bitches arrived, I crated them and put them in the boys’ kennel so they could have a chance to get used to each other before I tried mixing them. Three hours later I went to check on them… all four of the crates had been demolished, and only one of the bitches was still alive. The boys were lying on the floor… the wards on the fourth cage finally knocked them out. So, I’m in the process of feeding them three-quarters of my enchanter team… I try to be fair in my punishments. It’s a slow process because I’m doing it by weight. Oh, but I couldn’t punish them, Puppy… I disciplined when training them, but I don’t have the heart to really punish them. They know what they did, and I think they feel bad about it… they left the skins completely almost intact in the wrecked cages, like they thought I wouldn’t notice what they’d done.”

Assuming the other three had tasted at all like this one smelled, I couldn’t imagine anyone keeping the presence of mind it would take to do that and not just devour them skin and all.

“Oh, but I was telling the story,” Mercy said. “So there they are, lying on the floor and twitching, and there’s Lulu, my favorite of the four, absolutely rigid… well, she was catatonic, really. I wasn’t planning on letting her sleep in my bed until she was thoroughly trained, but I didn’t have anywhere else to put her… and if you want to talk about irony, Puppy, my usual method of training a female is to start by fucking her until she’s catatonic, so it was kind of funny… it was actually good, in a different way. Even at my age, there are still new things to see and do and feel… I tell you, Puppy, whoever it was who talked about ‘the banality of evil’ didn’t know what she was talking about. Talk about a failure of imagination.”

I stared at the poor girl… I couldn’t begin to imagine what it had been like, being caged and then watching as three other women were torn apart and devoured… and then being taken into Mercy’s bed…

“I see the way you’re looking at her, Puppy, and it’s okay,” Mercy said. “I did my homework… I know you like a nice rack. That’s one of the reasons she was my favorite to begin with. When you decide to become her sister, you’ll be able to play with her all the time. You aren’t as aggressive as my boys. I can tell I won’t have any trouble leaving the two of you alone.”

The feelings of horror and pity melted away from the sudden heat that idea sparked inside me. My heart raced at the thought… my heart raced and my mouth watered. I couldn’t take my eyes off Lulu now. I didn’t care that it was a stupid name or that it wasn’t her name, she was food and food didn’t need a fucking name…

She looked at me, too… it was the first sign that anybody was home upstairs. Her eyes locked on me, and I saw my hunger reflected back in them. She looked at me and gave a little sound that was something between a purr and a whimper, and she licked her lips.

Suddenly she didn’t look so much like food. With just those small gestures, the balance had shifted. Maybe it was positional… she was up high by Mercy, I was down low.

Or maybe it was just my nature… I was no predator.

If I was shut up in a room with Lulu, I would be prey.

“Oh, look at that! She likes you already!” Mercy said. “You know, if you wanted to see what your life will be like with me, we could set up a little puppy play-date where you could come sleep over. Wouldn’t that be fun? I could introduce you to my boys, of course, in a controlled setting… you know about Brutus… my first… and then there’s his younger brother Cassius. If I had had any inkling I might run into you here, I would have brought pictures. Oh, no, what am I talking about? I would have brought them. I can still send for them…”

“Excuse me,” Amaranth said from behind me, and her voice never sounded warmer or more beautiful. “I need to collect my toy.”

I turned around and threw my arms around her legs, clinging to her aura of warmth and comfort like a lifeline.

“Ah, you must be Amaranth,” Mercy said.

“At least somebody here knows my proper name,” Amaranth said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“You know who I am, I’m sure,” Mercy said. “You may call me Mercy. I’ve been hoping for a chance to speak to you.”

“That’s just fabulous, because I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too,” Amaranth said. “The Imperium may have some blind spots in its collective morality, but there are such a thing as anti-discrimination laws.”

“Anti… what?” Mercy said.

“Ma’am… can we please go?” I said quietly.

“Hush, baby, I’m talking,” Amaranth said to me. “Mercy, your advertisements claim that you’ll serve any race, but persons in your employ have repeatedly refused to do business with me.”

“First, I don’t have any persons in my employ,” Mercy said. “I have animals in my possession. That both simplifies things and gives me more options. Secondly, I wasn’t aware that nymphs ate meat, but I’m fairly certain we did make a deal with you at one point, and I’ll be happy to accept your gold in the future.”

“I’m talking about selling, not buying,” Amaranth said. “As reprehensible as the way you deal with unwilling victims of every other race is, the fact that you refuse to consider an offer from a consenting adult-equivalent nymph not only compounds your moral issues, but it may leave you exposed to legal consequences as well.”

“Okay. Wow, ” Mercy said. “You are the brightest flower in the field, aren’t you? Let me explain some things to you. First of all, even if you were human, you wouldn’t have a case… nobody has a right to force another person to buy them as a slave. Second, even if that were not the case, I get the feeling you’re talking about renting, not selling, and since we don’t enter into similar agreements with anyone else, it wouldn’t be discrimination to refuse to do so with you. Third, even if you wanted to sell yourself and I wanted to buy you, I couldn’t… nymphs can’t be enslaved, under current law.”

“Yes, but this is the beauty of it,” Amaranth said. “I don’t have to be a slave if I’m consenting, and as an immortal nymph…”

“As an immortal nymph, you have an immortal mother who’s made her thoughts on exploitation and abuse of nymphs almost apocalyptically clear,” Mercy said. “But I’ll make you a deal: you have your little toy poodle sign my little piece of paper, and in a century or two… when I’m ready to deal with Khaele as an equal… I’ll eat you as many times as you want. Okay?”

“Now you’re adding blasphemy to your sins,” Amaranth said. She reached for my hand. “Come along, Mack.”

Profoundly grateful, I grabbed her hand and let myself be led away as fast as I could totter.

“And she growls about being called ‘Puppy’,” Mercy said.

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Characters: Amaranth, Hobgoblin Bouncer, Lulu II, Mackenzie, Mercy, Mercy's Man